Spotlight shines

Yes, I know all the attention lately has been on that other movie. And, yes, I will go see Star Wars, episode whatever, the Force Awakens. It's not only wildly popular but getting good reviews. I'm looking forward to it. But I'm in no hurry.

I'm here to recommend another really good movie: Spotlight. This is no action adventure. There is no violence or sex, incredibly. It's just the best movie about journalistic integrity since, well, I think it's better than "All the President's Men." I can't think of a better one.

And it's not just a gripping story about investigative journalism, a sadly dying branch on the tree of contemporary media. It deals with one of the more compelling and tragic issues of our time, the abuse of children by priests and the cover up that enabled it to happen.

Click here to see the trailer.

If you don't catch it soon it will be gone from theaters. But add it to your Netflix queue!

Art at MASS MoCA: Size matters.

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I knew little about the place before we drove into the parking lot on a dreary, wet December day. I had read that it specialized in contemporary art and it was big. I had no idea how big.

The entrance was nowhere to be seen. After asking directions we made our way under a bridge connecting two massive brick buildings, then along a spacious paved yard bounded by more of the same. It all looked very much like what it once had been: a mill dating from the Revolutionary War period.

Turning a corner towards a courtyard surrounded by similar structures it suddenly became obvious that this was no longer a mill and in fact not any kind of ordinary place. A series of six contorted trees were growing from the bottoms of inverted stainless steel planters trussed up on telephone poles. Alice, the White Rabbit and the Red Queen might have felt at home amid what I later learned was an enormous work of art called “Tree Logic,” created by Natalie Jeremijenko. Even though defoliated by winter the trees clearly had been straining to correct the illogical orientation of their planting.

I soon learned that “enormous” could describe without hyperbole much of MASS MoCA. The former mill is a complex of many large, interconnected buildings that cover 13 acres in downtown North Adams, Massachusetts. As an electronics factory that served the military and space industries from 1942-1985 it employed over 4,000 people in a town of 18,000. The mill turned factory has again been repurposed as an interdisciplinary arts center.

Inside, the galleries sprawled from one enormous building to the next. I’ve never been convinced that size alone confers value on art, but moving throughout the MASS MoCA complex and seeing the variety of intriguing installations, the significance of the scale of the place was striking. Considering the history of the place, the scale and interactivity of the art it now contains was made more poignant. The mill, so long so central to the life of this community has once again come alive, this time through the arts. The power of the artworks is imbued with the power resonating within the place.

I can provide little more than a teaser, not only because of the scope of works on exhibit but because so many of them require immersion in the physicality of their presence.

The work of Brooklyn artist Teresita Fernández filled several galleries on an entire floor of the first building we entered.

This site specific installation called Sfumato (Epic) is made up of over 40,000 small chunks of graphite that flowed throughout the long, narrow space like an asteroid belt or a swarm of flying insects.

Black Sun fills a three-story tall space with “thousands of translucent tubes” that create cloud-like formations in colors ranging from amber to black.

An exhibit entitled The Dying of the Light: Film as Medium and Metaphor features the work of 6 artists — Rosa Barba, Matthew Buckingham, Tacita Dean, Rodney Graham, Lisa Oppenheim, and Simon Starling — all of whom favor traditional light-sensitive film over newer digital technologies. None of these can be rendered satisfactorily in a still image, as you can imagine. My favorite was a film projector similar to this one that was dangling from the ceiling by the looping film itself. The machine gently bounced and swayed as it projected a wavering rectangle of white light onto the adjacent wall.

An exhibit by Lee Boroson called Plastic Fantastic filled an entire building with a variety of forms all made of the ubiquitous material. One low-ceilinged room resembling a multi-chambered cavern was far too dark to photograph adequately.

This complex and whimsical installation, called Deep Current, rains ping pong balls from a hole in the ceiling, which then get noisily sucked back up before they fall again.

This piece, entitled Moisture Content, is colossal in scale as well as suggestive of planetary spheres, galaxies and other celestial phenomena.

It’s Only Human, by two British artists named Nick Veasey and Marilene Oliver, is in a gallery called “Kidspace,” although you certainly don’t have to be a kid to be impressed by the work.

