NYBG Orchid Show 2013

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I just renewed my membership to the New York Botanical Garden and stopped by for the first day of the 2013 Orchid Show. It was a cool, rainy Saturday - which meant that the crowds stayed away and I was able to indulge my ongoing fantasy that the Garden is actually my own private Idaho. Spring is poised on its haunches and soon everything will be 'fathered forth' in a flurry of cellular activity as chlorophyll revs the whole Northern Hemisphere into a high pitched scream of new green. Wait for it...

Photos: Mine 

Fairy-tale Logic

Fairy tales are full of impossible tasks:

Gather the chin hairs of a man-eating goat,

Cross a sulphuric lake in a leaky boat,

Select the prince from a row of identical masks,

Tiptoe up to a dragon where it basks

And snatch its bone; count dust specks, mote by mote,

Or learn the phone directory by rote.

Always it’s impossible what someone asks—

You have to fight magic with magic. You have to believe

That you have something impossible up your sleeve,

The language of snakes, perhaps, an invisible cloak,

An army of ants at your beck, or a lethal joke,

The will to do whatever must be done:

Marry a monster. Hand over your firstborn son.

- A.E. Stallings

Photo: Jason de Graaf

Reflecting on the Movies

As I make my way home from a weekend trip, it seems likely that I will catch the Academy Awards telecast only in part or not at all. Spring has come to the south and in moving north I am also traveling back in seasonal time. I could travel north to south repeatedly and slip into and out of spring many times before the east coast is of one mind about it. Movies can do something like that to us too, treating us to shades and nuances that we perceive as 'other', only to realize (or sometimes not realize) that we have become harmonized with them as we watch. I think our responses to movies indicate the kinds of experiences we are willing (or not willing) to have, quite apart from our likes and dislikes.

I don't know, and almost don't care who will win what. I can only say which movies took me along where they were going. Life of Pi, Rust and Bone, Silver Linings Playbook, Searching for Sugar Man, and The Master all did. Among the actors, Joaquin Phoenix, whose public persona is a bit off-putting to me, took me quite far. I loved Robert DeNiro's superstitious OCD character in Silver Linings Playbook. DeNiro has done almost everything in movies, including silliness, without losing the thread of what he's doing. He plays a mean game of chicken. Marion Cotillard is my pick for best actress - never mind that she wasn't nominated. Anne Hathaway and Quvenzhane Wallis both brought magic to their stations, turning them into constellations - which is why they're called stars. And, it's why we watch.

Photo,mine: A toddler is fascinated by the wall of live fish at the Georgia Aquarium

The Sessions, and The Master

A highly educated paralyzed man living with the help of an iron lung seeks the services of a sex therapist and a priest, the details of which are documented in The Sessions. Cheryl Cohen-Greene (played by a taut-faced Helen Hunt) is the sexual surrogate who helps Mark O'Brien (John Hawkes) have his first sexual experience. Helen Hunt approaches her role with unselfsconscious directness. Maybe because she doesn't need to act sexy, she is free to be naked without pretense. Mark's main goal is to have sex - to both receive and give pleasure, and once this is achieved, the sessions end - though neither participant escapes without some entanglement. Though both sexual surrogacy and prostitution eschew the formation of relationships, surrogacy in this case does well to break that rule albeit haltingly and in a very limited way.


In The Master - Freddie Quell, (Joaquin Phoenix) is a violent sociopath with a creative flair for alcoholic concoctions who meets an L.Ron Hubbard-ish new age guru Lancaster Dodd (Philip Seymour Hoffman) and his band of true believers; goes through programming designed to defuse his hair-trigger temper, his sexual repression and his creative boozing with medicine cabinet staples and paint thinner. Joaquin Phoenix is scary-good, and scary period. He lost an incredible amount of weight to play this role and he seems to disappear into it as into the folds of his baggy pants. Philip Seymour Hoffman and Amy Adams are the husband and wife team. He plays it straight, and she plays it even straighter than he does, calling into question the method's ability to cure all ills - specifically Freddie's.
The movie careens from one altercation to the next, and we do not get the sense that all the programming has done any good until, in the closing scene, Freddie is finally able to be with woman - apparently in a whole and honest way.

Searching for Sugar Man, and Five Broken Cameras

  

I'm almost through the long list of movies I wanted to see before the February 24th Oscars. All that's left to be seen of the Best Picture nominations are: Les Miserables, Zero Dark Thirty and  Amour. Of the other movies I wanted to see, only The Master, Hyde Park on Hudson, and the documentaries remain, which brings me to Searching for Sugar Man. 

