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"Hungering for a female hero"
Apr. 27th, 2012 | 03:55 am
This headline appeared in the Detroit News the day before the opening of The Hunger Games movie. In the article that followed, Tom Long observed that among the “top 200 worldwide box-office hits ever ($350 million and up), not one has been built around a female action star.”
Now there is. One. The headline has already proved prophetic: The box-office of The Hunger Games surged past $350 million last week, its fourth. That's in North America — worldwide, it’s well over half a billion. To put this in current perspective, it has already earned as much in theatres as all nine of the 2011 films Oscar-nominated for Best Picture combined had earned when the list was announced January 24th.
I think this is not a flash in the pan but a conflagration. More than most trendy phenomena, this one is finding resonances far from its youthful target demographic, inspiring social activism, political rhetoric, sports metaphors, sitcom and sketchcom quips, a Mad Magazine feature and other parodies, editorial and other cartoons, colorful Hunger Games make-up (!) and other unlikely products, and did you hear that Olympic-style archery will be introduced this fall into New York public schools? Yes, it’s thanks to The Hunger Games, which is so much in the cultural air we breathe now that people who knew from the start that this movie was not for them are checking it out.
Talk about timely! Like the hit novel on which it is based, the movie takes place in an Americanish country (Panem) where the rich have long since conquered and divided the once-rebellious poor. The streamlined narrative of the film (sampled in this “sneak peek”) suggests that the principal function now of the poor’s 12 districts is passively to serve up annual “Tributes” — one teenage contestant of each gender, conscripted by lottery — to be trained in the Capitol [sic] for the title show, a live reality-TV marathon.
The Tributes learn how to survive in the wild, how to fight, and how to attract sponsors (popularity can be very helpful). The winner is the one left when the other 23 have been murdered by their rivals or — to keep things exciting as the numbers dwindle — killed by reality-show challenges (fireballs, insects with psychotropic stings, even computer-generated carnivores with a craving for flesh-and-blood contestants).
Now I never thought I’d say this about any movie, but I enjoyed The Hunger Games despite having to see it on a big screen. While the story and its heroine are compelling, they would be just as compelling on your phone ... and the directing of Gary Ross would be far less distractingly defective.
The best thing Ross did was to ask actress Jennifer Lawrence, who was so beautifully contained in last year’s Winter’s Bone, to repurpose that Oscar-nominated performance to the role of Katniss Everdeen. And he serves her well, allowing her luminous presence to be felt in almost every one of the movie’s 144 minutes ... without requiring her to voice-over any of her character’s narration from the book. So while she says little, she is the moral core of the movie, the reason why the its muting of so much of the novel’s violence isn’t a total betrayal — we can feel her fierce ambivalences and anguish, even when they are suppressed for safety’s sake, as clearly as the fear and fury that leaks out. (The rest of the Tributes, like most reality-show contestants, are restricted at best to one or two caricaturistics each, so there is no chance that anyone will be sorry if Katniss lives to be in another movie.)
Ross, previously best known for not totally betraying Seabiscuit, did well with the casting in general — minor characters can disappear for an hour or more and still be remembered without hesitation on their return — but I question the decision to make so many of the Capitol’s residents so cartoony. Donald Sutherland (in a cameo) is the only fearsome grownup we see, and this bleeds much of the terror out of the outrageously glamorous TV presentation of dead kids walking, makes it more Alice In Wonderland than Schindler’s List.
Another good thing for the movie is that not being restricted to the narrator’s focus opens it to elements Katniss neither knows nor imagines — arguments between the Games Masters, for example. It also, secondarily, becomes a story of the making of the most elaborate reality show on earth ... and this aspect required mightier suspension of disbelief than I could muster.
Indeed, some of the content seemed quite arbitrary, or utterly nonsensical, and I was confused enough about whom to blame for my confusion that I bought and read the ebook ($5 from Amazon on their free Kindle for Mac), doing my bit to help Suzanne Collins become what Amazon celebrated last month as “the best-selling Kindle author of all time.”
Sure enough, the book’s implausibilities are far fewer, if only because what doesn’t seem to concern Katniss in the book is less likely to concern the reader than it does the viewer (the technology, for example, that can record every move of every Tribute intimately from multiple angles — how could it be invisible to them? Well, it sure becomes a question when it is invisible to us.)
Eventually, I thought that maybe the reason I can’t recall seeing a single TV screen is because the Panemites haven’t yet invented television. It’s hard to know what to expect of a fascist feudal world so dependent on coal that it virtually enslaves its miners, but travels on smokeless high-speed trains and (according to the book) ruthlessly controls the Games’ climate... conducts surveillance with dirigibles and rips the tongues out of children caught saying the wrong thing, but loves the tear-jerking human-interest stories of Hunger Games teens in peril ... fires off a cannon at the exact moment of death of every Tribute so that (again according to the book) the bodies can be collected fresh and made to look as lifelike as possible for a hero’s burial ... and never that I recall reveals anything like a camera, not even in the pageant and the subsequent interviews that precede the Games ... but makes watching the 24/7 public screening of the Hunger Games in each District a compulsory exercise in humility, a renewal of surrender.
While the writing has the unfussy style of Katniss, who relates the story, it is meticulously crafted by author Suzanne Collins, so that the details of Who and Where and, above all, Why??? become clearer and clearer to the reader ... only after our curiosity has been ratcheted up, along with the suspense. The movie trades in this steadfast perspective for an inconsistent mess of multiple realities, with Ross lurching between directorial styles and genre referents as if this were an audition reel ... and ignoring the expectations inculcated in our culture ...
* * * * *
Moviegoers all over the world have grown up with the ‘Hollywood’ language of cinema, which has conventions, as all languages do, and allows exceptions for artists (which, if I haven’t made myself clear, Gary Ross is not).
A Film 101 convention that is even more familiar now from drama series on commercial TV is the Establishing Shot, the wide/distant view that orients us, allowing us to be absorbed into closer-up experiences.
Less familiar to most viewers, but just as important subconsciously, is the convention that when two characters are talking (or fighting) face to face, the cameras through which we are observing them, from no matter how close or far away, are all on the same side of the line between them. (A shot from the other side would suddenly reverse our sense of right and left.)
The Hunger Games has so many violations of these basic principles that for most of the movie we don’t know where characters in the same scene are in relation to each other or in relation to their environment. Even when Katniss takes refuge from the Games in a tree, for example, Ross refuses us the perspectives we need for what’s coming — how high is she? what all can she view? can she be seen from below? do contiguous trees give her a possible escape route? Ross keeps his close-up lenses in place; he’d rather read poetry in her motion, and haikus of feeling on her face, neither of which is a totally terrible alternative, but still ...
Only the few fragments of the live-TV show that we get to see on big screens — always obliquely — seem crisp, clean, composed ... like a traditional movie. (The enormous studio audience, though, gets to watch on screens that for some reason are tall and vertical, maybe it’s a décor thing.) What you get from the movie itself in the theatre is aggressively in-your-face, a style that could be described kindly as ‘subjective’ or clinically as ‘schizophrenic’. The latter seems an ever-more-fair assessment as the movie wears on.
* * * * *
At the beginning, Katniss is shown to be a caring sister, a dutiful daughter, a gifted archer-hunter, and a model pal for a great guy. This is Ross at his most efficient, and aside from the gloomy grainy greyness of what is apparently a typical day in the Districts, the only problem is his resolute refusal to establish a horizon line — we’re almost always looking from above or below whatever we’re looking at, or from too close to tell. (The flashbacks to come will return to this drab palette, and the obscurest of them — someone left a loaf out in the rain? — will be repeated until we get told what to think.)
The District 12 conscription sequence that follows introduces the shaky-cam, Ross overwhelming the scene’s cruel pageantry with jerky, claustrophobic penetrations of the crowd and jump-cuts between extreme close-ups. Then it’s time to herd the ‘winners’ onto the train, and he pulls back a bit, using (I presume) the digital equivalent of film stock that has been drained of almost all color, and pushes the Holocaust analogy so far that one starts to look around for swastikas.
Another crowd-scene borrows from Ben-Hur the chariots that bear the contestants, waxed and buffed and fabulously costumed, to be examined by the wildly colorful studio audience and the unfathomable TV audience. Spectacular stuff! but Ross’s peaking ADD dissipates every aspect of the spectacle, most especially the 12th-and-last entrance — Katniss in a long, swirly skirt with cool flames that will get her dubbed “The Girl On Fire”.
Eventually we do get to the Games and — finally! — a free-for-all scene that is meant to be chaotic. Even here, though, it wouldn’t have been hard to come up with a staging more dramatic than having Tributes running in and out of focus across the front of the cameras.
What’s really insupportable, however, is what happens afterwards, when things get acutely alarming for Katniss in the artificial wild, and suddenly it’s as if we were watching The Blair Witch Project or Cloverfield or TV’s The River, all of which could justify their amateur blurry twitchiness because terrified characters were recording the bad things for themselves. But here the multiplicity of points of view betrays the scary isolation of a girl alone with the unknown in the dark. For you cannot see this scene without imagining a team of paparazzi videographers that cannot possibly exist in the world of the story.
* * * * *
Why blame the director? That too is a convention. The buck usually stops somewhere else, somewhere up the producer chain, but for artistic choices, ultimately the director is the designated decider. And while he (usually) may or may not himself be contractually obligated to publicize his work, he is certainly contractually forbidden to disclose matters that might sabotage the $u¢¢e$$ of the production. So we must feel free to speculate. And I want to understand what, besides inexperience or incompetence, might have caused this director to make so many bad decisions.
Much of it may have been the result of certain constraints. The paramount (for Lionsgate) need for a PG-13 rating, for example, may necessarily have been achieved at the cost of clarity. We are obviously used to the kind of insanely violent terrorism that permitted The Dark Knight a PG-13 (though the Parental Guidance should have been “Don’t even think about letting your pre-teen see this film!”), for this was about grownup who lives in a comic-book world. The very idea of letting children watch children killing children, however, must have caused doubt to seethe in the boardrooms of The Hunger Games backers ... until maybe Ross (or somebody) said, “Well, what if we don’t actually see it, quite?!”
Or think about the fortune that must have been saved on sets by letting us see a few small parts only of one District only, and the Capitol only at such a distance that it could be fully faked on an iPad ... and in the Capitol only one non-generic room ... and then set the Games themselves in woods and fields so ordinary that no one would desire (or by now expect) to see more of them. The only disadvantage to the backers, as it turns out, is that it’s going to be very very hard to hide the profits.
This rich reward, and a Rotten Tomatoes approval rating of 85% from both critics (252 of them) and amateurs (170,211 of them to date), would have put Ross, who was paid $3 million to direct and co-script the movie, in a prime position to seek improvement in his contract for the three (3) sequels. Instead, two weeks ago he apparently shocked Lionsgate by saying he would not return to direct Catching Fire. "As a writer and a director, I simply don’t have the time I need to write and prep the movie I would have wanted to make because of the fixed and tight production schedule." (One factor: The sequel requires a summer start because Jennifer Lawrence had previously been contracted to reprise her supporting role as Raven/Mystique in X-Men: First Class for a sequel that starts shooting in January.)
Last week, Lionsgate announced that the helm will be taken over by Francis Lawrence (no relation), a hugely successful director of big-deal commercials (Pepsi and Coke) and big-star videos (Lady Gaga’s “Bad Romance” won him a Grammy). He made the move into movies with Constantine (Keanu Reeves), I Am Legend (Will Smith), and Water for Elephants (Reese Witherspoon); most recently he also did the touching pilot for Touch (Kiefer Sutherland), about a single dad whose mute 11-year-old makes urgent connections between people through numbers.
So I’m uncautiously hopeful. Here is a guy who clearly has hip sensibilities and traditional big-screen values, gets along with artists, and enjoys making things look good.
Meanwhile, The Hunger Games returns today for a week in IMAX theatres across the continent. I'll be listening instead to the all-star 'soundtrack', a tribute I can watch on the back of my eyelids.
