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(02/10/14 3:27am)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>Commonly regarded as one of the most influential German tragedies ever written, Georg Büchner’s “Woyzeck” was performed Friday night at the Wells-Metz Theater. Though the play was left unfinished at the time of the writer’s death in 1837, it is said to resonate with performers and audience members alike as the first “modern tragedy” and as a forward-thinking critique of socio-economic class divide. “There are many themes coursing through ‘Woyzeck’ that are eerily applicable to our modern society,” performer Joe Cadiff said.“The first is the glaring class disparity.” Cadiff, who plays the drum major with whom Woyzeck’s lover has an affair, described the role as larger than life.“The primary distinction between modern tragedy and those before it is ... the socio-economic status of the protagonist,” Cadiff said. “‘Woyzeck’ is obviously a modern tragedy as it is centered around the struggles of a poor soldier, his ‘whore’ and their ‘bastard’ child.”Cadiff said his character takes what he wants.“It is this ruthless fulfillment of his desires that provides a catalyst for the central action of the play,” he said. In order to highlight the superiority of the officers in the play, the drum major and three other characters wore stilts and extended trousers. They towered over the other characters.Costume designer Barbara Abbott said the whole experience challenged her in ways she could never have foreseen. “I became the person responsible for maintaining the stilts; troubleshooting and fixing problems as they arose,” she said in an email. “I had to learn as I went along.”Woyzeck, described by Abbott as an otherwise thoughtful and kind man, is forced into a violent conclusion by the stresses and demands of his divided world. The tragedy of his downfall and the murder he commits have been immortalized in various genres, from the opera “Wozzeck” composed between 1914 and 1922 by the noted atonalist Alban Berg to a 1978 film by Werner Herzog. Playing the sadistic and psychologically abusive doctor, another character in stilts, Jacob Halbleib said he encountered complexities in his role. The abuse of the doctor, as well as the trauma engendered by the drum major, are ultimately responsible for the play’s tragic end. “He loves to watch pain, his experiments more often than not harm others,” Halbleib said. “Money has never been his problem, but he is still greedy.”
(02/06/14 5:00am)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>Year 2013 was good for writers.To begin with, Steve McQueen’s adaption of Solomon Northup’s “Twelve Years a Slave,” about a free man enslaved for his color, was released in the fall to near-universal critical acclaim. John Krokidas made his directorial debut with “Kill Your Darlings,” a somewhat premature homage to the Beat generation of writers of the 1960s including Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs.Now, we have “The Invisible Woman,” the handiwork of director, actor, Shakespearean and former leader of the Death Eaters, Ralph Fiennes. Based upon the book by English literary biographer Claire Tomalin, the film details the life of Charles Dickens and his affair with the titular actress, Nelly Ternan.Fiennes would appear to be working with very rich material. The amount of debauchery, drugs and general bawdiness that accompany writers’ lives makes modern celebrity sex tapes look like afternoon PBS.When we first see Nelly, played by Felicity Jones, with sad eyes and a bottled, quivering emotion, like someone who has not yet come to terms with the bad decisions she made in the past, the year is 1883. It is 13 years after the death of Dickens, and Nelly, who is putting on a performance of the master’s play “No Thoroughfare,” is in 20 pounds of Victorian dress, walking across a beach so fast she kicks up her skirts like a rockette. The allusion is to Wilkie Collin’s 1868 novel “The Moonstone,” in which a young servant who has fallen in love with an aristocrat saves her reputation by drowning herself in the sands of a beach. It’s a good motif and Fiennes comes back to it repeatedly in order to illustrate Nelly’s attempt to abandon the tragedy she continuously relives.This production of “No Thoroughfare” brings us back roughly 20 years earlier to Nelly’s own days on the stage, when she first worked with Dickens to premiere the drama. The writer Dickens, played by Fiennes with finesse, is a wonderful and believable caricature of the real Charles. He talks the same way he writes — in walls of words — and smiles with a chipper madness, clearly pleased with his universal success and wanting everyone to be pleased for him as well. Actors who play writers sometimes make the mistake of overdramatizing their source characters. Woody Allen’s 2011 “Midnight In Paris,” a romantic comedy that squeezes itself halfway in modern society, halfway in the 1920s Lost Generation of writers, gives Earnest Hemingway too much eloquence and Scott Fitzgerald too much dignity. The viewer gains the familiar perspective but loses the truth — these men lived much of their lives in solitude and were probably not the most charming cocktail companions.Fiennes’s Dickens deviates between celebrity and truant, but never quite manages to escape life’s banalities. One day in the life of the author has Dickens peeing, shuffling through story proofs and stumbling in on his naked wife. This is a success. However, what ultimately works best, and worst, for the film is the viewer never clearly understands why Dickens chooses to elope with Nelly. She’s younger and prettier than his wife, and does everything but squeal that she’s his number one fan — which is, for the master, perhaps worth risking a reputation over. But when they talk about love or spill the tragedies of their early lives, it’s not believable. For a relationship that lasted 10 years, the little depth that it’s given is shocking. In fact, most of the film is not even about the affair, but about its lead up and aftermath. When it does end, hazily, unsurely, the closure provides no resolution because the whole relationship was never very believable. There are approximately two scenes to illustrate the relationship. This is a problem because it provides no substance for the tortured Nelly we see on the beach 13 years later. The bildungsroman we’re supposed to read in Nelly’s affair is there, only without the bildungs. With Tom Hollander as Wilkie Collins, Dickens’s faithful lackey, “The Invisible Woman” is a portrait of a writer’s secret life that makes up for its lack of substance through scenic beauty and compelling performances by Fiennes and Jones. The film wants us to believe the life we see is not the life that’s led, but in aspiring to portray Dickens like one of his heroes — a redeeming Sydney Carton, a victorious John Harmon — it never gets beyond second-rate.
(02/05/14 5:02am)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>On Oct. 31, 1963, the renowned variety show host Ed Sullivan made this remark in London Heathrow Airport. He had never heard of the group before and was stunned to see Beatlemania well underway in Great Britain. More than 1,500 ecstatic teenagers congregated at the airport to welcome the band home from a tour in Sweden. When Sullivan asked what all the commotion was, he was told it was because of the Beatles. Sullivan’s curiosity was struck.Fifty years ago Sunday — Feb. 9, 1964 — marks the day he introduced the Beatles to the United States. But before the Beatles’ now-infamous debut on the Ed Sullivan Show, the group performed at the Royal Variety Performance in London, an event that drew performance artists to entertain British royalty. The Beatles were billed as the seventh act out of 19 and would be playing for none other than Queen Elizabeth and Princess Margaret. They were nervous, but had not lost any of the charm or cheeky humor that had already made them popular. Earlier that night, John Lennon had told Brian Epstein, the group’s manager, he was planning to crack a joke with the upscale audience.This came just before the band launched into “Twist and Shout,” their rousing closer. “For our last number I’d like to ask your help,” John said to the audience. “Would the people in the cheaper seats clap your hands? And the rest of you, if you’ll just rattle your jewelry.” With those words and a quick thumbs-up to the Queen Mother, John launched the song.The gesture of playful defiance and bold whimsy found its American audience a short time later. Peter Prichard, a London theatrical agent who worked for Sullivan, contacted Epstein soon after about “spreading the gospel of the Beatles in the U.S.A.” on the Ed Sullivan Show.Sullivan had been curious about the Beatles back in Heathrow, and he was curious now. But he still didn’t know how he was going to promote the group until Prichard mentioned they were the first “long-haired boys” to perform for the Queen Mother. Aspects of their American debut, from Sullivan’s introductory statement being drowned out by the hysterical audience to the length of the Beatles’ hair, are now infamous.“They looked so different, and the music sounded so different,” said Mike Conway, who teaches a history of journalism course. “I don’t know what today we would compare it to.” This is due, in no small part, to the state of the media 50 years ago. A majority of Americans owned a television in 1964, but there were only three channels.One of the channels was CBS, the network that hosted the Ed Sullivan Show. Sullivan achieved national acclaim for his abilities to scout young talent, playing host to Elvis Presley eight years before the Beatles and pioneering a young Itzhak Perlman in 1958.He was recognized as an enduring media presence.