Category: Reviews

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Julie & Julia

In theaters.

The conventional wisdom about Julie & Julia is that it’s half of a good movie: blogger Julie Powell (Amy Adams) is obnoxious and chef Julia Child (Meryl Streep) is awesome. I understand why they say that. Streep’s big, enthusiastic performance is a joy to behold, and Child is an icon; her magnum opus, Mastering the Art of French Cooking, a true achievement. By comparison, Julie is slight, her angst insignificant. Who cares? To which, if I’m being truly honest, I must reply: I do. I care because I identify with Julie’s angst and her dramatic arc. If Julie & Julia had been just Julia, it would have lost much of its meaning, and as that meaning strikes a chord with me, I cannot want that, even when Julie is a bratty narcissist. Perhaps this makes me a bratty narcissist, too.

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Othello

Presented by the Public Theater and LAByrinth Theater, at the NYU Skirball Center, through October 4.

Adapting the term problem play to describe Shakespeare’s more ambiguous comedies, as some critics have done, was always a stretch—the term originally referred to nineteenth-century dramas that realistically portray turbulent social issues (think Ibsen)—so, seeing as how problem play is likely the wrong term anyway, I prefer to ignore its roots and use it to refer to any Shakespeare play that feels uncomfortable for modern audiences. After all, The Taming of the Shrew and The Merchant of Venice present just as many problems as All’s Well That Ends Well and Measure for Measure, and as for Othello—well, if you can get through Othello without cringing at something, there’s probably something wrong with you.

And yet, there’s an allure to Othello—poetic, evocative writing; intriguing, enigmatic characters—that makes it worth wading through, despite the inevitable snags. The challenge of tackling its problems is part of the fun, so I enjoyed Peter Sellars’s new production of the play, even if I found some of his “solutions” rather perplexing. The acclaimed director manages to neutralize some of the truly pernicious racial elements, but in doing so, he makes the Moor all but inexplicable and kills any sense of classic tragedy. Plus, he creates uncomfortable new problems by merging the characters of Bianca and Montano. The production is interesting, at times compelling, but it lacks dramatic cohesion. It’s odd. I cringed a lot.

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Odd Man Out

In repertory at Film Forum through September 17.

The great actor James Mason gets top billing in Carol Reed’s moody, noirish 1947 film about a Irish nationalist wounded in a robbery for the cause and abandoned by his crew, but the credits are misleading. Odd Man Out isn’t a star-driven picture, and even though Mason spends more time onscreen than anyone else, a good deal of that time he’s not doing much, just staggering about, slipping in and out of consciousness. His character, the badly injured Johnny McQueen, is in no condition to act; instead, throughout, he is acted upon.

And that’s just one of the ways in which Odd Man Out defies expectations. What initially looks like a thoughtful heist flick turns into a series of character studies with heavy religious undertones. Despite the noirish cinematographic touches, the movie doesn’t have much in common, thematically, with the genre. And despite the title card’s assurances that the movie is “not concerned with the struggle between the law and an illegal organization,” clearly meant to be the IRA, that’s not precisely true. Odd Man Out dramatically portrays a town under lockdown, where citizens can’t trust the police or one another, where people are gunned down in the streets. The question of who is ultimately at fault—the British police or the Irish nationalists—might not be the focus, but the ramifications of that conflict are.

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The Magicians

By Lev Grossman. Published in 2009.

For a book with such an obvious sales gimmick—in this case, “Harry Potter for grown-ups”—The Magicians is strikingly well imagined. It might be opportunistic, but it’s not uninspired, and author Lev Grossman is a talented enough writer to find new ways around familiar elements while exploring fresh themes. The result is a book that’s less a fantasy novel than a dark coming-of-age tale—magic without the carefree whimsy and bright moral lines that usually accompany it.

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The High Line

Section 1, running from Gansevoort Street to 20th Street.

In the heart of Central Park, or Fort Tryon Park farther uptown or Prospect Park in Brooklyn, you can almost forget you’re in the city. The street sounds fade to near silence, and the canopy of trees obscures much of the skyline. That’s part of the fun of visiting—the convenient escape.

The High Line, by contrast, makes no pretensions at escape. It is an unabashedly urban park, an abandoned elevated railway once slated for demolition but now lovingly repurposed as public green space above the busy city streets. The design embraces the park’s industrial history, with benches evoking railway ties, and celebrates the plants that found a home there when the line fell into disuse and neglect. Visiting the High Line, you never leave the city, never even pretend to, but you glimpse it from a different angle, taking in the old buildings and new buildings and the Hudson River and the greenery all at once. It’s an interesting experience, an elegant experiment in conservation in a dense city.

