LONE SURVIVOR 2/16/14

Peter Berg’s LONE SURVIVOR based on a true story, gives us a view of war’s brutality, tactical decision making, heroism and machismo – all very close up and corporeal. The camera places us in the midst of the horror and camaraderie of four Navy SEALS on a mission in Afghanistan to assassinate a Taliban leader, Ahmad Shah, in late June 2005. I sit in a half-empty theater – an ice storm swirling outside on this wintry day, wiping clean the tears flecking my glasses wondering why I am emotionally perforated. I realize I am moved watching such young men attempting to survive an undertaking gone awry, due to equipment and communications break down; life and death determinations (which luckily most of us rarely have to make) involving ethical and tactical judgments affecting not only their lives, but radiating out to communities and families – war is heartbreaking..

 We penetrate the requisite male fuck-you banter (there are no woman in this film) glimpsing each of the main character’s lives  - family, children, upcoming weddings, etc. yet these young men are steel hard, having been trained to kill for their country. This is a propaganda film for The Navy SEALS and the “brotherhood” of men who are the “elite corps” disciplined to carry out operations quick and clean – no messy questions asked back home stateside – a place which seems very far away psychologically and physically. The camera contrasts the minuteness of man against the larger tapestry of Afghanistan’s breath-taking mountainous landscape  - dappled with Taliban warriors whose fierceness and savagery are both alien and a response to the many invasions over the past decades into their homeland,

Mark Wahlberg plays Marcus Lutrell and his well-acted “team” performed by Taylor Kitsch, Emile Hirsch and Ben Foster – four individuals who have bonded not only due to their rigorous indoctrination process, but additionally through their exposure to risk and isolation. A good part of LONE SURVIVOR contains an outnumbered fight-to-the–death gun battle; what made those scenes so singular was the tracking choreography – we move from macro to micro – we see an overview of strategy, and then the camera focuses directly into the eyes, deep gashes, and bleeding wounds of the casualties shocking us to the vulnerabilities of the flesh.

We also are made aware of the Afghani’s own code of ethics – the villagers who risked their own lives to fight the Taliban and help an American – the lone survivor. The movie glorified bravery and courage but at the same time revealed the profound attachments that are formed in combat. This is a war movie that does not show sweeping battles but rather a small group of soldiers who won’t stop fighting no matter the conditions and odds. We viscerally perceive humanity’s carnality and its mortality in the fight for survival.

GLORIA 2/4/14

The preview snippets for Director Sebastian Leilo’s GLORIA were more alive than the actual film which I was really looking forward to seeing, primarily because the leading lady played by Paulina Garcia, a woman on the latter side of middle-aged was portrayed in the “come-on” openers with vitality and singular humor. What a disappointment - those 3 minutes of exuberance ended up being the best parts of the movie.

We meet Gloria after work, looking for male companionship in one of the many dance clubs in Santiago Chile – the TV turned on, giving us a glimpse into the political backdrop and upheaval of Chilean society past and present. This story is a much-told tale – the beauty is in the telling, and in this case the joy and abandon that attracted me originally turned out to be predictably flat as the camera kept rolling along.

The essence of GLORIA is the sojourn of an older woman with gumption, who is extremely lonely and eventually learns to be alone and at peace with herself. Gloria is searching for love and sex…age does not matter – the pursuit is never ending.  A divorced woman living by herself with a cat who intrudes on her space every now and then; the cat becoming a glaring metaphor of self-recognition, once Gloria accepts the animal into her life...sigh! Back to Gloria who has two grown children whose lives are also filled with uncertainties and turbulence, rarely calling their mom - a scenario that sounds familiar.  Even though Gloria is outwardly aging, she is inwardly erupting with sexuality – yet her choice in men doesn’t seem very promising. UNTIL she locks eyes with Rodolfo (Sergio Hernandez) and they whirl, spin and swing into the wee hours of the night and into bed. 

