Let'sTalk Off-Broadway

FILM NOTE: A Serious Man with Michael Stuhlbarg, written, produced and directed by Joel and Ethan Coen

... Job in the Midwest ...

Billed as a dark comedy, A Serious Man is a modern version of the story of Job.  Larry Gopnik, played by Michael Stuhlbarg, is a likeable, responsible Jewish man, a Physics professor in a Midwestern university who's terrific covering the blackboard with Heinsenberg's uncertainty principle equations, his intensity indicating true passion for his subject.  Piece by piece, though, everything goes wrong.  His wife leaves him for another man who sends Larry off to stay at the local motel with his brother with the disgusting, suppurating sebaceous cyst.  His daughter's a narcissist, his son's just this side of delinquent, his neighbor impinges on his property, etc... etc...  The rabbis of his congregation can't provide meaningful guidance and the lawyers don't do any better, while running up big bills.  Even when things pick up -- againsts the odds, it seems, his son makes it through his Bar Mitzvah -- they quickly sour.

That may sound interesting in outline -- it works well in the Bible -- but it's not a good movie.  For one thing, the characters just do whatever the film makers want them to in order to make life hard for Larry -- nobody's bothered to make them consistent.  Why does his wife leave him?  And then why does she warm up to him at the Bar Mitzvah?  The writers give us no clue -- maybe we're supposed to fall back on Heisenberg's uncertainty principle but that's not good enough for the plot.  Two days before the committee is to meet to consider Larry's application for tenure at the University, the Chair drops by to mention it would be useful for Larry to let the tenure committee know of anything he's published in his field.  "I've done nothing," Larry says, like it's a new idea.  Nonsense, he would know the score.  And anyhow that's not how the process works -- why didn't the Coen brothers bother to get things straight?

Although Larry is the main character, visually and otherwise the movie feels as if it's told from a child's point of view.  There are many close-ups of older people's hairy ears, droopy noses and overlarge, wet mouths, uniformly yucky.  In one scene, Larry's son actually does face a rabbi who seems terrifying but turns out a humbug, like the Wizard of Oz.  Most important for the character of the movie, though, Larry's helplessness is like that of a child in an adult world, his struggle lacks Job's metaphysical strength. 

This seems like a grudge movie -- an ugly tone of old resentments.  Let's get back at the fathers, mothers, teachers, rabbis -- all those hypocrites, weaklings and moral cop-outs who call themselves adults.   Didn't the Coen brothers take well to the guidance, religious and otherwise, they received as boys?  Who knows?  The worst thing the rabbis do in the film is fail to explicate the meaning of life, nor do they solve the problem of evil.  It's hard to hold those failures against anybody, even Heisenberg.

Yvonne Korshak

FILM NOTE Inglourious Basterds, with Brad Pitt, Christoph Waltz, Melanie laurent, directed by Quentin Tarantino

                ... "Once Upon a Time in Nazi-Occupied France ... "

                                     -- INGLOuRIOUS BASTARDS  

Three driven personalities and three suspenseful story lines, all in collision course toward a hellish and thrilling climax. 

Out in the countryside during WWII, early in the German occupation of France, a Jewish girl, Shosanna Dreyfus (Melanie Laurent) is the survivor of a targeted Nazi massacre that wipes out her entire family.  Near the end of the war, she seizes the opportunity to carry out a vengeful plot.

Lieutenant Aldo Raines (Brad Pitt), under military orders, heads up a crew of Jewish soldiers organized to terrify Nazi's with brutal vengeance murders.  Raines is the right man for the job:  we don't know the source of his particularly passionate determination to kill Nazis but there are a couple of hints:  an ear to ear scar on his neck -- somebody taught him some brutal lessons with a knife -- and his reference to being part American Indian.

The Nazi Colonel Landa (Christoph Waltz in a performance of Academy Award caliber) matches Raines in his own compelling passion -- to round up and murder Jews.  We think we know him well from his first scene in which he directs the massacre of Shosanna's family.  Still, while the others run true to form, he surprises us.  The anomalies, the things he does off-path are intriguing.  Why, for instance, does he let Shosanna go free -- twice?  The subtle emergence of Landa's personality, specifically of his perverse sexuality and sadism, is one of the features that brings the film to near greatness.