I could have spent far more time than we had available in Mark Dion’s Octagon Room. Austere and bunker-like outside, on the inside it resembles a cross between a Victorian cabinet of curiosities and a peculiarly tidy basement. There are jars of pickled animals, carefully tagged sets of keys, shelves full of books and strange juxtapositions of objects. A wall of portraits depicts many famous scientists in odd frames.

Here we see framed compositions of randomly collected pottery fragments from riverside beaches as far apart as the Thames in London and the Seekonk in Providence, RI.

My favorite detail strikes me as a bit of personal catharsis. Jars full of ashes atop a cabinet are labeled “Burnt Archives” containing the likes of “correspondence,” “gallery announcements,” and “press releases.”

The most moving piece for me was quite impossible to photograph. A projected video depicted a leafless tree in graphic white on a stark black background two stories high. White shapes that at first appeared to be leaves accumulated until the tree was full to bursting and did in fact burst upwards as the leaves turned out to be birds that rose and flew en masse down a long, narrow ceiling. The space, called an atrium, must once have been a narrow alley between two buildings. The birds are passenger pigeons. The piece by the artist duo Susannah Sayler and Edward Morris and writer Elizabeth Kolbert is called Eclipse. It mourns the infamous extinction exactly 100 years ago of what is widely believed to have been the most abundant bird species on the planet. You can get a sense of it as well as a thorough description on the MASS MoCA website.

Last, but hardly least, all three floors of an entire building are devoted to a Wall Drawing Retrospective of Sol Lewitt.

The three floors proceed chronologically, beginning with the early linear, monochromatic works on the first floor.

North Adams, in the far northwest corner of Massachusetts, is a little off the beaten track. But if you’re a Lewitt fan you have plenty of time to plan a trip there to see this show. MASS MoCA literature proudly announces that it will remain on view for “an unprecedented” 25-year period.

Stay tuned. After visiting North Adams we travelled the entire length of Massachusetts to Boston (states are smaller in New England than they are out here in the Midwest) where we managed to catch more excellent art. 

Okay, I'm back and here's the link to Boston: Order and Disorder.

Star Trek makes good

I love the movies and I see a lot of them. I don't usually write about them, though, largely because it's time-consuming (and movies get plenty of press.) Furthermore, when I do write up a movie, it's usually one that is seriously moving, especially artistic, or under-appreciated.

Star Trek Into Darkness is none of these. But I enjoyed it immensely. The franchise had lapsed for a while, most likely because some of the movies were lame or worse. What I liked best about this one was that it felt a lot like watching an episode of the original sixties TV version, with Shatner and Nimoy, except, of course, that the special effects are now on steroids. (I even broke my Imax-3D virginity and was duly rewarded with visual spectacle and pzazz. It was fun!)

I give the writers a lot of credit for recreating the characters, moods, and campy atmosphere of the dialogue from the sixties, something to which most of the previous Trek movies didn't aspire. I had to wonder, as I heard sporadic chuckling from around me in the audience, whether anyone who has never seen the original series would appreciate the humor injected into scene after scene.

Kirk was the cowboy congenitally disposed to break rules and disobey orders, Spock was excruciatingly inscrutable, Scotty suitably apoplectic, and Uhura both sultry and self-assured. "Bones" had many of the best lines. Some seemed lifted straight from the TV series (e.g., "Damn it, Jim; I'm a doctor, not a torpedo technician!")

If you are a hard core Trekkie I think you'll especially like the attention to details such as the incidental presence of a Tribble. (Don't worry, it's not subtle.)

Of course it wasn't all fun and games. Benedict Cumberbatch is excellent as the villainous Kahn, which he plays with thoroughly humorless intensity. And, like any action-adventure movie, you had to suspend disbelief in spades (just how many blows to the head can Kirk take without major, lasting trauma, anyway?)

But enough--if you want to read some real reviews, check them out on Rotten Tomatoes where the movie is rated at 86% / 89%. Hey, with ratings that high, they can't all be Trekkies!

Art, Film, and Music in Milwaukee: it all rocks!

