Month: January 2015

MOVIE REVIEW: Big Eyes

I’m so glad I saw Big Eyes before Amy Adams won the Golden Globe as best Lead Actress in a Motion Picture- Comedy or Musical.

bigeyesThe movie Big Eyes could have been called Big Lie, for that’s what Walter and Margaret Keane shared. The paintings of children with eyes disproportionally huge peepers were painted by Margaret (Amy Adams), but Walter (Christoph Waltz) was superior at schmoozing and promoting; surely him taking credit for her paintings would be OK, wouldn’t it? He liked telling the story of his time painting in Paris, so he could chat up the press about his wife’s art, even if he claimed them as his own.

I’ve been fascinated by the effect of the lie, especially since I read the book Lying by Sissela Bok some years ago. Either the lie eats away at you, or it overtakes you, as the lie becomes the new reality. That’s what happens in Big Eyes.

I’m so glad I saw this movie before Amy Adams won the Golden Globe as Best Lead Actress in a Motion Picture- Comedy or Musical. I really liked the performance, but it’s subtle. Anyone expecting scene-chewing will be disappointed.

Big Eyes is a comedy or musical? Music DOES play a part in that the Cal Tjader group is playing at the hungry i nightclub where Walter initially hawks the paintings. Vince Guaraldi, the pianist/composer most associated with the Charlie Brown music, played with Tjader’s group for a time.

The real situation comedy comes at the end, in the courtroom scene, though the 1964-1965 New York World’s Fair narrative was darkly funny, I suppose, with Terence Stamp as a New York City art critic; now HE can chew scenery.

I’ve seen Amy Adams in about a dozen films, from The Muppets to American Hustle. But I’d never seen Christoph Waltz, even though he was also in a Muppets film, plus more serious fare, such as Django Unchained. He’s very good here as, initially, a very sweet and charming guy.

Some guy in my row in the theater said afterward, “That was a Tim Burton film?” It wasn’t particularly Burtonesque, except for one scene, teased in the trailer. This is not a BIG film, telling an epic narrative, but as one critic noted, an “entertaining take on a pop culture footnote.”

One of the negative reviews, by Rick Kisonak, notes: “It suggests Margaret was a browbeaten victim of her husband’s greed while making it clear she was actually a willing participant in the ruse.” I think the critic, and he’s not the only one, missed the point about how subtle manipulation can take place in relationships. He’s also putting post-feminist values in a pre-feminism situation.

Interesting how religion plays a role in Margaret’s narrative, at two different points, to very different results.

Last observation: the story is based on real events. Those paintings of kids with big eyes REALLY creeped me out when I was a child, and they seemed to be EVERYWHERE, part of the real Walter’s marketing genius.

Don’t Sleep Through the Revolution, by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

It may be true that you can’t legislate integration but you can legislate desegregation.

MLK-speakingAs I am wont to do, for this anniversary of Martin Luther King’s birthday, I want to recommend another less well-known, but important, speech, the 1966 Ware Lecture: Don’t Sleep Through the Revolution. Delivered by Dr. Martin Luther King. Jr. at the Unitarian Universalist Association General Assembly in Hollywood, Florida, May 18, 1966.

Here’s just an excerpt:

One of the great misfortunes of history is that all too many individuals and institutions find themselves in a great period of change and yet fail to achieve the new attitudes and outlooks that the new situation demands. There is nothing more tragic than to sleep through a revolution.

And there can be no gainsaying of the fact that a social revolution is taking place in our world today. We see it in other nations in the demise of colonialism. We see it in our own nation, in the struggle against racial segregation and discrimination, and as we notice this struggle we are aware of the fact that a social revolution is taking place in our midst.

Victor Hugo once said that there is nothing more powerful in all the world than an idea whose time has come. The idea whose time has come today is the idea of freedom and human dignity, and so all over the world we see something of freedom explosion, and this reveals to us that we are in the midst of revolutionary times. An older order is passing away and a new order is coming into being.

The great question is, what do we do when we find ourselves in such a period?…

First, we are challenged to instill within the people of our congregations a world perspective. The world in which we live is geographically one…

Secondly, it is necessary for the church to reaffirm over and over again the essential immorality of racial segregation. Any church which affirms the morality of segregation is sleeping through the revolution…

The next thing that the church must do to remain awake through this revolution is to move out into the arena of social action. It is not enough for the church to work in the ideological realm, and to clear up misguided ideas. To remain awake through this social revolution, the church must engage in strong action programs to get rid of the last vestiges of segregation and discrimination.

It is necessary to get rid of one or two myths if we’re really going to engage in this kind of action program. One is the notion that legislation is not effective in bringing about the changes that we need in human relations. This argument says that you’ve got to change the heart in order to solve the problem; that you can’t change the heart through legislation. They would say you’ve got to do that through religion and education. Well, there’s some truth in this.

