Archives for February 2005

In the end, I don’t care what the Academy does. Hell, I might even take a certain satisfaction in seeing my favorites robbed of what I think they deserve. But in the moment, it’s gratifying and honest to put your heart out there for the underdogs you love and to experience the punch in the gut when they lose. So I did right by Sideways tonight: let myself really hope it might win a few, and let myself feel the sting when it mostly didn’t.

Meanwhile, Michael Blowhard finally saw Sideways–just in time to see the Academy give it the dismissive little pat on the head that was its single award, for Best Adapted Screenplay–and we should all be glad, because he’s written a wonderfully perceptive appreciation. His post deftly breaks down a pivotal scene in the film, giving it the really close reading it merits, and then turns into a wider-ranging reflection on the joys of the movie close-up:

My one small film-pedant reflection on seeing this film? I was grateful to be reminded of how powerful movie closeups can be. Sandra Oh isn’t in the movie as much as I hoped she’d be. But she and Payne sketch in a convincing portrait of a confident yet vulnerable, frisky yet intelligent woman with just a few well-chosen actions and closeups.

The film’s most beautiful closeup is of Madsen. She and Giammatti are on Oh’s porch, getting used to each other’s company. Payne gives Madsen a short monologue about what wine has meant to her, and he discreetly moves the camera in as she speaks with feeling and reverence. Everything is quiet. It’s evening in wine country. Your senses are awakened; the fragrances in the air are gentle, the night’s sounds are distant, the evening’s food and wine are having their effect. And a luscious, generous woman is–with warmth, fervor, and grace–opening herself up. I don’t know how the audiences you saw the movie with reacted to this brief passage, but some of the people around me were sniffling. Wait a minute, I was sniffling.

I think we weren’t moved because the scene was sad, except in its awareness that life itself is finally sad. (Payne is of Greek descent, and he seems to me to have a Mediterranean, deep, and inborn acceptance of life’s tragic sides.) I think that people were moved instead by the moment’s combo of beauty and gentle appreciation. Without utilizing any advanced-technology whoopdedo, Payne and Madsen were working magic. Something transfiguring was happening; radiance was pouring through the screen. (The Wife whispered to me after the scene was over, “That’s my kind of special effect.”) When Giamatti bolts–he can’t handle what’s being unwrapped and offered to him–we know for damn sure how deep his sad-sackness and depression go, and how far he’s got to come back. We’re left alone for a second with Madsen, feeling the moment fade away.

Movie histories tend to make much of careers, spectacle, economics, business, and technology. Important topics, of course. But the fact is also that closeups have always been experienced as one of film’s most amazing gifts…

Read the rest! I’m tempted to quote more, but better you go read it over there. Sideways-wise, I’ll just say that despite my stubbornly voting for both Virginia Madsen and Thomas Haden Church while knowing they were bad bets, I still won the pool at the party I attended. The prize was made out of chocolate, which is always okay with me.

I’m so busy that I wasn’t planning to blog again until Tuesday at the earliest, but I couldn’t wait to tell you about my very first visit to Dizzy’s Club Coca-Cola, Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Columbus Circle nightclub, from which I returned a few minutes ago after hearing a breathtaking set by Jim Hall and his quartet. As regular readers of this blog know, I consider Hall to be the greatest living jazz guitarist, a tersely lyrical magician who gets more and more music out of fewer and fewer notes. He outdid himself this evening, playing a version of “All the Things You Are” so spare and elliptical that Count Basie might well have thought it understated. If you haven’t heard his latest CD, Magic Meeting, go here and buy it at once.

As I say, this was my first peek inside Dizzy’s Club C*c*-C*la (I henceforth refuse to spell out the loathsome name in full), and I was impressed. Aside from everything else, it’s the most attractive jazz club in New York, with a bandstand placed directly in front of a glass wall that looks out on the Manhattan skyline. The blond bentwood walls are acoustically gratifying. The service is discreet, the food good. If you’re there strictly for the music, the bar is both unusually long and strategically placed so as to supply a clear view of the musicians. The cover charge is $30 a head, neither cheap nor unprecedentedly high. I’ll be back.

That’s all for now–Louis awaits. See you a bit later in the week. Go get ’em, OGIC!

P.S. No, I didn’t watch the Oscars. Why bother? Did anything even remotely surprising happen there? My trainer will testify that I called it for Million Dollar Baby last week….

Here’s yet another plug for the two lectures I’ll be giving in Washington, D.C., next week:

– I’ll be delivering a Bradley Lecture at the American Enterprise Institute at 5:30 on Monday, March 7. The topic is “The Problem of Political Art.” For more information, go here.

– I’ll be delivering a Duncan Phillips Lecture under the auspices of the Phillips Collection at 6:30 on Wednesday, March 9. The topic is “Multiple Modernisms: What a Novice Collector Learned from Duncan Phillips.” The lecture will take place at the Women’s National Democratic Club, and reservations are required. Five pieces from the Teachout Museum (by Milton Avery, Jane Freilicher, John Marin, Fairfield Porter, and Neil Welliver) will be on display. For more information, go here.

If you’re an “About Last Night” reader, come up afterward and say hello. All requests to autograph books will be happily honored!

“A work in progress quickly becomes feral. It reverts to a wild state overnight. It is barely domesticated, a mustang on which you one day fastened a halter, but which now you cannot catch. It is a lion you cage in your study. As the work grows, it gets harder to control; it is a lion growing in strength. You must visit it every day and reassert your mastery over it. If you skip a day, you are, quite rightly, afraid to open the door to its room.”

