A Disjointed Oscars

The fate of the Oscars depended on the resolution of the writer’s strike, which had threatened to do to Oscar what it did to the Golden Globes, turn it into a glorified press conference. The strike was resolved just a week ago, and John Stewart was called in to try and helm an awards show that usually took months to prepare. Without the time to organize all the usual comedy bits and performances, this year’s Oscars were puffed up with unnecessary montages and interviews of past winners.

Last night ended up looking like a glorified clips show instead of the glamorous Oscars of better years. Stewart joked that if the strike hadn’t of been resolved there would have been even more gratuitous montages, like one on binoculars and periscopes in film. The joke was too close to the truth when thirty minutes later Jack Nicholson presented yet another painful slide show of all 79 past Best Picture winners. On top of this every segment of the show was ended with interviews of past winners. These weren’t all bad and it was cool to hear from Sydney Poitier, and Steven Spielberg, but was an interview of Elton John really necessary?

No Country for Old Men won the biggest awards of the night and the filmmaking duo behind it, the Coen brothers, took home Oscars for Best Picture, Directing, and Adapted Screenplay. The other best picture nominees all won at least one statue: Cinematography and Best Actor for Daniel Day-Lewis in There Will Be Blood, Original Screenplay for Juno, Best Supporting Actress for Tilda Swinton in Michael Clayton, and Best Original Score for Atonement.

The male acting awards went to the heavy favorites of Daniel Day-Lewis and Javier Bardem, but the women’s categories were surprises. Tilda Swinton and Marion Cotillard beat out the expected winners, Cate Blanchett and Julie Christie. Cotillard’s acceptance speech for Best Actress was the most moving of the night. Overwhelmed with gratitude and near tears she told the Academy, “You’ve rocked my life” and said there are still, “some angels in this city.” Cotillard won both the British and French versions of the Oscars for her role as Edith Piaf in La Vie En Rose.

The musical performances of the nominees for Best Original Song were mediocre and looked slapped together. The only good performance of the night came from the eventual winners, Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova, for their work on Falling Slowly from Once. The song was beautifully enhanced with an orchestra, and Irglova was given a historic second chance to deliver her acceptance speech after having been played off by the orchestra.

The comedy bits (what few there were) with Stewart and other Hollywood stars were excellent this year considering the time constraints, and if the montages had been cut out, we would have been left with a shorter but better quality Oscars. Instead this year’s show was lumbering and disjointed.

Cheap and Easy Writing

In Politics and the English Language, George Orwell gripes about the state of modern writing that at its worst, “consists of gumming together long strips of words which have already been set in order by someone else.” Orwell values precision and detail in good writing, and is angered with the prevalence of tired metaphors and readymade phrases that either don’t mean what the author intends or don’t mean anything at all. This type of, “lifeless, imitative style” he compares to politics and political writings in which everyone but a few brave rebels follow the same party line. They use the same language and phrases, and come of as copies of one another. Orwell is also bugged by the pretentious use of fancy words with Latin or Greek roots; he prefers humbler Anglo-Saxon words. Despite his complaining he admits that he has, “committed the very faults he is protesting against.” I agree with Orwell’s thesis that there is a tradition of common metaphors and lifeless writing, but this is not something unique to the modern age; its human nature to imitate. The English Language isn’t in a state of crisis; most writers are just a little lazy.