Gloria has allowed herself to be penetrated in every way - the aura of romance is blinding and passionate. The world is turned upside down; nature seems to radiate greater intensity; we inhale scents we have previously disregarded; we view the commonplace with raw sensitized nerve endings  - that is amour’s beauty and its momentary illusion and Gloria is caught in its grip. A relationship with Rodolfo begins, which at this time of life, involves one’s past often intruding on the present, and the question of how to deal with long-standing obligations and alliances, can be elusive and claustrophobic.

Gloria’s disappointments are allayed with a stiff drink or two, or some long tokes on a joint, Being diagnosed with Glaucoma and being prescribed eye drops becomes a recurring symbol of seeing the ”other” with greater clarity  - an allusion that drove me nuts with its medical inaccuracy. We are talking lowering pressure here not sight enhancement.

Music dominates the movie and the most sparkling scenes involve Gloria accompanying tunes that she hears while driving, relaxing at home or lounging in a dance / disco club – spontaneously singing along – cutting loose, unchecked and liberated. Then her innate complexity and indomitable will shine through, giving me insight into a woman who is developing a serenity with herself.

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THE GREAT BEAUTY (LA GRANDE BELLEZZA) 1/18/14

I HATED the pretentious film THE GREAT BEAUTY and won't write my usual review -  rather  I am jotting down some reflections...but had to allow my squirmy, moaning, muttering self - I am a terribly annoying movie partner to settle down. Judith who went with me had to literally kick my leg to shut me up. (She's allowed to do that by the way - we are such good friends.)

I am both perversely attracted and repelled by Germanic history, and the tragedy of my own German heritage - an internal antenna inside of me is finely tuned  to absolutist and monocratic proclamations - so the premise of the search for the glorification of the IDEAL of "GREAT BEAUTY" makes me tremble, bringing  me back to Aryanism.  But I tend to go there very quickly. I too am captivated by the rare blossoming of pulchritude (a word that sounds ugly) and often swivel my head to gaze at loveliness with appreciation, but that does not keep me from the day to day, often tedious business of going on with my life and work. The search for "Great Beauty" is no excuse to live an aimless life. Not in my book. The"romanticism" with the past is over-blown and "dangerously destructive."

This retro Fellini-esque film brought me back to the panting, excited girl who was seeing Italian and "foreign movies" in the Art Houses of the 60's; the enveloping darkness was erotic and mysterious;  those movies...oops "films"  were fresh and felt grounded in a magic that was new and enchanting, shattering the projected conventions of its period. THE GREAT BEAUTY was full of what some perceived as "deep", pithy, "philosophical" statements uttered by a jaded, older, seen-it-all, one book under his belt, AESTHETE whose boredom was YES boring.

Tony Servillo plays Jep Gambardella whose 65th birthday festivity  is an important pivotal moment in the film, which begins with his celebratory bacchanal. I did not mind  the director, Paolo Sorrentino's quoting other artists. Bernardo Bertolucci could touch upon the self-illusions that we need to construct for ourselves in order to survive, particularly in The Conformist brilliantly. But in this case the referencing was pure parody.  I was also uninterested in most of the characters, except the participants in an art performance dealing with Botox vignettes, addressing the fine touches we resort to in order to experience once again the ripe luster of youth.  Had the director conveyed the enthusiasts' "anguish" with greater conviction,  I might have been more sympathetic.

Undoubtedly I kept thinking about the Berlusconi years which continue today, but feel that someone in the future will do a film about that period of history more incisively. I bristled at the dialogue, the upper-class one-dimensional Fellini-but-not-Fellini eccentrics trying to find meaning through excess tiring me out to the point that my eyes were closing - opening only when  the one "echt" (interesting) person turns out to be a woman"dwarf" who actually revels in her daily ventures - a welcoming exception.

Many of my friends loved this movie - particularly those who have been to Rome. Nostalgia pins us to hours - even seconds from an earlier existence - when we can go back and shave off flakes of delicate memory. Even the cinematography felt predictable - shots of the moving clouds in the sky, the rippling water and of course views of the Coliseum - the site of great triumphs, brutality and decay - symbolic of the desultory lives of the film's self-conscious personalities.

