1. Megalopolis (Francis Ford Coppola, 2024).A film maudit was expected and a film maudit was what we got - a loony mess but an endearing one. So for me, someone who hasn't seen a Coppola film since 1992's Bram Stoker's Dracula because I've been busy and also, some of the titles didn't strike me, to quote Jiminy Glick, my only question is why does this feel like the work of a high school student? Coppola began conceiving of this in 1977, well past his adolescence. But the allegorical bedrock, the self-importance, the reckless spending all bespeak the habits of the Clearasil set. What happened (or didn't)?
2. George Michael: "Father Figure" in Babygirl (Halina Reijn, 2024).Unlike the Fifty Shades trilogy, there was less time here to lay out the rules of the S/M relationship between Nicole Kidman and Harris Dickinson (or ignore them altogether as in Some Call It Loving). So despite the bravest performance of Kidman's career, much of this comes off as rushed and underbaked. But every so often, a film will transform a song you think you've got down and that happens when "Father Figure" scores a steamy acquiescence scene. "That's all I wanted," the song starts, signaling not only a post-coital smokiness but a maturity rooted in Michael's openness to appear vulnerable. The skeletal track (mostly Michael on a Roland D-50) leaves no hiding spaces for his breathy vocal and the backup singers (Shirley Lewis and an inaudible-to-me Michael) take the chorus. He's as naked as Kidman in the scene and the amplified theatre sound leaves us too with no hiding spaces. It's an embarrassingly adult song, light years away from (though not necessarily better than!) than the teenpop of Wham! which fizzled out barely a year before. "Father Figure" has him growing up so quickly it forces you to reexamine if Kidman's submission is all that rushed to begin with.
3. Matthew Restall: Elton John's Blue Moves (33 1/3). Riot. Exile. Forever Changes. Big deal. But when the 33 1/3 series editors chose to publish an entire book on Elton John's dreadful 1976 double album, I perked up. Restall posits several theories as to why Blue Moves "was a success that failed, and yet also a failure that succeeded," i.e., it sold as well as its predecessor (1975's Rock of the Westies) but felt like a turkey - punk, John's coming out as bisexual in Rolling Stone two weeks before its release, music so uncompromising it dashed expectations like Fleetwood Mac's Tusk (no), David Bowie's Tonight (closer), and George Michael's Listen Without Prejudice Vol. 1 (there we go), John's former publisher Dick James Music flooding the marketplace with reconfigurations of older product (in re-released singles, comps, live albums, K-Tel collections, a box set) and muddying the waters of new material, etc. All reasonable explanations except of the music itself where Restall does not convince - the album remains a bloated, marshmallowy tax on the senses.
4. Illeana Douglas: Connecticut in the Movies: From Dream Houses to Dark Suburbia (Lyons). I thought this coffee-table book by the fine actor (best remembered by me as the art teacher Roberta in Ghost World) would plumb the psychogeography of Connecticut, especially its status as a de facto suburb of New York City. Alas, it's comprised mostly of synopses of films set in the Constitution State. So if you see it in a bookstore, read the photo captions and find the movie/city pairing that jolts you most. As a frequent resident of Stamford, I'm looking forward to taking in Boomerang (Elia Kazan, 1947) and, um, The Horror of Party Beach (Del Tenney, 1964).
5. Padgett Powell: Edisto (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1984). I'd wanted to read this since 1989 when Spin deemed it one of the Top 10 Coolest Books in an issue that changed my life. Alas, this diffuse portrait of a white boy growing up in a largely Black community in the South gave me the mehs, yet another reminder that popular music will always goose my ass harder than literature. Unsurprisingly, the one line that snapped out at me doubles as a fine piece of music criticism. In a description of the Black voices surrounding him, our protagonist compares them to the Godfather of Soul: "Like these James Brown guitar riffs of five notes that run twenty minutes, then one of the five notes goes sharp and a statement is made. A whole evening hums, and then there's a new note — razor out."
