Category Archives: The Morgue

The Martian

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The Martian, Matt DamonRidley Scott’s movie (trailer) based on the runaway best-seller by debut author Andy Weir is a knockout. But then I’m a sucker for stories with a big component of “how to make things work.” The hero of this story, astronaut Mark Watney has to get a lot of things working very fast, when the crew of the ARES III Mission inadvertently strands him on Mars, “the first person to be alone on a whole planet.” Watney (played by Matt Damon) is left behind when a massive sandstorm threatens the entire crew. Flying debris damages his biotelemetry unit, which registers him as dead. And in the storm, they can’t find his body.

First, he must solve the problems of food and water, long-term, since it will take at least four years until another Mars mission could rescue him, even if NASA knows he’s still alive. Which he has no way of telling them. It’s a test of humanity to put a person in extreme circumstances, and you cannot get any more extreme than the surface of the Red Planet.

Back on Earth, though, eagle-eyed Mars-watchers notice movement on the planet surface and come to an obvious conclusion. The race is then on—against distance, bureaucracy, technological limitations, and the implacable elements of Mars. All I can say is I’m glad I’m not NASA Director Teddy Sanders’s (Jeff Daniels) or his media relations director (Kristen Wiig). Especially strong were the roles of Jet Propulsion Lab director Bruce Ng (played by Benedict Wong), and ARES III Mission Commander Melissa Lewis (Jessica Chastain). Matt Damon is terrific, as always, in the role of Watney. Just the right mix of angst and wit, supported by an excellent script from Drew Goddard. The Martian surface was filmed in Wadi Rum, Jordan.

I know there are people who believe they don’t like science fiction. To me, movies like this are less about the science and more about the human spirit and how it can engage with the creative mind. The science makes it read “real.” As The Atlantic critic Christopher Orr wrote, “Excellence in cinema is sometimes a singular achievement . . . On other occasions, it’s the result of extraordinary collaboration. The Martian is one of these.”

Rotten Tomatoes critics rating: 93%, viewer ratings: 93%.

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A Comedy of Tenors

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A Comedy of Tenors, Paris

Antoinette LaVecchia (Maria) and Bradley Dean (Tito)(photo: Roger Mastroianni. Courtesy, Cleveland Play House)

Ken Ludwig’s new play, A Comedy of Tenors is a good old-fashioned theatrical farce. “Three tenors. Three egos. One stage. What can possibly go wrong?” said the Cleveland Play House promotion. You may remember Ludwig’s big hit of 26 years ago—Lend Me a Tenor—and this one, too, involves amorous shenanigans with high-voltage opera stars, most of them the same characters who appeared in the earlier play.

A Comedy of Tenors premiered at the Cleveland Play House in September then moved to Princeton’s McCarter Theatre, which co-produced it and where it was on stage through November 1. The entire cast of seven moved with it, as did director Stephen Wadsworth, who has masterminded numerous notable McCarter plays over the past two decades. Wadsworth is well acquainted with the operatic temperament through his work with opera companies across Europe, at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, and as director of Opera Studies at the Julliard School. He doubtless has a natural affinity for this comedic material.

Set in 1930s Paris, the story centers on the final hours before a “three tenors”-style concert. But impresario Henry Saunders can’t seem to get his three singers in the same place at the same time. First, a Swedish tenor drops out altogether, but the biggest star of the bunch—Tito “Il Stupendo” Merelli—objects to the replacement Saunders is lucky to find. He’s a much younger man whose popularity is soaring, and Merelli is beginning to feel his age. Making matters worse are several romantic mixups that only a deft hand with comedy can carry off. The three singers finally come together, then fall apart again, and it appears the only man who can save Saunders’s concert is a bellhop with a golden voice.

The strikingly gorgeous set used in Cleveland—a luxury hotel suite—also made the trip to Princeton. As set designer Charlie Corcoran said in the program notes, “There’s one very specific need in all farces, and that is doors.” Doors to enter, doors to exit, and doors to slam. Lead actor Bradley Dean makes good use of those doors, as he plays both Merelli and the bellhop, and must exit the stage left door as Tito, dash around backstage (changing costume en route) and enter the door stage right as the bellhop. Watching him switch roles, costumes, and personae is one of the play’s great charms.