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It was a good weekend for the arts here in Milwaukee. Three quick hits:

Visual art at Villa Terrace

On Friday evening the Villa Terrace Decorative Arts Museum opened a small mixed media group show called “Chasing Horizons.”  Guest curators Nirmal Raja and Christopher Willey, who both have ties to UWM, assembled a diverse set of Milwaukee artists whose work uses the idea of landscape as a point of departure. It’s not the kind of show one typically associates with Villa Terrace.

Most of the work is installed gallery fashion in the cleared upper rooms of the historic mansion. My favorite pieces, however, were the two site-specific installations. Kevin Giese has inserted two slender, undulating trunks of stripped buckthorn into the steeply sloping, carefully landscaped “backyard,” which sweeps dramatically down to the lakefront.

Emily Belknap, whose show at the Chazen I recently reviewed, has taken wonderful advantage of the ambiance of the building. Her installation, called “Flight Zones,” is made up of three life-size bronze sculptures of robins. A precise circle of finely sifted dirt surrounds each, indicating the distance at which a person’s approach will cause the bird to take flight. The circles of dirt echo the decorative period moldings on the ceiling and the intrusion of the “wildlife” creates a curious dialogue with the portrait paintings hung on the walls.

If you didn’t get to the opening you have plenty of time. The show will be up through August 25.

The Oriental Theater offers another great movie

Since we were in the neighborhood and it was still early my wife and I checked out the Oriental. From amongst the several interesting choices we were glad we picked “The Place Beyond the Pines.” It’s being promoted as a “crime thriller,” and there are aspects of that in it. However, it’s a much more nuanced and complicated story than that genre generally implies. It would be hard to describe much of the story without ruining the many truly surprising plot twists.

It begins with a stunt motorcycle driver played by Ryan Gosling who goes on a crime spree for an unusual motivation. Things don’t turn out as planned but that’s the only thing predictable about this provocative and sensitive narrative. Go see it before it goes away. 

Read more on the official movie website.

The Milwaukee Rep and Janis Joplin

Although we are season ticket holders for the MilwaukeeRepertory Theater, we might have missed this show because it isn’t part of the regular season. But we were very happy that we took advantage of a special Cinco de Mayo offer and went to see it last night.

It isn’t exactly a concert and it isn’t really a musical play. But I’ve never seen the Powerhouse Stage rock like it did last night. The performers were outstanding and the music was as energetic as any concert I’ve seen—and then some!

I’ve never been a particular fan of Joplin. I was just a couple years too young to have gone to see her perform live. Anyone my age has heard her most famous songs (especially “Me and Bobby McGee” and “Mercedes Benz”) repeated endlessly on the radio, of course, as well as seeing video of her performing. But those don’t hold a candle to the actual experience. The show was a visual and auditory extravaganza that seemed to represent her onstage persona pretty accurately. The only thing missing was a pall of pungent pot smoke wafting over the crowd--but I only know that from heresay!

I could quibble that the attempt to add a story line to the show was flawed by the lack of any real arc to the narrative. The implications of her famous dissolution and untimely death were quite subtle and understated. Still, it was nice to see and hear the people who influenced her, including Bessie Smith, Odetta, Nina Simone, and Aretha Franklin. Blues singer Sabrina Elayne Carten recreated all of those voices and presences and she deserves credit equal to Mary Bridget Davies, who played Joplin.

The audience was an intriguing mix and far more diverse than usual for the Milwaukee Rep. There were plenty of folks who looked old enough to have seen Joplin live—and even a few that came garbed in authentic-looking “period costumes” like dashikis, tie-dye, colorful stripped bell-bottoms, and leather vests. However, I was glad to see a wide variety of ages amongst the appreciative crowd. At first it took a bit of urging by the cast to break through the Milwaukee/Midwest reserve, but by the end of the first set the entire audience was on its feet, clapping, singing, and generally rocking the night away.

As she sings in Bobby McGee, “…feeling good was good enough for me!”

The show is called “One Night with Janis Joplin,” but you have many nights to choose from before the show closes June 2 to join in the fun.

The best of 2012?

A dozen years ago or so, around the turn of the century/millennium, I was appalled to read a column by someone I’ll leave anonymous. She was asked who she thought was the best artist of the twentieth century. This columnist was not a specialist in the arts and in fact had no business, as far as I could tell, prognosticating about art in any way let alone passing judgment on who epitomizes the “best,” however one might construe that subjective concept.