6. Margaret Drabble: The Millstone (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1984); A Touch of Love (aka Thank You All Very Much) (Waris Hussein, 1969). Drabble's portrait of an unmarried pregnant woman in London who's made up her mind to keep her baby is equal parts harrowing and warm and all the more welcome for it. But it leaves a sour aftertaste, rendering childbirth/rearing an achievement superior to all other pursuits. One sentence toward the very end threatens to tank the entire enterprise. Rosamund, now the mother of baby Octavia, invites George, the gay man who unknowingly sired the child one night in a fit of heterosexuality, back to her flat to meet the infant. George is polite but, understandably, cannot share Rosamund's resolute love for Octavia, prompting Rosamund to opine, "George, I could see, knew nothing with such certainty." How she's gained access to the whole of George's existence Drabble never makes clear. The film version, starring Sandy Dennis as Rosamund, is better because Rosamund's state of mind is left open to interpretation. And Ian McKellen's turn as George opens up even more tantalizing possibilities for living life for oneself without ever becoming selfish.
7. James McCourt: Mawrdew Czgowchwz (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1975); Andrew Holleran: Dancer from the Dance (William Morrow & Co., 1978). Two revered, fabulously gay, gorgeously written New York City novels that proved a slog, akin to listening to someone recall their rather characteristic Saturday night. Dancer from the Dance follows gay men boogieing to disco, ingesting drugs, and lusting after sundry Adonises, activities that meet Holleran's disapproval: "They were bound together by a common love for a certain kind of music, physical beauty, and style—all the things one shouldn't throw away an ounce of energy pursuing, and sometimes throw away a life pursuing." This disco scholar who deems Patti Jo's "Make Me Believe in You," which makes several appearances within, one of the greatest singles of the 1970s says, "Pah!" McCourt's novel is a tougher read but lets in more air by keeping its eye on the millions of people who couldn't care less about the titular opera diva (pronounced Mardew Gorgeous) protected by a phalanx of worshipers with equally wacky names.
8. Gypsy, Majestic Theatre (January 3, 2025). It's simple. Every post-Merman diva who has taken on what may be Broadway's greatest role acts the part of Rose to the detriment of each number's song shape. Dramaturgy trounces melody as is the norm in a post-Method/Sondheim world. So while Audra McDonald acquits herself more than admirably, I kept hearing Ethel Merman in my head. And the event was definitely not worth the $368 I had to choke up to witness it.
9. Meridian Brothers: Mi Latinoamérica Sufre(Ansonia/Bongo Joe, 2024). The Meridian Brothers was started in 1998 as a solo project by musical polyglot Eblis Álvarez who eventually formed a band to experiment more deeply with various genres - the music of his homeland Colombia, for sure, but also "the golden era of ’70s Congolese rumba, Ghanian highlife and Nigerian afrobeat" to which this new album is a homage. As per the liners, it's also a concept album about Junior Maximiliano III, a young man of privilege who wants to study the folklore of Latin America but gets sidelined by taking a drug he calls "soma" and harboring criticism of his motivations by the artists in his ethnographic sightline. Even Spanish listeners will glean little of this from the songs; the liners merely clarify the satiric tone, reminiscent of "Common People," of the lyrics which include such translated-by-Google language as "Hey, how does rotten cumbia continue to advance?" and "Yesterday I cried while shitting." Álvarez's guitar lines sound like a kid brother toggling the radio dial just enough to annoy the crap out of you, needling where the African norm is more soothing or euphoric. If you're leery about swallowing such a jagged little pill, then check out the fervid, pulpy cover art by Mateo Rivan. It's a perfect depiction of Junior's bent journey which ends with him encrusted in self-pity and asking the government to subsidize his suffering.
10. Geordie Greep: The New Sound (Rough Trade, 2024). Former singer/multi-instrumentalist of feted London math rockers Black Midi Geordie Greep has such a goofy, onomatopoeic name, looks so much like a cartoon character, sounds so much like Donald Fagen, sambafies his music as satirically as Steely Dan did, plays up his virtuosity just like Steely Dan did, hires a orchestra of virtuosos just like Steely Dan did, and inhabits a cast of sketchy characters just like Steely Dan did that the man had to be grown in rock critic Petri dish. Greep's solo debut is speedier and shoutier than the Dan and you're right to wonder how much distance he's gained from the incels about whom he harangues over 62 minutes. But that's only because he's fashioned such an outrageous, ear-demanding platform for their toxicity.