Now there is. One. The headline has already proved prophetic: The box-office of The Hunger Games surged past $350 million last week, its fourth. That's in North America — worldwide, it’s well over half a billion. To put this in current perspective, it has already earned as much in theatres as all nine of the 2011 films Oscar-nominated for Best Picture combined had earned when the list was announced January 24th.
I think this is not a flash in the pan but a conflagration. More than most trendy phenomena, this one is finding resonances far from its youthful target demographic, inspiring social activism, political rhetoric, sports metaphors, sitcom and sketchcom quips, a Mad Magazine feature and other parodies, editorial and other cartoons, colorful Hunger Games make-up (!) and other unlikely products, and did you hear that Olympic-style archery will be introduced this fall into New York public schools? Yes, it’s thanks to The Hunger Games, which is so much in the cultural air we breathe now that people who knew from the start that this movie was not for them are checking it out.
Talk about timely! Like the hit novel on which it is based, the movie takes place in an Americanish country (Panem) where the rich have long since conquered and divided the once-rebellious poor. The streamlined narrative of the film (sampled in this “sneak peek”) suggests that the principal function now of the poor’s 12 districts is passively to serve up annual “Tributes” — one teenage contestant of each gender, conscripted by lottery — to be trained in the Capitol [sic] for the title show, a live reality-TV marathon.
The Tributes learn how to survive in the wild, how to fight, and how to attract sponsors (popularity can be very helpful). The winner is the one left when the other 23 have been murdered by their rivals or — to keep things exciting as the numbers dwindle — killed by reality-show challenges (fireballs, insects with psychotropic stings, even computer-generated carnivores with a craving for flesh-and-blood contestants).
Now I never thought I’d say this about any movie, but I enjoyed The Hunger Games despite having to see it on a big screen. While the story and its heroine are compelling, they would be just as compelling on your phone ... and the directing of Gary Ross would be far less distractingly defective.
The best thing Ross did was to ask actress Jennifer Lawrence, who was so beautifully contained in last year’s Winter’s Bone, to repurpose that Oscar-nominated performance to the role of Katniss Everdeen. And he serves her well, allowing her luminous presence to be felt in almost every one of the movie’s 144 minutes ... without requiring her to voice-over any of her character’s narration from the book. So while she says little, she is the moral core of the movie, the reason why the its muting of so much of the novel’s violence isn’t a total betrayal — we can feel her fierce ambivalences and anguish, even when they are suppressed for safety’s sake, as clearly as the fear and fury that leaks out. (The rest of the Tributes, like most reality-show contestants, are restricted at best to one or two caricaturistics each, so there is no chance that anyone will be sorry if Katniss lives to be in another movie.)
Ross, previously best known for not totally betraying Seabiscuit, did well with the casting in general — minor characters can disappear for an hour or more and still be remembered without hesitation on their return — but I question the decision to make so many of the Capitol’s residents so cartoony. Donald Sutherland (in a cameo) is the only fearsome grownup we see, and this bleeds much of the terror out of the outrageously glamorous TV presentation of dead kids walking, makes it more Alice In Wonderland than Schindler’s List.
Another good thing for the movie is that not being restricted to the narrator’s focus opens it to elements Katniss neither knows nor imagines — arguments between the Games Masters, for example. It also, secondarily, becomes a story of the making of the most elaborate reality show on earth ... and this aspect required mightier suspension of disbelief than I could muster.
Indeed, some of the content seemed quite arbitrary, or utterly nonsensical, and I was confused enough about whom to blame for my confusion that I bought and read the ebook ($5 from Amazon on their free Kindle for Mac), doing my bit to help Suzanne Collins become what Amazon celebrated last month as “the best-selling Kindle author of all time.”
Sure enough, the book’s implausibilities are far fewer, if only because what doesn’t seem to concern Katniss in the book is less likely to concern the reader than it does the viewer (the technology, for example, that can record every move of every Tribute intimately from multiple angles — how could it be invisible to them? Well, it sure becomes a question when it is invisible to us.)
Eventually, I thought that maybe the reason I can’t recall seeing a single TV screen is because the Panemites haven’t yet invented television. It’s hard to know what to expect of a fascist feudal world so dependent on coal that it virtually enslaves its miners, but travels on smokeless high-speed trains and (according to the book) ruthlessly controls the Games’ climate... conducts surveillance with dirigibles and rips the tongues out of children caught saying the wrong thing, but loves the tear-jerking human-interest stories of Hunger Games teens in peril ... fires off a cannon at the exact moment of death of every Tribute so that (again according to the book) the bodies can be collected fresh and made to look as lifelike as possible for a hero’s burial ... and never that I recall reveals anything like a camera, not even in the pageant and the subsequent interviews that precede the Games ... but makes watching the 24/7 public screening of the Hunger Games in each District a compulsory exercise in humility, a renewal of surrender.
While the writing has the unfussy style of Katniss, who relates the story, it is meticulously crafted by author Suzanne Collins, so that the details of Who and Where and, above all, Why??? become clearer and clearer to the reader ... only after our curiosity has been ratcheted up, along with the suspense. The movie trades in this steadfast perspective for an inconsistent mess of multiple realities, with Ross lurching between directorial styles and genre referents as if this were an audition reel ... and ignoring the expectations inculcated in our culture ...
* * * * *
Moviegoers all over the world have grown up with the ‘Hollywood’ language of cinema, which has conventions, as all languages do, and allows exceptions for artists (which, if I haven’t made myself clear, Gary Ross is not).
A Film 101 convention that is even more familiar now from drama series on commercial TV is the Establishing Shot, the wide/distant view that orients us, allowing us to be absorbed into closer-up experiences.
Less familiar to most viewers, but just as important subconsciously, is the convention that when two characters are talking (or fighting) face to face, the cameras through which we are observing them, from no matter how close or far away, are all on the same side of the line between them. (A shot from the other side would suddenly reverse our sense of right and left.)
The Hunger Games has so many violations of these basic principles that for most of the movie we don’t know where characters in the same scene are in relation to each other or in relation to their environment. Even when Katniss takes refuge from the Games in a tree, for example, Ross refuses us the perspectives we need for what’s coming — how high is she? what all can she view? can she be seen from below? do contiguous trees give her a possible escape route? Ross keeps his close-up lenses in place; he’d rather read poetry in her motion, and haikus of feeling on her face, neither of which is a totally terrible alternative, but still ...
Only the few fragments of the live-TV show that we get to see on big screens — always obliquely — seem crisp, clean, composed ... like a traditional movie. (The enormous studio audience, though, gets to watch on screens that for some reason are tall and vertical, maybe it’s a décor thing.) What you get from the movie itself in the theatre is aggressively in-your-face, a style that could be described kindly as ‘subjective’ or clinically as ‘schizophrenic’. The latter seems an ever-more-fair assessment as the movie wears on.
* * * * *
At the beginning, Katniss is shown to be a caring sister, a dutiful daughter, a gifted archer-hunter, and a model pal for a great guy. This is Ross at his most efficient, and aside from the gloomy grainy greyness of what is apparently a typical day in the Districts, the only problem is his resolute refusal to establish a horizon line — we’re almost always looking from above or below whatever we’re looking at, or from too close to tell. (The flashbacks to come will return to this drab palette, and the obscurest of them — someone left a loaf out in the rain? — will be repeated until we get told what to think.)
The District 12 conscription sequence that follows introduces the shaky-cam, Ross overwhelming the scene’s cruel pageantry with jerky, claustrophobic penetrations of the crowd and jump-cuts between extreme close-ups. Then it’s time to herd the ‘winners’ onto the train, and he pulls back a bit, using (I presume) the digital equivalent of film stock that has been drained of almost all color, and pushes the Holocaust analogy so far that one starts to look around for swastikas.
Another crowd-scene borrows from Ben-Hur the chariots that bear the contestants, waxed and buffed and fabulously costumed, to be examined by the wildly colorful studio audience and the unfathomable TV audience. Spectacular stuff! but Ross’s peaking ADD dissipates every aspect of the spectacle, most especially the 12th-and-last entrance — Katniss in a long, swirly skirt with cool flames that will get her dubbed “The Girl On Fire”.
Eventually we do get to the Games and — finally! — a free-for-all scene that is meant to be chaotic. Even here, though, it wouldn’t have been hard to come up with a staging more dramatic than having Tributes running in and out of focus across the front of the cameras.
What’s really insupportable, however, is what happens afterwards, when things get acutely alarming for Katniss in the artificial wild, and suddenly it’s as if we were watching The Blair Witch Project or Cloverfield or TV’s The River, all of which could justify their amateur blurry twitchiness because terrified characters were recording the bad things for themselves. But here the multiplicity of points of view betrays the scary isolation of a girl alone with the unknown in the dark. For you cannot see this scene without imagining a team of paparazzi videographers that cannot possibly exist in the world of the story.
* * * * *
Why blame the director? That too is a convention. The buck usually stops somewhere else, somewhere up the producer chain, but for artistic choices, ultimately the director is the designated decider. And while he (usually) may or may not himself be contractually obligated to publicize his work, he is certainly contractually forbidden to disclose matters that might sabotage the $u¢¢e$$ of the production. So we must feel free to speculate. And I want to understand what, besides inexperience or incompetence, might have caused this director to make so many bad decisions.
Much of it may have been the result of certain constraints. The paramount (for Lionsgate) need for a PG-13 rating, for example, may necessarily have been achieved at the cost of clarity. We are obviously used to the kind of insanely violent terrorism that permitted The Dark Knight a PG-13 (though the Parental Guidance should have been “Don’t even think about letting your pre-teen see this film!”), for this was about grownup who lives in a comic-book world. The very idea of letting children watch children killing children, however, must have caused doubt to seethe in the boardrooms of The Hunger Games backers ... until maybe Ross (or somebody) said, “Well, what if we don’t actually see it, quite?!”
Or think about the fortune that must have been saved on sets by letting us see a few small parts only of one District only, and the Capitol only at such a distance that it could be fully faked on an iPad ... and in the Capitol only one non-generic room ... and then set the Games themselves in woods and fields so ordinary that no one would desire (or by now expect) to see more of them. The only disadvantage to the backers, as it turns out, is that it’s going to be very very hard to hide the profits.
This rich reward, and a Rotten Tomatoes approval rating of 85% from both critics (252 of them) and amateurs (170,211 of them to date), would have put Ross, who was paid $3 million to direct and co-script the movie, in a prime position to seek improvement in his contract for the three (3) sequels. Instead, two weeks ago he apparently shocked Lionsgate by saying he would not return to direct Catching Fire. "As a writer and a director, I simply don’t have the time I need to write and prep the movie I would have wanted to make because of the fixed and tight production schedule." (One factor: The sequel requires a summer start because Jennifer Lawrence had previously been contracted to reprise her supporting role as Raven/Mystique in X-Men: First Class for a sequel that starts shooting in January.)
Last week, Lionsgate announced that the helm will be taken over by Francis Lawrence (no relation), a hugely successful director of big-deal commercials (Pepsi and Coke) and big-star videos (Lady Gaga’s “Bad Romance” won him a Grammy). He made the move into movies with Constantine (Keanu Reeves), I Am Legend (Will Smith), and Water for Elephants (Reese Witherspoon); most recently he also did the touching pilot for Touch (Kiefer Sutherland), about a single dad whose mute 11-year-old makes urgent connections between people through numbers.
So I’m uncautiously hopeful. Here is a guy who clearly has hip sensibilities and traditional big-screen values, gets along with artists, and enjoys making things look good.
Meanwhile, The Hunger Games returns today for a week in IMAX theatres across the continent. I'll be listening instead to the all-star 'soundtrack', a tribute I can watch on the back of my eyelids.
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Oscars in context
Feb. 26th, 2012 | 02:37 pm
music: Hurting You Kind - Chris Velan
The most compelling observation I’ve read in advance of tonight's Academy Awards came this week from Vulture, NYMag’s daily culture briefing:
“How ironic. This competition boils down to one between a group of mostly French filmmakers who made a loving and elaborate recreation of Hollywood during the silent film era [The Artist], and a group of mostly Hollywood filmmakers who made a loving and elaborate recreation of Paris during the silent film era [Hugo].”