This South African documentary is the story of the search for an obscure sixties Detroit singer-songwriter named Sixto Rodriguez, who is credited (in the documentary) as being a catalyst for the anti-apartheid movement within the Afrikaner population. Rodriguez' voice is clear like Jose Feliciano's, melodious like John Denver's, with a vocal quality something like Bob Dylan's. The film itself employs a mix of old footage and creative camera work. It builds effectively from an air of mystery to revelation that still leaves a lot unexplained if not unexplored.
In short, it succeeded in revealing something without destroying the air of mystique surrounding this person - since he proved to be every bit as ineffable as the original myth about him had suggested.
Rodriguez was immensely popular in Apartheid South Africa, though this fact was not known outside of South Africa, not even to him. He passed his whole life after the recording of his two unsuccessful albums doing hard construction work in Detroit. Meanwhile, the South Africans had either invented or passed on the  myth of his suicide in front of a live concert audience by self-immolation in one story, by gunshot in another. That this myth survived until it was debunked by his eventual appearance on a South African stage was a testament to the complete isolation of Rodriguez from his fan base and indeed from the mainstream music scene of the day.

Five Broken Cameras is a documentary which follows the life of a Palestinian West Bank resident (Emad Burnat) and his five cameras (each of which was destroyed by gunfire and replaced by another) as he documents his community's non-violent attempts to hold on to their land in the face of increasing Israeli occupation. Beatings, arrests and even the deaths of his family members and friends are caught on camera - while he dispassionately narrates the action, albeit in voice-overs. I don't understand how he was able to remain at his station behind the camera as these things took place. Did the filming become more important than the events being captured? Or did this simply underline the desperation of the Palestinians for an unimpeachable witness? One of the most striking scenes for me was one in which the men returned to the battleground area to find that all the olive trees had been set on fire, presumably by the Israelis. The onscreen protests by one of the men about the olive trees' "innocence" was not necessary to convey the cruelty of the action, but instead raised an awkward question - didn't the Palestinians also consider themselves likewise "innocent"?  Documentaries are thought to put forward events as they happen -even if those events have elements of artifice in them. In this way artifice and truth can intersect. In one scene, Emad captures the death of his good friend as he falls into the frame after being shot at from a position presumably at Emad's side. After this,the action is followed by another cameraman who was also on the scene. Emad glances over to the live camera and then resumes his grieving over his friend's body. It is telling that even at this event, he is unable to give himself over to the moment until he has reassured himself that he will not be lost in it. Maybe this is how he survives.

Photo: Sixto Rodriguez, Searching for Sugar Man

Hold the Presses, its...The Paperboy

None of it was expected - not Zac Efron as a lovesick negro sympathizer (this was the sixties), not John Cusack as a murderous gator hunter with S&M predilections, and certainly not Matthew McConaughey as a closeted homosexual with a preference for black lovers and a poor radar for dangerous situations. Neither did I expect Nicole Kidman as a Monroe-like waif with a dark side, who bit off more than she could chew.
And finally, I did not expect Macy Gray (the singer) in any capacity, but there you have the cast of The Paperboy. A graphic, disturbing movie - complex, and ambiguous.

It sounds like a lot of sex, but most of it was insinuated. It was the inescapable subtext of the story which is actually about a murder investigation conducted by the two sons of a newspaper owner (Efron and Mc Conaughey as Jack and Ward Jensen).
All of the characters exude sensuality and there is sexual tension between Charlotte (Kidman) and almost every man except Jack (Efron), who is smitten - infatuated with her. She is, ironically enough, both too much and not enough woman for him, and his heartbreak is not only on her account, but also because of the departure of his mother after his parents'divorce. Jack also has affection bordering on the erotic for his black housekeeper (played by Macy Gray) who is something of a doting and indulgent mother figure. Set all of this in the heat of South Florida in the sixties, and its no wonder that almost everyone ends up dead - but it's great intrigue getting there.

Hitchcock and Argo

These two movies were films within films, begging the question whether any film could ever be true fiction or artifice, intersecting as it does with the real lives of real people - the actors who bring characters to life.  Hitchcock tells the story of Alfred Hitchcock's life during the filming of the movie 'Psycho', and is particularly interesting for what it reveals about the lives of  Anthony Perkins, Janet Leigh and Vera Miles, who played the main roles in that 1960 movie. Argo details the successful use of a fake movie production to rescue six American Embassy employees during the Iran hostage crisis.

