Author: Mary Beth

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Rossini’s Overture to “La gazza ladra,” Orbón’s “Tres versiones sinfónicas,” Bernstein’s “Divertimento for Orchestra,” and Ravel’s “Pavane pour une infante défunte” and “Boléro”

The Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra at Carnegie Hall on Saturday, October 2.

The program, led by guest conductor Gustavo Dudamel, was gleefully, ridiculously, unabashedly populist—endearingly so, but also a bit over the top. There’s something kind of goofy about selecting a Rossini overture AND Ravel’s Boléro AND a collection of Bernstein dances (not the West Side Story suite, to be fair, but so like it that it might as well have been). Part of me wanted something a bit richer and more challenging—something like the Prokofiev symphony Dudamel conducted in his New York Philharmonic debut three years ago. But even in my snobbier moments, I couldn’t help but enjoy it. If one must do a crowd-pleaser-packed program, one might as well do it exquisitely well. It would be easy enough to coast through this stuff—it’s going to get an enthusiastic reaction regardless—but Dudamel and company never rested on the music’s laurels.

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Chaos and Classicism

Special exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum through January 9.

I think I would have guessed that romanticism is the more dangerous end on the classicism-romanticism continuum. Extreme romanticism has a perverse infatuation with insanity, mania, and death; extreme classicism … well, I probably would have brushed that off as mere cold rigidity about aesthetic formulae. No doubt that’s the casual assumption of one trained in music, where classicism really is that harmless, but after wandering through the Guggenheim’s exhibition on art in France, Italy, and Germany from 1918 to 1936 (alarm bells!), I feel rather stupid.

Not that everything in Chaos and Classicism is fascistic. Some artists were simply reacting to the destruction and horror of the first World War by turning back toward classical order and beauty. The literature associated with the exhibit makes this sound almost cowardly (“Rather than frank confrontation, a self-conscious forgetting determined many of the significant new forms of art”), but I think that’s unfair (and perhaps unintended). Some of Pablo Picasso’s neoclassic paintings, for example, are heartbreakingly lovely, and that kind of beauty holds its own sort of truth—a very different truth from something like Guernica, obviously, but an invaluable truth nonetheless.

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Centurion

In theaters, theoretically, but easier to find on alternative platforms (Xbox LIVE, Amazon Video on Demand, etc.).

Somewhere along the line, I saw a preview for Centurion and decided I wanted to see it. I’d liked several of the relatively unknown actors in other movies (Michael Fassbender in Inglourious Basterds, for example) and was excited at the opportunity to watch them again. I’d heard interesting things about director Neil Marshall but had never checked out his break-out movie, The Descent, because horror really isn’t my thing, and a historical epic like Centurion looked more palatable. The preview’s sweeping panoramic shots of the wilds of Britain looked dramatic and gorgeous, totally the kind of thing I would love to experience on a big screen. I wasn’t expecting any kind of masterpiece, but it all looked exciting and fun. I added Centurion to my mental “to see” list.

And then, after the movie premiered, it was nearly impossible to find—and living in New York, I’m used to being able to see anything, both as soon as it’s released and weeks after. I eventually discovered that Centurion is one of those movies being released on various electronic platforms simultaneously with its theatrical release and that theaters are responding to this innovation by choosing not to show it at all. By the time I learned that, purely because I hate having even my most idle wishes thwarted, my desire to see Centurion had ramped up exponentially, so Sean and I ended up watching it On Demand (for significantly less than it would have cost to attend a theater, incidentally), and … it was okay. Completely … okay. And now I feel sort of silly about the whole deal.

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Namouna, a Grand Divertissement

The New York City Ballet on Sunday, September 19.

Ballets rarely use much plot. Ideally, if there’s a narrative at all, you want just enough to immerse the dance in emotion. Works that try to pack in convoluted twists and subplots dry out in a desert of pantomime.

Alexei Ratmansky’s “Namouna, a Grand Divertissement” is not one of those over-plotted ballets. To the contrary, it’s gleefully under-plotted, hinting at familiar ballet story elements (a lovestruck young man, virtuosic pirates, a sultry seductress, a demure mystery girl, a corps made up of identical, interchangeable women) but never bothering to knit them into a coherent story. “Namouna” is deliberately elusive, all intimation and no resonance, and as such, it’s charming but emotionally empty. Calling the work a “grand divertissement” is actually quite apt: for all its grandeur, it’s a trifle. That could be criticism, I suppose, but when the trifle is so delicious, why complain?

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Avatar: The Last Airbender

All three seasons on DVD and streaming on Netflix.

