My Fave Film of The Past Decade

If I had to choose only one movie of the past ten years to be stranded with on a deserted island it would be Martin Campbell’s smart and sassy “Casino Royale.” The director and his cast and crew collectively returned a sense of fun and play not only to the Bond franchise, but to the blockbuster as well. This popcorn flick’s got something to lure practically everyone into abandoning oneself to the magic of the screen. There’s richly drawn characters embodied not by stars but by highly skilled, hardworking actors (a definition that still fits Daniel Craig despite the film’s subsequently launching him into the cinematic stratosphere). Watch the chemistry between and concentrated performances from the likes of Craig (as a thuggish Bond cut from the roguish Connery cloth), Mads Mikkelsen as Le Chiffre and Jeffrey Wright as Felix Leiter during that famous high-stakes poker tournament – they could just as easily be performing Mamet on Broadway! The film’s action sequences are actually thrilling because they are organically connected to the swift-moving script, as opposed to mere excuses to blow something up so as not to disappoint a test market audience. Not to mention the riveting storyline keeps you on the edge of your seat like Ian Fleming’s page-turners did in the first place. Heck, as an added bonus there’s even a steamy gay leather scene between (my personal fetish object) Craig and sexy Mikkelsen! “Casino Royale” is classic, feel-good, Hollywood comfort food served up with just the right amount of spice.

No Final Solution: "The White Ribbon" & No Country for Young Dissenters: "Police, Adjective"

After viewing Michael Haneke’s masterpiece The White Ribbon, I came to the conclusion that Haneke is my favorite director of the past decade. From 2001’s The Piano Teacher on he’s consistently proven himself not only as a filmmaker merely to watch, but as a director to argue about akin to Lars von Trier and Roman Polanski (before the cinematic debate turned personal). Like von Trier, Haneke trains his cold lens on people desperate to make order out of mayhem. And in a way, Haneke is an anthropological Polanski, forever concerned with the evil we can’t see, with that which lies beyond the frame. He wants us to hear the words left out of the script, to feel the heaviness of absence—to ponder that which is missing.

Haneke’s Palme d’Or winner is set in northern Germany just before WWI changes the lives of the tale’s very Protestant villagers forever. The stock characters include a nerdy narrator schoolteacher, a rich baron, a strict pastor, a sadistic doctor, a suffering midwife, poor tenant farmers and—most importantly—the offspring of these varied human sources who all suffer equally and painfully. Beginning with the doctor’s bad fall from a horse that trips over a wire strung nefariously between two trees, a string of mysterious “accidents” occur that are each more disturbing and bizarre than the last. All the while these possible crimes go halfheartedly investigated since no one ever seems to have seen or heard anything (and no good religious person would dare speak evil anyway). In other words, witnesses are never present because they don’t want to be. These townsfolk are terrified to look in the mirror and maybe see a monster staring back.

To read the rest visit The House Next Door.

Better Than Santa: The 12 Acts of Christmas

Take a dash of burlesque, a scoop of modern dance mixed with classic ballet, plenty of candy cane-colored costumes, some sultry cabaret lighting, a rocking score stuffed with updated versions of holiday standards, sprinkle generously with vaudeville, then toss it all up in midair and you’ve got “The 12 Acts of Christmas” presented by Suspended Cirque, the sexiest troupe of aerial performers on the other side of the Hudson. I trekked through a blizzard to get to the warm intimate setting of the Galapagos Art Space in DUMBO for the only evening performance of their winter spectacular this year. (The weather outside was frightful but that dominatrix Santa sure was delightful!)

The entire show was one euphoric toy train ride, from its opening winking catfight routine and Santa riding a unicycle on the ground, to “Michelle on Fabric Skating in the Air” and “Angela and her Rope on a Silent Night” high above. There’s a touching, old-fashioned sensibility to this troupe, a reverence for burlesque and vaudeville, for slapstick and flappers. (“Michelle Drunk at a Party” could be a Chaplin routine – if Chaplin were a yogi.) Suspended Cirque combined the bawdy fun of the holiday season with the true beauty in its meaning via ropes, trapezes, sturdy fabric and hoops – not to mention the Peter Pan aerialists whose own bodies manage to defy both gravity and the human form itself. And the childlike thrill these talented folks take in performance is both exhilarating and downright contagious. For them the sheer joy of flying is a calling, and we as the audience are merely being allowed to live vicariously through them, to feel a part of their fantasy made real for a couple of hours. This is nothing less than transcendental performance art. Laced with Viagra.