Dionne Warwick: The Windows of the World (Scepter, 1967)
At the time, purchasing this 33-minute LP would have been a no-brainer given the four Bacharach-David cuts now familiar to anyone who's owned one of Warwick's myriad 1960s collections - the heart-yanking and eccentrically structured (there's no middle eight!) title track and "(There's) Always Something There to Remind Me" (both A-plusses), "I Say a Little Prayer" (A), and "Another Night" (high A-minus). Then, in a preview of the early-aughts mashup vogue, there's a version of West Side Story's "Somewhere" sang over "Cool" with 11-pm gusto. Warwick takes the Bert Kaempfert/Milt Gabler chestnut "L-O-V-E" (presented with no dashes here) as a childlike, whispery sex kitten (!) before dropping into her normal register and then ending on a parodic yodel to compliment the jokey wah-wah trumpet. Either the wine was flowing heavily in the studio that day or all involved hated the song (or both). Then we have two movie songs - "What's Good About Goodbye" sung by Tony Martin in the camp classic Casbah (John Berry, 1948) starring Yvonne De Carlo and Dory/André Previn's "You're Gonna Hear From Me" from Inside Daisy Clover (Robert Mulligan, 1965), both shouted with more 11-pm gusto. And then there's filler. Grade assured by the four A-level classics and the aspirational travel agency cover photo.
1. Jungle: "Candle Flame"(featuring Erick the Architect) (Caiowla/AWAL).
Single, video, and choreography of the year. As the oft acid jazzy duo Jungle, Brits Josh Lloyd-Watson and Tom McFarland seemed some of the least likely candidates to create music worth holding dear. But with "Candle Flame," they lay claim to haunted house, a specter of soul moaning above a post-disco beat. The apparently unsampled vocals sound like a dream of records past with all identifying marks fried out of distinction and twinkling doo-wop patterns hovering around the edges. It's such a raw, arresting sound that the duo felt it necessary to add Erick the Architect's raps as a placeholder more tethered to the earthly here and now. They needn't have bothered given how much presence and humanity the miraculous video, directed in one shot by Charlie Di Placido, returns to the song. Shay Latukolan's astonishing choreography uses the flow of gossip to activate his dancers. Individuals form canons as others pick up and spread the news. They attach to one another with copycat precision in a parody of bitchy clubgoers. But at the song's climax, the entire ensemble breaks free from the robotics and move together in looser-limbed ebullience. It's one of the most euphoric rejoinders to the idea that music organizes time. Here, music forges relationships and the dancers unhaunt the song, the emotional gibberish of the vocals finding a moment of articulation in their synchronized bliss-energy.
2.Vladimir Sorokin: The Queue (NYRB, 2008; originally published 1985).
Russia 1985–1999: TraumaZone: What It Felt Like to Live Through The Collapse of Communism and Democracy (Adam Curtis, 2022).
Tetris(Jon S. Baird, 2023).
Save for 21 blank pages intended to represent sleep, Sorokin's novel is comprised entirely of dialogue. 33 pages are devoted to a roll call. Several pages of oohs and aahs stand in for sexual activity. But mostly, people in the former Soviet Union chat with one another waiting in a series of lines for unnamed goods. With no other enunciative force in place, the novel forces the line to encounter itself as Sorokin makes clear in an incisive 2008 afterword: "The collapse of the line was much more painful for the collective Soviet body than the collapse of the Soviet Union...Gray and boring, but
inescapable, the line dissected the body into pieces, pacified and
disciplined it, gave people time to think about the advantages of
socialism and about the class struggle; and in the end they were
rewarded with food and goods" (261; 257).
Curtis gives viewers seven one-hour episodes to think about socialism for his latest Molotov documentary. As with The Queue, TraumaZone abjures similar enunciative functions such as voiceover and non-diegetic music, using only occasional explanatory titles over undeployed footage from the BBC's Moscow bureau. Less sanguine than Sorokin about the line, Curtis nevertheless mourns the loss of any ability to think collectively. How even Francis Fukuyama could view the subsequent slide into capitalist kleptocracy as utopian destiny defies belief.
