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Age of Consent • The Tempest
I came to Norman Lindsay’s witty, wise and wily novel AGE OF CONSENT through the effervescent film of the same name that the great Michael Powell directed in 1969. Some have spotted a connection to Shakespeare’s The Tempest in the plot, which concerns a painter struggling to find inspiration on an isolated Australian isle accompanied…
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The Marriage of Maria Braun
I saw the last performance of THE MARRIAGE OF MARIA BRAUN on Sunday afternoon at BAM, with the memory of the Fassbinder film from many years ago still vivid in my mind. Rainer Werner Fassbinder was one of the great naturalists of the cinema, and Braun was perhaps his most romantic work, lush and polished…
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Penelope
On one level, Enda Walsh’s PENELOPE is just a modernization of an episode from The Odyssey. Four suitors – living at the bottom of a drained out swimming pool on Odysseus’s Adriatic estate – vie for the affections of Penelope in advance of her husband’s homecoming – finally! – from the Trojan War. They continue…
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Gezeiten
GEZEITEN is directed and choreographed by Sasha Waltz, performed in two parts, and much of it in silence. The style of this dance theater piece is at first abstract, then a sort of deconstructed Naturalism that devolves into a post-apocalyptic Absurdism born of the truth that, having survived, it is the nature of human beings…
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A Quiet Place
The Leonard Bernstein-Stephen Wadsworth opera A QUIET PLACE was not well received when it premiered in 1985, but after seeing its first New York performance on Wednesday night, by the New York City Opera, I suspect that historical distance was the missing ingredient a quarter of a century ago. Alternating between the 1950s and the…
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Mesrine
MESRINE Parts 1 & 2 is a strangely compelling cinematic event, which seems the word to describe anything in the theater that requires a double commitment. I saw the parts on subsequent days but had the timing been different would have happily taken an intermission or lunch break on a single day. The anti-hero was…
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East Village Brunches
In these times, Saturday and Sunday afternoons in the East Village are about the consumption of offbeat re-considerations of traditional brunches. I call your attention to the music paper thin breakfast lasagna at Belcourt, the breakfast pizzas at Grape and Grain, the European twists and turns at The E.U. , the urbanized regional dishes at…
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The American • Up in the Air
Seeing THE AMERICAN made me read the book on which it is based. Martin Booth’s A Very Private Gentleman turned out to be a passable thriller that has its moments but pales in comparison to the film. The movie is a taut, perfectly paced and morally ambiguous character study that, by making the central figure…
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Inception
Christopher Nolan‘s INCEPTION. The themes are familiar. Think Philip K. Dick, Stanislaw Lem, Jorge Luis Borges, even Calderón, Cervantes, Shakespeare. Dreams within dreams, life as a dream, the universe dreamed by the maker. The filmmaking is deft, the timing exquisite, the rhythms gripping. Yes, there are the expected twists (or not) and the predictable ending…
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I Am Love • Everyone Else
I AM LOVE grows on you. In some respects it tells a straightforward story of love, family and infidelity. In others, it is oblique and enigmatic, like the Resnais and Antonioni films of the ’60s in that there seems always to be something vital but unspoken beyond the explicit plot, forever implicit, never stated or…