Tuesday, March 29, 2011

Some Bright Signs

Those of us who live here inside the Beltway occasionally realize that the so-called experts who devote immense amounts of column inches, especially in the Washington Post, to gauging the latest political breeze or whisper, are influenced by those who shout the loudest. So for what seems like years now, we've been hearing about the asserted power of the tea-baggers and other species whose significance is built up by such as Fox.

But all the sincere protests at state capitals from Madison to Columbus that followed the GOP attack on collective bargaining rights has made some of the pundits sit up and listen. Some even suspect that the next elections may turn out differently in those states and many others. I even feel I'm getting an answer to my question--Where were those folks last election day? The answer is that they didn't realize the true evil that corporate America, as represented by the corporate American party, the Republicans, had planned to wreak on the working people of this country.

First, their tax cuts for the rich have created more inequality in the U.S. than we had known for generations. Second, they have set out to wreck the last institution that stands up for working people: the unions. Seeing all these normal, fired-up people willing to stand up for their rights in state capitol buildings wasn't enough to dissuade the GOP from its planned course. Only a huge landslide against the party of the rich and the greedy next time will accomplish that goal.

I hope the Democrats now will show some bravery hitherto hidden and stand up for their constituents. Maybe they will stop trying to show that they are kind-hearted Republicans, only willing to cut less than the GOP. We know that the Dems are also bought--by Wall Street and other major contributors. Can they stand up to their cashflow? Democrats always had to run against the GOP-dominated press in the old days. Now they have to run against Fox and the Murdoch media machine.

They have to start by being clear about what's needed. No more tax cuts for billionaires--or even millionaires. No compromise on Social Security or health care or education or environmental regulation. The media and the GOP would have us forget about the crooked coal companies that fought the outnumbered mine inspectors for years and then bought a judicial election in West Virginia so blatantly that the Supreme Court, if only by 5-4, said it was too loathsome to allow the result to stand.

The Democrats mainly have to remember that they represent working people, yes, of all kinds and colors, but the similarities matter more than the differences. Enough of multicultural posturing that just divides our constituencies. Let's focus on what brings us together. Let's take care of the real majority--plain, hard-working citizens, employees, people who work for a paycheck not a dividend coupon.

Tax the runaway corporations where it hurts--when they want to sell their products in the U.S. If they want to run away, let them pay a large penalty to get their goods back in here. Tax the greedy rich -- especially the Wall Street types who got away scot-free with their thievery. Tax outfits like Wal-Mart who think that not enough people care about the rights of workers--women and men alike--to stand up against their sleazy discrimination and payoffs in poor communities to get their stores opened. Clinton showed that a fair tax structure will balance the budget and write down the debt. As Carville put it and we have failed to follow, it's always the economy, stupid.

Sunday, March 27, 2011

Oscar Wilde Surprise

You don't need me to tell you that The Importance of Being Earnest is one of the great theatrical pieces of all time, a classic of its period that works even when not performed by a great cast, similar to Sheridan's School for Scandal a century earlier. But last night we saw Oscar Wilde's Ideal Husband at the Shakespeare Theatre here in D.C. and much to my surprise, although it shouldn't have been, it was an absolute delight.

I should remember by now not to trust Washington Post reviews of anything; I used to limit my avoidance to movie reviews but their drama critic found this production tedious or boring or whatever. It was none of the above. First of all, Wilde's great lines--or bon mots--are almost as classic as in The Importance. The man was a theatrical genius--he could make a play work with a very simple plot with hardly any interesting complications but absolutely fantastic dialogue and killer lines.

I do need to remember that sometimes people put these plays down because they can't cut through the Brit accents. Here I don't think the accents--put on mostly by Americans--were especially thick. In fact, all the players were so good that I have trouble recollecting anything special about what turned out to be a truly fine ensemble. Even company veterans such as David Sabin and Floyd King contributed fine performances that did not break the effect of the ensemble production. There are often several layers of meaning in Wilde's epigrams.

You think you perceive what he's getting at but then another layer kicks in--and then there may be a double reverse, where he has trapped you in a logical snare that turns in on itself. I think what I enjoyed the most was that there is a whole lot of stage play concerning purloined letters but aside from some fun in one scene in particular--although not in any way the equal of the screen scene in School for Scandal--the play ends up by making the letter thefts almost inconsequential, which is all to the better.

Wilde, of course, falls into a category with Swift and Shaw, the Irishman who could most deliciously satirize the English. Since his several successful plays culminated in this one, followed by The Importance, his demise after his imbroglio over his gay relationships is all the sadder, in that he might have produced even more marvelous delightful theatrical experiences.

Wednesday, March 23, 2011

Elizabeth Taylor, R.I.P.

She was just the most beautiful woman who was a movie star in my lifetime. And she could act.

That was Elizabeth Taylor, Dame Elizabeth Taylor, the title awarded for good works by a queen who remembered that Liz was born English. The first picture I saw her in was Ivanhoe, opposite the stolid Robert Taylor, no relation, in the title role, and she was Rebecca, the ultimate Jewish princess and a doctor no less! (It's been a week for reviving my contact with Sir Walter Scott. Saturday was the broadcast and movie-house transmittal of Lucia di Lammermoor, Donizetti's opera based on Scott's The Bride of Lammermoor. A potboiler, to be sure, but it has wonderful music and the Mad Scene, and was the vehicle for Joan Sutherland's triumphal debuts at both Covent Garden and the Met--the coloratura soprano who made all the trills and scales sound easy. The current soprano filling the role was the French Nathalie Dessay, who was magnificent.)