ART REVIEW: ISA GENZKEN AT MOMA 1/17/14

Isa Genzken - reflections on her MOMA exhibition.

http://www.moma.org/visit/calendar/exhibitions/1345

http://www.creativereview.co.uk/cr-blog/2008/may/isa-genzkens-proposals-for-ground-zero

The Bauhaus, was a school in Germany that combined crafts and the fine arts. Founded by Walter Gropius with the idea of creating a "total" work of art in which all arts, including architecture, would eventually be brought together, it operated from 1919 to 1933 when the Nazis shut it down.

Isa Genzken’s stunningly moving retrospective both utilizes and repudiates Bauhaus legacy, brashly demonstrated by a seminal work entitled "Fuck The Bauhaus". Her retrospective surprised me with its range of experimental approaches, giving voice to a unique personal view of life – from the frottage oil paintings that looked like aerial views of bombed out/flattened terrains to the glitzy pedestal sculptures.

When I entered the Isa Genzken show at MOMA I was floored by the beauty of an installation depicting large formally pristine kayak-like shapes lying on the ground (“ellipsoids” and “hyperbolos”) – having no contact with one another, but hovering alongside each other with a do-not-touch-beauty that is rarified. Then I turn around and the aesthetic has shifted. I chuckle to see cement blocks anthropomorphized with T.V. antenna’s shooting out of their heads – inanimate becoming animate, making a point about materials – industrial materials in particular which often seem remote and inaccessible – but now like a magnet I approach what was once unapproachable.

The whole show is one of contradictions in the service of Isa Genzken’s singular humanity. She tosses off previous restraints, and I imagine her saying “fuck it – I NEED to do this!” And she does. Experimenting with materials – all kinds of detritus from the mechanical/manufactured culture to the throwaways of the consumer-merchandising sphere.

Scale dominates the show not only the physical but the psychological reaches of hierarchy and structure, often woven together - most evident in a group of building columns transmuting into intimate portraits of good friends – each subtly individualized. We are tossed around by architectural scale reduced to accessible mortal proportions.

American capitalistic scope and power is explored; the underbelly of shame and greed, the global reach of violence and mayhem are presented in assemblages utilizing whatever objects (toy cars, dolls, fast-food wrappers, etc.) and materials that are necessary to vent her anger at man’s inhumanity to man. These assemblages employ scale to great emotional effect ie: a building structure becomes larger because a small plastic tree is placed in the tableaux, delicate and fragile; a dreamlike ornament floats next to blood and terror. Installations are ripped from the headlines - the assault on a young schoolgirl being witnessed by her classmates’ cell phone pictures – a room reeking of horror and voyeurism.

Isa Genzken was in Manhattan on September 11, 2001 and there is a room devoted to her apocalyptic architectural proposals for Ground Zero that includes a Church, Disco, Hospital and Memorial Tower. Monuments that do not memorialize but instead bear witness to the act of destruction itself. In Car Park miniature cars are upended in a cage-like structure that is devoid of any possible movement or passage. The journey has ended.

Isa Genzken’s exhibition can be unabashedly gaudy wrapping the fragility and vulnerability of the human condition with the rubble and sediment of everyday objects. The result is painful and piercingly tender. The sadness enraptures.

HER 1/13/14

 We are in the future - a time when technology rules every aspect of our lives, and Director Spike Jonze’s HER catapults that idea to what some might consider an absurd place, but makes perfect sense when we consider our ever increasing umbilical ties to the computer in organizing and communicating with friends and strangers in our lives. This movie is billed as a comedy, but in essence it is a poetic story of searching for human contact with the very instrument that we rely on to contact other humans.

Joaquin Phoenix, an actor who keeps getting better and better, transforms himself into Theordore Twombly, a broken hearted reclusive man in the midst of a divorce, ironically working at a job as a “surrogate” love-letter writer, living a life of mournful resignation and withdrawal – coming home to an antiseptic apartment, playing video games and having the occasional Internet sex with strangers in the kooky way things are done in this “advanced “world; a universe that is not too different from the one we live in today, but the technological innovations are more all-encompassing.

