Roger Ebert was my favorite film critic because, first of all, I tended to like movies I saw after reading his positive reviews, or alternatively, I found that when I read his reviews after seeing a movie, I usually agreed with his views. He possessed a deep knowledge of the medium and had a fine ability to perceive what kind of audience would enjoy a particular movie.
So last weekend we saw the bio film on his life, entitled Life, Itself. While the picture seemed to spend more time on his last days in a rehab hospital, after losing most of his jaw to cancer, it told me things about him that I'd not known. He was editor-in-chief, for example, of the Daily Illini at the Univ. of Illinois and after securing a foothold at the Chicago Sun-Times as an intern, more or less fell into the movie critic's chair where he remained and thrived and developed an international reputation for the next several decades.
He made his encounter with illness in his last years public partly, it seems, because his partner on public tv, the late Gene Siskel of the Chicago Tribune, had kept his final illness a secret. Siskel and Ebert (the order of billing was determined by a coin toss) had their differences but each apparently disclosed at the end of each of their lives how much they respected the other. They were a good match. Siskel was a bit of a highbrow, having majored in philosophy at Yale while Ebert liked to style himself as a man of the people who grew up in Champaign-Urbana as the son of an electrician and a schoolteacher and went to the home-town school, Illinois.
It was also delightful to see that although Ebert was able to pal around with movie stars at Cannes and elsewhere, he retained his sense of himself and place, rejecting offers to leave Chicago. After all, it took some years for Siskel and Ebert to get their public tv show shown in New York and L.A. but ultimately they became the two best-known critics in the country.
I thought of how he is missed--despite his having trained a cadre of young critics who carry on his work as reviewers at RogerEbert.com. I was reading a review in the Baltimore edition of the City Paper of the classic Sunset Boulevard. The critic found the movie compelling despite his visceral dislike of most everything about it. He missed appreciating how Gloria Swanson had really been a silent star, how Erich von Stroheim who played her butler had truly been a great director in the 20s, and the irony of the tyrannical Cecil B. DeMille, whose extravaganzas are mostly ludicrous today, comes off in the picture playing himself as a kindly veteran who tries to let Swanson down with affection.Ebert doubtless would have remarked on most of these aspects, as well as the delight in seeing true silent stars such as H.B. Warner and Buster Keaton as companions of Swanson at a card-playing evening.
Thursday, July 24, 2014
Thursday, July 17, 2014
Two Traviatas in One Day--Neither in Lisbon
[This entry should have appeared two weeks ago--for which, apologies.]
Yes, this past Saturday, I managed to attend two performances of La Traviata: one was a video relay shown in the Bethesda Row movie house of a production at the Royal Opera, Covent Garden, with Renee Fleming, Joseph Calleja, and Thomas Hampson; the second, that night at the Gala Hispanic Theatre (nee Tivoli) on 14th Street in DC, was The IN Series production, with string ensemble and two stirring, totally able lead singers.
The IN Series production may have been the best operatic performance this series has yet produced, and that includes the modernizations of two Mozart-Da Ponte gems: Don Giovanni: the Long Island Version and Marriage of Figaro: the Vegas Version, in the first of which, the title character is truly a Mafia don, while in the second, the Count is a Wayne Newton type in the Vegas nobility.
Traviata always gets to me, beginning with the prelude, which usually brings the tears right at the start. The first act is absolutely perfect--musically it moves from one high point to another, ending with Violetta's two glorious arias, finally Sempre libere, the significance of which remains a wonderfully arguable issue.
The position of the late Alberta Masiello, told during one of those wonderful old-time Met intermission lectures on the Saturday radio broadcasts, was that in this aria she has decided she will not go off in love with Alfredo but will continue to live her life as a high-priced Parisian courtesan and enjoy joy after joy for however she endures (which in any case will not be for long).
I always have found this a worthy position to take, except that her expressed love for Alfredo in the very next act and her horror at having to give him up both tend to go against the point of the imperious if delightful Miss Masiello.
Renee Fleming was superb in her rendition, of course, and the Royal Opera's production was magnificent. In recent years, though, I've seen all kinds of Traviata productions--the trend is to stark, modern ones--and they all can work with this seemingly indestructible vehicle.
In between the late morning and evening shows, I also managed to take in the Shakespeare Theatre Company's Private Lives, probably Noel Coward's finest play. It remains a delight of his sharp comedy and he maintains the high level of dialogue through three strong acts. The players here were also fine, although seeing the company do Design for Living a couple of seasons ago makes me yearn for the impossible: the original cast of design, for whom Coward wrote the show: the Lunts and himself.
Yes, this past Saturday, I managed to attend two performances of La Traviata: one was a video relay shown in the Bethesda Row movie house of a production at the Royal Opera, Covent Garden, with Renee Fleming, Joseph Calleja, and Thomas Hampson; the second, that night at the Gala Hispanic Theatre (nee Tivoli) on 14th Street in DC, was The IN Series production, with string ensemble and two stirring, totally able lead singers.
The IN Series production may have been the best operatic performance this series has yet produced, and that includes the modernizations of two Mozart-Da Ponte gems: Don Giovanni: the Long Island Version and Marriage of Figaro: the Vegas Version, in the first of which, the title character is truly a Mafia don, while in the second, the Count is a Wayne Newton type in the Vegas nobility.
Traviata always gets to me, beginning with the prelude, which usually brings the tears right at the start. The first act is absolutely perfect--musically it moves from one high point to another, ending with Violetta's two glorious arias, finally Sempre libere, the significance of which remains a wonderfully arguable issue.
The position of the late Alberta Masiello, told during one of those wonderful old-time Met intermission lectures on the Saturday radio broadcasts, was that in this aria she has decided she will not go off in love with Alfredo but will continue to live her life as a high-priced Parisian courtesan and enjoy joy after joy for however she endures (which in any case will not be for long).