All three of these major characters perpetrate grizzly acts of violence but only one is evil -- Colonel Landa.  The exploration of the problem of pure evil, and of complicity in evil, is another of the film's strengths.

Actions in this movie are not only dramatic and compelling but resonate symbolically.  Shosanna up on a ladder, doing her job, dusts off one by one the letters on the marquee of her film theater -- a purge is in sight.

A close-up focuses on a French pastry as Landa stabs and then, with a deliberate, circular motion, snuffs out his lit cigarette in the whipped cream.  How x-rated!  How perverse.

Or, in a new take on that age-old sexual symbols (think Cinderella), Landa slips a lost shoe onto the foot of a German actress who's spying for the British and terrified of being found out;  the shoe's perfect, click into place fit incriminates her, whereupon Landa proceeds to -- well, I have to leave out the next part but if you see the movie, you'll see the relationship to the French pastry.  Tarantino uses visual images and symbolic repetitions -- and his camera -- to great effect.

What, then, keeps Inglourious Basterds from reaching the realm of the great all-time movies?  I think it's too mythic for a film about such recent and well known history.  People may be vague about some details of World War II but everybody knows Hitler died in a bunker -- not as here.  Nor would anybody believe that, with the Americans having invaded France and moving toward Paris, and the end of the war at hand, the entire German High Command would have handed themselves over to the trap this movie sets for them.  It didn't happen like that and it never could have and the movie, even for its own fictional space of time, just can't overcome that knowledge.

Never mind -- it's the best movie I've seen in a long time.  The way the war ends in Inglourious Basterds departs from history but grimly, perversely, humorously, it satisfies ones sense of justice restored, barely and at great cost.  That's real.

                                                                             Yvonne Korshak

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FILM NOTE: Julie & Julia, starring Meryl Streep

                                                           ... Mickey Mouse ...

This movie weaves between two stories, one from the past and one current.  The good part lets us in on Julia Child's early years in Paris, her ecstatic discoveries of French food, the pleasures of the good life she shared with her husband, and how she became a chef and author.  Julia, her husband, played with touching warmth by Anthony Tucci, Paris, the food all look wonderful.  Meryl Streep captures Julia's flighty, deep, tony voice, her bulky occupation of space that goes hand in hand with her alarming and amusing clumsiness, and her perseverance.  Julia Child lives before our eyes in that fascinating fluctuation of yes it's her but after all it can't be like watching Philip Seymour Hoffman as Capote or David Strathaim as Edward R. Murrow in Good Night, and Good Luck. 

What an annoyance that the contemporary story of feckless Julie keeps rudely interrupting the genuine Julia!  Julie, played by Amy Adams, living with her husband in "Astoria" (spoken as if the word "Astoria", in Queens, NY is some kind of exile, which it isn't) lacks a sense of purpose, so she sets about cooking through all the recipes in Julia Child's book written with two other chefs, Mastering the Art of French Cooking, in one year and, at her husband's suggestion, records it all in a blog.  Her blog becomes a success and she wins a book contract.

In the movie, outside of being able to follow the directions in a cookbook, Julie has nothing special to offer.  Her too-cuteness and bemusement over boning a duck don't compensate for her boring self-involvement.  Under a strain to be interesting, the Julie scenes unwind into slapstick.  Julia Child took no interest in Julie's project.  How right she was.  It all but spoils her movie.  And Meryl Streep all but saves it, so in the upshot, it's worth seeing if you're drawn to Julia Child.

The relationship between Julia and Julie reminds me of what Stephen Jay Gould showed happened to Mickey Mouse -- at first he was a feisty, self-assured mouse with a good long, sharp mouse's nose but over time softened up, turning into today's baby faced spinoff of the original Mickey, with a so cute little nose.   

                                                                                        Yvonne Korshak

On a culinary note:  Since I've made Julia Child's boef bourguinon which features prominently in the movie, I feel I should say it doesn't come out looking with that web of sticky-looking carrots on top.

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Film Note -- The Hurt Locker, with Jeremy Renner, Anthony Mackie and Brian Geraghty, directed by Kathryn Bigelow

                                             ... strong material, weak film ...

In a way everyone should see The Hurt Locker:  it's not a good film but it makes clear what it's like for our soldiers in Iraq to carry out their duties while relentlessly under the eyes of armed enemy insurgents out to kill them.

