Culturopolis

On Ice

2011-12-15T11:51:00.000-08:00

(Image courtesy of the St. Regis)

Ice skating may be the closest adult women (and some enlightened men) can get to indulging their floaty ballerina visions in a public space. Which makes the ultra fancy-pants St. Regis Astor Holiday Rink all the better for stoking that element of socially-sanctioned fantasy. I have skated at a number of other dreamy ice rinks including above the footings of the Eiffel Tower last Christmas where Radiohead played and the skates were free in deference to the season. Also memorable was the iconic, epic Rockefeller Center rink where rink-envoys were on hand to inquire about your pain factor when an especially dramatic fall happens. And the Astor Rink has its own unique appeal.Read more »

Teenage Dream

2011-12-14T08:39:00.000-08:00

In Young Adult, Charlize Theron doesn’t want to grow up

by Felicia Feaster

With the double-whammy combination of Bridesmaids and Young Adult, 2011 is officially the year of the stunted, frustrated girl-misfit. A toxic spin on all of those cutesy chick flicks where career girls yearn for marriage, the latter film is the convention-busting story of semi-slovenly, semi-slatternly 37-year-old Mavis Gary (Charlize Theron), who is hellbent on busting up a marriage. Mavis is a woman old enough — the social code goes — to be married and the proud owner of a child (or two). But instead she's floundering in a sea of insecurity when it comes to both love and career. It is an outrageously refreshing change of pace from the priss-pots and put-a-ring-on-it obsessives who constitute the majority of romantic comedies.

In a deliciously terse opening sequence, Mavis is introduced waking up in her cluttered Minneapolis high-rise apartment — more dorm room than grown-up pad — in a hungover funk that you sense she's been riding for a long time. A post-divorce bachelorette, Mavis drinks too much, guzzles Diet Coke for breakfast, and semi-neglects her baby substitute: a fluffy lap dog more tragic than Old Yeller. This is a woman who never grew up. But Mavis' most troubling stuntedness lies in her decision to drive back to her hometown of Mercury, Minn., after she receives an e-mail announcing her high school flame Buddy Slade's (Patrick Wilson) new baby. Her plan is to wrest Buddy away from his sweet, kindhearted wife (Elizabeth Reaser) and new baby daughter.Read more »

Occupy Alliance

2011-12-02T13:59:00.000-08:00

(Photo courtesy of the Alliance Theatre)

Foreclosures, an enormous gap between the haves and the have-nots, unscrupulous money-lending, greed and social injustice. No it’s not America circa 2011 but Victorian England mid-recession, the suddenly oh-so-relevant setting for the Alliance Theatre’s classic A Christmas Carol (through Dec. 24, www.alliancetheatre.org).

On the occasion of the first Occupy Wall Street Christmas, Charles Dickens is feeling a bit more 99 percentish these days. In their slightly tongue-in-cheek catalogue of fictional money bags, Forbes’ “Fictional 15” has clocked Scrooge’s worth at $1.7 billion, trailing Daddy Warbucks and Montgomery Burns. Black Friday sales may have been brisk but the air of regret and despondency that characterizes A Christmas Carol is a welcome lesson in moderation, charity, consideration and other seasonal touchy-feelyness that we hope our children will absorb in between trips to REI and Best Buy.Read more »

Anna and Jacob love each other Like Crazy, despite visa issues

2011-11-25T11:00:00.000-08:00

The L-Word
by Felicia Feaster

If fly-on-the-wall British director Mike Leigh decided to make a mumblecore film, it might look very much like Like Crazy, an ebb-and-flow love story where the blockages to romance are not Shakespearean feuding families but visa issues. Not since Green Card has so much romance been yoked to the ox cart of bureaucracy.

British journalism major Anna (Felicity Jones) has a visa to study in Los Angeles, where she meets a boy who in many ways feels like her male equivalent: artistic, creative Jacob (Anton Yelchin). An aspiring furniture designer, Jacob's first gesture of true devotion is to engrave one of his chairs with the words "Like Crazy" and present it to Anna for her seating pleasure. A surprisingly sensitive male character in a Gen-Y cinema awash with duuuudes, Jacob is a candy-coated dreamboat from girl-bait central casting. He clutches a bouquet of flowers for airport rendezvous, treats women with Old World tenderness, and can make goo-goo eyes like nobody's business.

But director Drake Doremus is no lightweight. He invests Jacob with a complicated back story, and Anna has a pair of hard-drinking, wacky parents who recall the grown-up bohos of Mike Leigh-land. In other words, these are interesting people with inner lives. Doremus takes his time developing their personalities too, rather than focusing on fluid-filled sex scenes that so often serve as short-cut indications of great passion for less insightful directors. And to his credit, Like Crazy is a love story told from the heart that melts like cotton candy on your tongue.Read more »

Patrick Heagney dismisses truth in a snap

2011-11-25T10:27:00.000-08:00

Heagney's photography investigates memory at Kai Lin Art
by Felicia Feaster

With his piercing blue eyes, slick photographs, and silver-tongued spin, photographer Patrick Heagney, 29, is his own best press. By day, Heagney works as a commercial photographer who's shot national musical meteorites including Janelle Monae and Athens' Of Montreal for publications such as Atlanta magazine, Architectural Digest, and Veranda. But his fine art photography, now on view at Kai Lin Art, is where he really gets to rock his cerebral cortex.

Hailing from Fairfax, Va., "the Marietta of D.C." as he refers to it, Heagney mines the fertile intersection of technology and photography while consistently reinforcing the idea that reality is malleable. A new breed of photographer along the lines of German photographer Loretta Lux for whom Photoshop and hyper-constructed alternate realities are second nature, Heagney uses his own technical experiments to delve deeper into the idea that reality is what we make it. Heagney uses his tools of manipulation to show how easily our own ideas of truth can be shaped and distorted.Read more »

Small-Screen Style

2011-11-20T09:11:00.000-08:00

by Felicia Feaster
illustration by Jesse Hora

As a set decorator for some of television’s hippest shows, Christina Tonkin is the master of subliminal design, turning unwitting viewers into her style disciples. Her sleek, monochromatic set decorations for shows like Sex and the City and Gossip Girl fulfill every fly-over fantasy of the luxurious lairs of Manhattan’s beautiful people.

Tonkin tends to favor a kind of meta-authenticity for her sets, as when she used Mikhail Baryshnikov’s own art collection for his Sex and the City character’s apartment, giving it the proper Euro-sophisticate vibe. “I shop where the characters would shop,” she says. “Of course, I cheat a bit with regards to the budget.” Tonkin also has a bevy of residential interior design projects in the works, including a 5,000-squarefoot home in East Norwich, Long Island and an East Village garden apartment. “When I decorate sets for TV, I realize no one has to actually live there, however the same design sensibilities apply to both: a blend of sophistication and livability; comfort and beauty combined,” she says. Tonkin’s TV work has been a great advertisement for her real-world services; one Manhattanite contacted her after seeing her work on the living room set for Gossip Girl.

Helter-Skelter

2011-11-16T06:03:00.000-08:00

Martha Marcy May Marlene is creepy, sexy, and very stylized

by Felicia Feaster

A semi-sinister little film with the eerie, sunlit ambiance of headspace thrillers like Rosemary's Baby or the original The Stepford Wives, Martha Marcy May Marlene presents a young woman trapped between two worlds. Having escaped an insular cult in the Catskills presided over by guitar-strumming head-hippie Patrick (John Hawkes), Martha (Elizabeth Olsen) has sought refuge at her older sister Lucy (Sarah Paulson) and husband Ted's (Hugh Dancy) vacation home in Connecticut. But even hours away, Martha is haunted by her memories of the cult — and a feeling that its members are watching her.

How much is her imagination and how much is real is left unsaid by newbie director Sean Durkin, who won the director award at the Sundance Film Festival for his debut feature. Renamed Marcy May by Patrick, the film's title indicates a young woman straddling two worlds, trying to decide, in many ways, between the lesser of two evils.

Though Martha never tells Lucy the exact nature of her distress, only that she has broken up with a bad boyfriend, there are many indications that all is not right in Martha's world. She is fragile, paranoid, and often inappropriate, crawling into Lucy and Ted's bed one night as they have sex. As the film unfolds and moves back in time to Martha's life with the back-to-nature cult, a picture emerges of the source of her strange behavior. Young girls are offered up as sexual playthings to Patrick by cult pimp Watts (Brady Corbet). Patrick likes fragile blondes and he likes 'em young. The presence of one baby on the commune grounds suggests that he is planting more than just tomatoes down on the farm.

Ciné 1.0: Melancholia, an Artsy Romance of Planetary Doom

2011-11-15T19:46:00.000-08:00

By Felicia Feaster

Melancholia opens with one of life’s most joyous occasions: a wedding. The doll-like, delicate Justine (Kirsten Dunst) has just married a handsome, adoring husband Michael (Alexander Skarsgard). The pair hold court at a lavish wedding reception bathed in opulent golden light in the upscale resort home of Justine’s sister Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg) and her husband John (Kiefer Sutherland).

But despite the jubilant mood, Justine seems more a bystander than participant in the party, slipping away to take a bath and to search for her equally distracted mother Gaby (Charlotte Rampling) and father Dexter (John Hurt), clearly hoping to confide in them. As the evening spirals into disaster and Justine falls into inescapable despair, she has sex with a young party guest and tells off her boss Jack (Stellan Skarsgard). Despite all of Claire’s ministrations and efforts to head off the looming cataclysm, Justine is deep in the throes of a profound, crushing, ruinous depression that has snuffed the light out of her eyes, and any sense of optimism about the future.

An astoundingly gorgeous film that imagines depression as—quite literally—the end of the world, Danish director Lars von Trier’s Melancholia draws from the director’s own famously herculean bouts with depression. Intensifying the gravity of such existential pain, von Trier casts the sunny blonde Dunst in the role, to better convey depression’s paralyzing, inescapable dread, as apt to destroy the beautiful and privileged as the luckless and abject.

With her marriage essentially ruined over the course of the reception and the groom departed, sisters Justine and Claire hole up at the resort. Both attentive and furious, Claire tries to pull Justine out of a despair that has left her confined to her bed, too sapped to eat or bathe.

But like any mental illness that can defy all efforts to aid or fix, the intractability of Justine’s depression is measured by the larger, cosmic force looming over the entire planet.

Atlanta's Plaza Theatre May Soon Be R.I.P.

2011-11-15T11:07:00.000-08:00

The Plaza Theatre, a fundamental Atlanta landmark was given a second chance at life through the valiant efforts of hipster cineastes Jonathan and Gayle Rej. Its tacky floors, beckoning neon marquee and cavernous, slightly spooky ground floor auditorium invest the act of movie going with romance, mystery and a fair amount of necessary seediness, reminding us of a time when films were equal parts glamour and vice. I hope some deep-pocket film lover or institution will recognize the Plaza's value and give it a new lease on life.—Felicia Feaster

Midtown’s Plaza Theatre Seeks New Owners as 35mm Film Dies.
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: Nov. 15, 2011
Contact: Jonathan Rej, jonny@plazaatlanta.com

For many years, Atlanta’s legendary Plaza Theatre has been a cornerstone of the local arts community, and Jonathan and Gayle Rej, the owners since August 2006, have maintained the theatre as a hub for local film buffs.

In June 2009 they established The Plaza Theatre Foundation, a 501(c)3 organization, with the intent of getting the Plaza to the next level as a destination theatre for a wider audience and to provide Atlanta a unique and classic film-going experience for years to come.

Despite their stellar idealism, economic realities have finally caught up with the Plaza.

