By J.K. Rowling. Published in 2007.
Warning: Many, many spoilers after the jump.
The return of fun with music videos
“Hey There Delilah,” Plain White T’s; “What’s a Girl to Do,” Bat For Lashes; and “Teenagers,” My Chemical Romance.
I haven’t written about music videos in a while, but the heat and humidity of summertime shortens my attention span and makes bumming around inside on the Internet that much more appealing. So once again, here are a few of the videos that made me pause in my compulsive YouTube clicking.
Bleak House
On DVD.
Contemporary culture often views a drama’s moral complexity as an indicator of its quality. The Sopranos is, I think, one of the best examples of that. We point to how Tony was sympathetic and recognizably human despite the fact that he was a murderous mobster as evidence of the show’s sophistication. Ethical shades of gray have become shorthand for artistic merit, and that’s reasonable, I guess, to a point. Progressing beyond cookie-cutter characters and recognizing the fallibility of heroes require some degree of maturity.
But that line of thinking can easily be oversimplified and perverted. Merely trying to turn an villain into a hero isn’t in and of itself a marker of quality, and using patently archetypal characters doesn’t necessarily indicate a lack of depth or value. I thought about that latter point, in particular, as I watched the 2005 BBC adaptation of Bleak House by Charles Dickens. Dickens is so broad by today’s standards—with saintly, self-effacing protagonists and vile, duplicitous antagonists—and yet Bleak House is a skillfully told, thoroughly absorbing tale. I sped through eight hours’ worth of Victorian melodrama as quickly as Netflix would send me the next DVD.
Moscow on the Hudson
The New York Philharmonic (not the Robin Williams movie, god forbid) on Thursday, July 5.
Programming a relatively casual concert entirely with music by Russian composers is sort of brilliant because much of the Russian canon is quite accessible to a lay audience. Memorable folk-like melodies, dazzling orchestration, and an infectious sense of vigor permeate the catalog. But thinking about that too hard always makes me sort of queasy.
Sure, you see the roots of that open, of-the-people quality in the nineteenth century, when Russian composers, led by Mily Balakirev, championed an essentially “Russian” style that embraced traditional Slavic musical elements. The influence of Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, a truly gifted orchestrator, also helped Russian music capture large audiences. But in the twentieth century, musical style became a state matter, with Stalin condemning composers to the gulag for the crime of “formalism.” So when I listen to some of the more crowd-pleasing works of Khachaturian or Shostakovich or Prokofiev, I always wonder, Is this what he would have written if a charge of elitism didn’t carry the threat of death? And if I enjoy it, does that put me in an aesthetic camp with Stalin? I know that’s incredibly silly and simplistic, but it bothers me nonetheless, and it saddens me that Stalin’s shadow still lingers over Russian music, even years after the fall of Communism.
Of course, such self-indulgent, over-serious ruminations are not at all the point of the Philharmonic’s “Moscow on the Hudson” program, part of its Summertime Classics series. That’s just me. And once I got over freaking out over a new bit of trivia (Did you know that the original text for Peter and the Wolf identified Peter as a Communist Pioneer?), I had a good time. It’s hard not to enjoy classical Russian music.
Ratatouille
In theaters.
When traditional hand-drawn animation studios suffer, commentators often point to Pixar, the shining jewel of American animation, for an explanation. “See?” they say. “The future is in computer animation. Like Pixar.”
That assessment breaks my heart. How can someone look at Toy Story or Finding Nemo or The Incredibles and determine that they owe their superiority to the use of pixels rather than brush strokes? Of course the animation is visually striking, even groundbreaking, but that’s not what makes those movies worth treasuring. Pixar is special not because they use computers or even because they use those computers well. Pixar is special because the people who work there are great storytellers. It really is that simple.
The studio’s latest, Ratatouille, lives up to the Pixar standard with charm, gentle humor, and a love letter to the enduring joy of cooking.
Romeo and Juliet
Shakespeare in the Park, presented by the Public Theater, on Saturday, June 30.