The movie does have suspense -- these are, after all, our boys moving into treacherous, hostile situations time and time again, acting heroically and escaping by the skin of their teeth.  One thing's for sure:  when traveling on a desolate road in this country, don't get a flat tire.

No soldiers place themselves more in danger than the three-person Bravo squad whose task is to locate and disarm -- locate the detonater and cut the live wires -- of car bombs, roadside bombs, and bombs which, if not padlocked to their chests, are surgically implanted into the guts of suicide bombers.  Staff Sergeant William James (Jeremy Renner) is the best bomb disarmer and biggest risk taker of them all, and even his tough squad members, Sergeant Sanborn (Anthony Jackie) and the young Specialist Eldridge (Brian Geraghty) are angered because he thrusts them into danger unnecessarily, risking not just his life but theirs, bypassing military protocol in his passion for disarming bombs -- he's done over 800 of them.

"Do you know why I do this?" James asks Sanborn (who looks like Ralph Lauren's famous Black male model, and has a similar range of emotional expression).  Sanborn doesn't, and unfortunately the audience hasn't a clue either.  We watch him take his irresponsible risks but he's so thinly characterized we don't feel his genuine drive, though we do feel some admiration for his ability.  That in itself might have been developed as a reason:  Sanborn describes hm as "a trailer park red-neck" so finding something he can do well could have helped explain James' passion and determination to keep doing it (he smiles with happy anticipation when, leaving behind a beautiful wife and adorable child who looks just like him, he lands in Iraq for another tour of disarming bombs) but there's no follow-through on that idea.

Often things are said and done that one just doesn't believe.  An army psychiatrist portrayed as an ectomorphic ivy league nerd-weakling joins on a bomb-search mission because he's bored around his office -- I don't think so.  Why doesn't James speak when he calls his wife and son from Iraq on his cell phone?  Why did Sanborn leave his Intelligence unit to volunteer for the bomb squad?  Why doesn't Sanborn want a child?  Why doesn't the army commander recognize a renegade when he sees one? 

"War is a drug" is the movie's answer to James compulsion but we never feel that wild high, though we're told of it, so James just seems, well, odd.  Stephen Crane got the intoxication of battle right in his Civil War novel, The Red Badge of Courage -- this film team doesn't.  Leaving the theater, some people thought the problem was poor acting.  I thought it was more a problem with the scripting -- too many "weighty" thoughts tossed in but never picked up by the plot -- like unused props on a stage -- and none of the characters have any back story that helps us understand them.

                                                                                Yvonne Korshak

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Public Enemies, starring Johnny Depp as John Dillinger, directed by Michael Mann

                                                          Loving the bad guys ...

John Dillinger was very smart and courageous in his exploits, totally loyal to his friends, took on the giants, and won again and again, against great odds!  Oh, yes, and he was "gentlemanly," throwing a coat over the shoulders of his female hostages.  To all that Johnny Depp adds his star power charm and a boyish cowlick.  What's not to love?  Outside of the fact that he's a gangster.

He preferred not to kill -- a point made in a couple of philosophical pauses in the movie by this otherwise unintrospective character -- but if your time is spent robbing banks and evading the law with blasts of machine guns and other fast violence, it's bound to happen often.  He was called "The American Robin Hood" but he didn't rob the rich to give to the poor -- he robbed for money.  Yet, law abiding citizen that I am, I found myself rooting for him as was most of the audience, just as many rooted for him back in the early '30's.  Sepia tones bring us back to that earlier period, and the photography is often angled close-ups of large machinery that hook us into the large and grinding emotions.

We also root for Dillinger because his ultimate opponent, the FBI's J. Edgar Hoover, is so easy to hate, a mean spirited martinet driven by selfish ambition.  But Melvin Purvis, Dillinger's one-on-one opponent whom Hoover puts in direct charge of the case is admirable -- he has a high minded view of law enforcement which lends a larger meaning to his manhunt, he doesn't like to kill either, and Christian Bale who plays Purvis is handsome and charming in his own tight, disciplined way with 1930's slicked back hair (read:  opposite of anarchic cowlick).  Still, you root for Dillinger -- after all, you don't know anything about how much Purvis loves his girlfriend -- and the movie builds wonderful suspense as it moves from Dillinger springing his friends from prison at great danger to himself, to daring robberies, to unbelievable escapes to robberies to escapes until ...