Vulture was talking specifically about front-runners for the Art Direction Oscar. But the coincidence is even richer if you consider that also Oscar-nominated in this category, and also competing with the front-runners for Best Picture, Best Director, and the Best Screenplay awards, is Woody Allen’s most successful movie, Midnight in Paris, in which he too takes us back to silent-era Paris ... mostly to meet iconic writers and artists and musicians, but also to remind us of some important things about love (and charm).
“What a great story!” ... Is there a more enticing recommendation for a movie? Acting awards get way more attention than writing awards, but acting awards tend to honor emotional extremes — tours de force in films that often challenge one’s tolerance for misery ... while writing awards tend to honor the core pleasures of narrative craft.
So if widespread appreciation of the screenplay is, as I believe, the most reliable predictor of movie enjoyment, you might be surprised by my list of the year’s Most Promising Films (based on the number of critics associations and industry groups that credited a film with the best screenplay):
1. The Descendants (Alexander Payne, Nat Faxon & Jim Rash) (12)
2. Moneyball (Steve Zaillian & Aaron Sorkin) (10)
3. Midnight in Paris (Woody Allen) (8)
4. A Separation (Asghar Farhadi, Iran ) (6)
5. The Artist (Michel Hazanavicius, France) (5)
6. 50/50 (Will Reiser) (4.5)
7. Margaret (Kenneth Lonergan (4)
8. Certified Copy (Abbas Kiarostami, Iran) (3)
* * * * *
If Midnight in Paris wins Woody Allen an Oscar tonight, it will be only the third of his 42 movies to do so. (Who knows how much this has to do with the virtual certainty that he won’t be at the ceremony to accept it.)
But last Sunday his keenest rivals, the members of the Writers Guild of America, gave him the award for the year’s Best Original Screenplay, as they had done in previous years for Crimes and Misdemeanors, Hannah and Her Sisters, Broadway Danny Rose, and Annie Hall. (He has Oscars only for Hannah and Annie, though the latter film also won for his directing and earned him his only Best Actor nomination.)
The Writers had also nominated him in the same category for Vicky Cristina Barcelona and Mighty Aphrodite, for Alice and Radio Days, for Bullets Over Broadway and Husbands and Wives, and for The Purple Rose of Cairo ... and prior to 1985 (when Comedy was integrated with Drama) they nominated his Interiors for Best Original Drama ... and Zelig, Stardust Memories, Manhattan, Sleeper, Bananas, Take the Money and Run, and What’s New Pussycat for Best Original Comedy... .
That leaves 22 Woody Allen movies for which the Guild did NOT nominate his writing, but for a couple of these — Match Point and Deconstructing Henry — the Academy DID.
Both outfits must be in awe of his discipline ... and jealous of his freedom. What writer has to go less far to win the approval of his director?!
* * * * *
John Williams, who has his 46th and 47th nominations for original score this year (for Stephen Spielberg's The Adventures of TinTin and for Spielberg's War Horse), must be the only nominee to have been disappointed more often than Woody Allen, having won only five: for Schindler’s List, E.T., Star Wars IV, Jaws, and uh ... Fiddler on the Roof.
His three rivals this year have their own director champions: Howard Shore, who has scored David Cronenberg movies for 33 years, turned three nominations into three wins for Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings, and is now nominated for Martin Scorsese's Hugo. Alberto Iglesias is Pedro Almodovar's go-to composer, but has won his three nominations for Swiss director Marc Forster's The Kite Runner, and adaptations of John Le Carré novels by Brazilian director Fernando Meirelles' (The Constant Gardener) and Swedish director Tomas Alfredson (this year's Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy). And front-runner Ludovic Bource is a first-time nominee for composing almost everything we hear in The Artist, his second score for writer-director Michel Hazanavicius.
Meanwhile, Trent ‘Nine Inch Nails’ Reznor and Atticus Ross won the British Academy Award for scoring the American remake of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo; they teamed up to win an Oscar last year for The Social Network by the same director (David Fincher), but failed to be nominated this time out.
Small world: According to Amy Verner in the Globe, Reznor and Bource have something in common — their agent is Amos Newman, son of Randy, who has two Oscars and 18 other song and score nominations to his credit.
And while we’re thinking about music: Why are only two songs nominated this year? Entertainment Weekly has the most compelling explanation for this unprecedented Academy anomaly:
“After several years of weak and obscure song nominees, the Academy’s music branch introduced a rule change in 2009 demanding that tunes receive an average score of 8.25 or higher (out of 10) from branch members to earn a nod. And if just one song hits the 8.25 mark, the track with the next-highest score gets a nomination. This year, it’s entirely possible that musicians in the Academy thought only one song was good enough for recognition....”
That song, though, isn't the song that won the Golden Globe last month: It turns out that Madonna’s “Masterpiece,” from her movie W.E., was not submitted because “it appears too late in the film’s final credits to be eligible.”
“How ironic. This competition boils down to one between a group of mostly French filmmakers who made a loving and elaborate recreation of Hollywood during the silent film era [The Artist], and a group of mostly Hollywood filmmakers who made a loving and elaborate recreation of Paris during the silent film era [Hugo].”
Vulture was talking specifically about front-runners for the Art Direction Oscar. But the coincidence is even richer if you consider that also Oscar-nominated in this category, and also competing with the front-runners for Best Picture, Best Director, and the Best Screenplay awards, is Woody Allen’s most successful movie, Midnight in Paris, in which he too takes us back to silent-era Paris ... mostly to meet iconic writers and artists and musicians, but also to remind us of some important things about love (and charm).
“What a great story!” ... Is there a more enticing recommendation for a movie? Acting awards get way more attention than writing awards, but acting awards tend to honor emotional extremes — tours de force in films that often challenge one’s tolerance for misery ... while writing awards tend to honor the core pleasures of narrative craft.
So if widespread appreciation of the screenplay is, as I believe, the most reliable predictor of movie enjoyment, you might be surprised by my list of the year’s Most Promising Films (based on the number of critics associations and industry groups that credited a film with the best screenplay):
1. The Descendants (Alexander Payne, Nat Faxon & Jim Rash) (12)
2. Moneyball (Steve Zaillian & Aaron Sorkin) (10)
3. Midnight in Paris (Woody Allen) (8)
4. A Separation (Asghar Farhadi, Iran ) (6)
5. The Artist (Michel Hazanavicius, France) (5)
6. 50/50 (Will Reiser) (4.5)
7. Margaret (Kenneth Lonergan (4)
8. Certified Copy (Abbas Kiarostami, Iran) (3)
* * * * *
If Midnight in Paris wins Woody Allen an Oscar tonight, it will be only the third of his 42 movies to do so. (Who knows how much this has to do with the virtual certainty that he won’t be at the ceremony to accept it.)
But last Sunday his keenest rivals, the members of the Writers Guild of America, gave him the award for the year’s Best Original Screenplay, as they had done in previous years for Crimes and Misdemeanors, Hannah and Her Sisters, Broadway Danny Rose, and Annie Hall. (He has Oscars only for Hannah and Annie, though the latter film also won for his directing and earned him his only Best Actor nomination.)
The Writers had also nominated him in the same category for Vicky Cristina Barcelona and Mighty Aphrodite, for Alice and Radio Days, for Bullets Over Broadway and Husbands and Wives, and for The Purple Rose of Cairo ... and prior to 1985 (when Comedy was integrated with Drama) they nominated his Interiors for Best Original Drama ... and Zelig, Stardust Memories, Manhattan, Sleeper, Bananas, Take the Money and Run, and What’s New Pussycat for Best Original Comedy... .
That leaves 22 Woody Allen movies for which the Guild did NOT nominate his writing, but for a couple of these — Match Point and Deconstructing Henry — the Academy DID.
Both outfits must be in awe of his discipline ... and jealous of his freedom. What writer has to go less far to win the approval of his director?!
* * * * *
John Williams, who has his 46th and 47th nominations for original score this year (for Stephen Spielberg's The Adventures of TinTin and for Spielberg's War Horse), must be the only nominee to have been disappointed more often than Woody Allen, having won only five: for Schindler’s List, E.T., Star Wars IV, Jaws, and uh ... Fiddler on the Roof.
His three rivals this year have their own director champions: Howard Shore, who has scored David Cronenberg movies for 33 years, turned three nominations into three wins for Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings, and is now nominated for Martin Scorsese's Hugo. Alberto Iglesias is Pedro Almodovar's go-to composer, but has won his three nominations for Swiss director Marc Forster's The Kite Runner, and adaptations of John Le Carré novels by Brazilian director Fernando Meirelles' (The Constant Gardener) and Swedish director Tomas Alfredson (this year's Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy). And front-runner Ludovic Bource is a first-time nominee for composing almost everything we hear in The Artist, his second score for writer-director Michel Hazanavicius.
Meanwhile, Trent ‘Nine Inch Nails’ Reznor and Atticus Ross won the British Academy Award for scoring the American remake of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo; they teamed up to win an Oscar last year for The Social Network by the same director (David Fincher), but failed to be nominated this time out.
Small world: According to Amy Verner in the Globe, Reznor and Bource have something in common — their agent is Amos Newman, son of Randy, who has two Oscars and 18 other song and score nominations to his credit.
And while we’re thinking about music: Why are only two songs nominated this year? Entertainment Weekly has the most compelling explanation for this unprecedented Academy anomaly:
“After several years of weak and obscure song nominees, the Academy’s music branch introduced a rule change in 2009 demanding that tunes receive an average score of 8.25 or higher (out of 10) from branch members to earn a nod. And if just one song hits the 8.25 mark, the track with the next-highest score gets a nomination. This year, it’s entirely possible that musicians in the Academy thought only one song was good enough for recognition....”
That song, though, isn't the song that won the Golden Globe last month: It turns out that Madonna’s “Masterpiece,” from her movie W.E., was not submitted because “it appears too late in the film’s final credits to be eligible.”
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Fantasy (the Genre) — The Best are Magical Exceptions
Dec. 29th, 2011 | 09:04 pm
music: Bohemian Rhapsody
Is this the real life?
Is this just fantasy?
The former, I hope. I am entertained best by exploring real life.
Sure, much of this exploration is mediated — guided by artistry and enhanced by narrative (and sometimes a good soundtrack). But “just fantasy” I don’t ever want. Even from fiction, I seek something imaginatively and emotionally true.
So when my friend Rose, who’s reading a lot of hard stuff at McGill, asks if I can recommend some Fantasy, I think of Bored of the Rings, a paperback Harvard Lampoon parody I enjoyed far more than the original Tolkien tome (1954-55). The latter, hugely influential, became a million-seller more than 150 times over and really defined for our time (in Oldish English) the genre’s durable dragons, demons, witches and warlords, and the lost or hidden worlds where the rough armies of Id do battle with the outnumbered heroes of Ego, at some cost to the innocents who motivate the heroes and heal them and empower them with beautiful Good Magic against the ugly Dark Forces.
And then I think of the Harry Potter series, which took these tropes and transcended them so playfully and (later) so passionately that it would seem to repel parody. But it’s over now, and I turn to my teenage friends Amalia and Dafna, who grew up with the series (initially in Hebrew) and loved them at least as much as I: Had they found something memorable to fill the void? .
Of course they had, many different things, but they were united in urging me to try Elantris, which turned out to be an improbably powerful chessgame of a novel, the 2005 debut of a storyteller named Brandon Sanderson, who brings to the board an embarrassment of imaginative riches that honor Fantasy traditions by refreshing them.
The world Sanderson creates here includes half a dozen cultures, each with its own distinct social, religious and political structures, versions of history, ways of speaking, and ways of making magic. And we get to know a few individuals from each well enough to have expectations of them, and to be surprised by what they actually do and say when push comes to shove, which it does often over the novel’s 600+ pages.
The improbable part is how suspensefully it leads these individuals into the endgame when everything around them is going to hell.
