The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt

Tina Fey's sit-com on Netflix, The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt is reasonably amusing, funny, and. until it loses nerve, disquieting.  The 13 show series is also a return to a kind of situation comedy that was ubiquitous throughout the sixties and seventies -- in short, the kind of TV show that provided a moral anchor to my childhood.  Sit-coms in the decade of Andy Griffith, That Girl, and Mary Tyler Moore were didactic.  The shows were written to present clear ethical and moral dilemmas that would be solved by the end of the episode.  Each show presented a moral proposition, appealing to its bourgeoisie viewers -- pride, greed, and vanity were predictably rebuked, honesty was always awarded, legitimate authority was applauded and prevailed in the end.  These shows, even proto-feminist series like Mary Tyler Moore and That Girl, endorsed conventional gender roles.  By characterizing these programs in this light, I don't mean to denigrate them -- in fact, many of these shows were works of consummate artistry that remain fresh and vibrant even as reruns.  Furthermore, these moralizing comedies were ingenious and difficult to produce -- each was a short story complete with a didactic message, delivered efficiently and with as much humor as possible.  By contrast, the cruelty and casual nihilism of today's sit-coms, things like Two-and-a-Half Men or Family Guy, seems easy to achieve.  The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt fits strongly into the pattern of the conventionally didactic sit-com of the sixties and seventies -- indeed, the show has something of a retro-feeling and is a perverse update of the girl-in-the-city sit-com, the formula that Marlo Thomas and Mary Tyler Moore made famous.  Kimmy Schmidt has changed her name to "Kimmy Smith" and moved to New York City to make her fortune.  Like the heroines of previous girl-in-the-big-city sit-coms, she is equipped with a supporting cast of zany characters.  Her roommate is a flamboyant gay man named Titus Adromanon and the role of the comical landlady, played by Cloris Leachman in the Mary Tyler Moore show, is updated:  Carol Kane appears as a besotted, nymphomaniacal landlady in The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt.  Kimmy is employed by a vicious and fantastically narcissistic Park Avenue housewife, a part played by Jane Krakowski.  Krakowski is always excellent and she delicately portrays the very slight panic and loneliness of the character, a woman clinging to a husband who is unfaithful to her.  (Tina Fey's shows specialize in providing back stories to her characters -- the blonde Krakowski is a full-blooded Lakotah Indian from South Dakota who has dyed her hair and fled, like Kimmy, to the big city.  The scenes showing Krakowski's character with her family of origin are carefully written -- they are funny, poignant, walking a fine line between satire and condescension.)  All of this is very standard and predictable.  What is different is that Fey provides Kimmy Schmidt with an astounding and profoundly disturbing reason for fleeing her former identity and moving to New York.  Kimmy Schmidt is one of "the Indiana mole-women" -- that is, she was kidnapped when she was fifteen by a psychotic religious fanatic and imprisoned for another fifteen years in a secret underground bunker.  Although the show is discrete on this point, it's apparent that Kimmy was repeatedly tortured and sexually assaulted during her imprisonment.  Accordingly, the show has as its premise an atrocity -- the sexual slavery of a young woman for half of her life in an underground prison.  (The sit-com is clearly based on the Elizabeth Smart kidnapping in Salt Lake City and the rescue of the three Cleveland women imprisoned for many years by Ariel Castro.)  Against this dark background, Kimmy Schmidt's little victories, her tentative romances and ability to form friendships and function in the big city, are moving and inspiring -- the moral of this program is invigorating:  Kimmy is not a victim; she is claiming her life for herself; she is both empowered and empowering. 

