papeetepatrick

I don't ever take this sort of thing very seriously. Unless classicism is the single only thing that ever lasted, other things lasted as well. These things are said in order to direct focus on something one has deemed 'more important' as well as just 'important'. Is Balanchine's own personality invisible in his works when performed most reverently? Of course not. You see it. If his isn't, it's unrealistic to say that the performer's would be either. Such statements denote something to aim for, in that one tries to be godlike. It's the right way to state it, it's of no importance that its application is strictly limited. This is all about concentrating on one kind of attitude as opposed to another one. If by 'classicism', there is meant 'not romanticism', you already have something in romanticism that lasted quite as much as did 'classicism' unless you decide 'romanticism' was a subsidiary of 'classicism'. Otherwise, classicism has to be everything that did last. Personality, if it was Martha Graham's, lasted as well. All you have to do is see her company 10 years after her death. These kinds of delimitings are necessary to produce a domain that sets itself off and they are concerned with matters of value and taste more than any kind of truth that would really be inclusive enough to apply to more than what is within the domain itself. Also, worth is not purely determined by its enduring properties, because many things could be said to have endured, but not nearly as long as much more longer-lasting things. Fo example, Homer is not necessarily greater than Beethoven, but it thus far is far more enduring. I don't know if one terms Homer 'classical' in the same sense as Haydn and Mozart.

patrick! This is the first silly thing you've ever said! Oh, I was hoping you'd catch me at this! It's just that I always found her so elegant and beautiful with her hair pulled back severely. But don't think it wasn't one of the most memorable performances I ever saw her do--because it was easily one of the greatest. I thought she never looked taller (except maybe in 'Mozartiana') on pointe, and I always remember her arms as the character is weakening. It was marvelous. You have to forgive my pettiness, you see I find her a very beautiful woman as well as dancer, and I thought she was a BLONDE until the hair came down! I hope you can forgive me, and I had never admitted this before...

I have nothing but confessions, but Sex and the City (the movie, that is) is not one I'll be making. I only saw 3 episodes of this on VHS and didn't like it. I don't ever like Sarah Jessica Parker-- not ever , especially when they let her sing (it is worse than Glenn Close.) I have liked Kim Cattrall once in 'Wild Palms' the phenomenal mini-series by Oliver Stone and Bruce Wagner (and Angie Dickinson brilliant in it), from 1993, so maybe that constitutes one guilty pleasure I'll report. I also re-watched 'Dillinger' from 1973 with Ben Johnson and Warren Oates for the second time Saturday night, and I love this film, even though it is along the lines of 'Bonnie and Clyde' and perhaps 'Thieves Like Us.' By 1973, we were getting photography as beautiful as it is today--and the photography of the Midwest is simply perfection in this film, and perfectly combined with the very old Western American folksongs like 'Skip to my Lou', 'Turkey in the Straw' and especially, 'Red River Valley'.

But I LOVE this one, the sillier the better... That reminds of how much I disliked Suzanne Farrell's hair when 'In Memory Of...' premiered. Reminded me somehow of Amy Irving in 'Yentl.'

Critics use this kind of purely subjective talk at the point they feel they can put it over. I always remember back to Barbra Streisand's attempt to begin her conquering of the opera 'n' Shakespeare world she always wanted to do instead of continuing with the treacly songs, i.e., she made 'Classical Barbra'. The Village Voice said something about 'shades of corporate blue', but I think this was even before IBM was termed Big Blue. It interests me because I thought I knew what 'corporate blue' meant even though it is just made up. I thought 'corporate blue' looked like certain skyscrapers in Midtown especially if they had a Marlboro Man ad up it. It must indeed be upsetting to dislike Mahler because of the boring ballets spun out of his music. I know that's not why I hate Minkus--some of the ballets to Minkus's music make it almost bearable...but not quite. There are times when I really don't want to hear 'incomparable', 'took incredible risks', or phrases like 'danced with piteous beauty'. I like Capezio ad cliches, however, they're so superficial and chic. And PLAYBILLS! They're so tacky they're a total joy! You can find out about all the expensive restaurants that are unconcerned with the cuisine. Still think Rite of Spring conveys tribal urgency well enough, but that Carmina Burana just conveys primitivism, plus anything danced to Philip Glass is automatic manipulation.

http://rawstory.com/news/2008/La_Scala_to_...es_An_0529.html This is rather unexpected, to me the interest is more a curio. I don't see this kind of thing as lending itself to opera. What do others think?

