Lonliest Planet too Boring to Be Gorgeous

The Loneliest Planet (2011/12)

Directed by Julia Loketv

IFC Films, 113 mins. Not rated. In English and Georgian.

*

This independent film did a scant $128,519 at the box office, but was such a sensation at film festivals that Sundance Select decided to distribute it. Reconsideration is definitely in order.

The film putatively follows an engaged couple–Alex (Gael Garcia Bernal) and Nica (Hani Furstenberg)–on a high-adventure backpacking trip across the Caucus Mountains of Georgia. Since neither speaks more than a few words of Georgian, they hire Dato (Bidzina Gujabidze) to guide them. That’s pretty much it. Along the way, Alex screws up by reacting cowardly when a group of mountain locals confront the trio. We think he’s feeling inadequate and unmanly, but given that Bernal only says a few dozen words in the entire movie, it’s hard to know. We also get Dato’s confession of a failed marriage and brief bonding between him and Nica, but very little happens, even less is revealed, and nothing at all is resolved.

So what did festival juries see in this film? Surely not fine acting. Bernal is quickly establishing himself as a one-dimensional bore on the screen who specializes in puppy dog eyes and hangdog expressions, but is incapable of much else. T’is time for him either to stretch or find other employment. It’s hard to say much about Furstenberg, as she’s nearly as silent as Bernal. We first meet her as a soggy nude jumping up and down in the shower. We don’t know why she’s doing that, we don’t find out why, and we never discover much of anything else about her except that she travels a lot and is trying to learn Spanish–perhaps to coax a monosyllabic word from her fiancé. There’s really not much one can say about the film’s script, except that it might have been a good idea to have one. Nor can one commend Lektev’s static direction, which runs the A to B gamut from close-up to long short.  

What is good is the setting. We see the Caucus Mountains in all its guises–rolling pasturelands, cliffs of loose scree, gently folded mounds, sweeping hill-and-valley vistas, easy strolls, and high-elevation oxygen depleting scrambles. It’s also beautiful to see the sunlight streaming through Furstenberg’s fiery red mane. But this isn’t enough and it’s hard to imagine why Sundance decided to promote a film that has bombed with audiences. If you want to see the Caucasians of Georgia, National Geographic is a much better idea. Flipping the pages will provide more movement than you’ll see in this film.

Rob Weir 

Paul Simon Restrospective a Worthy Overview of a Glorious Career

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PAUL SIMON

Over the Bridge of Time

Sony Legacy 88883757672
* * * * 

There’s no point to a conversation about the past six decades of songwriting if Paul Simon’s name isn’t invoked. His has been a (decidedly angelic) voice of poetry, wonderment, and explorations of the human condition. The greatest challenge of the 47-year (1962-2011) retrospective Over the Bridge of Time must have been deciding which 20 tracks to use. Producer Steve Berkowitz opted to select songs that hit the pop charts–from Simon and Garfunkel classics such as “The Sounds of Silence” and “The Boxer” straight through to 2011’s “Love and Hard Times,” with a brief stop for some of his Broadway ventures. In between lies another of Simon’s forays into world music on albums such as Graceland and The Rhythm of the Saints. Simon wasn’t the first to go global, but was there ever a timelier album than Graceland (1986), which introduced Ladysmith Black Mambazo to mass audiences just as South Africa was in the thralls of casting off apartheid? (In retrospect, those who accused him of boycott breaking and exploitation seem quite foolish.) Simon’s songs used to be taught in college poetry classes, but most of them bubble forth from the rainbow cosmopolitanism of New York City rather than ancient elegiac wellsprings. Turn a city corner and you leave one world for another–just like a Paul Simon song. Some might say he’s been a pop artist rather than a folk singer, but talk about conversations not worth having….

Rob Weir   

Kill Your Darlings a Fascinatiing Look at Pre-Beats Life

Kill Your Darlings  (2013)

Directed by John Krokidas

Sony Picture Classics, 104 minutes, R (language and sexual situations)

* * * *

William Burroughs… Allen Ginsberg… Jack Kerouac… Can we imagine the Beat movement without them? What became the most significant literary movement of the mid-20^th century was almost nipped before it budded and, if justice had been served, it would have been.