For a more triumphant narrative, Tetris, an Apple TV+ production, recounts the struggle to wrest the licensing rights for the evergreen video game out of the Soviet union just before its collapse. Given Hollywood's inability to think collectively (or to collectively bargain), the story is told via car chases, last-minute reversals, and characters partitioned off into Good and Bad categories. When the principal players (to name them would go against the spirit of this entry) finally get the game in proper capitalist hands, the Pet Shop Boys' "Opportunities (Let's Make Lots of Money)" plays over their triumph/the closing credits with no apparent irony.
3. Assassins, Kweskin Theatre, Stamford, CT (June 17). And at the same time that Fukuyama was proclaiming the end of history, this is the democracy he was celebrating. In what is quite possibly Stephen Sondheim's greatest achievement, all the Americans who attempted and/or succeeded to assassinate a president come together to sing "Everybody's got the right to be happy/to their dreams" as each points a gun at the audience. Also, please allow this entry to serve as a reminder to support local theater since this production was a far more unforgettable experience than Sweeney Todd on Broadway.
4. Pierre Leguillon: The Barefoot Promise (Triangle) A coffee-table book of film stills of the human foot in various forms. And far less cheap than that might seem. It sometimes takes a good scan to see how the foot signifies in certain photos - a renegade toe from Ozu's The End of Summer or a recessed Cinderella. Which means this is a gift from a true scholar of cinema, one who knows that much of the art of mise-en-scène lies in pulling your eye away from the main action.
5. Rectify (Created by Ray McKinnon, 2013-2016)A rewatch of The Sopranos is in order. Until then, this is the greatest serial of the Peak TV era I've ever seen. After nineteen years on death row, Daniel Holden is exonerated with the help of DNA evidence. But his return to small-town Georgia is far from Edenic. In Daniel's subsequent quest to keep meaninglessness at bay, we're forced to confront the decisions we make on a daily, even hourly basis. No other series and few films have glimpsed so penetratingly into quotidian existence. And while I've been known to make condescending remarks about the art of acting, the performances here humble me. Aden Young as Daniel is damn near extraterrestrial in his portrayal of Daniel. But Abigail Spencer, J. Smith-Cameron, Adelaide Clemens, Clayne Crawford, Luke Kirby, Bruce McKinnon, Jake Austin Walker, and J. D. Evermore (I need to list their names) all dumbfound.
6. To Leslie (Michal Morris, 2022)
The Lost King (Stephen Frears, 2022)
Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret (Kelly Fremon Craig, 2023) Three absolutely fantastic middlebrow films. Believe the hype re: To Leslie, a tale of redemption told with such simplicity, hell, such purity that I was crying buckets at the end when a clear line communication between the principals is finally opened up. Frears is the finest middlebrow director extant so the high quality of The Lost King is no surprise. A biopic on Philippa Langley's quest to exhume the remains of King Richard III, it has trenchant things to say about urban planning and the victors of history. It's a measure of the freshness of Judy Blume's 1970 book Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret that it took such a criminally long time to make it to the screen. Hopefully, this consistently inventive adaptation, along with the terrific 2023 documentary Judy Blume Forever, will inspire more Blume-authored projects.
7. Jason Farago, "Why Culture Has Come to a Standstill," The New York Times, October 10, 2023, p. 38 This bullshit again. It's a fool's errand to pick apart each nugget of wrongness in this venal thinkpiece on why "ours is the least innovative century for the arts in 500 years." For the real goal of articles like this is to assure the Times-reading landed gentry that the world is not changing.
8. Hugh Hodges: The Fascist Groove Thing: A History of Thatcher's Britain in 21 Mixtapes (PM) As a catalogue of popular/semipopular musicians' response to Thatcherism, essential; as a reading experience, numbing. "I knew I was never going to get everything and everyone I wanted into these pages" (155), Hodges rues. But boy does he ever try. Organized around 24 mixtapes (not 21 since 3 come in two parts), his pedantic, rockist prose cries out for pruning. And that's without mentioning the ten pages of recommendations for further reading and the 39-page annotated discography. In a footnote listing songs that addressed nuclear war, he admits/threatens, "I could go on" (137). Oh, we know, Hugh, we know.
