Category: Reviews

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Pan’s Labyrinth

In theaters.

The theater screened previews for several dreadful-looking horror movies before showing Pan’s Labyrinth, and that puzzled me at first. I rarely see previews for this kind of dreck—they just don’t appear before the films I usually attend—so why were they playing now? Then I remembered that Pan’s Labyrinth is, technically, a horror movie itself. The villain, a viciously sadistic captain under GeneralĂ­simo Franco, gleefully tortures resistance fighters he captures, and numerous freakish, mythical creatures make appearances as well. It is a horror movie, but to put it in the same category as a banal monster-attack flick or soulless torture-porn seems terribly unjust.

Writer-director Guillermo del Toro takes the familiar tropes and grotesqueries of horror and uses them to tell a fairy tale. Such a meld might have been perverse, but del Toro’s sensitive treatment of his young protagonist elevates both genres. Pan’s Labyrinth is horrifying but beautiful, a heartbreaking tale of an innocent struggling against a very dark world.

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Die Zauberflöte

The Metropolitan Opera on Friday, December 15.

A week or so ago, I commented on how strange and creepy the story of The Nutcracker is—and I stand by that—but I have to admit The Nutcracker has nothing on Die Zauberflöte. With its clandestine order of monks, irrepressible bird-people, supernatural children, numerous melodramatic suicide attempts, and wild allusions to Masonic secrets and Zoroastrian mysticism, Die Zauberflöte is kooky even by operatic standards.

As such, it is well-suited for Julie Taymor’s distinctive, over-the-top direction. Taymor echoes the libretto’s hodgepodge of plot devices and references with a symbol-smothered rotating stage and costumes inspired by everything from geishas to Kabbalah to hip-hop.

At times, the jumble of imagery and ornamentation annoyed me (particularly when the stage crew noisily shifted the set during one of Sarastro’s arias), but I couldn’t help but appreciate the way the kaleidoscopic dazzle of the production kept the mustiness of age away from Mozart’s gleefully un-elite singspiel. No one could ever relegate the opera to a museum piece while enormous bears straight out of The Lion King dance to the beat of the music. If Taymor’s production is busy and cluttered (and it is), then so is Die Zauberflöte itself, charmingly so.

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The Last King of Scotland

In theaters.

Like any good little white liberal, I cringe at those stories that filter the painful experiences of “other” people through the eyes of a white protagonist. You know the type: the courage and suffering and strength of those “others” are relevant only insofar as they serve as a crucible for the heroic white man’s personal growth. When I saw the previews for The Last King of Scotland, which portrays the horrific rule of Ugandan dictator Idi Amin as experienced by a Scottish physician, I assumed it was another one of those movies. I was absolutely wrong.

Last King is actually, in large part, about the perversity and immorality of white people treating Africa as their personal playground for self-discovery. The screenplay, written by Peter Morgan and Jeremy Brock, based upon the novel by Giles Foden, pulls no punches: Dr. Nicholas Garrigan, their protagonist, might be naïve, but he’s no innocent. A bad version of this story would have let you anticipate a happy ending for him. A mediocre version would have made you wonder whether a happy ending was possible. This movie goes further: it urges you to consider whether a happy ending for Nicholas is even appropriate.

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The Nutcracker

The New York City Ballet on Tuesday, December 5.

Time and endless repetition might have dulled the creepy edge from the story of The Nutcracker, but it’s still there. Underneath all the sugarplums and snowflakes is the weird tale of little Marie (or Clara, depending on the storyteller), whose godfather manipulates her into dreaming of his young nephew saving her from a mutant rodent and then whisking her away to a magical kingdom of sugar and antiquated stereotypes. It’s like a child’s feverish sexual fantasy: she gets the boy and lots of candy! Hot! The Nutcracker has its odd charms, to be sure, but how did it become America’s favorite ballet, the crossover hit?

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The Art of the Book: Behind the Covers

Reading Series Event at the Kaufmann Concert Hall, 92nd Street Y Tisch Center for the Arts, on Monday, December 4.

Sean is a graphic designer, and I work in book publishing, so the 92nd Street Y’s panel discussion of cover art intrigued both of us, particularly once we saw who would be on the panel: Chip Kidd, Milton Glaser, and Dave Eggers. The Reading Series organizers did an excellent job of assembling the panel, for the three men each come from different backgrounds and aesthetics, and each is an interesting, engaging speaker. The event ran for nearly two hours—and could have run longer—and I was never bored. (How could I be? Lots of slides with pretty pictures! Whee!)