“Ed Sullivan’s just became — from how long it lasted — the most important variety show,” Conway said. Sullivan was able to pull off unconventional acts, including Elvis’s controversial hips, without sacrificing the reputation he maintained with his older, more conservative followers. “He was a risk taker,” Conway said, “but he wasn’t going to risk his reputation.” Few would deny to recognize the foresight Sullivan displayed to premiere the Beatles. More than 73 million viewers tuned in to watch the four youngsters sing “All My Loving.” The instant and overwhelming popularity made the harsh, critical backlash the group originally received seem culturally quaint. Lesser known to the public is the fact that CBS had completed a film report on the Beatles back in November, which was filed by Alexander Kendrick. “Besides being merely the latest objects of adolescent adulation and culturally the modern manifestation of compulsive tribal singing and dancing, the Beatles are said by sociologists to have a deeper meaning,” Kendrick said. “They symbolize the 20th century non-hero, as they make non-music, wear non-haircuts.”The Beatles’ story, originally aired Nov. 22, was re-released. Jacobs School of Music professor Glenn Gass, who teaches “The Music of the Beatles,” said the band’s popularity marked a change in American culture.“We could finally exhale,” Gass said. “Suddenly, it was OK to have fun.”Gass described the Beatles in their early years as the leaders of a bold, new generation that so many would come to see them as later.He said the band was like America’s hip older brothers. Gass’ course, taught for more than 30 years, is the longest-running Beatles appreciation course in the nation.He said his appreciation for the band began when he saw them on the Ed Sullivan Show. “That was the moment my life rebooted,” Gass said. “Rock ’n’ roll really defined the teenager as something more than a transition between childhood and adult.” Elvis may have been responsible for bringing rock ’n’ roll into the public’s focus, but the controversy he created did not make him a well-received public figure in the eyes of adults concerned for the well-being of their children. But the Beatles kept youth culture a priority in songs like “I Want to Hold Your Hand.”“They were fun and buoyant and cheery enough to be very child-friendly,” Gass said.Gass maintains his intense personal and emotional connection with the Beatles. When he attended the band’s 1966 performance at the Washington Coliseum — a performance picketed by the Ku Klux Klan angered by John’s famous claim that the band was “more popular than Jesus” — the event left an indelible impression on him. “It was like seeing the pope from a mile away,” Gass said. Many Beatles’ fans have expressed a similar, personal relationship. “There’s something real about it,” said Douglas Babb, a professor of class about the Beatles and Pink Floyd. “There’s something true about it.” Babb has a weekly radio show as “Dr. Spin, The World’s Only All Vinyl D.J.” His Friday performance at Smee’s Place in Indianapolis will feature a 12-album homage to the Beatles. Still touring hot off their television debut in 1964, the Beatles arrived at the Indiana State Fairgrounds in Indianapolis for a 10,000-person show that sold out so quickly, another show was booked later that night. Ringo Starr, awake and wandering around the fairgrounds at four in the morning, was approached by a policeman and asked if he wanted to take a ride around the town. The two eventually ended up at the policeman’s home in Carmel, where the officer’s unlikely breakfast guest astonished his daughters. “There’s a lot of folklore behind the Beatles,” Babb said. “But more people are familiar with the music, and far fewer with the story behind it — the friendship and the story that these four guys took together.” The Grammy award-winning music writer and critic Anthony DeCurtis has spent more than 30 years writing for Rolling Stone and getting to the heart of that story. He has conducted interviews with the Beatles, including George Harrison, in an experience he described as amazing.“I was really just trying to absorb it,” DeCurtis said. “There were a few moments. The first was when he asked me how Paul was doing. I thought, ‘This is what’s become of the Beatles. George Harrison having to ask me how Paul McCartney was doing.’” DeCurtis’ experience also reveals a level of complexity to the Beatles’ relationships with one another after the 1970 breakup. When DeCurtis answered, he thought McCartney was a little controlling.DeCurtis recalled George responded with a smile. “There was a kind of intimacy to it,” he said. “It was a complicated moment.”During seven years of recording, the Beatles marked the transition from simple, fine-crafted pop songs of “Please Please Me” to the symphonic explosions in “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.” They took pop music to something greater. “They dared to say ‘we are high art,’” Gass said. “And it didn’t feel that different to go between the Beatles and Beethoven.”Fifty years after their appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show, listeners will certainly return to the Beatles canon or perhaps experience it for the first time. “It’s a generation celebrating the momentous change that took place,” Gass said. The nostalgia and the feelings surrounding the Beatles remain powerfully tangible and elusively delicate. The feeling is perhaps like a Beatles song covered by a later band. It veils aspects of the original, and yet the original song remains with clarity. With it comes the unmistakable presence of the Fab Four, as close to listeners as they were 50 years ago. “It’s a passage for a new generation,” Babb said. The generation that was not born when Ed Sullivan revealed his four mop tops, that never followed the Beatles in real-time through their rapid-fire career, will have to decide for itself how it will interpret the Beatles’ narrative. Fifty years spent celebrating the Beatles’ legacy may be an attempt to create such a happy ending. For many, however, the day will pass into obscurity. The Beatles’ music — the love and spirituality it inspires, the companionship it celebrates and the youth it eternalized — will be neither more nor less significant on this anniversary than on any other day. Still, others will celebrate the times that were and not bother with the narrative at all. “It was a great pop culture phenomenon, whatever it was,” DeCurtis said. “It was fun."
(01/30/14 5:00am)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>Denver became the first city in the United States to legalize the selling of marijuanaa little more than three weeks ago. For rather obvious reasons, this thought came to mind as I listened to the debut album “The Bright Side” by the Massachusetts-born rap duo Aer last week. “Good kush in my pockets / Chicks at my spot be the hottest / Air Max under my new corduroys / Neighbors telling me to turn down the noise,” David von Mering raps in “Kush in My Pockets.” As much as booze, the hard life and beautiful women, marijuana use is a staple of rap — the utilitarian symbol of chill-out, a designation of protest against the overly-regulated, overly-capitalized world — most rap ironizes, parodies and, occasionally, laments.But these lyrics came from 2012, back when marijuana legalization was still the murmur of the municipalities and not the buzz of the students.Aer, practically their same college-age selves who had managed to forge a promising career out of a small university music website, had found pristine middle ground between reggae rock and rap, which had been all but monopolized by California big shots like Sublime, Pepper and the Expendables.The lyrics, like the marijuana, were clichés, but Aer was working with what it knew, and it had enough style to pull it off. It was also working with what had worked in the past.So what happens when the marijuana begins to be accepted society? When rappers blew their smoke rings in the faces of their critics, the gesture implied an idea of protest. Will the relationship continue to work in the liberalized 2014?Aer, on their self-titled album, does not attempt to look so far into the future. Most of the album is backwards looking; though, to be fair, there is substance behind the lyrics. The two, mostly von Mering, are gifted at speed rapping — able to pellet lyrics with enough vocalization they still convey emotion — and this speed is juxtaposed well with broad choruses.“If sleeping home alone means I’m on my way, / Then you and I should call it a day,” goes the opening track, “Spades, Clubs, & Diamonds” the speed of the lyric matched with the force of enunciation before von Mering sobers with the chorus, “Put these cards out on a table, / That’s the best that a man should know, / Thought I had chance but I read it wrong.”Unfortunately, this is about the sum of Aer’s perspective. What remains after creation is variation. “I’m Not Sorry”, decidedly reggae, jabs at an unfaithful ex and does little else other than continuously not make apologies about it.“Sincerely,” which attempts, and fails, to reconcile the same general theme — people who do one thing and say another — lapses into motivational-refrigerator-magnet-mantra: “If you want something grab it, if you have a beat stab it, / Shitload a legwork not just livin’ lash,” and, inadvertently, self-congratulation that is no where near flamboyantly egotistic enough to be justified. “Ex” is pure Sublime in its acoustic riffs, but it treats the theme tiredly, contrasting bodily lust with bad decisions and arriving at a revelation that doesn’t yield anything better than “temporary satisfaction” and “vicious cycle.” Nevertheless, when it wants to, the duo can record something truly memorable: something that boasts style and distinction.“Won’t Laugh,” the album’s strongest title, is also the song in which Aer finally recognizes their transition from college band mates to professionals. The lyrics typify this change. They open unimaginatively, thematically weightless: “I got tattoos, so people think I’m cool / Oh college, I’m better than school / And I smoke pot, it’s the only thing I do.”The beat is excellent, minimal, but tight, lightly syncopated and obviously inspired by indie rock and electronic. Interestingly, it doesn’t build, but it glides and lets the lyrics search for their originality.Aer is capable of small revelations when its scope allows the listener the perspective of the small people, the regrets that haven’t been cleared up, the fears of what comes next rather than mess it up with sentiments that don’t belong.Egotism and bad girlfriends fog and muddle a perspective that’s otherwise sobering and open when it’s being honest.