The tagline for this season’s Shakespeare in the Park is “Free Love.” You see those words plastered on buses and in subway stations, and it strikes me as ironic because Oscar Isaac and Lauren Ambrose, playing the parts of Romeo and Juliet, interpreted their roles with the least amount of romanticism I’ve even seen in a production of the play. In their hands, real love barely figured into the tragedy.
I don’t mean that as criticism. Despite the Prince’s final speech—with its facile “feuds are bad” moral and canonization of the poor foolish teenagers—I’ve always felt that Romeo and Juliet is ultimately about the dangers of rash decision-making, and not just on the part of the title characters. Mercutio’s heedless push to crash the Capulets’ party, Tybalt’s pugnacious insistence of dueling, and Lord Capulet’s impulsive decision to marry off his daughter (despite his earlier vow that he would only do so with her assent)—to name just three examples—all play into the disastrous chain of events that leave not two but, lest we forget, six people dead.
I’m not sure whether director Michael Grief intended his production to be read this way, but in my eyes, Isaac’s Romeo never matured from impetuous to passionate, and Ambrose’s Juliet did so only fleetingly. Partly because of that and partly because of the great use of humor in the earlier acts, Romeo and Juliet became less sentimental, less about love and more about the folly of youth.
Swan Lake
The American Ballet Theatre at Lincoln Center on Wednesday, June 27.
Swan Lake is my favorite ballet—kind of pedestrian of me, I guess, but it’s perfect, and as much as I enjoy Giselle and Cinderella, they can’t compare to the perfection of Swan Lake.
Paprika
In theaters.
I usually include a brief summary of the premise when I write about movies, but I haven’t a clue how to manage that with Paprika. The brilliant but bizarre anime feature slips in and out of reality without notice. The plot twists frenetically, the characters take on multiple guises, and the imagery challenges Western expectations about what animation can accomplish.
Only ninety minutes in length, Paprika feels longer, not because it drags (it doesn’t) but because it’s so rich and dense and stimulating. It’s the kind of movie that demands that you give yourself over to it, that you accept its phantasmagorical world and let go of any preconceived notions you might have had about where the story will take you—and that kind of aesthetic submersion is thrilling. Once Paprika was over, I immediately wanted to watch it again.
Tradition and Innovation
The New York City Ballet on Sunday, June 17.
Oscar Wilde was a paragon of dry, satiric wit, so I tend to forget that his writing could be a bit maudlin, too. Some scenes in An Ideal Husband, for example, become downright cloying if not handled with what I ever so humbly consider to be the proper arch tone. As for Wilde’s story “The Nightingale and the Rose,” it tilts dangerously toward bathos—which perhaps makes it well suited for ballet. Ballet, as a medium, can transform the mawkishly sentimental into something beautiful and affecting.
But I have mixed feelings about Christopher Wheeldon’s new short ballet based on Wilde’s short story. Wendy Whelan danced the role of the Nightingale with lovely, avian delicacy, and Bright Sheng’s score, commissioned for this work, had some striking, exquisite passages, particularly during the Nightingale’s death. The ballet has lingered in my memory, yet the tearjerking sensibility, mixed with unsettling imagery and staggering cynicism, left me uncertain about the work as a whole.
Guitar Hero II
On PlayStation 2.
You can’t learn a difficult piece of music simply by playing it repeatedly from beginning to end. You have to isolate the problem passages, work out the fingerings and phrasings, and then drill them, slowly at first, until you teach your fingers exactly how they should move and your eyes exactly what they should see and your ears exactly what they should hear. As a music major, I spent hours alone in practice rooms, painstakingly working through a few sticky measures. It sounds tedious, and it often was, but when I finally could nail those tricky passages, the sense of accomplishment made me giddy. It was worth it.
Still, drilling fingerings and rhythms is hardly exciting, which is why Guitar Hero II amuses me so much: Underneath all the bells and whistles, it re-creates that experience.
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