Annie Dillard, The Writing Life

Currently making the rounds of the blogosphere are lists of Things I’ve Done That You Probably Haven’t (I got the idea from Eve Tushnet). So here goes. In no particular order, I’ve:

• Watched an opera singer drop dead on the stage of the Metropolitan Opera House, run to the nearest pay phone, called the city desk of a newspaper, and shouted, “Get me rewrite!”

• Taken part in a bottle-rocket duel in the middle of a bean field (I have a scar on my right hand to prove it).

• Fallen all the way down a spiral staircase.

• Stolen a city-limits sign and used it as a prop for a dust-jacket photo.

• Shaken hands with Bill Monroe, father of bluegrass, backstage at the Grand Ole Opry.

• Taken a three-hour ride in the back of a hearse.

• Read and reviewed a full-length book between nine a.m. and one p.m. of the same business day.

• Been mugged at gunpoint on New Year’s Eve.

• Barely escaped serious injury from a falling chandelier.

So I finally, finally watched McCabe and Mrs. Miller over the weekend. I thought it was beautiful. Strangely for a movie I’ve been hearing about almost all my life, it struck me as an entirely new thing in the world–I realized nearly as soon as it started that I’d never seen so much as a scene or a still from it. That’s odd, isn’t it?

Some plot points, I think, escaped me. Didn’t bother me much. What will stay with me is the killer combination of those achingly lovely vistas (was ever a film better served by letterboxing?) and the Leonard Cohen soundtrack, so anachronistic and yet so fitting. Why “achingly” lovely? Because as the characters go about their work against these gorgeous backdrops, you realize, first, that the beauty is ordinary to them and, second, that their work is the beginning of the process of deleting it.

I still like The Long Goodbye best among Altmans–no contest–and California Split second. But I think there’s a place after that for McCabe.

Bart Schneider’s new novel Beautiful Inez is about a troubled classical violinist and her affair with a younger woman. It should be of special interest to ALN readers–its treatment of music is knowledgeable, intricate, and intense. My review of the book appears in today’s Chicago Tribune; here’s a taste of what I say:

Inez’s implacable depression is this novel’s true subject, and Schneider turns out one of the least reductive literary representations of the malady I’ve encountered. He recognizes that a simple logic of cause and effect cannot satisfactorily account for a full-blown case of depression like the one that oppresses Inez. Hers has specific causes, to be sure, some of them acute. But, true to reality, no more can one or two of them be isolated and called determining than the string section can take primary credit for the impact of an orchestra concert. By the time we know her, Inez’s depression has hardened from a condition to be diagnosed into a fact to be assimilated. And there is–blackest irony–something symphonic about it.

…Schneider drew much of the new novel’s passionate, detailed–and hauntingly ambivalent–evocations of music from his father, a concert violinist with the San Francisco Symphony. If depression is this novel’s subject, music is the sine qua non in which it’s steeped. Entwined in some enigmatic alliance with madness, music confers great blessings and takes enormous tolls here. In the book’s amazing pivotal scene–Inez’s impromptu solo concert at a mental institution–the blessings and the tolls become indistinguishable.

Read the whole thing here.

It’s Friday, meaning that you’ll find my weekly drama column in this morning’s Wall Street Journal. Today it’s a triple-header–an import, a revival, and a new play.

First up is Shockheaded Peter, in which I took extreme delight:

An actor who looks not unlike a freshly exhumed corpse strolls onto the stage of what looks very much like a blown-up toy theater. He fixes a fishy-eyed stare upon the hushed audience…and stands there. And stands there. Finally, to the sound of nervous titters, he speaks. “Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls,” he intones in a voice of ripest ham, “I am the grrreatest actor that has ever existed!” Then he leaves.

Welcome to “Shockheaded Peter,” now playing at the Little Shubert for what I hope will be at least a year. This homicidally hilarious British import is a musical version of the “Struwwelpeter” stories of Heinrich Hoffman, the 19th-century German author famous for his cautionary tales of ill-behaved tots who get what they deserve, and then some. (Guess what happened to little Conrad when he kept on sucking his thumbs after Mommy told him to stop?) It is, in theory, a children’s show, though the only child I can readily imagine appreciating “Shockheaded Peter” to the fullest would be Wednesday Addams….

Next up is the Irish Repertory Theatre’s splendid production of Samuel Beckett’s Endgame:

If you were bothered by the twitchy excesses of the Worth Street Theater Company’s “Happy Days,” rest assured that “Endgame” is played straight down the middle. You couldn’t ask for a stronger cast (Alvin Epstein, amazingly enough, appeared in the American premieres of “Endgame” and “Waiting for Godot”). Nor do I see how Charlotte Moore’s simple, self-effacing staging could possibly be improved. To see it in a house as intimate as the Irish Rep is more than a pleasure–it’s a privilege….

Last is On the Mountain, about which I had substantial but not necessarily fatal reservations:

The first 15 minutes of Christopher Shinn’s “On the Mountain,” now playing through March 13 at Playwrights Horizons, contain references to AA, Ashton Kutcher, iPods, Radiohead, Tori Amos, group therapy, cell phones and Prozac. At the mention of the last of these, I snuck a peek at my watch, turned to my companion for the evening and whispered, “This isn’t a play, it’s a magazine article.”

Fortunately, I was wrong. “On the Mountain” really is a play, albeit one of a very particular kind: It’s a Gen-X kitchen-sink drama, right down to the kitchen sink….

No link. To read the whole thing (of which there’s much more), get thee to a newsstand, or go here and proceed as instructed.