(01/27/14 4:00am)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>Two hundred years of traditional classical music combined with the latest in cutting-edge artistic technology Saturday night, during a performance by Fifth House Ensemble at Jacobs School of Music’s Auer Hall. The critically acclaimed chamber music ensemble from Chicago performed its piece “Black Violet: The Leagues of Despair.” The performance, which used a projector and various images, was a joint effort between the ensemble and graphic novelist Ezra Claytan Daniels. “We worked with the artist one-on-one to develop the music really to go with the story,” said Meredith Hite, Fifth House Ensemble’s oboist. “It really was a collaboration.”Daniels, the graphic novelist of the “Black Violet” drama, has been praised for pioneering the live art spectacle and for developing new ways to combine artistic genres. “There are all these beautiful characters in ‘Black Violet,’” Hite said. “Ezra is absolutely an amazing artist.” “Black Violet” was set during the last resurgence of the Great Plague in 17th century London. It chronicles the story of Violet, a black house cat who is ostracized by her community for being a suspected carrier of the plague. She wanders through the streets of London in search of her mistress. Daniels’ visual graphics are sketched in monochrome with characters bearing physically awkward joints and expressions.“The story is really dark,” Hite said.The ensemble employed pieces by five different artists, several of them contemporary, 20th and 21st century composers. In addition to the varied styles, the composers also come from a wide range of places like America, Germany and Brazil. Fifth House Ensemble celebrates these differences, but regards the music on its own standards, Hite said.“We judge by what music is good,” she said. “It doesn’t have to be old. It doesn’t have to be new. It has to be good.” The audience of more than 100 gave the performance two ovations.Chamber music ensembles traditionally do not collaborate or use visuals to narrate music. The genre dates back to the 17th-century Baroque period of music history and includes duets, string quartets, ensembles and small orchestras, which were played in small, single-room settings. Despite using a screen projector, Hite said she believes Fifth House Ensemble is a part of the same tradition. “The spirit of chamber music and how it began with a group of friends providing a small, intimate concert for themselves — we still try to bring that spirit to the community,” Hite said.Community involvement and interaction with others is part of Fifth House Ensemble’s mission to make its music immediately personal for audiences. In “Luna de Cuernos,” another collaboration in its 2013-14 season, Fifth House Ensemble set a Puerto Rican creation myth to music, and presented it to a Puerto Rican community in Chicago to engage the audience with its own cultural history.“What I love about Fifth House Ensemble is that we’re taking ourselves out of the equation,” Hite said. “We’re re-examining how the act appeals to the audience.”The musicians are not the only ones who notice the new direction in which their ensemble is taking music. Director of Marketing and Publicity for the School of Music Alain Barber was instrumental in bringing the ensemble to Auer Hall. “They have a completely different set of ideals,” Barker said at the performance. “They maintain their sense of quality and craft in what they do.” Other chamber music groups are also experimenting with the genre.“It’s really a trend across the United States,” said Barker. “Multiculturalism has become a future of where art is going.”Multiculturalism and the blending of artistic forms is also a musical tradition dating back to the 19th century.In 1830, the French composer Hector Berlioz premiered his Symphonie Fantastique, a piece of program music, or music that narrates a specific story, widely considered to be the first of its kind. Hite, however, said he views the music of “Black Violet” to be more interpretative.“I don’t ever want to assume that I think that the ‘Walter Piston Divertimento’ is a piece of program music,” she said, referring to one of the performance pieces. “We’re using it in a way to collaborate with narrative without disregarding the nature of what the composer intended.”Constance Glen, an audience member as well as a senior lecturer at the music school, noted the cutting-edge use of visuals in the performance. “They’re setting standards we want our students to know about,” Glen said. “They’re a very interesting group of musicians.” “Black Violet: The Leagues of Despair,” the first act in a three-act drama, ends on a cliffhanger. However, Fifth House Ensemble is not yet scheduled to return to Jacobs School of Music to complete the trilogy.“We’d love to come back and do acts two and three,” Hite said.
(01/23/14 5:00am)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>“High Hopes,” Bruce Springsteen’s 18th studio album, is actually my first Springsteen album.Admitting this is, I realize, a kind of blasphemy for any of us who style ourselves rock ’n’ roll listeners. Rock ’n’ roll without Springsteen is like literature without the modernists.“High Hopes” is, luckily, a good place to start making up for lost time. “Wrecking Ball,” the artist’s 2012 studio album, was angry and reactionary — the response of an artist who had spent the majority of his career celebrating an ideal America and finds that it no longer exists.Despite its positive critical reception, there is something unsettling in the transition from blazingly patriotic “Born in the USA” to bitter irony in “American Land.”Springsteen probably felt uncomfortable with his new outlook, which is why “High Hopes” is characterized by retrogression, both in perspective and in sound.Most of the songs on the album are covers, reboots or songs that the artist has performed before but has not found a suitable album to include them. Essentially, it’s an album of misfit tunes.That being said, most of the songs on “High Hopes” are excellent. Springsteen’s supreme gift — the ability to turn Heartland, Americana rock into a timeless tradition and not just a relic on a jukebox — makes almost every song sound fit for a stadium.“High Hopes,” for instance, takes a cue from Jersey Shore rock and adds a spunky brass section and keyboard to an already-lively chorus.The album nevertheless offers plenty of simpler messages to go along with its commentary.“Just like Fire Would” carries the theme of rough and tough — those good ole’ boys — with a series of images borrowed directly from the 1980s.Springsteen treats love and moral values the same way to far less effect on the album’s weakest songs, “Heaven’s Wall,” “Frankie Fell in Love,” and “This is Your Sword,” which never become more than charming, and which often fall into the category of self-parody.With his strong, gravelly voice, Springsteen is especially susceptible to passion, but when he trades his brass for a fiddle and groans lyrics like: “This is your sword, this is your shield/ This is the power of love revealed,” you wonder if the effort wouldn’t be better put toward karaoke or a rendition of Auld Lang Syne. Of course, we forgive the rock god for these mishaps. At its worst, “High Hopes” borders camp, but at its best, even the re-releases sound revolutionary.It would be a mistake to attempt and find a theme that ties all the songs of “High Hopes” together when its only theme is the artist’s history.However, you can marvel at the balance between the grandiose “Tom Joad” and the album’s incredible “American Skin (41 Shots)” from 2000. Springsteen wrote the song in response to the police shooting of the unarmed immigrant from Guinea, Amadou Diallo, but began performing it again on his “Wrecking Ball” tour last year in honor of Trayvon Martin, whose shooting in 2012 sparked international controversy.More intimate than even the artist’s devastating “Nebraska” from 1982, “American Skin” is as powerful and haunting as they come. It’s a rock ballad steeped in remorse so profound that Springsteen doesn’t sing his lyrics, he laments them and lets a chorus of mourners whisper the “41 Shots” that riddled Diallo’s body: “No secret my friend/ You can get killed just for living in your American skin.”With songs as timeless as this, Springsteen doesn’t need anything new.
(01/23/14 5:00am)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>Recently, it seems that every action thriller you go to see falls into one of two categories: the superhero story — a quick Google search will show five sequels and three origins films slated for a 2014 release, about two more than were released in 2013 — or the action thriller that tries too hard to act like Jason Bourne. Mercifully, “Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit,” a reboot of characters created by the late Tom Clancy, does not try to have it both ways, which just goes to show that director Kenneth Branagh, who also stars as the film’s villain, knows how to exercise restraint even when he’s pincushioning someone with bullets. Branagh has been quiet these past few years — the last time I saw him, as Laurence Olivier in “My Week with Marilyn,” he minced and screamed away at a despondent Michelle Williams while his eye, awkwardly clutching at a monocle, looked prepared to burst a blood vessel. Here, as a tight-lipped Russian villain, Branagh is content merely to stare at the camera for an uncomfortable amount of time and let the anger eek out of him. It’s an effective strategy — his face, which bears resemblance to Kevin Spacey’s Frank Underwood from “House of Cards” and Ronald Regan, is jaundiced and bulging like a rotted squash. You can look at it for only so long.Less effective is Chris Pine as the eponymous CIA analyst turned reluctant gunman. Having enjoyed a career playing sexy superstars with fast wits and faster trigger fingers, most recently in the newly adapted “Star Trek” franchise, Pine decides to buckle down with his character, who is — wait for it — a sexy superstar.But wait. We’ve seen this before, in 2002’s “The Sum of All Fears” where the character was sketched out by Ben Affleck, obviously uncomfortable taking over from Harrison Ford, but trying to work himself over it. Ford, whose effortless authority is clear and present in every scene, is still the best Jack Ryan to date.Pine’s too-golden boy — a red, white and blue-wired patriot who looks like he should still be in college, but is instead mixing himself up in foreign affairs.Kevin Costner, a predictably grizzled mentor, puts it best when he calls him a boy scout and watches as Pine responds with a sheepish grin. It’s a good line but it’s not his own. Henry Czerny said the same thing to Harrison Ford in “Clear and Present Danger,” and has to take a step back to keep Ford from throttling him. We meet Ryan in an extended opening sequence in which the character, an economics student in London, joins the Marines after the events of 9/11, is shot down while on a mission, sweats in physical therapy — partly from the exercise, mostly from flirting with Keira Knightley — and joins the CIA.We don’t need this opening sequence. It weeps with forced patriotism and mistakenly gives Ryan the aura of a triumphant hero, returned and recognizable, like Superman donning his uniform in a new remake. People of my generation will not be convinced that Jack Ryan is that famous.Ryan, who analyzes super-secret Russian assets on Wall Street and reports findings to the CIA, winds up in the motherland to audit some billion-dollar accounts he can’t access.Viktor Cheverein (Branagh) has sizeable investments in American companies, which he plans on suddenly withdrawing — just in time for a bomb he has planted to go off in New York in order to collapse the value of the dollar.Ryan’s visit threatens audit and Cheverin sells his assets to prevent it. Economics first, terrorism later. This plays out about as boring as it reads.Branagh has a good eye for pacing and tension, but he should have taken the cue from the previous Jack Ryan film “The Sum of all Fears” and stayed out of the motherland.He still treats his Russians as Reagan’s evil empire. They are all slimy politicians in expensive suits who listen exclusively to classical music and give curt nods whenever they want an American dead.Cheverin’s excuse, that he’s vindictive about United States’ involvement in the Soviet War in Afghanistan and wants to make his country great again, is as thin as characterization comes.In reality, lots of people are pissed off at the U.S., though the film chooses to ignore that fact and run with purely pro-American propaganda.Cheverin’s character would suggest there is no archetype fit for the Russian character other than that of the prodigal son, straight-laced and choleric, who sprays bullets because he would have nothing else to do with himself if he weren’t. Kevin Costner, playing a kind of foil to Branagh, looks bored or high or both, but is, either way, just in it for the chance to squeeze off extra rounds into security goons.There’s not a trace of Branagh’s villainous desperation when Costner fires a gun. His backup to Ryan’s bravado is strictly for his own enjoyment.And why shouldn’t he enjoy it? This is a kind of pre-retirement for the 59-year-old, and though Costner isn’t exactly yachting, he sails through the role just fine. No danger here.