* * * * *
However, it’s only when I look at the books the World Fantasy Conventions have nominated since 1975 for their annual awards that I realize that I have read and admired scores of Fantasy novels — among them more than a few I wouldn’t have thought to include (most especially D.M. Thomas’s The White Hotel, an amazing kick in the head, and the only other novel besides Hermann Hesse’s Steppenwolf that I think important to read in one sitting).
So feeling freer now, I nominate to my personal Fantasy Writers Hall of Fame, in addition to the above ...
Clive Barker for Imajica, and Frank & Gillian for Luminosity. Both are seductive stories that become fully wondrous, haunting invitations to consider limitless possibility. If you still have my copy of the latter, please send it home. No other book I love is so rare.
Italo Calvino for If on a winter’s night a traveler, which is a whole suite of such invitations, deliciously surreal.
Mark Helprin for Winter’s Tale, which features an immortal white horse in an alternate New York and moves in profoundly subconscious/spiritual ways.
Salman Rushdie for Midnight’s Children, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez for One Hundred Years of Solitude — the best of magic realism.
Marion Zimmer Bradley for The Mists of Avalon, the story of King Arthur and the rise and fall of Camelot powerfully re-imagined from a feminine (not feminist) perspective. And Guy Gavriel Kay for The Fionovar Tapestry, in which the Arthur legend is only one of the resonances brought to bear on the startlingly moving transformations of a group of Toronto college kids in a world where their whims have life-and-death effect.
David Grann for The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon, a first-person page-turner, a non-fictional surrender to the extraordinary power of Fantasy. (Was there some Truth at the core of an explorer's viral Legend?)
Douglas Adams for parts one, two, three, and five of The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy Trilogy, and Robert Shea & Robert Anton Wilson for The Illuminatus Trilogy — strangely cheery paranoid fantasies, the former bitingly funny, the latter barkingly mad. Likewise Firesign Theatre for I Think We’re All Bozos on This Bus, brilliantly absurd, must be heard to be disbelieved.
And, speaking of theatre, William Shakespeare for The Tempest, still being reinterpreted by the greatest of actors for the bravest of directors in its quadricentennial.
Finally, last but most, three Fantasy authors of multiple favorites, cult novelists I celebrate for whole bodies of addictive work — Jonathan Carroll, starting with Land of Laughs; John Crowley, starting with Little, Big; and, consistentest of all, Charles de Lint, the Canadian folksinger whose writing has been nominated 17 times for World Fantasy Awards.
Beaux rêves, chères amies ...
Is this just fantasy?
The former, I hope. I am entertained best by exploring real life.
Sure, much of this exploration is mediated — guided by artistry and enhanced by narrative (and sometimes a good soundtrack). But “just fantasy” I don’t ever want. Even from fiction, I seek something imaginatively and emotionally true.
So when my friend Rose, who’s reading a lot of hard stuff at McGill, asks if I can recommend some Fantasy, I think of Bored of the Rings, a paperback Harvard Lampoon parody I enjoyed far more than the original Tolkien tome (1954-55). The latter, hugely influential, became a million-seller more than 150 times over and really defined for our time (in Oldish English) the genre’s durable dragons, demons, witches and warlords, and the lost or hidden worlds where the rough armies of Id do battle with the outnumbered heroes of Ego, at some cost to the innocents who motivate the heroes and heal them and empower them with beautiful Good Magic against the ugly Dark Forces.
And then I think of the Harry Potter series, which took these tropes and transcended them so playfully and (later) so passionately that it would seem to repel parody. But it’s over now, and I turn to my teenage friends Amalia and Dafna, who grew up with the series (initially in Hebrew) and loved them at least as much as I: Had they found something memorable to fill the void? .
Of course they had, many different things, but they were united in urging me to try Elantris, which turned out to be an improbably powerful chessgame of a novel, the 2005 debut of a storyteller named Brandon Sanderson, who brings to the board an embarrassment of imaginative riches that honor Fantasy traditions by refreshing them.
The world Sanderson creates here includes half a dozen cultures, each with its own distinct social, religious and political structures, versions of history, ways of speaking, and ways of making magic. And we get to know a few individuals from each well enough to have expectations of them, and to be surprised by what they actually do and say when push comes to shove, which it does often over the novel’s 600+ pages.
The improbable part is how suspensefully it leads these individuals into the endgame when everything around them is going to hell.
* * * * *
However, it’s only when I look at the books the World Fantasy Conventions have nominated since 1975 for their annual awards that I realize that I have read and admired scores of Fantasy novels — among them more than a few I wouldn’t have thought to include (most especially D.M. Thomas’s The White Hotel, an amazing kick in the head, and the only other novel besides Hermann Hesse’s Steppenwolf that I think important to read in one sitting).
So feeling freer now, I nominate to my personal Fantasy Writers Hall of Fame, in addition to the above ...
Clive Barker for Imajica, and Frank & Gillian for Luminosity. Both are seductive stories that become fully wondrous, haunting invitations to consider limitless possibility. If you still have my copy of the latter, please send it home. No other book I love is so rare.
Italo Calvino for If on a winter’s night a traveler, which is a whole suite of such invitations, deliciously surreal.
Mark Helprin for Winter’s Tale, which features an immortal white horse in an alternate New York and moves in profoundly subconscious/spiritual ways.
Salman Rushdie for Midnight’s Children, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez for One Hundred Years of Solitude — the best of magic realism.
Marion Zimmer Bradley for The Mists of Avalon, the story of King Arthur and the rise and fall of Camelot powerfully re-imagined from a feminine (not feminist) perspective. And Guy Gavriel Kay for The Fionovar Tapestry, in which the Arthur legend is only one of the resonances brought to bear on the startlingly moving transformations of a group of Toronto college kids in a world where their whims have life-and-death effect.
David Grann for The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon, a first-person page-turner, a non-fictional surrender to the extraordinary power of Fantasy. (Was there some Truth at the core of an explorer's viral Legend?)
Douglas Adams for parts one, two, three, and five of The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy Trilogy, and Robert Shea & Robert Anton Wilson for The Illuminatus Trilogy — strangely cheery paranoid fantasies, the former bitingly funny, the latter barkingly mad. Likewise Firesign Theatre for I Think We’re All Bozos on This Bus, brilliantly absurd, must be heard to be disbelieved.
And, speaking of theatre, William Shakespeare for The Tempest, still being reinterpreted by the greatest of actors for the bravest of directors in its quadricentennial.
Finally, last but most, three Fantasy authors of multiple favorites, cult novelists I celebrate for whole bodies of addictive work — Jonathan Carroll, starting with Land of Laughs; John Crowley, starting with Little, Big; and, consistentest of all, Charles de Lint, the Canadian folksinger whose writing has been nominated 17 times for World Fantasy Awards.
Beaux rêves, chères amies ...
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Potter — Harry Potter
Aug. 31st, 2011 | 03:26 am
music: You Only Live Twice, Nancy Sinatra
Hard to believe I’ve been going back to school (and into battle) with Harry Potter for the better part of 17 years. Seven novels (my favorite the overflowingly imaginative fifth) and now eight densely entertaining movies ... the most successful entertainment franchise of all time ... until you think to adjust the success of James Bond for inflation (and product placement).
Even harder to believe that I was in school when Bond was outwitting, outplaying and outlasting the Russkies and other baddies in the canonical Ian Fleming novels. I devoured all 12 in paperback, though none of the 40+ Bond books subsequently licensed to other authors, and have managed to see every one of the 24 Bond films in their first runs (1962-2010).
So I feel I can speak with some authority when I say of these two heroes that despite their superficial differences, they have a remarkable amount in common:
— Both lost their parents when they were school kids, and were placed in the care of relatives.
— Both were endowed by their authors with scars.
— Both are reckless games-players and skilled fighters who face overwhelming odds at least annually.
— Secret organizations reinforce both with arcane knowledge and cutting-edge technology. Neither hero could have survived without this help ... and even so, their survival would have remained highly improbable without firm support from their respective authors (and without a whack of luck supplied at crucial junctures by every one of their directors.)
— Fleming dismissed his kinetic thrillers as “pillow-book fantasies of the bang-bang kiss-kiss variety." His Bond appeals to the teenage boy in every fan and embodies a pre-Beatle teenager’s idea of masculine confidence and sophistication. J.K. Rowling was famously a single mother on welfare when she created Harry Potter and his world, and he embodies the insecurity and vulnerability of a real schoolkid of either gender. The fact that he has to find heroism in himself seems to have appealed to most anyone who was ever a child.
— As their series progress, both heroes turn cool, shrewd, calculating, manipulative ... and unforgiving (unless there’s an ulterior motive). As well, both love their friends, but are not very good friends to their lovers.
— Nonetheless, both have inspired loyal followings not only among masses of readers and filmgoers, but also among stars who have built their lives around inhabiting even minor roles in the lives of Harry and James ... year after year after year ... decade after decade after decade in the case of Desmond Llewelyn, who played Q the MI-6 gadget guy in 17 Bond films (1963-99).
So ... can it be mere coincidence that Ian Fleming, who started writing his fantasies in retirement, died in the south of England just months before J.K. Rowling, who started writing fantasy stories at age five or six, was conceived there?
Even harder to believe that I was in school when Bond was outwitting, outplaying and outlasting the Russkies and other baddies in the canonical Ian Fleming novels. I devoured all 12 in paperback, though none of the 40+ Bond books subsequently licensed to other authors, and have managed to see every one of the 24 Bond films in their first runs (1962-2010).
So I feel I can speak with some authority when I say of these two heroes that despite their superficial differences, they have a remarkable amount in common:
— Both lost their parents when they were school kids, and were placed in the care of relatives.
— Both were endowed by their authors with scars.
— Both are reckless games-players and skilled fighters who face overwhelming odds at least annually.
— Secret organizations reinforce both with arcane knowledge and cutting-edge technology. Neither hero could have survived without this help ... and even so, their survival would have remained highly improbable without firm support from their respective authors (and without a whack of luck supplied at crucial junctures by every one of their directors.)
— Fleming dismissed his kinetic thrillers as “pillow-book fantasies of the bang-bang kiss-kiss variety." His Bond appeals to the teenage boy in every fan and embodies a pre-Beatle teenager’s idea of masculine confidence and sophistication. J.K. Rowling was famously a single mother on welfare when she created Harry Potter and his world, and he embodies the insecurity and vulnerability of a real schoolkid of either gender. The fact that he has to find heroism in himself seems to have appealed to most anyone who was ever a child.
— As their series progress, both heroes turn cool, shrewd, calculating, manipulative ... and unforgiving (unless there’s an ulterior motive). As well, both love their friends, but are not very good friends to their lovers.
— Nonetheless, both have inspired loyal followings not only among masses of readers and filmgoers, but also among stars who have built their lives around inhabiting even minor roles in the lives of Harry and James ... year after year after year ... decade after decade after decade in the case of Desmond Llewelyn, who played Q the MI-6 gadget guy in 17 Bond films (1963-99).
So ... can it be mere coincidence that Ian Fleming, who started writing his fantasies in retirement, died in the south of England just months before J.K. Rowling, who started writing fantasy stories at age five or six, was conceived there?
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AWWWARDS! The Big Picture. The Big Sounds
Apr. 18th, 2011 | 01:58 am
music: Won't Be Back (feat. Eric Clapton) - Robbie Robertson
My my, hey hey
Rock and roll is here to stay
Three-time Hall-of-Famer Neil Young withstanding, rock’n’roll is on a downward spiral.
Sure, summer festivals and PBS fundraisers continue to showcase the genre’s surviving stars. Veteran critics are responding warmly to new work by veterans Robbie Robertson and Paul Simon — albums whose eclectic branches do not entirely obscure their rock’n’roll roots. Neil himself — thanks again to director Jonathan Demme — has another visceral, intimate rock’n’roll-band concert-movie DVD on premium cable and in Canadian theatres this month (Neil Young Trunk Show, trailered here. And Internet economies predict that ever-thinner slices of the audience will continue to be served archival rock’n’roll pie.
