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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.
Monday, August 24, 2009
Friday, August 14, 2009
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.
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.
Wednesday, August 12, 2009
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.
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.
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