Let me share a few last cinematic heresies, with some annotations this time because it’s 8:00 and I’m fresh as a daisy compared with my recent blogging sessions:

American Beauty. I know, you picked it, too, but I couldn’t resist. From Kevin Spacey, playing the single role he always plays, to Annette Bening, as a gay screenwriter’s idea of a castrating hag; from the ridiculously worshipful depiction of a teenage pothead to the implication that a Marine World War II vet is a repressed homosexual Nazi (it was people like Spacey, Alan Ball and Sam Mendes, of course, who actually stopped the Nazis from conquering the world), this breathtakingly mendacious picture of American suburbia takes the cake.

Thank you. I’ve been really gratified to see how many people actively dislike this movie. I saw it in less than ideal conditions: in a promotional preview on a college campus with Spacey, Mena Suvari, Thora Birch, and Wes Bentley in attendance. The starstruck college kids in the audience hooted and clapped through the whole thing, egging on Spacey’s character. My alienation from my surroundings was complete. I’ve avoided the movie ever since. But judging from what many of you had to say, I wasn’t simply swayed the unfavorable circumstances–there was a kernel of discernment at work, too.

Leaving Las Vegas. It seemed like an exercise in piling on the gratuitous misery and despair, and I’ve realized of late that I think gratuitous despair is much worse than gratuitous sex and violence. (I’m of the Jane Austen “let other pens dwell on guilt and misery” school of thought.) Watching it, I got the feeling that all the critics who praised it were congratulating themselves for being brave and
tough-minded enough to watch something that depressing. Blech.

Not having seen this one, I’m not qualified to comment. But what the hell: Blech!

The Natural. Here’s the movie I hate that most people like and it usually ends near the top of best sports movies. Honestly, I can never forgive Redford for what he did to this story. Roy Hobbs doesn’t hit that home run, he doesn’t win the game; no, he fails and everyone thinks he was paid off by gamblers.I don’t expect a movie to be 100 percent faithful to its source material, but there has to a point where someone says “You know that story we’re making into a movie? This is no longer that story.” Yeah, I know Malamud himself seemed OK with it, mainly because he said the movie would cause him to be thought of as something other than a Jewish writer. Sorry, can’t find the exact quote. Robert Redford is one of those people I thought would have more respect for the story. For me, his reputation is forever sullied and I’d just like to ask, “WHAT THE HELL WERE YOU THINKING? JUST GO MAKE SOME OTHER FREAKIN’ BASEBALL STORY YOU HACK!”

Reading this struck an deep chord in me. I read Malamud’s novel as a teenager, right around the time the Detroit Tigers had their Cinderella season. Being caught up in baseball made me especially attuned to Roy Hobbs’s plight, and I was devastated; it was one of my first truly intense encounters with a truly bleak literary vision. Close on the heels of that, the movie felt like the worst kind of betrayal, and continues to stand as an all-time low in my movie-viewing history.

This next one also loudly rang a bell.

About Schmidt. Look, I grew up in Palo Alto, California, and go through a tin of flavored hummus a day, but the sneering condescension that pervades every shot in this film had me yelling to my friends about the elitist values of Hollywood on the way out of the theater. Oh, look at those poor people in Omaha with their bleak, meaningless lives. I’ve heard people talk about how sympathetic this movie was, but is there one character who isn’t presented as either an asshole or a desperate loser? And does anyone actually still think that Jack Nicholson is a serious actor?

Well, I’m not sure it’s Jack Nicholson’s fault that for a while now he hasn’t been able to play anyone but Jack Nicholson. It probably is. But more to the point, this movie vexed me no end because I was such a fan of Election and Citizen Ruth (and, more lately, Sideways, though–don’t write–I’m fully aware of the case against; I’m not convinced, however, that this case, or the one against Lost in Translation, would have gathered so much steam absent the movies’ success). I was fully prepared to like Schmidt. I loathed it. Coming from a director who is usually such a precise ironist, the false note of the final scene, especially, left me shocked and disgusted. And yet I suspect that the tonal difference between this film and Election was a matter of millimeters–millimeters that just happened to fall across some crucial line separating lampoon from contempt. (Speaking of Election, Quiet Bubble mentions in passing that it’s one of his cows. I’m curious why, but in a way I don’t want to know since QB has great taste and I wouldn’t want to be talked out of my love for it.)