I thought so too, but think she is also perfect in 'Three Women'. Her scenes with Sissy Spacek are great.

Unfortunately, that's true. Total solipsism by now. If you'll look back, you'll see I didn't compare Amerian Beauty to Blue Velvet, I didn't say it was more over-the-top than American Beauty, only that Inland Empire is all indulgence and solipsism. Anyway, however much I don't like much Lynch, I do like Blue Velvet a great deal, and think it's very funny. I also think 'Mulholland Drive' is very good. Frankly, I don't see that Blue Velvet and American Beauty have much of anything in common. Blue Velvet is removed from the world, American Beauty isn't, it's in the world. They are therefore about two different worlds, at least as artistic worlds they are different, even if Lynch is also approaching the real world obliquely. Lynch is so solipsistic he has to create a new world, namely LynchWorld, before he can even begin. I think it works in 'Blue Velvet', but primarily I find it funny because Isabella Rossellini is so marvelous every time she appears (which isn't quite the case when she appears in 'Wild at Heart'.) I'm not a Pauline Kael fan, but I liked her phrase for Isabella in Blue Velvet--'a dream of a freak'. She's great with Dennis Hopper, with Kyle Machlachlan in bed (as in 'you cannn....feeleet'), and running naked up to the clothesline, and Hope Lange is the perfect jarring note with her 'blanket to cover her'. But Blue Velvet is much campier than American Beauty IMO. By the way, I definitely don't think 'over the top' should be meant as a criticism nearly as often as it is. Some of the best things in the Arts are over-the-top.

I doubt it. I thought that floating plastic bag sequence was the most irritating thing in the movie. You had to watch and watch and watch, with the director using everything short of semaphore to signal: “Look at this. This is amazing. This is really special.” Urrrggghhh. These are perfectly understated compared to Lynch's endless noir lamps on nightstands in hooker motel rooms in 'Inland Empire'. And they are all cleaned and polished, as if for collectors of noir memorabilia. Prostitutes may keep their 'little apartments' (Raymond Chandler's term in 'The Little Sister') clean, but I don't think they usually have the Tiffany version; and there must be a hundred stills of these silly noir lamps. In most disussions of 'Inland Empire', as opposed to 'Mulholland Drive', the hipster enthusiasts do not even know that Inland Empire is a SoCal region containing not only Pomona, discussed from the Hollywood Walk of fame in the 'searing' (and tedious and boring and most hateful) final terrible Laura Dern (as abused David Lynch actress) scenes, but Palm Springs as well. The latter is not mentioned as I recall, but the early Jeremy Irons sequence as director seems rotten with self-congratulatory Palm Springs arriviste attitude. I think Lynch should degenerate further now, into something that might be called 'The Valley Hunt Club' or maybe he could do a documentary on Mark Taper as he gets more and more effete. Perhaps we'll see if the very oldest money can be penetrated and shown in sewer form. I once looked at a 1000 Greatest, but that was enough, because too large a number for it to be interesting. I was pleased to hear that the Village Voice had done a 100 Greatest once, and they had included Russ Meyer's 'Beyond the Valley of the Dolls', which is very funny and starred Dolly Read, widow of Dick Martin, who died last week.