Day-today operations of an independently owned cinema are rife with challenges, but the death of 35mm film in the very near future is one hurdle they cannot overcome. With film studios such as Warner Brothers and Twentieth Century Fox no longer booking 35mm repertory film prints and already destroying their film libraries, soon there literally won’t be film to run through the Plaza’s projectors. The Regal Tara Cinema has already converted to completely digital, the Landmark will follow shortly and the Plaza simply does not have the monetary funds to convert.

Therefore, the Rejs are seeking a party or parties: a college, museum, TV network, historical society or another entity, to take over the Plaza Theatre and make the necessary investments to maintain Atlanta’s oldest cinema…to keep its doors open, the movies rolling and the popcorn popping. They believe that the broad diversity and size of the Atlanta metro area population should be more than sufficient to support a theatre that offers a rich mix of programming and would hope to see a prominent Atlanta organization step up and save this landmark.Read more »

House Hunter

2011-11-15T09:57:00.000-08:00

by Felicia Feaster
photos by Bruce Damonte

“I often think of us as architectural plastic surgeons,” quips architect Robert Edmonds. He is referring to himself and Vivian Lee, his partner at their San Francisco firm, who also happens to be his wife. Edmonds and Lee frequently find themselves taking existing buildings and re-envisioning them for their clients’ more modern tastes. “We’re really able to attack the DNA of a building and transform it,” Edmonds says.

Their elegant solutions to preexisting buildings include a light-drenched bachelor pad in the historic Oriental Warehouse in San Francisco’s South Beach neighborhood, and their own ’50s-era San Francisco home, where a wooden-screen-wrapped façade gives it the look of a vintage View-Master. In contrast, the Summerhill Residence, one of their few ground-up projects, was built for Lee’s brother as a second home. Its series of buildings has served as a backdrop for fashion shoots, and as the cover image for the architecture book California Cool. The design of this home typifies the clean, modern lines of the signature Edmonds + Lee look.

“I often think of ourselves as architectural plastic surgeons. We’re really able to attack the DNA of a building and transform it.”

Eastwood Drops Macho and Gets Sensitive

2011-11-14T11:53:00.000-08:00

Clint Eastwood’s J. Edgar is a sympathetic portrait of a closeted man

Nuthin’ But a G Thang

by Felicia Feaster

Warner Bros.

In addition to evidence that J. Edgar Hoover was gay, a cross-dresser, a conspiracy nut, and a Red-hater, in the engrossing new biopic J. Edgar, director Clint Eastwood contends that the notorious G-man and founder of the Federal Bureau of Investigations was also a major nerd. A fascinating portrait of an influential American, J. Edgar presents Hoover (Leonardo DiCaprio) as a flawed but prescient figure whose public role building the FBI into an important institution is contrasted with a private life as a closeted gay man devoted to his right-hand man Clyde Tolson (Armie Hammer), who became a devoted soulmate.

For the most part, Eastwood tends to soft pedal Hoover's most malicious and damaging acts of wire-tapping and bad behavior, glossing over the fallout of his character assassination. Eastwood and screenwriter Dustin Lance Black (Milk) prefer a more humanizing approach. J. Edgar begins with a gray-haired, dour, heavyset, and aging Hoover dictating a self-aggrandizing autobiography to a handsome underling, but flashes back frequently to a spryer man whose zeal for commie hunting was formed in the anarchist movement of the post-World War I era. Trained under fellow Red-hater Mitchell Palmer (Geoff Pierson), Hoover went on to advocate for increased power for the FBI, including the right to bear arms and for the same powers normally afforded to a police force. While the rest of the Feds mock Hoover for his obsession with fingerprinting and deride his "science lab" inquiries into crime scene analysis, Eastwood gives Hoover his history-book props.

2011-03-19T13:48:00.000-07:00

Ed Helms plays the stunted hero in Cedar Rapids

Should you blush? Should you cringe?

by Felicia Feaster

The uproarious comedy Cedar Rapids comes from the blushing cinema of embarrassment that gave us Cyrus and The 40 Year Old Virgin. At the film’s center: a 34-year-old sunny geek Tim Lippe (Ed Helms) convinced selling insurance is an expression of god’s love. As heartily as he sells that message, you almost begin to believe it. You don’t know whether to hug him or give him a wedgie.

Is Lippe arrested? Baby-fied? Filmmaker Miguel Arteta (Chuck & Buck, The Good Girl) doesn’t make any bones about the stunted but poignant status of its orphan hero, who has lost both parents and looks to his boss for nurturing. Lippe even has a Mrs. Robinson, the over-age hottie Macy Vaderhei (Sigourney Weaver) who, wait for it — used to be his seventh-grade teacher. Can you say mommy complex? That relationship pretty much sums up the kinky and sweet rhythm that Cedar Rapids grooves to, a film that makes everything from adultery to snorting coke look positively peachy-keen. Should you laugh? Should you cringe? Should you hide your eyes behind your hands?

In nerd cinema, every geek has his mountain to scale, his churning river to ford, the leaky ink pen in his pocket. Seems the insurance agency’s star-seller has just met with an unfortunate end via auto-erotic asphyxiation. So it looks like Lippe is up to bat. Lippe’s crucible is his company’s annual insurance convention that his blowhard boss Bill (Stephen Root) packs him off to with strict orders to come home with the coveted lucite Two Diamonds Award, the Grammy of Midwestern life insurance. He leaves his beige world of Brown Valley, Wis. for the phantasmagoric Oz of Cedar Rapids, Iowa, with its decadent trifecta of hookers, hotel bars and indoor swimming pools. Giddy at the thrill of flying on an airplane for the first time and interfacing with the big, bad metropolis of Cedar Rapids, Lippe straps himself in for an adventure of scavenger hunts and business-card hand-off cocktail mixers, with regular calls back to his sugar mama Macy for moral courage.

The title of the film is a joke about the places we consider cesspools, not New York or L.A. in this case, but a seemingly white-bread bland town that, it turns out, is in fact a teeming sewer of vice and corruption. And that’s within the walls of the convention hotel. There are early signs that all is not right in Dodge. A fresh-faced hooker trolls the convention lobby looking for a date and the convention custom — despite the lip service paid to the insurance company’s born-again founder — appears to be booze guzzling and bed-hopping. Worse still, Lippe has been housed in the same hotel room with his agency’s arch enemy, the client-stealing scumbag his boss has warned him away from, Dean Ziegler (John C. Reilly).

Cedar Rapids’ babe in the woods set-up is hilarious. Lippe is all nervous-nellie about forking over his credit card for the room deposit and carries his traveler’s checks in a zippered money bag strapped to his body. He expresses white-boy shock that his other roommate is a b-b-b-b-b-lack man, possibly the first he’s encountered in the vanilla ranks of Iowa. It’s all just too-too awkward and unfamiliar for poor Lippe, whose first encounter with insurance poobah Orin Helgesson (Kurtwood Smith), the man who has the ability to bequeath the Two Diamonds upon him, in the hotel’s gym locker room is a certifiable spit-take.

Like Belushi or Jack Black, John Reilly’s comic mojo in Cedar Rapids is pure id: Ziegler is an uncontrolled mess of crude jokes and inappropriate bon mots who suddenly snaps into morose when reflecting on his ex. His straight man is the equally-ribald-in-his-own-way Ronald Wilkes (Isiah Whitlock Jr.), whose infomercial-perfect diction, starched suits, and affable business-ready manner carries a whiff of sadness; he’s a black guy in a white world who’s done everything he can to fit in. One of the most subversive black characters in movies in a while, Whitlock is so square he gets his ideas of gangsta where we all do: from TV, specifically the HBO series The Wire (which he starred in as the slimy Clay Davis). Whitlock’s performance is pitch-perfect.

Rounding out their happy quartet is the family gal Joan Ostrowski-Fox (Anne Heche) who uses the convention every year as an opportunity to forget she’s tied down. Again, there’s that whiff of sadness behind the comedy. They take Lippe on as their prodigy, introducing him to the pleasures of drink (his guzzle of choice: sherry) and loose women (he falls hard). As Lippe, Ed Helms retains his shiny innocence even in the midst of Midwestern depravity; he somehow manages to convince, and endear, a shiny, gullible Jimmy Stewart trapped in the flesh-pot of Hooverville.

Cedar Rapids gains points for mixing up its very, very rude comedy with a real sense of purpose. It reveals the ethical handicaps and general bad behavior in a supposedly god-fearing white collar world and the honor-among-renegades of Lippe and his crew. You end up rooting for the geeks and for the corny but reassuring message that friendship and stand-up guy (and gal) values triumph in the end.

2011-03-19T13:41:00.000-07:00

Theater & Film

Theater review: “Exit, Pursued by a Bear,” Synchronicity’s dark and campy comedy of domestic abuse

by Felicia Feaster | Mar 7, 2011

If the Coen Brothers decided to set a feminist revenge tale in Atlanta and sprinkle it with Dixie Chicks pixie dust, it might look something like “Exit, Pursued by a Bear,” a raucous comedy (interspersed with drama) of friendship, domestic abuse and performance-as-catharsis. The show runs through March 27 at Synchronicity Theatre at 7 Stages.

Nan Carter (Veronika Duerr) is a woman at wit’s end, married to underemployed Fox News-watchin’, deer-huntin’, Jack-guzzlin’ no-’count husband Kyle (Nicholas Tecosky), who at some point in their marriage began to take out his frustrations — with a slap here, a busted lip there — on his wife.

When “Exit, Pursued by a Bear” begins, there is a spotlight on the mounted deer head that dominates Nan’s and Kyle’s wood-paneled living room. Another spot then illuminates Nan, likewise caught in the headlights. As many feminist theorists have pointed out, there is an equivalence in our society between the brutality with which animals are treated and the brutality to which women can be subjected. Playwright Lauren Gunderson makes a similar comparison between the creative, animal-loving Nan — who despises nature shows for reducing adorable critters to eventual bacon when the predator enters the fray — and her potential destiny, if she stays with Kyle, of winding up mounted and dead like that deer head.

But à la Sarah Palin, Nan yearns to be a mama grizzly, and she has duct-taped Kyle to his easy chair in preparation for an act of nature’s vengeance. (It is somehow apropos that George W. Bush’s fave fix-it is the material with which the play’s trio of liberals strap down the Republican.) Nan has “a cocked and locked plan for your imminent demise,” she vamps to Kyle. In the play’s first scene, she has enlisted her best girlfriend, stripper Sweetheart (Taylor M. Dooley), in a drama of self-empowerment that Nan has devised. Sweetheart takes turns play-acting Kyle and then Nan in the story of Nan’s life, as drama becomes a kind of kick start to action and a way of provoking Kyle’s mea culpa.

Nan’s vulnerability is tangible in Veronika Duerr’s performance, which wavers between traumatized and resolute, twin poles that one can only imagine many abused women must occupy. Duerr has the hardest job in “Exit,” occupying the dramatic locus of the play, and she is utterly believable in her fluctuations: talked back into her marriage when Kyle’s duct-taped mouth is uncovered, and then spurred to action by Sweetheart and Nan’s gay knight in shining pompoms, Simon (Clifton Guterman, left). With his shaggy hair and mildly combative idea of flirtation in early “scenes” from their marriage, Tecosky does a convincing job playing a lunk whose inferiority complex could inspire tender feelings in Nan, before that same inferiority turns sour and mean once into the marriage.

By performing her life, Nan is spurred to action in the many plays-within-a-play that give “Exit” its knowing, contemporary edge. Also wonderfully contemporary, with elements that suggest film transposed to stage, are director Rachel May’s and Gunderson’s use of supertitles to introduce characters and offer comic punchlines. The ironic twang of country music punctuates the scenes, and characters directly address the audience in asides that feel more “Funny Games” than Shakespeare (the inspiration behind the play’s title).

