the list of now

IFC Films, 2011

I watched this film last weekend. I’m still having difficulty formulating what I want to say about it.

I’ll start with some context. Wim Wenders was working with Pina Bausch on a documentary about her life when she suddenly died. The intended film was replaced with a new vision for a moving tribute by her company, who perform several of her most celebrated pieces and talk about their experience with her. This collaboration produced a masterpiece that works on so many levels.

Dance on film has been done very well, (especially in classics) and done very poorly (although I still love the cheesybad ones). I don’t think I’ve seen anything on film that approaches the level of cinematography and theatricality that Wim Wenders accomplishes directing dance in “Pina.” It’s fucking astounding. These dancers are not on display. There is nothing passive about this. Film as a medium is choreographed here, into the pieces themselves. It’s transformative.

Now that I’ve gotten the technical aspects out of the way (ha!), can we talk about my feelings? One of the company members recounts Pina telling her that her fragility is her strength. This could be a metaphor for the entire film as Pina’s pieces constantly play with trust and intimacy issues. Age, gender, and body image, as well as physical connection, are present issues in almost every piece, but not in any overarching distracting ways that leave the viewer attempting to “figure out what it’s saying”. It just flows. It’s just real.

Elements and energy are huge factors as well with dancing in water and dirt, on public transportation, at commercial intersections, in (literal) glass houses – this would be gimmicky it if wasn’t so visceral and blunt. The settings anchor the movement, which is so much about bodies, not at all pageantry. The diversity of this company is also striking. You see dancers in this film that you don’t commonly see in mainstream American companies – older dancers (over 40!), people of color, of many different ethnicity and speaking their native languages. You see intense vulnerability with male dancers, dancing with each other, as partners, which is so rarely done that it sometimes seems downright profound.

There is a weight to what they are doing, emotional and physically heavy. Again, this is the depth in displaying fragility. These dancers DIG IN. Their bodies are all in, in a way that seems to be a direct subversion of showy, airy, “proper” prettiness that popular convention likes to demand that dancers display. Have you ever watched a tiny ballerina produce exacting, perfect movements, just wanting her to just do something crazy? Sometimes I think it’s painful knowing there is a powerhouse beneath, that this body has  incredible strength and gives excruciating effort to produce the appearance of tidiness andweightlessness. It can be lovely, but I also kind of hate that. I find it boring. It is fucking delightful to watch dancers break that convention into pieces and this company brought it to a level that I haven’t seen in a while.

For me, almost any art is more fun when the artist has shown their work somehow. Watching this film you hear the dancers thanking Pina over and over for pulling at their fragility, fears and vulnerabilities. And then you watch them pay tribute with their entire bodies and selves. It’s breathtaking.

One company member notes that Pina danced as if she had a hole in her belly.  That line is what I think about when I can’t stop thinking (feeling) about this film.

Yes.

More of that.

Exactly that.

Visit the official site for the film here. (Watch the trailer!) Pina is currently streaming on Netflix if you have a subscription, but it was also recently added to the Criterion collection and is available on DVD. Find a way to see this film!

I still remember the day that I found out that no one was really singing in the movie version of West Side Story (and learned about dubbing) — not going to lie, my five-year-old heart broke a little bit.

Eventually I got over it. After a while, I was able to still watch and enjoy West Side Story for all the fabulous dancing and Sondheim lyrics, and beautiful (even if piped-in) music. It will forever be one of my favorite films of all time. It was groundbreaking and brilliant. I’m not going to lie though, it was never quite the same. I will never watch it without wondering (or googling now) who is really singing, wondering about the acting and character in the voice that is coming from a different human than who we see on screen.

Julie Andrews movies also helped me through this difficult time (thank goodness they actually always let her do her own singing, she’s a goddess).

Cut to the present, sometimes even when we are talking about the recording industry and mainstream pop music, my mind often wanders to issues of authentic performance and recording, singing and acting. The difference between good mixing, capturing something “true” in performance during recording and studio flattening mediocritizing waste.

There is even more of an emphasis on this with movie musicals in my mind. Which doesn’t mean I don’t enjoy nearly ALL of them. There have been some really fun and even great movie musicals over the years, but I do notice and critique choices in the recording. Sometimes choices that don’t quite fit the performance choices on set.

So why is Tom Hooper’s Les Mis a game changer? I truly believe this one is different from anything we’ve ever seen.

With Anne Hathaway’s raw and wrenching version of “I Dreamed a Dream” in the first trailer and now this extended first look (an in-depth explanation of how they are approaching the entire concept of music on screen) — without even seeing the entire film, it’s becoming obvious that Tom Hooper (and a phenomenal cast) are doing something amazing by recording all the vocals live on set during filming.

