Christ, Spacey, you didn’t even make the poster? You need a new agent, dude.
When mainstream screens are clogged with predictable-looking drek like Shutter, College Road Trip, and this weekend’s hott new entry 21 (so unsurprising in appearance that the New Republic’s house critic took it upon himself to review based on the trailer, and seems to have nailed it), it’s a great time to hit up your local repertory house.
Start your weekend off right with a trip to the Film Forum with your honey to watch love die painfully in Jean-Luc Godard’s masterpiece Contempt. I have this sense that there’s a new print of this thing in circulation every other year, which mildly annoys me (so many great films out there…), until I remember that it’s actually been a while since I’ve been able to see it and end up heading to the theatre to be forcefully reminded of its sheer greatness. Contempt is almost certainly Godard’s most beautiful film (though Eloge de l’amour ranks) and its general formal restraint—so unlike his other sixties works—makes it one of his most accessible and effective. I’d actually like to see it on a double bill with Week End for a nice summation of that period of his career, something that might well be possible with Film Forum’s upcoming retro of his storied work from that decade.
After Sunday brunch you could stumble home drunk on mimosas and hit up the DVR, or you could head over to BAM for a Manoel de Oliveira double bill featuring The Letter (which I haven’t seen) and Inquietude, a clear masterpiece. The three Oliveiras in the series that I’ve managed to catch for the first time have only served to broaden and deepen my idea of the range of this great artist (I’m glad I now know that he made a surrealist robot opera in The Cannibals, or tried to take on the history of Portugal and warfare in Non, or the Vain Glory of Command), and I’ve heard good things about The Letter, so I’m excited for it, and even more so for the chance to experience Inquietude again. Don’t take my word for it; take Jonathan Rosenbaum’s—he named it his #1 film of 1998.
And if you’re still fogged from the remnants of your weekend on Monday, head back to BAM and settle in for Chantal Akerman’s epic, glacial, and, in the end, rather terrifying Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, playing in their tribute to J. Hoberman. Akerman’s pretty hard to get a hold of over here (only a few of her films have made it to DVD) and Jeanne maintains its legendary status amongst her oeuvre for a reason. Definitely, definitely, definitely catch this one on the big screen.
None of these sound appealing? I suppose there’s always this.
We’re not theatre critics here at Reverse Shot, so I hope any who happen to cruise by here will forgive a brief indulgence: I spent my Saturday with a few Reverse Shot pals, Tom Stoppard, and the cast of his The Coast of Utopia trilogy and it was a bit of a monster.
This is not to say that his nautically inflected trilogy (Voyage, Shipwreck, and Salvage) about the exploits of the erstwhile crew of Russian thinkers and would-be revolutionaries circling around the lesser-known figure of Alexander Herzon doesn’t falter or lag across is nearly nine hours of length. This is largely to be expected. But even when the humor flattens out, the expository dialogue grows unwieldy, and historical accuracy jumps the shark, the entire project coasts (pun intended) on a forceful perspective and historical sweep that’s all too rare these days in any art form. I can’t imagine not seeing Utopia in a single afternoon—the bits that rhyme across plays would most likely be forgotten, and more importantly, the salvage act Stoppard performs on his group would be far less apparent, and less affecting because of it.
The Coast of Utopia captures that moment in the mid 1800s when a seismic societal change seemed possible, even likely to many, and folks like Herzon, Mikhail Bakunin, Karl Marx and others actively worked to foment upheaval. Of course, 1848 didn’t work out the way any of these thinkers had planned, and Stoppard (no fan of Marx) spends much of the time in his first two plays poking at the hypocrisies of the intellectual class waging hypothetical battles on behalf of the proletariat. But, it’s in his third act, where dreams have long been shattered, and hope mostly lost, that he tosses Herzon a victory in the form of the Russian emancipation of the serfs. In this, the playwright allows his characters a measure of redemption and fully recasts their struggles in the first two plays—maybe foolish and misguided, but often well-meaning, these folks loved an idea of what their Russia could be and finally, unexpectedly helped bring about some kind of change. It’s a message to take to heart.
Oh, and there are lots of famous people in it: an astonishing Billy Crudup, a furiously mugging Ethan Hawke, Josh Hamilton, Martha Plimpton. See the marathon if you can…the performers were visibly excited to have accomplished nine hours of theatre, as was the audience. This is probably old news by now, but it’s running for a few more months, so any of you out there who are on the fence should give it a shot.
As usual, screens of varyingly inappropriate sizes around New York are competing for quality-hungry cinephiles this weekend—with Max Ophuls’s magnificent The Earrings of Madame De… still gliding across Film Forum’s downtown shoeboxes, cute little BAM’s Imamura retro hitting its peak on Saturday with his 1983 Palme d’Or winner The Ballad of Narayama, and Jafar Panahi’s Offside hitting U.S. theaters via the East Village dumping ground called the Quad (…but still, God bless you, Quad!), it’ll be tough to choose which masterpiece to see with which cramped viewing experience. With David Fincher’s video-velvety procedural Zodiac still showing in crisp, elegant digital projection at the Ziegfeld behemoth, it’ll be tough not to pitch a tent in that dying 53rd street movie palace all weekend. Best to enjoy them all, even if flanked on all sides by inappropriately giggling Film Forum middlebrowers, overly reverent Brooklynites, trenchcoated villagers who thought they bought a ticket for a movie called “Backside,”or out-of-(mid)towners looking for a little “spectacle” (and then getting pissed off that Fincher dares not provide it…for two hours and 45 minutes).
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