The need to love and be loved, the need to listen and to be heard, the need to laugh and experience joy – face to face with another flesh and blood person – those are the existential issues posed in HER. Can a computer fulfill those needs? Can the disembodied voice, even that of the husky, resonant, sweet-toned Operating System Speaker Samantha  (articulated by Scarlett Johansson) whose electronic persona takes on a life of its own, programmed to be both empathetic and intuitive, can SHE become the idealized companion that Theodore dreams of? Can an “inter-species” relationship with a machine give us the emotional profundity and togetherness that we ache for in contrast to real, corporeal interactions which often involve compromise, and where selfishness over selflessness is often the norm.

The movie witnesses other couples – one being a neighbor played by Amy Adams (a lovely actor who chameleon-like is always a surprise) trying to contain the bursting seams of her own marriage. More and more of the characters in HER are seeking adequate substitutes for traditional alliances and Operating System “romances”  - whose basic nature is onanistic - might be a solution. Perhaps making love to oneself is the ultimate aphrodisiac?

This film felt fresh and original, like the winds of change transporting the way we interact with one another in our determined attempt to stave off isolation and find intimacy. Nowadays we spend less and less time on the phone - instead we text; we meet our friends in chat and hangout rooms; we have the increasing capacity to have a “fulfilling” virtual life - one that is populated with avatars and perpetuated by illusion. I was fascinated by the issues raised in HER, charmed by the enchanting magic of Samantha and Theodore’s “software system” courtship – no matter how much a chimera – at least it was “shared.”

THE WOLF OF WALL STREET 12/29/13

Martin Scorsese’s new film THE WOLF OF WALL STREET makes Gordon Gekko, famous for his “Greed is Good” speech in Oliver Stone's 1987 movie WALL STREET, look housebroken and tame by comparison. This wild and offensive cinematic experience is overly long, with a kinetic performance by Leonardo DiCaprio portraying the real life, shameless Jordan Belfort (who wrote the book from which this movie was made,) an individual who reminded me of an evangelical preacher - stirring up his congregation of hungry, amoral brokers to bilk working class people - seducing them to invest in fraudulent penny stock transactions. The rapid ascension to personal enrichment is made to seem smooth and simple.

While many people in the audience laughed at Jordan and his team’s gaming of the “suckers”, I wore a dour expression during the three hours of what some experienced as exhilarating entertainment. I despised Scorsese’s celebration of the perks of debauchery. Though some critics might see this film as a sharp indictment of the culture of Wall Street, I found the opposite to be true; there was absolutely no penetration of the surface capitalist veneer of grasping wealth at the expense of others. On the contrary, this movie plunges into the dank, muddy swamps of excrement and attempts to beguile us with the empty putrid spoils that are found there.

Jonah Hill is proving to be a good actor playing Jordan’s co-conspirator, Donnie Azoff - introducing him to the world of getting “high”, giving him the "gift" of hallucinatory release, ecstasy and eventual addiction. Also Matthew McConaughey in a very short cameo role, almost steals the show as Belfort ‘s early “mentor” in the business of exploiting corporate acquisitiveness. It was also good to see Rob Reiner as Jordan’s father, the one sane person in a room of “animals” all unfettering their “ids” in unison.

We witness the hackneyed culture of “the good life,” lots of drugs, (quaaludes  and cocaine,) constant screwing – women’s bodies were all of the typical  fantasy mold  - existing to satisfy the “boys” in both classic and extravagant positions. Despite the illusion of “extreme” dissipation, the unfeeling and repetitive acts of dissolution became tiresome, and that was one of my major problems with THE WOLF OF WALL STREET. Jordan Belfort is a cardboard,  onanistic testosterone driven, self-indulgent man who can motivate others with the passion of his own greed, but there is no sense of an actual person behind the beautiful clothes and cars that he surrounds himself with, and so frankly I don’t give a damn about him or his ilk.