And that is the most salient point, it seems to me: how do you define “art” before you decide who represents the best of it? She didn’t try. Her choice of Norman Rockwell (I’m not making this up) was bad enough in any case – even if we grant a definition of art that is limited to painting (which I definitely do not.) I won’t go into the pros and cons of her choice, except to say that it is not only a populist one but a blatantly culturally biased one. If it must be a painter I’d have to go with Picasso, but that’s not how I’d approach the question.

In order to get a handle on who might be the “best artist” of the twentieth century I believe we must decide what art form best represents that century. I didn’t at the time and still don’t think the answer is painting. In my opinion, it was the new medium of film. Since I’m not a film critic or historian I have never presumed an opinion about which of many great filmmakers best represents the art form. But I definitely am of the opinion that if one is to decide the best artist of the twentieth century that a filmmaker should be at the head of the class.

I do love the movies, though. All of this is to introduce my thoughts on films I saw in 2012. Again, I don’t presume to pronounce them “best” in an objective way. Some among my favorites, listed below, appeared on some actual film critics’ lists of the best of the year. Some did not. Some that I didn’t like also appeared on a few of those lists, including my choices for “most disappointing” and “stupidest.”

My list must be qualified by admitting that I have yet to see some of the films that are on many “best of 2012” lists. Several are in my Netflix queue. But that, I think, is the value of these rituals, isn’t it? To provide suggestions, encourage audiences for what might otherwise go unnoticed.

For instance, it won’t surprise anyone who has seen them (or read any of the “best of” lists out there) that Lincoln or Argo are among my own favorites. But they aren’t at the top. That spot is held in a tie by Life of Pi and Beasts of the Southern Wild.

However, rounding out my six favorite films of the year are two far less well known.

The Intouchables is a powerful and moving story about a paraplegic millionaire who hires a down and out ex-convict as a personal caretaker.

Robot and Frank is a heartwarming futuristic story with some surprising twists and quirks about a man whose family gives him a caretaking robot in lieu of placing him in a nursing home.

The biggest disappointment I mentioned? The Hobbit. I almost didn’t go to see it in fact, because I suspected as much. I love all three parts of The Lord of the Rings, but, of course, Tolkien wrote it in three volumes. Not so The Hobbit, a much lighter tale. I won’t waste money on the next two installments, which seem like the most egregious example of milking the franchise since the third trilogy of Star Wars came out. Perhaps worse.

The stupidest of the year: The Avengers wins hands down. (Of course this is still only considering movies I actually went to see.)

I don’t mind a good cartoon movie, either. My list of guilty pleasures, if that’s what they must seem, includes the latest iteration of Spiderman. I enjoyed all three of Tobey Maguire’s impersonations of my favorite cartoon character – to varying degrees. But Andrew Garfield simply was more suited to the role. It was worth the remake, I thought.

I also liked Skyfall. Bond movies have been all over the board in terms of quality and excess. So, this wasn’t a given by any means. After the success of Casino Royale, the last one with Daniel Craig (the name of which I’ve blocked from my memory) was awful. Skyfall is better than most Bond films and if it’s milking a franchise, at least it’s doing it well.

Although I waited until it came to the budget cinema, I was pleasantly surprised by The Hunger Games. I hope it’s not a prescient look at our future. My wife observed, astutely I think, that it was a combination of a futuristic version of what the Romans did in the colosseum and any number of “reality TV” shows taken to their logical extreme.

Was Magic Mike a guilty pleasure or something better? Raunchy but fun, I’m going to leave it in the guilty pleasure category.

Finally, my choice for favorite documentary of 2012: Ai Wei Wei: Never Sorry. (If there were comparably good ones, as there must have been, I missed them.)

So, a few suggestions to add to your Netflix lists. Or not.

Sidney Lumet will be remembered

I saw Dog Day Afternoon when it opened in 1975. There are a lot of things that I’ve forgotten since 1975 (along with a few that I wish I could forget!) There has to be a good reason why images from that movie remain fresh after all the intervening years. On the surface it’s a forgettable story of a petty thief who bungles a bank robbery. But life is complicated. Sidney Lumet, who directed, and Al Pacino, who played Sonny the would-be bank robber, managed to make of this misfit character a sympathetic hero who spoke volumes about the frustrations of a decade that simmered in the aftermath of the tumultuous 60’s.