(06/06/13 4:00am)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>It’s doubtful that even M. Night Shyamalan would be capable of devising a twist ending as bizarre and convoluted as his own career. In the span of fourteen years, the one-time visionary director has gone from Academy Award nominations to the ruler of the Golden Raspberries for worst picture. His new film After Earth, a post-apocalyptic (is anyone else sick of this theme?) action flick set 1,000 years in the future, though far from being the director’s worst accomplishment, is a plodding, predictable, melodramatic mess that’s no fun for anyone, least of all the actors. Considering Shyamalan’s early penchant for psychological depth, it’s odd to see the director take such a blockbuster premise as the post-apocalyptic one, which every year spits out another dozen or so films of questionable creative merit. Zombies, tyrannies, world war; choosing between these catastrophes is like choosing between different colored M&M’s.In After Earth, we follow the mass evacuation of Earth to a neighboring, presumably more hospitable planet (whose name I forget), whereupon it is discovered that someone made a gross miscalculation of the surrogate home. This one is considerably more dangerous than Earth and is populated by a race of fearsome, ugly devils known as Ursas, who, though blind, track and hunt humans by smelling pheromones excreted through fear. Fortunately, an elite band of rangers has stumbled upon the means of overcoming fear through sheer willpower. Will Smith, playing a sort of he-man named Cypher Raige, is the leader of the rangers who, with his son/spirited lackey Kitai (Jaden Smith), is forced to make an emergency crash landing on Earth during a transportation mission gone awry. With Smith senior lying crippled and with their distress flare over 100 kilometers away, the film becomes both a search and rescue and an opportunity for the junior Smith to prove his worth to his father by finding and then shooting the flare off. It gives nothing away to say that an hour and a half later, the film climaxes with Smith junior holding up the flare in search of a signal. In another life, Shyamalan could have been making Verizon commercials. Ostensibly the overarching story of what happens when we let global pollution go unchecked (spoiler alert: it’s bad), After Earth is more the story of a robot infestation that takes prominent actors as its hosts and drains all life and emotion out of them. At least, this is what the viewer is led to believe given Shyamalan’s camerawork, which places the actors front and center of every shot like an awkwardly direct interview or a video confessional. This wouldn’t be so bad if Smith senior — whose cropped hair, placid eyes, and ashy skin looks like a burnt-out Obama after a fifth or sixth term — were allowed to show even the slightest bit of character. He may be fearless, but drill sergeants, Terminator and even Neo from The Matrix were allowed to say something ironic, or at least crack a smile. Smith doesn’t allow himself even one moment of humor — his dialogue is half Boy Scout instruction manual (poisonous plants to be found here, medicine to be injected here) and half preachy monologuing, so contrived and hastily placed that the White Out is still fresh from where it was copy and pasted. It’s a miracle that he even manages to keep a straight face with Shyamalan looming uncomfortable inches away from him, camera poised to capture yet another of these moments. But all this being said, the main problem with After Earth is the same problem the director’s had for the past decade. He takes himself, and his actors, far too seriously for anyone’s own good. The result: uncomfortably long scenes that linger and weigh like an inappropriate dinner comment, with actors looking as though they just farted somewhere public and are now wishing that they were somewhere, anywhere else.Yes, the world may be gone, but we’re still here, and though that may not be worth a laugh, it’s at least worth a smile. “She had too much old chat in her about politics and earthquakes and the end of the world,” said Molly Bloom in James Joyce’s “Ulysses.” “Let us have a bit of fun.”Is that really too much to ask?
(06/05/13 7:21pm)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>A little less than two months ago, the British literary quarterly Granta put out the fourth edition of its Best of Young British Novelists series, a tradition dating back 30 years that is responsible for discovering writers Salman Rushdie, Kazuo Ishiguro, Ian McEwan, David Mitchell and Zadie Smith (appearing again in the latest issue) just to name a few.Given Granta’s sterling reputation for putting unknown and prodigious literary talent on the map, it is likely tempting for the magazine to want to push the same talent — the people currently writing our literary bestsellers (literary, not the stuff you buy in the terminal before your flight) — and market the next Alan Hollinghurst instead of its no-names. Editor John Freeman however, makes it abundantly clear that the magazine has no intention of doing this. “Our happiness as readers,” Freeman writes in the issue’s introduction, “increased greatly when we stopped looking for the next Will Self, the next David Mitchell...these writers were original in their own way when they emerged.” And he’s right on the money, for the most part. Though I haven’t read enough of the novels from this latest batch of writers to feel comfortable forming and arguing a strong opinion, several of the stories (excerpts, for the most part) stood out more than others. Adam Thirlwell (a 2003 Best Young British Novelist) builds tension with a watchmaker’s precision in the excerpt from his novel “Slow Motion,” which he then augments with a style embracing self-parody, discourses in morality, and an eye for a good simile: “Fate was all around me, like the crimping on a beer-bottle top.” Benjamin Markovits, who has published six novels, contributes an engaging excerpt from a new one, “You Don’t Have to Live Like This,” about a group of Yale friends, their business ambitions, their girlfriends, and a budding maturity which threatens to tear it all apart. Markovits, shown spinning a basketball in Nadav Kander’s excellent slideshow of the writers (you can find it in the New York Times Books archives), is a spirited writer with a young man’s talent for banter and ironic, convoluted interior monologue. At one point, his character reflects on the possibility of his own homosexuality, citing that his failure with a recent girlfriend might suggest his preference for his same sex. The dilemma is resolved handedly: “I didn’t want to be gay, for several reasons. One of them being that I wanted to sleep with girls.” Try as I might, I couldn’t much get into Zadie Smith’s entry “Just Right,” though I assume the fault was in my own lack of perseverance (this is the sort of magazine one should read at least twice). Naomi Alderman’s “Soon And In Our Days” and Ross Raisin’s “Submersion” are the only short stories and both operate (and succeeding) under absurd premises: a visit from a Biblical prophet and a father on a rocking chair lost in a flood, respectively. The two also provide a welcome sense of closure, instead of the ambiguous cut-offs from most of the novel/novella excerpts. Stephen Hall’s “The End Of Endings” is an interesting read, though it gets to be a little gimmicky with half the submission printed in retrograde on black paper. Whatever complaints one may or may not have, it can be agreed that if there’s one thing the current batch of Young British Novelists have, it’s vision. It’s variety. Hutzpah, if you prefer. And, fortunately or unfortunately, it’s a characteristic endemic of Granta, “The Magazine of New Writing (and Writers).” Most American top-tier journals can’t boast many new writers. Not that this is a problem, exactly. The Paris Review, that 60-year mogul of trending literature with a nifty app (relatively new) and a gorgeous daily blog that I’ve set as my homepage, deserves all the praise it gets (which will never be enough). I receive more than a dozen literary journals and magazines now, but The Paris Review was my first and still the first to which I’ll go when I crave good reading. Even so, like a good husband, I love the review while recognizing virtues as well as faults. Young, upcoming writers are all but forcefully barred entry from any hopes of publication within its pages. The Paris Review is an old man’s game — it’s the cool kids’ club and the top-tier fraternity and a place that good looks, genius, a winning smile and a considerable amount of luck still won’t get you into. Like the New Yorker, another top journal, the Paris Review has its chosen darlings (Sam Savage is the first that comes to mind) to publish and republish — a condition shared by many of the best journals — and ambitious first comers are told to look elsewhere. But luckily for the young author, America enjoys a far greater number of literary journals for first publications than Europe or Great Britain. Many universities (including IU) publish quarterlies or bi-annuals looking to promote new writing. It’s a good route for the future novelist to take: there’s the experience of submission (and, let’s face it, rejection), the possibility of an acceptance and a resume builder and the hope after acceptance of building a name for oneself. It’s a path, one that is broadening every day with new journals and growing readerships, and one that wasn’t available 30 years ago. And yet the path into the literary limelight offered by your average college journal sort of looks like stepping-stones to the young writer when compared to the six-lane highways of the established moguls. Carving a name out for yourself, university by university, in order to advance a literary career can take decades: it can take a lifetime. Small journals simply haven’t been around long enough, haven’t had the opportunities to publish the Great Novelists, to enjoy the prestige of the top-tiers. All this is meant less to serve the purpose of outlining the woes of the writer than it is meant to praise the publications, such as Granta, that use their prestige for the purposes of discovering the Next Great Authors instead of reiterating the ones already there. Granta is perhaps the most forward-thinking literary publication there is, one that, instead of shying away from the writer-without-a-name, embraces the writer as a name-that-can-be. We need the big magazines to keep the current names current — a writer out of print is a dead writer — but in the dog-eat-dog world of publishing, a magazine that chooses as its combatants not its aged warriors but its greenhorns, is an anomaly. Read and reread this issue of the Best of Young British Novelists. It is right to celebrate them.