Some of my favorite films and in my opinion, some of the best films ever made, are particularly good adaptations of plays. Some directors have an absolute gift for taking the sheer power of the stage and putting it on screen without allowing the screen to diffuse it at all – to remove us from the impact.

Mike Nichols has done it a few times, I’m not sure anyone can watch Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf without feeling as deeply unsettled as you would sitting in a theatre. His miniseries version of Angels in America is the definitive one as far as I’m concerned. And Closer was brilliant and uncomfortable to watch, many people didn’t realize that was an adaptation, but I knew right away even though I hadn’t been familiar with the play before. There was something different in the writing, the cadence of the dialogue and even the blocking on set.

Good adaptations of plays to movies are theatrical in a noticeably different way, making the best of the dramatic elements and taking the perfect amount of advantage of the medium.

Great film can do many things that great theater does very differently and I appreciate them both in different ways. The fusion of the two however, in a great adaptation achieves something compelling emotionally that I’m having difficult finding the words for. It’s something that lives in my gut, something somehow related to being a heartbroken 5 year old watching “West Side Story” with new eyes and struggling to find the truest part of what I fell in love with there.

I guess it might be a bit premature to say for sure that Tom Hooper’s version of Les Misérables will change everything or anything, but I feel that he’s doing something similar to what Mike Nichols (and many other talented directors and casts) did to bring some of the most brilliant plays to the screen and he’s doing it with one of the most brilliant and evocative musicals of all time.

That alone is something interesting and admirable — and also what makes the trailer and the extended look so compelling even as stand-alone pieces.  (The cinematography and editing should also be noted here, because it’s pretty damn spectacular.)

So even if it’s not a mainstream cinema game-changer, for people who grew up loving Les Mis or love movie musicals or theater in general, it probably already is.

For those of us who still cry in dark theaters when the tension breaks or someone’s voice cracks at the right moment, or someone hits an incredible note or an orchestra swells. Or sometimes just watching videos on youtube of Bernadette Peters singing “Unexpected Song”…  (So admittedly, it doesn’t take much to make me cry, ok?)

This film is not just adapting a work, it’s being created as a hybrid, it’s is changing the process of a production in order to access the truest parts of the characters AND the music simultaneously.

If you read all this, the entire very confessional extended em0-rant, and have been getting what I’m saying from West Side Story on — 1. Thanks for sticking with me. 2. Bottom line: this movie is being made for people like us. AND 3. That’s so incredibly exciting.

I’m a total Olympics fangirl. I also have a longstanding crush on London. Needless to say, I’ve been looking forward to the opening ceremonies and these events for weeks. I thought Danny Boyle did an extraordinary job with the opening ceremonies and there was a lot that I loved about it. That is going to have to be a separate post though, because right now, I need to rant.

So what has NBC done wrong? Let’s count the ways (so far, since we are only a day into the games):

1. The Unprecedented “Free” Coverage aka Epic Collaboration With Greedy Cable Companies & Corporate Sponsors

I heard on a radio news program weeks ago that NBC would be making more content available online, streaming for free, than ever before! Had it been true, this would have been a huge deal for these Olympics and a growing American public that has been turning towards the internet for more and more content as powerful and greedy cable corporations continue to dominate, restrict access and content and overcharge the masses. It wasn’t.

All the hoopla, preparing people for unprecedented free content was for nothing.  It’s content that can only be accessed if you are already a cable television subscriber. The BBC is offering everyone in Great Britain unrestricted access to pretty much everything online, with no ads or commercials interrupting events. The IOC has a handy youtube channel for everyone in the world to watch events for free, except for us. If you are accessing it from inside the USA, you get only clips and a redirection to NBC. And they expect us to believe that this is about advancement of technology, accessibility and spirit of global unity? NBC is owned by Comcast. You do the math.

And here’s a bonus douchbag punch very few people are talking about – you don’t just have to be a cable subscriber (because I have a basic cable package that comes with my internet), you have to pay for a certain level of package and that’s just bullshit. I logged into my online service just fine, I got to the page with the Olympic events. I clicked on one and an “I’m sorry” message popped up, immediately followed by an ad trying to get me to immediately pay for an upgrade. Quelle Suprise.

We know it’s all about the money, NBC. I’m just so tired of corporations throttling everything that happens in our culture. Just stop pretending you are on our side.

Moving along to their opening ceremonies gaffs… in which NBC goes for gold as if “pissing on us and telling us it’s raining” is a brand new sport…

2. No live broadcast.

A prime-time broadcast was necessary to please advertisers, this is expected. However, why did it have to be the only broadcast? Showing it live and then rebroadcasting was not a ridiculous option. Neither is live-streaming it online. This was their statement:

“We are live streaming every sporting event, all 32 sports and 302 medals. It was never our intent to live stream the Opening Ceremony or Closing Ceremony. They are complex entertainment spectacles that do not translate well online because they require context, which our award-winning production team will provide for the large prime-time audiences that gather together to watch them.

