Author: Mary Beth

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The Dark Knight

In theaters.

Consider the title fair warning. Dark doesn’t even begin to describe the latest Batman movie. I don’t think much of the ratings system, but if you’re going to have one, it’s outrageous that The Dark Knight is rated PG-13. True, I don’t recall any swearing or exposed breasts, but the violence is wincingly graphic and deeply unsettling and not remotely cartoonish. Comic book source material notwithstanding (and frankly, turning up one’s nose at the medium is a breed of snobbery for which I have no respect), this is a movie for grown-ups.

And that, of course, is part of the reason it’s so good. Director Christopher Nolan and his brother and co-writer Jonathan aren’t content just to sell action figures and blow stuff up, and their ambition shines through in every scene of The Dark Knight. It isn’t as perfectly conceived and crafted as their previous collaboration, the underrated The Prestige, but unlike most summer blockbusters, Knight gets under your skin and leaves you talking. It stays with you.

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Dr. Horrible’s Sing-along Blog

Available online at drhorrible.com through July 20 and available for download at the iTunes store.

If I didn’t already love Joss Whedon, I would for this: When the writers’ strike prohibited him from working on screenplays for film or TV, he used the break as an opportunity to collaborate with friends, family, and colleagues on an Internet project, an oddball musical about a would-be supervillain, his smug superhero nemesis, and the object of his unrequited affection.

Given that “Once More, With Feeling,” the musical episode of Whedon’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer, was one of the few truly bright spots of season six (I might love Joss, but I’m no apologist for Buffy’s sharp downturn), I was looking forward to Dr. Horrible’s Sing-along Blog, and it didn’t disappoint. It did surprise, though. I suppose I had expected something lighter and breezier, a trifle to match its let’s-put-on-a-show roots, but now I wonder why. After all, Whedon has all but perfected the art of exploring hard emotional truths in potentially campy premises. Why shouldn’t he do that online as well as on TV?

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Concert in the Park

The New York Philharmonic at Central Park, on Tuesday, July 15.

Lesson learned: When attending a free concert in Central Park, go directly after work to stake out a spot. In the past, I’ve done that as a matter of course, but the concert Tuesday snuck up on me, and I made a quick trip home to grab dinner and a blanket to spread on the ground. By the time I arrived at the park about forty-five minutes before the program began at 8, I could only find room about two-thirds of the way down the Great Lawn.

From there, I could barely hear the orchestra, particularly because at that distance most of my neighbors would best be described as picnickers rather than concert-goers. Not to be a snob, but I don’t understand their thinking. If you just want to eat and drink and talk and enjoy the outdoors, why attend a concert at all? Have a picnic some other night, and leave the concert-going for those of us interested in hearing the music!

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Giselle

The American Ballet Theatre at Lincoln Center on Tuesday, July 8.

Dancers generally don’t show fatigue. No doubt the fact that they’re in peak physical condition has something to do with that, but even so, it just wouldn’t do to have anyone gasping for breath between pirouettes or pausing after a series of leaps to put his head between his legs. So part of what makes the ballet Giselle so much fun is that it makes such a show of exhaustion. Characters literally dance themselves to death—but not before they pant and heave and collapse a few times, almost as if their bodies tire like those of normal human beings—and I have to admit, I kind of love it.

My sicko tendencies aside, however, Giselle is a wonderfully lush, twistedly tragic ballet, a paragon of the romantic tradition. If the score were by Tchaikovsky, it would be perfect. (The music, from a hodgepodge of sources, is fine, but it can’t compare to Swan Lake or Sleeping Beauty.)

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Tell No One

In theaters.

Conveying paranoia is one of the things movies do best—and not just showing it but making you feel it along with the characters. Looming images, wary pans, jumpy camerawork, and carefully doled information can create a delicious sense of anxiety, the perverse thrill of jangly nerves and bated breath.

The French thriller Tell No One achieves those tense heights of paranoia beautifully (a few sequences have real Hitchcockian flair, not quite Cary-Grant-in-the-corn-field but admirably close), but if falls short of what might be the more difficult trick: the dismount. As long as the threat against protagonist Alex Beck is left vague and shadowy, Tell No One works the classic man-unjustly-accused theme to great effect. Undefined, the threat feels overwhelming, but once the movie starts spelling everything out in long explanatory flashbacks, it begins to feel small and sordid, a letdown.

