FILM: Cruella

Cruella is as wicked fun as it looks, and Emma Stone is delightfully wicked in bringing to life this re-envisioned classic Disney villain. Evil characters are so much more interesting than good ones, and especially when writers dream up intriguing back stories where people aren’t quite as black-and-white as a 1961 Disney film may have made them out to be. Especially when they are foiled against an even more evil villain in Emma Thompson’s fantastically wicked baroness, who imperiously rules over a London fashion empire, whom a young Cruella aspires to be like and eventually take down. Using the cut-throat high fashion industry as the set is brilliant for this story, and comparisons to The Devil Wears Prada are apt, especially since this film was co-written by the same writer. Emma Thompson’s baroness makes even Meryl Streep’s fashion queen seem warm. The 1980s London punk aesthetic is the perfect look for the young upstart designer, with a gothy parade of fantastic costumes, and there’s just something about London that makes for charming thieves and grifters, with fun heisty bits like at times like a lighter version of Ocean’s Eight. The twisted plot has enough twists to keep this villainous prequel intriguing to the end, with some nice puzzle pieces falling into place to set up the classic Disney film.

FILM: Los Hermanos

If you like modern Cuban classical music, or if you just enjoy a good uplifting story, you should see Los Hermanos (The Brothers), a documentary about two Cuban brothers, both extraordinary musicians, one a violinist who made his life in the US and the other a composer and pianist who made his life in Cuba. After decades of limited contact, the two finally got the opportunity to make music together in a joyful reunion. Through some improbably obtained archival footage, we get glimpses of their childhood in Havana, their musical education, and their father who is a notable Cuban composer and conductor. The film beautifully presents Cuban life in all its contradictions, the joy and the privations, the cultural richness and the bureaucracy. But the heart of the story is the music and the passion for making it, and the music these brothers are making is vibrant and riveting. There are some great scenes that really give insight into how musicians talk to each other as they are bringing a piece of music to life. There is a joy in life that they exude in their music, and they wear their hearts on their sleeves, on their strings, and in their scores. We came away from this film smiling, humming, and filled with their contagious joy. We were lucky to attend the film premiere in Santa Monica, where we could enjoy this music-filled film in full theater sound, and afterward there was a Q&A with the filmmakers Ken Schneider and Marcia Jarmel hosted by NPR arts journalist Mandelit Del Barco. (Ken is an old high school friend, and I couldn’t be more proud to know Ken and Marcia after seeing this fantastic work!)

FILM: Limbo

From the trailer, we expected Limbo would be more funny and more uplifting than it was. What we found instead was a more thoughtful and existential reflection on the experience of refugees in the limbo of awaiting adjudication of their status. The story centers on Omar, a young Syrian man from a lineage of famous musicians, who carries his “oud” (a lute-like instrument) with him everywhere he goes, but never plays it. He lives with several other would-be immigrants from various places on a remote windswept Scottish island, where they are not allowed to work, and must simply wait for months or perhaps years for their status to be resolved. They are met with varying reactions from the locals, ranging from true sympathy and kindness to suspicion and outright racism. A class meant to teach them about British culture provides some of the lighter moments. The real humanity is revealed slowly as we get glimpses of these characters, their paths to this place, their motivations, and their precarious hopes. The film crafts a sense of the absurdist suspense of these refugees trying to hold on to hope in this limbo of unknown duration and outcome, where peers are sometimes taken away with no explanation, and the rest remain like the characters in Waiting For Godot. The setting of the remote barren island perfectly enhances the bleakness. An improbable looking phonebooth in the middle of nowhere provides occasional communication with distant families, unless they want to hike up to the top of the local hilltop which is the one spot on the whole island with cellular reception. Omar walks through this life in a sort of jet-lagged daze, like Bill Murray in “Lost in Translation”. He wistfully remembers the apricots from his family’s fruit trees, and the sweets his grandmother made from them. There’s a Syrian expression — “tomorrow there will be apricots” — meant to offer hope when things look bleak. He never heard the expression growing up, because, he confesses, “there were always apricots.” A cast on his hand has kept him from playing his oud, but when the cast is removed, it turns out there’s an emotional cast on his spirit which is really what keeps him from playing his music again. He needs to rediscover the slender thread of hope that has lead him this far. The end is neither a Hollywood ending nor a French ending, but it is a thing of quiet beauty. While this was not what we expected, I was glad I saw it.

