Category: Reviews

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Community

Thursdays at 8 p.m. on NBC. Five episodes into the second season.

The standard knock on metafiction (storytelling that self-consciously addresses the conventions of fiction, never letting its audience forget the essential fictionness—the falsehood—of the tale) is that it’s empty and insincere, refusing to commit to the emotion or the characters of its story and instead indulging in arch, self-congratulatory naval-gazing, cleverness for its own meaningless sake. That can be true, no doubt—to understand a work as fiction, you always have to take a step or two back, and it’s easy to reach too far a remove—but it’s not necessarily so. The best metafiction finds meaning in the idea that stories are true even in their falsehood, and to me, at least, that’s a tremendously powerful, affirming idea. (I’m the sort of person who cries through much of Adaptation and Stranger Than Fiction.) Good metafiction also provides rich ground for humor, mining the nonsense of storytelling even as it embraces the story. (Arrested Development was brilliant at that.) The balancing act is precarious, and it will never be to everyone’s taste, but done well, metafiction can be startling and provocative and downright hilarious.

Community, an under-performing tongue-in-cheek sitcom in its sophomore year, is still fine-tuning its balancing act. It has its glib moments, its cheap gags, but as it discovers who precisely its characters are and refines its voice, it gets funnier and funnier and, at times, surprisingly affecting. I know Modern Family has its partisans, Glee its passionate fans, but Community is the sole comedy now airing guaranteed to set me in a good mood. Its satiric bite is delicious, its sense of the absurd is unrivaled, and its sentiment well leavened with honesty and wit. This is metahumor done right.

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The Social Network

In theaters.

The title is misleading—deliberately, ironically so, I suspect—because Facebook, the now ubiquitous social networking site, is not the subject of The Social Network. The network at the heart of the docudrama is much more traditional: the volatile relationships among a small group of bright, privileged young men, none of whom come across particularly well.

Given voice by screenwriter Aaron Sorkin, known for his stylized, rapid-fire dialogue, the founders of Facebook and their rivals are articulate and crude, brilliant and oblivious, arrogant and insecure, occasionally charming and nearly always nastily misogynistic. In other words, they are immediately recognizable. Anyone who has ever attended college knows guys like this. I don’t know how accurate the history is, but there’s definitely some kind of truth here.

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El Gato Con Botas

The Gotham Chamber Opera at the New Victory Theater on Saturday, October 9.

Not everyone liked the little puppet boy in Anthony Minghella’s 2006 production of Madama Butterfly. The artifice was unapologetically overt: the puppeteers might have been dressed in black, but they were there on stage, right next to Cio-Cio San, manipulating the boy’s head and limbs by hand. You either accepted it or you didn’t.

I did. To my eyes, the puppet fit beautifully into the production’s vividly stylized aesthetic, apiece with the paper-lantern stars and, for that matter, the thirty-something Butterfly. But I can understand (grudgingly) how for other people, puppetry was jarring in a relatively realistic opera and better suited for something like, oh, El Gato Con Botas, in which the lead is not a victimized teenage girl but a wily talking cat.

Those people clearly are no fun at all. The stunningly expressive creations of Blind Summit Theatre (the company responsible for the puppets in Butterfly and El Gato) should not be limited to children’s fairy tales—though they are, I admit, perfect for fairy tales. Xavier Montsalvatge’s slight little opera isn’t much on its own, but with the cat and rabbits and ogre (not to mention a few of the humans) brought to life through Blind Summit Theatre’s artistry, El Gato Con Botas makes for a dazzling hour or so of entertainment.

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Chaconne, Monumentum pro Gesualdo, Movements for Piano and Orchestra, Tschaikovsky Pas de Deux, and The Magic Flute

The New York City Ballet on Sunday, October 3.

For more than a decade, the New York City Ballet hasn’t performed fall repertory (aside from an opening gala in November before Nutcracker season), which has always been unfortunate for me personally since my mom, who introduced me to ballet, tends to visit in the fall. She and Dad also like to visit in mid-spring, in between the City Ballet’s winter season (January and February) and spring season (May and June). It’s almost as though Dad has been scheming to avoid being subjected to tutus. (Ha! I kid. We would never subject Dad to tutus.)

In any case, I don’t know why City Ballet changed up their schedule, adding a new fall repertory season, but Mom and I were delighted at the opportunity to go to a performance together, and we got lucky: it was a great program, varied but not incoherent, with great music and lovely dancing—and in October! What more could we ask?

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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.