No–this isn’t an anti-Beat rant. Like millions who came of age in the 1960s and 1970s, I was weaned on Naked Lunch, Howl, and On the Road. But I wonder if any of those works would have seen the light of day if the truth had been told in August of 1944, when Lucien Carr murdered David Kammerer. The film Kill Your Darlings takes us back to the early 1940s, when the world was at war, clubs served up sizzling hot jazz until the sun came up, gay and drug subcultures thrived in the shadows, and some of the brightest young minds in New York City spent more time dancing on the razor’s edge than studying in the hallowed halls of Columbia.

Ginsberg entered Columbia in 1943, a shy Jew from Paterson, New Jersey with a poet father, a mentally ill mother, and distressed musings over his own sexuality. There he met the brilliant-but-lazy Lucien Carr who shared his contempt for formalist poetry. In the film, Ginsberg’s relationship with Carr parallels that of Arthur Rimbaud and Paul Verlaine–madcap antics, initiation into gay life, free-flowing alcohol and drugs, and a coalescing circle of intellectuals-in-the-making. The latter group included John Clellon Holmes, Gregory Corso, Kerouac, and the older Burroughs, well on his way to a life of addiction and dealing. Through the use of occasional jumpy camera work, skewed angles, dark tones, and quick-spliced sequences, director Krokidas depicts a world that is, in measure, sordid but exciting, and experiences that rocket between surreal and hyper-real.

Krokidas gets superb performances from his cast. Daniel Radcliffe continues to leave Harry Potter far behind in his nuanced portrayal of Ginsberg. He is, in turn, prescient but naïve, lustful but frightened, brilliant but arrogant. Like Carr and Kerouac, he seems one step from success, but just a half step from implosion. Dane DeHaan’s depiction of Carr is reminiscent of that of Anthony Andrews as Sebastian in Brideshead Revisted back in the 1980s–volcanic, charming, infuriating, and androgynous but sexually alluring. The film implies that Carr and Ginsberg were lovers, which most biographers doubt. The same biographers debate Carr’s relationship with David Kammerer (Michael Hall), the older man who saved him from a teenaged suicide attempt and then became–depending on whom you believe–his lover, his stalker, and/or his despoiler. He was, most certainly, Carr’s victim, but one that yielded surprisingly little jail time as Carr used an “honor killing” defense at his trial.

The latter is a reminder of how dangerous it was to wander outside the mainstream in 1944. One could literally get away with murder if, as Carr did, you could convince a jury that your victim intended homosexual molestation. (Until 1961, sodomy was illegal everywhere in the U.S.) Nor is there much doubt that Burroughs (Ben Foster) and Kerouac (Jack Huston) obstructed justice in an attempted cover-up–Burroughs by not reporting it and Kerouac by helping hide evidence. Imagine if the entire truth had come out in 1944–that Ginsberg and Burroughs (and perhaps Carr) were gay, that Kerouac was bisexual, that all of them had used illegal substances, and that several of Carr’s friends conspired to hide a murder.

This is a very good film, though it’s not without its faults. Let’s just say, straight or gay, it’s decidedly a man’s world. You’ll see credits for Elizabeth Olsen, Kyra Sedgwick, and Jennifer Jason Leigh, but even the word cameo is a bit grandiose given how little screen time they have. In real life, Ginsberg was hardly the angelic naïf we see on the screen, nor was he exclusively gay in the 1940s. Moreover, Krokidas simply presumes you know who everyone is; if you don’t, you won’t quite know what role Burroughs plays in the drama. For my taste, Foster plays Burroughs as if he’s channeling Hunter Thompson instead of Burroughs, but I may be nitpicking. And, I suppose if one really wants to nitpick, the film’s implication that Carr cut his ties with the Beats is untrue.

