February Things

In addition to watching the Oscars and seeing a lot of movies in preparation for that I did a few other things in February.

I saw the play God of Carnage by the Huntington Theatre Company and a couple of days later saw the Roman Polanski film version, Carnage. It was interesting comparing a theatre and film version of the same material. The play was written by Yasmina Reza and first performed in Europe in 2006. It opened on Broadway three years ago with Jeff Daniels, Hope Davis, James Gandolfini and Marcia Gay Harden. It won Tony's for best play, director and actress. It's about two couples who meet in an apartment to discuss a violent incident between their eleven year old sons. The play is in real time and covers just over an hour. The conversation starts out almost civil and then degenerates. There are a lot of fun insults but the situation does feel a little forced as you wonder why doesn't the visiting couple manage to leave the apartment. Polanski's cast (Jodie Foster, Kate Winslet, Christoph Waltz and John C. Reilly) were first-rate, so I'm not surprised they were better than the Huntington's cast. I was surprised that for a story that takes place in one room, I thought the film did a better job of feeling claustrophobic than the stage. The film set was much smaller than the stage and the camera afforded different angles. One character constantly takes phone calls to the annoyance of all the others. He steps away a bit but given the stage it was hard to tell if it was a polite distance or not. Also there was one scene where a character spoke at length and everyone else was still; I wasn't sure if it was meant to be thoughts or a pause in time or real-time. Finally Polanski added two scenes during the opening and closing credits. The first is of the incident with the kids in a park. It's a long shot and there's only music so it's still unclear exactly what transpired but it distracted me and I didn't think it was a good addition. The final shot I won't describe, but I loved it and it made up for the first.

Wynton Marsalis is doing a two year six lecture series at Harvard. I went to the third in that series, "Meet Me at the Crossroad". It was history lesson of American music up to the 1950s. He had a band on stage and played lots of examples. It was 3.5 hours long so I won't completely summarize it. There's more here. They played a lot of examples of American music from the 19th century and noted how while there was tremendous segregation, musicians just want to play good music and are willing to borrow from everywhere. As people travelled, their music travelled and in particular rhythms were borrowed. I didn't realize America invented the rhythm section. As public schools flourished in the late 1800s, people got really good music educations. He snipped that even at a juvenile prison, a 10 year old Louis Armstrong could get a first class music education and free trumpet and now we're cutting music programs from public school. Rhythms kept getting more complex through bebop and then the big bands started fading and in a post WW-II, GI-bill American, for the first time teenagers had disposable income and math and science became more important than music education and rock and roll recording companies took advantage of that.

The story of Shackleton's expedition to the south pole is amazing. I was intrigued by a performance at Arts Emerson called 69º S. The Shackleton Project . "Theatre, dance, puppetry, photography and film unite in an impressionistic, stunning and evocative series of tableaux vivants, taking us on an artistic and emotional journey that explores the symbiotic relationship between humans and the environment and reinvigorates the spirit of foregoing individual glory for the sake of collective survival." It's turns out the key word in that description was tableaux and that means very little motion. It was only a little over an hour and it felt like forever. Rather than a story it was more like 9 dioramas with four foot tall puppets controlled by people on stilts. The set was kinda interesting, but that's all that was.

I went to Phoenix to visit some friends and we spent one day in Sedona. It was my first time and yes the rocks are very red. It also happened to be during the Sedona International Film Festival so we saw three films: The Big Fix, Cracks, and The Heir Apparent: Largo Winch. The first was an effective documentary on corruption by BP and Washington in the gulf oil spill cleanup. The Q&A was helpful as they presented some of the later information in a more balanced way that I wish had made it into the film. Cracks was girls school story that lost its way and was a little week. Largo Winch is based on a comic series I hadn't heard of and is Bond-like adventure story but the espionage is corporate rather than governmental.

Most recently I saw Stephen Tobolowsky tell stories for the third time. This was a fund raising event for IFFBoston held at the Coolidge Corner Theatre. He's really an amazing storyteller, both engaging and insightful. His stories are true and they happened to him and he's led a surprisingly eventful life. I've been listening to the podcast, The Tobolowsky Files on long drives and I highly recommend it (not for kids). I get it via iTunes.