THE GRAND BUDAPEST HOTEL 3/27/14

I absolutely adored Wes Anderson’s MOONRISE KINGDOM – a film that was enchanting, eccentric, visually as clear as breathing in the early morning light. The director successfully used actors against type making me realize the range of their abilities. I was held captive and surrendered my prosaic reality for almost 2 hours until the magic ended.

THE GRAND BUDAPEST HOTEL was about 70% as mesmerizing even though the dialogue was snappy, the actors racing back and forth – torsos rigid and legs moving like Keystone Kops right out of a Mack Sennett film  were endearing, but “sight gags” too oft repeated can be tedious. Anderson walks a tightrope – between being overly cute, and conjuring incisive transformations that are entrancing. He teeters on both sides of that thin line – sometimes outrageously playful and facetious, and at other times predictably slapstick and repetitive.

Through flashbacks, we are introduced to Gustav H. (a wonderful stately, farcical Ralph Fiennes) who is the ideal concierge of The Grand Budapest Hotel located in a fictional kingdom somewhere in Central Europe in the 1930’s. We are shown inklings of a tremulous and uneasy time period between the wars, and the cataclysmic changes that will soon overtake the continent. Glimmers of fascism are on the rise, but the movie treats the black-shirted “thugs” with short shrift – ridiculing them as if they were burlesque characters out of a Marx Brothers film – impotent and ridiculous.

Gustave H is a gentleman who lives by the rules of his profession and has a genuine affection for his job and his patrons. He is a man who believes in “service,” and has the personality and charismatic appeal to glide in out of seductions, preferably with the older and wealthier of his female clientele. Cynicism is made palatable by the undeniable joy and high spirits of his antics.

 Basically this is a mystery tale – a whodunit involving the murder of one of the hotel’s customers; a missing will and the theft of a valuable painting. It is also essentially a film about a friendship – a mentorship of a young apprentice, aptly named Zero Mustapha (an enthusiastic and winning Tony Revolori) who is the most fully realized individual in THE GRAND BUDAPEST HOTEL,) a “lobby boy” taken under the Concierge’s wing becoming his ally and devoted friend. Their adventures combine whacky perilous undertakings overlaid with the innocence of innate goodness, often involving Wes Anderson’s ensemble cast – Harvey Keitel, Edward Norton, Tilda Swinton, Bill Murray and Owen Wilson with “newcomers” Jude law, F. Murray Abraham, William DaFoe, Jeff Goldbaum and the fragile Lea Seydoux thrown in the mix.

Visually THE GRAND BUDAPEST HOTEL feels like a fairy tale. Once upon a time…in a far off land …describes what Anderson’s world evokes. Emotional resonance does not peek out very often, except for a few tender scenes between Zero and Gustav H. and even then there is a wall of self-conscious drollery that separates us from them. But I definitely think that this is a film one should see by a director who deserves our attention. 

TRUE DETECTIVE 3/10/14

True Detective, an ambitious 8 part series on HBO, where the word Detective is singular not plural. Always wondered if the title gave that designation to Rust Cohle (Matthew McConaughey) who obsessively continued "detecting/searching" for 17 years after a serial killer case in the backwoods and swamps of Louisiana was "solved" with lots of unanswered questions left in the dank and steamy air. His partner - Marty Hart ( Woody Harrelson), a mercurial, womanizing, down-to-earth antithesis to Cohle saw the conclusion of the case, and the end of their relationship as the finale to a tormented, life-altering period.

We meet them again in 2012- a plot device which had many "red herrings" -the two former Louisiana detectives being interrogated - a flashback technique - addressing issues of hindsight, marriage, prevarication and the attempt to bring some clarity to the intervening time period.

Basically this series was about the relationship between these two men; their different approaches to investigation - the ups and downs of their personal connection - interspersed with mysticism, philosophical gibberish, religion, hard drugs, drinking, rough sex, shootouts, and most importantly deeply ingrained familial tragedies that slowly leak - drip by drip down to the next generation. We can not escape the "darkness' of our forebearers, at least that is what creator Nic Pizzolatto would have us believe.

What held my interest, despite the convoluted plot and Rust Cohle's pretentious monologuing, was the strong acting performances by McConaughey and Harrelson. The chemistry between them was strong, their human failings and the burdens of life's heavy lifting were etched in their body language as well as their oftentimes passionate and eloquent features. Each stayed in character - one mask like and inscrutable, the other engaging with a seductive grin - the tongue peeking out with delight out of the corner of Harrelson's lips.

I believe the last episode left an opening for a sequel. I hope so.

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.”