For the first six or so episodes, The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt is very strong, disturbing, and powerful -- it is also very funny.  The first half of the series probably climaxes with an episode in which Kimmy goes to see a nightmarish plastic surgeon played grotesquely by Martin Short.  (Her employer has gone to see the doctor to get Botox shots).  Short's face is locked into a sardonic grimace and, because his skin is so excessively taut, he can barely speak.  He offers to show Kimmy "the Lifetime network or a little porno" on the TV poised over his treatment couch, remarking that Kimmy's skin is remarkably clear, "completely undamaged by the sun" but that she has "very strong scream lines."  After this exceptionally strong first half-dozen episodes, the show reverts to standard sit-com tropes -- the characters wear wacky costumes, there are elaborate parodies, and the stories become increasingly absurd; more supporting actors are introduced, and, some of them -- for instance a feckless local sheriff (Tim Blake Nelson) from Indiana -- are not very funny.  For about four episodes, the show is funny but its undertone of menace and atrocity are muted -- it's a bit like Thirty Rock or Community.  Apparently sensing that the show's inventiveness was flagging, Fey's screenwriters ratchet up the conflict by staging a trial of the monstrous kidnaper who abducted the four women.  The eleventh episode introduces the trial in Indiana and is brilliant, the highlight of the series.  Tina Fey plays an incompetent prosecutor like Marcia Clark, the hapless prosecutor in the O. J. Simpson trial and Jon Hamm appears as the noxious, but relentlessly charming, kidnaper.  The show is hilarious but also contains the seeds of the program's ultimate failure.  First, the episode equates a cult-like fitness instructor in New York City to the Indiana kidnaper -- although this is funny and effective, it is emotionally a miscue.  The kidnaper viciously deprived a young girl of her childhood and half of her life; the fitness instructor is preying on some wealthy socialites in New York by taking their money in exchange for "spinning" (that is, fixed bicycle training).  The equation works for awhile, but it is disingenuous.  Second, Jon Hamm plays the kidnaper as a likeable if dishonest fellow -- this falsifies entirely the dire implications of the series first six episodes.  Indeed, the trial of the kidnaper occupies entirely episodes 12 and 13 and here it is evident that Tina Fey and her writers have entirely lost their nerve.  The show minimizes the women's mistreatment.  The problem is that by approaching too closely the nightmarish back-story on which the show is premised, the writers find themselves in the situation of making jokes about something that they can't bring themselves to make funny.  And, so, the script downplays the kidnaper's viciousness, undercuts the earlier hints about his savagery, and allows Jon Hamm to play the man as loveable rogue. This doesn't work and its more than a little icky. This approach, in effect, destroys the show and it ends on a sour note.  (Netflix ordered another season of the  show and we will have to see how Ms. Fey solves the problems afflicting the first series' last two episodes). 

I recommend that you watch the first five or six episodes -- they are all on Netflix streaming and only 27 minutes each.  I also recommend the first episode involving the trial (Tina Fey's presence re-invigorates the show) -- I think it is the 11th episode in the 13 show sequence.  And failing that, make sure you watch, at least, the superb title sequence:  we see a hatch opening in darkness, a SWAT team lifting women up into the light.  The women are wearing Amish style dresses and the camera swoops across the green field where the bunker was hidden to show Kimmy grinning stupidly at the sun and open sky.  This is all intercut with shots of a next-door neighbor, the ubiquitous guy in the trailer next to the monster's house of horrors who always appears on the evening news to declare that the bad guy was completely normal, a regular dude who kept to himself, and gave no sign of his wickedness.  In the case of The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, the neighbor is clearly modeled on the wonderful Charles Ramsey, one of the rescuers of the girls kidnaped by Ariel Castro in Cleveland.  Ramsey is so wonderful in the local news coverage as to his involvement in the rescue that he deserves a sit-com of his own.  Before watching The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidit, you should watch the You-Tube footage of Ramsey's two-minute interview on the afternoon of the Cleveland rescue -- "I was just sittin' on my porch eatin' my McDonald's and, then...." 

Sauve qui Peut (la Vie)