Ludwig’s Lend Me a Tenor is still playing all over the United States, and for theatergoers who love a romantic farce, his new play is something to watch for!

Peggy Guggenheim: Art Addict

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Peggy Guggenheim, Alexander Calder

Guggenheim with an Alexander Calder mobile (photo: JR, creative commons license)

The new documentary Peggy Guggenheim: Art Addict (trailer) tells the story of Guggenheim’s remarkable role in preserving and presenting modern art. The niece of Solomon Guggenheim, whose New York City museum is a fixture in the contemporary art scene, she immersed herself in art while living in Paris and London in the 1920s and 1930s.

The film was directed by Lisa Immordino Vreeland (interview), whose first award-winning film focused on another larger-than-life woman, Diana Vreeland. In Guggenheim, the filmmaker saw a woman who was courageous, strong, and had the “ability to believe in underdogs. These artists were not mainstream, yet she had the vision to believe in them and create a new place in history for them and for herself.”

In 1937, she opened the Guggenheim Jeune gallery in London, which showcased artists such as Jean Cocteau and Vasily Kandinsky. As World War II began in Europe, she purchased treasured works by artists such as Georges Braque, Salvador Dalí and Piet Mondrian, and as the war escalated, she arranged for over 150 paintings and sculpture to be shipped as “household goods” to New York, thereby saving seminal works from being confiscated or destroyed.

She conducted notorious love affairs with numerous artists, including Max Ernst, whom she married briefly after helping him leave Europe. Ernst has one of the best quips in the film saying, “I had a Guggenheim, and it wasn’t a fellowship!”

The documentary uses extensive interviews with art historians and curators to describe how Guggenheim became the protector and promoter of postwar art. As The Hollywood Reporter’s John Defore says, when she settled down in Venice, she would “throw great parties, tend to dozens of dogs, and watch the world grasp the scope of what she’d done.” Her Palazzo Venier dei Leoni on the Grand Canal is now home of The Peggy Guggenheim Collection, one of the most important showcases in Italy for the works of early 20th century American and European artists.

While the documentary has been making the film festival circuit, reportedly it will have a limited distribution in theaters beginning November 6.

UPDATE, 11/13: Los Angeles Times Credits Guggenheim’s perspicacity!

This review is by Tucson-based guest reviewer Jodi Goalstone, who writes the highly entertaining blog Going Yard, Offbeat Baseball Musings.

Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Piazza Venier dei Leoni, Venice

Piazza Venier dei Leoni (photo: wikipedia)

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Spooky Reads

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haunted house

(photo: Sean MacEntee, creative commons license)

The book-obsessed websites haven’t overlooked the opportunity to capitalize on the scary underpinnings of the Halloween season. A reader poll by the folks at BookRiot yielded this top 10 list, with The Shining scariest of all:

  • The Shining by Stephen King
  • It by Stephen King
  • Salem’s Lot by Stephen King
  • The Exorcist by William Peter Blatty
  • Pet Sematary by Stephen King
  • House of Leaves by Mark Danielewski
  • The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson
  • The Stand by Stephen King
  • Heart-Shaped Box by Joe Hill
  • Bird Box by Joshua Malerman

When you recall that Joe Hill is Stephen King’s son, that family has lock on half the fright mindshare.

Not surprisingly, The American Scholar takes a more high-brow approach to its list of “Spooktacular Books,” with the only overlaps House of Leaves and The Haunting of Hill House.

No time to read whole books? Jonathan Sturgeon, writing for Flavorwire, has assembled 30 of the scariest moments from Western literature—going all the way back to 760 BCE. Once again, Shirley Jackson and Hill House make the bloody cut.

Literary Duds & Decor for Halloween

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Halloween is just another opportunity to strut your literary predilections. Here’s a roundup of clever ideas that have crossed my desk this month.

pumpkin, book art

(photo: Topeka Library, creative commons license)

  • Turn books into Halloween art pieces – pulp fiction, 3-D constructions, collage, bent, torn, printed on—books can do more than sit on shelves
  • Jack o’ lanterns for readers – more Maurice Sendak than Jane Austen, but still . . . you know where the wild things are, and so will the neighbors!
  • Easy-to-challenging costumes – is the need “to die your hair” a bit too Freudian a slip? And for the Lizbeth Salander costume, find someone delicious to draw that dragon on your back!
  • Then check to see whether your costume idea is being overdone in your area with Google’s Frightgeist!
  • Miss Havisham

    “Did you hear that?” asks Miss Havisham.