I always have found this a worthy position to take, except that her expressed love for Alfredo in the very next act and her horror at having to give him up both tend to go against the point of the imperious if delightful Miss Masiello.
Renee Fleming was superb in her rendition, of course, and the Royal Opera's production was magnificent. In recent years, though, I've seen all kinds of Traviata productions--the trend is to stark, modern ones--and they all can work with this seemingly indestructible vehicle.
In between the late morning and evening shows, I also managed to take in the Shakespeare Theatre Company's Private Lives, probably Noel Coward's finest play. It remains a delight of his sharp comedy and he maintains the high level of dialogue through three strong acts. The players here were also fine, although seeing the company do Design for Living a couple of seasons ago makes me yearn for the impossible: the original cast of design, for whom Coward wrote the show: the Lunts and himself.
Two Fine French Flicks
Seeing two good French pictures within a few days' spread makes me realize how much I've missed seeing them. Saturday we went to the Eric Rohmer--A Summer's Tale--released in the U.S. finally 18 years after he made it. It suffered not at all from the wait, although Rohmer died, at 89, in the interim. It's a slight story about a slightly goofy guy who goes to the beach, hoping his travelling girlfriend will join him.
Meanwhile he encounters the still-charming Aurelia Langlet, who was Pauline in Pauline at the Beach, another Rohmer seaside feature, who is the improbable waitress at her aunt's restaurant for the summer, until she returns to working on her PhD in ethnology. She intros him to yet another friend and suddenly he has to balance three relationships and begins to falsify just enough to keep all the balls in the air.
Eventually his girlfriend turns up and you can see how he is drawn to her even if she is unpredictable and sometimes downright mean to him. The beach scenes at St Lunaire and Malo and other Breton spots are delightful and the whole story leaves you with a satisfying feeling.
Last night was a much more serious film, both at the wonderful Avalon in Chevy Chase, D.C., Diane Kurys' Pour Une Femme, or For a Woman. The Avalon's promo material emphasized that the picture had some relation to people having been in the Holocaust. This did not serve to attract me, but perhaps it does for some. Had they bothered to mention that it was a Diane Kurys film, that would have clinched it for me, though.
She has made several memorable films, one was One Sings, the Other Doesn't, and often she deals with her own life, which is all the more timely today as she frequently explores lives of Jews in France. This one is the story of a marriage--he saves her by getting her out of the French concentration camp with him and she marries him in return; alas, this is not necessarily the basis of a loving life together. Then some mysterious "relatives" appear with a totally different agenda from his somewhat contradictory goal of becoming a full-fledged member of the bourgeoisie, while maintaining full identification with the French Communists.
The picture explores how the couple cope with the challenges they face, through a long series of flashbacks told by their daughters. Kurys always seems to identify with one of the daughters, as she did in one of her earliest films, Peppermint Soda. French pictures often deal with working class characters more meaningfully (when was the last American picture to deal with them at all?) as in the 2010 picture, Potiche, where Catherine De Neuve is the seemingly incapable wife who takes over a company and deals with Gerard Depardieu as the union leader with whom her husband had come to a standstill.
That picture also demonstrated how "aging" stars like those two could appear as leads though in their 60s--and even though a rather huge Depardieu didn't look as well as De Neuve, who was definitely une femme d'une certaine age. Lastly, these pictures actually treat Communism seriously, including making fun of the Party while appreciating its role in the French society of the postwar 1940s.
Meanwhile he encounters the still-charming Aurelia Langlet, who was Pauline in Pauline at the Beach, another Rohmer seaside feature, who is the improbable waitress at her aunt's restaurant for the summer, until she returns to working on her PhD in ethnology. She intros him to yet another friend and suddenly he has to balance three relationships and begins to falsify just enough to keep all the balls in the air.
Eventually his girlfriend turns up and you can see how he is drawn to her even if she is unpredictable and sometimes downright mean to him. The beach scenes at St Lunaire and Malo and other Breton spots are delightful and the whole story leaves you with a satisfying feeling.
Last night was a much more serious film, both at the wonderful Avalon in Chevy Chase, D.C., Diane Kurys' Pour Une Femme, or For a Woman. The Avalon's promo material emphasized that the picture had some relation to people having been in the Holocaust. This did not serve to attract me, but perhaps it does for some. Had they bothered to mention that it was a Diane Kurys film, that would have clinched it for me, though.
She has made several memorable films, one was One Sings, the Other Doesn't, and often she deals with her own life, which is all the more timely today as she frequently explores lives of Jews in France. This one is the story of a marriage--he saves her by getting her out of the French concentration camp with him and she marries him in return; alas, this is not necessarily the basis of a loving life together. Then some mysterious "relatives" appear with a totally different agenda from his somewhat contradictory goal of becoming a full-fledged member of the bourgeoisie, while maintaining full identification with the French Communists.
The picture explores how the couple cope with the challenges they face, through a long series of flashbacks told by their daughters. Kurys always seems to identify with one of the daughters, as she did in one of her earliest films, Peppermint Soda. French pictures often deal with working class characters more meaningfully (when was the last American picture to deal with them at all?) as in the 2010 picture, Potiche, where Catherine De Neuve is the seemingly incapable wife who takes over a company and deals with Gerard Depardieu as the union leader with whom her husband had come to a standstill.
That picture also demonstrated how "aging" stars like those two could appear as leads though in their 60s--and even though a rather huge Depardieu didn't look as well as De Neuve, who was definitely une femme d'une certaine age. Lastly, these pictures actually treat Communism seriously, including making fun of the Party while appreciating its role in the French society of the postwar 1940s.
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