Before we can solve these problems men and women must rise to the majestic heights of being obedient to the unenforceable. I would be the first to say this. If we are to have a truly integrated society, white persons and Negro persons and members of all groups must live together, not merely because the law says it but because it’s natural and because it’s right. But that does not make legislation less important. It may be true that you can’t legislate integration but you can legislate desegregation.
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I’ll also point you to Martin Luther King Jr.: Remembering a Committed Life by Gary May, “who wrote the book, Bending toward Justice: The Voting Rights Act and the Transformation of American Democracy. May appeared on Moyers & Company [in July 2013] to discuss his book and the agonizing but ultimately victorious struggle to pass the 1965 voting rights legislation — which he described to Bill as ‘a perfect example of the value of collective change to bring about progress in this country, people getting together and being committed and willing to risk their very lives to bring something when the country desperately needs it.'” Note, of course, how the Supreme Court has chipped away at voting rights legislation in recent years, which, I imagine, would have made Dr. King very sad and/or very angry.

“Lose your bearings. Regain a view of the horizon anew.”

Both the Dady Brothers and the Slambovians told Pete Seeger stories.

2015GrandSlamboviansFirstNightIt’s New Year’s Eve. The Wife is driving us to Oneonta; the Daughter is already there, staying with the grandparents. I’m wading through a stack of unread newspapers for the week, plus the December 18 edition of Metroland, the Albany area’s alt news and entertainment weekly.

Columnist David Greenberger wrote this positive review about a group called Lucius. Except it REALLY wasn’t about the group, or the concert, at all. It was “a passionate suggestion that the next time someone you trust recommends anything you’ve not experienced before, you say ‘Yes.’

“This isn’t just about music, but film, literature, food, a walk in the woods, anything at all. Step into such unknown realms that are offered to you with this a sort of towering kindness and willingness.”

The Wife and I had agreed to meet the relatives at the atrium. My parents-in-law are great fans of The Dady Brothers, described as an Irish folk duo, though they are far more eclectic than that. I had seen them perform at previous First Night Oneonta celebrations.

But before we found our family, we ran into our friend Penny, who lives near Albany; in fact, she works on the same floor of the office building I work in, though I’d known her for decades. We attended her daughter’s wedding in August 2014.

She and her husband Broome were there to see The Grand Slambovians, billed here as playing “Surreal Roots Rock”. She recommended highly that we stay to hear them, as she was sure I’d like them. I HAD vaguely heard of The Slambovian Circus of Dreams, and they are the same folks, more or less. Broome had seen them in Philadelphia, PA the day before, and he and Penny were going to see the group in Northampton, MA a couple of days later.

I might have stayed anyway – the adjacent space was crowded and cacophonous – but the endorsement sealed the deal. And I DID like them. Early on, they performed Very Happy Now, which “combined with two of the song’s influences, Donovan’s ‘Epistle to Dippy’ and the Ramones’ ‘I Wanna To Be Sedated.'” As Broome and Penny knew, this tickled me.

Even more so, I appreciated the merger of the Christmas carol ‘Angels We Have Heard on High’ with Van Morrison & Them’s ‘Gloria’. Broome bought me a Slambovian DVD, because he decided, as is he wont, that I needed it.

Interesting that both the Dady Brothers and the Slambovians told Pete Seeger stories. One of the Dadys wrote a song about Pete, which they sent to him. Later, they had a chance to play with him. At this show, they performed that song they wrote, plus the Pete classic This Rainbow Race.

The Slambovians gave Pete a ride from Cold Spring to his home in Beacon, at which point Pete invited them in and talked for four hours. They felt Pete knew they were faux folkies, while everyone knew Pete was the real deal. Pete, they realized, was really lonely, his wife of 70 years Toshi having died in July 2013; Pete himself died in January of 2014. The Slambovians played Suzanne, the Leonard Cohen song, in honor of Toshi and Pete.

The moral, perhaps for the year: I’ll Try Something New. Which, oddly, reminds me of a song by DIANA ROSS and THE SUPREMES with THE TEMPTATIONS.

A is for Apostrophes

I DO use the apostrophe when it would be otherwise confusing, such as with plural letters.

greedy3-330Recently, I was watching this news show on ABC-TV (US) featuring a bunch of talking heads. A feature has a couple of Picks of the Week from each participant, a noteworthy story. That week included Democratic strategist James Carville; the overlay showed JAME’S PICK.

I wanted to scream. The one thing you NEVER do with an apostrophe is break up someone’s name ending in S just before that letter.

One doesn’t visit the JONE’S house, one visits the JONES’ house, or the JONES’S house, depending on your school of thought on this. If you’re unclear, you visit the JONES family and avoid the apostrophe altogether.

I’m convinced that it is the use of the apostrophe that creates the bulk of spelling errors in the United States. There are road signs with ONION’S FOR SALE, when the plural doesn’t need an apostrophe at all.

Here’s an interesting bit from WikiHow:

Know how to use apostrophes for acronyms and years. Say you use an acronym for a noun, like CD. To make CD plural, use “CDs,” not CD’s.” The same logic goes for years — instead of writing “Spandex was popular in the 1980’s,” use “1980s.”

