“Fish in the Dark” & The Critics Love to Hate

Posted on March 13, 2015 by McPhedran

The critics have spoken on Larry David’s Fish in the Dark.

The New York Times: …set postures, lines and deliveries, while throwaway humor has been exaggerated in ways that perversely shrink its impact.

The New Yorker: …sour-voiced schtick…a cynical manipulation of sentimentality and humor.The Wall Street Journal: (Larry David’s) playwriting debut, a poor and embarrassing excuse for the kind of Jewish humor that went out of fashion with Gertrude Berg, (is) bursting at the moldy seams with embalming fluid.

It’s not as if Larry David made any highfalutin’ claims. “I saw Nora Ephron’s play, Lucky Guy. I just thought, ‘That must be a really interesting thing to do.”

The hate from New York’s papers is perhaps best summed up by the theater critic in Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Birdman: I’m gonna turn in the worst review anyone has ever read and I’m gonna close your play. Would you like to know why? Because I hate you and everyone you represent. Entitled, selfish, spoiled children. Blissfully untrained, unversed and unprepared to even attempt real art. Handing each other awards for cartoons and pornography.

Luckily, the real-life critics aren’t having so much luck. Larry David’s play has broken box office records and been greeted by constant laughs and ovations every night. Fish in the Dark, as Mr. David is not ashamed to say himself, is “pre-tty, pre-tty good.”

Your MLK Day Quiz: What Would You Do For Someone Else?

Posted on January 19, 2015 by McPhedran

The Dardenne brothers latest film, Two Days, One Night posits a basic question for all of us to consider: Would you choose to receive a bonus if it meant that your colleague lost her job? Understanding that your colleague does her job well but she is not a close friend, what would you choose to do?

Martin Luther King Jr. often asked such questions of us. His final speech in Memphis, Tennessee was no exception: “The question is not what might happen to me if I stop to help the sanitation workers. The question is what happens if I do not stop to help, what will happen to them? That is the question.” Are you willing to sacrifice for others? Or is it you above all else?

“Birdman”: Inarritu’s Unexpected Film of Intelligence

Posted on November 24, 2014 by McPhedran

Birdman is not as advertised. It is not a quirky dark comedy, but a claustrophobically relentless attack on modern-day life. Emma Stone screams it best: “You’re scared to death, like the rest of us, that you don’t matter! And you know what?! You’re right! You’re not important! Get used to it!” Michael Keaton plays a washed-up super-hero actor who tries to find relevance in his Broadway staging of Raymond Carver’s personally raw What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. Ed loved her so much, he tried to kill her.

Raymond Carver

Inarritu’s film is an intense combination of the intellectual – akin to Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author – and visceral – offering an edit-less flow of images that winds through the serpentine backstage hallways and stairwells of a Broadway theatre, only briefly escaping to a bar, a tight balcony and a nightmarish run through Times Square. And while the film does tend toward polemics – with everyone, including a theater critic, overtly stating their points of view – it will leave you breathless, wondering what it is you just saw and when you might be able to see it again.

Chris Nolan’s “Interstellar” Rip-Off

Posted on November 20, 2014 by McPhedran

Interstellar is but a messy compilation of almost every science fiction film done before.

It opens as Shyamalan’s Signs – a paranormal tone established on a farm – and develops into Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind – the lead character following intuitive clues to a secret government installation.Our cast goes off in search of other worlds – like all other star-bound yarns – and toils through predictable and half-developed space-age themes like isolation, claustrophobia and love in close quarters, with a couple of buddy-robots thrown in for laughs. The worst of the plagiarism is the sophomoric rip-off from 2001: A Space Odyssey. Nolan makes repeated attempts at reaching a Kubrick-ian plateau by diving through worm holes, black holes and inner space, eventually arriving at a fifth dimension where time becomes a soft-focus library, from which the viewer can only beg to be released.

The only way this film could be made more tedious would be to view it on Dr. Miller’s Water Planet (pictured below) where an hour equals seven earth-bound years. That’s right, 21 straight years of Matthew McConaughey tearing up because he can’t age fast enough.

Instead of Interstellar, I recommend a 1996 episode of The Outer Limits, Worlds Apart. As cheap as the special effects may be, the story is the same and it’s free on-line.

Justice Breyer on “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance”

Posted on October 22, 2014 by McPhedran

I went to a movie with Justice Stephen Breyer last night. It was a classic: The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, directed by John Ford, starring John Wayne, Jimmy Stewart and Lee Marvin. To my surprise, it wasn’t made in the heyday of the Western, but rather 1962, and so revealed a genre on the decline, stumbling between haphazard morality speeches, comic drunken bits and a camera that lingered too long over everything. Justice Breyer loved it though, praising its themes of justice which espoused the eternal need for “Achilles shield” behind lawyers and judges. He went on to reflect upon the process in the Supreme Court, how there were never raised voices, no matter the issue, and that the 5-4 decisions were always different combinations. He added that the experiment of the United States of America, although temporal, would carry on for many more years. (Everyone at the 92nd Street Y applauded that.)

Werner Herzog: The Myth of the Man

Posted on September 5, 2014 by McPhedran

“There are 50,000 spectators,” Werner Herzog explained to the rapt audience at BAM, the final image of his documentary The Great Ecstasy of Woodcarver Stein on display. “But we see only the man alone against the snow.”

In his interview at BAM’s Harvey Theater in Brooklyn on Thursday night, Herzog admitted to creating myths in his documentaries; he has often stated that “all filmmakers are liars”.