9. Alex Pappademas and Joan LeMay: Quantum Criminals: Ramblers, Wild Gamblers, and Other Sole Survivors from the Songs of Steely Dan (University of Texas Press) The rare book that deepens the mysteries of a discography. Pappademas respects the abyss at the center of Steely Dan's music. Seizing on the inexpressive codes of Brill Building pop, Donald Fagen and Walter Becker disappeared themselves behind lyrics knotted with proper nouns and a sound besotted with jazz heard from a suburban afar. "The music tells you nothing about the people who made it," (3) Pappademas tells us early on. So with the help of LeMay's wry illustrations, he provides exegeses of damn near every lifeform populating the Steely Dan songbook. Dr. Wu, Kid Charlemagne, Josie, the Gaucho, Third World Man all get a chapter. Fagen and Becker too - they're the most prominent aliens on board. It's the most trenchant analysis of the Dan extant. And still you close the book knowing that you will never get to the bottom of this parallax view of an oeuvre.
10. Olivia Rodrigo: Guts (Concrete/Motown/Quality Control, 2023) Album of the year. Some may welcome the insight Rodrigo's lyrics provide into the travails of dating while famous. Me, I'm in it for the music, man. Not since Lady Gaga has an artist evinced so much joy in the sheer craft of songwriting. She rocks, she pops, she Fleetwood Macs, she raps some. Even her parlor ballads exude variety and inventiveness. Two great albums already and she's not yet 21. So to all potential suitors, I have this to say: Dude (or gal, cf. "Lacy"), don't bother! You'll probably just bore her and, even worse, keep her from writing songs.
Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (Lunt-Fontanne Theatre, September 17, 2023)
The performance of Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street at the Lunt-Fontanne Theatre last Sunday was the first Stephen Sondheim show to leave me underwhelmed. But I'm struggling to posit reasons why. Maybe I remain too in awe of the first Sweeney Todd I saw, the 1982 TV movie with Angela Lansbury and George Hearn as Mrs. Lovett and Todd, respectively. Maybe the leads were miscast. Annaleigh Ashford and Nicholas Christopher (filling in for Josh Groban which was why our tickets were cheaper than usual) possess gargantuan talent, especially Christopher who was dripping with sweat for many minutes after a fiery "Epiphany." But both seemed too young for the roles (as I suspect Groban is too) and neither were as rotted or scary as Lansbury and Hearn. And maybe, just maybe, Sweeney Todd pales in comparison to Company, Into the Woods, Assassins, etc. For once, a Sondheim musical bore the two negative hallmarks of a Broadway show - too long and too many ballads. Still, nothing could detract from the power of the best number - "The Ballad Of Sweeney Todd" which opens and closes the show and is reprised throughout. That's because, as always, it's an ensemble number, Broadway's greatest gift to humankind. With queerly high tenors and screeching sopranos building to near glossolalia, Sondheim skirts the edge of chaos. To quote Salieri in Amadeus, it was both terrifying and wonderful to watch.
1.BBC livestream of The Queue. Snicker all you want that an estimated 250,000 people waited sometimes more than 24 hours to walk past Queen Elizabeth's coffin lying in state; I might join you myself. But the livestream was a classic of durational cinema, four days where Warhol's Empire was a mere eight hours. And unlike Empire, there was plenty to break up the monotony beyond the changing of the guard every twenty minutes [sic!]: celebrity queuers ("Look - it's Joe and Jill!"), fainting guards, the spider on the Queen's coffin, "Oooh, he's hot!," "That's what you wore?," the last person in the queue (Sarah Clarke [at left below], The Lady Usher of the Black Rod in the House of Lords), and a cascade of facts testifying to the enormity of the undertaking.