When Guterman enters wearing a cheerleader’s skirt, his snazzy metallic pompoms raised high, the whole tilt-a-whirl affair goes off the rails in the best way possible.

Synchronicity’s mission is to create positive social change and support the work of female artists, but it’s hard to know whether the message of self-empowerment offered by the comic sight of a husband duct-taped to a chair and drizzled with honey is exactly the agency most victims of domestic violence are looking for.

There is no denying “Exit’s” comic chops. In fact, the Holly Hunter-meets-Beverly D’Angelo sauce dished out by Dooley combined with the anarchic hilarity of Guterman’s vengeful gay BFF tend to tip the balance of the play from comedy-drama to comedy with the merest whiff of drama. The action takes a distinct slowdown when Nan and Kyle re-enact their courtship, one of several backward glances that greatly impede the play’s necessary motion forward.

Sweetheart and Simon are just too much fun to watch: farcical, Southern-fried lunatics far too big for the diminished lives in which they have found themselves. As these two pouting torsos strut across the stage, “Exit” shifts from “Thelma & Louise” to “Raising Arizona.” And so, at a certain point, calling “Exit” a play about domestic abuse seems as odd as saying that “Raising Arizona” is an examination of the issue of child abduction.

Pretty Baby

2011-03-16T15:05:00.000-07:00

Photographer Lisette de Boisblanc can see right through you

Taken by the Fog revels in de Boisblanc's eerie X-ray vision

by Felicia Feaster

There is something innately fascinating about hidden worlds: the subway tunnels that underlie cities; the phosphorescent creatures lurking in the ocean's sunless depths; the insular subcultures of bikers and circus folk. New Orleans photographer Lisette de Boisblanc's photos in Taken by the Fog at Jennifer Schwartz Gallery (which moves to the Westside this month) document a hidden world, too, one that serves as a metaphor for the similar intangibles that lurk inside our own flesh casings.

Something between a photographer and a scientist (in fact, the artist once worked in science), de Boisblanc has X-rayed a bevy of her grandmother's dolls against an inky black background. The images bear a distinct resemblance to Man Ray's photograms, which used sunlight to achieve a similarly ghostly image.

The result of de Boisblanc's X-ray process is an eerie catalogue of the hidden innards of these creatures rescued from their watery post-Katrina graves. Inside, there are elaborate networks of weights and strings that allow a baby doll's eyes to open and close or which anchor arms and legs to torsos. There are also sharp metal pins and pieces, some of which appear to be part of the dolls' mechanics and some more mysterious in origin. The images conjure up the sadism of little children, shearing their baby dolls' hair off or plunging daggers into their bodies. But they can also evoke more disturbing scenarios, of child abuse and its secret, hidden wounds. The works are chilling for being so evocative of human injury as in "Interview with the Ward Part 1," which depicts a G.I. Joe action figure. The doll's ready-for-battle sneer suddenly looks more like the rictus of death. Splayed out and seen from above, he resembles a battlefield casualty.

The hidden networks lurking inside de Boisblanc's dolls bring to mind circulatory systems and spinal columns but also suggest some abstracted brain or consciousness. The systems take on the characteristics of their age. The porcelain dolls have jerry-rigged systems within their porky, plump bodies. But the Barbie-type dolls have guts as sleek and squared-away as the Space Age that spawned them.

De Boisblanc's close-up images of her baby dolls' faces are the eeriest, reminiscent of the jarred embryos of freak shows and medical labs. With their fake, painted-on features obliterated in the X-ray process, they bear an uncanny resemblance to real babies. Their faces have an unformed but still recognizable appearance, with tiny gaping mouths open in some existential wail, black pits for eyes, their fat, amorphous heads floating in an amniotic universe of pitch black. In the creepy little triptych "Zen," a kind of fetal form lurks inside a plastic casing. It appears to be a doll whose emotions can change depending upon how its head is turned, like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde personalities warring to get out.

I know what you're thinking. Photographs of dolls ... really? Haven't we trod this road before? De Boisblanc's work certainly has an easily digestible quality that could allow it to be seen only for its superficially strange, gothic air. But there are ripples of something uncannier in this compelling work. There is a reminder of mortality and the tribulations of our own experiences to give these ghostly creatures intellectual heft and something deeper than simple shock value.

2011-02-02T16:32:00.001-08:00

Ciné 1.0: Dogtooth, a dark parable of family as constructed reality

February 2, 2011

By Felicia Feaster

Film still copyright Giorgos Lanthimos

Today we are excited to introduce a new film column by Felicia Feaster. Check here on the first Wednesday of each month for Ciné 1.0.

Recently nominated for an Academy Award in the Foreign Language category and winner of the Un Certain Regard award at the Cannes Film Festival, the dark, kinky Greek psychological drama Dogtooth bypassed Atlanta on its tour of big city art houses. Heralded by smart critics across the country, this film is now accessible via Netflix and Amazon in your own home, probably the best place to experience the skin-crawling excesses of this creepy gem with special relevance to artists interested in its critique of patriarchy, government, family, and the highly subjective, easily shaped notion of “reality.”

A prolonged shout-out to the power of nurture over nature, Dogtooth centers on a Greek businessmen and father (Christos Stergioglou) who lives with his family in an Edenic, gated compound of green lawns and swaying palm trees in an unidentified rural section of Greece. The father has created his own disturbingly self-defined utopia inside. Behind the wall that encircles his family compound/prison live his three children: his eldest daughter (Aggeliki Papoulia), daughter (Mary Tsoni), and son (Hristos Passalis). The children are well into their 20s but live in a state of absurdly arrested adolescence, utterly defined by the rules set out by their parents and preoccupied — like very young children — with the stickers their father gives out as rewards for good behavior. The alternate universe the father has created is not without its idyllic qualities. Protected from the real world anxiety of relationships, conflict, work, and the ordeals of adult life, they instead while away their days swimming, playing silly games of make-believe and concocting activities and challenges to pass the time. Their greatest anxiety is pleasing their parents who dole out equal portions of love and discipline, meting out the latter — often violently — if they misbehave. The wife (Michele Valley) is her husband’s co-conspirator, carrying out his strange imperatives, the enforcer who punishes their children for infractions. She seems to have no will of her own, but exists to do her husband’s bidding.

In an effort to keep them sequestered from the world outside, their minds pure, and imaginations under control, the parents have forbidden their children from ever leaving the compound. Determined to keep his children under his thumb, the father has even created his own fairy tale of what befalls those who dare to cross the threshold to the outside world, and it is as vivid, grotesque, and fear-inducing as any Brothers Grimm tale of dark forests and bad wolves. The parents have also created an alternate vocabulary so that the children will never yearn to know the world outside by discovering the true meaning of “sea,” “motorway,” or “excursion.” When the son asks his mother what “zombie” means, she tells him “a little yellow flower,” a handy diversion complicated when he discovers little yellow flowers in the family’s yard.

The woman who introduced “zombie” to the son and who has given him a glimmer of what lies beyond the compound gates is Christina (Anna Kalaitzidou), a security guard at the father’s factory. Each week, the father blindfolds Christina and brings her back to the compound to have sex with the son. But Christina begins to take advantage of the children’s naivete to serve her own sexual desires, and she begins to represent a troubling, contaminating influence on the children.

Dogtooth has echoes of other films which examine family as an autonomous creation subject to the laws of charismatic patriarchs, from the documentary Surfwise (2007) about a doctor-turned-surfer who dropped off the grid to raise his nine children in a Winnebago to director Michael Haneke’s deeply disturbing exegesis of modern malaise, The Seventh Continent (1989). Based on a true story, Haneke’s film shows a modern Austrian family willingly cutting itself off from society by also opting out in the most dramatic and violent way imaginable.

The world in a bubble that the father has created is utterly patriarchal: He imports Christina to satisfy his son’s sexual urges but in no other way acknowledges that his daughters might have the same desires. As if to intensify his own centrality as protector and mythologist within his egomaniacal kingdom, he creates scenarios that affirm his master of the universe status. He drops fish into the swimming pool and, when his daughter discovers them, adorns himself in flippers, mask, and harpoon gun to save the family from the interlopers. This world the father has created suggests the changing nature of Greek life where a tight, traditional family guided by a father-in-chief has been threatened by contemporary shifts in which families are dispersed and children rebel against its laws. Director Giorgos Lanthimos has said that his intent in Dogtooth was something, “almost science fiction. It started from me wondering about the future of families … maybe at some point they would become extinct for some reason.”

Film still copyright Giorgos Lanthimos

And yet, Lanthimos says, there would be some “obliged to protect what they know.” The blinding white light, the family’s isolated, minimally decorated home and the absence of media or consumer images (the father cuts off all packaging and labels from the objects he brings into the house, and forbids the children from seeing films from the outside world, although he himself consumes pornography) and the otherworldly reality Lanthimos establishes certainly enhances the sense of the Dogtooth universe as science fiction.

But at its heart, the film seems a hyperbolic examination of the family as a universe unto itself, with its own laws, values, government, and order. It is a glimpse into the total control parents can exercise over their children, and the vulnerability of children subject to the whims of their protectors who can also become their tormentors. While watching Dogtooth it is hard not to think of real life perversions of family hidden away from the world, of Jacyee Dugard, kept in a compound and abused by the man who abducted her, or of Josef Fritzl, the Austrian man who kept his own daughter and the children he fathered imprisoned in his home for 24 years. The father’s world is far more loving and protective, but all families, both the good ones and the bad, are defined as institutions set apart from the world at large which either work to help children negotiate the world outside, or keep them imprisoned and away from its influences.

Required viewing for artists and cineastes, Dogtooth addresses an idea countless artists have contended with over time, questioning how reality is defined according to circumstance with any number of factors: economics, family history, social class, nationality, and ethnicity shaping our sense of what is real and true. Think of Adrian Piper with those hilarious business cards given out in social situations to puncture the accepted definition of the world as white and cohesive: “Dear Friend. I am black. I am sure you did not realize this when you made / laughed at / agreed with that racist remark.” Reality is what we make of it — a construct, a phantom — and it is the job of artists to bust it wide open and reveal the nature of its construction.

Dogtooth (2009). Directed by Giorgos Lanthimos. Starring Christos Stergioglou, Aggeliki Papoulia, Mary Tsoni, Hristos Passalis, Michele Valley, Anna Kalaitzidou. In Greek with English subtitles.

Felicia Feaster is an Atlanta editor and writer who worked, most recently, as the senior editor at The Atlantan. Her writing has appeared in Creative Loafing, Elle, Playboy.com, Atlanta magazine, Art in America, ART PAPERS, Sculpture, and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

Her column, Ciné 1.0, is an examination of films with relevance to the visual arts that address some of the same issues that concern visual artists today. Ciné 1.0 is also a look at cinema history and cinema present, delving into the at times overlooked or forgotten but nevertheless thought-provoking, artful films that have impacted world culture and altered our perception of life and art.

2011-02-01T12:02:00.000-08:00

Books & More

Slavery helped build Emory, now it explores its history with “Slavery and the University”

by Felicia Feaster | Feb 1, 2011

In the Atlanta boosters’ mantra of “the City Too Busy to Hate,” the mania to move forward has often come at the expense of historical denial: old buildings razed to make way for the new or the unquiet history of slavery too often glossed over.