But the fact remains that rock’n’roll songs and albums were less of a presence on the Billboard charts last year than in any of the previous 50. The big awards shows reflect that, of course — old-timers are invited to present and to be praised, and once in a while to perform on a verse or two of a golden oldie. But there aren’t many replacements up-and-coming. The cast of Glee can’t do it all by themselves. (Oh, wait, maybe they can.)
So ... whatever happened to the commercial groove of the rock’n’roll that will never die?
The answer was the biggest surprise of my awards season. More than at the Grammys, the Junos and the BRIT Awards combined, rock’n’roll was all over the Academy of Country Music Awards show, which kicked off at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas this month with a kick-ass reunion performance of southern rock by Alabama and fellow guitar-slingers.
After that, crossover session-vets promptly swung into gear, Nashville style, to support Toby Keith and then Carrie Underwood, and the energy level on stage (and in the audience) was such that no adjustment had to be made when Underwood was joined by rock icon Steven Tyler of Aerosmith for duets — one of her songs and then one of his (Walk This Way!) ... and there was backbeat and groove aplenty among the 18 performances that followed, ending mellowly with James Taylor/Zac Brown duets (before the Entertainer of the Year presentation to Taylor Swift.
Another surprise was the climactic performance of a rousing original anthem by a developmentally challenged choir and its catalyst — Darius Rucker, the lead singer of Hootie & The Blowfish, who recently became the first African American to hit #1 on the country charts since Charlie Pride ... 28 years ago. Given how racially integrated rock’n’roll has been since the very beginning, it seemed surreal that the only other black face I saw on stage (or in the visible audience) was the fabulous face of the singer on the cover of the current Rolling Stone. R&B diva Rihanna had sold more than 60 million records and turned 23 six weeks before coming to Vegas ... to give Jennifer Nettles of hot country duo Sugarland a different duet occasion to rise to (which she sure did!) ... the first performance of Rihanna’s latest single, California King Bed.
* * * * *
Let’s go downtown and watch the modern kids ...
For all three of the other big music-awards shows, the story was Arcade Fire, who rock mightily, imaginatively, memorably ... but are on the wrong side of the generation gap to play rock’n’roll. They don’t have the elasticity — they tend to divide each bar as precisely as they can.
In the previous generation gap — the one carved out in the 60s by the Boomers, the one that liberated us from all limitations and became the hugest generation gap, like, ever — both sides respected the elasticity of feel / groove / swing. The musical difference that most bugged the parental establishment was our reckless embrace of immersive sonic power — the kind celebrated most prominently recently by Neil Young with producer Daniel Lanois on the Juno-winning album they called Le Noise ... which also generated the Grammy-winning Best Rock Song, Angry World. You can see the album here.
Boomer cohesiveness was shattered by the mid-Seventies confluence of two very different counter-rebellions — punk anarchy, which vilified the rock’n’roll machine and eventually freed performance from the need for musicianship, and disco, which strait-jacketed R&B suppleness and eventually freed dance from the need for partnership. The combination — and the DIY explosion of ever-cheaper computer/recording technology — created the gap that still affects us ... the gap between the new-wave rock generation that grew up with the hypnotic comforts of pounding drum and digital Beat ... and the retro-rockers who grew up with groove. No judgment here — both of the most durable chart-toppers in rock history (Dark Side of the Moon and Thriller) partook of this hypnosis, and both were about as universally loved as anything since the Beatles. But while mainstream music-awards shows continue to honor the formerly disorderly, it is the new-wavers who do most of the honoring ... and most of the other performing too.
At the 31st annual BRIT Awards presented by the “British Phonographic Industry” (Feb. 15) Quebec’s Arcade Fire roused the punters with Ready to Start before being named Best International Group and credited with the Best International Album for The Suburbs. As well, Ontario’s Justin Bieber, who has finally turned 17, was presented with the award for Best International Breakthrough Act by Ontario’s Avril Lavigne, a BRIT winner when she was almost as young.
Two days earlier we had the 53rd Grammy Awards, where both Bieber and Arcade Fire had performed, and where The Suburbs shocked Americans by being named the Album of the Year. Bieber lost Best New Artist to Esperanza Spalding (!), and Best Pop Vocal Album to The Fame Monster — Lady Gaga — but I’ll bet his versatile performance won him a whole lot of converts. Funny, I’d assumed he was a rock’n’roller at heart, but it turns out that only his hair is groovy.
Less of a surprise is that these Canucks went head-to-head for Album of the Year at the 40th Juno Awards. Or that Arcade Fire won, also taking home the awards for Songwriter, Group, and (oh yes) Alternative Album, giving the most energizing performance of the night (see Rococo here), and displaying an acceptance-speech modesty and spontaneous enthusiasm matched only by Artist of the Year Neil Young, who took time out to marvel at how good Arcade Fire was. (Bieber did win for Pop Album; Matthew Good for Rock Album, Young also for Adult Alternative Album, whatever that is, though I think we can guess. Host Drake, who came in with the most nominations, went home with his credibility intact.)
Most of the 40 Junos awarded were handed out the night before the telecast, which focused on performance. As with the similarly streamlined Grammys, this is good for ratings but bad for diversity. The Juno flashback montages celebrated musicians who felt distinctively Canadian. The present-day performers (aside from A. Fire) demonstrated how well Canadians can adapt to corporate culture. We used to be famous for our lyrics, for our harmonies, for our inventive rock, and we still do those things really well (Barenaked Ladies, Great Big Sea, Karkwa, Loco Locass, many more), but mostly what was happening on stage was high-tech spectacle with a high-tech soundtrack, as at the Grammys.
And the Americans spend money on ordinance better than anybody. The Grammy show was as spectacular as any I’ve ever seen on television. Lady Gaga, though, wasn’t the lightning rod this time. The reigning queen of aggressive spectacle shocked me this time with a choreographed production of Born This Way that was beautiful and vulnerable and ultimately moving; she left over-the-topness to Katy Perry, to Fuck You! by Cee-Lo Green with Gwyneth Paltrow & The Muppets, and — most successfully, to the astonishing construction and destruction of four virtual stages for Muse and its Uprising, passably captured here
.
My prediction is that the show will be the big winner in its small category at the Emmys in the Fall.
And that all four music awards shows will be back again next year. Along with the Oscars, the Emmys, the Tonys, and the Golden Globes, they are among the most successful of annual live-television events ... for a reason that generates much complaint: They all hand out trophies without sufficient regard to either critical opinion or the popular vote (sales, texting). This allows them to take flak from both sides ... and to remain entertainingly unpredictable.
(This is also true — on a much smaller scale — of the Genie Awards for Canadian film; the big surprise of the one-hour telecast March 10th was the excitement of the music — when did that last happen at the Oscars?! I’m thinking of Quebec’s Karkwa singing Leonard Cohen’s Dance Me to the End of Love with a stylish pair of pas de doers from the Royal Winnipeg Ballet, but even more of the drop-kick start of the show with Melissa Etheridge joining Serena Ryder on a rocking Broken Heart Sun.)
Also in March, by the way, one of the funniest, most moving, and most thrillingly theatrical performers I’ve ever seen was inducted (by Neil Young! — he’s everywhere!) into the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame, to the great delight of the celebrity audience. It has been 25 years since I last had a chance to see Tom Waits live, but this wonderful profile/performance clip suggests that nothing important has changed.
And while we're at it, let me add a shout-out for the 25th Anniversary Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame Concerts DVD that finally came out last year. There are a few longueurs, but the long sets by Paul Simon and friends, by Jeff Beck and friends, and by Bruce Springsteen and friends in particular are always revealing, often mesmerizing, and rise in each case to occasions so ecstatic as to resurrect one’s faith in the power of rock’n’roll.
* * * * *
Okay, a few words I haven’t read elsewhere about the Oscars: The most interesting thing about them this year was that all the winning Actors were winning Academy Awards for the first time ... and so were the winning Directors (including for Documentary Feature and Foreign) ... and likewise the winning Cinematographer, Writers, Composers, Editors, Art Directors, Sound Mixers and Visual Effects team-members ...
By rare contrast, The Wolfman was giving Rick Baker his seventh Oscar in 12 nominations for makeup design. And Toy Story 3 earned Randy Newman his twentieth nomination, and second win, for Best Original Song ... even though most of the songs on his own albums are vivid audio roles that feel waaay more original.
Appropriately enough, young actors James Franco and Anne Hathaway were first-time winners of the job of Oscar Host. Unfortunately, they were given little to do except play dress-up.
I find it fascinating that the ceremony this year was once again tarred with the epithet ‘predictable’, usually by the very people who had spend months devoting acres of print and hours of telecast to divination and divulgence. The show is as much a ritual as any church service — newsworthy novelty is not what is being prayed for by the faithful. And calling the awards themselves predictable in the final days is like anticipating the winners of the Indy 500 from the perspective of the 499th lap.
Let me remind you that as the Awards Season began, it was clear that The Social Network had a lock on victory. 29 film critics associations had named it the best movie of the year. The runners-up, with 1 vote each, were 127 Hours, Black Swan, Inception, The King’s Speech, and Scott Pilgrim vs. The World. So don’t believe anyone who tells you they foresaw 10 nominations for the remake of True Grit.
* * * * *
it’s hardly an exaggeration to say that what distinguishes our culture from all previous cultures is its saturation in entertainment.
-- Jonathan Franzen in the ‘Journeys’ issue of The New Yorker
We call this the end of the Awards Season. The congratulations and thankyous aren’t about to stop, but from here on in, it will include work done (or at least showcased) this year. By media tradition — which is what counts, of course — the new season begins in a few weeks with the Cannes Film Festival. This isn’t the first big film festival of the year (that would be Sundance in January), or the most influential (that would be Toronto in September), but in the old days when newspapers made news, Cannes earned a reputation for being exotic, controversial, star-studded, and photogenic — hence attention-grabbing — that it has never lost. Robert De Niro will preside over the jury for the main competition. More details will trickle out (be carefully leaked) in the days ahead. Winter-worn journalists like going to work on the Riviera in the spring.
Rock and roll is here to stay
Three-time Hall-of-Famer Neil Young withstanding, rock’n’roll is on a downward spiral.
Sure, summer festivals and PBS fundraisers continue to showcase the genre’s surviving stars. Veteran critics are responding warmly to new work by veterans Robbie Robertson and Paul Simon — albums whose eclectic branches do not entirely obscure their rock’n’roll roots. Neil himself — thanks again to director Jonathan Demme — has another visceral, intimate rock’n’roll-band concert-movie DVD on premium cable and in Canadian theatres this month (Neil Young Trunk Show, trailered here. And Internet economies predict that ever-thinner slices of the audience will continue to be served archival rock’n’roll pie.
But the fact remains that rock’n’roll songs and albums were less of a presence on the Billboard charts last year than in any of the previous 50. The big awards shows reflect that, of course — old-timers are invited to present and to be praised, and once in a while to perform on a verse or two of a golden oldie. But there aren’t many replacements up-and-coming. The cast of Glee can’t do it all by themselves. (Oh, wait, maybe they can.)
So ... whatever happened to the commercial groove of the rock’n’roll that will never die?
The answer was the biggest surprise of my awards season. More than at the Grammys, the Junos and the BRIT Awards combined, rock’n’roll was all over the Academy of Country Music Awards show, which kicked off at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas this month with a kick-ass reunion performance of southern rock by Alabama and fellow guitar-slingers.
After that, crossover session-vets promptly swung into gear, Nashville style, to support Toby Keith and then Carrie Underwood, and the energy level on stage (and in the audience) was such that no adjustment had to be made when Underwood was joined by rock icon Steven Tyler of Aerosmith for duets — one of her songs and then one of his (Walk This Way!) ... and there was backbeat and groove aplenty among the 18 performances that followed, ending mellowly with James Taylor/Zac Brown duets (before the Entertainer of the Year presentation to Taylor Swift.