Next, two brave souls dissent from the common wisdom on a film that I personally have never heard a heartfelt negative word about, Waking Life:

– Earlier this week the Onion A.V. Club blog tossed out the question of what movies have inspired people to walk out of the theater, which got me thinking about this kind of stuff. So I thought I’d mention Richard Linklater’s atrocious Waking Life. When it came out, I was in the middle of an extremely rigorous self-imposed academic hell at the University of Chicago, so the sight of Ethan Hawke or Julie Delpy standing on a pseudointellectual soap box spewing out “chicken soup for the soul”-brand political and social philosophy made me physically ill. I think this is a controversial choice, not because I’ve gotten into arguments about it with my friends (in fact, I haven’t allowed any loved ones to see it if I could help it), but because of the rapt expressions of those around me when I was stumbling over them to get myself out of the theater as quickly as possible. I am sure they wouldn’t agree with my assessment.

– When I read your post about attacking movies that everyone else loves, I immediately thought of Waking Life. I am alone among my friends who have seen this movie in thinking that it is 90 minutes of repetitive, self-impressed, pseudo-intellectual tripe. For some reason, the pretty pictures and elementary analyses blind the rest of my friends to its shallowness.

Conveeeeeniently, I haven’t actually seen the movie and can’t take a side. I’m a fan of Linklater, though that principally means I’m a fan of Dazed and Confused (as is the friend who wrote the first of these comments). So this should have been a natural choice for me, but something kept me from seeing it. Now–perhaps–I know what.

Next is another movie I’ve never seen. In this case, however, I’ve been congratulating myself on my judgment from the get-go.

Forrest Gump. The idea of the novel (I’m told) is that

Here’s my list of recommended Broadway and off-Broadway shows, updated each Thursday. In all cases, I either gave these shows strongly favorable reviews in The Wall Street Journal when they opened or saw and liked them some time in the past year (or both). For more information, click on the title.

Warning: Broadway shows marked with an asterisk were sold out, or nearly so, last week.

BROADWAY:

– Avenue Q* (musical, R, adult subject matter, strong language, one show-stopping scene of puppet-on-puppet sex)

– Chicago (musical, R, adult subject matter, sexual content, fairly strong language)

– Doubt (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, implicit sexual content)

– Fiddler on the Roof (musical, G, one scene of mild violence but otherwise family-friendly)

– The Light in the Piazza (musical, PG-13, adult subject matter and a brief bedroom scene)

– Sweet Charity (musical, PG-13, lots of cutesy-pie sexual content)

– The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee* (musical, PG-13, mostly family-friendly but contains a smattering of strong language and a production number about an unwanted erection)

OFF BROADWAY:

– Orson’s Shadow (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, very strong language)

– Philadelphia, Here I Come! (drama, PG, closes Sept. 25)

– Sides: The Fear Is Real… (sketch comedy, PG, some implicit sexual content)

– Slava’s Snowshow (performance art, G, child-friendly)

CLOSING SOON:

– Glengarry Glen Ross (drama, R, adult subject matter, copious quantities of spectacularly strong language, closes Sunday)

– Fee paid by Cosmopolitan in 1932 for U.S. serial rights to Thank You, Jeeves, P.G. Wodehouse’s first full-length Jeeves novel: $50,000

– The same amount in today’s dollars, courtesy of Inflation Calculator: $607,551.90

(Source: Robert McCrum, Wodehouse: A Life)

“We grow tired of everything but turning others into ridicule, and congratulating ourselves on their defects.”

William Hazlitt, “On the Pleasure of Hating”

My friend and colleague John Rockwell, the chief dance critic of the New York Times, has published a column called “Has Mark Morris Made Only One Masterpiece?” which is so wrong-headed that I felt I had to say something about it at once.

Here’s part of what John wrote:

Mark Morris is rightly regarded as the finest modern-dance choreographer of his generation, and his “L’Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato,” a richly varied, deeply moving evening-length setting of Handel’s oratorio to Milton’s text, is widely believed to be his masterpiece.

But if “L’Allegro,” which was created in Brussels in 1988 and concluded its fifth New York run since 1990 at the New York State Theater on Saturday, is Mr. Morris’s masterpiece, what’s he done since? Should we, as dance lovers and Morris admirers, be concerned that a choreographer still in his prime–he’s just shy of 49–and celebrating the 25th anniversary of his company has not produced a comparable triumph in the last 18 years? And if not, why not?…

Size and success are not synonymous. Scattered through the shorter dances that make up the typical mixed-repertory programs of the Mark Morris Dance Group are innumerable gems. But grandeur of scale does make an impact; it stretches out the canvas to allow more room for the rich emotional range and teeming variety of detail that enliven “L’Allegro.”