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August: Osage County

Now playing at the Music Box Theatre on Broadway.

The centerpiece of August: Osage County is a grandly disastrous family dinner. The matriarch of the Weston family gleefully tears a strip out of everyone in turn, paying particular attention to her three daughters and leaving behind a glut of emotional carnage: reopened wounds, exposed secrets, and shattered psyches. The frequently made comparison to Tennessee Williams’ work isn’t an overstatement. It might be set in Oklahoma rather than the Deep South, but this year’s winner of both the Pulitzer Prize for Drama and the Tony Award for Best Play falls easily into the muggy, tempestuous Southern gothic tradition.

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Wall-E

In theaters.

Movement is near to nature—as a bird flying—and it is the spoken word which is embarrassing. The voice is so revealing, it becomes an artificial thing, reducing everybody to a certain glibness, to an unreality. Pantomime to me is an expression of poetry, comic poetry. I knew that in talking pictures I would lose a lot of eloquence.

—Charlie Chaplin

I love that line. I don’t entirely agree with Charlie Chaplin (I’m a word person, after all), but it is truer than I would like that words—even the right words—often are inadequate. An image, a gesture, a silence often means more than words ever could.

To demonstrate the point, I give you Wall-E, Pixar’s latest animated gem and, according to many, the studio’s masterpiece. It is, indeed, a gorgeous movie, one destined for a cherished spot in my DVD collection, but I don’t think it’s as perfect as its most passionate fans believe, and I’d even guess (with unforgivable arrogance) that Chaplin would agree with me. The wordless passages—the opening act, the zero-gravity robot ballet, the poignant history-of-art epilogue over the closing credits—are just as profoundly beautiful as everyone says, but whenever dialogue enters the picture, the movie dips from greatness to goodness. The words aren’t bad (though they do veer toward the heavy-handed), but they simply can’t compete with the poetry of pantomime and suffer by comparison. In this instance, at least, Chaplin was right.

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Soulive with Joshua Redman

JVC Jazz Festival at Le Poisson Rouge on Friday, June 27.

I don’t know anything about jazz. I mean, I can recite the requisite list of icons—Charlie Parker, John Coltrane, Miles Davis, and, um, other people who aren’t dead yet—but I’ve never studied jazz or even listened to it much. I feel so out of my element here that I tried to convince myself I needn’t write about this concert at all, but that would go against my personal Code of Blogging (really!), and besides, it was an amazing experience, one that I want to remember, so it would do me good to try to articulate what I got out of it. So here goes:

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Then and There

The New York City Ballet on Tuesday, June 24.

The lyrics to “At the Ballet” from A Chorus Line (“Everything was beautiful at the ballet / Graceful men life lovely girls in white …”) make me think of works like Balanchine’s “Brahms-Schoenberg Quartet.” Sure, the costume colors tend more toward peaches than cream, but “Quartet” presents exactly the kind of unabashed, innocent sweetness that the song so wistfully celebrates. Charmingly pretty and traditional, it is all pirouettes and arabesques and pink tulle tutus.

It was fun to see that juxtaposed against “Prodigal Son,” a completely different Balanchine ballet in which the dancers tend to creep about with their feet wide apart and the prima ballerina, Siren, spends a great deal of time wrapping a long velvet train between her legs in a suggestive but distinctly unladylike manner. The contrast is striking—in the steps, in the dancers’ physical bearing, in the costume style—but both works are a joy to watch.

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More Hulu programming

Burn Notice, Kitchen Confidential, and House.

I hardly ever watch TV on TV anymore. Even with a digital video recorder, sitting down in front of the TV to watch something seems so inflexible and archaic. If it’s not available online—either on Hulu or some other site—keeping up with it is too much bother. (I stopped watching Gossip Girl when it was no longer available on the Internet, and the ratings would suggest that I wasn’t the only one. Poor move, CW.) Besides, the Internet provides so much more variety, plus instant gratification. Here are another few shows I never would have seen were it not for the glories of the World Wide Web.