Both movies were suspenseful - Hitchcock, because the thrill and terror of his movie 'Psycho' was revealed to be a reflection from some dark recess of Hitchcock's own psyche. Argo, because the scenes of Middle Eastern social unrest and Anti-American sentiment are still very much current today, even though the eye-wear, hairstyles and clothing of the movie date these events as belonging solidly in the late seventies.

In both movies, the general outcomes are already known, so these are not stories of what, but stories of how. I wonder, for instance how Hitchcock's wife is able to come to his rescue and help complete 'Psycho' after he falls ill, when he has jealously hounded her and all but accused her of having an affair. It is also not clear whether she is privy to her husband's dark fantasy involving her own murder which seems to have been granted a kind of proxy via the making of the movie. If we are to take these representations as truth, then it does seem that she saves both herself and her husband (not to mention his reputation and career) by taking the helm of this runaway train and bringing it safely into the station.

The tension in Argo was marvelously thick throughout. Therefore, one almost couldn't believe that together, the nimble-fingered Iranian children laboring to piece together the shredded photographs, and the menacing airport security detail were not able to identify the Americans in time to stop the plane from taking off and carrying them to safety. Funny, in life as in art -- suffering is infinitely explorable, whereas happiness resists exploration and is in fact often reduced to a cliche.

Silver Linings Playbook and Django Unchained

I didn't plan on seeing Django Unchained but there it was, actually a nominee for best picture, so in the interest of balanced reporting I had to suck it up. Django (Jamie Foxx) is a slave emancipated at gunpoint by  German bounty hunter Dr. Schultz, (Christoph Waltz) who seeks his assistance in capturing a few notorious heads, (those on the shoulders of the three Brittle Brothers) for which endeavor Django would be the 'spotter'. For his trouble, Dr Schultz promises to help Django free his wife from her owner,Calvin Candie and his plantation named Candyland. Like most Tarantino films, Django was violent in a way that dulled one's senses, subverting natural aversion into numbness.The busiest man on set must have been the blood splatter master - no matter how far away the target was in the scene, we were treated to explosive blood-works which were curious in their excess. Alongside this almost cartoonish physical violence was the considerable and palpable emotional violence, of which as it turns out, Dr Schultz is a victim. Django, for his part, manages to hold himself together despite his anger, revulsion and fear, aided by his unswerving resolve to find his wife and keep his cover intact. The unexpected reversal was interesting. Dr Schultz is used to killing people for a reward, but discovers that he has no stomach for the brutality of slavery. I loved the cinematography - part Marlboro Man, part Attack of the Zombies and the soundtrack - part seventies pop, part nineties gangsta rap. This movie is a study in opposites that manages to synthesize something noteworthy in the middle and I suspect that's why it's staring down the barrel of a best picture nomination.

Silver Linings Playbook was my second great favorite of this Awards season (watched it twice). It's the portrait of a dysfunctional family, an OCD father Patricio (Robert De Niro), an insecure competitive brother, and a hand-wringing mother (Jackie Weaver). The crown jewel is the bipolar Patricio Junior (Bradley Cooper) who, as the movie opens is serving time in a mental institution for the assault on his wife's lover which occurred in Pat's own bathroom shower.
Pat gets out of the mental institution and tries to make a fresh start and rescue his marriage from the restraining order put on him since the assault He is deliriously optimistic, we might say pathologically so. He sees silver linings everywhere, even in the disingenuous platitudes of those who have written him off. 'Silver developments' abound and where they obviously do not (as in the ending of the novel 'A Farewell to Arms') he becomes enraged. Bradley Cooper stretches here - and I like to see actors stretch.
The cast (DeNiro,Weaver and Jennifer Lawrence with an entertaining appearance by Chris Tucker) congeals nicely around this character - everyone bringing something to the table. The only flaw I found in this movie was some sloppy editing, forgivable because of the engaging story, cast and acting.

Hope Springs, and Best Exotic Marigold Hotel

The thing about movies staffed with actors in their golden years is that the subtext of age invades every aspect of the movie -which almost forces the movie to be about that age in a way that movies cast with youth are not.