    It may be more practical to look to short stories for costume inspiration (fewer people have probably read them)

  • But if you’d rather focus your creativity on writing, here’s a list of horror fiction ideas straight from recent news headlines – I have dibs on “Important Ohio bridge infested with thousands of spiders”
  • And a little of everything in this gallery of “literary Halloween” ideas. Love the “Nevermore” wreath.
  • Wearing your best Victorian garb, propping your foot on a pumpkin cushion, settle back to enjoy a “Hyde potion.” Bloody good cocktail, that.

(Thanks to Book Riot, Electric Literature, Pinterest, and HGTV for the inspiration!)

The Witches are Back

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Puritans, Salem witch trials, The Crucible

(photo: Len “Doc” Radin, Creative Commons license)

Right on time for Halloween is a new book about the tragedy of the Salem witch trials. The Witches: Salem, 1692, by Stacy Schiff describes how—at the behest mostly of hysterical young girls—19 men and women in the Massachusetts colony were tried, convicted, and hanged for witchcraft. The punishment for a 75-year-old man was being crushed to death with stones: “More weight,” he legendarily cried. Two guilty dogs also were executed. In other words, plenty of wrongheadedness was going around that has never been satisfactorily explained or completely understood. According to Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Joseph J. Ellis, “The Witches is the fullest and finest story ever told about Salem in 1692.”

Schiff’s September 7 New Yorker article about how the Puritans got so far off track focused much attention on the educated members of the colony, who were as caught up in the events as anyone, and especially the role of prominent ministers and intellectuals Cotton Mather and his father Increase, president of Harvard. The two had some different reactions to the hysteria, though Cotton Mather believed “he had made a case for prosecuting the guilty, his father for protecting the innocent. Were they not saying the same thing?”

It will be interesting to read Schiff’s book to find out to what extent she subscribes—if at all—to various alternative theories about the phenomenon, one of which is that a covetous desire for wealthier Salemites property was at its root. Many years ago, I read Joe Klein’s biography of Woody Guthrie, who suffered from Huntington’s disease, a genetic disorder that can cause an afflicted person to writhe uncontrollably and to appear wild and violent in speech and movement. In an afterword, the author reported genealogical research on Guthrie’s family, which he said revealed his ancestors included several of the condemned witches.

Of course, the practice and perils of the witchhunt haven’t died. Arthur Miller’s play, The Crucible, in the guise of looking back to the late 1600’s, was written to demonstrate how it can reappear wearing modern-day political garb. A thoughtful reconsideration of 1692, such as Schiff’s book provides, is timely anew.

Steve Jobs

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Steve Jobs

(photo: wikimedia)

This Danny Boyle biopic (trailer), with a screenplay by the rapid-fire Aaron Sorkin, may not be to everyone’s taste, but I left the theater feeling both emotionally wrung out and strangely energized. Jobs was a complicated man, a visionary regarding the gestalt of the digital world and the devices we use to interact with it. He was not a genius engineer or a software developer, and he was totally unsentimental (and unsympathetic) toward company products past their prime and the employees who worked on them. He never threw anyone a sop, or agreed with them just to get along. As a result, the movie delivers, as Village Voice reviewer Nick Schager says, “a blistering barrage of combative dialog.”

The decision to focus this movie around three product launches—rather than the endless quotidian details that led up to them—was, I think, brilliant. Emotions were at their peak, expectations were highest, and the parameters of success or failure clearest. No case of the dwindles here. The first launch—of the Macintosh—came shortly after the revolutionary 1984 Super Bowl spot and the audience arrived pumped with expectations. The Mac was overpriced and failed miserably, and Jobs lost his job. The second launch from Jobs’s new company—the NeXT—was another flop. And the third, the 1998 introduction of the iMac? Well, the third time’s the charm. Yes, he was impossibly demanding and ruthlessly critical, but would another personality, making subtle compromises all along the line have achieved as much?