But let’s let the literary biographers argue all of this. I often invoke the late Roger Ebert’s assertion that a really good film has the ability to take us inside a world we couldn’t enter on our own. Enter this one and you’ll see the madness, the junkies, the angelheaded hipsters, jazz cats, agitators, and the queens that led Allen Ginsberg to howl. Do we think Ginsberg might have howled even louder when he contemplated gay bodies sinking into the Hudson?  --Rob Weir

PS: Controversy has emerged because Daniel Radcliffe spends screen time tongue-locked with DeHaan and later has a nude love scene with another man. There is nothing salacious about either scene, though the furor is a distressful reminder that some 1944 attitudes remain.

FYI: For lovers of irony, Lucien Carr fathered three children, one of whom is novelist Caleb Carr.   

   

James Keelaghan's First Twenty-Five Years

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JAMES KEELAGHAN

History: The First 25 Years

Borealis 222

 Describing Saskatchewan-bred James Keelaghan as a “singer/songwriter” is woefully inadequate. For the past quarter century, Keelaghan has been an artisan carefully crafting and burnishing narratives, melodies, memories, and inspirations into something sublime. His songs are personal and universal, touching and provocative, literate and literary. Quite a few are history as it should have been–with the romance put back in, as he insists. And even as the tunes reverberate, Keelaghan’s masterful storytelling transports us across time, borders, and cultures. He commemorates his first twenty-five years of touring with an 18-track CD culled from his eleven albums, and with an accompanying 70-minute DVD in which he exercises his Irish shanachie roots by regaling listeners with the back story of his songs, family, journeys, musical collaborations, and inspirations. It’s a dealer’s choice of songs and the stories, hence a mix of audience favorites such as “Fires of Calais” and “Cold Missouri Waters,” and ones that mean a lot to him, such as “Mi Vida,” a collaboration with surrogate brother Oscar Lopez, and “Captain Torres,” a tale of a doomed vessel which he penned with very specific musical texturing in mind. He also lets us in on the secret that sometimes the song he’s singing isn’t exactly the story he’s telling; “McConnville’s,” for example, is as much about trying to score a bottle of whisky for his ailing father than the lad at the song’s center. Savor both CD and DVD–performers of Keelaghan’s skill, intelligence, and warmth are rare brews.

Rob Weir

How to Opt Out of Christmas Yearly PSA

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Ho Ho, No!

Here’s our annual Black Friday “How to Opt Out of Christmas” piece.

We opted out of Christmas years ago. It wasn’t the money; we simply wanted release from the stress, crowds, and mindless consumerism associated with the most intensely crass and secular of all American holidays. Spare us the Babe in the Manger speeches; Christmas in America has more to do with Adam Smith than Baby Jesus. 

We decided to reinvent December as a month of dining with friends, making contact with family, and consuming fun rather than getting caught up in rituals of reciprocity and gluttony. The breaking point came about 15 years ago, when our nieces were still children. One Christmas morning they were literally swamped under a mound of gifts. (Seriously! The wrapping paper debris was piled to twice the height of the youngest.) Our nieces no sooner opened one present than another was thrust in front of them so that every relative under the sun could snap a photo of the bewildered lasses. Soon, they were dazed and numb. As clichéd as it sounds, by mid-afternoon they were having more fun with the wrapping paper and boxes than with the presents. (The boxes made a nice makeshift fort.) And here’s the worst part: the wreckage represented expenditures of hundreds of dollars, much of it from folks that could have used the cash for much better purposes.

Christmas was even more crass when we bought for adults. It had degenerated into a zero sum game–you buy me the item on page 72 of the L.L. Bean catalog and I’ll buy you one from page 104. Christmas shopping sucks for two types of adults: those who can afford to buy things and have all they need (but nonetheless invent things to want “in the spirit of the season”); and those who shouldn’t engage in consumer frenzy, yet are pressured into doing so. If you fall into the second category, for heaven’s sake stop! Consider this sobering statistic–if you rack up $6,000 on your credit card and try to pay it off by making the minimum payment, it will take roughly 54 years to do so even if you never use the card again! Fa, la, la, indeed! In trying to conform to manufactured images of seasonal jollity you have placed yourself in economic thralldom akin to that of 19^th-century sharecroppers.

It’s our seasonal prayer that none of you are in that sinking boat. But even if you have plenty of dough, there’s simply no reason to put up with the stress and the madness. Just say no. Here’s a how-to-guide for opting out.

