The Scariest Thing about Paranormal Activity

The scariest thing about Paranormal Activity is what it illuminates about normal activity. Yes, the audience screamed three times when I saw it – quite a reaction – but for the reflective viewer the really scary part comes later, when you realize that this movie could be about how into every relationship both partners bring their demons. Some are just more demonic than others.

The action is gritty and claustrophobic. The hand-held, wobbly camera angles (we saw this in Blair Witch as the reviewers will note) reminds us of our own home movies, the kind we used to make in the nineties before our phones became video cameras. This and the introductory text commentary on the screen and generally low production values put us into an amateur documentary mode which makes us feel that everything we are about to see is very real.

When you focus on two people in a relationship in a closed place for a period of time with very little distraction, except, of course, the major one, you begin to see things:

A relationship that seems simple and straightforward at first grows increasingly complex and troublesome over time. I don’t think you need extraordinary events like the ones depicted on this screen for this scary phenomenon to be believable.

What some might consider a typically male reaction to a situation stands out in greater relief as events progress. The male character wants to “solve the problem.” He enlists technology ranging from cameras and computers to a Ouija board. He rejects the opinions of “experts,” insisting on direct engagement. Naïve, well- intentioned and fearless, he turns the drama into a contest of egos with an unknown force.

At least that could be the position of what some might consider the usual female reaction to that male reaction. In other words, “he just doesn’t get it.” The female character is in tune with a reality of greater dimension than the one the male character sets out to conquer; in this film, that’s an understatement.

The contrast between these two views, forget male or female, and their inability to understand each other in everyday life is scary. There is something positive, charming and deeply American about attacking daunting problems with confidence and optimism, which we cannot give up without reducing our national character. At the same time we hope that such an approach would be informed by a reasonable though not paralyzing sense of limitations, otherwise the prospect of whatever we call success when the target is as large as a global financial crisis or a fourteenth-century conflict in a faraway country, our “success” will indeed be limited. That’s scary.

This is a sighting, not a review. It’s not about how good or bad the film is, but about what insights we can draw from it. Imagine a time before photography when the only images of ourselves were paintings and sculptures; the static visual arts of that time had great power, inconceivable to us who peruse photos on Facebook every day. Go back beyond the cave paintings to the constellations; left on their own, the earliest stargazers searched for meaning and human patterns in the night sky. Our images are on electronic screens; think of these as raw materials. They reflect our preoccupations, values, anxieties, hopes to a degree that those who process them – producers and directors – may not even be aware.

So, do we feel today increasingly preoccupied with forces that operate mysteriously in ways that we cannot understand or control? What do you think?

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A Serious Man: The Coen Brothers Get Serious

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Uz is not Oz, but then Oz was not Oz either, which is a very brief description of the Coen brothers’ newest movie, possibly the most serious comedy ever written for the screen.

Uz was the land inhabited by Job of biblical fame, where every manner of misfortune was visited on a just man. And Oz was, well you know… the promised land where no promise is kept, and pay no attention to that man behind the curtain.

I heard an astonishing radio interview of an American GI who had just returned from tours in Afghanistan to find himself unable to pay the mortgage on his house. He complained about the stress. When asked to compare it to dodging bullets, he said it was much more stressful, because he knew what to do in the field.

It seems wrong to minimize life-threatening situations by putting them in the same paragraph with domestic challenges, but there you are.

Every movie deserves its time, and now we have this one.

None of the main actors is recognizable, which makes for easy identification for the audience. Only Adam Arkin and Richard Kind, who plays Uncle Arthur, do we know from other roles. Michael Stuhlbarg does such a great job as the central protagonist that throughout his trials and tribulations, we keep wondering where else have I seen this guy.

Thousands of reviewers will focus on the Job reference and spend time telling us that the Coen brothers grew up in an intensely Jewish community in the Midwest. Every realistic story about social interaction must plunge into a world, with believable specifics, and this happens to be one the Coen brothers know very well (but they’ve already shown us so many others). More important than the colorful language (the website for A Serious Man includes a Yiddish glossary), is the way this particular world outlook and this film articulate simultaneous struggles: how to deal with the demands of the world while searching for meaning while trying to be a good man. This story is universal; it’s for everyone, especially in this country at this time.

The characters surrounding Larry Gopnik are as helpful to him as Job’s neighbors who do nothing more than blame him for his troubles. In the midst of all, Job cries out: “My days are swifter than a runner, they flee away.” See this movie.