ART: Amy Sherald and Lygia Pape at Hauser & Wirth

I celebrated my second Moderna shot on Friday by making my first visit to an art gallery in over a year. At Hauser & Wirth in DTLA Arts District, they have a showing of the portrait artist Amy Sherald, who was boosted into national prominence a few years ago with her commissioned official portrait of First Lady Michelle Obama. This show of five of her recent works is called The Great American Fact. Her distinctive style is a simplified realism, working in bold colors and clean simple shapes, reminiscent of Henri Rousseau, but focused on portraits of African-Americans in an idealized and iconographic visualization. Her works are striking, and not just because of their bold colors and monumental scale (approaching life size). It is her depiction of African-Americans at leisure inhabiting clothes, spaces, poses, and symbols that are traditionally white cultural property. The juxtaposition made me catch my breath and wonder: this is something I haven’t seen before, but why should it be so unexpected? The settings and symbols are classic Americana: Norman Rockwell-esque white picket fences and yellow clapboard houses, sunflowers, 1950s classic bicycles and cars, a James Dean style denim jacket, a Barbie pink outfit, a pink flamingo, a composition that calls to mind American Gothic. The relaxed poses have a natural feel that just adds to the subversiveness. And in another element of her signature style, skin tones are all rendered in grisaille, literally taking away the color of the skin, and creating an intriguing contrast with the strong colors used everywhere else. The picture of the surfers on the beach was particularly striking to me in the context of the recently resurfaced story of Bruce’s Beach, a thriving Black-owned beach resort in Manhattan Beach in the 1910s/1920s, one of the few places in southern California where Blacks could enjoy the beach at that time, which was run out of town with government sanction in a shameful example of racial injustice. Sherald says she paints the world she wants to see. Her scenes, including her beach, feel more like New England (it’s that Norman Rockwell vibe), and she may draw more positive inspiration from Martha’s Vineyard, which (unexpectedly to those unfamiliar with the history) does have a better example in Oak Bluffs, a town where African-Americans have historically owned, lived, and vacationed. Wherever their inspiration, I found her portraits visually appealing and thought-provoking.


They also had another exhibition, of the Brazilian artist Lygia Pape, which I was more mixed about. In one darkened gallery was a lone engaging abstract work called “Ttéia 1, C”, a composition of “silver thread, wood, nails, and light”. The silver threads are arranged in parallel floor-to-ceiling lines to create two diagonal columns that intersect each other. In the dark gallery, they are invisible except as spotlights catch them, so you only get glimpses of the overall form at any one time, and the visible portion shifts dynamically as you walk around it. It’s a beautiful visual, and it invites (or perhaps even compels) your interaction by walking all around it and raising and lowering your perspective to see how it changes. In the second gallery, there were a series of works all on the theme of the Tupinambá, an indigenous people of Brazil reputed to have been cannibals. The Tupinambá are represented in her work by red feathers, and the art pieces mostly comprised large balls covered mostly or entirely in red feathers. In some instances, there were single red-feathered balls with random body parts sticking out – a foot, a hand, or breasts – in poses that seemed not to be appendages of the spheres, but as remnants of what the people-eating spheres had consumed. A large installation comprised a large number of these spheres all together on top of a large tarp, with bits of bones sticking out of them. There were also a few spheres under the tarp, and those spheres were only partly or barely covered in red feathers, and otherwise dark. If you looked closer at the dark spheres under the tarp, they were covered with cockroaches, I suppose suggesting that the vibrant red cannibals were themselves ultimately going to become eaten by bugs. Interesting in concept, if not so visually appealing.

Fortunately, I didn’t view them in that order, the cannibals consumed by roaches weren’t the last thing I saw, and my appetite was intact to wander over to Salt & Straw to experience a different kind of art. At those masters of ice cream, I ventured to try a flavor made from Oregon Bartlett pears with blue cheese. It was excellent. The pear flavor really came through in the ice cream, with goodly sized chunks of pear in it, and occasional small bits of blue cheese, just enough for accent but not overpowering the more subtle pear flavor.

FILM: 2021 Oscar-Nominated Animated Shorts

For many years now, we have enjoyed a secret: the pleasure of viewing the Oscar-nominated short films. Last night we viewed the 2020 crop of animated short films. The joy of a mini-festival of short films is that you can experience such a range, from pure light-hearted comedy in one moment to wistful, mysterious, or deeply moving in another. Burrow started us off with a warm smile, a charming story of a small rabbit armed with a shovel and a hand-drawn plan for its dream home, running into all sorts of unexpected neighbors also living beneath the earth. We were then jolted into the acid trip dreamscape of Genius Loci, which starts off as meditative poetry and morphs into a psychotic break. Emotionally it is unsettling, with people and recognizable elements of urban life morphing into a very subjective first-person experience of mental illness. Artistically, it may have been the most beautiful and intriguing, alternating fluidly between fully colored-in watercolor-like scenes and abstract partial sketches. Opera was one long pan down a vast pyramid, a fantastical cross between Hieronymous Bosch and Rube Goldberg, with hundreds of figures moving through bizarre rituals in different chambers of the pyramid, with some great Sisyphean battle at its base between fire and cold. If Anything Happens I Love You was a beautiful and poignant story without words, in which we are shown the rift between a husband and wife, the two fleshed out characters avoiding each other in silent tension while shadow figures above them express emotions and flickers of memories. As the shape of the hole in their hearts is slowly revealed, it does not just tug at our heartstrings, but shoots our heart like a bullet. Mercifully this was followed by another light-hearted entry, Yes-People, in which vividly humorous claymation-style people inhabiting the same apartment building go through their day saying only “yes” (or its Icelandic equivalent) with various amusing expressions and intonations. The presentation also included three films that had been short-listed but didn’t get nominated. Kapaemahu enacts the legend of four “mahu” (third-gender persons) who came from Tahiti to Hawaii in ancient times and were great healers, ultimately transferring their healing powers to four great rocks before disappearing. The animation is beautifully done in warm tones and the figures reminiscent of cave pictograms, and the story behind it is fascinating. The actual rocks can be seen in Waikiki, and the legend is a documented oral tradition that is narrated in this film in the Niihau dialect of Hawaiian (the only continuously spoken form of Hawaiian and probably closest to what would have been spoken in the time of the healers). The Snail and The Whale is an animated version of a children’s book, a lovely story narrated in verse by Diana Rigg, with character voices by Sally Hawkins and Rob Brydon, with delightful seascape imagery, like a shorter version of Finding Nemo. Finally, To: Gerard is another charming story, this one about a would-be magician working in a mail room, his childhood inspiration for magic tricks, and how he passes on the legacy. 