For there’s a deep rooted sexiness that lies in the mingling of physicality and spirituality, allowing a transcendence of the self. With the dexterity of jungle animals and the enthusiasm of kids climbing trees the company uses each other’s bodies, even their own limbs as ropes, utilizing flesh on flesh to create. As they seamlessly move from floor to ceiling, as if walking on air is the most natural thing in the world, the need to be air born becomes a palpable hunger, an orgasmic drive. There’s a lust for life that encompasses the room. Indeed, watching “The Ladies of Suspended Cirque on the Triangle Trapeze” camp it up in miniskirts and glitter, mock pushing then catching one another from on high to a club mix of “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town,” it’s hard to believe that any dream wouldn’t come true.

20 Fave Films of The Decade

A Most Subjective Eclectic List of Films That Made Me Shamelessly Evangelize (in no particular order)

Forever (Heddy Honigmann)
Flame & Citron (Ole Christian Madsen)
Melody for a Street Organ (Kira Muratova)
Hunger (Steve McQueen)
Man on Wire (James Marsh)
The Edge of Heaven (Fatih Akin)
2046 (Wong Kar-Wai)
L’Enfant (Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne)
Grizzly Man (Werner Herzog)
Water (Deepa Mehta)
Cold Souls (Sophie Barthes)
Casino Royale (Martin Campbell)
Wendy and Lucy (Kelly Reichardt)
This Is England (Shane Meadows)
Flight of the Red Balloon (Hou Hsiao Hsien)
4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (Cristian Mungiu)
The Piano Teacher (Michael Haneke)
Antichrist (Lars Von Trier)
Gomorrah (Matteo Garrone)
The Pianist (Roman Polanski)

So Cold He's Hot

“Race,” the latest David Mamet play to open on Broadway, stars the effortlessly brazen James Spader. Spader, of course, has fashioned an entire career playing slick, sexy scoundrels whose looks allow them to get away with behavior a lesser nebbish like Woody Allen would get locked up for. For nearly three decades(!), and in a feat incomparable to any other actor of his generation, Spader has repeatedly and subversively performed his own form of jujitsu on Hollywood typecasting. Consistently he's cashed in on his leading man, pretty boy looks while simultaneously embodying character actor assholes—in the process exposing the very essence of sex appeal. In contrast, a star like Tom Cruise is a good guy at heart, forever excusing his high wattage looks in an "Aw shucks, don't hate me because I'm beautiful" appeal. Spader is Cruise's polar opposite, both refusing to apologize for the genes life dealt him and not caring one iota whether we like him or not. Frankly, my dear, he doesn't give a damn. Spader's sexiness—as opposed to mere physical attributes—lies in his flaunting of genuine self-confidence through his characters.

To read the rest visit my “Sex Beat” column at Carnal Nation.

Moscow on the Hudson: Russian Film Week

Russian Film Week, like the Eastern-European films it shows, runs at an absurdly frustrating, devil-may-care pace (at least for this New Yorker). Screenings of sweeping 160-minute epics often begin an hour late, which admittedly comes in handy if you show up at the School of Visual Arts on the east side instead of the SVA Theater on the west side, as too many of us confused movie-goers did for a sold out “Anna Karenina.” But if you’re willing to brave the stampeding, Russian-barking crowds at the entrance, followed by a sponsor-thanking trailer, followed by a live sponsor-thanking Russian, followed, of course, by the English translation, then by a gratitude-spewing director (or five or six if you went on the sold-out opening night), then by that English translation, to finally see whichever film you’ve by now forgotten the title of, you might just catch some meaningful cinema.

To read the rest visit The House Next Door.

Exposition

Exposition is:

A. A setting forth of meaning or intent.
B. The presentation of information in clear, precise form.
C. A public exhibition of broad scope.



D. The title of a stealthily hilarious “theatrical collision” directed by Michael Gardner and written by Matthew Freeman along with their pitch-perfect seven member cast (eight if you include The Couch, which got its own bio in the program, though I doubt it did much writing).

And letter D is all of the above and then some, and tonight it concludes its quick three-day run at The Brick Theater in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. The one hour show is rollercoaster comedy for the Dada crowd, a series of fun sketches in which the actors dressed in eveningwear as if for a Bunuel dinner party make small chat like aliens inhabiting human form, dialogue often overlapping and repeating as in a musical composition. “I squatted and peed on my own desk,” one actress declares in a “Saturday Night Live” Coneheads cadence. “To this day I believe it’s the most amount of blood that ever came out of my body,” a smiling tux-clad actor brightly chirps 50s TV sitcom style in fond recollection of his first car accident. (“And then I thought, ‘There’s another person in the car with me,’” he later adds, followed by, “No, that’s the person from the other car.”) There’s a tantalizing chemistry between the show’s director and its playwright who together make great use not only of the sparse black box stage, but also of the uncomfortable silences stretched to the breaking point of hilarity. “Why are we the only two people here?” an actor wonders even though there are six thespians onstage. Between the body language and emotions that don’t connect with the spoken word, and the words that don’t connect with any semblance of (staged) reality there’s enough in “Exposition” to make even the most cynical surrealist cheer.