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Ugly Betty

Thursdays at 8 p.m. on ABC. Nine episodes into the first season.

Where to start with Ugly Betty? The Americanized telanovela about an unglamorous assistant at a hyperglamorous magazine is a tangle of contradictions. It’s both frivolous and sincere, farcically broad one moment and surprisingly delicate the next, cheerfully divorced from reality and then ready to examine issues of class, for example, that most purportedly “serious” dramas don’t touch. To focus solely on Ugly Betty’s charming silliness would belie its depth, but to concentrate on its heavier, more provocative elements would also misrepresent the show.

That weird, contradictory chemistry of goofy camp and earnest thoughtfulness is what makes Ugly Betty so interesting. It doesn’t always work—sometimes a scene tilts too far in one direction or the other—but when it does work, Ugly Betty contradicts its own name.

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Casino Royale

In theaters.

James Bond isn’t just a spy; he’s a killer. Before I saw Casino Royale, I had never really thought about that. Previous Bond movies and actors make the character so smooth and debonair that one never really considers the blood (however guilty and megalomanic) on his hands. Not a drop of red stains the crisp white shirt of his tux.

Casino Royale and actor Daniel Craig reimagine Bond by making the British superspy not so much cool as cold, delivering barbed double entendres rather than playful ones and taking as much pleasure in a succesful hit as a sexual conquest. The contrast between old Bond and new is striking—and perhaps not to everyone’s taste—but it brilliantly reinvigorates the stale franchise.

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Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip

Mondays at 10 p.m. on NBC. Eight episodes into the first season.

I don’t like Aaron Sorkin, perhaps the most overrated writer working on television. I don’t like his self-conscious banter. I don’t like the condescension with which he writes women. I don’t like the way most of his male characters are obvious stand-ins for Sorkin himself. I don’t like his idealization of political naiveté or his self-righteous Luddism or his shameless grandstanding.

That pomposity was more tolerable (and Sorkin’s other weaknesses somewhat less pronounced) on The West Wing, where the presidential subject matter made grandiosity excusable, even appropriate on occasion. I’m not immune, for example, to the power of the second season’s Thanksgiving and Christmas episodes, which earn their emotional punch with truly thoughtful, beautiful writing. More often, however, Sorkin’s trademark rapid-fire dialogue (not to mention the fine actors delivering it) disguises shallow reasoning and inconsistently drawn characters. Is it more interesting that much of the drivel on TV? Well, yes, but that doesn’t make Sorkin the screenwriting god that some make him out to be.

Sorkin’s triumphant return to television (after being fired from The West Wing for—apparently—one too many tardy scripts) is Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, an embarrassingly masturbatory, self-congratulatory show about just how Challenging and Consequential and Socially Significant writing for television is. Sorkin has become so arrogant, so lacking in self-awareness, that in the pilot, when the Heroic Writer sweeps in to revive a sketch comedy show that has lapsed into mediocrity, a tremulous little production assistant actually asks, “Are you coming to save us?” How can you not roll your eyes at that? Sorkin thinks he’s single-handedly saving us from cultural decay, and he’s doing so by giving us this ham-handed excuse for a drama.

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Stranger Than Fiction

In theaters.

Perhaps I should begin this review by acknowledging that I’m a sucker for this sort of metatextual film, tweaking the distinction between fiction and reality. I am, after all, the sort of person whose idea of introspection is to imagine how an omniscient narrator might describe me. When something bad happens to me, my first consolation is the thought that I can turn it into a good story, and when I’m angry, I tend to say biting things I don’t mean due to my longstanding, secret desire to play the villain in a Jane Austen novel. Needless to say, I adored the premise of Stranger Than Fiction, the tale of a man with a narrator stuck in his head, from the moment I heard it.

To his credit, though, screenwriter Zach Helm has more in mind than an archly clever play on fictional constructs. Although the film, directed with subtle polish by Marc Forster, never loses its gentle playfulness, it sincerely grapples with philosophy (and not just postmodernism), and it treats its characters with real heart, not ironic detachment. In retrospect, I don’t think it achieves all of its considerable ambitions—this is a movie trying to be a high-concept comedy, a romance, an allegory, and a metaphysical treatise all at once—but it has moments of real beauty, the kind you only get when you’re trying to say something True.