I did not read Walter Isaacson’s eponymous 2011 biography, so was left with some questions about the balance of information presented. It would be obviously impossible to condense all the arguments, recriminations, and flashbacks we see on film into the final few minutes before a product launch—there wouldn’t be time—but that was cinematic license. What I couldn’t assess was whether his daughter Lisa was actually such a significant part of his life, though I understand the filmmakers’ impulse to humanize him through his interactions with her; nor do I know whether Joanna Hoffman was really his conscience over such a long period of time. If so, I bow down in respect to her. The credits do indicate license was taken in fictionalizing some characters and events.

Despite overall positive reviews—Variety calls it “strikingly literate” and “a brilliant film,” the movie is not doing well at the box office. Perhaps this is because the main character isn’t seen as “likeable”—in direct contrast to the Tom Hanks character in Bridge of Spies, reviewed here yesterday. Perhaps Michael Fassbender is not yet a bankable name, and ditto re Hanks.

Certainly the cast was well up to the task. As Jobs, Fassbender is passionate about product and icy about people; Kate Winslet plays the long-suffering Hoffman with the slightest East European accent; Seth Rogen is the passed over Steve Wozniak; and Michael Stuhlbarg, the oft-berated, yet mostly bouncing back programmer Andy Hertzfeld. Jeff Daniels is John Sculley, who replaced Jobs as a more avuncular head of Apple and who, eventually, was fired himself as the company lurched toward bankruptcy. His departure paved the way for the emperor’s triumphant return.

The script includes some of Jobs’s famous aspirational and inspirational quotes. I have one—not used in the film—over my desk. It says “Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life.” Words he clearly lived by.

Rotten Tomatoes critics rating: 85%; audiences 79%.

Bridge of Spies

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Tom Hanks, Bridge of Spies

Tom Hanks in Bridge of Spies

Stephen Spielberg’s riveting new film (trailer) portrays the real-life events and personalities that led to a historic U.S.-Soviet-East German prisoner exchange in the frozen depths of the Cold War. In 1962, in a divided Berlin, an accused Soviet spy is to be traded for two Americans, if all goes well. An off-the-books U.S. negotiator has led the Soviets and the East Germans separately to the brink of agreeing the exchange, but hostilities are strong, motives are complex, and success is far from guaranteed.

Based on the 2010 Giles Whittell book of the same name, the story centers around the intertwined fates of William Fisher, born Rudolf Abel, a British-born KGB agent whom the FBI arrested in New York; Francis Gary Powers, U.S. pilot of a super-secret U-2 spy plane shot down while flying over Russia; and Frederic Pryor, an American graduate student who finds himself on the wrong side of the new Berlin Wall and in the hands of the Stasi, East Germany’s notorious secret police.

Spielberg tells these men’s stories, but centers on the role of U.S. insurance attorney James Donovan in the negotiations. Donovan’s role initially is to defend Abel in his trial on espionage charges. He takes on this thankless task, even though everyone in the country, including the judge in the case, believes Abel is guilty. However, American legal processes need to be followed, if only to show the world that every prisoner receives a fair trial (an ironic punctiliousness half a century later). Inevitably, Abel is convicted, but at least Donovan persuades the judge not to invoke the death penalty. It’s a controversial choice for Donovan to decide to appeal the verdict, and one that puts himself—and perhaps his family and career—in some danger.

When Powers’s plane is shot down, the possibility of a prisoner swap is immediately seized upon by the CIA. They want Powers back. He knows too much. Donovan is asked to negotiate an Abel-Powers trade, unofficially. What he encounters on all sides in wintry Berlin is stubborn resistance salted with suffocating paranoia. He also hears about the unlucky American student and insists he be part of the deal, which the CIA rejects. They’re not interested.

The acting is terrific, especially Tom Hanks as Donovan and Mark Rylance as Abel. In smaller roles, the CIA agents and Soviet and East German negotiators are suitably opaque and blustering. Amy Ryan, Donovan’s wife, is always excellent. They have the benefit of working from a strong script by Matt Charman, Ethan Coen, and Joel Coen. I particularly liked how, whenever Donovan asks Abel if he is worried about some particular outcome, Abel responds, “Would it help?”