In an effort to sift through the past to illuminate the present, Emory University is hosting “Slavery and the University: Histories and Legacies” from February 3–6, billed as “the first-ever conference examining the history and legacy of slavery’s role in higher education.” For a complete conference schedule go to: http://transform.emory.edu/conference/

Emory Faculty, Oxford College, GA, 1860. (Emory University Archives Photograph Collection (EUPIX Series 5.1), Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, Emory University)

The conference features academics from 30 institutions including Brown (chartered in 1764, with much of the college’s early endowment coming from slave owners’ wealth), Harvard, Stanford and other colleges. They will deliver papers on, among other things, their colleges’ ties to slavery. The conference will launch February 3 with a keynote lecture at Emory’s Glenn Memorial Auditorium delivered by Brown University president Ruth Simmons and entitled, “From the Shadows to Plain Sight: Slavery and Justice at Brown University.” It is open to the public.

“Slavery and the University” is an outgrowth of the Ford Foundation-funded Transforming Community Project directed by Emory professor of history and African American studies Leslie Harris, the author of “In the Shadow of Slavery: African Americans in New York City, 1626-1863″ (University of Chicago Press, 2003). “It is vital to recognize the foundational role of slavery and slave labor in the creation of institutions in the United States and around the world,” states Harris in Emory’s literature on the conference.

Miss Elmira Henderson, 1910, from the Henderson Family Collection

The underpinnings of “Slavery and the University” are Emory’s own historic ties to slavery established when the college was founded in Oxford, Georgia in 1836. One of the organizers of the conference and the community research fellow at TCP, Melissa Sexton, concedes that, “history has shown that a lot of the people in and around Oxford College were slave holders and it looks like some of the buildings were built by slave labor.”

Such unsettling revelations are partly based on the research of anthropology Mark Auslander, a former Oxford College professor now at Brandeis University. He has also investigated Emory’s ties to slavery in an essay published in “Where Courageous Inquiry Leads: The Emerging Life of Emory University.” Much of that history will be treated in Auslander’s forthcoming fall 2011 University of Georgia Press book “The Accidental Slaveowner: Revisiting a Myth of Race and Finding an American Family.” Auslander will also speak at the conference and lead a revistitation of Emory’s complex relationship with slavery at Oxford College (Emory’s original campus) on February 6.

Auslander has found concrete evidence of Emory’s economic ties to slave labor in the school’s minutes from 1840 which stated, “Resolved … That five of the man servants hired by the Trustees be employed in making rails and in hauling them to the place where they will be needed in the repairs of the fence around the plantation.”

“The institution’s founders were, without exception, slaveholders,” Auslander asserts in his “Where Courageous Inquiry Leads” essay “Dreams Deferred: African Americans in the History of Old Emory.”

Such pieces of the history record, ferreted out over time, stand in opposition to the absence of visual proof of an sometimes unpleasant history at Emory. “The biggest revelation is the lack of images: this history has been erased, people have been erased. There are no pictures. And it’s not just at Emory,” says Sexton.

In an effort to in some way correct that lack of visuals, Georgia visual artist Lynn Marshall-Linnemeier has created an installation also to be unveiled on February 6 at Oxford called “Unraveling Miss Kitty’s Cloak.” The piece commemorates the experience of slave Catherine Andrew Boyd, also known as “Miss Kitty,” who was owned by Emory’s first Board of Trustees president James Osgood Andrew who, Auslander asserts, owned some 20 slaves. Residents of the local Newton County community, Emory academics and the descendants of both James Osgood Andrew and Catherine Boyd will meet at Old Church for a “talking circle” that same day.

History undergrad Patrick Jamieson, who will deliver a paper on February 4 at the “Slavery and the University” conference, found that although an 1851 publication of rules and regulations for Emory students stated that, “no Student shall keep, for his use or pleasure, any horse, carriage, dog or servant, except when his parent or guardian shall, with the approbation of the Faculty, allow him a horse for the purpose of healthful exercise,” the institution both profited from and championed slavery. Jamieson stated in Emory’s campus newspaper “The Emory Wheel,” that, “Augustus Baldwin Longstreet, Emory’s second president, serving from 1840-1848, became one of the most prominent defenders of slavery by the mid 1840s.”

“Emory impressed upon its students a pro-slavery ideology which evolved with and paralleled pro-slavery thought across the South” notes Jamieson.

“A lot of this was undocumented and it’s been hard to dig down and tell the stories that need to be told,” says Sexton.

“Slavery and the University” comes on the heels of Emory’s recent statement of “regret” for its ties to slavery as the university celebrates its 175th year in 2011. Emory did not allow black students to attend the school until 1962.

2011-01-26T09:38:00.000-08:00

Falling in and out of love in Blue Valentine

The Death of a Relationship

by Felicia Feaster

We’re so enamored with the love story, with its promise of happy endings and the sunny side of life, that watching a film about the dissolution of a marriage triggers deep feelings of loss and sadness. Blue Valentine is a difficult, heartbreaking film, but it’s also essential viewing if only for offering a corrective to all of the tales of blissful, uncomplicated love we’ve been spoon-fed.

Initially, it’s unclear what is at the heart of Cindy (Michelle Williams) and Dean’s (Ryan Gosling) troubles. They are not financially well off, but they have a daughter they adore. But indications that something is gravely wrong begin when Dean coerces Cindy into a romantic getaway at a cheesy Poconos love nest. Cindy runs into an old college flame at the liquor store on the way, which shakes the couple to the core, and every time Dean touches Cindy she pushes him away.

Director and co-writer Derek Cianfrance’s superbly executed film begins to color and complicate this troubled present-day relationship with flashbacks to the couple in happier days. Dean rescues Cindy from a brutish jock boyfriend and saves, or dooms, her by coming to her aid at a crucial time in her life. Those flashbacks are heart-wrenching, capturing the exquisite tenderness of Cindy and Dean falling in love. Dean, who has a tragic family history, provides Cindy with an escape from her unhappy home life, and his sense of whimsy allows her to indulge her carefree, silly side. The pair blossom in each other’s company; both are old souls who share a sensitivity toward the elderly, exemplified by their first meeting in an upstate New York retirement home. The old people in Blue Valentine imbue the film with another layer of melancholy. They represent a kind of future in Cianfrance’s taxonomy of relationships: the lonely end game in which one spouse survives the other.

The most arresting emotion in Blue Valentine is a profound sense of loss, for what is and for what is to become and the way the best times of life can corrode and transform into the worst. Blue Valentine makes you feel the heaviness of time, old age, and things passing away. It is as much a story about the birth of love as it is about the death of us all, how everything lovely eventually fades away. In a modern world where divorce is perhaps more of a reality than the advertised ideal of true love, it is unbearably sad to see Cindy and Dean at their most romantic and hopeful, racing through the streets of Brooklyn, making love, discovering the mysteries of the other person, all contrasted with their marriage’s bitter end.

Williams and Gosling pull off the remarkable feat of conveying bright possibility in the flashback scenes and exhaustion and squandered potential later. Both are deeply sympathetic, imperfect, needy creatures, and by the end of the film they feel as vivid and as real as friends. Her hair pulled back off her face, her shoulders hunched, Cindy conveys a bone-deep sense of despair in the small details of her demeanor and appearance. And the hip, quirky details that defined Dean — his leather jacket, his ukulele — have, in married life, been traded for the unshaven face and hipster wardrobe that suddenly look like badges of happy underachievement. While Cindy works on call as a nurse (the subtext is that her dreams of being a doctor ended when she met Dean) and has ambitions of moving up in the world, Dean gets drunk before his job as a house painter, squandering the potential he once represented to Cindy.

It’s little wonder that a young Cianfrance worshiped at the temple of avant-garde filmmakers Stan Brakhage and Pier Paolo Pasolini. His camera delivers people’s lives with the same light-soaked truth and intimacy that characterized Brakhage’s experimental explorations of childbirth and family. Cianfrance and his actors convey the tidal wave of love, how huge and deep it can be, which we measure against its brittle, ugly collapse in the present. Andrij Parekh’s (Half Nelson) camera pulls in so tight to the lovers’ faces and bodies that escape is futile. You are trapped along with them in the intimate hell of their predicament. But more than anything, Blue Valentine recalls the extraordinary, difficult, and perceptive work of John Cassavetes, whose ’70s films showed the pain and poetry of marriage. If you have it in you to stare one of the most ordinary but devastating experiences known to human beings — the death of a relationship — in the face, then Blue Valentine is guaranteed to stay with you for a long time.

2011-01-26T09:33:00.000-08:00

Art & Architecture

Review: JuYeon Kim’s exhibition is “In-Between” at ACA Gallery of SCAD but not close enough

by Felicia Feaster | Jan 26, 2011

Korean-born artist JuYeon Kim’s exhibition “The In-Between” takes the notion of things liminal and runs with it. The show’s title refers to the eighth-century “Tibetan Book of the Dead” from which Kim takes much of her horrifying imagery of the progress from the real world to the spiritual realm. Instead of the binary oppositions in Western culture — light and dark, good and evil — Kim draws from an Eastern philosophy where all is mash-up and where experience lies somewhere in between those polarities.

But the exhibition at the ACA Gallery of SCAD (through February 27) is also somewhere in between a student show and the usual high-caliber, often single-artist exhibitions the gallery more typically mounts. And that latter in-between can make for a less than satisfying viewing experience. If you long to see the veil of art-making lifted with this excavation of how Kim and a group of SCAD students collaborated, this guided tour of process might be enlightening. But I was disappointed by the overbearing, often monotonous exegesis in “The In-Between” which tended to crowd out its reflective potential.

What “The In-Between” is mostly composed of are drawings, sculptures, works on fabric and photographs that show how SCAD students and Kim collaborated to create two large-scale installation pieces. One piece is “Untitled_ci10″ or “the cave room,” a dark, wooden space whose interior is composed of bas-reliefs depicting the “the Six Realms of Rebirth,” which define human experience — from blissful to tortured. You’ve heard of sensory deprivation booths? This is a sensory overstimulation booth stuffed to the gills with postures of suffering and abjection more oppressive than a “Jersey Shore” marathon.

If “the cave room” is all darkness and horror, arms reaching out for you, flayed skin and despair depicted in contorted, writhing gray figures, “Untitled_mi10″ or “the meditation room,” is a contemplative zone for reflection. Kim’s visual repertoire is fascinating, suggesting in part (but there are references galore) textbook illustrations, Greek mythology, Henry Darger, Sue Coe and Atlanta’s own Jiha Moon. There is lyricism and nightmare in equal measure and the effect of works like “the meditation room” is, to say the least, destabilizing.

Enter into the circular “room” composed of three layers of cotton panels hung from the ceiling and you are transported, at least initially, to a place of ethereal light. But what makes this work interesting is the juxtaposition of material and meaning. The content of “the meditation room” is equally, if not more, horrifying than “the cave room”‘s garden of nightmares. Rather than allegorical, the content is literal, part of our quotidian world: blood and urine, political violence, death, rage, birth, the full-spectrum of messy life transposed in sewing and in painting onto delicate strips of cloth. If babies are given quilts adorned with cheerful bunnies and giraffes to delight and soothe, this is a tapestry of overload, of consciousness, of existence, a Mondo film of the profane and, occasionally, the sublime.

Had “The In-Between” emphasized the profundity of Kim’s imagery and the powerful form she chooses to express human suffering and experience, this could have been a haunting and provocative show. I would have preferred to be immersed and overtaken, as “the meditation room” does, instead of offered this deconstructed IKEA box of components to assemble. Learning about the collaborative process strikes me as infinitely less interesting than the confrontation with the nature of existence that Kim can only sporadically propose here.

Subtext

2011-01-25T10:12:00.001-08:00

Testament to my gnome obsession, lower left.

artscriticatl.com

2011-01-25T09:38:00.000-08:00

Art & Architecture

Review: Architecture takes its lumps in Katie Bollman Walker and John Lehr photos at Hagedorn gallery

by Felicia Feaster | Jan 15, 2011

Architecture’s dramatic, but also risible, properties make up the heart and soul of the Hagedorn Foundation Gallery’s double whammy of shows, from Atlanta-based Katie Bollman Walker and Brooklyn-based John Lehr, through February 28. (Poor Tobia Makover’s ghostly, encaustic-caked images are relegated to the “Rebecca” gothic attic on the gallery’s third floor.)