Other images from the same year remain, the most searing being the scene of helicopters airlifting desperate U.S. military personnel and South Vietnamese allies from Saigon, marking the end of the Vietnam War. I guess my mind prefers to linger over the figure of Sonny striding out towards the police barricades, brashly making demands in the face of apparently insurmountable odds, and the cheers his persuasive eloquence elicit from the crowd that has gathered for the spectacle. Memory is complicated.

A year later, in 1976, an even more riveting character captured the national zeitgeist with his now iconic rant "I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore!" The movie was Network, which won four academy awards and is considered by the American Film Institute to be one of the best movies of all time. The director was Sidney Lumet. Peter Finch played Howard Beale, an anchorman on a fictional news network. He was a flawed character in a voracious industry in an insatiable culture. Like Sonny, he is both triumphant and tragic. Culture is complicated.

I have a short list of favorite movies that I revisit from time to time, but neither of these is on it. That isn’t why I remember them. I haven’t seen either one again in over 30 years. I remember because they are unforgettable, because they spoke to something in my own life, and left a deep impression. Meaningful art has that power. Hippocrates wrote “life is short, art long.” I have no doubt that Sidney Lumet (1924-2011) will be remembered. He made films that expressed how complicated life can be.

Recommended viewing: Black Swan

Witnessing madness elicits emotions that range from compassion and fascination to revulsion and horror. It is difficult to see in real life, for various reasons, and as with a physical deformity, we are socialized not to stare. Art, of course, encourages us to stare and in Black Swan, cinematic art allows us a profound view into normally private psychological depths. But do we turn from manifestations of madness in life because it isn’t polite or do we fear the erosion of our own grip on reality? In art our horror may be the result of clever direction and filmmaking, but there also may be something more elemental in our reactions. We can watch with equanimity and distance ourselves when stories put characters in dangerous situations that we don’t expect to encounter. But what if the danger lies inside ourselves?

Black Swan opened yesterday amid overwhelmingly favorable reviews (see rottentomatoes.com) and I am happy to add to the applause. I think it’s great! Briefly, it is a story about a dancer who seeks to play the dual parts of the white and black queens in Swan Lake, Tchaikovsky’s famous Romantic tragedy. The white queen succumbs to a spell transforming her into a swan from which she can only be rescued by true love. The prince who comes to her rescue is seduced by the evil black queen. The two characters usually are played by different dancers but the director wants to inject the familiar ballet with new drama and symbolism by adding this dramatic twist. It puts tremendous stress on the principle dancer, for each of the parts is physically demanding. But it is the psychological stresses that threaten to overwhelm the character of Nina, played brilliantly by Natalie Portman.

Black Swan plays subtly with stereotypes as well as our expectations. The dancers are jealous and ready to do whatever it takes to make the lead, including grueling workouts with over-the-hill dance coaches who have foreign accents. The director is aloof, arbitrary, and demanding. He is also sexually provocative and intimidating. Nina’s mother is overbearing and protective. But where is the line between stereotype and archetype? A lesser cinematic achievement would’ve resulted in clichés. But they are subverted in the same moment that Nina’s grip on reality comes into question. We constantly wonder what is real and what the result of her disturbed imagination.

Don’t go to see Black Swan expecting a pleasant story about ballet (and don’t take the children.) If you’ve seen Requiem for a Dream, also by the director, Aronofsky, you will have an inkling of how dark his work can be. The movie that this most closely resembles for me, however, is one that I haven’t thought about since I saw it in the 1970’s, but which came bubbling spontaneously out of my subconscious: Roman Polanski’s Repulsion. Such is the power of art to live on even beyond conscious awareness. Both movies explore psychological tensions that result from sexual repression and loss of control. Black Swan sets this tension in the maelstrom of the backstage world of top level dancers where the struggle for artistic success is relentless. It questions the price of perfection and suggests that an overzealous pursuit of art itself might lead to madness. “Is the fault, dear Brutus, in our stars or in ourselves, that we…” will not be underlings?