Another surprise was the climactic performance of a rousing original anthem by a developmentally challenged choir and its catalyst — Darius Rucker, the lead singer of Hootie & The Blowfish, who recently became the first African American to hit #1 on the country charts since Charlie Pride ... 28 years ago. Given how racially integrated rock’n’roll has been since the very beginning, it seemed surreal that the only other black face I saw on stage (or in the visible audience) was the fabulous face of the singer on the cover of the current Rolling Stone. R&B diva Rihanna had sold more than 60 million records and turned 23 six weeks before coming to Vegas ... to give Jennifer Nettles of hot country duo Sugarland a different duet occasion to rise to (which she sure did!) ... the first performance of Rihanna’s latest single, California King Bed.
* * * * *
Let’s go downtown and watch the modern kids ...
For all three of the other big music-awards shows, the story was Arcade Fire, who rock mightily, imaginatively, memorably ... but are on the wrong side of the generation gap to play rock’n’roll. They don’t have the elasticity — they tend to divide each bar as precisely as they can.
In the previous generation gap — the one carved out in the 60s by the Boomers, the one that liberated us from all limitations and became the hugest generation gap, like, ever — both sides respected the elasticity of feel / groove / swing. The musical difference that most bugged the parental establishment was our reckless embrace of immersive sonic power — the kind celebrated most prominently recently by Neil Young with producer Daniel Lanois on the Juno-winning album they called Le Noise ... which also generated the Grammy-winning Best Rock Song, Angry World. You can see the album here.
Boomer cohesiveness was shattered by the mid-Seventies confluence of two very different counter-rebellions — punk anarchy, which vilified the rock’n’roll machine and eventually freed performance from the need for musicianship, and disco, which strait-jacketed R&B suppleness and eventually freed dance from the need for partnership. The combination — and the DIY explosion of ever-cheaper computer/recording technology — created the gap that still affects us ... the gap between the new-wave rock generation that grew up with the hypnotic comforts of pounding drum and digital Beat ... and the retro-rockers who grew up with groove. No judgment here — both of the most durable chart-toppers in rock history (Dark Side of the Moon and Thriller) partook of this hypnosis, and both were about as universally loved as anything since the Beatles. But while mainstream music-awards shows continue to honor the formerly disorderly, it is the new-wavers who do most of the honoring ... and most of the other performing too.
At the 31st annual BRIT Awards presented by the “British Phonographic Industry” (Feb. 15) Quebec’s Arcade Fire roused the punters with Ready to Start before being named Best International Group and credited with the Best International Album for The Suburbs. As well, Ontario’s Justin Bieber, who has finally turned 17, was presented with the award for Best International Breakthrough Act by Ontario’s Avril Lavigne, a BRIT winner when she was almost as young.
Two days earlier we had the 53rd Grammy Awards, where both Bieber and Arcade Fire had performed, and where The Suburbs shocked Americans by being named the Album of the Year. Bieber lost Best New Artist to Esperanza Spalding (!), and Best Pop Vocal Album to The Fame Monster — Lady Gaga — but I’ll bet his versatile performance won him a whole lot of converts. Funny, I’d assumed he was a rock’n’roller at heart, but it turns out that only his hair is groovy.
Less of a surprise is that these Canucks went head-to-head for Album of the Year at the 40th Juno Awards. Or that Arcade Fire won, also taking home the awards for Songwriter, Group, and (oh yes) Alternative Album, giving the most energizing performance of the night (see Rococo here), and displaying an acceptance-speech modesty and spontaneous enthusiasm matched only by Artist of the Year Neil Young, who took time out to marvel at how good Arcade Fire was. (Bieber did win for Pop Album; Matthew Good for Rock Album, Young also for Adult Alternative Album, whatever that is, though I think we can guess. Host Drake, who came in with the most nominations, went home with his credibility intact.)
Most of the 40 Junos awarded were handed out the night before the telecast, which focused on performance. As with the similarly streamlined Grammys, this is good for ratings but bad for diversity. The Juno flashback montages celebrated musicians who felt distinctively Canadian. The present-day performers (aside from A. Fire) demonstrated how well Canadians can adapt to corporate culture. We used to be famous for our lyrics, for our harmonies, for our inventive rock, and we still do those things really well (Barenaked Ladies, Great Big Sea, Karkwa, Loco Locass, many more), but mostly what was happening on stage was high-tech spectacle with a high-tech soundtrack, as at the Grammys.
And the Americans spend money on ordinance better than anybody. The Grammy show was as spectacular as any I’ve ever seen on television. Lady Gaga, though, wasn’t the lightning rod this time. The reigning queen of aggressive spectacle shocked me this time with a choreographed production of Born This Way that was beautiful and vulnerable and ultimately moving; she left over-the-topness to Katy Perry, to Fuck You! by Cee-Lo Green with Gwyneth Paltrow & The Muppets, and — most successfully, to the astonishing construction and destruction of four virtual stages for Muse and its Uprising, passably captured here
.
My prediction is that the show will be the big winner in its small category at the Emmys in the Fall.
And that all four music awards shows will be back again next year. Along with the Oscars, the Emmys, the Tonys, and the Golden Globes, they are among the most successful of annual live-television events ... for a reason that generates much complaint: They all hand out trophies without sufficient regard to either critical opinion or the popular vote (sales, texting). This allows them to take flak from both sides ... and to remain entertainingly unpredictable.
(This is also true — on a much smaller scale — of the Genie Awards for Canadian film; the big surprise of the one-hour telecast March 10th was the excitement of the music — when did that last happen at the Oscars?! I’m thinking of Quebec’s Karkwa singing Leonard Cohen’s Dance Me to the End of Love with a stylish pair of pas de doers from the Royal Winnipeg Ballet, but even more of the drop-kick start of the show with Melissa Etheridge joining Serena Ryder on a rocking Broken Heart Sun.)
Also in March, by the way, one of the funniest, most moving, and most thrillingly theatrical performers I’ve ever seen was inducted (by Neil Young! — he’s everywhere!) into the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame, to the great delight of the celebrity audience. It has been 25 years since I last had a chance to see Tom Waits live, but this wonderful profile/performance clip suggests that nothing important has changed.
And while we're at it, let me add a shout-out for the 25th Anniversary Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame Concerts DVD that finally came out last year. There are a few longueurs, but the long sets by Paul Simon and friends, by Jeff Beck and friends, and by Bruce Springsteen and friends in particular are always revealing, often mesmerizing, and rise in each case to occasions so ecstatic as to resurrect one’s faith in the power of rock’n’roll.
* * * * *
Okay, a few words I haven’t read elsewhere about the Oscars: The most interesting thing about them this year was that all the winning Actors were winning Academy Awards for the first time ... and so were the winning Directors (including for Documentary Feature and Foreign) ... and likewise the winning Cinematographer, Writers, Composers, Editors, Art Directors, Sound Mixers and Visual Effects team-members ...
By rare contrast, The Wolfman was giving Rick Baker his seventh Oscar in 12 nominations for makeup design. And Toy Story 3 earned Randy Newman his twentieth nomination, and second win, for Best Original Song ... even though most of the songs on his own albums are vivid audio roles that feel waaay more original.
Appropriately enough, young actors James Franco and Anne Hathaway were first-time winners of the job of Oscar Host. Unfortunately, they were given little to do except play dress-up.
I find it fascinating that the ceremony this year was once again tarred with the epithet ‘predictable’, usually by the very people who had spend months devoting acres of print and hours of telecast to divination and divulgence. The show is as much a ritual as any church service — newsworthy novelty is not what is being prayed for by the faithful. And calling the awards themselves predictable in the final days is like anticipating the winners of the Indy 500 from the perspective of the 499th lap.
Let me remind you that as the Awards Season began, it was clear that The Social Network had a lock on victory. 29 film critics associations had named it the best movie of the year. The runners-up, with 1 vote each, were 127 Hours, Black Swan, Inception, The King’s Speech, and Scott Pilgrim vs. The World. So don’t believe anyone who tells you they foresaw 10 nominations for the remake of True Grit.
* * * * *
it’s hardly an exaggeration to say that what distinguishes our culture from all previous cultures is its saturation in entertainment.
-- Jonathan Franzen in the ‘Journeys’ issue of The New Yorker
We call this the end of the Awards Season. The congratulations and thankyous aren’t about to stop, but from here on in, it will include work done (or at least showcased) this year. By media tradition — which is what counts, of course — the new season begins in a few weeks with the Cannes Film Festival. This isn’t the first big film festival of the year (that would be Sundance in January), or the most influential (that would be Toronto in September), but in the old days when newspapers made news, Cannes earned a reputation for being exotic, controversial, star-studded, and photogenic — hence attention-grabbing — that it has never lost. Robert De Niro will preside over the jury for the main competition. More details will trickle out (be carefully leaked) in the days ahead. Winter-worn journalists like going to work on the Riviera in the spring.
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Not Fade Away Figures
Feb. 6th, 2011 | 09:26 am
3 — hat trick scored by Montreal’s Arcade Fire, who are performing at the Grammy Awards (Feb. 13), the Brit Awards (Feb. 15), and the Juno Awards (March 27), after winning multiple nominations from each for album #3, The Suburbs.
6 — books contracted this year to Simon & Schuster by Bob Dylan. Two will be follow ups to Chronicles: Volume I, another is to be based on dialogue from his radio show on Sirius/XM, the remainder are TBA. (Rolling Stone)
69 — age of Chubby Checker, who limberly performed one Limbo and two Twist songs last weekend on Téléquébec’s weekly concert showcase, Belle et bum. He had recorded the three hits between the ages of 18 and 21. (At 17 he was still Ernest Evans.)
17 — other singles he charted in those four years.
69 — age of Bob Dylan, 88 days older. At 17 he was still Robert Allen Zimmerman.
94 — age of Ernest Borgnine. Born Ermes Effron Borgnino, he won the SAG (Screen Actors Guild) lifetime-achievement award for achievements that followed his name change.
164 — movies he acted in when he wasn’t busy in America’s Navy for ten years and in McHale’s Navy for five, and in other TV series (Airwolf, The Single Guy) for another five. His most recent movie is the all-star action-comedy Red; three more are slated for release in 2011.
89 — record age of first-time SAG Best Actress Betty White, who won for Hot In Cleveland. (She got her lifetime-achievement award from them last year.)
65th — birthday this year of stars who seem to have come from different eras ...
Jimmy Buffett and Patti Smith,
Patty Duke and Sally Field,
Peggy Lipton and Diane Keaton,
Liza Minnelli and Cher,
Bill Clinton and George W.,
Candice Bergen and Cheech Marin,
Dolly Parton and Naomi Judd,
Susan Lucci and Susan Sarandon,
Stephen Spielberg and John Waters,
Sylvester Stallone and Tommy Lee Jones,
etc.
11,500 — Americans turning 65 every day, on average, for the next 19 years, according to CBC-TV’s tyro of talk, George Stromboulopoulos. And 1,000 Canadians a day.
* * * * *
$62 million — estimated earnings last year of Lady Gaga, according to the Feb. ROB. That may be more impressive if you think of it as 170 thousand-dollar bills a day, including weekends and holidays.
$25.3 billion — total earned last year by the 25 top hedge-fund managers. Or an individual average of 170 thousand-dollar bills every twenty minutes of a 40-hour work week.
24.4% — decline in attendance at North American concert tours from 2009 to 2010, according to Billboard Boxscore.
13% — decline in album sales, which were led by Eminem’s 3.4-million-selling comeback album Recovery. None of the top-10 was a rock album.
14% — increase in vinyl album sales, to around 2.8 million, led by Abbey Road and The Suburbs. All of the top-10 were rock.
67% — Increase over last year in the average cost of secondary-market Superbowl tickets the weekend before the game.
$200 — face-value tickets this year for the plaza outside the stadium
69.6 million — avocados that will be consumed tonight by people watching the Superbowl. According to the Hass Avocado Board, that’s enough to cover the Cowboys Stadium field to a height of almost 27 feet.