Jean-Luc Godard's 1979 Sauve qui Peut (la Vie), released in the U. S. as Every Man for Himself -- the French title means something like "Save Yourself!," an imperative that might be uttered in the context of a shipwreck -- was touted as Godard's return to mainstream cinema after half a decade wandering the Maoist wasteland as part of the Dziga Vertov documentary group.  Godard himself described the picture as his "second first film," drawing a connection between the movie and 1961's Breathless.  The film is reasonably accessible and, indeed, comprised of three interlocking narratives that can be readily deciphered -- in this film, we know who's doing what to whom, a rarity in Godard's later films, although it is, certainly, not clear why some of things that we see are occurring.  I don't like this movie -- it is shallow, cold, repellant, and disingenuous.  On the Criterion disk, there are a variety of helpful extra materials, including a couple of cringe-inducing interviews with Dick Cavett.  (Cavett is obviously suffused with boyish awe for the great filmmaker and Godard's English is not equal to what he wants to express -- he spends a lot of time staring into the air about eight inches above his balding forehead, apparently, searching for English words -- and most of what he says is gibberish, completely confounding to Cavett).  In the Cavett interviews, Godard claims that the film is feminist (although he doesn't use that word), arguing that men will see the movie as expression of despair, but that women will be empowered by the portrait of the female of the species that he provides in the picture.  And I almost believe him.  But I know enough about Godard and his persistent misogyny to be suspicious of claims like this.  In Godard's later films, he contrives ways to get his young, and comely, leading ladies naked, puts them in overtly degrading sexual situations, and, generally, asserts that women are so alien to male sensibilities as to be incompletely human.  It is true that the male characters in Sauve qui Peut are uniformly despicable.  But it is equally true that the women he presents are either disgruntled and rapacious ex-spouses or strangely benumbed whores -- an odd choice for a film that is supposedly feminist in its implications.  Take, for example, a bizarre insert into the opening sequence of the film, the part of the picture that is most clearly feminist in its tone -- a woman rides a bicycle through Switzerland.  She has abandoned her boyfriend, a lout named Paul Godard, who works (not surprisingly) in the Paris Tv and film industry.  The woman, named Denise, hopes to sub-lease the apartment that she shared with Paul in Paris and she spends a lot of time on the phone making business arrangements with respect to the flat.  The woman is a novelist and she is looking for a day-job.  First, she meets an old friend at some kind of bizarre game played in the Swiss cantons -- it seems to involve hurling a hammer and catching it with baskets on tall poles.  The man is strangely hideous.  He tells the woman to seek work at a local dairy farm.  At the dairy farm, the heroine watches cows being fed.  Then, we are treated to a shot of a beautiful woman, naked from the waist down, exposing her luscious behind to the nearby cows.  She says something like:  "You can get the cows to lick the crack of your ass."  (Godard is much concerned with rectal licking in this film -- an ability to effectively tongue an asshole is said to be a prerequisite for successful whoring.)  The shot is certainly striking, unexpected, and remarkable -- but it's also totally gratuitous, without point from a narrative perspective, and awfully stupid:  does Godard really want us to think that beauteous Swiss milkmaids routinely present their posteriors to cows be licked?  Undoubtedly, Godard would accuse me of being naïve:  obviously, the shot is just a distraction, an alienation effect, something to remind me that the movie is just a movie and not a representation of truth or existence -- okay, point taken, but why use this imagery?  Godard would reply because the film is about sexual relationships between men and women and the image represents the kind of fantasy, one could suppose, that would occur to the loathsome Paul Godard, a fellow who routinely fantasizes about sodomizing his 12 year-old daughter.  But all of this is a pretty wan justification for something that is, more or less, exploitation and gratuitous, as well as more than a little creepy to boot.  Further, Godard would argue, one supposes, that he wants the (male) audience to acknowledge complicity in Paul Godard's nastiness -- that is, we are secretly excited by the image.  But all of this is bullshit, Godard's métier to be sure, but bullshit, nonetheless.  The fact is that Godard has an unhealthy interest in prostitution, a theme to which he reverts time and time again, using highly predictable imagery -- his prostitutes are always extremely glamorous, beautiful, submissive, philosophically astute, in a word fantasy-whores at the beck and call of a wealthy and powerful man (someone a lot like Godard himself).  The fact that Godard openly acknowledges, and, even, luxuriates in his obsession with this material doesn't excuse the fact that he wallows in this stuff.  Sauve qui Peut's plot, if it can be so characterized, is fairly simple.  Paul Godard is a divorced man, estranged from his wife and adolescent daughter, both of whom treat him with contempt.  He is also separated by his girlfriend, Denise, who has urged him to move to the Swiss countryside.  Denise tries to rent the apartment she shared with Godard -- he has been living for some months in a luxury hotel.  Godard picks up a young and beautiful prostitute, Isabel (played by the very young and luminous Isabelle Huppert).  The film shifts emphasis to follow Isabel's peregrinations, including an elaborate Sade-ian orgy involving a wealthy boss, another prostitute, and an enterprising, and accommodating, male employee.  The boss is clearly another surrogate for the filmmaker.  Carefully arranging bodies and orifices, the boss says "now that I've got the visuals, we need so supply the sound," instructing the participants as to the noises they are supposed to make with each motion that he directs.  Isabel is approached by her younger sister who needs to pay off some legal expenses -- she's been consorting with bank robbers (or jewelry thieves, I can't recall which).  Of course, Isabel gives her sister some helpful tips as to how to make an earning in the prostitution business, including advice as to anal licking techniques.  In the end, Isabel runs into Denise, Paul's ex-girlfriend, and subleases the apartment from her -- the picture has something of the character of Max Ophuls' La Ronde.  As the film has progressed, characters have from time to time expressed puzzlement about music that they keep hearing -- this is the film's soundtrack.  The last scene of the film shamelessly steals from Woody Allen's Bananas -- Paul's rapacious wife and daughter, hear music, enter a underground car-park, and, then, stroll past an entire symphony orchestra playing the theme music to the film.  (In Bananas, Allen's character has an emotional love scene set to lush harp music; suddenly, he frowns, asks where the music is coming from, and finds a harpist in his closet -- "I'm just practicing here,' the harpist says.)  Godard's soundtrack is conspicuously brilliant and the film, of course, is a master-class in disorienting ways to stage time-worn scenes -- the meeting of lovers in a train station, confrontations between an ex-husband and his former wife, pimps brutally disciplining a beautiful young prostitute.  As always, Godard finds remarkable and innovative ways to present this material.  But the material itself just isn't very good in this picture and I thought it was disappointing.