Avatar: The Last Airbender is definitely a children’s show. Unlike the Pixar movies or some of Hayao Miyazaki’s films, which seem to have an adult sensibility and adult rhythms underlying the animation, Avatar follows the familiar contours of kids’ programming: a single strongly expressed theme in each episode; straightforward plotting; goofy, broad humor. And yet, as the show progresses, complexities reveal themselves beneath the simplicities. The morals of the story, though transparently conveyed, are more challenging, sometimes more unsettling, than typical kids’ fare. It took most of the first season for me to settle into the guileless storytelling, even longer for the boisterous child hero Aang to endear himself to me, but the vivid Japanese-style animation held my attention in the meantime. Eventually, I could see why so many people love this show so deeply—and why M. Night Shyamalan’s widely reviled live-action adaptation of the first season is such a travesty.

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Zombieland

On DVD and streaming on Netflix.

Clearly, I’ve played way too much Fallout 3 in my time because I could barely watch Zombieland without shrieking at the characters, who didn’t seem to have my hard-won expertise at surviving under post-apocalyptic conditions. “Shouldn’t you be foraging through that abandoned grocery store?” I’d cry. “Don’t just trash the place.” I’d shake my head in frustration when they wasted ammunition with celebratory shots in the air, and I never could handle the way they’d saunter blithely into an unfamiliar building instead of methodically scoping it out and clearing it. “These people deserve to die,” I’d grumble.

I’m not usually this insistent on practicality in suspense movies. (I rather liked Red Eye, for example, only recognizing after the fact how many flat-out idiotic mistakes Rachel McAdams makes in attempting to escape psycho Cillian Murphy.) But Zombieland pulls a bait-and-switch. The opening narration is all about our protagonist’s rules for surviving among the undead, and I was excited about this cinematic Zombie Survival Guide. Tips! But then it turns out that the movie isn’t so much about how to defeat zombies as it is about the value of community and how No Man Is an Island, et cetera, et cetera, and weirdly, this annoyed me no end. What’s more, the serious themes don’t gibe with the flip tone, making for a scattershot film, reveling in gross-out slapstick one minute and trying to do something semi-heartfelt the next. I couldn’t keep up with the record-skip mood shifts.

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Scott Pilgrim vs. the World

In theaters.

Like many people, I’ve tired of Michael Cera’s whiny, wavering, painfully awkward persona. It was cute back when he was on Arrested Development, but he’s not an adorable kid anymore, and the schtick has gotten very old. When I see that little-boy-lost face, hear that whimpering little voice, I want to throttle him and shout that it’s time to grow the hell up already.

Exasperated as I am with Cera, I wasn’t overly optimistic about his new movie, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, but to my considerable amusement, telling his character to grow the hell up turns out to be the whole point of the movie. Every time I rolled my eyes at Scott, virtually all the other characters rolled their eyes at him, too—a very gratifying development indeed.

But there’s more to Scott Pilgrim vs. the World than eye rolling. Director Edgar Wright (who also cowrote the screenplay adapting Bryan Lee O’Malley’s series of graphic novels) got his start working with Simon Pegg, directing the cult TV show Spaced and the brilliantly satiric movies Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz, and with those collaborations, he’s developed a wonderful sense of style, an ability to craft action sequences that are both thrilling and hilarious. That talent serves him well with Pilgrim, which constantly references the aesthetic of O’Malley’s graphic novels as well as countless old video games while still functioning as a exuberant, glossy movie. Thematically, it doesn’t quite come together—the metaphors are hopelessly mixed—but it’s delightful to watch, definitely more fun than your average action comedy.

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A Song of Ice and Fire

By George R. R. Martin. Series includes A Game of Thrones, published in 1996; A Clash of Kings, published in 1998; A Storm of Swords, published in 2000; and A Feast for Crows, published in 2005.

The studio exec overseeing HBO’s upcoming adaptation of George R. R. Martin’s sprawling epic-in-progress into a serial TV drama is fond of claiming that the series isn’t really high fantasy. His motive is obvious—HBO doesn’t want A Game of Thrones (the TV show’s title) to be consigned to the genre ghetto, seen only by fanboys—but there’s still something to what he’s saying. Despite the presence of dragons and wights and other mythical beasts, Martin’s world rarely feels alien to our own. In part, that’s because the creatures and magic are on the periphery, but more significantly, it’s because, fair or not (probably not), fantasy has a reputation for drawing bright white lines between Good and Evil, and Martin refuses to do so. In the Song of Ice and Fire books, sympathetic characters feel compelled to do terrible things, and unsympathetic characters have admirable qualities. No one has a clear Hero’s Quest to follow, and everyone encounters awful questions for which there are no easy answers. The world is complicated, muddy, and deeply unfair. Even dragons can’t make such a familiar world feel entirely like fantasy.