I didn't plan to see Hope Springs, but there I was watching an impossibly wrinkled Tommy Lee Jones and a visibly older Meryl Streep going through the motions of marriage counseling with a much effaced Steve Carrell as their therapist. (I didn't plan on seeing Django Unchained either, but more on that in another post). I was hoping that Meryl would keep her hands away from her face - there is this thing she does in almost every movie - a gesture of false modesty that I dearly hoped she would spare us. About three times in the movie, she didn't (spare us). See publicity shot.That's not acting, that's a Meryl thing. Kay and Arnold had been married for thirty years - the last five of which were sexless. Kay is ready to break out or break away, and Arnold is in some sort of denial. In desperation she books them both for a week with a celebrity therapist in the town of Hope Springs, Maine. At the beginning, our sympathies lie with Kay ( her attempts at intimacy are bluntly rebuffed by her husband) until the third or so therapy session when it becomes clear that Arnold is the one who sustained the emotional blow years earlier. We can see the shades go up behind Steve Carrell's eyes as he realizes that all is not as Kay has painted it. The couple awkwardly goes through a series of exercises aimed at restoring intimacy, and they eventually arrive at something , though I don't know what. However at awkwardness, they were good.


The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel is an Indian oasis where British golden oldies come to live (almost) free or die. Part medical tourism mecca, part halfway house - these Brits are all strapped for cash and averse to curry. The hotel is run by a young man trying to hold up his candle to his older bothers' lanterns. His mother is barely humoring him, and her threats to close the hotel and ostracize his love interest make up the sub-plot of the movie. Best Exotic showcases a range of responses to aging: awkward attempts at hooking up, eleventh hour gold-digging, siren calls, swan songs, fatalism and reinvention. Judi Dench plays a woman with nothing left in England who finds fulfillment using her knowledge of consumer psychology to help Indian phone bank workers. In this she finds new purpose for her life. Judi Dench is no freer of Judi in her acting than Ms Streep is of Meryl,except that she approaches her roles from the opposite direction. Through her default mode of stoicism ,she lets the emotion break through believably, and we take her in whole. Ms Dench seems to use emotion for traction whereas Ms. Streep tries to use it as an engine. One performance has movement and the other is just so much wheel spinning.

Life of Pi , and Salmon Fishing in the Yemen

It's probably telling that I've already triple dipped into the Life of Pi. From the very first scene -those strutting pink flamingos against the backdrop of a sepia painted wall with the gauzy overlay of the sublime voice of Bombay Jayashri - I knew this would be a special movie. It was beautiful to watch - expanses of sky and water in a breathtaking array of colors and textures. People were almost superfluous to this movie, and in truth, no one competed with Ang Lee's scenery. This was a tale about survival on many fronts - physical, spiritual and emotional - and a testament to the idea that survival sometimes depends on the stories we tell ourselves.(actually, when does it not?) This is destined to be a classic - a movie that will be loved and watched over and over again. I've already seen it three times - not counting the six times I've watched the opening sequence just to hear "Pi's Lullaby".

Salmon Fishing in the Yemen was a simple (and somewhat simplistic) love story built around the grand idea of bringing a sustainable salmon population to Yemen to feed a rich (yet honorable) man's appetite for fly fishing. British scientist in a professional marriage meets (British) attache to the Yemeni sheik in question. The project was green-lighted as a counterfoil to some bad press surrounding British-Yemeni relations. A stretch of a story (except for the part about the bad press). Nothing was fleshed out - there was no real explanation of the challenges beyond those implied by an aerial shot of a desert gorge littered with heavy machinery. There was no real tension, only insinuations of conflict and danger.We were asked to believe that this vague project (half-heartedly sabotaged by an unspecified fringe element ) and the fruition of this unlikely endeavour so lightly treated in the film could be the stuff of a great love story. I love Ewan McGregor, but I couldn't.

Rust and Bone, and Beasts of the Southern Wild

Things are looking up - I hit upon not one, but two good movies.

I watched Rust and Bone in French without the benefit of subtitles - and it's a testament to the acting that I didn't need them. In fact, I found myself wishing that the music soundtrack was in French as well. Marion Cotillard is enthralling. She seems to come away clean from every role she plays, and goes into each new performance bare and believable. This time she's an aquarium performer who loses both legs in a horrible accident involving a killer whale. A chance meeting at a nightclub (a boxer moonlighting as a bouncer, before the accident) is the slim thread upon which she hangs her future because there was nothing and no-one else. After the accident, she fell out of her circle of aquarium friends as into a black hole and her former boyfriend was nowhere in evidence. The bouncer saves her from suicidal despair, and helps her navigate her recovery even as he gets bruised and bloodied for money in illegal fight clubs, and continues to seek random outlets for his almost angry sexual energy. When he comes to her physically he is considerably broken in, and when he comes to her emotionally in the wake of his son's near drowning, he's just plain broken... and finally open.