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Scherzi Musicali

4x4 Baroque Music Festival at the Church of St. Mary the Virgin on Tuesday, September 1.

The raw emotion of Baroque songs takes you by surprise if you’re expecting “classical” music to be prim and refined. Composers of the era often strove to convey just one intense feeling in an individual work, so a song would be given over to undiluted passion, or sorrow, or bitterness, or agony—especially agony. The poetry the composers set was well suited to this single-minded aesthetic, feverishly so, with translated lines such as “Alas, foolish, blind world! alas, cruel fate,” and “I’ll drink my own fatal tears, and I’ll always be the most heartbroken of all abandoned lovers,” and “I wish the abysses to see my suffering, and the furies to weep at my bitter lamenting, and that even the damned souls will concede my torment is greater.” See? Agony. Apparently Baroque poets were the emo kids of their day.

The two soprano soloists who performed at the Scherzi Musicali program, featuring songs by Claudio Monteverdi, perfectly handled all that Baroque craziness, vividly conveying the passion, and sorrow, and bitterness, and agony—especially agony—with deliciously theatrical fervor without ever sacrificing the beauty of their voices. Such a sacrifice would have been unacceptable, for Jolle Greenleaf and Molly Quinn have exquisite voices. Their ornamentation had that light, seemingly effortless quality that I so envy, and in their duets, their radiant bell tones blended so well that it was hard to belief two separate beings were producing them.

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Inglourious Basterds

In theaters.

The amusingly paradoxical thing about Quentin Tarantino is that his movies constantly reference other ones—a blizzard of allusions and homages and old-fashioned knock-offs—and yet a Tarantino movie is instantly recognizable as a Tarantino movie. He’s a magpie but somehow a unique magpie—distinct even from those whose work he has appropriated.

And what is that—the ability to take something old and transmute it into something new—if not art? As aggravating as Tarantino can be, there is true virtuosity about his work that I always enjoy, sometimes despite myself. I might be in two minds about Inglourious Basterds, but in my gut, I love it in all its messy, bloody, problematic glory. No one makes movies like Quentin Tarantino.

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The Bacchae

Shakespeare in the Park, presented by the Public Theater, on Sunday, August 16.

People asked me whether I enjoyed The Bacchae, and I could only answer, “Well, it was interesting.” I don’t mean that as criticism or a non-recommendation (well, not exactly). I doubt that you could create a production of Euripides’s play, more than thousand years old, that I would enjoy, per se. Despite the program notes’ insistence otherwise, I don’t find much of contemporary relevance in the ancient Greek work. But it’s interesting, I’ll grant you without hesitation, and the performances are intriguing, and the production is striking and well done, so I couldn’t ask for more. The Bacchae is what it is. It couldn’t be otherwise.

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A Flowering Tree

At the Mostly Mozart Festival on Thursday, August 13.

This is the hardest thing to write about: the thing that surprises you, envelops you. You sit rapt with a straight back and clasped hands, and afterward you sigh with mingled happiness and regret, because it is so beautiful and because it is over and because you will never experience it new again.

When I went home after the performance, I babbled happily to Sean (who had to work late and couldn’t join me) about John Adams’s new opera, and when I paused to draw breath, he smiled and said, “You’re using lovely again.” I felt somewhat abashed. Lovely is my gushiest word, and I often overuse it, but it was appropriate in this case. To me, lovely goes beyond beautiful. It has a goodness about it, a special quality that draws me out at my most earnest. If I use lovely, it is only because, well, I love it.

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Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

In theaters.

Charles Dickens’s books have been made into movies, but the most successful adaptations, I think, are miniseries. The intricate stories and enormous casts need time to flower into the lavish gardens they are on the page. One can compress the novels, of course, but in doing so, one loses a great deal of what makes Dickens Dickens.

I think of the Harry Potter books in much the same way. Author J. K. Rowling owes much to Dickens, from her unapologetically sprawling plotlines to her numerous tellingly named characters. As with her predecessor, the charm of her writing is in the imaginative little details, the emotional beats, the vivid sketches of minor players, the immersive world she creates—exactly the sort of elements that tend to be squeezed out in film adaptations. And frankly, that’s why I’ve never had much interest in the Harry Potter movies. I’ve seen the first (I’ll never forgive director Chris Columbus for the flat, inert portrayal of the death of the unicorn, a scene that resonates with loss and foreboding in the novel) and the third (I’ll happily watch virtually any film directed by Alfonso Cuarón), but only once each. Even Cuarón’s effort disappoints me as much as it delights.

So I didn’t have any plans to see Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, but then Sean wanted to go and I wanted to go with Sean, and here I am writing about it. I have to admit it was better than I expected—quite good in some spots—but still, ultimately, not good enough. Movies simply aren’t the best medium in this case.