But Elizabeth Taylor, with the violet eyes, fascinated us from National Velvet through playing Rock Hudson's wife (!) and James Dean's heartthrob in Giant, to Maggie the Cat, title character of Tennessee William's wonderful Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and Gloria Wandrous in BUtterfield 8, for which she got the Oscar she had deserved for Cat. Later there was the marvelous and draining tour de force with then-husband Richard Burton in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Aren't those enough for anyone--and she made many many more pictures, some as good as those.

She did become the modern definition of a celebrity, with all the negatives that that implies. And of course, I still enjoy Philip Roth's view of her, seen through Portnoy, if I recall correctly, who, musing that the dynamic showman Mike Todd, husband 3, was the only one of her fabled eight spouses who could handle her, and he of course perished in a plane crash. Portnoy sees her as "the ultimate shiksa who could do the ultimate shiksa thing--ride a horse--and who would have thought that what she craved was a guy like Mike Todd, who might as well have been my Uncle Hymie?"

There were plenty of awful pictures and brawls with Burton, himself a fine actor brought low by booze. It got to where she was being caricatured on TV by John Belushi. But I found it wonderful that her skill as an actress was recognized even by those who had reason to despise her, such as Debbie Reynolds, whose storybook marriage with Eddie Fisher she broke up, and who said she even voted for her for the Oscar.

I will, however, always remember her as Rebecca, beautiful and skilled daughter of Isaac of York, in Ivanhoe, who nurses the hero back to health and then has to lose him to Joan Fontaine's Rowena. Even then, as a kid, I couldn't see how he couldn't have chosen Elizabeth Taylor.

Saturday, March 12, 2011

French on the Fly

I'm passing time in the Singapore airport en route to Indonesia, where I'll be on the program at a conference of the International Association for Court Administration in Bogor, which is about an hour away from Jakarta and has possibly the world's finest botanical garden. There are lots of magnificent banyan trees and thatweird plant from Sumatra that flowers every however many years and is the biggest flower (and possibly smelliest) in the world.

But on my flight, which stopped in Seoul, where the ultramodern airport is at Inchon, which seems flat with mountains in the distance, which I assume is how it seemed almost 60 years ago when MacArthur staged the famous landing there in the Korean War, I happened to see a terrific movie. It's French and called Potiche, and stars two vets of the French cinema, Catherine Deneuve and Gerard Depardieu. Not only has Deneuve aged magnificently--from someone who recalls seeing Belle de Jour when it first opened--but she is the ultimate representation of that fabulous French character, une femme d'un certaine age.

Depardieu remains an equally fine actor but unless he just put on plenty of avoirdupois for the picture, he's become quite huge. It's not a highly original plot--the spoiled factory boss's wife and the Communist mayor--but the way they play it and the several interesting plot twists make it to me a small, delightful, cinematic gem. It was made last year, did well at the Venice film fest, and was wel-reviewed in Britain. A friend in D.C. saw it at a film club showing recently so I suspect it may be soon appearing in U.S. distribution channels.

As well it should. Let's face it, we get to see so few foreign films in the U.S. these days that a treasure as this one is should become popular as the Amelie pic did a few years ago. To me, this is the ultimate response to an industry that in the U.S. feels that stars must be geared to teenaged audiences only. If Deneuve and Depardieu can't make a wonderful film click at the U.S. box office--at least by the relatively low standards set for foreign films--no one can.

Unlike almost all the movie reviewers I read--usually with the marvelous exception of Roger Ebert--I shan't give the plot away except to say that the picture does play to lots of wonderful French cultural references, including politics and sex and the general tenor of life in a country that still sets the standard for knowing how to live. It's also about something I've had occasion to learn about over the years--industrial relations--but don't let that scare you. Nor need you fret if you don't pick up everything. I'm sure I didn't. But it does help to know things like George Marchais having been the postwar Communist Party leader in France or that the CGT is the largest--and Communist--labor federation. This kind of thing just fills in the background--the picture is perfectly cast and succeeds even if you know very little about France. Last note: the title is apparently the French term for "trophy wife" which apparently has quite a different meaning there.

The flight also reminded me, since I have been travelling a lot this year within the U.S. but only occasionally overseas, that flying can still be pleasant, when, unlike in the U.S., the flight personnel are not barking at you every second not to congregate outside the lavatories (which is something that after a 13-hour flight takes a stronger resistance to smell than I possess) or do anything that might conceivably or inconceivably be treated as the slightest interference with their dictatorial (blaming the U.S. government, which does bear some of the responsibility for inculcating the sense of fear you see in too much of America) attitude toward passengers, who once held the higher status of customers.

Anyway, this picture erased all that for a few hours--as did the flight, which of course featured better-than-edible meals and attentive service even in the back of the plane. I admit to a true indulgence: following up the French pic by watching the old movie musical from the '50s--High Society, which was Cole Porter's musicalization of the Philip Barry play and movie, Philadelphia Story. Not his best musical but much fun is had by Crosby, Sinatra, Celeste Holm, and Louis Calhern, with the always superb Sidney Blackmer in a truly supporting role. Somehow he's always menacing even when there's no such element in the plot. But this picture will make you recall how fine an actress Grace Kelly was in her prime--well, her career until her royal wedding. Not only was she beautiful but she could do it all in terms of acting. And if you don't enjoy Bing and Frank doing Well, Did You Evah, there's little else to add. A real treat.