(05/30/13 4:00am)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>The title of this third (and hopefully last) installment of the “Hangover” franchise is misleading. There is no hangover; at least, not until after the credits have started rolling and we’re given a short scene of the all-too-familiar nudity, drugs, and absurd amounts of booze. Director Todd Phillips makes a bold move by not including the familiar premise of the last two installments of his trilogy, and at first it’s a welcome change. We’re not immediately led to believe that this film, like its sequel, will be the formulaic plug-and-chug of frivolity and the attempt to reconstruct the evening post-inebriation. There’s a sense of change, or at least an attempt to make the film appear different. But problems confront the film almost as soon as it begins. Unlike the last two films, our lens isn’t focused on the Wolf Pack, but on the spitfire Leslie Chow (Ken Jeong). Tunneling out of his maximum-security prison and wading through the sewer system, à la “Shawshank Redemption,” Chow bursts into the open world eager for drugs, girls and stolen gold.If, like me, you tired of Chow halfway through the first film, taking his periodic outrageous moments with little more than an occasional snicker, you’ll grow sick of the pinched-voice character here. His antics are the stuff of cheap, hard liquor during a hangover: hardly enjoyable the first time around and vomit-inducing the second. Sharing the spotlight with Chow is the hirsute manboy Alan (Zach Galifianakis). Recently taken off medication, Alan celebrates his new freedom by buying a giraffe, but promptly decapitates it. While giving him his residual tongue lashing, Alan’s father suffers a heart attack and dies, prompting an intervention from family, friends, and the Wolf Pack. The Wolf Pack, consisting of Phil (Bradley Cooper), Stu (Ed Helms) and Doug (Justin Bartha) make the decision to drive out to Arizona, where Alan—more annoying, proto frat-boy with greasy locks than the awkward fat kid he once was—is headed to a rehabilitation clinic. But the plan goes awry The gang is kidnapped by a mobster who tells them they have three days to find and capture Chow, who stole $42 million in gold from him. Doug is taken as collateral and promised a slug in the head of anyone tells the police. What follows is the search and rescue drill from the last two films, but where those films constantly upped the ante, the third installment bumbles along a nonlinear path that relies upon Alan for most of its humor. This is an unfair burden to place upon Galifianakis, though it doesn’t stop the actor from trying to take the reins of the group while Phil and Stu watch, helpless. Scene after scene of Alan shaking his mane or whining go by and draw on much, much longer than they should. Alan’s absurdity only worked when it was bounced against a strong, straight character like Phil. Cooper, rugged, confident and ever in control, was a convincing leader. He wore his arrogance like a well-chosen piece of jewelry: ostentatiously but appropriately, and viewers could sit back and enjoy it. Why he and Helms, much stronger in the previous installments, choose to let Galifianakis steal away all the glory (or lack thereof) remains a mystery. Of course, nothing can be said that will stop the fans from sneaking in the back exit and posting the memorable lines as their Facebook statuses (expect “I’m Alan and I bought a giraffe” to flood your newsfeed). This, however, will probably die out soon enough. Nothing in Phillips’ film passes as any other than cheap gag comedy. Tired and bored, with the staleness of something once good now bland and sour, Hangover: Part III is every bit the taste of sobriety.
(05/30/13 4:00am)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>Promising lots of bang and big names for your buck, Chris Wedge’s (“Ice Age”, “Robots”) new film “Epic” is the usual slapdash project of computer graphics, forced morals, big-name actors and Pixar-esque setting sans cleverness that will have kids squealing and parents yawning. The picture follows a common family movie formula: parent-child conflict, usually about how one prioritizes his/her affairs, with a gentle resolution in which all sides are seen and empathized with. In this case, the daughter is teenager Mary Katherine (Amanda Seyfried), though she prefers the much more trendy M.K., a city girl and a bit of a rebel (she has three piercings in one ear and wears her hood up). Following the death of her mother, she comes to live with her estranged father in the middle of the wilderness. Convinced that an army of leaf men is monitoring the wellbeing of the forest, her father becomes too preoccupied with his studies to pay much attention to his family and doesn’t recognize his daughter’s need for attention. After about an hour, M.K. gets fed up with his eccentricity and decides to leave, only to become transformed into a mite-sized specimen of herself through a bizarre ritual involving the queen of the forest community (Beyoncé Knowles). The queen gives her a pod that, when it blooms, will transform into the new guardian of the forest, and a destination to take it before she dies.The journey of self-discovery that follows is something we’ve all seen and grown tired of long ago. Enlisting the help of Ronin, the Irish-accented and no-nonsense leader of the forest army (Colin Farrell) and his flirtatious young protégé Nod (Josh Hutcherson), M.K. begins a quest to defend the forest from a host of baddies, led by a particularly ghoulish one named Mandrake (Christoph Waltz) who aims to turn all of nature into a wasteland, for reasons that are never explained. Bad guys will do bad things, we are led to believe, regardless of visible motive. What bugs me about the film however, isn’t its predictability or its constant moralizing, but its maxim that nature is not, contrary to the laws of nature, self-sustaining. Wedge’s film gives us a nature that is in a constant state of unease and dependability. Mother Nature isn’t a life force so much as it is a country (America, to be specific) that requires constant, violent policing in order to survive. What’s more, dividing nature into such a grim binary of good versus bad teaches children the wrong lesson in accepting, or not accepting, unchangeable natural order. Last week I watched, for perhaps the tenth time, Hayao Miyazaki’s immortal classic, “My Neighbor Totoro,” a truly epic feat in the realm of children’s film. In “Totoro”, Miyazaki’s nature isn’t antagonized like Wedge’s. The outdoors are treated as a place of constant exploration and wonder, separated from the problems of the outside world by a firm green door. Life, as strange and wonderful and complex as only life could be, goes on without our interference and the results speak for themselves. Wedge’s film reiterates a simplicity of nature that was never really true, and though I may be going a step too far in saying the film promotes a dangerous message, it certainly promotes a delusional one. If you must see it, take away only the wonderfully active animation, but let its themes, as dead as crushed leaves, dissolve through your fingers.