2. Bob Stanley, Let's Do It: The Birth of Pop (Faber UK). Where Stanley's Yeah Yeah Yeah: The Story of Modern Pop dealt with the popular music of the latter half of the twentieth century, this sequel takes on the first half. Like its predecessor, it conveys no coherent point of view and is most useful as a compendium of songs and artists that you should get to at some point (Earl Bostic! Reginald Foresythe!). But in a chapter on post-war Broadway about three-quarters through, Stanley takes long overdue aim at the oeuvre of Rodgers and Hammerstein although he shields himself by dissing only the lame film adaptations. Trust me, Bob - even in the theatre, Carousel's "storyline drags and the pacing is awful." Elsewhere, the man has wit to spare. On Jack Jones: "He simply existed to fill a gap that was exactly Jack Jones-shaped."
3. Chez Kane, Powerzone (Frontiers Music SRL). The denizens of Expert Witness, the Facebook group dedicated to the glory of Robert Christgau, were going on a bit too long about Taylor Swift's Midnights last October. So to be a brat, I tried to steer the conversation towards this album which I'd never heard. Turns out to be, um, actually kinda good and precisely the kind of trash jolt Midnights could use. A Welsh pop-metaller, Chez (rhymes with Pez) Kane has her Vixen and Benatar steals down pat. Chuck Eddy music if I've ever heard any and Swift could do worse than give her a call.
4. Jesus Nalgas (@jesus_nalgas on Instagram and @jesusnalgas on TikTok). Nalgas gives the impression that during high school he spent more time observing faculty rather than hanging out with friends. Whatever the case, he's transformed his possible loneliness into a series of hilarious performances as exasperated teachers, office workers, lunch ladies and has since branched out into other professions: TSA workers, DMV meanies, bank tellers, the like. With his airhorn voice and overenunciation of every syllable, he evokes an overworked service provider who prays he won't have to repeat himself yet again but knows damn well he'll have to because people just 👏 won't👏listen.
5. Belle and Sebastian, Late Developers (Matador). Where once Stuart Murdoch, Sarah Martin, and company had alienated childhoods to mine for their absurdly catchy songs, they've now "got kids and dystopia" and it's hell on their sense of specifics. Absurdly catchy the songs remain--any rom-com producer in need of an end-credits sync should look to the title track or "I Don't Know What You See in Me," the gushing first single. But they're either too bored or too blindsided by their late-developing adulthood to call it up with any concreteness. Gone are the proper nouns and local color that made their alienation feel lived-in. Perhaps if their kids prove too uncool to start their own Belle and Sebastian, it will jolt them out of their vagueness long about 2030.
6. Into the Woods, St. James Theatre (October 16). Remember when I said that Broadway musicals don't need second acts? That doesn't apply to Stephen Sondheim. The obsession starts here.
7. Noirvember, Spectacle (November 19). Spectacle is a collectively run microcinema in Brooklyn and Noirvember is their annual all-night film noir festival. Only hints are announced beforehand so "an offbeat and criminally unseen b-film directed by a certain public enemy number one, in his sole directorial effect" turned out to be James Cagney's 1957 Short Cut to Hell while the "special 16mm film noir treat" at midnight (really closer to 1 a.m.) was Kiss the Blood Off My Hands (Norman Foster, 1948). We left as the George Raft vehicle Nocturne (Edward L. Marin, 1946) was playing off a digital file. The sheer unlikeliness that the event attracted a good thirty movie lovers trumped any individual title.
8. Eddie Izzard Performs Charles Dickens' Great Expectations, Greenwich House Theatre (January 20). When all modes of narration converge on one person in the theatre, the burden becomes too much to bear. With barely existent stage design and two or three brief musical cues, Izzard compressed Great Expectations into two dreary hours by performing every character and providing chunks of narration. The effect was akin to a speed freak breathlessly recounting his new favorite HBO Max series. I know Izzard is attracted to endurance tests; she completed 32 marathons over the 31 days of January 2021. Would that I experienced this one as an item in the Times too.
9. The return of Creel Pone. The great experimental music reissue label went dark for a while. But they're back with a completist-infuriating vengeance. New titles are pouring out (the latest is CP 281.03 Henry Martin: Concerto Per Un Quadro Di Adami). But there are dozens of "reéditions" adding bonus tracks to previous releases. So those of us who've managed to collect everything up until now have plenty of catching up to do. In a word that mirrors the squelchy sounds in which Creel Pone traffics, ARRRRGH!!! On sale at Alpha State NYC.