(How much the world has changed in just a few short years is evident from one of the opening scenes in the movie.  The hero, Paul Godard, beset by an opera singer with an alarmingly loud voice in the next suite, flees his hotel room.  In the parking lot, he is approached by a bell-boy who begs the famous director to bugger him. The man says that he is in love with Godard and tries to kiss him.  Godard knocks the man down, shrieking imprecations, and drives away.  A commentator on the film, narrating a video essay about the movie, remarks about this "hilarious scene' -- as far as I can determine the commentary was recorded in 2010.  To the sensibility of 2015, with gay marriage now existing in a majority of states, the scene plays as homophobic, unfunny, and mean-spirited.)

Calvary

After observing a dignified Catholic priest vilified by one of his eccentric parishioners. a woman says:  "You have to put up with this shite all of the time?"  Shrugging, the priest replies:  "There's a lot of this going on."  Indeed.  In John Michael McDonagh's ludicrous Calvary, a long-suffering priest, played by Brendan Gleeson, is told that he has only a week to live -- another of his parishioners declares that he will kill the saintly pastor in seven days in recompense for childhood sexual abuse inflicted upon the man by another member of the clergy.  With logic typical to this script and production, the murderous avenger says:  "There's no point in killing a bad priest.  So I'm going to kill a good one."  Although it might seem implausible, the threat of homicide is the least of the poor priest's problems.  In the course of the seven days methodically chronicled in the picture, the priest's faithful dog has his throat slit and his tiny church is burned down.  (The best thing in the film is the scenery -- the action takes place in the ravishing west of Ireland somewhere near Sligo; the movie is gratuitously beautiful.)  Members of the priest's congregation attempt to seduce him and snort cocaine in his presence.  A decadent hedge fund millionaire, played by Dylan Moran who looks sad and besotted as usual, offers the priest 100,000 pounds and, then, threatens to kill himself.  Suicide is contagious in this film -- just about everyone is contemplating self-murder and many scenes involve the priest's  encounters with his daughter still bearing the marks of her attempted suicide.  It seems that the priest was married but, when his wife died, he abandoned his daughter for his vocation -- something that his daughter deeply resents.  The altar boy is stealing wine, a local butcher is pimping his wife to an auto mechanic from Guyana, and an elderly American novelist who resides near a picturesque lagoon like something out of Bill Forsythe's Local Hero asks the pastor procure him a gun so he can also kill himself.  The local chief of police is sleeping with an extravagantly flamboyant gay hustler who speaks with an affected Brooklyn accent exclusively in thirties' movie idioms.  The gay hustler and the cop, the novelist (played by M. Emmett Walsh no less!) and another kid who wears a bowtie and rides a motorcycle are whimsical characters right out of a Wes Anderson movie and the film, at times, plays like a sardonic cross between Moonrise Kingdom and Ingmar Bergman's Winter Light.  (And I've forgotten to mention the nymphomaniac and the serial child killer, the fashion-model beautiful French widow and the fatal car crash).  Gleeson is okay as the priest -- although he's stuck with oldest cliché in the world:  the two-fisted man of God is a recovering alcoholic -- of course, he gets drunk and, in the obligatory booze scene, doesn't just embarrass himself but shoots the town pub to pieces with a 45.  There are some impressive monologues in the movie but the film (and the village in the film)is so full of eccentricity, psychopathology, and threatened suicide that it makes David Lynch's Twin Peaks look placid and ordinary.  In this movie, everything is absurdly over-the-top.  At one point, the priest has to procure a revolver.  But it's just not any revolver, but an antique firearm that played a part in what the characters call "the first Bloody Sunday."  But why can't a gun just be a gun?     