(04/11/13 4:00am)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>There’s nothing inherently wrong with Fede Alvarez’s remake of the 1981 horror classic “Evil Dead.” The film, like its predecessor, delivers precisely what it promises, no more, no less, and there’s something praise-worthy in the way it makes no bones about prolonging its most cringe-worthy moments well past any point of decency. Try to find someone who doesn’t know this most generic of horror plots, and you’ll likely get laughed out of town. The five-friends-in-a-haunted-cabin-in-the-woods gimmick is old enough by now to start collecting social security. Alvarez, for his part, smartly embraces the cliché, cutting quickly to the friends-in-route with a panning view of the forest, shot upside down. There’s an allusion here to the opening of Kubrick’s “The Shining,” which demonstrates Alvarez’s knowledge of horror film lore. No longer the five college students of the original, these young adults, David (hero), Eric (disgruntled sidekick), Mia (frumpy sister), Olivia (just along for the ride) and Natalie (slam piece with bad timing) have a little time to develop themselves before they fall into their pre-chosen archetypes. It’s a rare and admirable, though ultimately meaningless, stab at characterization. Even so, it’s a nice gesture. Mia, played by the excellent Jane Levy, is not just a fun-wrecker of a sister, but instead a drug addict who’s been dragged to the cabin by her friends for an intervention. Still smarting from her mother’s recent death, she’s not exactly enthused when her long out-of-touch brother David (a weak Shiloh Fernandez) shows up to offer moral support. She’s not the only one. It would seem that David’s been too caught up in his own life to pay much attention to his friends and they, particularly the bitter hipster Eric, let him know it. Prompted to fulfill his role as a good older brother, David becomes acting chief of a plan to detain Mia at the cabin until she’s squelched her drug addiction. Things start going south when Mia, smelling rot, leads the team into the sanctum of the cabin where they discover, among hanging bird corpses, the barbed wire-bound Necronomicon, a sort of idiot’s guide to summoning demons. As if the all caps scrawling of not to touch the damned thing weren’t enough, the book is bound in human skin and bloodied beyond the point of legibility. But this doesn’t stop Eric from reading out loud the ill-fated lines that summon the hell-spawn. Of course, we all know what comes next. Maybe if Alvarez hadn’t relied so much upon the stupid/stubborn-hero trope (“you all wait here while I go check it out”) the film’s ensuing hour of carnage would have been a bit more tolerable, the characters a little more pitiable. Because there are some finely disturbing moments in the beginning, the infamous “tree-rape” being one of the most commendable horror moments to date, shock value is enough to sustain attention, at least for a while. But the film stalls midway through and resorts to repeating age-old gimmicks: slamming doors, faces appearing in mirrors, huddled figures in the corner, while the rest of the friends find their ways in, and back out of, their graves. There’s a prevailing sense that Alvarez is trying too hard to play to separate audiences: the one looking for a genuine horrific experience and the other that’s just looking for “Evil Dead” camp. In this sense, the film tries, and fails, to stretch beyond its roots while still clinging to them. It can’t be both a loving tribute to the gratuitous bloodbath of the original and an attempt to add depth where before there was just chaos — the former relies on absurdism, the latter on at least a semblance of realism. Fans of the original “Evil Dead” will flock to this remake with open arms. They won’t be disappointed. There’s enough gore to satiate even the most sadistic of viewers, and plenty of references to the original: everything from the terrible dialogue (“I’ll eat your soul!”) to the iconic chainsaw, brought to life in an extremely well executed nail-biter of a closing scene. This being said, for the most entertaining “Evil Dead” experience, I’d recommend watching the 2003 musical. It’s guaranteed to be the grooviest time you’ll ever have with zombies.
(04/11/13 1:59am)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>About a month ago, someone posed to me that age-old question about why our society loves to glorify its athletes, celebrities and businesspeople while its intellectuals, particularly its writers and artists, scrape a living off of periodicals and food stamps. This seems to be a question that has never been properly addressed. Why is it that parents dote upon their children’s fantasies of becoming doctors and astronauts but chide or caution them for wanting to become artists? Why is it that artistic professions merit societal disrepute? Why are humanities majors regarded with skepticism and contempt? Oh that’s nice. So what are you going to do when you graduate? How are you going to make a living?Perhaps it’s actual concern. Of course it’s no secret that the life of the artist is hardly an easy one: the starving or desperate artist cliché certainly does not lack substance. J.K. Rowling was diagnosed with clinical depression and was near homelessness when she conceived “Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone.” Franz Kafka ultimately died of starvation. Harper Lee’s “To Kill A Mockingbird” wouldn’t have been written had not a generous benefactor gifted the author with the Christmas present of a years’ wages in order to write “whatever you please.”Many other writers, however, have avoided these drastic measures by choosing orthodox day jobs. Brian O’Nolan (Flann O’Brien, best known for his masterpiece “At Swim-Two-Birds”) was celebrated as a preeminent journalist before he was realized a novelist, as was John Updike and Gabriel García Márquez (“100 Years of Solitude”). Other writers, such as David Mitchell, served as teachers until success, seemingly due to nothing save luck, fell into their laps. Others, like T.S. Eliot, chose reputable desk and clerical jobs, while others, like Vladimir Nabokov, a lepidopterist (butterfly enthusiast), and James Joyce who, before “Ulysses,” was a celebrated tenor, fell back on their hobbies in order to get their immediate wages. And yet, there are even more who, following initial success, were forced into churning out a wealth of writing in order to support their lifestyles. F. Scott Fitzgerald spurned his many poor-quality short stories as “whoring” out his talents for the benefit of the public. Anthony Burgess, believing himself ever on the edge of poverty, kept a manic work schedule, writing more than 350 book reviews in a two-year period while also working as a novelist, lecturer, tutor and critic. But why did these writers, most of them now regarded as geniuses or invaluable cultural icons, have to resort to these measures in the first place? The simple answer is because the writer’s occupation does not exist. He or she is constantly chasing after a job for which there is no application, no education requirement and no required time other than what the writer decides. And once the writer has proven his or her worth to society, there is hardly a moment for rest: the public grabs at its newest icon and milks it for all its worth, regardless of artistic integrity. Popularity is a death sentence for the true writer, for it demands not literature, but the product. This is not entirely society’s fault, however. The writer confuses society’s notions of employment and production. There is no immediate demand for literature as there is for more standard creature comforts: TV sitcoms, sports teams, etc. True literature indelibly alters human perspective. It makes us question our prerogatives, our standard perceptions of the day-to-day, our personalities and even meaning itself. Psychology tells us that humans understand the world through the use of narrative, language and symbolism (if you doubt this, try to imagine any concept without using language). Therefore, literature and its tropes represent the purest path toward understanding — unlike essays or treatises that merely expound upon ideas and principles, it makes for much more natural reading, and its effects, its alteration of our judgments, are easier to perceive. It’s no small wonder that Plato expounded his mathematical philosophies through the use of the Socratic Dialogue, which used the literary devices of character and setting. The writer, the producer of literature, is something of a rebel, even a punk. The successful writer produces a work whose very nature is antisocial and anti-capitalist. When you’re reading, you’re not buying, nor is there much space for product placement within the pages. When you’re reading, you’re not being “productive,” in the sense that you’re not actively contributing towards the economy. Such is the truth expressed in the words of the great Oscar Wilde, that “all art is quite useless.” Why, of course it is, the writer affirms. Nobody asks for perspective. Nobody asks for his or her life to be altered. Indeed, nobody really wants change, just the idea of change: a whisper, not literature’s riotous exclamation. Of course, none of this alters the state of the writer. If he or she is to be truthful to his or herself, then he or she must accept the burden that has been placed upon their shoulders. For the life of the writer is the life of the unknown vigilante: a thankless job of quiet diligence and hard labor whose results won’t be realized until long after the laborer’s death, a job whose hours are long and difficult and its rewards paltry, a job of low demand that constantly suffers under the argument of its uselessness. Useless maybe, but 100 percent necessary.
(03/28/13 4:00am)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>On Jan. 20, Richard Blanco, an openly gay Latino immigrant, delivered President Barack Obama’s inauguration poem: “One Today.” It was called a “fine example of public poetry” by Entertainment Weekly, alongside the attributive adjectives “humble” and “modest,” though The Guardian’s review of the poem make some very fine points about it.What all these reviewers mean to say is that the poem was boring, and if you’ve read it, you’ll probably be inclined to add on that it’s not only boring but grossly romantic and rife with cliché, invoking everything from the majestic Appalachians to proud mothers watching their children grow.I don’t mean to be too critical of Blanco: a “good” inaugural poem, one that addressed social issues rather than reiterate sentiment, would have run the risk of questioning the nature of the celebration’s optimism. Given his sexuality and nationality during this time of social upheaval, Blanco was also a prudent choice for the government to publicize its solidarity. What should be addressed though, is the fact that an inaugural poem goes against much of what true art stands for.Maybe, if Blanco didn’t want to run the risk of being labeled a rabble-rouser, he would have looked back 100 years for his inspiration, instead of at park benches and smiling mothers. 1913 marked the time right before the advent of the Great War, a time during which the world’s population and its collective belief in humanity would be cataclysmically disturbed. Never before had slaughter been so publicly realized or so widespread as it was during the war, never before had faith in the imperialism of the state been in such doubt. For the first time in modern history, the world was made to see the price paid for its political “progression” and asked the question of whether it was willing to continue to pay that price.This realization was due in no small part to the World War I poets, namely the English writer Wilfred Owen, who lamented the carnage and scorned those responsible in such pieces as “Anthem for Doomed Youth.” Yet while Owen appears to have been the foremost of the dissenting voices, his message was a mere echo from the much stronger dissent of Joseph Conrad, who, in works such as the novella “Heart of Darkness” (1899), lambasted the machine of imperialism that drove men to commit heinous acts of violence and, in so doing, become the eventual victims of that same violence.Conrad was popular during his lifetime: the reviews of his work are staggering even by today’s standards, yet for all his prestige, his message of doom was ultimately rejected, as history shows us. People may have liked Conrad’s stories, but they didn’t like his bad news. They ultimately chose delusion, to believe in the power and the goodness of the state rather than in the idea of its corruption. It’s no accident that Rudyard Kipling, the “prophet of British imperialism,” as the dissenting George Orwell scathingly labeled him, overshadowed Conrad throughout his lifetime and stole the coveted Nobel Prize for Literature in 1907.Despite what Conrad or any of the other literary malcontents may tell us, a belief in the state is necessary for progress. Without the authority that writers such as Kipling celebrate, the community itself would cease to be and humanity would become nothing more than a collection of demoralized anarchists, paralyzed by mistrust. Even so, we cannot afford to do away with our rebels: with Conrad or Owen or Orwell, or to read their messages at face value before throwing them aside.This all goes back to the inaugural poem and why it is inherently flawed. If the poem were to attack, challenge or do anything else but celebrate the authority that commissioned it, it would be biting the hand that fed it. So, when the government commissions an artistic piece, the piece is immediately deprived of any social value it might have had. It becomes a way for the government to celebrate its own authority. Kipling’s famous and racist poem “The White Man’s Burden,” written originally for Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee, is a dangerous example of such a piece.Whether we accept such “art” is our own choice, though we cannot afford to do so unquestionably. Too many artists, from Conrad to Orwell to the late Chinua Achebe, have shown us the evils of political authority for us to remain blind to them.