1. Step One: The Power of Guilt. We must ask ourselves how Christmas got to be such a mess in the first place. The answer is simple: We’ve been sold a bill of literal and metaphorical goods on what a “perfect” Christmas is supposed to be like. Don’t underestimated how powerful that imagery is. To counter it, you need to present an equally powerful counter image.

As Christmas approaches, subtly drop remarks to loved ones such as “We have so much and there are others who have so little. What do you think about scaling way back and making donations to charity instead?” My guess is that about three-quarters of your friends and relatives will breathe a sigh of relief and get on board immediately. Your job is to follow up by continuing to drop reminders. Don’t call a week before Christmas and say, “We’re not giving presents this year, right?” Instead, make a plan in the next few days, and follow up in a week by reminding down with the plan that they said they wanted to give to charity. Tell them you are writing a check for a donation in their name and ask which charity they’d like you to support.

2. Step Two: Phasing In the Plan. There will be some people on your list who won’t buy in immediately. One or two may even feel hurt and assume you don’t care enough to buy them something. You need to go gentle with these folks. Start by scaling back instead of going cold turkey. Appeal to their soft side. Do they love animals? In addition to a modest gift, get a really nice card and insert a Heifer International brochure with a note that you’ve given a donation in their name. It may take a few years before these folks stop the gift cycle altogether, but they will.

3. Step Three: Be True to Your Principles. It’s not enough to say you want to spend time with friends and family instead of gift buying; you need to do it! Make sure you schedule dinners out (or potlucks in) with close friends and family. The goal is to make the holidays joyous, not to become the Grinch.

4. Step Four: Replace Consumer Goods with Thoughtful Ones. What people really want during the holidays is a reminder that you care. A plate of home-baked cookies can say this louder than an item plucked from a catalog. So too can cleaning someone’s gutters, fixing a squeaky door, or taking their car for an oil change. Are you craft-oriented? Phoenix makes earrings that cost next to nothing to make, but resonate with friends more than those $50 mass-produced “holiday” earrings you see all over the country. I’ve written a few stories and songs that I’ve shared. Want to do something really simple? Rent “It’s a Wonderful Life” and watch it with someone you care about. Provide the buttered popcorn. The biggest gift you can give is your time!

5. Step Five: Buy Your Kids a Pen Pal. If you have little ones, it’s hard to eliminate gifts totally, but the U.N. and other agencies have programs that allow you to sponsor a child abroad. Do this for your kids and spend part of Christmas with books, pictures, and maps that illustrate where their pen pal lives. Help your kids write a letter to that child. Follow it up in the weeks to come with language lessons, food, and other such items. I had international pen pals as a kid and they made me think about the world. I remember a correspondent from Peru way more than I remember most of my toys.

6. Step Six: Remember the Box Rule. Overindulge children and you run the risk of overwhelming them (or having them grow up to be pampered brats!). Kids need to exercise their imaginations more than they need some toy from China that will be broken by Ground Hog's Day. Buy and make things in which they can participate, not merely consume. The box fort was fun. So too are time-tested things that last: Lincoln logs, blocks, Legos, Slinkies, bikes, fantasy dolls, train sets, interactive books, musical instruments…. Google “top ten toys of all time” and you’ll find none of the glitzy über-expensive “hot” toys of this or any other Christmas. Those things are just ads-of-the-moment that will fade from consciousness as soon as the latest “next big thing” comes along (and proves not to be the next big thing!)

7. Step Seven: Treat Yourself in December. Take some of the dough you’re not spending on prezzies and go out. Take in a concert or a show. Fun is always a good antidote for stress!

8. Step into the Light: If you live in the North, the stretch between Thanksgiving and Ground Hog’s Day is filled with (way too much) darkness. Turn this time into something pagan: festivals of light. Go for hikes in the daylight and gather pinecones, bittersweet, pine boughs, and other such things to make into Christmas decorations. We made an “Electric Forest” one year–an unsightly welter of pine boughs through which we strung dollar-store lights. It was as ugly a hound dog’s fanny, but it’s a memory over which we laugh years later. Other light-themed events include taking short drives to see electric displays, after-sunset window shopping, bonfires, and hitting an after-hours spot (ice cream shop for kids, cafes and bars for adults) in which the darkness is tempered by holiday or atmospheric lights).