You have to read the book to understand Kubrick's masterful changes. This is the only Stephen King book I've ever read, and that will be enough. The ending is pure Disney claptrap, with the little boy and mother and the Scatman Crothers character all happy by a burbling brook; the Overlook Hotel has itself been blown up in cheap Halloween season movie style. In the film Crothers gets an axe in the chest, Shelley and the little boy just barely and very furtively escape, and the house is left with its ghosts of Mr. Grady, the little girls, the rich old nymphomaniac and her young stud, and now Jack's photos with 'till We Meet again' sung to them, as he joins the continued hauntings. I find it amazing that Kubrick could revamp this pulpy story so that it remains scary after you leave the theater, and the mother and child could never have fully reoriented themselves to normal life again. I mean, what could they even do about the hotel, call the police and say it was full of ghosts that had killed Scatman and Jack, who had tried to kill her first? The best horror tales end with evil triumphing, at least to a degree, but King hasn't that kind of guts. This is one of the few films I've seen that were much better than the novel--and I suppose this usually happens when the novel is Grade B or less, as with 'Flamingo Road' (play) and 'Letter to Three Wives' (I'm guessing to some degree on this last one, a Cosmopolitan Mag serial, I believe). Only the Masterpiece Theater version of J.B. Priestley's 'Lost Empires' has actually improved upon an otherwise superb novel, at least among things I've seen. Although 'Member of the Wedding' does equal the excellent McCullers original, which I think 'Reflections in a Golden Eye' comes close to doing as well, but that's been some time since I've seen it (think Liz is perfect in it). Now that I think of it, McCullers has been one of the most fortunate in filmed versions of her beautiful and deeply moving works, and it may have to do with their lending themselves to film treatment, but I like even 'Ballad of the Sad Cafe' (most don't) and 'The Heart is a Lonely Hunter' as well (more do). As for the substances, thanks for the information-they clearly did their business well, just as the martinis William Holden drank to loosen up for the dance with Kim Novak in 'Picnic' did theirs.

Yes, I thought so, and like the rose petals because they're so nauseating and remind one of the difference between funereal florists and wild roses. Well, it sure interests me, it's just that it's not realistic to expect it in many domains unless one wants to make oneself miserable. I'd say 'Last Year at Marienbad was 'cinematic' and 'artistic' but not 'soulful'. That is not what you get with Robbe-Grillet, although you may with Resnais sometimes (as in 'Muriel' and in the 2003 'Pas sur le Bouche', a sublime film of an old operetta--ridiculous that this didn't at least get more than a festival showing, given that many inferior French films do). On the other hand, within its own world, it was perfect. Robbe-Grillet's novels are often like that too. I didn't care about 'American Beauty' as message, but it seemed to have this sort of hallucination of traditional society falling apart at the seams, with violent slippages from the very beginning--but we saw the old and the new side by side, uneasily going back and forth one to the other. I don't see it as 'solving' bourgeois stodginess by going back to the id or whatever, but rather showing a good number of symptoms one after the other of budding putrefaction, and that inevitably includes a lot of id-recall. Okay, so maybe it was perfect, what do I know. At least the movie itself didn't go back to the id, like 'Inland Empire' does. This last film is very overrated among alternative types as far as I am concerned and I can't stand it, Laura Dern emoting and all the rest. Only the Gypsy Woman made it worth the pain, what a camp. Anyway, I like 'soulful' too, don't get me wrong, and last night watched the old 'Member of the Wedding' with Harris, Waters, and DeWilde. I'd only read the novel and seen a TV production, but this was the gem, with some scenes uncannily alive--and heartbreaking.

I've been imagining this story as a movie for a long time now, and it seems esp. trenchant now b/c it seems to anticipate many important features of the Internet--i.e., the proliferation of second, third, fourth-hand (etc.) knowledge at the expense of direct experience. Can you say why, though, you imagine it as a ballet? What sort of dance scenes are you imagining? (lots of solos, haha). Oh yes, the elastic Mending Apparatus for Suzanne Farrell (that's when I imagined it back in the 80s) and someone mature and retired and tired of doing Aurora's mother and/or Carabosse for Fat Vashti...really then only needs the Male Soloist in a good bit of agony as Vasht's son (no Damien Woetzel, please, I agree with somebody else this is a dancer I don't get...), I could imagine Mathiu Ganoi, since Villella isn't up for this sort of thing by now. Aurelie Dupont as the Mending Apparatus more than Ashley Bouder by now. Vashti would just have to sit there and talk on the telephone and look at monitors about the Brisbane School of what-have-you (I don't have a copy available) and just generally become the Fabulous Sedentary. I have just been getting familiar with Tippett's Piano Concerto, and that is a bloody knockout, not necessarily for the Machine Stops but for something that is a little like Ballet Imperial a la Moderne or something. Tippett's orchestrations are as elegant as any I've ever heard, and even more than in this Piano Concerto, you can hear the perfected and well-tempered orchestra in his symphonies. I wonder if anybody has ever seen Tippett's work danced to, because along with Britten, these are probably the masters of 20th Century English Music.