(03/28/13 4:00am)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>It’d be hard for anyone born in the ’90s not to have seen a film that director/writer Chris Sanders has not worked on. His filmography includes both classic Disney hits (“Beauty and the Beast,” “Aladdin”) and more recent family movies (“How to Train Your Dragon”), which could be the reason that his and co-director Kirk Demicco’s latest production “The Croods” feels so familiar.Starring a family of cavemen, “The Croods” is a more or less nominal story, one part family dysfunction and the other part journey of self-discovery. Father Grug, voiced by none other than Nicholas Cage, leads his tribe of Neanderthals through a placid life of hunting and gathering with the motto “never not be afraid.” Newness is dangerous in a world inhabited by giant, flesh-eating cats, and it should be avoided at all costs.This suits everyone in the Crood tribe just fine, save for Grug’s strong-willed daughter Eep (Emma Stone), who pines away for a life outside of the cave walls.Fortunately for Eep, adventure comes in the form of Guy (Ryan Reynolds — which would explain why he’s always shirtless), a dashing homo sapien with a pet sloth who brings fire and a prophecy of doom. The world is ending, he says, and the only salvation involves a strenuous trek cross-country to high ground, “to the light — to tomorrow.”How he knows this, or what he was doing in Crood country in the first place, remains a mystery, as there’s little to no backstory about the young man. Instead, we get lots of chase scenes, a love story and an eventual wilderness journey to the land of tomorrow that flows about as smoothly as a family car trip.Crood world, though, is as lush as the promised land Guy describes, with dizzying colors, hybrid beasts (elephant mice, cat boars) and an imagination that sustains even the most cliché daddy-daughter relationship. What’s more, the film doesn’t cater to its 3-D in the obvious ways that most family films have a habit of doing.Though the whole of “The Croods,” from its characters to its cute monsters, may echo Disney or “How to Train Your Dragon” too much, the film is still a visual delight punctuated with a nice message of family loyalty and open-mindedness. There’s nothing “crood” about that.
(03/28/13 4:00am)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>Back in the sixth grade, I was in the habit of creating artistic masterpieces for my school binders. They were relatively simple projects — a sheet of computer paper enameled with dozens of Google images around my name in cursive, which I would slide in between the binder and its protective plastic covering. Nevertheless, they attracted both the attention and, presumably, envy of my schoolmates. My favorite was a sheet for my band class that I had peppered with images from my favorite video game, Square Enix’s “Kingdom Hearts.” I toted it underneath my arm in the hallways and on field trips: anywhere where it would get a bit of publicity. Once, when I was sitting alone on the school bus admiring my handiwork, another young boy sat next to me and pointed to my pictures. “Are those from ‘Kingdom Hearts?’” I nodded, and we started to chat and continued to chat for the next eight years. It’d be no stretch to say that young boy was my first and certainly still is my best friend and the basis of that near-decade-long friendship came from “Kingdom Hearts.” The game, a hybrid of characters from “Final Fantasy” and Disney, came out in 2002, though it has since become a franchise with a manga series, action figures and a multi-platform bevy of sequels, prequels and who only knows what else. But I don’t care so much for the franchise it spawned than for that first, glorious experience. There was something special about it — some chord it struck whose resonance still resounds much stronger than that of other childhood memories, such as of watching “Pokémon” or playing “Yu-Gi-Oh!” When compared to my days of playing “Kingdom Hearts” or of listening to its beautiful but utterly incomprehensible theme song “Simple and Clean” by Japanese pop star Utada Hikaru, Pokémon seems outlandishly, stupidly childish. I’ve outgrown that, I think with a smirk when I hear Pikachu references. Not so with “Kingdom Hearts.” The game holds on to my memories with a dogmatic resilience, driving me to tears, even now, as I remember the days I spent playing as the free-spirited hero, Sora, gallivanting with sidekicks Donald and Goofy, pining away for my dainty, fire-red-headed BFF Kairi (also, my first real crush). The source of these palpable memories may be due in part to the “Kingdom Hearts” community, which included most of my friends back in middle school. We were all fanatics: we all could sing “Simple and Clean” in pitch, we all had our own strategies for defeating certain baddies and we all had and still have certain scenes and lines of dialogue emblazoned in our memories. With middle school being one of the first places where friendships started to stick, it’d be no wonder that the source of so much of that friendship should continue to hold.Or perhaps it’s the game itself and the way that it perfectly crossed the childhood sentiment of Disney with the much more mature, Steampunk swashbucklers of “Final Fantasy.” Kids like me caught in the years when childhood began to erode away to the teenage years could take solace in “Kingdom Hearts,” where the two stages coalesced. We didn’t have to settle for campy G-rated flicks, nor did we have to take the maturity that games like “Halo” were offering. We had Sora and Kairi. We had our Keyblade. It’s everything we could have wanted. Today, just one day after my own birthday, “Kingdom Hearts” will turn 11 years old. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that we’ve been growing up like this these past 10 years, inseparable save for a single day. Like the shadow of my childhood, incredibly near yet impossibly far, “Kingdom Hearts” continues to tag behind me: an echo of bygone days, a remembrance of things past but not forgotten, spent but never wasted.
(03/07/13 5:00am)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>It seems that this year’s B-movie list has been a bit more exhausting than usual. We’ve gotten an overdose of pretty much everything you could ask for, with special attention paid towards the inane and the gratuitously violent — “Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters” fits both categories remarkably well. From “X-Men” director Bryan Singer, “Jack the Giant Slayer” lies at the end of it all. It’s a delightful, though predictable, take on the old English folktale. It succeeds mostly because its actors, namely the formidable Ewan McGregor and Stanley Tucci. Also featured are the lovely Eleanor Tomlinson and, back from the dead of “Warm Bodies,” Nicholas Hoult, who is shaping up to be a contender as this year’s teen film lover boy. They have more fun with their roles than anyone else.The film opens with the young Jack being read a bedtime story by his father. Meanwhile, on the opposite side of the kingdom, the young princess Isabelle (Tomlinson) is being read same story by her mother. We get most of the future plot here: following an ancient and terrible war with the giants, the King smelts himself a crown that dictates the wearer’s sovereignty over the monsters. He then casts the giants back into their kingdom — a tangled, floating mass that looks sort of like a clump of moss, and cuts down the bean stalk from whence they came. Flash forward 10 years. Jack is a pauper and a dreamer. His head is, so to speak, always in the clouds. In these reside the beautiful princess, whom Jack sees in town and of course, instantly falls in love with. Lucky for him, she’s strong-willed. Resisting the protection of her well-meaning father and his intention to marry her to the beaver-toothed Roderick (Tucci), she flees from his clutches into a dark and stormy night (inspiration for this relationship can be found in every Disney movie from the 90s). Here she meets Jack and the two flirt, accidentally spill some magic beans and manage to get the princess stuck “halfway up to heaven.” Religious themes and ideas about true human destiny are hinted at vaguely for the first quarter of the film before being inexplicably dropped. A vein of British nationalism is likewise introduced in the final quarter of the film.We’ve got a rescue mission on our hands now. Call in the royal guard, who are really not much more than a bunch of armor-plated peacocks. Their chief is Elmont (McGregor), whose impeccably-styled hair and blatant attempts at English-ness — no one really says “tallyho” — combine both the flair and looks of a skinnier Kenneth Branagh with GQ-level grooming. He’s the most fun to watch, if only because he looks damned spiffy in tight leather. Tucci takes second place. The actor, savoring his villainous role, is nevertheless careful not to overdo the wickedness when he takes command of the ancient crown and begins bossing the giants around. As for the giants, they’re a bore more than anything else and come equipped with all the standard grotesqueries: burping, farting, booger eating, etc. Their ample fight scenes, along with the sprawling castles, also borrow too much from “The Lord of the Rings” to look like anything other than unoriginal, expensive special effects. But the picture can still be entertaining while being droll. However, if you do get bored by, say, the humdrum-ness of the dialogue, try your hand at guessing the line before the character can say it, or try and pick out repeated plot motifs before they reoccur — it’s not that hard. Or just wait for another look at McGregor’s gorgeous moustache.