10. Lil Yachty: Let's Start Here. (Concrete/Motown/Quality Control, 2023). More than the last frontier in consciousness or an accurate evocation of a drug experience, psychedelia in music is a catalog of sounds that repays obsessive listening. Given how Yachty's discography (if not post-sampledelic hip-hop in general) provides a bedrock for trippy sonics, this plunge into Tame Implala-cured acid rock is far from the radical departure most critics claim. The falsetto Yachty adopts to sing through the three a.m. vapor waves does get wearying. But unlike another late-night tripper, John Cale on his new Mercy, he submerges his voice into the muck often enough to provide some variation. Also unlikeCale, he cedes much of the vocal spotlight to female guest stars Diana Gordon and Fousheé as true collaborators rather than decorations. Start with the last song, "Reach the Sunshine" which bears the same relationship to Let's Start Here. as the title track did to Roxy Music's For Your Pleasure - a methodical stroll launching the entire album into space.
Deception (Arnaud Desplechin, 2021); Crimes of the Future (David Cronenberg, 2022); Company (Third Broadway Revival, 2021)
Deception (Arnaud Desplechin, 2021)
Deception is one of the most egregious violations of the Show Don't Tell rule in cinema history. On one hand, Desplechin had no choice but to tell tell tell since the 1990 Philip Roth novel on which the film is based is all dialogue. But on the other, perhaps that was an indication that no one should attempt to film the thing because Deception is a disaster. The French excel at cinema featuring little more than characters talking for the entire running time, e.g., select titles from Rohmer, Eustache, Garrel, etc. But the talk either points to a world outside the local concerns of the story at hand or epitomizes an exquisite waste of time. Deception dotes on Philip (Denis Podalydès) aka Philip Roth. Or the Philip Roth that comes through conversation, i.e., maybe not the real Philip Roth. For who could know the real Philip Roth including the (real?) Philip Roth himself? Isn't all self-fashioning mere deception? The film stays at this level of Philosophy 101 throughout as Philip's King Kong ego pulls all the women in his life (few of whom have names, e.g., Léa Seydoux plays "The English Lover") into his orbit. What any of this has to do with Desplechin remains a mystery. Even worse, sometimes Desplechin will show and tell for double the dreariness as when Philip's wife tells Philip that she's seen a revealing notebook of his and then we see her seeing the revealing notebook. In ventilating this airless novel, Desplechin suffocates it all the more. Nadir: the mock trial in which feminists accuse Philip of misogyny.
Grade: C
Crimes of the Future (David Cronenberg, 2022)
It's no Crash. But I loved it, of course. I need to see it with closed captioning, though, since I missed a lot of the sotto voce lines - what did Kristen Stewart (a great performance, appropriately unnatural in its perpetual weepiness) whisper to Viggo Mortensen at his first performance with Léa Seydoux? Also, much of the crime aspect of the film escaped me. For now, I read the final shot as hopeful. Or, more precisely, the only hope we have to survive the destructive path of capitalism is to rearrange our bodies to use destruction as our fuel.
Grade: A-minus
Company (Third Broadway Revival, 2021)
This revival has Katrina Lenk playing a woman, Bobbie, in the role Dean Jones originated in 1970 as a man, Bobby. The gender reversals do nothing to diminish the majesty of some of Sondheim's greatest music and lyrics, their Bacharachian swells, their dizzying repetitions, their absurdly long notes. The finest moments in musicals are ensemble numbers anyway precisely because they subsume a character's particularity. Company's money shot comes early in the opening title (and best) number. The cast is crammed into Bobbie's apartment, waiting to surprise her on her 35th birthday. But in this production, the apartment moves to the front of the stage for the final chorus at which point our audience burst into helpless applause. The sole purpose of this narratively unnecessary movement is to bring us closer into the company. And for a brief moment, there were no protagonists and antagonists, no performers and audience, just orgasmic oneness. No other art form better offers that illusion.