... Dillinger's girlfriend, Billy Ferchette, played by Marion Cotillard is brutally beaten by law enforcement authorities to induce her to rat on him -- she doesn't -- and for all the invincibility Dillinger's shown, we're pretty sure by this point that he won't be able to spring her, and so what if he did?  look what he's already let her in for.  There's no way he could possibly pay for that.  So by the time the inevitable betrayal happens that leaves him dead on a Chicago sidewalk, we're ready to give him up too.  Public Enemies considerately resolves the ethical issue of the anti-hero and lets the audience off the hook -- this is a true Hollywood movie in the old sense, part of its nostalgic appeal. 

It would be a better, even more engaging movie if we understood the backstories of the characters.  The little said about Dillinger is too thin to help us see him as fully three-dimensional, as is true for the others.  It reminds me of the old Dick Tracy detective comic strips -- characters outlined, fast movement from frame to frame, and you do stay with it.

                                                                                      Yvonne Korshak

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Film -- Whatever Works, written and directed by Woody Allen ...

                                                   (  ... but he doesn't act in it ...)

Whatever Works is about a brilliant man with a totally morbid view of people and existence -- a real Woody Allen stand-in.  Most of us manage to block out this fundamentally realistic view of existence most of the time, but Boris Yelnikov sees it and feels it every moment -- no wonder he's given to panic attacks.

Once a Physicist at Columbia University "almost nominated for the Nobel Prize" -- echoes of Brando, "I could have been a contender" -- Boris is now a professorial dropout who pays rent on his dingy, wonderfully textured Greenwich Village apartment by teaching chess to children, and berating them for their stupidity.  For Boris, everyone is stupid except himself, and he believes this with good reason:  he had hold of a unique understanding of the full tragedy of existence.

The scruffy, balding Boris, gimpy from a failed suicide attempt, meets up with Meloody, an under-21 beauty pageant winner from the deep South who is, he thinks, stupider even than the other "worms" and "cretins" around him -- this is as hilarious looking a September-May romance as has ever been filmed.  Melody, played by Evan Rachel Wood, has the youthful comfortable in her underwear charm that's characterized Allen's leading ladies since Annie Hall.  Allen has a wonderful time -- so does the lucky audience -- with their collision of sophistication and naivete, of his burdened, wary pessimism and her dreamy optimism and joie de vivre.

Melody's small town Alabama conservative church-going Mother appears -- herself a runaway from the disasters that, yes, even the most mainstream middle class Americans risk, and in no time she's fully into the New York swing, showing her photographic collages of rearranged body parts of naked men and women at a tony art gallery.  Uptight Dad -- sort of a Governor Mark Sanford type -- comes soon and it doesn't take long for him to get liberated either, as it all spins off into an impressive series of mix-and-match loves (like Mom's polymorphic body collages).  And these loves are ... well, "Whatever Works."

New York City is lovingly filmed -- the movie starts reassuringly, though somewhat slowly, in a Greenwich Village cafe, and gathers steam with the arrival of the finest actor in the cast, Patricia Clarkson as the Southern Mom.  It's a very funny movie but ... if only Woody Allen were delivering the irony and pessimism himself.  Larry David as Boris comes recognizably close, and at times even manages to look like Woody -- or Woody's camera manages to make that happen -- which makes you realize whom you really want to see playing Boris.

Woody Allen cuts deeper and deeper to the bone of existence, which has always been his subject.  As the movie moves along, he hands over his ultimate pessimism to love.  That's part of his genius:  he never forgets who he is as an artist -- a comedian -- and by the end he lets you off the hook so you can leave with a happy smile -- thank you, Woody.

                                                                                         Yvonne Korshak

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Blithe Spirit by Noel Coward, the 1947 film with Rex Harrison, Kay Hammond ...

                                                                ... always ...

Since Noel Coward's Blithe Spirit is currently on Broadway, it seems like a good time to look at the 1947 film, directed by David Lean.

With an evanescent greenish cast and semi-transparent, a beautiful ghost returns to stir things up with her novelist husband in the midst of his new life with a new wife.