We will be providing clips and highlights of each ceremony online so viewers know what to look forward to in primetime on NBC.”

Fuck. This. Noise. Something is lost when an event, even a “complex entertainment spectacle” that is designed to be a massive global event, is tape-delayed. It loses the surprises, the opportunities for genuine reaction and shared experience. It loses the ability for me to log on to Twitter and connect with a global conversation happening. Just no. Just unacceptable.

This experience was cheapened by NBC making the profit-maximizing decision. One that also allowed…

3. Chopping the Opening Ceremonies to Bits
I had read tweets that tipped me off last night as I was trying to enjoy Danny Boyle’s vision (more on that later), that we were watching a highly edited version. It was only today when I was able to rewatch it, this time on BBC One, that I realized just how much we truly missed.

We frequently noticed some choppy camera work and we thought it was just wonky. No, it was actually, literally choppy. NBC frequently cut-away from moments of music, crowd-reaction and dance sequences. They showed none of the applause, bows and teary-eyed volunteer performers that I found really emotionally satisfying and compelling after each segment, opting to abruptly end them. They cut to commercial in the middle of several parts and did not return to the same place to continue.

So disappointing, but this is editing and a certain amount was expected. What wasn’t expected, however, was blatantly cutting out entire portions for no good reason. Most egregious among them, a really incredible memorial tribute to victims of terrorism. You can see it here on Deadspin. What we saw instead was Ryan Seacrest’s aggressively boring interview with Michael Phelps. To be fair, even if it was riveting, it had no place being in the middle of the effing opening ceremonies.

They also omitted a really cool Sex Pistols bit, which is less of an issue of respect, but still disappointing. I can’t find a decent video of it, but it was part of the montage of pop music, immediately after the awesome Queen part. Paying tribute to punk was not unimportant in a entire bit highlighting Britain’s contributions to pop culture.

4. Offensively Terrible Commentary

It was actually just offensive and embarrassing how awful the commentary by Matt Lauer and Meredith Vieira was. Painful. First off, it was way too much. There was no tasteful introduction tempered with allowing us to observe quietly and hear the music for extended periods. Nope. Constant. Distracting. Chatter.

It was obviously poorly “scripted” – one of the justifications for the tape delay was needing to script it so that American audiences would understand the complexity – and it was clear that they were directed to narrate as if we were were all five years old and watching the Macy’s Parade.

I also don’t know how much of their delivery was scripted or ad-libbed, but they sounded uninformed and ignorant themselves. During Danny Boyle’s tribute to British Pop Culture, the Digital Age and Youth, they harped – literally repeatedly harped on teenagers being “a parent’s worst nightmare”. Oh those kids and their gadgets, har har har! Way to miss the point, assholes.

To add insult to injury, that particular segment ended with Sir Tim Berners-Lee, there in person, tweeting his iconic ideal (the words lighting up in the crowd around the arena) “This is For Everyone.”  And Meredith Viera says “If you don’t know who Berners-Lee is, don’t worry…neither do we”. That kind of statement with a laughing tone doesn’t just say “I’m uninformed,” which is embarrassing enough for a national news anchor, it says “Don’t know? Who cares?”

Why should we? It’s not like the creator of the world wide web is an integral part of American culture too, right? Ugh. It’s bad enough we don’t give a shit about other countries, but can we at least agree that it’s fucking shameful to ignore science and technology and refuse to learn our own history?

The Parade of Nations was a shitshow involving awkward and sometimes inappropriate commentary about war, scandals and politics interjected when they were supposed to be honoring the athletes. And then when there was important and appropriate moments to provide more information – for example discussing the countries that sent women this year for the first time, making this the first Olympics with women from all nations, they were flippant and dusted over it. They didn’t even show the Saudi Arabian women – which is a huge deal.

5. Honoring Danny Boyle’s creative vision with a brief interview… or not… How about that Queen?

This killed me. I was really excited to get to hear Danny Boyle say a few words about his show. Throughout this process, his emphasis was on the thousands of British volunteer performers and participants who made this possible. He was very clear to include the construction workers who built the stadium at an integral moment in the show. It’s obvious his vision was about so much more than pagentry. So what did our American Commentator ask about first? Working with the Queen of course. Fine, fine… whatever, Americans know who the Queen is… moving along. Oh WAIT. There was no moving along. In fact, she rudely interrupted him to redirect him BACK to the Queen.

For those of you who missed it, here is a recap of what happened (more or less):

Meredith: And now we get to talk to Danny Boyle! Danny, out of this entire really beautiful and creative display, the big moment, the money shot* was obviously James Bond and the Queen! Tell us what it was like working with the Queen!!! How did you get her to agree to this? What was it like? What was it like? What was it like? Queen Queen Queen Queen Queen?