The Weight of Water

I was driven back to The Weight of Water by the Hurt Locker, simply because, different as they are, they had the same director. I am as guilty as Rich in his exchange with Adaline when he expresses doubt that a woman would be capable of choosing an axe for a murder weapon. She responds with Lizzie Borden, and he responds that she was acquitted, and she responds yes, by a jury of men who could not conceive of a woman wielding an axe. I was first surprised that a woman had directed Hurt Locker, and then doubly surprised that she had also directed The Weight of Water, a film I had already seen three times. I went back for a fourth time.

This conversation between Rich, playing the brother of Thomas (Sean Penn), is light fare compared to the one between Adaline (played by Elizabeth Hurley) and Jean (Catherine McCormack), wife of the Sean Penn character. It is presumably about poetry (Thomas is a poet), but both women know it goes much deeper.

Early in the film, Thomas makes this comment: “Women’s motives are always more concealed.” I suppose those words could set off a raging debate, which I would not mind staging here if anyone has read this far.

This movie interleaves two stories better than any other I can remember. Jean is a photographer commissioned by a magazine to take pictures of the scene of an unsolved crime that took place more than a hundred years ago. Like many journalistic types in many movies she involves too much of herself in the reporting, and the juxtaposition of the past and her present simultaneously illuminate and destroy each other.

There is only one word for how the action reveals the truth – visceral.

Cold Souls

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What is a soul? I happened to be reading a brilliant book about religion as a human manifestation. In the hunter-gatherer stage of our existence, it was believed that the souls of other people could inhabit our bodies. Cold Souls is not the most riveting Giamatti performance. He mesmerized us as John Adams in the HBO Series. Some people list Sideways as their favorite movie.

There are two moving portraits in this film – that of a woman poet with a soul too big for her own life and that of the woman at the center (or just off-center) of Cold Souls, the transporter of souls. In the beginning, she seems as cold as the picture this film gives us of a mechanized, industrialized Russia, but she wins our sympathy by the end; we cannot leave the theater without feeling deeply for her.

In this film, a soul is that without which we would not be ourselves. Losing one’s soul creates a feeling of emptiness, turns us into something neutral and barely alive; we’ve seen this theme in so many movies where the word soul is never mentioned. The Visitor comes to mind. This soul is our life-force, the thing that animates us to be ourselves. It’s an old thing, our hunter-gatherer soul.

Great acting, especially the portrayal of a historical figure – a living, or once-living, breathing human being – is the successful absorption of another person’s soul into the actor’s body. As John Adams, Giamatti does it.

Inglourious Basterds

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Quentin Tarantino is made of celluloid. He is so deeply immersed in film that his creations are all about film. Remarkably, he is also the film-maker today who most closely fulfills Ezra Pound’s mandate to the artist: “Make it New,” at least in the two movies of his that I know and like best – “Pulp Fiction” and now, “Inglourious Basterds.”

Quite literally, Tarantino burns up the screen this time.

There will be thousands of reviews of this film before the week is out. The kinder reviewers will do you the favor of not ruining the suspense by telling you the plot.

“Pulp Fiction” broke new ground and so does “Basterds.”

The storyline of “Basterds” carries you through time with such movie efficiency that you barely know you are watching a film, yet you are reminded of it every minute. How is this possible? Since it’s Tarantino, you will have to endure an inordinate amount of violence (but certainly not more than the real-life violence of the period); yet you may very well agree that this is a comedy and that the violence more closely resembles what we are used to from cartoons; but at the same time, it’s very real, especially when it is visited upon the characters we find sympathetic.

When films have arresting moments, they are usually visual. The beauty of a landscape… how often have we seen the land itself take on the force of a character? There is none of that here, unless it is how the camera falls in love with the faces of the two female leads.

The arresting moments are all in the words, reminding us that even for Tarantino, celluloid man, it all begins with words. So, it’s possible to think back upon exchanges between the characters as we would upon the visual tableaux of other films. The words of this confirmed writer/director have astounding energy; we’re impressed by the intelligence of the actors, how they see what we did not, and draw conclusions that we thought were hidden. It’s not quite the dialogue of “Pulp Fiction,” but it’s close.

This film has been many years in the making, usually a sign that the director believes it to be his or her masterpiece. I don’t think masterpieces can be planned. “Eyes Wide Shut” and “Gangs of New York” were supposed to be masterpieces, but both directors made accidental true masterpieces well before these much lesser films. “Inglourious Basterds” is much closer to “Pulp Fiction” than the planned masterpieces of Kubrick and Scorsese are to their greater works, but I think “Pulp Fiction” is still Tarantino’s masterpiece.

Tarantino does something here that you have not seen before. Aware and fully immersed in the film influences that brought him here, he burns them up.

