papeetepatrick

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/24/theater/...24fad67&ei=5070 We don't need to forget to mention this great musical theater lady. Even before she and Adolph Green met Leonard Bernstein, they discovered and developed Judy Holliday--that would have been enough for me to be grateful to them forever--for 'The Revuers' at the Village Vanguard. Later, with Jule Styne, all of them triumphed together again in 'Bells are Ringing'. This Thanksgiving had an unusually large number of major losses in the Arts, I thought.

Just a little update on this thread where we talked about all sorts of film musical adaptations, I thought I had seen 'Chitty Chitty..' but hadn't ever. So I checked it out--it's not a bit bad, has lots of charm and both Dick Van Dyke and Sally Anne Howes are terrific; she is just gorgeous and sings beautifully. I must have so hated that title I wouldn't have anything to do with it, and thought that that somehow meant I'd seen it. No truly great score--the Shermans again--but nicely done fantasy in a genre I usually can't stand. I checked out 'Phantom of the Opera' from 2004 also, and dread watching it, if I must say..perhaps I could be talked out of it?

and Dirac--I had meant to report when I went to see 'Babel,' that the preview of 'Dreamgirls' I saw was my first knowledge of it. I was surprised, because I think I have been hearing about doing a 'Dreamgirls' movie since at least 1996, but I think well before that--so I just thought they were never really going to do it. From what I could tell from the previews, I might go even though you can't tell all that much, but I enjoy this sort of thing about pop musicians even when it's far from perfect: I recently watched the often pedestrian 'Why Do Fools Fall in Love' and had a wonderful time just because of the good bits (esp. Halle Berry); but I also thought Kevin Spacey did a really moving job on Bobby Darin and Sandra Dee in 'Beyond the Sea' and that people did not pick up on it at all. It was a real labour of love--and one of the nicest things was that Ms. Dee got to see it a few months before her death, and called Spacey to tell him how much she liked it. Anyway, I hope 'Dreamgirls' is as good as they're predicting, because this kind of musical can be one of the best kinds. Edited to add: and even by the 'chicago' people, I think it will be a lot better, because the music will be the center and has to be good. (In 'Chicago', the dance had been the center and should have been good, and wasn't--no sense in doing a Bob Fosse show and throwing out the Fosse.) But Knowles and Hudson are clearly going to deliver the goods all the way here. Yeah, I'll pay for this one.

On Raul Esparza: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/26/theater/26wadl.html?fta=y The NYTimes review of last night's opening. http://theater2.nytimes.com/2006/11/30/the...wsVBMS8ad3UeThw This looks like a real season is opening up on Broadway for the first time in years. Juliana Moore in a David Hare play, a revival of this musical that sounds like it couldn't have been possible, and in the spring Vanessa doing Joan in 'Year of Magical Thinking.' Yes, better than in recent years, better than 'Dirty Rotten Scoundrels' , 'Spamalot' and umpteen musicals without scores.

I am not fond of 'pret a porter', but do think this 'traffic management' is very effective in 'The Player', which I thought brilliant (and I believed signalled a comeback for Altman) and certainly in 'Nashville', a masterpiece. I probably liked 'A Wedding' better than most and 'Short Cuts' has got a lot going for it.

Farrell Fan--that's very cool. I always like stories like that.

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/19652 This is a much better review from the NYReview of Books, in the current issue, than was that one of 'The Queen'. I am not very interested in this film (and don't plan to see it because it sounds boring), but some of the commentary has been interesting--this one easily the most so, at least to me. It's interesting how Coppola would have made certain kinds of crucial, deadly omissions. Knowing that, I'd rather re-read St-Simon's Memoirs, even if it's about Louis XIV, if I need a sense of the singularly luxurious style--because Antoinette did a lot of it, but I doubt anyone ever surpassed the Sun King at this variety of pursuits: There's a cake recipe with 18 eggs in the St-Simon that Louis XIV used to gorge on, so he really ought to be as famous for cake as Antoinette was.

dirac--thanks so much for telling me about 'Jubilee'--a very rich and funny film. Jarman echoes Warhol and also some of the early Kenneth Anger movies like 'Eaux d'Artifice' and 'Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome.' Has seen his Pasolini and Antonioni too. The 'Miss Amyl Nitrite' ballet in urban wasteland is not exactly a pristine thing that balletgoers need to see, but it's one of the many quirky things in it, along with gardens full of terrible gnomes, the Lounge Lizards and Orlando, the outrageous 'owner of media'. Made before Jarman became ill and so not so dark as 'The Garden', another of his I now remember seeing, but had forgotten because much of it is silent.