I think E.M. Forster's 'The Machine Stops', his futuristic story with the wormlike 'mending apparatus' of the mechanized society, would be a marvelous ballet, but no Philip Glass, please. There's probably some music of Benjamin Britten or Michael Tippett that would be just right to keep it in its period but still be about future sterile hell.

Yes! That's perfect, and I'd forgotten how I specifically hated that.

I think I noticed a number of people thinking 'American Beauty' was overrated, but I don't. I don't care if wasn't perfect, hardly anything is. It has such brilliant moments, and many of them, that I think it a great film. 'Apocalypse Now' as well. I also like 'The Godfather' a lot, but don't think 'The Godfather II' is overrated either. They're both very fine, I think, even though I never really like Diane Keaton in anything where she gets tearful. I, too, love 'Dancer in the Dark' though--Bjork is magic and Deneuve is good in an unglamorous and uncharacteristic role. I should see it more than once, though, which I haven't. Have seen none of the big Spielberg things since 'Close Encounters'.

There's a DVD of Fall River Legend by Dance Theater of Harlem, 1989. Virginia Johnson and Lorraine Graves, Danish Radio Symphony Orchestra. I'll watch it soon, anybody here seen it?

Hilarious choice for your example. I have a hard enough time remembering his belly in 'Nuts' with Ms. Streisand. Viva Airplane!

I've always wanted to see it. Just looked it up on wikipedia, which said it was in ABT's 2007 season, but I missed reports of it. Gillian Murphy and Julie Kent in lead roles, it said. Morton Gould is not much heard by now, but his music definitely had its moments.

Agree totally in terms of right now. She is simply stunning.

I didn't mean they weren't 'recognizably human', but they were not characters worthy of making anything other than a documentary about. They were all stupid, every one of them, and neither is the Hilary Swank character any brighter or more sensitive. She is indeed mentally disturbed, but not sympathetic because she is using dildoes on girls without their knowledge, posing as a boy. You asked, and this is the crucial detail, because the girls are also thereby raped, the Hilary Swank character is also a rapist; it is why the movie is dramatically worthless, is only a fictional version of a casehistory, because it does give the impression that you ought to sympathize with this 'hero/ine' somewhat--nothing is ever said about how the Brandon character is a rapist as well. I find it incredible that nobody ever sees this most obvious point. One could sympathize with any kind of rapist, therefore, based on to what degree an 'appealing and insensitively misunderstood mental illness' seemed to apply or not, seemed to 'cause it to happen'. In the Brandon Teena documentary, some of these girls show their ignorance by still proclaiming, even with all the facts before them, that 'it was real'. These are not 'poor people characters', which can exist, and a good example of how these can be made theatrical are the Menotti operas like 'St. of Bleecker Street', 'The Medium', 'The Consul', or even 'Amahl and the Night Visitors.' He was sometimes called 'The Puccini of the Poor', and he was proud of it, knowing he did these things well. I just see 'Boys Don't Cry' as another TV-fact-based commodity, there's not a story there for a fictional or theatrical medium. Menotti's spiritualist, his political dissenters, his stigmata girl in Little Italy are poor people characters, 'Boys Don't Cry' is still just the poor people in Nebraska, never made into real characters. In fact, one of the most appalling results of the attempt to make Brandon somehow sympathetic is that--since she's not, being a rapist herself--the subsequent rapist-killers, while seeming piglike (and being it as well, to be sure), then can be seen in their crimes to have arrived at them logically--given their class and general personal habits to begin with. I don't mean that excuses what they did, but that's not important anyway, there are a million cases and we only know about this one because a movie with a serious and diseased flaw at its core made it famous.