NYT Defense: Something Wicked This Way Comes

Ben Brantley has been a theater critic at the New York Times for 15 years and chief theater critic for 12. He is in his 50’s and has a long list of writing credits including Elle, The New Yorker, and Vanity Fair. Brantley’s prominence as a critic is validated by his superbly written review of a new version of Macbeth. This incarnation of the Scottish Play features Patrick Stewart, best known as Captain Luc Picard from Star Trek, in the title role. The lead is a poetic interpretation of the forces at work in Macbeth’s mind. It is aesthetically pleasing, but it is also practical and sets up Brantley’s thorough analysis of Stewart’s performance. The review flows well and the transition from Stewart’s performance to an analysis of the set is smooth. The imagery that Brantley uses captures the feel and themes of the play. The “but” comes in the middle of the article where Brantley deems some of the director’s touches, “unnecessary and obstructive.” However, in a rare double “but”, he praises the fine cast in the next paragraph and the rest of the review is positive.

http://theater2.nytimes.com/2008/02/15/theater/reviews/15macb.html?pagewanted=1&sq=something%20wicked%20this%20way%20comes&st=nyt&scp=1

Mutual Misery

The marriages in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? are fueled and maintained by alcohol, bitterness, delusions, and lies. One peculiar night after George and Martha have come home from a university party and are settling into their nightly routine of drunkenly tearing each other down, Martha informs George that she has invited a newly employed professor and his young wife over for drinks. George is a history professor and married to Martha, the daughter of the university president. Over the course of the night the years of deception reach a breaking point, and by sunrise the fantasies that are holding up both of the marriages have been shattered.

The leads are excellent and have a raw chemistry together. Richard Philpot is George, a smart middle-aged man who has been defeated by his wife, career, and father-in-law but wears this as a badge of honor. Martie Groat Philpot is especially good as Martha, a sexy, blunt, and spunky woman.

George and Martha love to hurt and be hurt by one another. When George complains about the treatment he’s receiving from Martha she replies, “You can stand it, you married me for it! My arm is tired of whipping you.” They primarily use sex to wound one another and much of the script is laced with sexual dialogue. When Martha tries to seduce the young Nick into dancing with her, George warns that the dance Martha wants from him, “is a very old dance, as old as they come.”

Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is performed in a simple black box theater. The audience surrounds the stage on all four sides giving the play an intimate quality, but this also has some technical drawbacks. (I got stuck sitting behind a coat rack for the first act.) The set is a living room from the 60’s complete with ugly couches and a full bar to keep the night going.

The actors who play the younger couple, Nick and Honey, are obviously not as experienced as the two leads. In a show where the cast is only four this sours some of the enjoyment of the show and makes certain scenes painful to watch. Carol Zombro goes overboard in exaggerating Honey’s ditzy qualities and comes off like a two year old. But even though her character is over the top at least she’s consistent with her performance. Trevor Maher who plays Nick is not consistent at all. There was nothing that suggested internal motivation, and he over enunciated all of his lines. Also he physically did not look like the all-American hunk that the script kept suggesting he was.

The play ends powerfully with Martha telling the guests about her and George’s son while George reads from a Latin catechism. Martha’s story and George’s chanting merge into the chaotic litany that has kept their dysfunctional marriage together for so long.

On the Couch

Gabriel Byrne has the perfect analyst’s voice, soft and inquisitive. He works his patients over with it, guiding and goading them into revealing the hidden truths of their troubles both to him and to themselves. The soft voice contrasts with the hard angles of his face, but are alike in that they are both totally neutral. His patients would be surprised if they knew what he really thought of them.

The new HBO show In Treatment examines not only the dynamics between a psychoanalyst and his patients, but what the constant stresses and pressures of being the voice of reason can do to a person. The show runs from Monday to Friday, chronicling Paul’s (Gabriel Byrne) sessions with different patients on the first four days of the week and culminating in his own session with his psychoanalyst Gina on Friday. Each episode is thirty minutes long.

Although In Treatment does not have the intimate sex scenes of Tell Me You Love Me, the other popular psychoanalyses show on HBO, the revealing confessions between patient and analyst can be just as effecting. Paul’s Monday patient is Laura, a romantically confused beautiful twenty something with a bad case of erotic transference (she is in love with her shrink). She has just left her long-time boyfriend and has impulsively had a fling with a guy at a bar. When Laura begins to tell Paul about following the guy back to the bathroom, her body language changes subtly; she tenses up, and makes bold eye contact with Paul. Melissa George who plays Laura does an excellent job of creating that sexual tension.