The look of the film is exactly right—cold, forbidding—and the Glienicke Bridge, site of the hoped-for exchange is a desolate place. Spielberg’s handling of Donovan as “the standing man,” underscoring a metaphor introduced by Abel, works. If only he’d resisted a few message-heavy Hollywood touches (East Germans versus U.S. children scrambling over a wall, for example), it would have been perfect.

Rotten Tomatoes critics rating: 92%; audiences 91%.

More Philadelphia Outdoor Art Magic

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Isaiah Zagar, Philadelphia

(photo: Rob Wanenchak, creative commons license)

Although Philadelphia street-art may be most famous for its astonishing array of some 4000 public murals and several world-famous sculptures, the city is also home to a quirky collection of outdoor mosaic art by Isaiah Zagar. He has covered storefronts, purpose-built walls, doorways, and the fully mosaicked gallery spaces and labyrinth sculpture garden called “Magic Gardens” at 1020 South Street. Online resources include a map of the locations of Zagar’s mosaic installations in his Center City neighborhood.

Philadelphia-born Zagar assembles his elaborate designs from broken pottery, pieces of mirror, bottles, and even unexpected materials like bicycle wheels. They are a sprightly addition to the area’s staid colonial architecture, and on a sunny day wink at passersby with their color and shine. In order to make art more accessible to wider audiences and to engage more people in artistic creation, the Magic Gardens hold monthly Mosaic Mural Workshops and Family Jams.

Isaiah Zagar, Philadelphia

(photo: Vicki Weisfeld)

Zagar’s work is included in the permanent collections of a number of prominent museums, and he has received numerous awards. He says his work makes reference to other visionary artists from around the world who have created memorable public art environments, such as those here. (If Philadelphia isn’t near you, perhaps the work of one of these other eccentric creatives is!)

Zagar’s son Jeremiah made a well regarded “warts and all” film about the family and Isaiah’s artistic ambitions, In a Dream.

 

Enlarging Your Travel Circle:

  • Philadelphia is less than 50 miles away when you’re visiting Wilmington (33 miles)
  • About 100 miles away when you’re in New York (96) or Baltimore (101) and
  • Only 140 miles away when you’re in Washington, D.C.

Phoenix

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Phoenix, Nina HossWhat is identity? Is it who we are or who others think we are? A scenario capable of stripping people of their selfhood greater than the Holocaust is hard to imagine, and German filmmaker Christian Petzold puts his protagonist Nelly, played with great subtlety by Nina Hoss, in that predicament in Phoenix (trailer). A Jewish former cabaret singer, she’s somehow survived the concentration camp and is determined to return to Berlin to find her husband Johnny among the piled-up post-war debris and psychological ruin. Her stalwart friend Lene doesn’t trust Johnny, but Nelly won’t be deterred.

She was horribly disfigured by her concentration camp experience and, aided by Lene (Nina Kunzendorf), undergoes extensive reconstructive surgery, pleading for the Swiss doctor to return her face to exactly the way it looked before, though he warns her that may be impossible. In Berlin, still bearing the bruises of her extensive plastic surgery, she re-encounters Johnny (Ronald Zehrfeld). His belief that Nelly is dead is so strong, he ignores signs that this woman, who calls herself “Esther” (“There aren’t too many Esthers left,” he says), and his wife are one and the same.

In her job, Lene finds people among the dislocated and helps them get them to Palestine. She plans for them both to go there, a future she believes in whole-heartedly, but which interests Nelly not at all. The endless poring over the lists of the murdered takes its toll, and Lene finally says she feels more kinship “with our dead than with the living.”

Johnny wants Nelly to masquerade as his wife to gain the fortune she’s inherited after the deaths of her entire family. This leaves her with the mind-bending quandary of pretending to be someone pretending to be who she really is. In truth, neither of them can “see” the other.

Based on a somewhat simplified version of the French novel Return from the Ashes, it’s a story about the crumbling of trust and how illusions—Nelly’s and Johnny’s equally—blind us to reality. A powerful film whose conclusion is a shattering confrontation with the truth. Excellent performances by Hoss, Zehrfeld, and Kunzendorf. Kurt Weill’s haunting “Speak Low” is heard throughout in different versions.

Rotten Tomatoes critics’ rating an unequivocal 99%! Viewers 81%.

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