Enjoyed the review, atm--but even with your reservations, it sounds like there is much that is worthy in this. I don't know if I'll get to it, but I like Julianne Moore's work too, and have thought she was brilliant in a number of things, esp. 'Boogie Nights' and 'Far from Heaven.'

It could also be that judgments about Balanchine not being such a good pianist were based on hearing playing when he was out of practice. One of my finest teachers, Ilona Kabos, didn't bother to keep in practice as she got old, but she could still manage to get across musical ideas by doing 'sketch playing', with plenty of wrong notes and fudge, and Balanchine probably did some of this. He was obviously doing something related to this when he demonstrated ballet sometimes, e.g., the story Villella tells about showing him Apollo. Villella would have meant that Balanchine was able to embody Apollo, not that he would thereby be taking it out on the stage--otherwise, no need for Villella's younger body to do it.

Very true--although there can be good musicianship without great piano technique, there cannot really be real piano technique, except the mechanical thing, without good musicianship.

David Daniel said that Balanchine could reduce a Xennakis orchestra score at sight at the piano. I doubt this was quite literally true, because even Xennakis piano solo pieces such as 'Herma' are not playable at sight; and even virtuoso pianists would rarely be able to play a Xennakis orchestra score so that it could be recognized (and the hearers would not know whether they were recognizing anything anyway, since Xennakis is not music you can remember until you master it many times over. However, there are, of course, some conductors who could do this). He could have meant that Balanchine could play the music of 'Pythoprakta' after hearing it a good number of times and then using the score to produce some sort of reasonable transcription. But even that would mean a considerable achievement, and I haven't any reason to doubt it. As we know, he was very specific with what he wanted with his rehearsal pianists.

BABEL This is sensational--it's got tons of sensation but profound too. You definitely need to see it in a theater. This is a sort of Essay on the Other, and it is not superficial. The telling point is that the supposed 'stars'--are far less interesting and full-bodied than literally every single actor among 'the Others.' There's more than structural similarity to 'Intolerance' than even I thought, therefore, with this matter of the Foreign Other. One of the most beautifully photographed films I've ever seen--in Baja (with the border between the U.S. and Mexico very important), Morocco, and Tokyo--it's got subtleties in it that you think are being lost in the interests of some ordinary style of narrative, only to then find them surprising you. All 3 stories in all 3 lands are tied together with the merest thread which nevertheless hugely affects all characters involved. One of the most amazing things is the reverse-chronology over a short period of time, which is even somewhat reminiscent of Robbe-Grillet (including some of the serialized images echoed in an intertextual way from one story to another), except by now new things have occurred and what is spectacular is that Director Alejandro Gonzales Innaritu makes you feel the power and presence of both the Global Spectacle and it's Internet Instant, but also the many-hours difference in time zones as still existing and juxtaposed to each other! The high-tech editing and lingering over 'still lives' like various interior an exterior shots near the action but with nobody in them are part of the grammar of this truly cinematic masterpiece--as are the striking sound images and use of music. As for the 2 Malibu stars...er, um, San Diego characters... played by Cate Blanchett as pure drear and Brad Pitt as a caricature of the hot American movie star who gets down to breaking heads and doing quite difficult things (read 'China Syndrome', read Robert Redford, read Richard Gere doing tough and brooding)--well, they are rendered, miraculously, as 'exotic Others' in quite as much a way as all the non-Malibu actors are: They seem so dessicated and uninteresting by comparison to all the rest of the cast that you don't care anything about their characters' fates, at least I didn't. I never ever once saw either of them as anything but Blanchett and Pitt doing 'movie star.' Brad Pitt runs after a disappearing bus and he definitely needed a stunt man or double to do this, but his weird running has a cramped authenticity to it all the same. The most moving story is the Japanese one, to my mind, about the deaf-mute daughter of a woman who has recently committed suicide. However, in one of the Baja segments there is a Mexican wedding that is pure pleasure to watch, reminding one of the big crowds in Robert Altman, but a lot more sensual and human.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/09/business...artner=homepage I was surprised and saddened to read this.