82% — American followers of at least one sport who prefer professional football to baseball, the runner up. Add college teams to the stats and football is two and a half times as popular as baseball. To watch.
6 — books contracted this year to Simon & Schuster by Bob Dylan. Two will be follow ups to Chronicles: Volume I, another is to be based on dialogue from his radio show on Sirius/XM, the remainder are TBA. (Rolling Stone)
69 — age of Chubby Checker, who limberly performed one Limbo and two Twist songs last weekend on Téléquébec’s weekly concert showcase, Belle et bum. He had recorded the three hits between the ages of 18 and 21. (At 17 he was still Ernest Evans.)
17 — other singles he charted in those four years.
69 — age of Bob Dylan, 88 days older. At 17 he was still Robert Allen Zimmerman.
94 — age of Ernest Borgnine. Born Ermes Effron Borgnino, he won the SAG (Screen Actors Guild) lifetime-achievement award for achievements that followed his name change.
164 — movies he acted in when he wasn’t busy in America’s Navy for ten years and in McHale’s Navy for five, and in other TV series (Airwolf, The Single Guy) for another five. His most recent movie is the all-star action-comedy Red; three more are slated for release in 2011.
89 — record age of first-time SAG Best Actress Betty White, who won for Hot In Cleveland. (She got her lifetime-achievement award from them last year.)
65th — birthday this year of stars who seem to have come from different eras ...
Jimmy Buffett and Patti Smith,
Patty Duke and Sally Field,
Peggy Lipton and Diane Keaton,
Liza Minnelli and Cher,
Bill Clinton and George W.,
Candice Bergen and Cheech Marin,
Dolly Parton and Naomi Judd,
Susan Lucci and Susan Sarandon,
Stephen Spielberg and John Waters,
Sylvester Stallone and Tommy Lee Jones,
etc.
11,500 — Americans turning 65 every day, on average, for the next 19 years, according to CBC-TV’s tyro of talk, George Stromboulopoulos. And 1,000 Canadians a day.
* * * * *
$62 million — estimated earnings last year of Lady Gaga, according to the Feb. ROB. That may be more impressive if you think of it as 170 thousand-dollar bills a day, including weekends and holidays.
$25.3 billion — total earned last year by the 25 top hedge-fund managers. Or an individual average of 170 thousand-dollar bills every twenty minutes of a 40-hour work week.
24.4% — decline in attendance at North American concert tours from 2009 to 2010, according to Billboard Boxscore.
13% — decline in album sales, which were led by Eminem’s 3.4-million-selling comeback album Recovery. None of the top-10 was a rock album.
14% — increase in vinyl album sales, to around 2.8 million, led by Abbey Road and The Suburbs. All of the top-10 were rock.
67% — Increase over last year in the average cost of secondary-market Superbowl tickets the weekend before the game.
$200 — face-value tickets this year for the plaza outside the stadium
69.6 million — avocados that will be consumed tonight by people watching the Superbowl. According to the Hass Avocado Board, that’s enough to cover the Cowboys Stadium field to a height of almost 27 feet.
82% — American followers of at least one sport who prefer professional football to baseball, the runner up. Add college teams to the stats and football is two and a half times as popular as baseball. To watch.
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Need to come up with a title
Feb. 4th, 2011 | 03:32 pm
Ahmondieu, Achmeingott, Omygod, so busy! I’d better stop thinking about it and actually DO something. Maybe something relatively unimportant that I can accomplish quickly.
It occurs to me that in the absence this week of my organizing principal — she who has replaced the daily deadline of the columnist with the daily priorities of the husband — the option field is a thicket.
Probably I should seize my scythe and thresh something so vital that I will not be deflected by the weeds and wildflowers that clog one’s available time.
Curious how unhappy Word is with verblessness, as it is with verbosity.
So I’m writing a piece that will require me to think about getting organized enough to get something accomplished. So I won’t worry about why the dog is barking, the dog usually doesn’t need much of a reason. The bills can stay unpaid today; the cat’s away, my mouse can play. Which is the kind of couplet that could make for a fresh lyric, with a bit of editing and a bunch of followthrough, but I’ll bet I could think of a better after I get some food into me. Creativity requires fuel, and I won’t even have to stop thinking if I bring a fresh, list-free pad with me and don’t put it down just anywhere. Some music might help too, something with flowing energy and no words. Now the day can begin properly if I don’t answer the phone or check emails or think what might be happening in the world with me unaware.
Hmm. Not being introspective of body, I tend to assume that a lack of accomplishment Is a failure of will. Which it is, of course. “What must be done to feed the children” [The Invitation] is sackcloth to the ashes of my momentum. Not that I have any children. Though I do have the aforementioned dog who is barking. Could be the mice. We have an unprecedented invasion of mice this year, unless someone is coming along nightly and strewing mouse droppings on our countertops. For sure, dealing with that is on my to-do list. Having the mice barked at is not proving sufficiently effective.
It occurs to me that a lack of corporeal insight is probably genetic, or more likely genderic. Women who ignored ailments probably didn’t reproduce, and men who devoted too much attention to ailments probably didn’t survive. One of the rewards of writing is making such discoveries for oneself, when the time is right. But I guess I am feeling lousyish, and this gets support from my observation that I have mild symptoms of a potentially fluish nature, and that makes me feel somewhat better about doing this somewhat less than well, which is something, when the time is up
It occurs to me that in the absence this week of my organizing principal — she who has replaced the daily deadline of the columnist with the daily priorities of the husband — the option field is a thicket.
Probably I should seize my scythe and thresh something so vital that I will not be deflected by the weeds and wildflowers that clog one’s available time.
Curious how unhappy Word is with verblessness, as it is with verbosity.
So I’m writing a piece that will require me to think about getting organized enough to get something accomplished. So I won’t worry about why the dog is barking, the dog usually doesn’t need much of a reason. The bills can stay unpaid today; the cat’s away, my mouse can play. Which is the kind of couplet that could make for a fresh lyric, with a bit of editing and a bunch of followthrough, but I’ll bet I could think of a better after I get some food into me. Creativity requires fuel, and I won’t even have to stop thinking if I bring a fresh, list-free pad with me and don’t put it down just anywhere. Some music might help too, something with flowing energy and no words. Now the day can begin properly if I don’t answer the phone or check emails or think what might be happening in the world with me unaware.
Hmm. Not being introspective of body, I tend to assume that a lack of accomplishment Is a failure of will. Which it is, of course. “What must be done to feed the children” [The Invitation] is sackcloth to the ashes of my momentum. Not that I have any children. Though I do have the aforementioned dog who is barking. Could be the mice. We have an unprecedented invasion of mice this year, unless someone is coming along nightly and strewing mouse droppings on our countertops. For sure, dealing with that is on my to-do list. Having the mice barked at is not proving sufficiently effective.
It occurs to me that a lack of corporeal insight is probably genetic, or more likely genderic. Women who ignored ailments probably didn’t reproduce, and men who devoted too much attention to ailments probably didn’t survive. One of the rewards of writing is making such discoveries for oneself, when the time is right. But I guess I am feeling lousyish, and this gets support from my observation that I have mild symptoms of a potentially fluish nature, and that makes me feel somewhat better about doing this somewhat less than well, which is something, when the time is up
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Foreign Film Figures
Jan. 24th, 2011 | 12:03 am
music: Share The Land - The Guess Who
13, 12 — Foreign-language film Oscars since 1947 that have gone to Italy and France respectively.
11 — that have gone to Asia, Africa and the Americas collectively.
4 — Record number of Oscars to a foreign-language director, a tie between Fellini and De Sica. Bergman was runner-up with 3.
4 — Record number of nominations without a win, accumulated by Andrzej Wajda of Poland over a record span of 33 years.
(The foreign-language films that have won Oscars in every other category became eligible by entering through the main gate with all the Americans — opening for a minimum of one week in New York and Los Angeles.)
5 — Years since the Academy rules were changed to allow a country to submit a movie that was not in one of that country’s official languages. This first enabled Canada to win a 2006 nomination for a film in Hindi, Deepa Mehta’s Water.
3 — Canadian films that had previously won foreign-language nominations in our official other-than-English language: Le Déclin de l’empire américain in 1986, Jésus de Montréal in 1989, and Les Invasions barbares. which won the 2003 Oscar. All three were directed by Denys Arcand. Truffaut once had a similar streak.
1.2 — Canadian scripted foreign-language films that are on the long list of 9 for this year’s Academy Awards. (The list will be reduced to five nominations on Tuesday.)
The 1 movie buffs know about is a cinematic adaptation of Wajdi Mouawad’s theatrical Incendies, which was an international hit in French, in English as Scorched, and in other languages. The realism of film, though, required that the Arabs who are central to the plot actually speak Arabic in the movie. Which is no longer a disqualifier.
(The writer-director is Denis Villeneuve, probably best known about by Anglos for Polytechnique, his 1999 movie about the 1989 Montreal massacre of female students “I am deeply inspired by what I fear,” Villeneuve told CBC’s George Stromboulopoulos late this week. He also said his years away from filmmaking was partly “that I became cynical. For me that’s a little bit irresponsible right now. You have to keep faith. You have to be critical about the system, but when you lose faith you become Denys Arcand, and then you don’t know what to do next.”)
The .2 is Life, Above All, a movie about living with AIDS in Africa, which started life in Canada, was developed by a Canadian producer, and still apparently has a script by Vancouver’s Dennis Foon, based on a young-adult novel (Chanda’s Secrets) by Toronto’s Allan Stratton. The vagaries of co-production financing, though — and artistic will, perhaps — resulted in its becoming a South African film directed by a German.
Laissez les bons temps rouler!
11 — that have gone to Asia, Africa and the Americas collectively.
4 — Record number of Oscars to a foreign-language director, a tie between Fellini and De Sica. Bergman was runner-up with 3.
4 — Record number of nominations without a win, accumulated by Andrzej Wajda of Poland over a record span of 33 years.
(The foreign-language films that have won Oscars in every other category became eligible by entering through the main gate with all the Americans — opening for a minimum of one week in New York and Los Angeles.)
5 — Years since the Academy rules were changed to allow a country to submit a movie that was not in one of that country’s official languages. This first enabled Canada to win a 2006 nomination for a film in Hindi, Deepa Mehta’s Water.
3 — Canadian films that had previously won foreign-language nominations in our official other-than-English language: Le Déclin de l’empire américain in 1986, Jésus de Montréal in 1989, and Les Invasions barbares. which won the 2003 Oscar. All three were directed by Denys Arcand. Truffaut once had a similar streak.
1.2 — Canadian scripted foreign-language films that are on the long list of 9 for this year’s Academy Awards. (The list will be reduced to five nominations on Tuesday.)
The 1 movie buffs know about is a cinematic adaptation of Wajdi Mouawad’s theatrical Incendies, which was an international hit in French, in English as Scorched, and in other languages. The realism of film, though, required that the Arabs who are central to the plot actually speak Arabic in the movie. Which is no longer a disqualifier.
(The writer-director is Denis Villeneuve, probably best known about by Anglos for Polytechnique, his 1999 movie about the 1989 Montreal massacre of female students “I am deeply inspired by what I fear,” Villeneuve told CBC’s George Stromboulopoulos late this week. He also said his years away from filmmaking was partly “that I became cynical. For me that’s a little bit irresponsible right now. You have to keep faith. You have to be critical about the system, but when you lose faith you become Denys Arcand, and then you don’t know what to do next.”)
The .2 is Life, Above All, a movie about living with AIDS in Africa, which started life in Canada, was developed by a Canadian producer, and still apparently has a script by Vancouver’s Dennis Foon, based on a young-adult novel (Chanda’s Secrets) by Toronto’s Allan Stratton. The vagaries of co-production financing, though — and artistic will, perhaps — resulted in its becoming a South African film directed by a German.
Laissez les bons temps rouler!
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CBC v. PBS
Sep. 30th, 2010 | 03:00 am
Caution, I have flu fingers. Please do not breathe what I type.
Out of the ether came a question:
“If one had to disappear, should it be CBC or PBS?”