International Pop at the Walker Art Center

The new exhibition, "International Pop," on show at the Walker Art Center until mid-August is daunting and, more than a little, exhausting for the viewer.  The exhibit seems huge and the art on display is challenging and rebarbative.  There are two reasons for this:  first, Pop art was originally styled "the new Vulgarism" and the subject matter in the show is relentlessly ugly and banal, commercial imagery of the most obvious kind presented in glaring colors that are without any beauty or sophistication.  Second, most of the art has an idea-content that is superficial and, also, without allure -- all of Pop art's ideas were fully developed and exhaustively explored by the master of the form, Andy Warhol.  Once the viewer understands Warhol's rather limited repertory of ideas and gestures -- generally something about art as a commodity and the diminution of the "aura" -- there's nothing much more to think about as the spectator strolls the sequence of uphill galleries.  Pop Art was conceptual and it's hard to imagine anyone having any affection for these garish and obvious canvases and sculptural assemblages:  in film, Pop Art displayed in someone's house is always an emblem for sexual perversion and wealthy narcissim -- Exhibit A in this regard is Stanley Kubrick's use of these kinds of art objects in his dystopian A Clockwork Orange.  You can't envision an ordinary aesthete having this kind of stuff on his or her walls.  Furthermore, the show is so big and ambitious that it loses its own thread of argument -- the best stuff in the exhibit doesn't seem to me to be Pop Art under any meaningful definition of that term.  Consider, for example, a wonderful large painting by David Hockney  ("The Room, Tarzana")in the show's last gallery.  The canvas shows a young man lying on his belly on a bed in some suburban house -- the young man is naked from the waist down (except for white socks), displayed as a sexual object and the picture is overtly erotic.  Hockney's palette is beautiful as always, cool blues and greens, the color swimming pools and shrubbery in the Santa Monica mountains.  And the painting itself has an important precursor, an image made by Gauguin showing his teenage mistress lying naked on her belly on a bed, haunted by a terrifying apparition, the spirit of Death -- the picture is called "The Spirit of the Dead watching."  Hockney's picture alludes to the Gauguin image -- the young man's nudity is equally vulnerable and the boy turns his head to the side with a look of abject terror similar to that shown in the girl in the Tahitian painting.  Viewed in this light, the half-open door in Hockney's picture seems to take on a sinister significance.  This is a wonderful image, one of the finest paintings in the show, but has nothing so far as I can ascertain with Pop Art or any of the themes of the exhibit as articulated in the verbose, if helpful, captions on the walls.  Echt-Pop Art seems to me to have started as a kind of collage technique, quotidian commercial items made part of the picture, a technique pioneered by Picasso and Schwitters more than fifty years earlier.  Ultimately, the artists seem to have decided that the fragments of reality that they were collaging into the image were more interesting than the other parts of the painting, and, so, the school morphed into art that appropriated bits of commerce and advertising but presented them in a heightened form -- the heightening of the form, or is defamiliarization could be accomplished by sloshing the images in paint, as in Warhol's "Sixteen Jackies" or, probably, the best Pop image in the show, his nightmare electric chair images; or the artist could play with the scale of the image, inflating little bits of commercial imagery into colossal murals as in the works of Ron Rosenquist, Tom Wesselman (his huge picture of pop bottles "Still Life") and Roy Lichtenstein ("Look, Mickey!").  Pop Art could be adapted into ice-cold landscape painting as in Ed Ruscha's "Standard Station, Amarillo, Texas", one of the highlights of the show, and in European countries, Japan, and South America, the style generally was used for polemical purposes -- the show has many interesting, although forgettable, images made by Japanese and South American artists that are primarily political in character, mostly obvious and banal attacks on the American enterprise.  (Two of these works stand out -- an image of Chairman Mao made from hundreds of tiny, thumb-sized heads and torsos and a South American assemblage, or "combine," consisting of a lurid polychrome Christ crucified on an American fighter jet, this alarming image sharing a dark gallery with Yoko Ono's video "Sky," a work of conceptual art that shows nothing more than a featureless blue sky.)  Countries that enthusiastically adopted Anglo-American Pop purported to do so within their own specific traditions and concerns -- but if there are national variants of the style, this is difficult to perceive except in broad strokes:  The German works are cerebral and abstract, Japanese pop is relentlessly colorful and "cute," and the South American art joylessly prosecutes local political grievances, manifold, of course, under the authoritarian regimes on that continent.  The most alarming thing in the show is Antonio Diaz' "My Portrait," a larger than life-size simulacram of a man's torso and head -- the head is represented as a rag marked with three grisly-looking bloodstains and the torso is a tray of spongy pinkish dough garnished with spike-like hairs; the object is grotesque and looks like one of Philip Guston's late paintings materialized as a sculpture.  As you wander these large galleries, the eye longs for something painterly and, predictably, you find yourself lingering in front of canvases that seem to have been made by human hands and, not, stencils and air-brushed paint.  In the end, you can reach only one conclusion:  to the extent that something is arguably beautiful (for instance, the wonderful works by Jasper Johns, for my money, the greatest living artist) it's not Pop Art.