Thanks so much, bart, but I stole that from Joan Didion , who was specifically talking about movie reviewers and how they didn't know much of what they are talking about half the time. I think I'm quick enough to put it here right after you noted it, and I ought to stop thinking some of these things are household phrases!

carbro! that's MARVELOUS! thanks soooo much! Yes, of course, those are all the ones, and just please watch if you have time the 'I Feel Pretty' and Lenny talking about how 'Kiri just ate it up' with the more Viennese tempo he took for it.

It hasn't stood up so well, although Brando is still amazing. But it was a great movie of its moment. Disagree, think it's still a masterpiece and in no way a period piece. Finally had time to read the whole thread. This is closest to this year's CCNY Kirov thread in posters pulling all the stops out. The ones I most disagree with being called overrated are 'Citizen Kane', 'Psycho','History of Violence', 'Children of Paradise', and 'Last Tango'. I think they are all as brilliant as their reputations, and also think most Bergman is. On the other hand, I hate all Woody Allen, including 'Annie Hall'. Have I achieved the hatchet-job spirit yet? I don't think 'the Sound of Music' was ever rated especially highly in an artistic and critical sense. It was very popular and I have never really liked it, even though I think it is well-made. Overrated for me is the Nicole Kidman 'Moulin Rouge', although I don't like her in anything very much. I think the film is garbage, even seen alone, but especially compared to the divine piece with Zsa Zsa like a heavenly phantom of Parisian volupte and Jose Ferrer. Unlike Cygnet, I do like Tom Cruise playing Tom Cruise, as in 'Magnolia' and 'Eyes Wide Shut' (in which he is light-years beyond his then-wife), but think both of those movies are overrated if they were highly rated (I don't know if they were.) Cruise is popularly disliked these days, but he's dazzlingly brilliant when he's good, much more of a natural movie star than his ex-wife, whom I find ordinary. 'Boys Don't Cry' is godawful beyond belief, the worst highly-touted movie of the 00's, and repulsive in every artistic sense. If one watches the documentary 'The Story of Brandon Teena', you get the real story and that's where it should have been left. This cheesey story full of uniformly unsympathetic characters contains not a single scene worth putting into a piece of would-be fictional art. Recently, 'Eastern Promises' proves to be overrated, and Viggo thoroughly ordinary in it. It is like a toney version of 'The Sopranos', and might have been more than just a good film (which it is), if it didn't follow the infinitely superior 'A History of Violence'. Would definitely say I think all Quentin Tarantino is overrated, especially 'Kill Bill'. We all love to do our 'petit point on Kleenex.' One of America's favourite pastimes.

Bart--aren't we talking about the same documentary? Definitely agree TeKanawa was wonderfully relaxed and simply in awe of Bernstein, comparing him even to Mozart which he later contradicts without referencing her remark specifically, but when talking about how 'America' was his favourite song from the show. He was talking about how it remained the freshest--he said 'well, maybe not quite like Mozart; none of us is on that level' (I disagree; many great artists are occasionally up there, just not nearly as often as Mozart...) And those big dancing musical interludes between the verses are wonderfully soaring--in quite the same away as the 'around the corner or whistlin' down the river' are in 'Somethin's Comin', which is probably my favourite song from the show, but was not well-sung by Carreras; this is, in fact, where the engineer annoyed Bernstein with prodding about the accent, with Carreras singing 'comb-ing' instead of the American sound that was needed, and there was even a bit of 'wheez-lin' down the reeee-ver'. I think Bernstein realized that that particular problem was hopeless, was not going to be solved, and well, they weren't going to fire him, so let's just give it up.

Thanks for reporting this, I would love to see it, and will. Adore Kylian and Mozart, and think the combination will be all the things you said.