The Art of Stealing from Errol Morris: The Art of the Steal

Don Argott's suspenseful “The Art of The Steal”—which delves deeply into the government and corporate takeover of a beloved private institution, the Barnes Foundation, by the city of Philadelphia and the Pew Charitable Trusts among other "charitable" organizations—is propaganda at its finest. The film follows the gripping saga of the art collection of the visionary Albert C. Barnes, who had the foresight to buy up the best of the best by iconoclasts Van Gogh, Picasso, Cezanne and Matisse among other masters while the rest of the stuffy art world turned up its collective nose. In turn, Barnes gave the finger to the rarefied museum establishment by founding a school in Merion, Pennsylvania where the artworks—now estimated to be worth $25 billion—would hang above the faculty and students with limited hours open to the public. This didn't sit too well with Barnes's arch-nemeses, the Annenberg family, and the rest of Philly's notoriously corrupt power brokers.

To read the rest of my review visit The House Next Door at Slant Magazine.

"North Atlantic" at REDCAT

“North Atlantic,” the latest production from stalwart avant-garde troupe the Wooster Group, is a sexed up “Catch-22” that follows the travails of an international, Cold War-era peacekeeping force confined to an aircraft carrier while on a classified mission in the North Atlantic. James Strahs wrote the piece for the company way back in 1982 and it's now being revived not to draw any modern political parallels, but because, well, according to highly practical director Elizabeth LeCompte during a Q&A after the show I attended at the REDCAT theater in L.A., the play fits the space that's available for the NYC run. And Frances McDormand wanted to work with the group. While it's refreshing to hear a director candidly embrace limitations and ignore politics, it requires more than that to create great art.

To read the rest of my review visit The House Next Door at Slant Magazine.

Why Can’t A Woman Be More Like A Man?

As a freelance critic who is one of the few female voices at many of the sites I write for I found “NY Times” bigwig film critic Manohla Dargis’s run-up to the Oscars rant at Jezebel (see "Fuck Them": Times Critic On Hollywood, Women, & Why Romantic Comedies Suck, a follow up to her more staid “Times” lament Women in the Seats but Not Behind the Camera on the dearth of female directors in Hollywood) delightfully ballsy. For how often do you hear Grey Lady journalists explain why romantic comedies are so cringe worthy in the following terms?

“One, the people making them have no fucking taste, two, they're morons, three they're insulting panderers who think they're making movies for the great unwashed and that's what they want. I love romantic movies. I absolutely do. But I literally don't know what's happening. I think it's depressing that Judd Apatow makes the best romantic comedies and they're about men.”

But Dargis’s swinging cojones are also the problem with the piece. As a longtime fan of both Dargis and her own object of fandom, action director Kathryn Bigelow, I wholeheartedly agree with Dargis’ assessment of the shameful state of Hollywood with regards to female filmmakers. What’s more interesting, however, is why I’m a fan of both these talented women – and not, say, Nancy Meyers, a Hollywood player in the rom-com genre who I like even less than Dargis does. The simple truth is both Dargis and Bigelow (as opposed to Nancy Meyers) create their art from that very same male POV that Dargis herself seems to blame.

For let’s face it. This isn’t a matter of Hollywood not trusting women – it’s a matter of Hollywood, like society, placing a higher value on the white, hetero masculine gaze. It’s the same reason a filmmaker like Douglas Sirk would never direct a western like John Ford. Sirk just didn’t direct from a typically straight male point of view. Both Dargis and Bigelow, not to mention the many women execs in charge of those big bad studios, have been let into the good old boys club simply because the male honchos recognize them as one of their own. (That Bigelow eventually got kicked to the curb for low box office receipts unlike some of her under-performing male colleagues could be attributed to a million other factors besides gender, as Dargis dubiously hypothesizes.) Dargis and Bigelow write and direct, respectively, like their male counterparts, from a very comforting and familiar, masculine point of view.