Also on display at the Walker is a show called "75 years of Gifts".  This exhibit is smaller occupying the three or four Target galleries.  I wandered into these rooms after spending 90 minutes with the Pop Art show and, immediately, wished that I had reversed my priorities.  Although most of the artists were unknown to me in the "75 years" show, the works in that gallery were more interesting and, generally, better than the majority of the objects exhibited in the Pop galleries down the hall.  A hyper-realist self-portrait by Chuck Close dominates one of the rooms and it is an astounding work.  An artist named Llyn Foulkes is represented by a conventionally sized canvas called "I got a job to do" -- this painting is utterly mysterious, charming and surreal, and more conventionally Pop than most of the things in the International Pop Art show:  the picture features a masked older man brandishing boxing gloves and a "Rueckenfigur" of Mickey Mouse seated on an actual log protruding from the picture plane; the image is completed by a painting within a painting a noble-looking Victorian man holding a torch to illumine the darkness.  I have no idea what the picture is supposed to represent but it is captivating.  As a 60-year old middle-class White man, of course, I despise Kara Walker and understand that the detestation is mutual -- but honesty compels me to admit that her two works in the show are excellent and, even, brilliant in her characteristically perverse manner.  Walker seems to have progressed from race-baiting to expressing a generalized contempt and horror at heterosexual relationships -- she has an image of a southern Belle who has slit her wrists, portrayed as a powerful black silhouette, probably stenciled on the wall so that it seems to literally float in the air, sometimes appearing to the eye as a black cavity and other times seeming to be in high relief against the white wall.  A large painting by Walker showing a mournful woman between two obviously phallic towers, minaret-style erections with small silhouette figures vomiting on one another while incongruously sporting halos is witty and so over-the-top as to be wonderful in its own exaggerated way.  There is a gorgeous Philip Guston abstract work -- Guston was not only the best figurative artist of the sixties and seventies but, prior to that period, the artist who painted the most subtle and delicately beautiful abstractions in the New York School.  Finally, there is an amazing large-scale photograph by Alec Soth that is better than anything in the whole International Pop show -- viewed from a distance, the picture looks like a collage including tattered images of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X.  At close range, the spectator is surprised and entranced by the fact that Soth's image is a photograph, the remarkable collage effect of curtain, window, hat, and pictures within the picture is something he actually found in a Memphis apartment.  My recommendation is that you spend the majority of your museum visit in the "75 years of Gifts" show and, then, tour International Pop at a brisk trot.