(02/28/13 5:00am)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>It’s becoming a more recognized truth that banning a book may very well be the best thing one can do to ensure its long and fruitful lifetime. For the first time in their usually small lifetimes, books have the opportunity to move from book clubs and onto front-page news. Publishers seize the opportunity to market for all they’re worth, brandishing controversial ‘unabridged’ and ‘un-annotated’ editions of the text. Authors achieve high profiles and their agents are suddenly working with celebrities. Unknown politicians and small-time leaders who institute a ban achieve notable statuses and the opportunity to flaunt agendas unrelated to anything literary. The bigger institutions that commit the banning regain a beloved spotlight. Through it all, the public swarms and its heated gossip is fueled indefinitely. Because the subject is touchy, everyone’s opinion suddenly becomes important. This can be both a very good thing and a very bad thing. Given that the banning of one’s work is generally synonymous with filthy content, religious aspersion and a blatant disregard for a decorous opinion, it is difficult to see how the banning of a work can be a good thing other than for the inflation of public ego. Nevertheless, being on the public radar, even if it flies under the flagship of obscenity or anathema, is preferable to melting into obscurity. The average reader is much more likely to pay attention to opinions concerning the book provided that she has a prior knowledge of the subject, no matter how small. Your average citizen of the early 20th century had most likely never read Joyce’s “Ulysses.” Yet a knowledge, albeit skewed knowledge, of the novel entered into his vocabulary by virtue of the book’s lengthy and publicized trial: United States vs. One Book Called “Ulysses.” Controversy can also give the book a valuable historical climate through which one may obtain a better sense of the book’s context. Students now laugh at the fact that “The Catcher in the Rye” was considered immoral in 1951. They laugh even harder at the idea of Holden Caulfield being the universal symbol of rebellion, forgetting that he was the first when icons such as James Dean or Sid Vicious were still years away. For the scholar or the teacher, this is all well and good, but there’s a tendency to forget that the names on the covers of those controversial works have lives of their own. They are often not nearly as glamorous as the work’s public attention. In modern day history, the most infamous of the banned books has probably been Salman Rushdie’s 1989 book “The Satanic Verses,”. Rushdie’s recent biography “Joseph Anton” chronicles the events following the institution of the Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa, a sort of death sentence on the author. The Ayatollah, declaring “The Satanic Verses” to have been published against Islam, had never owned much less seen a copy of the book. While the fatwa represented another example of the dangers of ignorance from a person in power, the lessons from the fatwa cost innocent lives and ruined much of Rushdie’s own. Most controversies don’t achieve as much as Rushdie’s, though. Nor are they always indicative of high literary endeavor in the manner of “Ulysses”’s defense of obscenity for artistic fulfillment or “The Satanic Verses”’s defense of religious criticism. “50 Shades of Grey” represents pornography with little to no artistic affect: sheer shock value. Nevertheless, the book’s subsequent bans in libraries in Baltimore and Wisconsin have elevated author E.L. James from her status as a fan fiction writer to a kind of free speech advocate. It goes without saying that we must be prudent in how we regard our banned literature. Controversy is good for engendering closer reading of a work that otherwise might have been met with meek disregard or no regard at all. This is not to say that the work wouldn’t have been read had there been no controversy, only that the work’s global significance may not have been realized. On the other hand, a ban can cause readers to dig too deep into a piece’s significance and force out a meaning that likely never existed. What was pulp has now been dubbed cultural iconography.
(02/21/13 5:00am)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>I must have been about 3 years old when I first fell in love with books.I still remember the moment it happened, too. My mom was on the phone with someone, and I was in the living room, ignored and annoyed with being ignored. I wanted to impress upon her the fact of my being ignored, so I picked up a Wishbone novel and flipped through it the way I had seen the grown-ups do it.When I finished, I wandered over to my mom and held up the book I had just “read.” I was duly congratulated. Of course I hadn’t understood a damn thing about what was written down, but that wasn’t the point. That moment marked the first time the book became meaningful. It became a tool I could use to project myself onto others whenever I was in danger of being ignored or forgotten.I’ve probably presented a dozen different arguments about why I don’t like eReaders. They pose a danger to trade paperback publishers, they have an awkward weight, they don’t carry out-of-prints, the font is too big, they’re not romantic, etc. But these are all secondhand arguments compared to the real reason I can’t abide electronic readers: they’re too personal. Strangers can’t see the title or the cover art or anything like that. When you read an eBook, you are completely alone with whatever it is you’re reading.In essence, this is the ideal reading environment for things like “50 Shades of Grey” or any other pulpy, embarrassingly juvenile novels. Readers are free to maintain their private worlds in terminals and coffee shops without having to fear a judgmental passer-by.But how we got it in our heads that reading was something that should be entirely personal, I’ll never know. My first experience with the book is testament to its multi-functionality in allowing the reader to enter into a private world while also enabling him to insert himself into a stranger’s. The book is a private world, but we can never forget they are also glorified icebreakers. Depriving that public passer-by of his judgment by hiding behind an eBook ultimately boils down to depriving him of his rightful opinion.And then there are the aspects of cover art and the font-inflated titles, both of which are on the book for the sole purpose of outside viewership. Keeping all of this to oneself might very well constitute a kind of hoarding.Of course, I say all of this as a very prejudiced reader. I’m not afraid of letting the passer-by see what I’m reading, because I make sure to read something impressive when I go out in public. I once flew to Dallas with a copy of Joyce’s “Ulysses” and four companion texts tucked in the crook of my arm. This was outstanding vanity on my part, but at the same time it was also an invitation for others to exercise their own vanity. Why fear outsider opinion when it is much easier to cater to it? An airport security man and a total stranger both stopped me to converse about their admiration for the Irish writer.Needless to say, this wouldn’t have happened had I kept “Ulysses” as an eBook.
(02/21/13 4:12am)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>Did we really need another “Die Hard”?“A Good Day to Die Hard,” the fifth film in the franchise, offers approximately two hours of solid bullet spray and bad one-liners, yet never really addresses this problem: if it weren’t for the opening credits, anyone could be mistaken for thinking the movie was just another expensive action flick with the ubiquitous gunslinger, Bruce Willis, taking the lead.After an extended prologue involving some rival Russian politicians and an assassination, New York City detective John McClane decides to investigate the situation in Moscow. Turns out, the assassin was his estranged son Jack (Jai Courtney), whose pinched face and toned muscles really do resemble those of big daddy McClane. Jack, along with the politician Yuri (Sebastian Koch), is about to testify in court against the corrupt politician Chagrin when the courtroom explodes. The two make a getaway in an overly long and confusing car chase, meet McClane, who has been dog-tailing, and find their way to a safe house. Five minutes later, the cover is blown and Yuri is captured.This is more or less where the plot ends. With the excuse of getting to Yuri and a mysterious file, whose contents contain evidence of Chagrin’s illicit nuclear affairs, Jack and John work hard the next hour to stack up as many bodies as possible. Director John Moore might once have had ambition for the film, but he certainly doesn’t show it. There’s a hint at a relationship between Jack and John, expressed mainly through lousy sentiment and frequent “atta boy’s,” but nothing brings the two together quite like carnage.This is fortunate, because there’s a multitude of villains that need killing. Among these is Alik, a dancing henchman who hates Americans and tries too hard to fit the archetype of the eccentric bad guy. Those Russians just don’t ever change.This is, coincidentally, much of the film’s problem. There’s no sense of character or ambiguity outside the most rigid of old prejudices. The bad guys are the ones with the accents, who still call each other “tovarisch” and want to destroy the world because they’d make a good profit. The good guys are the ones with the guns — the ones who can rip through baddies and still score hoots from the audience by virtue of the fact that they’re protecting Uncle Sam.McClane is more Rambo than Bond, and this isn’t a bad thing. He doesn’t think so much as reload and smirk. But what ultimately kills the film is the fact that there’s no variation on this theme, because everything exists to be destroyed, and bad guys exist to get shot. It doesn’t matter so much what they’re after so long as they have a cool death.If gunplay is what you’re looking for, then “A Good Day to Die Hard” won’t disappoint. The film can’t be faulted for delivering what it promises, which is a multitude of explosions and thousands of empty cartridges. Even if it’s all pretty much meaningless, at the very least it still looks and sounds cool. Yippee Ki-yay.