Still, like so many musicals, Company is too damn long - 2 hours and 40 minutes including intermission in this iteration. I felt my attention flagging in the second act despite the presence of several classic numbers. Not being a ballad guy, I suggest cutting "Someone Is Waiting" and "Marry Me a Little," Bobbie/Bobby's solo numbers from the first act. Bobbie/Bobby is the least interesting character in the show, presumably by design. Things happen to and around her/him. So retaining only "Being Alive" for the finale would lend the song extra force and bring to the fore its complexities, holding marriage as exhilarating and marriage as stifling in tension with one another.
For the first ten or so minutes, Steven Spielberg's West Side Story remake feels like a tomb opened up for the reanimated corpse of Robert Wise's 1961 film adaptation to pirouette onto 2021 screens. You ask yourself, "why this again? why now?" Soon, though, I was sucked in by the incomparable score. And by the time Tony (an underrated Ansel Elgort) lets forth with "Maria," I was blubbering. Spielberg injects some jokey moments into the number such as neighbors slamming their windows shut. But the man means no disrespect to the genre as evinced by the irresistible shot in which Tony looks heavenward while a pool of lights reflected in pissy street ponds twinkle around him, quite possibly the loveliest moment in Spielberg's oeuvre. Thanks to Spielberg's commitment, I now hear "Maria" as an apotheosis of American musical theatre and wonder if Stephen Sondheim ever composed a couplet as divine as "Say it loud and there's music playing/Say it soft as it's almost like praying."
And so it goes. Rachel Zegler as Maria, Ariana DeBose as Anita, David Alvarez as Bernardo, Mike Faist as Riff, and, yes Elgort all acquit themselves admirably and then some. The mambo at the dance gave me the chills (but then again, it always does). "Tonight" is performed largely through an illegally locked fire escape grate. Tony tells Maria that she should get the landlord to fix that, a specific more heart-warmingly New Yawk than an opened-out "America" featuring a protest against Robert Moses. "Cool" makes more sense here as a rift between Tony and Riff rather than as a time killer in the 1961 film. And giving "Somewhere" to Valentina, the new character to replace/beef up the role of Doc, is a stroke performed by Rita Moreno as a more generalized plea for transcendence. My heart was heavy. The 156 minutes whizz by. I loved it.
But...what does it all mean? Now that we know what a West Side Story film would be like with actual Latin actors in the roles of Maria and Bernardo (and an Anita with no brown face), what's next? Does this augur a Hollywood with not only more work for Zegler, DeBose, and Alvarez, but more culturally specific stories as well? Anbodys is now a trans guy (played by non-binary actor Iris Menes) who protests the Jets' marking him as female. When he wins them over by informing them that Chino (Josh Andrés Rivera) has a gun and is looking to shoot Tony, one of the Jets praises him with a preposterous "You've done good, buddy boy." Even though I found this as groan-inducing as any of Tarantino's historical revisions, I applaud this moment of acceptance if it makes a trans viewer feel mighty real. But as Peggy Lee (and Cristina) once asked, is that all there is? A sprinkling of Representation Matters into a proven property?
Judging from the premature obituaries for the film's "underperformance" at the box office, that apparently is all there is, at least at the tentpole level. But there are (coughs) alternatives. I saw West Side Story after spending a weekend with two hideous, offensive films - Single All the Way and The Bitch Who Stole Christmas, the former Netflix's go at a gay Hallmark Christmas movie, the latter a feature-length version of one of those DOA musical numbers on RuPaul's Drag Race. Both function as what Kristen Warner calls "plastic representation" - a box-checking quantifiable difference that "overdetermines the benchmarks of progress and obscures the multifaceted
challenges inherent in booking roles as well as securing work on writing
staffs, directing gigs, or even reaching executive gatekeeper
status—thus privileging the visible (actors) over all other cinematic
and televisual functions." If Single All the Way and The Bitch Who Stole Christmas are "gay films," I'll stick with my "perverse" and "naive" readings of the queerness in select Joan Crawford and Franklin Pangborn titles. But I left West Side Story with plasticity on the mind. Isit a trans film now or even a Latin one? Could it ever be?
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