Carmen

Georges Bizet composed the opera Carmen after a novel by Prosper Merimee for the Parisian Comic Opera.  This was the opera company that had made Jacques Offenbach famous and several of the features is Bizet's popular show derive from its Comic Opera roots.  First, much of the dialogue between musical numbers is simply spoken -- the opera has no recitative, a characteristic of operas written for this stage.  Second, the show features a number of rousing gallop-like tunes that sound similar to familiar works by Offenbach.  Finally, the ramshackle plot always seems teetering on the edge of self-parody -- in some respects, the opera plays like a parody of a verismo work by Puccini or Mascagni; the libretto is self-consciously sordid and garishly sexual -- people are always getting up and there's bondage subtext to several of the scenes. Indeed, I wonder if any director has ever had the courage to mine the opera for its humor -- I think the show could be convincingly staged as pitch-black comedy.  Certainly, the bombastic toreador song, the most famous tune in the show, seems ridiculously over-inflated -- in the Minnesota Opera production that I saw on May 2, 2015, the arrival of the matador in the fourth act riding like a conquering hero in a pretty little convertible underlined comical aspects of the libretto.  The titular heroine has a taste for rough-trade in men -- she seduces a straight-arrow soldier, a big, dumb brute of a man, finds him too sensitive for her taste (he's a momma's boy) and abandons him for an affair with the preening, narcissistic matador.  The brute revenges himself on poor Carmen, who remains resolutely remote and unlikeable in this production, by carving her up O. J. Simpson-style while the matador similarly carves a bull in the adjacent stadium, a piece of heavy-handed, if effective, symbolism.  Directors of Carmen always labor to make the leading lady sympathetic -- but this is contrary to the libretto and Bizet's music.  I think it would be more honest to stage the opera like Berg's Lulu -- Carmen is sexually rapacious and fickle (in fact, her Habanera number sounds like La Donne e mobile); she's disloyal and faithful only to her own pleasure.  Indeed, in the Minnesota Opera production, she hangs around with two nice-looking gals who strut their stuff as if they were lesbians -- they are always groping and embracing one another.  Don Jose, the brutal and vengeful soldier, has a stiff, unpleasant love-interest in a girl sent to him by his mamma to summon him away from Seville (and the tempestuous Carmen) to his home village.  Carmen, the wild gypsygirl  born outside the law, is, at least, fun and probably exciting in bed -- the stiff little emissary of Don Jose's mother is just irritating.  The opera makes no sense from a narrative perspective -- Bizet had no architectronic skills at all and the story is just one crowd-pleasing number after another:  he loads up the action with tavern scenes (for rousing drinking numbers), gypsy dances, and children's choruses whether required by the narrative or not.  A scene set in the mountains involving smuggling always looks ridiculous -- it involves much toting of heavy boxes that have to be dragged on stage and, then, dragged off again -- and I think it would be best to stage that scene for laughs (even though this part of the opera, Act III, begins with the sweetest and most tuneful music in the show, a very beautiful folk-song like overture.)    The production staged by the Minnesota Opera had excellent singers in the main roles and the actress playing Carmen was appropriately sexy and cruel -- I thought she was, however, a little stiff as a dancer.  The Minnesota Opera sets and costumes were resolutely and perversely ugly; Carmen is dressed in dowdy frocks and doesn't get to wear anything sexy until the last Act when she plays the doomed bull to Don Jose's knife-wielding matador.  The sets looked as if they were made of towering panels of corrugated cardboard and they were absurdly overlit.  But none of this mattered on May 2, 2015 -- the audience had come to hear the some of "the world's most beautiful melodies" as tunes from Carmen used to be called when hawked on TV in promotions featuring LP records of classical music and, of course, there was an obligatory, enthusiastic standing ovation.   

Ex Machina

A stylish, if slow-paced, variant on Frankenstein, Alex Garland's  Ex Machina  (2015) recycles motifs familiar from the old Universal horror films of the Thirties:  a mad scientist has isolated himself in a fortress-like retreat high in the mountains; there he labors to create artificial life.  The mad scientist has a skeptical apprentice and a taciturn, exotic henchman.  Ultimately, the man-made monsters go berserk, murder their creators, and escape into the world.  Ex Machina updates this formula -- the life form created by he mad scientist, a technology nerd like Bill Gates or Steve Jobs, is a sexy female robot thought to embody artificial intelligence.  The skeptical young colleague is a computer programmer recruited to perform a perverse Turing test to determine if the robot-woman can pass for human -- here, the criteria for true artificial intelligence is that the robot shows the capacity to seduce her human evaluator even though her mechanical innards are disconcertingly visible.  Instead of a hunchbacked factotum, the mad scientist's henchman is a silent Japanese woman, a beautiful young geisha who is, of course, a robot herself -- however, a "basic pleasure model" like Pris in Blade Runner.  Gilbert shoots this hackneyed material as if it were innovative and significant -- his sets look like moist terrariums or interiors in an Antonioni film, everything is a slightly out of focus, and the colors are tastefully muted beiges and browns.  The dialogue is reasonably witty and the acting is fairly convincing.  The film is static, theatrical, and, almost entirely shot indoors -- the scenario has the character of a stage-play adapted for the screen.  The film is quite scary and the horror sequences in the last ten minutes are effectively staged.  But the film is irritating because it is pretentiously self-important -- the director forgets that this is just another, more sexually explicit, version of The Bride of Frankenstein, albeit longer, much less funny, and, certainly, lacking the grim beauty of the thirties film.  (The comparison is unfair:  very few films in the history of the medium are as funny, intelligent, and beautiful as The Bride of Frankenstein.)  The mad scientist keeps a collection of dead beauties suspended in closets, very much like Bela Lugosi's gallery of embalmed girls in The Black Cat -- and, as in that movie, a post-modernist mansion is significant as a character in its own right in the action on screen.  The picture is modestly thought-provoking and it yields one dividend:  the movie's subtext suggests that computer geeks become technology titans are obsessed with creating ideal robotic sexual partners as if in recompense for rejection suffered by the nerds during their high-school and college years -- a picture like this casts the unfortunate Linda Gates in an entirely new, and different, light.  