People talking to the ghost in one direction when she's really on the other side of the room ... flowers carried from the table to the mantelpiece with no one carrying them ... a seductive ghost ... a suave and youthful Rex Harrison .. a terrific "great performance" medium played as an English eccentric by Margaret Rutherford ... a common sense Constance Cummings as the second wife puzzling through inexplicably opening and closing doors ... that's a lot.

A broad percentage of the film's appeal comes from the sheer allure of Kay Hammond as the ghostly first wife, with her throaty voice, ironic gaze, and the cast given by greenish overtones to her red lips.  Lounging gracefully over the back of the sofa, she's completely at home -- so amusing. 

The title comes from Shelley's poem "To a Skylark" ... "HAIL to thee, blithe spirit!  Bird thou never wert -- "  The film has a musical theme, "I'll be loving you, always, with a love that's true, always ... "  Right, "always."  The plot is thin -- but the fantasy is powerful!

                                                                                               Yvonne Korshak

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Lets Talk Off-Broadway -- Film Note: Duplicity with Julia Roberts and Clive Owen

                                             ... James Bond on a leash ...

James Bond tamed -- that's Duplicity.  Bond-style music, master spies, international glossy views and fantasy luxury gorgeously photographed, and Clive Owen's looks almost fall in line with the Sean Connery successors though there's a touch of the spaniel about him.  But the intrigue, which anyhow lacks the scope and wild imagination of a Bond film, plays second fiddle to the saccharine and unbelievable love story whose sex scenes and dialogue are platitudes:  Roberts to Owen:  "I know what you are and I love you anyway."  Owen to Roberts:  "I've been faithful."  James Bond domesticated.  

                                                                         Yvonne Korshak

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Lets Talk Off-Broadway -- The Curious Case of Benjamin Button -- Faust With No Choice

A man is born and grows young:  this brilliant reversal, from a story by F. Scott Fitzgerald, shines a new light on all the commonplaces of life.  They say that when people have cataracts removed they see everything with a new brightness and intensity of color, even if they didn't realize they were missing anything before.  In Benjamin Button, everything -- birth, growth, death, love, separation, joy, pain -- is recognizable but seen afresh, and with poignant intensity.

All that, and the Faustian allure of growing young again and finding a beautiful love.

The film begins with routines carried out inside a New Orleans hospital while the first winds and water of hurricane Katrina slash at the windows, a framing metaphor for the treachery of existence and the combination of ignorance and nobility that keeps human beings moving in the face of it.  Benjamin Button's story -- and her own -- emerge from the memento filled suitacase of a dying old woman.  A clock is built to run backwards, and the movie pulls out all the stops in turning an old man into a young one.

Queenie, a Black maid in an old people's home, determines to keep the grotesque-looking White baby abandoned on her doorstep, rejecting the cautions of a reasonable, kind doctor that some are not born for existence.  The full, worthy life Benjamin goes on the live, albeit backwards, validates her decision.  The movie was made to prove Queenie right about individual worth.

In the "brief encounter" love story, the transience of the affair is bound not by train schedules or prior loyalties but by the lovers' trajectories criss-crossed in time:  growing old meets growing young.  Still they find a way to make their love permanent as life itself -- life, that is, with Katrina at the windows.

From his wizened babyhood, Benjamin adapts to his odd position by being careful not to cause trouble, and by watching others for clues about how to act.  A problem with the film is that he maintains his defensive passivity as he grows young.  Even as a hale and hearty man in mid-life, he continues to react rather than initiate, which thins the character and narrows what's asked of Brad Pitt in terms of emotional range.  Still, Pitt's right for the part:  for those lacking Queenie's saintly character, it takes the exceptional charm and tousled-haired good looks of a Brad Pitt to offset unease about a freak of nature, and to make him seem enough of a regular guy that we -- and his lover -- can warm up to him.

While Benjamin grows young, Cate Blanchett as the volatile Daisy grows older in a subtly developed personal evolution.  Taraji P. Henson as Queenie touches the heart with her lightest smile.  In this movie of richly developed -- richly loved -- characters, there are in a sense no small parts.  Jared Harris as the tugboat Captain who gives Benjamin a vocation, cluing him in at the local brothel about why a man needs money in his pocket, is particularly vivid.

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, directed by David Fincher, is ambitious in taking on existence as its subject, and it's as engaging, humorous, tragic, sensuous, suspenseful, serious and moving as life itself. 

                                                                             Yvonne Korshak

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