THE HOBBIT: THE DESOLATION OF SMAUG 12/25/13

Peter Jackson, the wonderful maestro of the magical world of Middle Earth has now directed THE HOBBIT: THE DESOLATION OF SMAUG, the second in a trilogy based on J.R.R. Tolkien’s great novel The Hobbit, prequel to The Lord of The Rings, and it is another big budget film, and more importantly to the studios and its investors, a huge successful moneymaker. Looking at the closing credits took at least 15 minutes – filled with name upon name of all those involved in the making of this spectacular “much of the same” and for me alas a yawning bore of a cinema experience.

My problem with the film is that it felt like last year’s model, the territory including the mood and “light” is visually too familiar. The landscape and special effects are panoramic, both natural and artificial – products of the digital age we live in - filled with fierce, snarling animals, teeth bared accompanying equally vicious and savage creatures called Orcs, along with gigantic spiders weaving viscous entangling webs, and a rapacious fire-breathing flying dragon, Smaug – of the title - who resides in The Lonely Mountain protecting his copious bounty of purloined coins and jewels.

Despite the inclusion of many of the same actors such as Gandalf the Wizard (a bit more bedraggled Ian McKellan) who can still conjure up enchanted divinations, and the beautiful Orlando Bloom, heroic as ever as an Elvin Prince, I felt confused by the addition of characters that were never in the original book. I can accept a director creating composites in their screenplays that diverge from the book, but this time it was at the expense of the wonderful  Bilbo Baggins (delightfully played by an often bewildered Martin Freeman,) the brave Hobbit who reluctantly again leads a band of 13 dwarves on their urgent quest to reclaim their homeland, the dwarf Kingdom of Erebor from the overlord of Middle Earth, Smaug, the green-eyed, molten bellied monstrosity, at any moment primed to expectorate flames annihilating all those who step into his realm. Unfortunately, Bilbo’s humanity disappears in the CGI effects, and for much of this barely under three-hour movie, he is an ancillary personage in the plot. One inclusion I did respond to was that of a female Elfin warrior Tauriel (lovely Evangeline Lilly,) who is excellent at her craft and refreshingly human, inserted into this practically all-male cast to attract female audiences, creating a whisper of a possible “interspecies” romance.

The most intriguing part of THE HOBBIT: THE DESOLATION OF SMAUG addresses the age-old question of isolationism vs. interventionism in the face of dictatorial chieftains preparing to expand their territory. Absolute power vs. the exploited; tribal factions, self-interest, and ethnic purity with its accompanying disdain for the “other,” are still recognizable in our contemporary universe. The grab for world superiority aligned with the corrupting dominance of lucre is never-ending, and the fictional Middle Earth is no exception.

For some context - here is last year's review of the first of this Hobbit Trilogy:

THE HOBBIT 12/25/12

Very simply The Hobbit is a tale of a displaced people (in this case Dwarves) struggling to reclaim their Lonely Mountain Kingdom; in doing so wandering through the lands to reach that home. There are trials by fire and the "help of Wizards - one being Gandalf The Gray - subtly and merrily not-so-subtly played by the wonderful Ian McKellan and Galadriea the fairest and most powerful Maiden in Elve Land acted by the beautiful Cate Blanchett. I regretted not seeing more of her as she is such an aesthetic feast for my eyes.

That this adventure takes place in Middle Earth - prequel to The Lord of the Rings does not change a basic tale of mankind's journey and fight for their homeland. I found the early scenes in the Hobbitshire charmingly fairytale-ish and the dialogue between Bilbo Baggins ( a well-cast Martin Freeman) and Gandalf quite amusing and also touching on another universal theme - the quiet, unassuming home-body who goes on an adventure and steps out of his/her "ordinary" life and thereby changes him/herself and the "world."

I must admit to terrible boredom with fight scenes between goblins and various creatures on scary wolf-like animals and wait for those scenes to end-my only fascination with them is how they are choreographed.

The pivotal and most moving scene in the film is between the wonderful Andy Serkis as the schizophrenic Gollum (fighting between his dark and light side - evident by his eyes and facial expressions) and Bilbo who discovers more about his own character through this encounter.

This film also uses special effects, and all that CGI can do to make a small lovely book The Hobbit, into a 3 part movie - with all the money that it will rake in.