For most of my life the answer would have been obvious: CBC is part of my DNA ... one of my reasons for gladness to be Canadian ...
But it is decreasingly part of my current input.
Doc Zone ... The Hour with George Stroumboulopoulos ... that's it recently for TV ... and radio? well, I'm very grateful for some of their podcasts ... but I miss the former ambition ... mass media for minorities ... experimental films, progressive music, fine arts as significant challenge ... news with an ethical foundation ... My Word, Man Alive, The Galloping Gourmet, Front Page Challenge, The Struggle for Democracy, The Plouffe Family, the pioneering grit of issues-drama Wojeck, and especially This Hour Has Seven Days ... all of these opened many parts of the world to me, and defined me in relation to it.
Radio Canada still has some balls — the Quebec-based French network is an example of television still willing to seek passion and risk rejection — but the English-language CBC has become an intimidation-free zone. Aside from a few moated protectorates (Ideas, Quirks & Quarks, Tapestry, Sunday Morning), it has sacrificed deep loyalties to leave no demographic behind. AM and FM (is there any content difference now?) have been turned over to enthusiastic children (Wow! Gershwin was really good! and here's why) and to audiotronic adults who intone news neutrally and chat amiably and solicit anecdotes from listeners across the country and hope not to turn anybody off.
Meanwhile, PBS for most of my life was a placebo pasture. It was Lawrence Welk and BritComs, warhorses of Opera and Orchestra, generic dramatizations of Literature and Agatha Christie, lifeless History and nice things about Nature. NPR was Garrison Keillor. They seemed peripheral to anyone (okay, me) who was looking for more than comfort and nostalgia.
Now they are foreground. Wherever I am, NPR provides local issues, regional entertainments, and international newscasts in translation, and makes much of it available as podcasts. And PBS? Well, it's getting braver about politics and more adventurous about science, but what makes it feel essential to me is its contributions to culture:
Austin City Limits was my conversion to Montreal's Arcade Fire, and other concerts on that series have catalyzed happy renewals of my interest in more than a few musical legends, jambands and alt.rockers ... and confirmed my lack of interest in other acts, especially last season — also a valuable service.
Keeping Score (the San Francisco Symphony series informed by conductor Michael Tilson Thomas) gave us not only what is surely the first concert broadcast of Charles Ives' wildly impressionistic "Holidays" Symphony (some of which requires multiple conductors), but also two hours of rich human interest, historical context, and musical analysis that transformed the work from intellectual challenge to emotional satisfaction. And last week’s season-opening Live From Lincoln Center featured a full-bodied Symphony No. 3 by Pulitzer winning jazz composer Wynton Marsalis that lived up to its name, “The Swing Symphony.”
Upcoming, some serious theatre; a terrific 21st-century take on Holmes & Watson (Sherlock: three Sunday movies in a row starting Oct. 24); and, for the first time, all twelve of this season’s Metropolitan Operas Live in HD (60 to 90 days after their movie-screen broadcasts. Particularly noteworthy for awestruck admirers like me: the Met has entrusted (1) its first new Wagner Ring Cycle in 24 years to Québecois director Robert Lepage, who launched the season this week with Das Rheingold and will conclude it with Die Walküre, and (2) its new production of one of the great Verdi operas — Don Carlo — to the conducting of Montreal wunderkind Yannick Nézet-Séguin, who ignited last year’s Carmen.
This is the sort of programming the CBC once did, but no longer has to in an era of global communications, and no longer can in an era of c/Conservative insistence that it make money but not compete with private broadcasters. I have admiration for its signal successes in CanComedy from Wayne & Shuster through Second City to Kids in the Hall to Little Mosque on the Prairie. I have sampled The Nature of Things for 50 years. I do think that during the three seasons of The Border, there wasn’t a more provocative, involving law-enforcement series on the airwaves; CBC has done what it can to collaborate on good work with better-funded partners. As well, CBC Radio, lest we forget, still represents us to the world ... and, As It Happens, still brings the world to us.
So in the end I guess I’d vote with my DNA. I just hope that intelligent, imaginative, committed public broadcasting continues to thrive whatever its source.
Out of the ether came a question:
“If one had to disappear, should it be CBC or PBS?”
For most of my life the answer would have been obvious: CBC is part of my DNA ... one of my reasons for gladness to be Canadian ...
But it is decreasingly part of my current input.
Doc Zone ... The Hour with George Stroumboulopoulos ... that's it recently for TV ... and radio? well, I'm very grateful for some of their podcasts ... but I miss the former ambition ... mass media for minorities ... experimental films, progressive music, fine arts as significant challenge ... news with an ethical foundation ... My Word, Man Alive, The Galloping Gourmet, Front Page Challenge, The Struggle for Democracy, The Plouffe Family, the pioneering grit of issues-drama Wojeck, and especially This Hour Has Seven Days ... all of these opened many parts of the world to me, and defined me in relation to it.
Radio Canada still has some balls — the Quebec-based French network is an example of television still willing to seek passion and risk rejection — but the English-language CBC has become an intimidation-free zone. Aside from a few moated protectorates (Ideas, Quirks & Quarks, Tapestry, Sunday Morning), it has sacrificed deep loyalties to leave no demographic behind. AM and FM (is there any content difference now?) have been turned over to enthusiastic children (Wow! Gershwin was really good! and here's why) and to audiotronic adults who intone news neutrally and chat amiably and solicit anecdotes from listeners across the country and hope not to turn anybody off.
Meanwhile, PBS for most of my life was a placebo pasture. It was Lawrence Welk and BritComs, warhorses of Opera and Orchestra, generic dramatizations of Literature and Agatha Christie, lifeless History and nice things about Nature. NPR was Garrison Keillor. They seemed peripheral to anyone (okay, me) who was looking for more than comfort and nostalgia.
Now they are foreground. Wherever I am, NPR provides local issues, regional entertainments, and international newscasts in translation, and makes much of it available as podcasts. And PBS? Well, it's getting braver about politics and more adventurous about science, but what makes it feel essential to me is its contributions to culture:
Austin City Limits was my conversion to Montreal's Arcade Fire, and other concerts on that series have catalyzed happy renewals of my interest in more than a few musical legends, jambands and alt.rockers ... and confirmed my lack of interest in other acts, especially last season — also a valuable service.
Keeping Score (the San Francisco Symphony series informed by conductor Michael Tilson Thomas) gave us not only what is surely the first concert broadcast of Charles Ives' wildly impressionistic "Holidays" Symphony (some of which requires multiple conductors), but also two hours of rich human interest, historical context, and musical analysis that transformed the work from intellectual challenge to emotional satisfaction. And last week’s season-opening Live From Lincoln Center featured a full-bodied Symphony No. 3 by Pulitzer winning jazz composer Wynton Marsalis that lived up to its name, “The Swing Symphony.”
Upcoming, some serious theatre; a terrific 21st-century take on Holmes & Watson (Sherlock: three Sunday movies in a row starting Oct. 24); and, for the first time, all twelve of this season’s Metropolitan Operas Live in HD (60 to 90 days after their movie-screen broadcasts. Particularly noteworthy for awestruck admirers like me: the Met has entrusted (1) its first new Wagner Ring Cycle in 24 years to Québecois director Robert Lepage, who launched the season this week with Das Rheingold and will conclude it with Die Walküre, and (2) its new production of one of the great Verdi operas — Don Carlo — to the conducting of Montreal wunderkind Yannick Nézet-Séguin, who ignited last year’s Carmen.
This is the sort of programming the CBC once did, but no longer has to in an era of global communications, and no longer can in an era of c/Conservative insistence that it make money but not compete with private broadcasters. I have admiration for its signal successes in CanComedy from Wayne & Shuster through Second City to Kids in the Hall to Little Mosque on the Prairie. I have sampled The Nature of Things for 50 years. I do think that during the three seasons of The Border, there wasn’t a more provocative, involving law-enforcement series on the airwaves; CBC has done what it can to collaborate on good work with better-funded partners. As well, CBC Radio, lest we forget, still represents us to the world ... and, As It Happens, still brings the world to us.
So in the end I guess I’d vote with my DNA. I just hope that intelligent, imaginative, committed public broadcasting continues to thrive whatever its source.
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Serbiana
Jul. 7th, 2010 | 04:16 am
The mind reels today. Both of the highlights of my much-truncated sampling of the Montreal Jazz Festival, which ended yesterday, turned out to be free shows by Serbian bands named for guitarists who could hardly have been more different from each other.
That’s two more Serbian acts than I could have named last week ... if you don’t count outscoring Germany at the FIFA World Cup ... and maybe assassinating Mr. and Mrs. Archduke Ferdinand, maybe just being blamed for it, but either way, causing World War I, which was the principal cause of World War II.
One of the bands was the focus of a Big Festival Production — heavy-duty light show, multiple sound systems, multiple cameras feeding so many big screens that the show could be enjoyed blocks away from the stage, even by short people. What was on audioview here was the distended party music of a large gypsy-punk showband — Emir Kusturica and the No Smoking Orchestra.
Rallying the motley troupe, cajoling the huge crowd, and conjuring vocal melodrama while dressed as a cheesy blue fairy was “Dr.” Nelle Karajlic, the kind of funny-uncle who must have given Stephen King his profitable nightmares about clowns.
Fiddling while the Roma burned, and displaying show-stopping dexteriosity — even while applying his violin to a (very) long bow held over his head by comely conscripts —was Dajan Sparavalo.
Kusturica himself sat in on guitar, mostly lost in shadow, but his is the leading international brand name in Serbian culture, mostly thanks to thirty years of films, both controversial and prizewinning, and his would seem to be the restless, eclectic vision the band adopted. Indeed, their variety show was such ridiculously good fun you had to wonder what they might have been smoking.
At the other extreme of site and sound was the hard-sprung power-blues of Ana Popovic. What a discovery! A benevolent warrior-queen in confident command of an amazing technique, a versatile voice, and a driven, driving support team. Mesmerizing!
Of course, the miracle of YouTube was pretty immediately evidence that she has been prediscovered, starting like about 12 years ago, though only one of the more recent videos caught some of the fire I felt. And while it's pretty crappy, the videographer does settle down after a bit, which is also when imagination starts to punch up the sound. See hear for yourself.
That’s two more Serbian acts than I could have named last week ... if you don’t count outscoring Germany at the FIFA World Cup ... and maybe assassinating Mr. and Mrs. Archduke Ferdinand, maybe just being blamed for it, but either way, causing World War I, which was the principal cause of World War II.
One of the bands was the focus of a Big Festival Production — heavy-duty light show, multiple sound systems, multiple cameras feeding so many big screens that the show could be enjoyed blocks away from the stage, even by short people. What was on audioview here was the distended party music of a large gypsy-punk showband — Emir Kusturica and the No Smoking Orchestra.
Rallying the motley troupe, cajoling the huge crowd, and conjuring vocal melodrama while dressed as a cheesy blue fairy was “Dr.” Nelle Karajlic, the kind of funny-uncle who must have given Stephen King his profitable nightmares about clowns.
Fiddling while the Roma burned, and displaying show-stopping dexteriosity — even while applying his violin to a (very) long bow held over his head by comely conscripts —was Dajan Sparavalo.
Kusturica himself sat in on guitar, mostly lost in shadow, but his is the leading international brand name in Serbian culture, mostly thanks to thirty years of films, both controversial and prizewinning, and his would seem to be the restless, eclectic vision the band adopted. Indeed, their variety show was such ridiculously good fun you had to wonder what they might have been smoking.
At the other extreme of site and sound was the hard-sprung power-blues of Ana Popovic. What a discovery! A benevolent warrior-queen in confident command of an amazing technique, a versatile voice, and a driven, driving support team. Mesmerizing!
Of course, the miracle of YouTube was pretty immediately evidence that she has been prediscovered, starting like about 12 years ago, though only one of the more recent videos caught some of the fire I felt. And while it's pretty crappy, the videographer does settle down after a bit, which is also when imagination starts to punch up the sound. See hear for yourself.