As opposed to Nancy Meyers who, in Daphne Merkin’s profile of her in the “Times” magazine, is constantly reminding her crew that she wants things “soft” – right down to digitally eliminating spiky plants. Meyers isn’t just a female filmmaker, but a very feminine filmmaker, and one whose viewpoint greatly appeals to a lot of other female-gaze oriented folks. (This is also why she doesn’t direct like Dargis fave Judd Apatow – and Hollywood’s hiring a talented rom-com director who happens to be female with the same masculine gaze as Mr. Apatow would merely be an exercise in redundancy, not equal rights.) Personally I find Meyers as boring and predictable a director as Guy Ritchie, yet I’m also willing to admit that for all I know Meyers could be the next Douglas Sirk, lambasted in his own day for being soft. Perhaps her reputation will be rescued a few decades from now by a female-gaze oriented critic more insightful than I who recognizes the filmmaker’s petal pushing in a Hollywood world of bomb throwers as a radically subversive act of art.

And like the art establishment, where women’s work often makes up less than five percent of a museum’s collection, the business of Hollywood reflects America’s binary patriarchal society – it doesn’t determine it. In another century Georgia O’Keefe “suffered” from her affiliation with Alfred Stieglitz in the sense that his male gaze was forever being placed on top of her paintings. Once Stieglitz had eroticized the artist herself via his photographs her pictures were seen only through a sexual lens in the public imagination. O’Keefe’s artwork could no longer be expressions of a female sensibility. They had to undergo a masculine eroticization to be valued. Yet altering (mis)perception isn’t up to MOMA or Warner Brothers, but to the grassroots artists on the ground, including the gender-neutral gaze, indie filmmakers who elicit change. Only then will a studio call on Kelly Reichardt, or Ramin Bahrani for that matter, to direct the next superhero flick.

My Favorite Performances of The Past Decade

Film reviewing like life itself is a subjective experience. So when I started thinking about which actors stood out as the “best” of the decade I inevitably thought of which performances became seared into my own mind with the visceral force of a hot iron. And that in turn has led me to these five thespians that with the slightest gesture, with a single syllable raised the powerful films they were in to a shamanistic level.

Daniel Day Lewis – There Will Be Blood

Daniel Plainview is no Bill The Butcher. The always-mesmerizing Day Lewis plays obsessed oilman Plainview equal parts camp and pathos in a performance to rival that of Gloria Swanson as Norma Desmond in “Sunset Boulevard.” Day Lewis is ready for his close up and his milkshake – forcing us to swallow it whole.

Javier Bardem – No Country for Old Men

Rather than downplay his steamy looks Bardem taps into the darkness of his innate sensuality to turn in an edge-of-your seat performance as the assassin Anton Chigurh. In spite of the Coen brothers’ crazy hairdo idea he keeps us watching with an attraction-repulsion effect, forever wondering if a hint of warm-blooded impulse will break through that stone cold exterior. Without any help from theatrical makeup or prosthetics Bardem transforms that leading man face into a chilling inhuman mask.

Michael Fassbender – Hunger

As the real life (IRA) prisoners’ rights activist and hunger striker Bobby Sands Michael Fassbender announces himself as the next Daniel Day Lewis. Fassbender’s dignified and nuanced portrayal of a man whose body physically deteriorates while his mind and soul spiritually grow is nothing short of astounding. Christian Bale should take note.

Isabelle Huppert - The Piano Teacher

Gainsbourg at the beck and call of Von Trier is no match for Huppert under Haneke’s strict hand. As the piano professor Erika whose sexual repression leads to a sadomasochistic spiraling downwards Huppert doesn’t create a character so much as stage a slow-motion, human car wreck. By the film’s shocking end we view the heroine’s suicide as a mercy killing.

Heath Ledger – The Dark Knight

Even if it weren’t Ledger’s last completed film watching the dark blockbuster you fear for his life the whole way through. The Joker takes over the actor like something out of “The Exorcist.” This is less a performance than a channeling of a sociopath, as if Ledger instead of embodying a role emptied his body of his own soul. Whereas an actor like Sean Penn might disappear into the character Harvey Milk, Ledger just disappears. Wipe away all the clown makeup and, even more terrifying, still not one trace of the actor will be glimpsed.

Suspended Cirque’s “Speak Easy”

True artistic discoveries—relatively secret revelations that unfold before one's eyes—are few and far between, even for those of us who spend an inordinate amount of time watching and thinking about theater and film. But every once in a while a group like Suspended Cirque, an under-the-radar band of aerial performers, all heart but no budget, comes along to remind us of art's very purpose. The young company's latest show, “Speak Easy,” like their first three, had a blink-or-you'll-miss-it run over at Galapagos Art Space in DUMBO. Some high-flying patron needs to give this troupe a permanent home or artistic residency before the bloated Cirque du Soleil scoops them up.