At times the writing of the show is contrived. The patient’s problems are annoyingly straightforward and far removed from the actual problems of real-life patients. But then again, all television shows are a little contrived, and the occasional glimpses of the manufactured storyline are made up for by the exceptional acting of the cast.

The Friday sessions between Paul and Gina are the most interesting of the series. These two have a complicated history including a falling out, and the tension from this is present in their session. Byrne drops his guard and unmutes himself. He reveals that he is losing his patience with his patients and having a professional crisis. He also admits that his work is interfering with his home life. Paul and Gina are expert analysts, and their professional rivalry as well as their past makes the meeting ugly. Paul says that Gina was right in the past when she said that the problem is they have no audience, and that he feels like he needs someone to tell, “Hey, did you see how I maneuvered that guy?” Gina responds, “What I meant was, we have no critics.”

The critic as artist

The Critic as Artist corresponds with Wilde’s personal philosophy of aestheticism, and art for art’s sake, but at times I think he was being coy about it and poking fun at himself. He makes meaningful points, that the highest form of Criticism, “really is, the record of one’s own soul”, and that the, “sole aim (of the critic) is to chronicle his own impressions. It is for him that pictures are painted, books written, and marble hewn into form.” These idealistic but well argued points are balanced with witty, outrageous lines like, “We live…in the age in which people are so industrious that they become absolutely stupid. The sure way of knowing nothing about life is to try to make oneself useful.”, or when he writes that, “Anybody can make history. Only a great man can write it.” These statements are ridiculous, but instead of undermining Wilde’s arguments they have the strange effect of reinforcing it. By admitting how ridiculous some of his arguments are about criticism and art, Wilde reveals that while his passion for it is great he also doesn’t take himself too seriously.

Critique of Pauline Kael

Pauline Kael was the first to transcend the role of critic and became famous in her own right. She attracted a dedicated fan base that followed her unique and sharply written opinions on film, and influenced a generation of critics during her time at The New Yorker from 1968 to 1991. Because of this mini cult of personality that arose around Pauline, and the corrupting power that came with it, her writing became overly aggressive and downright mean. Often she used her reviews as a soapbox for things that were going on in American culture at the time rather than what was actually going on in the film.

One of the problems with Pauline’s writing is that she will frequently employ a badgering tone that implies that if you disagree with her you are an idiot. Not only does she attack the film for being worthless; she will mock its audience. In her review of Hiroshima Mon Amour she rhetorically asks, “Was it possibly an elaborate, masochistic fantasy for intellectuals?”, and later she sarcastically generalizes that the audience for the film, “feels virtuous because they want to buy peace.”

She also can be unnecessarily mean and degrading to people in or who worked on the films she is reviewing. In her review of Top Gun Kael devotes the entire opening paragraph to making fun of Tom Cruise’s height. A brief mention of the humorous image of Kelly McGillis adjusting to the short Cruise would have been sufficient, but she devotes nine lines to humiliating him. Her language in describing sexuality is crude for the sake of shocking the reader, like in her review of Silkwood, where she writes that Kurt Russell, “demonstrates the very latest in gentle, good-animal lovemaking.” A sex scene in any film is a risk for the actor and requires a lot of bravery; it doesn’t deserve smirking comments like this.

Kael was often accused of writing about everything but the movie. In her long review of Hiroshima Mon Amour she only spends a third of the review writing about the actual film. The rest is about her perception of art-house snobbery.

Renata Adler, who also worked at The New Yorker, is one of Kael’s biggest critics. She believes that Kael’s work, “embodies something appalling and widespread in the culture”, and that her, “quirks, mannerisms, tactics, and excesses have also proved contagious, so that the content and level of critical discussion, of movies but also of other forms, have been altered astonishingly for the worse.”