Beasts of the Southern Wild was gritty, gory, and in the end, glorious. A father and his six year old daughter (Wink and Hushpuppy) barely eke out an existence in the squalor of the Louisiana 'Bathtub' district. She is a sassy yet sensitive child terrorized by her father's mercurial moonshine moods, and his mysterious illness. A storm puts the Bathtub under water, but the Bayou people refuse to evacuate. Knowing that her father is near death, Hushpuppy searches for her mother who left shortly after giving birth to her. She cremates Wink when he passes away from his illness, and soldiers on with her adoptive community. The young actress who plays Hushpuppy (then 6- and now 9-year-old Quvenzhane Wallis) manages a miraculous transformation within about three seconds of screen time - her face takes on resolve and wisdom seemingly without any physical tricks (jaw-setting or teeth gritting). Those few seconds were magical. Hers were some of the most memorable line in the movies so far: "When it all goes quiet behind my eyes, I see everything that made me. I'm a little piece of a big big universe and that makes things right."

It seems that unknown actors have the greatest power and potential to stun us with their performances.
Increasingly, movies are created as vehicles for big name actors, leaving big movie performances in the domain of the relatively unknown actors. Of course there are exceptions, so I'm hopeful that I'll find a few more Marion Cotillards before this year's Oscar odyssey is over.

Skyfall and Moonrise Kingdom

No other Bond but this one (Daniel Craig's) could have traced his path forward into the world from an ancestral home like Skyfall. It was a bit of a stretch even for him, but no other Bond was dark enough to pull off such a grim origin, and frankly none of them left enough of the character on the screen to warrant that close of a look. The past three Bond movies have a continuity that the others lacked, and prompt a different level of investment (if one is a fan, as I am). In this movie - the wall between M and Bond is utterly demolished. There could be no going back from it, hence M's demise. Daniel Craig appears gaunt and a little haggard - did he lose weight for the movie,or just sleep? Or, was that look deliberately cultivated with makeup? I couldn't tell, and I found that more unsettling than Javier Bardem's scene-stealing Vader move - taking apart his own face as he confronts Judy Dench's M with the devastating effects of a not-quite-fatal cyanide pill. In case anyone is still wondering, M stands for Mother - or it should.

Moonrise Kingdom was an unusual little movie set on the fictional island of New Penzance ( actually, Rhode Island) - Gilligan's Island meets The Wonder Years meets Hogan's Heroes... or maybe something a little darker, like MASH.
Two misfit twelve year olds find each other (and love) and try to blow a bubble around themselves.He's a bespectacled 'coonskin capped cub scout, she's a reading runaway with a hair trigger temper.This was a comedy, and I bought it all the way up to the moment that the girl knifed one of the other cub scouts. Yes, he was a bully, but he was a kid and this was a comedy, dammit!. The wound wasn't serious, and neither was anything that followed.There was a storm, a Harold Lloyd-like run in with a clock tower, lightning, a flood, and perfectly respectable actors like Frances Mc Dormand, Ed Norton and Tilda Swinton ( et tu, Tilda? ) caught in the matrix of this movie with Bill Murray and Bruce Willis. I loved the 'New England nautical' look of the movie, and the soundtrack - but not much else.

Showtime!

Here we are again, another new year, and I am getting ready to run my annual movie marathon.In the meantime, I discovered two BBC Masterpiece Series ( Downton Abbey and Sherlock) which have helped make my 90 minute commute (each way) more bearable.

As usual, the awards movie 'short list' is pretty long - twenty-six at last count - many of which I will not see, however it is with a sense of relish that I read the list and the synopses, trying to figure out which ones to watch - the way one surveys a banquet table and selects something to eat.

Already there are some that I intend to pass on - Zero Dark Thirty and Django Unchained (too violent), Flight (I'm no expert, but I find Denzel Washington's acting range to be a bit narrow - exception:Training Day), and Hope Springs (again I'm no expert, and though she is probably deserving of high acclaim, I find that Meryl Streep's portrayals are quite similar.)

So (in alphabetical order) here's the list:

Amour
Anna Karenina
Argo
Beasts of the Southern Wild
Best Exotic Marigold Hotel
Django Unchained
Flight
Hitchcock
Hope Springs
Hyde Park on Hudson
Les Miserables
Life of Pi
Lincoln
Moonrise Kingdom
Promised Land
Rust and Bone
Salmon Fishing in the Yemen
Silver Linings Playbook
Skyfall
The Deep Blue Sea
The Hobbit
The Impossible
The Master
The Paperboy
The Sessions
Zero Dark Thirty

(Here's) to the movies, and... To The Movies!