9. Step Nine: Replace Old Rituals with New Ones. Okay, I admit that If I hear “Silent Night” at a mall one more time, I may spew. I loathe Christmas carols, plastic reindeer, and blow-up lawn displays. But I’d be the last to say that rituals are bad. If you dislike the old ones, make some new ones. We buy a new tree ornament every year, label it, and try to recall when we bought it when it comes out of storage. We also have some invented holidays, such as Moosemas on December 16, which is celebrated by eating clam chowder and drinking Scotch. A small ritual is walking amidst the downtown lights on Christmas Eve after the stores have closed. Another is a short walk in the woods behind the house on late Christmas morning. Still another is playing CDs of English and Scottish carols that we’ve not heard a billion times. Our most cherished is an annual pre-Christmas dinner at a restaurant with our dearest friends.

10. Step Ten: Make a Wish. Some families may find it impossible to eliminate Christmas presents altogether. Fair enough. But let’s not confuse quantity with quality. Even if you have kids, there’s nothing wrong with limiting their desires. Break out The Rolling Stones and make them listen to “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” until it sinks in. Instead of buying everything under the sun, ask people in your lives to set priorities. If you could only get one thing, what would you really like? (If you have kids, ask for a list of three or four and tell them you’ll ask Santa to bring one of them so that he doesn’t run out of gifts for other children.)

11. Socks are not Stinky! Everyone loves to open presents. It’s horribly environmentally unsound, but a certain degree of debris is part of Christmas. So who says the stuff inside has to cost an arm, a leg, and a kidney? Sock gifts are a lot of fun–dollar store Etch-a-Sketches, crayons, and wind-up toys for kids, inexpensive foodstuffs for adults, card games to share…. You can get very creative about sock gifts; you can also fill one for a fraction of what it costs to provide gifts that will soon be forgotten.

12. Step Twelve: Make Christmas all about the Food. When you ask most people to name their favorite holiday, it’s usually Thanksgiving. Why not? It’s about food, family, and a relaxed pace. So make Christmas into a second Thanksgiving. Prepare foods that take a long time to make. Buy a really, really good bottle of wine. Have a multi-course meal that unfolds over several hours. And, above all, share it with friends and family. Don’t forget to mention how lucky you are to have so much when others have so little.   

Leni Stern Sways to Senegalese Groove

LENI STERN

Jelell

Leni Stern Recordings

***

Leni Stern was a gal playing sizzling electric long before it was sexy to do so. She did mash-ups before any hipster jumped on the jargon bandwagon with the term. World music? Been there, done that. It should therefore come as no surprise to learn that her latest record falls into no hard-fast category. It’s a bit jazzy, a bit of rock and roll, meditative and ambient, but with flashes of gritty rawness. Mostly it dances in to Senegalese groove, courtesy of sidemen Mamadou Ba (bass), Alioune Faye (percussion), and numerous guest musicians. Or, perhaps sways would be a better term. This is a record that takes its time. Stern plays off various drums, and bass lines to allow her liquid notes to flow through the mix in ways in which dancing or contemplation are equally valid. The effect and the crystalline executions of her runs are reminiscent of Jerry Garcia when he was in the zone. Stern and her band mates add vocals, but even these are more overlay than structure. If you must label it, call it West African bass and drum with value-added guitar.

Rob Weir

There are no YouTube selections from this album as of yet, but you can sample a bit of the title track here.

Blue is the Warmest Color Not a Masterpiece but More than a Sex Film

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Blue is the Warmest Color: La Vie d’Adèle  (2013)

Directed by Adbellatif Kechiche

Sundance Classics, 179 mins. NC-17 (graphic sex)

In French (English subtitles)

* * * ½

The color blue is associated with valor, harmony, faithfulness, and confidence. It also signifies sadness and depression, Blue is the Warmest Color has very few of the first qualities, but quite a few of the latter.