John Lehr: "2467"

If Ralph Lauren is ever in need of a photographer who can make the American heartland look dramatic, sexy and iconic as all get-out, he should look up Walker’s images of farms whose blank white barns and hulking silos are so stark and graphic that they resemble James Casebere’s cardboard constructions.

Though her work apparently often takes architecture as its focus, this particular show feels like a grab bag of the photographer’s various interests: locating small human figures against large physical expanses, for one. In the Richard Misrach-evocative image “Contemplating Navel,” a couple dwarfed by the sea and sand around them are flanked by a pit in the sand. In the equally wink-wink, nudge-nudge “In the Hood” (at right), a man in the middle of a chalk-white desert is at work on his broken-down car, his head buried in its interior.

For locals, Walker’s portraits of a cross-section of a demolished Atlanta hospital, in “Cube 2 Pink” and “Cube 1 Original,” may be the most interesting images here. They imagine the city as a bombed-out zone evocative of Gaza, though here it is development, not war, that reduces our landscape to rubble.

Far more satisfying, for its evocation of a theme and a much tighter focus, is John Lehr’s work on the gallery’s second floor. “Gibberish” is a humorous deconstruction, in Madison Avenue’s own blazing look-at-me color scheme, of how signage and architecture illuminate human folly. For Americans used to living in a bleating, noxious universe of slicker-than-slick media images, the abject failure that Lehr documents — or wills into being via his well-placed camera — is a distinct pleasure.

Nothing thrills Lehr like an image of a juicy hamburger that has crumpled, like a used tissue, into an abstraction, or an image of a grinning white-haired couple, advertising blissed-out old age, that Lehr shoots through a metal gate (at left), suddenly warping the beaming oldsters into nursing home caged animals. In Lehr’s photos, warning signs are tacked up to face the wrong way, black garbage bags are improvised to hide irrelevant signage, and some yahoo has undertaken a misguided neon-orange paint job on his home, improvising a plastic tarpaulin on a neighboring shrub to protect it from daddy’s overzealous spray.

Lehr is in a mocking mood, but it’s also quite possible to see poignancy in these images, of mom-and-pop businesses and cash-strapped homeowners doing the best (and worst) they can with the tools at their disposal.

artscriticatl.com

2011-01-25T09:34:00.000-08:00

Theater & Film

Theater review: California malcontents rage and stew in PushPush’s “Borderline”

by Felicia Feaster | Jan 23, 2011

Decatur’s PushPush Theater is the love child of two actors, Shelby Hofer and Tim Habeger, who have turned their space into a multi-purpose cultural emporium where actors, filmmakers and cineastes can get together to see plays, attend workshops and view or make movies (the local film success “The Signal” was incubated there). It’s a laboratory and creative clubhouse, and you get the sense that, 21 years after founding it, Hofer and Habeger are as thrilled as ever to make a living from creation.

At the preview for their latest production, California playwright Murray Mednick’s ”Borderline,” Habeger quickly transitioned from greeting the crowd in the space’s cramped lobby to introducing the play and then mounting the small, minimalist stage to perform. As the play unfolds, it’s easy to forget that you are in the staid suburb of Decatur. You could be in the East Village or Los Angeles, watching raw, exploratory art-making flame before your eyes. (“Borderline” will run at PushPush through January 29.)

Eddie Levi Lee (left) as Spotsy and Alex Van as Craig in PushPush's "Borderline"

Two men stand on a stage lost in a conspiratorial fog, as loud, brash Carl (Habeger) berates the timid, neurotic Craig (Alex Van) for being a pushover with a bossy wife and a “borderline” personality disorder. Carl seems to have a feeble understanding of what, exactly, borderline means, and keeps offering to lend Craig a book so he can better understand his flaws. It’s a great assessment of a very 21st-century personality tic (along with Mednick’s au courant bead on adopted Asian children, power wives and slacker husbands): everyone’s an armchair authority and glad to share his incompletely absorbed knowledge.

From left: Eddie Levi Lee, Alex Van, Vivi Thai, Shelby Hofer and Tim Habeger

Initially Carl seemed like a figment of Craig’s imagination, an inner voice pecking at him with fears and doubts. But it turns out that that’s just how characters speak in Mednick-ville, spewing forth a nearly Mametian gurgle of words fueled by doubt or anger, dread or boredom. In Mednick’s play — PushPush has mounted eight of his works — life sucks and then you die.

But what might seem an impossibly dire work about marital and generational alienation, environmental destruction and corrosive self-doubt has a surprising strain of lightness and buoyancy in the strangely detached, amusing way the characters converse. They may issue definitive, bossy pronouncements and rage against the world, but you get the sense that they’re as confused and lost as anyone. It’s a comfort and makes for a surprisingly effervescent spin on contemporary despair.

Despite his obnoxious desire to stoke the flames of Craig’s marital unhappiness, all the better to validate his own crumbling marriage, Carl is one of the most engaging of “Borderline’s” California malcontents. A college instructor and ceramicist with a super-sized ego that can’t hide his essential unhappiness, Carl seems bound and determined to make his ophthalmologist wife Frances out to be a monster. He longs for Craig to come along with him for the ride and vilify his noxious wife Cindy (Hofer). But Carl is too much of an easy-going pill popper, happy to while away his days debating God and the Holocaust with his pal Spotsy (Eddie Levi Lee), a homeless rabbi who lives in his car, carries shot glasses for that quick schnapps fix and shuffles across the stage like a droopy basset hound. Spotsy may be homeless and alone, but he often seems like the most contented guy in this crowd of mouthy misanthropes who like nothing more than meditating on the human condition as a way station before the inevitable dirt nap and disintegration of flesh into soil.

“Borderline” offers a grab bag of ideas to chew on, depending upon your mood or inclination. (“Is there a God, or just suffering?” is a typical vein opened up for bloodletting.) It’s the brightest play about suffering out there, and as good an antidote as any to the nihilistic strain of joy that defines so much of our popular entertainment.

2011-01-25T09:32:00.000-08:00

Natalie Portman loses her mind in the exquisitely gothic Black Swan

Just Dance

by Felicia Feaster

Courtesy of Fox Searchlight Pictures

Nina (Natalie Portman) has got a real nasty case of pink eye

Nina (Natalie Portman) lives and breathes ballet. She awakes to an anorexic's breakfast of an egg and half a grapefruit, and after a grueling day of practice, comes home to dance some more. Her feet are flayed and her state of mind wobbly next to the confident, determined Alpha dancers who surround her.

Her mother Erica (Barbara Hershey), a former ballerina, is both her supporter and her tormentor. Erica keeps her daughter housed in a pink bedroom that appears unchanged since Nina's childhood. Nina's life is an endless circuit from the Upper West Side apartment she shares with the overbearing, controlling Erica to the underground, bunker-like Lincoln Center rehearsal spaces where an equally ominous cast of characters lurk. It's all enough to make a girl go mad, and so it does in the exquisitely gothic vision of Darren Aronofsky's psychological thriller Black Swan.

With her enormous doe eyes, porcelain complexion, and tiny frame, Portman has always had a delicate, doll-like quality, which works magnificently in this film. Here she plays a woman in a state of arrested girlhood much like Sissy Spacek in Carrie or Catherine Deneuve in Repulsion, who has so channeled her femininity and ardor into ballet that her real sexuality appears to have atrophied. Nina is vulnerability incarnate, the projection of the wishes of her mother, her Svengali choreographer Thomas Leroy (a delightfully smarmy Vincent Cassel), and the expectant audience for whom she will perform.

Nina's fondest desire is the Swan Queen lead in Tchiakovsky's Swan Lake, a doppelganger role in which the ballerina is required to play both a pure, lovely White Swan and a dark, sexually enticing Black Swan. The role, and Aronofsky's film itself, reveals something of the absurd dualities of femininity: innocent or knowing, virginal or experienced, without any marriage of the two. In the process of securing the role, and reconciling her girlish virginity with an adult sexuality, Nina's psyche fractures. She becomes convinced that a seductive new dancer Lily (Mila Kunis) wants to steal the Swan Queen lead away from her. The film's plotline begins to echo the ballet itself, with the drama offstage as hysterical and highly-charged as anything onstage.

The Swan Queen role is the ultimate be-careful-what-you-wish-for devil's bargain, and it's given to Nina with definite strings attached. The ballet's impresario Leroy has just unloaded his drunken, vindictive prima ballerina Beth (Winona Ryder), who has grown too old for ballet, and has his sights set on Nina as her impressionable, malleable replacement. Black Swan shows the complicated head game acted out in creative realms where one person wields power and the other is the "muse." Thomas begins to manipulate Nina's fragile emotional state and play with her sexuality in the name of achieving a better performance. It's hard to imagine a better encapsulation of the curse of Aronofsky's own directorial profession, which so often pairs older, experienced men wielding enormous power with impressionable young actresses willing to do anything for a role.

Despite some of the film's campy trappings and dramatic excesses, Black Swan also has something of value to say about the rigor of the artist's life. Aronofsky takes pains to show the athleticism of ballet, an athleticism ironically acted out by frail-looking women who appear easily breakable but possess wills of steel. There is a fine line in Black Swan, between the self-punishment required of any great dancer and the masochism that often attends female perfectionism, evident in Nina's self-cutting and emotional insecurity. Black Swan makes one feel sweaty and trapped within Nina's consciousness. In the gloriously creepy opening scene, we watch from Nina's perspective as she dances onstage, assaulted more than aided by her male dancer. To be young, beautiful, and talented is as much a danger as an advantage.

Lensed by Matthew Libatique and supported by Aronofsky's murky, gothic treatment of repressed female sexuality, the film has shades of vintage Roman Polanski in its intertwined horror and sympathetic, penetrating study on its heroine's dilemma. Aronofsky's visually outrageous, spooky, fantastically hysterical expression of Nina's crack-up is a visual hall of mirrors to rival The Lady from Shanghai, a projection of the dancers' constant self-appraisal in mirrored ballet studios and Nina's fractured state of mind. Aronofsky plays with his audience's own perception of truth and fiction. Gloriously creative and utterly watchable, Black Swan pictures a hostile, perilous world for female artists in Aronofsky's splendid blend of excess and insight.

2011-01-25T09:29:00.000-08:00

The Company Men is relevant but heavy handed at times

In Good Company

by Felicia Feaster

Courtesy of Odyssey Entertainment

These guys really wish they hadn't spent all their money on suits

Every generation has its definitive cataclysm: World War II, Vietnam, Watergate, and the loss of innocence and despair those events bring. The Company Men is no different in charting the central tribulation of our own age. The suits in the film are dealing with their own traumatic after-effects, though this time from an economic cataclysm: the 2008 Wall Street meltdown. These high-level execs shuffle with their sad cardboard boxes through corporate parking lots, shout affirmative mantras at career centers, and try to grapple with having their master-of-the-universe chairs kicked out from under them. The film opens with a survey of American plenitude: status cars lined up in driveways, understated mansions, rec rooms filled with computer games and kitchen counters equipped with a jackpot of shiny, expensive Williams-Sonoma appliances. Ensconced in that plush upper-middle-class world is sales executive Bobby Walker (Ben Affleck), who is also the first to go when The Company Men opens. Walker is a cocky 37-year-old gunning for CEO who's stunned to see his trajectory dramatically interrupted by corporate downsizing.

