Month: April 2006

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Le Nozze di Figaro

The Metropolitan Opera on Saturday, April 15.

Le Nozze di Figaro is a soap opera, packed with disguises, infidelities, eavesdropping, improbable revelations and convoluted schemes. Figaro, Susanna, Cherubino, the Count and most of the other characters are content to live in a world of farce, but the Countess transcends the buffoonery of her peers. One of Figaro’s greatest strengths is the tension between the silliness of the story and the reality of Countess’ undeniable pain over her husband’s unfaithfulness. Mozart had the sensitivity to give the Countess dignity, and that choice elevates the entire opera.

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Brick

In theaters.

Few styles are more distinctive than that of film noir. The disillusioned gumshoes, seductive femme fatales, dark alleyways and darker motives are instantly recognizable, particularly when shot in shadow at odd angles. At first, the idea of transposing film noir from the city underworld to the suburban high school seems little more than a clever conceit, a gimmick, but writer-director Rian Johnson makes it work in Brick.

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The Third Man

On DVD.

Watching The Third Man for the first time, I couldn’t help but feel a twinge of déjà vu. Anyone who has ever read anything about film noir is going to recognize Orson Welles’ first dramatic appearance, the scene of the Ferris wheel, the chase sequence through the sewers, the line about the cuckoo clock, and the beautifully odd zither score. Often, that kind of familiarity makes actually watching the film in question anticlimactic, but that wasn’t the case for me with The Third Man.

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The Cusp of Magic

The Kronos Quartet and Wu Man, pipa, at Carnegie Hall on Friday, April 7.

I had never heard of the pipa before I attended this concert given by the Kronos Quartet and pipa player Wu Man, but I immediately recognized the sound of the lute-like instrument from countless Asian-themed movies. Part of the joy of the concert, however, was hearing Wu Man play the instrument as part of nontraditional compositions, music that doesn’t immediately bring to mind a watercolor image of a delicate woman in a silk cheongsam.

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Inside Man

In theaters.

Inside Man opens with a long shot of an old-fashioned roller coaster. The roller coaster, of course, is a familiar metaphor for the thriller, so the shot (accompanied, oddly, by a jaunty Bollywood number) reads like a promise of high-tension and a truly spectacular climax.

The movie certainly has its share of twists, but it never builds enough energy or momentum to be a roller coaster. The pleasure of Inside Man is the details, the quirks that make it a Spike Lee joint rather than a generic heist pic.

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An introduction

Shakespeare’s play Much Ado About Nothing spins on mistaken identities, misplaced bravado and misunderstandings galore.