Monday, December 28, 2009

Sherlock Holmes, the movie -- great fun, even though it's ridiculous

Sherlock Holmes, directed by Guy Ritchie. Robert Downey Jr. as Holmes (a pretty good Holmes), Jude Law as Watson (bears no resemblance to the original Watson -- this Watson is a street-fighting stud who dresses nattily), and Michael Strong, as Lord Blackwood (who looks like a 30s movie Dracula).

The new Sherlock Holmes film (no title other than the name?) is a lot of fun. It's really an action film, from start to finish. Much of the time, I had no idea what was going on. And what was going on was preposterous. Doesn't matter.

A couple of things I missed, that I wish they would think about for the sequel: 1) the Holmes stories were always, at bottom, realistic. They presented Holmes and Watson with an inexplicable event or mystery (a person disappears, a crime is committed with seemingly no clues left behind). Holmes always proves that the crime CAN be explained. If we go too far over the edge into the fantastical and unrealistic, then we're left with Holmes and Watson as cartoon figures. 2) We're in late 19th century London and, as Doyle did with the original stories, it's good to linger on the details of the story, or of life. The movie does that a little, but in its rush to get to the next action scene, it obliterates Holmes's background solidity. He meditates. He thinks. He walks slowly and ponders sometimes.

But it's a decent romp all the same.

Friday, December 25, 2009

Up in the Air, a movie that does not make sense

Up in the Air is a modest film that tries hard to say something profound and yet be light and bouncy. I didn't dislike the movie. I like George Clooney, the main character, and I liked his depiction of a man whose job it is to fire people, a man who must stay up in the air flying, always moving, striking and then flying again to the next spot unencumbered by family, possessions, or steady relationships. It's no coincidence that he speaks warmly of sharks in his motivational speeches to audiences of corporate managers.

In the movie, he seems to discover that he might want that family, possessions, and steady relationships after all. He sees his life as vacuous. He attempts to recover these things through Alex, a female flying shark. But it doesn't work out. We end the movie with George Clooney looking gloomy and unsatisfied, which is how I felt.

Up in the Air looks like it was shot over a weekend. I know that the director and screenwriter, Jason Reitman, gets a lot of hype for having serious film creds, but the filmcraft here is uneven. The sound ambiance is unchanging. Clooney is addressing a conference hall full of people, through a microphone, yet we hear his baritone voice no differently than when he speaks to his boss in an office. We don't hear the sound of an amplified voice, nor the room ambiance. Thus, the sound fails to contribute to the movie's emotions. Is this just laziness on the part of the director? An unforgiving deadline? The soundtrack consists of a few cheesy songs meant to mirror the plot. And there is the constant use of closeups. Clooney's face constantly fills the screen, as do the other characters. There's rarely a long shot showing a larger scene, or the relationships of the characters to each other. It's boring visually.

This is a movie about inner, spiritual turmoil. What should I do with my life? What should I do next? Yet, religion doesn't exist in the film. It doesn't exist in any American film I can remember. Priests and rabbis are generally either buffoons or rapacious hucksters, if they're depicted at all. Even the wedding in Up in the Air is devoid of religious scenery. Religion doesn't help sell movies, or the product placements (American Airlines seems to be the only airline in America, and a giant economy size A1 Sauce is naturally what a bachelor wants in his fridge). Yet, the movie can only make sense with some attempt to confront Clooney's spiritual and religious consciousness. And since that's absent, the movie does not make sense.

Tuesday, December 22, 2009

Richard Wright's Native Son is gripping and painful

Native Son (Harper, 1940), by Richard Wright . A novel on CD by Harperaudio.com. Excellently read and performed by Peter Francis James.

I have listened to more than half of the novel, and I am always sorry when I either get to the parking lot at work, or the garage at home, and I have to turn off the car.

Once Bigger Thomas, the young black man whose mind and thoughts and skin and sweat is detailed in the story, commits murder, I felt as if his nightmare were mine. I found myself imagining a different sequence of events for Bigger, that he would have found a way to control his fear when Mrs. Dalton appeared in the doorway, that he would not have suffocated Mary Dalton, that he would go on to work for the Daltons as their driver, that he would move his mother, brother, and sister out of the rat-infested room they live in, that he would make sure his brother and sister went to school -- a happy ending. But no, Bigger thinks out what he's going to do, and he does it, and it's not happy -- it means carrying a dead white woman down the stairs in a trunk, stuffing her body into a burning coal furnace. It's ghastly. It's depraved. It's hard to listen to.

All the characters act with an almost scary realism. The blacks and whites are as I, and I bet most other Americans who haven't lived sequestered lives, have known them to be.

Saturday, December 12, 2009

The saddest line spoken anywhere:

"Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow"

- Macbeth (upon hearing that Lady Macbeth is dead)

He goes on:

"Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
the way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!...."

Macbeth -- a murderer goaded on to his crimes by his now dead wife.

Friday, December 11, 2009

Anderson Cooper's book "Dispatches from the Edge"

Dispatches from the Edge, by Anderson Cooper (Harper Collins, 2006)

Cooper's desire to see and be where the action is (usually natural and manmade disasters, wars, upheavals) propels him to work on the edge, reporting for CNN and others on the human misery he encounters. The book journals his coverage for the year 2005, and includes Iraq, Bosnia, Rwanda, and Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans. His own misery (a retelling of his father's early death, and the suicide of his brother) is intertwined with the reports, though I'm not sure to what end.

His narrative of the behind the scenes activities reads as a somewhat repetitive amplification rather than clarification of the events themselves. There isn't a lot of insight. He's not really interested in illuminating the events and places. What he wants is to give us a sense of what it's like to be Anderson Cooper. He partly succeeds, though he probably doesn't need an entire book to accomplish this. The workings of the media are presented, and his groping to understand his role in it, but he doesn't turn much attention on his employers (perhaps because they are, after all, his current employers). We're convinced that he's a good guy, but that's not a big enough subject.

Cantalina's Sunday afternoon concert "Northern Lights"

Cantilena (a women's chorale) in a "Northern Lights" concert of Scandinavian choral music (Hovland, Grieg, Heiller, Sallinen, and others), Sunday, December 6, 2009.

It was a likable concert last Sunday afternoon. Their new director Allegra Martin looks like a teenager. We loved the Elgar, and the Sallinen Songs from the Sea. We thought the instrumental musicians were excellent, adding some tonal variety to the concert. The pieces they did with the choir were very effective. The Rautavaara pieces based on Lorca's poetry filled the place with an eerie, dissonant unease.

I can't say that I'd want to listen to an all women's chorus frequnently, but we enjoyed it. A surprisingly good crowd, probably more than 120 people.

An interesting note in the program book: the Scandinavian countries have a higher rate of participation in choral groups than any other nations. Perhaps 10% of Sweden's population sings in a choir.