Walker's smart, supportive wife Maggie (Rosemarie DeWitt) is pragmatic: put the house on the market, end the country club membership, sell the Porsche. Even his son knows the score: return the Xbox pronto. But for Walker, the illusion of success is what distances him from abject, future-ruining failure. Without the Porsche and golf, he fears a future employer will smell his fear.

The Company Men feels almost documentarian in its comprehensive treatment of downsizing on both Walker's micro and American industry's macro level. Director and writer John Wells, a TV vet (ER, The West Wing), covers the loss of self-esteem and shame downsizing brings (Walker can't bring himself to tell his extended family he's lost his job). But he also tackles a catalog of attendant gripes: excessive CEO salaries, industries that have lost touch with the product they are selling, and a disposable aging workforce represented by pushing-60 company man Phil Woodward (Chris Cooper) whose prospects after losing his job are nil. The conscience of the film, the one who voices many of these macro issues, is Gene McClary (Tommy Lee Jones) who founded Boston shipbuilding and manufacturing behemoth GTX along with CEO James Salinger (Craig T. Nelson). McClary does not like Salinger's reflexive tendency to downsize whenever there's an economic downturn. Looking around Salinger's lavish office, McClary sees one way to make a mint without losing workers; he tells Salinger to "Sell the fucking Degas!" on the wall. While Salinger continues to plot lavish vacations and command an enormous salary, Salinger's ax-woman Sally Wilcox (Maria Bello) is razing the ranks of his company with his blessing.

In a subplot that may strike some as excessively obvious, Walker gets in touch with the lost American values of hard-work and integrity by taking a desperate last-ditch job with his brother-in-law Jack's (Kevin Costner) construction company. There, Walker confronts a new code of ethics, including a boss who works late to get the job done on time (but sends his workers home to their families) and protects his workers' jobs at his own expense. For Walker, it's a radical departure from the everyman-for-himself white-collar scheme. In some ways the point is well-taken. Though notions of honest work and allegiance to co-workers aren't the norm in the American workplace, Wells' delivery is heavy-handed.

Much of The Company Men feels a little too pat and tidy: white collar bad, blue collar good. And director Wells is too anxious to deliver a fairly conventional happy ending and obvious message too, which reeks of the tidy moral bundles that characterize TV episode plot lines. The better strategy might have been to go deep into the travails of just one of these execs (Cooper would get my vote) rather than trying to offer a cross-section of economic crisis from multiple generational points of view. Yes, the economic downturn has hit thirtysomethings in a different way than fiftysomething executives, but one film can't possibly tell all of those stories without losing focus and depth.

There are other problems too, from the affair craggy old-timer McClary is carrying on with golden girl Sally Wilcox. Really? It's the kind of beauty-and-the-beast pairing only Hollywood could dream up. And Affleck, while playing a man in the despondent economic doldrums, never really loses his shiny-penny gleam. It's hard to feel his despair in the same way as Cooper's, with his squirrelly panic and old-guy hair combed into a sad semi-pompadour.

The Company Men tackles some highly relevant ideas that are nice to see in an American film besides a muckraking documentary. But its approach is often superficial and obvious, and a topic this relevant, that affects so many people, deserves much more.

Girls Just Want to Have Fun

2008-07-02T06:04:00.000-07:00

Women suffer through interminable summer movies centered on the kind of comic book heroes that delighted little boys. Now recast as “thoughtful,” “complex” Incredible Iron Bat Guy Men because they suffer and struggle. They are now soulful. And dark. We have to listen to all of the critical excavation of depth and subtext in the big summer bang-bang, kapow, muscle-bound multiplex product. And one summer, a movie comes along that women like. It’s called Sex and the City. Women eat it up, partly because it treats female friendship and relationships and infidelity and marriage with the earnestness they deserve. But also because like a drink of water offered to a dying desert traveler, it is blessed, sweet relief. But are women allowed to enjoy the escapist pleasure of a summer movie? Hell no. We get writers who use film criticism as a venue for their erotic fascination telling us Sex and the City is shallow and insipid. These women are too old. Superficial. Too into shoes. And closets. Consumers. Shoppers. You know: women. The ugliest word you can muster.

I think we’ve all spent some time giving men the benefit of the doubt. The 40-Year-Old Virgin and Knocked Up lent some charm to male anxiety. But by the time the witless Porky’s redux Superbad rolled around, I for one was over it. All the praise seemed very familiar: like the hosannas that greeted another teen boy fantasy, American Pie, all those years ago. I for one have lost my patience for indulging stunted adult male egos, and their teen movie proxies. I think any of us, male or female, can relate to panic over the scariness of adulthood, marriage and child-rearing. But suffering through a prolonged snickering quest for beer and sex disguised as a sweet coming-of-age buddy film a la Superbad? Umm: No. If you want real male panic and angst worth getting ga-ga over, check out Old Joy. Now that is a film about boy-anxiety with some poetry and pathos I can relate to.

I thought the above illustration accompanying Anthony Lane’s New Yorker review of Sex and the City pretty much summed up just how this film has turned into a forum for some pretty nasty misogyny. Women as monsters. Harridans. Lacking the dignity to die and give up when they pass 25.

I liked the film. I thought it was transcendently escapist and deeply pleasurable. I sat in an audience of mostly women (and their boy-pals), packed on a Monday night at Landmark Midtown and marveled at the communal experience of cinema I have so rarely tasted in the age of movie cell phone calls and moronic chatter. These women were juiced for some entertainment and it struck me as tragic that Hollywood seems so disinterested in making smart, snarky films for women, films with fleshed-out characters and a rude sense of humor beyond the chick flick sucking chest wound of 27 Dresses and the whole regrettable Sandra Bullock canon. I can’t say that I feel a solidarity with womankind on a daily basis. But that night I did.

Surf's Up

2008-06-20T12:55:00.000-07:00

(Photo courtesy: Magnolia Pictures)

Almost everyone must at some point harbors a secret desire to drop off the grid: to leave behind the racket of health insurance and home payments and just, be, in that hackneyed Sixties sense. Surfwise, the documentary about Dorian "Doc" Paskowitz, a Stanford-educated M.D. who dropped out of the rat race to raise his nine kids in a 24-foot camper, is both a cautionary tale and advertisement for living free. I have a deep affection for lovable iconoclasts and for surfing movies, so teamed up, this film is pure narcotic.

Killjoy

2008-06-20T07:00:00.000-07:00

How not to feel like Queen Sourpuss when your 7-year-old sits guffawing beside you and the rest of the movie theater audience sounds ready to bust a gut and all you can do is squirm for some release? The Get Smart movie had some amusing moments, but not the kind of full-throttle hilarity I'd leave my house for. I find comedy the consistently most disappointing and alienating of film genres. Everyone else is making like Hands Across America over Superbad and Borat, and there I am with my arms folded feeling like the sad-eyed goth in a Tim Burton film.

I recently met an Atlanta artist who told me he enjoyed my art reviews, but thought my movie reviews took all the fun out of film. He's apparently not the only one, as this golden oldie proves. I still smile every time I read it.

Bad Boy

2008-06-16T06:41:00.000-07:00

Roman Polanski remains one of my favorite filmmakers despite some personal life snafus that test my ability to admire him.

Both pop and profound, his films stand up to countless repeat viewings. Rosemary's Baby remains my favorite film for straddling that Polanski line; a slick potboiler on one hand, but on the other prickly and subversive for how it delves into the way women's bodies are colonized, occupied and owned in pregnancy. Polanski has an identification with life's victims that adds moral depth to his artistry. But what to say about the man himself, with that unpleasant yen for young girl flesh? I love him like a deeply flawed relative: I can't seem to break the ties.

Read my review of the new HBO documentary (coming to theaters soon) of Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired, in New York Press.

Torture Porn

2008-05-19T19:34:00.000-07:00

There hasn’t been such a gratuitous abuse of slow motion since Flashdance as there is in Standard Operating Procedure. Errol Morris’s film gives the same emotional significance in his tedious overuse of the technique to a drop of blood falling from the body of an Iraqi man who has been tortured to death, as it does to a cracked egg artfully dropped into a frying pan by super-bad man Saddam Hussein. Pretty, pretty pictures.

Errol Morris’s “expose” of Abu Ghraib is like watching two hours of “The Jerry Springer Show.” Never has there been so much play-by-play description of senseless, base behavior with so little insight. Coupled with Morris’s artful reenactments and endless slow-motion imagery, and the film makes Abu Ghraib into a music video, circa 1985. It’s an intensely disturbing, obsessively documented film about the disturbing, obsessive need to document.

The bulk of Standard Operating Procedure is a succession of Abu talking heads: poster girl Lynndie England, and some equally obtuse soldiers and investigators, describing the combination of bad judgment and casual sadism that gave rise to Abu Ghraib. But you long for an expert, some form of navel-gazing: an academic, a psychologist, Susan Sontag back from the grave, anyone, for god’s sake, even that knuckle-dragger Dr. Phil, to offer perspective in Morris’s intellectual void. As my movie companion Genevieve pointed out, these soldiers are the text-messaging generation speaking, devoid of introspection and simply acting compulsively documenting every step, no matter how stupid, in their lives with a photograph to prove their existence. If I heard one more monotone justification of how their actions were caused by someone else I was going to tear my hair out. Yes, as Morris points out in lockstep, unadventurous liberal fashion, the higher ups did escape blame or prosecution. Yes, the Bush Administration is morally corrupt. But does that mean these blank, affectless zombies with their thumbs up gestures and simulated fellatio weren’t stupid and sadistic too? Soldiers have been taking trophy photographs of their war kills and atrocities and collecting battle souvenirs since there have been cameras and since there have been wars. It’s ridiculously naive and proof of this film’s utter lack of judgment or context to act as if Abu Ghraib is some isolated incident of Americans behaving badly. With so many worthwhile films about the sickening misbehavior and incompetence surrounding Iraq, Standard Operating Procedure is an especially pointless exercise in inert moral outrage. We’ve seen many of these photos before: to see them paraded out once more is degrading and depressing without some new wrinkle, some fresh insight into the psychology of how and why they happened. It becomes pure shock and when combined with the fetishistic reenactments, gratuitous to boot.

All Wet

2008-05-17T21:27:00.000-07:00

Some films bring out the smart-aleck in me. It was hard not to take the piss out of the tempest in a teapot faux-Merchant Ivory production Before the Rains, reviewed here for New York Press.

Kung Fu Fighting

2008-05-17T21:11:00.000-07:00

I was amused by a recent interview with writer/director David Mamet in The New Yorker. Somewhat sheepishly amused, because I am one of the journalists who has occasionally opened with a lame question like the one he cites in his litany of clichés, “What inspired you to do this film?” I often think on press junkets how tired people must get answering the same questions over and over, but also of how hard it is to ask a truly original question.

I reviewed Mamet’s latest Redbelt, in The Charleston City Paper.

Aliens

2008-05-08T14:25:00.000-07:00

Few things, perverse though it may be, give me more pleasure than an unhappy, alienated film hero. I will always identify more with the Travis Bickles and the tortured chumps like Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray) in Double Indemnity than with cinema's winners. If I have a movie culture Achille's Heel, a surefire way to slay me, it's the loser, the oddball. La Vie En Rose, Old Joy, Ghost World: show me a failure and I'll show you a five star rating. On that note, two recent films about alienated guys, The Visitor and The Counterfeiters spoke to that part of me that wants to see suffering, miserable-looking sadsacks struggling to connect.

Who's Your Mama?

2008-04-24T09:49:00.000-07:00

Tina Fey is sublime.

And oh, how I wanted to enjoy Baby Mama, which I reviewed for the Charleston City Paper. I loved Tina Fey's Mean Girl's script and appreciate her skeptical-lady take on contemporary life (a favorite Fey-ism was her calling Hugh Hefner's gaggle of bimbette girlfriends "tit meat").