Jersey Boys: the Audience is the Audience

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Three days after “That Dorothy Parker,” on Saturday evening, it was “Jersey Boys.” The two nights in between spent at Yankee Stadium for Red Sox-Yankees, dramatic performances also, full of anguish and expectation, if you’re a fan. More about that later.

The Big Chill was the first movie I remember to use popular music to win over the audience in such a big way. Remember Jeremiah was a Bullfrog. Forrest Gump did it too, not just with the music, but with the public events of our lives. The familiar tunes “win the audience over.” When the song appears, it’s like running into an old friend you want to see.

Here’s how I think it works. The familiar song sends each person into his or her own reverie because we’ve all heard the songs so many times and we have our own memories attached to the music, even if we can’t quite locate them. So, we feel like we’ve found something of our own that carries us through the performance. We’re participants. It’s almost unfair.

In “Jersey Boys,” it’s about music and the story behind the music. The audience becomes the concert audience of the play, where songs that we know are destined to become hits are just being tried out. We come with a list of expectations (a lineup of songs we want to hear) and this play satisfies them all.

It’s a rags-to-riches-to-dislocation story. The songs are so familiar and well done that as members of the audience we couldn’t help but cheer; we played our parts well. After the actors bowed to our standing ovation, the entire audience should have bowed… in “Jersey Boys,” you can’t have a performance without an audience.

Hey, that’s always true.

That Dorothy Parker starring Carol Lempert

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So, it was a mad week of performances, beginning with two successive nights at the Cornelia Street Café and Wednesday night, “That Dorothy Parker,” a one-woman show written and performed by Carol Lempert, who does an amazing job of successfully resurrecting “Mrs. Parker.”

I’m interrupting myself here by covering the events of last week out of order, and, of course, this is not a movie – but it is an incredible performance – supporting my belief that books, plays, movies all exist on a single continuum that tells us things.

In my “sightings” blogs I’m not interested in reviewing things as much as sighting them and recognizing what small or large piece of reality they illuminate. So the performances – whether books, plays, films, or other types of performances – are like shells or pieces of colored glass found during an endless walk along the beach. The more beautiful ones make you stop and pick them up; you hold them up to the light and they reveal some of their secrets.

If I were a practiced reviewer, I would give Carol Lempert (and director Janice Goldberg), the highest praise – the kind of praise I heard from members of the audience in the basement lobby of the theatre after this one-night show. The audience was invited by the actress to a reception after the play, where they reversed roles. She became the audience and they became the performers, coming up, one after the other, expressing themselves to her. Many of them were silver-haired ladies who registered their surprise that such a young woman could so capture someone “from our era.”

This is my sighting. The best art is trans-generational, like so few things in this country. We’re segmented into age brackets. Eighth graders and seventh graders don’t hang out with each other. A compelling performance breaks down those barriers, makes us all one again.

I arrived about 15 minutes before the play, in lower Manhattan at the Soho Playhouse on Van Dam Street. As I sat in my seat looking at the empty stage, I heard the gentleman behind me recounting that he had been to a reading long ago where Dylan Thomas had opened with “Under Milkwood” and Dorothy Parker had followed with her poetry, and so had others. He was there too, at the end, to praise Lempert’s performance.

Looking back, the evening reminded me of a moment one afternoon the only time I have ever been to Savannah, Georgia. I was looking across the river at the trees – a serene, beautiful scene – when I noticed ten feet to my left a woman selling prints of her painting of the same scene. The print was matted and framed in the matting material, but the painting extended beyond where we would usually expect it to be and into the frame – the branches of the tree continued upward – as if the representation was so real that it could not be contained by its frame.

That’s how I felt about this performance for two reasons – first, because Carol Lempert exploded the frame by doing something more than acting; she “embodied” Dorothy Parker, her famous wit, her ambivalence about being famous for her wit, her deep association and eventual disaffection with the Algonquin Round Table, her flirting with suicide, her alcoholism, her disappointments in love, but most of all her yearning. We heard the word “embodied” about Charlize Theron’s portrayal in Monster, and the two portrayals of Truman Capote one by Charles Seymour Hoffman in the film named after its protagonist and the other by Toby Jones in Infamous. It seems as if it would be easier to “embody” these more extreme figures than it would be the subtleties of Mrs. Parker, which Carol Lempert does so well with her words (how she wrote them; how she delivers them) and her movement across the stage.

And secondly, because the performance began for me before the play – with the reminiscences of the audience members – and continued after the play with their endorsements of the portrayal, just like the painting bleeding beyond the frame.

After the applause and before the reception, the actress announced that this one-woman ninety-minute show is waiting in the wings for its next set of engagements. Whoever and whatever the mechanism that makes those kinds of things happen, please take note.