To read the rest of my review visit The House Next Door.

“Filmmaker” magazine’s winter issue now playing at a newsstand near you!

Oscar-winning director James Marsh (“Man On Wire”) tells me about his latest “Red Riding: 1980,” the second film in a three-part neo-noir based on David Peace’s novels that revolve around the infamous “Yorkshire Ripper” of the 70s and 80s. A must-see series – and a must-read interview!

A Critic Squirms on Broadway

“NY Times” theater critic Ben Brantley’s reviews are a must-read for me. Like the best of the best whether I agree or disagree with his takes is irrelevant. I always come away feeling that I’ve learned something new – because even after all these years Brantley himself seems to be discovering something fresh from each and every show he analyzes.

And then at the other end of the “Times” spectrum is critic Charles Isherwood, whose byline shouldn’t even be gracing the same page as Brantley’s. Normally I avoid Isherwood’s predictable, clichéd non-think pieces but the title Feeling Unsettled At a Feel-Good Show in this past Sunday’s “Times” (1/31/10) caught my eye. The essay is the result of Isherwood’s conflicted response to the Broadway hit “Fela!” about Nigeria’s iconic Afrobeat creator and political activist, directed and choreographed by the legendary Bill T. Jones. Four paragraphs into the piece Isherwood explains, “As much as I enjoyed the show…it left me with lingering questions about the depiction of the African milieu it evoked. In short, the emphasis in ‘Fela!’ on the spectacle of African culture tilted the show a little too closely toward minstrelsy.”

In short, Isherwood is upset that he was forced to think, to confront a reaction he didn’t expect, instead of being merely entertained. (Which led me to wonder, did he not get the memo that thinking is part of his job requirement?) But instead of looking in the mirror and asking himself why he’s disturbed that “the way the dancers weave in and out of the audience repeatedly seems ingratiating, a sort of seduction that almost sexualizes the performers,” as Isherwood puts it (and what is wrong with this sexualizing other than the fact that it makes a particular theater critic uncomfortable?) he does something even more outrageous than any touchy-feely performer would dare. He blames the show!

After expounding upon the production’s women in their “flesh-baring ensembles” who “strut around the stage and the theater looking exotic, imperious and sexy” Isherwood adds that, “So too do the male members of the ensemble, who also bare a lot of flesh but have little to do other than sing and dance. Hence my discomfort.” Considering “Fela!” is a show directed and choreographed by a gifted and unapologetic dance man Isherwood’s attitude is damn condescending. “Little to do other than sing and dance” implies that singing and dancing are a step below the speaking of dialogue. Isherwood complains that only the title character gets to have his say, while ignoring the fact that all those hardworking performers rendered mute are actually emoting through their bodies. Which he’d realize if he’d chosen to set aside his preconceived notions of what a musical should be and simply watch this form of theater through its choreographer’s lens. Isherwood is only freaked out because “Fela!” doesn’t adhere to what he believes a Broadway show to be – with spoken words privileged above body language. (He later adds, “Although some of the dancers have individual moments, none are given individual voices.” Only if by “voices” Isherwood means actual words. My guess is that Isherwood is not listening to distinct voices emerging through a physical form because he can’t transcend his own limited way of seeing.)

Indeed, Isherwood admits as much when he writes, “Would I feel any discomfort if I were attending an African dance recital at Dance Theater Workshop? Probably not.” But for Isherwood the Broadway setting is “a little like being in a Disneyland version of Africa.” Since Disney seems to own most of Broadway these days (has he not heard of the Disneyland version of Africa called “The Lion King”?) one wonders why Isherwood is overly sensitive only to “Fela!” being Disney-fied – so much so that he faults the production for the context he’s seeing it in. “’Fela!’ sometimes seems to turn its ostensible characters into flashy sideshow entertainments, to elevate sensation over substance,” he even laments. But isn’t this what Fela Kuti himself did? First came the sensation (his music) followed by his substance (his politics). Isherwood couldn’t even get past his own unnerving sensations – so how could he ever hope to experience the substance within “Fela!”? Now that I think of it, perhaps I did learn something from Isherwood after all. When it comes to a critic like this it’s best to blame the messenger.