I totally agree, but my spellcheck doesn’t like CDs or 1980s; it prefers CD’s and 1980’s! Oy.

Moreover, I DO use the apostrophe when it would be otherwise confusing, such as with plural letters: “I got 4 A’s and two B’s on my report card.” Sans apostrophe, A’s looks like the word As.

A lot of confusion comes from the recognition of a possessive. There are lots of websites that explain this better than I, such as The Oatmeal and Scribendi.

THE most common error, of course, involves it’s and its, and it’s somewhat understandable. Possessive nouns take an apostrophe: THE GOAT’S FUR; possessive pronouns do not: ITS FUR. The word IT’S is a contraction, meaning IT IS. I see this particular error SO often, even in newspapers and magazines, that I despair of it ever being truly understood.

And I know why, per Henry Hitchings, though disputed by HistoriAnn:

[H]ere’s the rub: say any of these names aloud and you’ll be struck by the fact that the apostrophe works on the eye rather than the ear. Simply put, we don’t hear apostrophes, and this is a significant factor accounting for the inconsistency with which they are used.

You grammar buffs, and I count myself in your number: IS it a lost cause?

ABC Wednesday – Round 16

MOVIE REVIEW: Into the Woods

James Corden, who I did not really know, is the breakout star of Into the Woods.

Somehow, I had managed never to have seen any iteration of the popular stage musical Into the Woods, with music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim and book by James Lapine. despite the fact that it played on Broadway in 1987, and has been produced many times, including “a 1988 US national tour, a 1991 television production, a 1997 tenth anniversary concert, and a 2002 Broadway revival,” among others. The Wife and The Daughter saw a production at the local theater, Steamer No. 10 a couple years back.
into the woods
As for the movie version, which the three of saw at the Spectrum on the first Sunday of 2015:
“The musical intertwines the plots of several Brothers Grimm fairy tales and follows them to explore the consequences of the characters’ wishes and quests.” The main characters are taken from stories of:
Little Red Riding Hood – Lilla Crawford (the Annie on Broadway in 2012-2014), with Johnny Depp (Pirates of the Caribbean) as the Wolf
Jack and the Beanstalk – Daniel Huttlestone (the movie Les Misérables), with Tracey Ullman as Jack’s mother
Rapunzel – Mackenzie Mauzy, with Billy Magnussen as her prince
Cinderella – Anna Kendrick (Up in the Air), with Christine Baranski (TV’s The Good Wife, the movie Chicago) as her stepmother, Tammy Blanchard, and Lucy Punch as her stepsisters, and Chris Pine (new Star Trek movies) as her prince

There’s a framing story involving a baker (James Corden, who’ll be replacing Craig Ferguson on a late-night talk show), his wife (Emily Blunt from The Devil Wears Prada) with Meryl Streep (also The Devil Wears Prada, now that I think of it, and a whole lot more) as the witch who has a curse on the couple. They need to gather items associated with the other four stories.

It’s all good fun. The singing is strong. Corden, who I did not really know, is the breakout star. Pine and Magnussen have a duet, Agony, that is just a hoot. The Baker’s Wife is perhaps the key character, and Blunt is strong here. Many observers, including the Wife, thought that Red Riding Hood was annoying and the Wolf creepy, but I thought that was what they were supposed to be. Jack is much more likable, and he’s a thief.

They mostly live happily ever after, and apparently, that’s how Act 1 of the musical ends. I heard this story of the out-of-town tryouts for the theatrical production, with composer Stephen Sondheim literally running out to the parking lot telling patrons that the show was not over.

Act 2 is somewhat darker. This is epitomized in a terrific song called “Your Fault”, which I HAVE seen performed on TV – perhaps on the Tonys some years back? I understand a movie is necessarily truncated from its source material. Since it’s a Disney movie – and marketed so heavily on its channels that the Daughter wanted to see the film more than I – thematic elements have been removed. Obviously, I can’t comment on what I’d not seen, but the solution as presented worked for me. And while it had “some suggestive material,” the Daughter was fine with it all.

In other words, I liked it quite a bit, though it dragged, briefly, in places. Interesting that at Rotten Tomatoes, the audience liked it less than the critics. Some, I imagine, are Sondheim purists. Critic Leonard Maltin says that this movie adaptation of a Broadway show actually IMPROVED on the original.

Let’s face it, you either buy into the notion of people breaking into song on a regular basis, or you don’t. Somehow it flowed very well here, perhaps in part because there was the narration, by the Baker, to break it up. Also, it was so fantasy-laden, the singing seemed less jarring than, say, in Sondheim’s West Side Story – which I love – but which is more based in reality.

Pictures: top, l-r, Kendrick, Corden, Streep, Huttlestone, Ullman, Mauzy; bottom, l-r, Pine, Blunt, Depp, Crawford, Baranski, Magnussen.

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