Herzog does not believe in documenting facts, offering data to support a thesis, but instead creates a nebulous thing from which a greater truth may be derived.

He uses whatever he has – everything from archival images of starving people gazing longingly at a sausage (Little Dieter Needs to Fly) to an albino alligator (Cave of Forgotten Dreams) – to make his film work; it doesn’t matter if the material is factually accurate. He has gone so far (in Lessons of Darkness) as to write down his ideas and attribute them to Blaise Pascal, just for effect:

The collapse of the stellar universe will occur – like creation – in grandiose splendor. – – Werner Herzog

At the end of the talk, Herzog read from his book, Conquest of the Useless, a journal he kept while filming Fitzcarraldo:

I did not even feel my bleeding foot. There was no pain, no joy, no excitement, no relief, no happiness, no sound, not even a deep breath. All I grasped was a profound uselessness, or to be more precise, I had merely penetrated deeper into its mysterious realm.

“Blue is the Warmest Color”: Just Another Film That Needs an Editor

Posted on September 2, 2014 by McPhedran

While Abdellatif Kechiche’s Blue is the Warmest Color received controversial press for its stark portrayal of sexuality, the film’s only real problem is in its self-indulgence. Choked with scenes of endless dancing, staring into space and, yes, sex, the film needs an editor; at over an hour too long, the film’s essential moments and images are lost in the ego of the author. Of course Kechiche is not alone in his onanism; many an excellent director has fallen victim to believing that everything shot is sacred, including Spike Lee’s Malcolm X, Martin Scorsese’s The Departed, Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo, Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now Redux, Lars von Trier’s Nymphomanic, Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining and Michael Cimino’s infamous Heaven’s Gate. This is to say nothing of the glut of Hollywood monstrosities such as Titanic, The Lord of the Rings and all of the superheroes piled atop each other.It’s the simpler things that ring true, such as a director listening to his inner voice: “Cut!”

The Suicide of Robin Williams

Posted on August 13, 2014 by McPhedran

Robin Williams was a talented actor whose characters touched a common thread of compassion and understanding, well remembered in such films as Dead Poet’s Society, Mrs. Doubtfire and What Dreams May Come. However I struggle with the accolades and reverence being expressed at the moment. As much pain and torment as he might have suffered, his suicide could steer many in the wrong direction.

Some years ago, I lost a student the same pointless way, a most empathetic and delightful young man – much like Mr. Williams – and was privileged to offer these words at his funeral:

Recently I was at concert of Ladysmith Black Mambazo, a South African a capella group. Their voices really are something, eight voices singing together in unison, long deep notes, short happy ones, all of these singers singing in unison. I thought a lot about B. while I listened to this music, because as beautiful as it was, I didn’t feel very good. I was off. Something was missing. I wasn’t just sad; I was uncomfortable. I wasn’t myself. And it came to me. One of the singers was gone from my life. Notes were missing. A voice was gone. I had lost B’s voice, that laugh, that insane guffaw, that wild energy exploding out, all of those over-reaching concepts, so many of them now not realized.It makes me quite upset thinking about it, not just sad, but angry too. I don’t know why I had to lose this voice.

As much as we want to debate our beliefs in this world, there is one thing we cannot dispute: this life is all we have. And I wish Mr. Williams thought more about that.

An Ominous Sound for an Ominous Future

Posted on July 18, 2014 by McPhedran

Fripp & Eno started it with The Heavenly Music Corporation, not ambient music but ominous and terrifying sonic explorations, lovely too. (Click preceding link to listen.)I heard the sound again, years later, at a Grateful Dead show in Miami in 1988; it was like being inside a jet engine, all-encompassing, so very loud.

And then, in Steven Spielberg’s War of the Worlds (2006), a new version, low and distant, perhaps over-produced, arrived on screen. (Click preceding link to listen.)It arose again in the trailer for Chris Nolan’s Inception (2010), promising aural profundity; regrettably, the sound was brief and the movie was not.The sound became more realized in Gravity (2013), providing the soundscape for the impending doom of debris.It has now returned to the frontier of music, more than My Bloody Valentine’s sonic wall, in Sigur Ros’ latest work, Kveikur (2013).Louder and deeper, back-filled by drums and wailing voices, the sound builds, just falling short of the next plateau. As this sound continues in its evolution, getting deeper and fuller, it might even be a synchronistic backdrop for our promised apocalypse.

Marie Antoinette of Wall Street

Posted on May 26, 2014 by McPhedran

Excess is best. Or at least excess is great while it lasts. So is the message of Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street (2013) and Sophia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette (2006).While Coppola’s film does attempt to present the Queen of France’s point of view, placing her debauchery in the context of her heritage and youth, the film depends almost solely on a litany of gluttonous imagery. Scorsese makes no such effort, starting and ending with scenes meant to shock – dwarf tossing through orgies to drugs on top of drugs – that becomes tedious and, rather than offer a point to reflect, childishly glorify the experience. There might be a moral buried somewhere in these films – after all our heroes meet bad ends – but that isn’t the theme of either. Instead we are made witness to tributes to consumption, all of it beyond our wildest dreams – palaces and helicopters – and how marvelous that really is. It is an interesting comparison of time periods – the French Revolution and Wall Street America – exposing two societies which hid behind claims of freedom, knowledge and tolerance to maintain the excesses of the few who continued to grind the species towards extinction.

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