There were some laughs in Baby Mama to distract, and take the sting off the world outside the theater doors, as any comedy should. But movies like this remind me of how hard it is to get excited about going to see a movie sometimes, when there is so much half-baked or just plain awful product circulating. Watching Werner Herzog's documentary Land of Silence and Darkness last night, I felt a pang of longing for directors with such a ravenous interest in people and life and with such a quiet, delicate touch. Delicacy and subtlety seem so rare these days. Like so many people I talk to, I want to sandbag the front yard and hole up with Netflix and forget that Speed Racer and Iron Man are knocking at the front door. And though his recent profile was fun to read, unlike David Carr, I don't think Robert Downey, Jr. is the second coming.

After reading the Anthony Lane review of Baby Mama in The New Yorker, I agree, that the gist of the film is class warfare, though I wanted some incisive, snarky girl-take on reproductive issues. But the film could have gone a little deeper in this regard.

I did enjoy the digs at yuppie organic/green obsession in Baby Mama. If I read one more article about $700 "green" hemp purses I am going to lose my mind. Or sustainable body lotion in plastic bottles. Urg.

There's so much to say about that smug, self-satisfaction at shopping at the right places. Eating the right foods. Caring so very deeply. It's as if you're making a political statement by picking up a bag of potato chips these days: something along the lines of, "yes, I am an American glutton who has failed to make the evolutionary leap to a $6 bag of Terra chips. And my Frito-Lay purchase makes it clear that I support the war in Iraq."

Is Morgan Spurlock Funny?

2008-04-17T11:01:00.000-07:00

Where In the World is Osama bin Laden?
Opens April 18
Landmark’s Midtown Art Cinema – 931 Monroe Drive – Atlanta

Ummm...not especially. Read my New York Press review.

Sex Games

2008-04-17T10:52:00.000-07:00

(Photo courtesy: IFC Films)

The Duchess of Langeais
Not Rated / 130 minutes / In French with English subtitles
Landmark’s Midtown Art Cinema – 931 Monroe Drive
Opens April 18

Like so many stories centered on regret and heartbreak, The Duchess of Langeais begins in the present and works backwards. We immediately understand from director Jacques Rivette's contemplative long shots and the pervasive stillness that defines these early scenes, that matters of fate are at work.

A handsome Napoleonic General Armand de Montriveau (Guillaume Depardieu, son of Gerard) with a grave air, sits in a white Spanish convent high on a hill overlooking the Mediterranean. Armand is disturbed and restless, consumed by some unnamed force. His obsession is the French woman living in the convent, a woman Antoinette (Jeanne Balibar), he knew long ago who has since become a barefoot Carmelite nun. Their reunion – her behind metal bars and him longing to reach out to her – begins Rivette's enthralling adaptation of a 1934 Honore de Balzac novella, "Don't Touch the Axe."

The bulk of Rivette’s story unfolds five years previously in the elegant living quarters and ballrooms of 1820s Paris amidst the highly ordered and hypocritical French aristocracy during the Restoration period. It is at one such ball, that Armand first meets the Duchess of Langeais– Antoinette – who has noticed him from across the room. The Duchess is a practiced coquette confident in her beauty. And she is clearly entranced by a new victim, this creature from another, harsher reality, a former prisoner of war with a distinct limp who has seen the ugliest side of life.

That a relationship will ensue is clear from their first meeting in her apartment, when the Duchess dons an ethereal white gown and feigns sickness, perhaps the better to lure Armand in close. The Duchess begins to receive Armand every evening at her home, where she seduces and charms him, but keeps Armand at arm's length.

We are used to films of sexual desire founded on courtship and then consummation. But this teasing, seductive Duchess never delivers the goods. The Duchess flirts, and Armand simmers. She clings to her religion and her unseen husband and it's clear Armand is consumed by not having her.

As their relationship continues, something perverse and doom-filled begins to define the love affair and it is clear, from that first view of Armand and Antoinette separated by those convent iron bars, that something tragic will happen. Antoinette realizes too late that she loves Armand, and by then he has decided to punish her for torturing him.

Tension is a feature of certain film genres like horror and thrillers. But rarely is excruciating tension milked from a love story. The Duchess of Langeais will be a riveting cliffhanger for those intrigued by the rituals and social codes of another age, when rigid rules of propriety were followed and emotional intent had to be as carefully read as tea leaves. In Duchess the characters communicate in a kind of subterfuge: through music and clothing. The Duchess is at its heart, a film about what is not said and actions not taken, and the unpleasant consequences that result. There are moments in the film that recall the strange secret society and hidden rituals of Stanley Kubrick's Eyes White Shut. When his frustrated desire for Antoinette takes an unpleasant turn, Armand enlists the help of a secret society of men, to help him act out his revenge.

As Duchess unfolds it becomes clear that not only vanity, but propriety keeps the Duchess from realizing her love for Armand. And it is a truth of the society they live in that while Armand risks little in an illicit love affair, the Duchess risks everything, including being cast out from society if her betrayal of her husband is ever discovered. By the film's sad conclusion, we begin to appreciate the Antoinette's entrapment and sadness with her lot in life. It is testament to the actors' skill that we appreciate both Armand's furious, frustrated passion and Antoinette's often cruel reticence.

Rivette was one of the lesser known of the French New Wave, the former film critics-turned-directors like Francois Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard, who revolutionized film form and content in the Fifties and Sixties. He never made a film to rival the reputation of a 400 Blows or Breathless. But at almost 80, Rivette proves his cinematic skill is still robust. He has created a genuinely taut, tension-filled film. For those willing to fall sway to its carefully orchestrated, subdued tone and revealing performances, it is a masterful, intensely rewarding work.

War Cry

2008-04-11T05:42:00.001-07:00

Though I was a fan of Boys Don't Cry, as much as I wanted to like Kimberly Peirce's Stop-Loss I just couldn't. The best film about the war in Iraq is, I think, as yet unmade.

Fashion Victim

2008-04-07T05:49:00.000-07:00

I don't think my Vogue subscription has lapsed since I was 13. I love fashion, even though I'm hardly a clothes horse and would probably recoil in horror at any real proximity to the industry. But when fashion and documentary collide? Frothy goodness. I am anxiously awaiting my first viewing of Frederick Wiseman's 1983 The Store now available on DVD about the fabled Dallas Neiman Marcus. I have been feeding my frivolity jones in the meantime with more contemporary fashion fixes, like the purported "insider" view of Chanel designer Karl Lagerfeld in Lagerfeld Confidential, he of the frosted hair, finger bangles and brittle Teutonic air. Andy Warhol had nothing on Lagerfeld's studied aloof, hologram-like cult of personality. At the opposite end of the spectrum is the vivacious, quip-master American hipster designer Marc Jacobs, the subject of a recent French doc, Marc Jacobs & Louis Vuitton I also reviewed for the New York alternative weekly New York Press.

Fashion it ain't, but for sheer weirdness, if you are in New York from April 9-22 and in the mood for something truly odd, check out the Israeli doc Stalags, reviewed here about the phenomenon of kinky paperbacks produced in Israeli during the Sixties featuring busty, whip-cracking Nazi prison camp guards torturing brawny American and British prisoners of war. The documentary doesn’t adequately explain why the Israeli Stalags authors did such a gender flip, and made women the cold, hard Nazi sadists and made rugged sides of male beefcake the victims of rape and torture. But this strange sub genre of porn, riding the coattails of the Adolf Eichmann trials and the testimony of Nazi sadism and degeneracy it provided, is required viewing for fans of the outré and the bizarre psychological byways of popular culture.

The Hills Are Alive

2008-04-06T07:06:00.000-07:00

Watching Shirley Temple in Heidi (1937) last night was the ultimate comfort-drug. It’s almost embarrassing to admit to a fondness for Temple considering our contemporary scorn for unironic, non-Takashi Murakami cuteness and cloying children. Author Graham Greene's apprehension about what Temple "means" still lingers. In a 1937 film review for Night and Day magazine, of Wee Willie Winkie, Greene implied a pedophiliac appeal to the half-pint minx, "Her admirers – middle-aged men and clergymen – respond to her dubious coquetry, to the sight of her well-shaped and desirable little body, packed with enormous vitality, only because the safety curtain of story and dialogue drops between their intelligence and their desire."

While I can certainly see Greene’s point - anyone who has caught one of the lurid “Baby Burlesques” short films with their racist and sexual suggestiveness and pouting tots in diapers may feel a bit tainted by the experience - to me Temple is a sublime, albeit fantastic icon of childhood. She represents the magical potential of children to heal rifts, bring people together, melt hearts and engage enthusiastically and wholeheartedly with the world. Corny perhaps, but when the current notion of childhood is depraved or nonexistent and children are either seen as some expensive hobby for “breeders” or a sexualized, marketable commodity, I cling to even the mirage of innocence Temple represents (with full knowledge that in her age, she was a marketable commodity too). Maybe it’s because I loved Johanna Spyri’s book so much as a child, or maybe it’s that I spent some of my formative childhood years in Germany. But the film strokes some primitive pleasure receptors in my brain. The way Heidi rejects the Frankfurt high life to go live with her crusty, self-reliant grandfather in the mountains - that stomach-clutching homesickness - gets me every time. The cozy, snow globe comfort of the Alpine village where Heidi and “the grandfather” live is utterly intoxicating too: I want to go there, milk goats, make my own cheese, sleep in a hay loft. I kept thinking of Leni Riefenstahl watching the film, and the Bavarian fetish for the mountains, fresh air, good health. The fascists obviously ran with that one, but Heidi’s thirst for nature seems more related to that blissful, enchanted state of childhood, when your connection to the earth is so fervid and strong.

Like so many childhood heroines of film and literature, Heidi is an orphan, which increases the poignancy factor. But her grandfather (Jean Hersholt) tugs at my heartstrings too. What misanthrope can’t relate to an idyllic exile in the mountains, and the joy that even one tiny, vivacious companion might bring? The community Heidi so desperately longs for is tiny - the goat herd Peter, his blind grandmother, the village chaplain - but the simplicity of her ambition is supremely childlike. In Heidi Temple exercises an almost divine ability to charm cranky men and make crippled girls walk. Childhood is, indeed, magical and Heidi epitomizes that fact.

The Littlest Critic

2008-03-27T13:39:00.000-07:00

I find it rich beyond belief that as I prepare to step down from a 15-year tenure as an alternative weekly critic, my 7-year-old son’s reviewing career is ascendent. Illustrating the value of independent businesses, a recent visit to the beyond-charming Little Shop of Stories in Decatur yielded a mega-dose of bookwormophilia in my man-child. One hint of A’s interest in Ripley’s and other oddball phenomena and the bookstore manager Terra, who was so righteously named, was off and running. She was grabbing books about parasites, books about Houdini (score!). The woman knew a slightly freaky book kid when she met him. Then, the coup de gras: Terra unloaded a stack of advance reader’s copies for A to peruse. You know, check them out, make some recommendations.

“You are a book reviewer!” I squealed with delight at preparing my child for professional obsolescence.

His first, rather ambitious if you ask me, undertaking was a 12 and up (yes, I’m bragging. No he didn’t read it on his own) tome about the Scopes monkey trial. We enjoyed that one, probably because the word “monkey” was involved, much as I enjoy a film with the words “Viggo Mortensen” involved.

I bought him a clipboard for taking notes. He wrote a heartwrenchingly cute note to Terra, who has become a huge intellectual crush and G.O.N. (Grown-Up-of-Note) to A. He recommended the book to readers interested in “court,” which is perceptive, since that probably describes about 75% of America.

Funny Games?