(Read the whole thing here.)

Fudge the point though he does, John is not so implicitly arguing that size and success are synonymous, or something close to it. He remarks in passing, for instance, that “Mr. Morris has delivered eminently serious work in recent years. Like ‘V,’ set in 2001 to Schumann’s E-flat Piano Quintet.” Yet that unforgettably compelling one-act dance, together with many other post-L’Allegro works of comparable weight and significance that John neglected to mention, is apparently as nothing when placed next to the full-evening L’Allegro, which to John’s way of thinking is Morris’ sole and only “masterpiece.”

How shall I start dismantling this argument-by-assertion? With the most appropriate possible comparison. Mark Morris is about to turn forty-nine. How many full-evening dances had the greatest of all choreographers, George Balanchine, made by the time he was forty-nine? Er, one. He made The Nutcracker in 1954, shortly before his fiftieth birthday, and while it is an indisputably great and miraculous ballet, I don’t know anybody over the age of ten who’d be likely to call it his masterpiece. Too bad poor Mr. B piddled away the remainder of his first five decades on such comparatively minor jobs of work as Apollo, Prodigal Son, Serenade, Concerto Barocco, Ballet Imperial, Symphony in C, Orpheus, The Four Temperaments….

You see my point, of course. Yes, L’Allegro is a masterpiece, probably Morris’ greatest achievement to date, and its scope is part and parcel of its greatness. To quote what I myself have written about it, L’Allegro is “a whole world of dance in a single evening, everything from childlike pantomime to knockabout comedy to complex groupings reminiscent of George Balanchine in their control and clarity.” This all-encompassing generosity of inspiration is one of the reasons why we respond to it so powerfully. But it’s not great because it’s long, nor are long works of art necessarily greater than short ones. In my opinion, the greatest ballet of the twentieth century–perhaps the greatest ever made–is Balanchine’s half-hour-long Four Temperaments, which contains whole universes of thought and emotion. Jerome Robbins never made a single full-evening dance. Merce Cunningham has made only one, Ocean, and it’s no masterpiece. To date Paul Taylor has made two, neither of which has remained in his company’s repertory. And as for Morris, I can think of any number of his post-1988 dances which I and many other critics and dance lovers believe to be as good as L’Allegro, even if they’re not as long. Dido and Aeneas, Love Song Waltzes, Grand Duo, Rhymes With Silver, The Office, The Argument, V: that’s what Mark Morris has “done since,” just for starters. So unless you define “masterpiece” as “a person’s single greatest achievement,” which John is obviously not doing in this context, then what he’s written makes no sense at all.

Could it be that John has confused greatness with ambition? Or was he simply spinning out a big idea in haste and without sufficient forethought, as journalists, myself included, have been known to do on occasion when a deadline beckons? Beats me. But I wish he’d left this particular idea in the oven to bake a little longer before he served it forth in the New York Times.

Up and coming on my calendar:

– SEPTEMBER 14: “Jules Olitski–Matter Embraced: Paintings 1950s and Now” opens at Knoedler & Company

– SEPTEMBER 20: Street date of Trio da Paz’s Somewhere (Blue Toucan)

– OCTOBER 11: Street date of Hilary Hahn’s first violin-piano CD, a set of four Mozart violin sonatas accompanied by Natalie Zhu (DG)

– OCTOBER 20: “Marks of Distinction: Two Hundred Years of American Watercolors and Drawings from the Hood Museum of Art” opens at the National Academy Museum

– OCTOBER 25: Street date of Looney Tunes Golden Collection, Volume Three (Warner Home Video)

Sorry, folks, but that crackling noise you hear in the middle distance is the sound of me burning out. I’m driving up to Connecticut this morning to see a show, which I consider more than sufficient reason not to blog again today. Though I do finally seem to be on the verge of licking this damn cold–I actually took a two-hour nap yesterday afternoon that was blessedly rich in Rapid Eye Movement, something on which I’ve been severely short since last Thursday….

Anyway, see you tomorrow. Or maybe Friday. (And don’t ask me which Friday.)

Ms. Cup of Chicha has returned to the blogosphere after an extended absence. She’s as wicked as ever. Go say hello!