Anyone who has heard of this film knows that it has generated controversy on several levels. First, it’s the first adapted graphic novel to ever win France’s coveted Palme d’Or, which it carried off at the 2013 Cannes Film Festival. Second, it’s based on a very graphic graphic novel. Here in the Land of Bible Readers Who Can’t Mind Their Own Damn Business (USA), any movie with nudity and people actually making love generates backlash. Add to the mix that genitalia (prosthetics, allegedly) are shown and that the people making love are two women, and hell hath no fury like a Puritan seeking to stamp out sexual pleasure.

You’ll probably have to find an independent cinema in a liberal town to see this one as, to be frank, the only way sex gets more vivid than what’s on the screen is if you’re actually having sex while in the theater. There is a seven-minute all-parts-bared, no-holds-barred scene between the film’s lead actresses that leaves very little to the imagination. This of course, has led to charges that the project is simply well scripted pornography–mostly leveled by those who’ve not seen it.

The basic plot is quite simple: boy meet girl, who meets girl and dumps boy. Girl eventually loses girl and spends a lot of time trying (and largely failing) to get over the loss. But it’s more than this. The film centers on Adèle (the radiant Adèle Exarchopoulos), a high school junior coming of age, confused about her sexuality, and  encouraged by her girl posse to bed down with a handsome senior guy who has been eyeing her. She does so even though she’s been having erotic dreams over a blue-haired woman she’s seen on the street. Adèle’s attempt to “go straight” does not go well. Not at all like what happens when she meets blue-haired Emma (Léa Seydoux), who turns out to be a fourth-year art school student and painter. To say that they have hot sex and that Adèle is into Emma’s body is a bit like saying that gourmands like food–a strangely appropriate analogy!

Blue is the Warmest Color is about way more than sex. Among the unstated, but clearly centered questions in the film is: What do you do when you meet the girl of your dreams and she turns out to be wildly inappropriate for you in just about every way except physically? Adèle and Emma are a gorgeous couple, but Adèle is immature, awkward, a dilettante, and spontaneous; Emma is cerebral, has been around the proverbial block, focused, and has a business plan for promoting her work. Moreover, Adèle, who longs to teach young children, is voracious in everything that interests her. When Adèle eats, cooks, reads French literature, dances, teaches, or has sex, she is laser-like in focus and a free-range animal in spirit. She also knows of no other artist than Picasso, a bit of an obstacle for Emma, who admires Egon Schiele and poses Adèle as Schiele might. And Adèle knows she’s way out of her depth when Emma’s art school friends are around and the conversation turns to anything other than food or the novels she likes. Among Adèle’s problems is that she simply can’t get her mind around things that don’t move her. Another is that she retains the spontaneity-bordering-on-recklessness that is part of the makeup of people of her age group (17-21).

Adèle grows into young adulthood and becomes a teacher, but does she yet know who she is? She has known deep heartache, but can she cope and does she have the capacity to move on? She has mastered joy, but can she navigate melancholia?

This is a very good film, though by no means a masterpiece. Kudos go to Exarchopoulos and Seydoux for bold performances that lay bare both body and soul. The buzz is that neither woman is a lesbian off-screen. If that’s true, a whole bunch of listless, unconvincing cold fish Hollywood lovers need to take passion lessons from these two. Among the possible problems, though, is that Kechiche’s voyeuristic direction invites critiques of the male gaze. I’d be tempted to give him a pass on that one, but not the film’s length. I generally appreciate the unhurried pacing of French cinema, but all complex stories elide time and a director must ultimately decide what to cut. Blue could lose almost an hour with little effort whatsoever. When we see Adèle eat spaghetti once, we know she loves it; we don’t need to see that scene repeated. Nor do we need to see her doing African dances with her pupils more than once. How long must the camera dwell on a tear-drenched face and runny nose before the audience knows the person is sad? When does an awkward moment become a drawn-out boring one? And, in the film’s last quarter, how long must we watch someone too depressed to do much before we realize she’s stuck? Blue is the Warmest Color is best when the heat is turned up; once the flames go down, it’s a bit like a sparse two-verse Delta blues song dragged out by an overlong guitar solo. --Rob Weir