2008-03-07T15:04:00.000-08:00

(Photo courtesy of Warner Independent Pictures)

If you thought Michael Haneke's 1997 Austrian feature Funny Games was an exercise in sadism, then you should check out the ad campaign associated with his current Hollywood remake of the film starring Naomi Watts, Tim Roth and Michael Pitt centered on a vacationing family tortured by a pair of privileged Bret Easton Ellis-type teenagers. In a certifiably sick movie tie-in, viewers can go to the Funny Games website:

Click on "Play the Game."

You customize an email message and a phone message using the name of a friend or loved one and receive a message for your friend delivered in the voices of the film’s killers. It's an incredibly creepy promotional gimmick.

It's strange to see this diabolical device used to promote a film by this exceedingly smart, subversive director. Does Haneke know? If I had his email address and phone number, I might have to customize one for him.

I have written about Haneke a number of times and his brilliant cinema of contemporary dis-ease. Like other admirers of his work, I was a bit put off by the notion of him remaking Funny Games, a film so thoroughly disturbing it haunted me for weeks following my first viewing. Fans of Haneke’s work won't be able to stay away from his virtual shot by shot American remake of Funny Games, though it will probably feel less creepy and shocking the second time around.

But the American version seems to have fulfilled the director's mission to assault desensitized Americans with their taste for violence-as-entertainment. The couple seated in front of me had all of the usual horror movie reactions to the movie: "Get out of the house!" "Why is he eating? Now!?" but by films end seemed to have been lulled into a creeped-out stupor. We'll see if the film reaches beyond the art house crowd or is perversely embraced as "ironic" by the same thrill-seekers who sing the praises of amoral gore hound Tarantino.

Many will think of Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange when they see Funny Games. There are so many shared elements: the cold, ironic teenage killers, the white outfits, the home invasion, the dispassionate sadism. But as Haneke noted in a 2007 profile in The New York Times, Kubrick’s use of violence in Clockwork was in some ways an ugly affirmation of sadism’s dark allure. I think Haneke is coming from a far more solidly moral, subversive place where Kubrick’s approach to violence was more about his delight in a remarkable story and the apparatus of cinema. According to Haneke, Kubrick was disgusted by how the ultra-violence was received. I personally love Kubrick. His influence on film (and the art world too) is immeasurable. But the way he handled violence, especially sexual violence, in this film still repulses me.

There is a slick, tantalizing element to the antisocial cruelty meted out by Alex (Malcolm McDowell) and his droogs. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that teenage boys from probably every generation since have dressed up as these characters for Halloween. And I won’t even get into the many literal and metaphorical rape scenes in Clockwork, including the one set to the strains of “Singing in the Rain.” It has an ugly, erotic element not unlike the rape scene with Susan George in Sam Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs (“She likes it! She really likes it!”) and in some ways seems to illustrate how directors in the Seventies (both films were released in 1971) were dealing with the sexual revolution and the subsequent rise of women’s rights in a not altogether pleasant way.

Watch for my review of Funny Games in the March 11 issue of Creative Loafing.

Oskar!

2008-03-06T18:54:00.001-08:00

Why "Oskar" with a "k"? It's only that the "k" reminds me of my favorite cinematic Oskar, played by David Bennent in Volker Schlondorff's The Tin Drum. Why have a pet at all, if you aren't going to embed a cryptic movie reference? I never thought I was a dog person. That doggy smell, wet and musky, always made my stomach lurch. But Oskar has become such a beloved baby-substitute, such a Dickensian waif with those sad, dewy eyes, it is taking all my stamina and the barest trace of self-respect not to plant a big ole kiss on his gooey doggy lips. Must. Not. Turn. Into. One. Of. Those. People.

I won't name the very high profile Atlanta gallerist who once tried to get me to kiss her pooch. I thought it crossed a line, in an art world where there are no lines. But now with my own dark, goofy dog-love tendencies awakened, the impulse doesn't seem quite so bizarre to me. I don't know if that's growth.

madonna and children

2007-01-23T09:46:00.000-08:00

I defy any fan of kitsch not to fall immediately in love with this vulgar, slick digestion in a single image, "Blessed Art Thou" of the annoying sanctification of celebrity that runs rampant in American culture, but also the sanctification of self that certain celebrities like Jolie seem to engage in endlessly. North Carolina artist Kate Kretz proves that Southerners are often the most adept smart-asses when it comes to feeding our culture back to us on a pitchfork.

Hell is for children: Pan's Labyrinth

2007-01-18T13:30:00.000-08:00

Go to this website for my review of one of the best films I've seen in months:

PAN'S LABYRINTH

Media Overload

Movies for Kids

2006-07-28T09:40:00.000-07:00

Seeing the first children’s movie in a long time that doesn’t turn my
stomach, The Ant Bully, I am only reminded of how noxious and
base the majority of swill made for children is; the cinematic
equivalent of Cheez Wiz. I am personally not a fan of the Adam Sandler
and Will Ferrell genres of lad-yukks, but so many children’s films are
virtually cut from the same cloth: an inane series of fart jokes and
casual violence and abject stupidity.

The Ant Bully, thankfully has the strength of character to
actually say something (though there is also the requisite
potty-humor), and offers insight into our culture of bullying
individualism and isolation in the human world contrasted with the
community and cooperation of the ant world. The message about bullying,
and how might does not make right must be a real muddle for parents to
explain to their wee things post-screening when the subject of Iraq
comes up. It’s ironic how the moral lessons we teach our children are
so rarely our own. It all seems very progressive, very matriarchal,
and a nice corollary to the Sept. 11=Iraq War=Let’s Kick Some Terrorist
Ass message of Oliver Stone’s politically wacked World Trade
Center.

The Ant Bully is matriarchal in terms of the ant colony, presided
over by the voice of Meryl Streep, even if the human mother in the
film, despite being presented as a pitiable and beloved figure for her
son, is given an ass the size of Topeka in the usual disparagement of
mothers as mom-jeans wearing, SUV-driving soccer-mom lunatics. Are
there any equivalent caricatures of fathers?

Wassup Rockers

ART

TALK ABOUT THE WORK
On the eve of the National Black Arts Festival, artists see a changing landscape in Atlanta

Creative Loafing Articles 7/05

2006-07-05T09:48:00.000-07:00

HARD ROAD
Fact blends with fiction in docudrama The Road to Guantánamo

EVERYDAY PEOPLE
Fall to Grace

FULL MOON RISING
Landscapes shows a folk artist fully embracing the vision thing

Creative Loafing Articles 6/28

2006-06-28T09:53:00.000-07:00

FASHION VICTIMS
Prada's devilishly one-dimensional women make for ill fit

THE DEVIL YOU KNOW
The King goes Deep South -- but how deep?

IN THE HERE & NOW
Just months in Atlanta, Cinqué Hicks is already making a mark in the art world

EAST MEETS WEST
Fusion is the name of the game in Red Beans and Rice

Creative Loafing Articles 6/21

2006-06-21T09:56:00.000-07:00

MASTER BUILDER
Sydney Pollack sizes up architect Frank Gehry

BY THE NUMBERS
Quick: What's an eight-letter word for 'diverting'?

NOTES FROM THE UNDERGROUND
Mike Wsol's commentary works from the bottom up

Creative Loafing Articles 6/14

2006-06-14T09:59:00.000-07:00

EXTREME MAKEOVER
The Beauty Academy of Kabul schools Westerners on Afghanistan

Creative Loafing Articles 6/07

2006-06-07T10:01:00.000-07:00

WEAK SIGNAL
A Prairie Home Companion struggles with radio-free Americana

IF THESE WALLS COULD TALK
Photographer Sarah Hobbs experiments with weird science

Creative Loafing Articles 5/31

2006-05-31T10:04:00.000-07:00

BREAKING THE WAVES
Matthew Barney and Björk get metaphysical on the high seas

THE MORE THE MERRIER
Atlanta arts collaborative gets it on in forthcoming retrospective

Creative Loafing Articles 5/24

2006-05-24T10:06:00.000-07:00

SADDLE SORE
An imitation cowboy woos an underage filly Down in the Valley

SMACK DAB
Clean balances real emotion with penchant for style

Creative Loafing Articles 5/17

2006-05-17T10:09:00.000-07:00

SEX AND THE INDIE GIRL
Somersault fails to break classic teen drama formula

KING OF PAIN
Four new DVD releases from masterful director Michael Haneke

Biographical Sketch

2006-01-01T15:07:00.000-08:00

I was born in Jimmy Stewart's hometown of Indiana, Pennsylvania and
received my B.A. in film studies from the University of Florida and my
M.A. in film studies from Emory University. My master's thesis on
exploitation film became a book, Forbidden Fruit: The Golden Age of
the Exploitation Film co-authored with fellow lowbrow connoisseur
and husband Bret Wood. I am the staff art and film critic for
Atlanta’s alternative newsweekly Creative Loafing. My writing has
appeared in Elle, Atlanta magazine, Sculpture, Art in America, Artnews,
Playboy online and Art Papers. I have curated exhibitions for the
Atlanta Contemporary Art Center and the VSA Arts for All Gallery. I
have received multiple Green Eyeshade Awards for criticism and feature
reporting from the Society of Professional Journalists.

That's the one I send out when someone needs a string of professional
citations.

I am also, though I would never tell anyone I work for, a confirmed
misanthrope who nevertheless sees untold marvels, possibility and
transcendence in the human creations of film and art. So people, at
least when they are creating and thinking are displaying the best parts
of themselves. When they are driving and grocery shopping...hmmm...not
so good.

I live in a 1930 bungalow in an offshoot of Atlanta I have
characterized as a "racially-diverse Mayberry" called College Park.
College Park somehow manages to combine smalltown charm, a funky,
friendly diverse Black-meets-White-meets-Hispanic, nouveau riche and
downright impoverished vibe that seems to have quite unintentionally
created a New Urbanist semi-utopia that urban planners and architects
keep trying to create from the ground up for yuppies seeking an
“authentic” smalltown experience along with a good market carrying fig
preserves and prosciutto within walking distance. It is the first
place I have lived in my restless life where I have felt grounded and
content.

I work a breath away from my husband,a writer and filmmaker who has
made a documentary, Hell’s Highway about driver’s education films and a
narrative film based on pioneering “sexologist” Krafft-Ebing’s writings
called Psychopathia Sexualis. Bret shares a home office with me and
the obliterating kudzu of our DVDs, books, files, paint-by-numbers,
laserdiscs, and framed posters for exploitation film classics like
Dwain Esper's The Seventh Commandment (adultery, baby) and Marihuana
(reefer, baby) and the leather Man-Chair I bought for him to soothe him
as his 40th birthday approached. He looks very happy in the times he
is able to get-all-up-in-his-man-thang. I have my nose buried so deep
in my third appendage laptop, and he in his, we barely know the other
person's there.

Though I often write about contemporary, conceptual art and love the
work of Laylah Ali, Gillian Wearing, Mike Kelley, Loretta Lux, Shelby
Lee Adams, William Eggleston, Nam June Paik, Adrian Piper, Rodney
Graham, Rachel Whiteread, O. Winston Link and so many others (and a
host of Atlanta-based artists too), I am also deeply invested in
kitsch, lowbrow and craft and can probably get equally excited at
scouring -- and perhaps scoring -- remnants of our dearly departed 20th
century at the local thrift store. I am deeply distrustful of people
who are not in touch with both their high and low sides. I consider it
an essential component of human consciousness.

I have lived all over the world and in hideous and wondrous nooks and
crannies of this country, but oddly enough, find succor and
satisfaction in the American South, a region with humility,
authenticity and character despite its undeserved reputation for
runaway brides, warped kiddie beauty pageants, abject Wal-Mart culture
and me-first Republicanism. Regional-discrimination, my friends, and
not necessarily so. At least not the South I know.