LA Plays Itself

The literary theorist and critic, Walter Benjamin, imagined a book comprised solely of quotations from other writers.  He seems to have attempted to compile such a book in his vast, and failed, Arcades project, the Passagenwerk.  Thom Andersen's LA Plays Itself (originally released in 2003, remastered and re-edited in 2013) is the Arcades project of cinema --  Benjamin set out to define Paris, as "capitol of the 19th century," by a vast system of quotes; Andersen defines Los Angeles by editing together film sequences in which the city and its locations play a significant role.  Since movies are made in Hollywood, Los Angeles appears in the background of thousands of pictures.  Andersen's project to reverse the ordinary relationship between background and foreground; his enormous film essay -- the picture is three hours long and designed to be shown with an intermission -- is encyclopedic, an odyssey through the history of films, film styles, long-forgotten scandals, and chronicles the growth, and, in Andersen's eyes, the decadence of Hollywood and southern California as a whole.  Andersen's method is simple:  he shows one film clip after another, sometimes at length, accompanied by a fiercely opinionated and sardonic voice-over commentary.  As with Chris Marker's film essays, Andersen's method is associational and, sometimes, the thread of his argument is hard to follow:  his approach is leftist-radical, a polemic against Hollywood and its boosters that is simultaneously a celebration of the work made in that place.  Some of his views are profoundly idiosyncratic:  he endorses as great L.A. films pictures like Coffey, Robert Culp's Hickey and Boggs, and the original version of Gone in 60 Seconds.  He seems to despise the well-known film writer David Thomson and bashes him whenever he can.  (He also hates Woody Allen and Henry Jaglom, worships Cassavetes, and is generally disdainful of big-budget Hollywood pictures.)  Andersen makes some factual errors in the voice-over -- after all its a 180 minutes movie -- and, occasionally, his ideas are banal and self-righteous, but, by and large, the film is a triumph:  it is continuously fascinating and the commentary is thought-provoking and, of course, the film clips, which range from the obvious and famous to the completely obscure, are extraordinary.  The first half of the film, the most diffuse part of the picture, is entitled "L.A. as a Character" and is built from clips in which the city's buildings or landscape are integral to the action -- of course, Andersen shows the "Music Box Steps" made famous by Laurel and Hardy's exertions in their Oscar-winning two-reeler, The Music Box, from the early thirties.  Andersen also explores the luxury mansions, many of them built in exemplary Modernist style, that seem to feature in melodramas as haunted houses, the pads of brutal criminals or psychopaths, a general terrain of villainy set in structures that were supposed to be prophetic of a more sane, and healthy, future:  there is the Lovell Health House and, of course, the Ennis House, Frank Lloyd Wright's Mayan temple near Silver Lake, and various other iconic glass and steel palaces, in the movies all of them infested with criminals and bad guys of various species.  "L.A. as Subject," the second half of the picture is more tightly argued and rhymes to some extent with themes treated briefly in the first part of the movie -- for instance, Andersen devotes a fair amount of time to L. A. police misconduct; he describes Jack Webb as a robot, an appellation that resonates with sequences showing Arnold Schwartzenegger as the "terminator," a "cop-killing machine," Andersen says displaying for us as an exhibit the "I'll be back" sequence in which the homicidal automaton slaughters a station-house full of hapless cops.  These arguments, in turn, bring to mind a short shot in the first half of the film in which Andersen notes that the famous Bradbury building used in many films including DOA and Blade Runner is now the headquarters for L.A. police Internal Affairs.  Other films to which Andersen devotes significant attention are Chinatown and L.A. Confidential, both pictures about civic corruption, and, of course, Blade Runner, a picture that Andersen idiosyncratically sees as a celebration of urban revival -- "a diverse community with lots of pedestrian activity on the streets and good parking right next to your apartment complex."  Andersen ends his magnum opus with a poignant study of L. A. neo-realism -- the great films that show the city's poor and disenfranchised in a realistic light and that have received next to no recognition:  he cites, at length, two transcendent films that deserves to be better known, Keith McKenzie's The Exiles and Charles Burnett's Killer of Sheep.  The film's final sequence, a traveling shot of an enormous wrecked factory that once made Goodyear tires, images redolent of the decline of the Black middle class that formerly flourished in Los Angeles, summons from Andersen a final flourish:  "Tourists were once given tours of this factory where tires were made just as tourists today take tours of the studios where movies are made..."  Filled with weird curiosities, flashes of brilliance, bits and pieces of old comedies and bizarre-looking horror films, all of these oddities interlaced with sequences from much more famous pictures, Andersen's picture is ideal as a home DVD -- you can dip into here and there, watch twenty minutes or an hour, and come away refreshed and intellectually invigorated:  it's like Richard Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy, a huge tome with interesting material on every page, too big to be read continuously but always fascinating.