Exactly! and the same is true of the Wright and the Suskind (especially) books. They are written about in so many op-ed pieces, etc., that you think you know what they are about by reading these sources. So these 3 books, 2 of which I've finished, mark the first time I decided to go ahead and make my way all the way through myself, instead of just counting on Frank Rich, etc., and was I in for a revelation. The things I found in the Suskind, finished last night, were simply incredible: Most of the talk about that book has been on the Crawford briefing by CIA, but in the book you find out about what has really happened to CIA since 9/11--how its evidence-gathering function has been literally gutted. You also read that all persons Suskind interviewed for the book think it's a matter of when, not if. Such things as the August, 2003, plans to attack the New York subways were kept secret and many other things as well. When the blackout of August, 2003, occurred, most people, myself included, thought briefly that it could be a terrorist attack--but the government thought that's what it was for hours, due to what they knew about plans to use cyanide in the subways. So, no more skipping of O'Neill books, Clarke books, etc., for me anymore. I did not get enough from reading Scheer (when he was still at LATimes) and Dowd.

Thanks for the thoughts on Jarman, about whom I know less; and also for mentioning 'Jubilee', which I was able to put a hold on just now, and will report back when I see it. I probably need to watch 'The Last of England' again, and for those going to see 'The Queen', there are some interesting 'home movies' of the Windsors in that film. I remember the Thatcher-type asking some returned soldiers 'Did you enjoy the Falklands?' but it's been 15 years since I saw it.

I think that's the other one, dirac; you already had to redirect this one, but all is interesting to me. Anyway, I hope somebody else saw 'Distant Voices, Still Lives,' made 12 years before 'the House of Mirth', but if they haven't, they should try to find it, because it is a truly heartfelt, heartbreaking and poetic film.

dirac--I posted that review in case others wanted to read it, and just read it myself now. I don't plan to see the film during the current run, but I didn't care for the review anyway. I don't like much writing about the English royals, in fact, but things like, in comparing Blair and the Queen, 'if he was a concert, she was a museum' is just not good enough for the New York Review of Books, of which I am a loyal reader. Mr. O'Hagan wanted to identify with the queen and agree with her about the prime minister's more fragile hold on the public--pretty old hat stuff by now and cloyingly predictable.

I agree, and that's why I never forgot Chaplin, although I can't remember another thing about that version. Chaplin is a very special actress, one of my favourites, and at that time was very goddess-like. Even the kooky Karen Hood of 'Welcome to LA', riding around neurotically in taxis all day, was something that has never been seen on film. Interesting that she got the real Chaplin look, but also got to look so glorious in it, as in that red dress at the end of the same film. That's partially why I was surprised I liked Anderson, though, because as the film deepened, it occurred to me that that sort of look might have been one that had charisma in Wharton's Old New York, even if I'd rather see it elsewhere. He's a worthwhile director, though, and I was glad to see him getting actors by now like Laura Linney, Dan Ackroyd, Anthony LaPaglia, and Eleanor Bron.

Yes, of course, because the integrated musical didn't occur until 'Showboat' and, especially, 'Oklahoma.' There'd always been some story in operetta, but American musicals of the most admired kind were pre-dated by hundreds of 'numbers musicals' and 'show biz musicals', and this is not the diagetic. I actually like the numbers musicals quite as well at this stage of life, they seem more authentically American much of the time. Then there are mixtures of the diagetic and non-diagetic, this can be effective too. Another good adaptation that came to mind is 'Damn Yankees,' also apropos of discussion of Fosse. I find the film to still be extremely enjoyable, and it's interesting to see Verdon and Fosse dancing in it: She's got just a touch more energy than he does, and her dancing is perfect in this.

Recently I also saw Davies's 'The House of Mirth', which probably had a bigger audience than the other things, and it looked more expensively produced. Gillian Anderson was convincing, although it was hard to forget Geraldine Chaplin in the 1981 version. Very worthwhile, but probably ought to be the last word on this story. Extremely fine cast, I even got used to Eric Stolz, but thought he was a bit weak.

Suskind's 'the One Percent Doctrine.' Excellent, and I must finish it before Tuesday--superstition. Otherwise, I can't say anything, since it's political. However, it came out about 6 weeks before 'The Looming Tower', about Al Qaeda and going up to and just through 9/11, whereas this one starts with 9/11, just before, with the CIA at Crawford in August, 2001, and goes on up to today. So that they make an excellent summary of the facts of the main matters going on in U.S. foreign policy today when read in the opposite order from which they were published. I'll then get to Woodward's book.

I did notice when I couldn't get in that there were as many as 90 + users, so maybe that's what flood control is? Now, there are 20 +, and I've gotten in both twice. I like the TAT better than VNP, because you get a longer list, and after VNP, you have a hard time getting to anything previous to them, have to click a lot. But today, even if I clicked 40 times, from either entrance, I never got in.

I'm in now--from the Today's New Topics. The other posts I made were from the front board, picking them out. No idea of this sort of thing.

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/19570 Review of 'The Queen' in NYReview of Books.