Archives for March 2017

I’ve decided to play the game that’s currently going around the web and post a list of my favorite films released in each year of my life to date.

Here are my two self-imposed rules:

• For the purposes of this exercise, I define “favorite” as the one film from the year in question which continues to mean the most to me today, and to which I have returned most frequently and with the greatest pleasure—broadly defined—since I first saw it.

• No cheating, faking, or posing. None of these films was chosen to impress the reader, or in an attempt to reflect a critical consensus, whether past or present. They’re here because I love them, period.

The nature of the list—only one film per year—has resulted in some anomalies. You’ll find only a handful of foreign-language films, for example, and the list also fails to reflect my general aesthetic preference for comedy over drama. So please note that these are not my Sixty Favorite Films Released Since 1956. That list would be a lot harder to draw up, if not impossible.

For the record, I went to a movie house for the first time in 1961 and started doing so with reasonable regularity in 1975, when I went off to college and walked a mile to the nearest theater to see The Longest Yard. I made the initial acquaintance of all but one of the earlier films on this list long after the fact, usually on home video or, before the VCR was invented, on network TV. (I saw Chinatown on a tiny portable bedside set in my college infirmary, having come down with the flu. I had a fever that night, and Roman Polanski’s cameo weirded me out beyond belief.) The first one that I saw on its original release was The Godfather, to which my unwitting parents deigned to take me, God knows why. I bless them for it.

Try as I might, I found it impossible to pick just one film in 1959, 1960, 1976, 1987, 1988, 1993, 1998, and 2016, so I listed both of my favorites for those years. Elsewhere, though, I treated this as a “forced-choice” quiz, meaning that a considerable number of films that I love failed to make the cut simply because they came out in the same year as other films that I love even more.

The films whose absence surprised me most are Croupier, The Limey, and Magnolia, all of which were given the push by Topsy-Turvy, and The Dreamlife of Angels, which was in competition with Next Stop Wonderland and The Last Days of Disco. The film whose absence I most regret is Henry Bromell’s Panic, a forgotten one-shot masterpiece—Bromell never wrote or directed another movie—which came out in the same year as You Can Count on Me, for me the greatest film of the past quarter-century. (I also hated to have to cut Barbershop, but it was up against Ripley’s Game, so what could I do?)

I should mention that I wrote an essay about film each month between 1998 and 2005. As a result, I saw a much higher proportion of the films that came out in those halcyon years, the golden age of the indie flick. Toward the end of that period, though, I came to feel that American film was entering a period of artistic decline which was unlikely to reverse itself in the foreseeable future, so I decided to stop writing about it. Since then I’ve devoted most of my time to reviewing plays and musicals. In most of the years since 2005, I’ve seen no more than a half-dozen very carefully chosen films, if that many.

I leave it to you to note the idiosyncrasies on display in this list, which is an all-over-the-place mélange of indisputably great films, big-budget middlebrow crowd-pleasers, no-budget indies, and purely popular popcorn-and-a-Coke charmers. (Yes, I like The In-Laws better than Apocalypse Now. Sue me.) I will, however, point out that all three of Kenneth Lonergan’s films made the cut, and that it was his Margaret that knocked Whit Stillman’s Damsels in Distress off the list. Sorry about that, Whit, but please don’t forget that I picked Metropolitan over Goodfellas!

You will also, I suspect, note the absence of, among others, Woody Allen, Michelangelo Antonioni, Ingmar Bergman, Clint Eastwood, Federico Fellini, Jean-Luc Godard, Ron Howard, Akira Kurosawa, George Lucas, Satyajit Ray, Steven Spielberg, Quentin Tarantino, and Luchino Visconti. Draw your own conclusions—but don’t count on their being right.

Finally, if I had to choose one all-time favorite film from this list, it would probably be Chinatown, but that’s because it’s the last one I saw.

With that, here are my sixty-one hostages to fortune:

1956: The Searchers
1957: The Tall T
1958: Vertigo
1959: North by Northwest/Rio Bravo
1960: The Apartment/Shoot the Piano Player
1961: The Hustler
1962: Jules and Jim
1963: Charade
1964: A Hard Day’s Night (take that, Dr. Strangelove!)
1965: The Cincinnati Kid
1966: A Man for All Seasons
1967: Point Blank
1968: Rosemary’s Baby
1969: The Wild Bunch
1970: Patton
1971: The Last Picture Show
1972: The Godfather
1973: Charley Varrick
1974: Chinatown
1975: Dog Day Afternoon
1976: Network/Taxi Driver
1977: Slap Shot
1978: The Deer Hunter
1979: The In-Laws
1980: Atlantic City
1981: Arthur
1982: My Favorite Year
1983: Tender Mercies
1984: Blood Simple
1985: The Trip to Bountiful
1986: Hoosiers
1987: Near Dark/The Untouchables
1988: Bull Durham/Who Framed Roger Rabbit
1989: The Fabulous Baker Boys
1990: Metropolitan
1991: Defending Your Life
1992: Strictly Ballroom
1993: Groundhog Day/Tombstone
1994: Ed Wood
1995: Kicking and Screaming
1996: Lone Star
1997: The Apostle
1998: Next Stop Wonderland/The Last Days of Disco
1999: Topsy-Turvy
2000: You Can Count On Me
2001: Ghost World
2002: Ripley’s Game
2003: Lost in Translation
2004: Napoleon Dynamite
2005: Me and You and Everyone We Know
2006: Cœurs (Private Fears in Public Places)
2007: No Country for Old Men
2008: The Dark Knight
2009: Me and Orson Welles
2010: The King’s Speech
2011: Margaret
2012: Moonrise Kingdom
2013: Frances Ha
2014: Mr. Turner
2015: none*
2016: Hell or High Water/Manchester by the Sea

* I saw only one new film in 2015, Star Wars: The Force Awakens, which I hated.

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A scene from Arthur Hiller’s The In-Laws, my favorite film comedy to come out in my lifetime:

George Sanders sings Cole Porter’s “Thank You So Much, Mrs. Lowsborough-Goodby” on Ford Star Jubilee: You’re the Top, a TV tribute to Porter originally telecast by CBS on October 6, 1956. Sanders accompanies himself on the piano. The song was written for Ever Yours, an unproduced 1934 musical:

(This is the latest in a series of arts-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday)

“You talk about the theatre as if it had some cosmic significance. As a matter of fact it is pathetically sublunary; a drab and dusty monument to man’s inability to find within himself the resources of his own entertainment. It is usually rather fittingly housed in a dirty old building, whose crumbling walls occasionally resound with perfunctory applause, invariably interpreted by the actor as praise. A sad place, draughty and smelly when empty, hot and sick when full.

“I wonder which is the sickest, the audience which seeks to escape its miseries by being transported into a land of make-believe, or the actor who is nurtured in his struggle for personal aggrandisement by the sickness of the audience.

“I think perhaps it is the actor, strutting and orating away his youth and his health, alienated from reality, disingenuous in his relationships, a muddle-headed peacock forever chasing after the rainbow of his pathetic narcissism.”

George Sanders, letter to Brian Aherne, December 31, 1937 (courtesy of Farran Smith Nehme)

In today’s Wall Street Journal I review the Roundabout Theatre Company’s Broadway revival of Arthur Miller’s The Price. Here’s an excerpt.

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“The Price,” the least frequently revived of Arthur Miller’s major plays, has returned to Broadway after a 17-year absence, this time in a Roundabout Theatre Company production starring a Broadway debutant by the name of Danny DeVito. That’s news right there. Moreover, “The Price” is Miller’s best play—the only one, in my opinion, that is totally successful as a work of theatrical art—and Jessica Hecht, Mark Ruffalo and Tony Shalhoub, Mr. DeVito’s co-stars, are actors of high repute. But big-name productions aren’t always all that they ought to be, especially when they feature movie stars with limited stage experience. While Mr. DeVito got his start off Broadway, it’s been upward of 40 years since he was last seen on a New York stage, and the only play in which he’s acted in recent memory was a 2012 West End revival of Neil Simon’s “The Sunshine Boys.” On top of that, Mr. DeVito, a New Jersey-born Italian-American, has been cast as Gregory Solomon, an 89-year-old used-furniture dealer with a Minsk-Kapinsk Russian-Yiddish accent. He’s 72, so it isn’t that much of a stretch for him to play someone who’s a decade and a half older, but otherwise, as Solomon himself might say, typecast he’s not.

So how’s he doing? We’ll get to that. For now, let’s talk about the play. First performed in 1968, “The Price” is the story of Victor and Walter Franz (Mr. Ruffalo and Mr. Shalhoub), two brothers who haven’t spoken to one another for 16 years. Victor is an angry, frustrated beat cop, Walter a surgeon in a camel’s-hair coat, and Esther (Ms. Hecht), Victor’s status-conscious wife, hates the fact that he isn’t as successful as Walter (though she loves him anyway). The setting is the attic of the Franz family home, which is crammed tight with ancient furniture that Victor and Walter want to sell off….

For reasons of his own, Mr. Miller claimed in 1999 that “The Price” was all about Vietnam. Maybe so, but it’s also—and mainly—a resounding parable of the power of pride to gnaw away at the ties that ought to bind a family….

