Archives for January 10, 2008

There Will Be Blood and The Diving Bell and the Butterfly each begin by taking us somewhere most moviegoers, and indeed the people who made these films, could otherwise only imagine: Blood to the depths of a nineteenth-century silver mine, Diving Bell behind the eyes of a paralyzed patient regaining consciousness after three weeks spent in a coma. In both cases I found myself conscious of and a little awed by the flights of imagination required to stage and film these scenes–the surmise that was necessarily involved to answer the question “What must it have been like?”, not to mention the technical ingenuity (this piece in the Times last weekend on the production designer for Blood is illuminating on this point). And in both opening sequences space, vision, and movement are radically restricted so that we experience the passage into the rest of the movie as a widening of the given world–before it ultimately, inexorably narrows again.
I don’t think there is a lot that connects these very different movies, but I was struck in each instance by a sense of sharing or seeing a foreign experience, one unavailable outside the movie house or the imagination. Seeing these movies in the same twenty-four hours was not necessarily my brightest idea ever: they both have powerful, distinctive visions that demand their own space in which to be absorbed and appreciated. In their own singular ways, they each have a hallucinatory quality and a series of indelible images. For me, the experience of Paul Thomas Anderson’s booming, declamatory movie on Saturday overwhelmed the equally spectacular, but infinitely more delicate, sensual spectacle of Julian Schnabel’s, which I saw at a Sunday matinee.
Still, it was better to have these two bump up against one another than to miss either one. They were among the very best 2007 releases I saw. I left Blood uncertain of what it was really about–greed? capitalism? capitalism and evangelism? obsessive ambition?–and I remain unmoved by any of the answers put forward in reviews I’ve read or conversations I’ve had, while remaining tremendously moved by the movie–especially any scene in which Daniel Day-Lewis’s character, Daniel Plainview, wants something. The Diving Bell I might need to see again to fully grasp its beauty and its sharp irony: as seen, heard, and felt by a trapped and hungry mind, this world is an outrageously plenteous place.

On this week’s Savage Lovecast, Dan fields a call from the befuddled boyfriend of a grammar nerd who likes to play out the usage wars in the bedroom (call begins at 31:50). NSFW, but enjoyable for anyone who’s ever loved a copy editor.

Here’s my list of recommended Broadway, off-Broadway, and out-of-town shows, updated weekly. In all cases, I gave these shows favorable reviews in The Wall Street Journal when they opened. For more information, click on the title.

Warning: Broadway shows marked with an asterisk were sold out, or nearly so, last week.

BROADWAY:

• August: Osage County (drama, R, adult subject matter, closes Mar. 9, reviewed here)

• Avenue Q * (musical, R, adult subject matter and one show-stopping scene of puppet-on-puppet sex, reviewed here)

• A Chorus Line * (musical, PG-13/R, adult subject matter, reviewed here)

• The Farnsworth Invention (drama, PG-13, reviewed here)

• Grease * (musical, PG-13, some sexual content, reviewed here)

• The Homecoming (drama, R, adult subject matter, closes Apr. 13, reviewed here)

• Is He Dead? (farce, G, reasonably family-friendly, reviewed here)

• Rock ‘n’ Roll (drama, PG-13, way too complicated for kids, closes Mar. 9, reviewed here)

• The Seafarer (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here)

OFF BROADWAY:

• The Devil’s Disciple (drama, G/PG-13, not suitable for children, extended through Feb. 10, reviewed here)

• The Fantasticks (musical, G, suitable for children old enough to enjoy a love story, reviewed here)

IN MILWAUKEE:

• The Norman Conquests (comic trilogy, PG-13, adult subject matter, closes Jan. 20, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON:

• The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee (musical, PG-13, mostly family-friendly but contains a smattering of strong language and a production number about an unwanted erection, closes Jan. 20, reviewed here)

“Old age equalizes–we are aware that what is happening to us has happened to untold numbers from the beginning of time. When we are young we act as if we were the first young people in the world.”
Eric Hoffer, Reflections on the Human Condition