Danny Boyle:  Well, you know, it was all arranged through other people, so I didn’t actual have to ask her directly, but the working part was fun. She’s really sharp, takes direction well. HOWEVER, let me talk for a minute about all our volunteers and I specifically also wanted to highlight one of the most important parts of this show were the people who built this arena—

Meredith: No but really, Danny, focus – Queen! Queen! Queen! She is known for her sense of humor! Queen blah blah blah Queen!

Danny Boyle: ((Looks at the camera like “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me, America.”))

—–

And that was it. I’m only barely exaggerating. Her rudeness was beyond.

*Oh and I didn’t make that part up, she actually used the phrase “money shot” in reference to James Bond and the Queen.

Stay classy, NBC.

I just watched this movie and then was sitting down to write a different blog post, but I couldn’t focus because all of this was stuck in my brain. A movie is never just a movie. These are the type of things I think about.

See also: times when I wish I could turn off my “critical analysis” mechanism.

1. I’ve seen this movie dozen of times. Why is it that I always forget how truly awful Mickey Rooney’s racist character and performance is? Really bad. Really, really offensive and bad.  And purposefully so, even within the context of the time period.

2. Times may change, but vapid parties are forever. Apparently huge parties based on image over substance are an constant in this universe.  Wealth and hipsters then, wealth and hipsters now.

3. I love Audrey deeply. She obviously created this film character the the movie version of Holly is iconic. However, I can also never watch this without thinking of the parallel character of Holly from the book. The other Holly, I always imagined, looks more like a young Mia Farrow.  That Holly is a scrawny chameleon tomboy/bohemian/socialite mash-up. I always imagined her as a different kind of woman who ran on charm more than natural elegance, where the movie Holly has that streak and is quirky, but still kind of floats through on Audrey’s grace.

4. That emotional scene where she says to Doc “Stop calling me that, I’m not your Lulamae anymore.” never sits right with me.  It’s directed well and Audrey brings the emotion perfectly, but there is a complexity that the writing never gets at.  Because she both is (in terms of how parts of us are different to different people) and never was Lulamae (because whoever she decides Holly is, even if she is constantly reinventing herself, that is always the truest part, the most vital part). None of the lines in this movie really speak to that, especially the end. Which brings me to another point…

5. That whole bit about her running away and keeping herself in cages at the end… You know, the part where the dude tells her all about herself  - even though I understand how and why it fits for the movie’s love story – I don’t care for it. She’s way too complex for that. I just wish that the script, in some places, let Holly be that complex.  She is treated as a broken thing. Her quirks and choices are seen as escapes and defenses. And maybe some of them are, but that really isn’t for anyone else to say, especially not anyone who is trying to love her. The movie could have handled a bit more of her complexity, humanity. Audrey certainly could have handled it as an actress – she would have ripped it open, the way she does in The Children’s Hour when she has to dance through 800 levels of “not talking about being a lesbian” – the tension in that movie is incredible. Breakfast at Tiffany’s lacks some tension where it would have potentially been brilliant.

6. The book is not a love story, or rather it is, but not a romantic love story. The narrator in the book (the writer, whom she calls Fred) is gay. It’s a story about connection. It’s a story about human stories. I love this movie, but again, when the culmination is a confrontation and kiss-in-the-rain scene, I really actually prefer Capote’s original vision. The one that ends with Fred sitting in a bar thinking about this girl he used to know. Where no one is ever allowed to keep Holly.  Even Holly.

7. I wonder if the dude who wrote that terrible “What About Breakfast at Tiffany’s” song in the 90’s ever actually saw this fucking movie. That is one of the worst and most disingenuous songs about breaking up/staying together ever.

Sidenote:  I always find it odd that Audrey sings in this movie and does a lovely job, but they wouldn’t allow her to sing in My Fair Lady. What was that about?

Fun trivia: Marni Nixon, who sings in My Fair Lady also was the dubbing voice for Maria, and some of Anita’s vocal parts in West Side Story. She got paid shit for it too and often the actresses were kept in the dark about what they were actually recording. So it was a totally fucked situation for all the women involved.  And also, my heart broke a little the day I found out that Nathalie Wood didn’t really sing!

Waste of talent. Waste of time. Terrible movie.

It might have been salvageable and decently fun, had the entire movie been about Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone’s characters. Maybe not. Maybe I could just watch Ryan Gosling do anything

The directing alternated between boring and weird. The writing was way too trite to take itself this seriously (or was it even more trite that it did take itself this seriously?)

Also, congrats on the barely having one likeable (Emma Stone) female character, who only has 3 scenes in the movie while the rest of them were portrayed as some combination of crazy, cheating, weak or stupid.