The highly charged naturalism of Mr. Ruffalo’s acting is terrifically impressive—he’s going to be one of the great Willy Lomans once he gets a little more age on him—and Mr. Shalhoub, whose post-“Monk” stage performances have all been noteworthy, leaves nothing to be desired….

On the debit side, Mr. DeVito is effective enough in an obvious way, but he’s using Solomon as a star turn, wearing him like an ill-fitting suit instead of creating him from the inside out….

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Read the whole thing here.

The cast and director of the Roundabout Theatre Company’s revival of The Price talk about the play:

A complete performance of Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem, telecast live by the BBC from London’s Royal Albert Hall on August 4, 1964. The soloists are Heather Harper, Thomas Hemsley, and Peter Pears, accompanied by the Melos Ensemble, the London Philharmonic Choir, the BBC Chorus and Choral Society, and the BBC Symphony. Britten conducts the Melos Ensemble and Meredith Davies conducts the full orchestra:

(This is the latest in a series of arts-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday)

In the online version of today’s Wall Street Journal, I review Joan of Arc: Into the Fire, David Byrne’s new Public Theater musical. Here’s an excerpt.

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Chronologically speaking, David Byrne, who was born in 1952, is by definition a purveyor of what the millennials call “dad rock.” But there’s nothing daddishly old-fashioned about the minimalism-tinged world-music rock of the founder of Talking Heads, who in recent years has discovered the stage and is now presenting his second show, “Joan of Arc: Into the Fire,” at the Public Theater. The Public’s latest musical-theater ventures, “Fun Home” and “Hamilton,” are as unsquare as it gets. As for Mr. Byrne, anything by the man who gave us “Houses in Motion” and “Life During Wartime” is bound to be worth seeing—or hearing—and “Joan of Arc” is no exception. Even so, it isn’t a fully successful theatrical experience, and the reasons why “Joan of Arc” doesn’t quite come off are almost more interesting than the show itself.

The most surprising thing about “Joan of Arc” is its straightforwardness. Mr. Byrne, who has written the book as well as the songs, steers clear of the ironic overlay usually found in contemporary treatments of the story. His Joan of Arc is an innocent young countrywoman who claims to have been visited by angels, believes what they tell her, transforms herself into a warrior, endures hideous tortures at the hands of her inquisitors and goes to the stake secure in her faith….

What gives here? All I know of Mr. Byrne’s religiosity, or lack of it, is his reply when asked by a journalist in 2002 if there is a God: “I would say yes, but in a form so strange and so convoluted and so unusual for us that we will never, ever understand it.” This makes it all the more surprising that “Joan of Arc” is direct to the point of naïveté. The lyrics are singsongy: “Each day we take confession/As the towns they hold all fall/With my banner here beside me/To each village large and small.” As for the dramaturgy, it’s rigidly linear, with event following event in a pageant-like procession that makes “Joan of Arc,” like “Jesus Christ Superstar” before it, feel more like an oratorio—or a double album—than a stage drama.

None of this would matter if Mr. Byrne’s through-composed score were more musically varied, but while it has his stylistic fingerprints all over it, every song in “Joan of Arc” consists of an endless string of four-bar phrases in four-four time. In the near-total absence of extended dialogue scenes, you find yourself longing after a half-hour or so for something to break the sameness—a waltz, a joke, even an intermission….

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Read the whole thing here.

David Byrne, Alex Timbers, and Jo Lampert (who plays the title role) talk about Joan of Arc: Into the Fire:

“Love is rarer than genius itself. And friendship is rarer than love.”

Charles Péguy, Basic Verities (trans. Anne and Julien Green)

Here’s my list of recommended Broadway, off-Broadway, and out-of-town shows, updated weekly. In all cases, I gave these shows favorable reviews (if sometimes qualifiedly so) in The Wall Street Journal when they opened. For more information, click on the title.

BROADWAY:
• Dear Evan Hansen (musical, PG-13, all shows sold out last week, reviewed here)
• Hamilton (musical, PG-13, Broadway transfer of off-Broadway production, all shows sold out last week, reviewed here)
• On Your Feet! (jukebox musical, G, reviewed here)

OFF BROADWAY:
• The Fantasticks (musical, G, suitable for children capable of enjoying a love story, reviewed here)

IN SARASOTA, FLA.:
• Born Yesterday (comedy, PG-13, closes April 15, reviewed here)

CLOSING SUNDAY IN BROOKLYN:
• The Skin of Our Teeth (tragicomedy, PG-13, reviewed here)