SCREEN: The Queen's Gambit

The Queen’s Gambit (a 7-episode limited series on Netflix) is an enthralling look at the sometimes fuzzy line between genius and demons, in this story about an orphan girl who becomes a world-class chess prodigy during the 1960s. A series of other chess champions are the nominal antagonists, but the real antagonist is the protagonist herself and her self-destructive impulses rooted in her troubled childhood. Anya Taylor-Joy’s brilliant performance brings Beth Harmon to life, conveying her guarded character as much with looks and movement and tone as words. (I first became acquainted with Taylor-Joy last year in her charming performance in Emma.) The American 1950s/1960s are vividly rendered in costume, color, sets, style, and speech, which really enhances the production. There’s a Cold War undercurrent throughout, with the Soviets being the chess world superpower of that time period, and the US State Department and various organizations interested in helping Beth succeed as a show of American superiority. And yet that whole trope is a clever contrast to an underlying theme of the limits of individualism: Beth can succeed if only she can find people who will support her and if she can learn to trust them. Like a great chess game, I really wanted to see how this story played out, and like a great chess game, I could watch it all over again right now to see how the early moves built to the ending.

STAGE: Matthew Bourne's Romeo & Juliet

George and I went to the ballet tonight, thanks to Center Theatre Group's Digital Stage program. Matthew Bourne’s choreography never fails to be breathtaking, and when combined with a creative reimagining of Shakespeare’s Romeo & Juliet set to Prokofiev’s dramatic score, the result is riveting. Two very talented and very young dancers, Cordelia Braithwaite and Paris Fitzpatrick, bring to life the star-crossed lovers. Their dance duets are charged with passion and energy, with effortless gravity-defying moves that make you wonder whether there aren’t hidden strings. Their fluidity is amazing, and in one remarkable scene they carry off their pas de deux in a prolonged lip-locked kiss. The tale is made contemporary, and reset in some kind of mental institution with an abusive guard, and it is a darker more twisted version of the classic tragedy. But the beauty of the music and the movement captivates with hope for the young lovers right up to their doomed end.

Christen Lost Too Soon

Today I mourn the loss of Christen Smith Herman, who was a good friend through junior high and high school. We bonded in French class, and in high school, I remember a tree well where Christen, Pat Ruffino, and I would always meet at recess and lunch, more comfortable being with each other than at any of the more popular lunch tables. She was a vegetarian and into yoga decades before those were as cool and widespread as they are now. I think her fandom of George Harrison may have lead her to Ram Dass and Paramahansa Yogananda, her love of music flowing naturally into an Indian spirituality that I think she came to authentically and just found herself in tune with. I remember her carrying around “Be Here Now”, and her teaching me how to draw an “om” (which we used to decorate our yellow Pee-Chee folders that were ubiquitous in our day). I remember that she would always look carefully before sitting down at the tree well because she valued life, even insects, and didn’t want to accidentally squash any ants. She had a brilliant smile and wore it often. She played guitar and had a beautiful mezzo-soprano voice. Her voice and passion for music would become a career, singing in the St. John’s Cathedral Choir, and joining a trio called Voxfire who sang medieval music (Hildegard of Bingen!). We lost touch after high school but loosely reconnected about 20 years ago. I probably saw her a half-dozen times, a few times intentionally, and a few times just bumping into each other (which happens more often around Los Angeles than one might expect). We once literally bumped into each other at St. Paul’s Cathedral in London, as we were both looking up in amazement at its awesome heights. And thanks to social media, we were able to keep a sense of what each other was up to. I got to know her first and second husbands and watch her two kids grow up through her posts (though I did get to meet all of them in real life at least once). I’d been enjoying her artistic eye capturing the beauty of the San Juan Islands, where she had moved a few years ago. I had been planning to visit her last July on the way to an Alaska cruise, but Covid canceled those plans. And now we may reschedule that trip next year, but she won’t be there to visit. It’s hard to believe she’s gone so suddenly and too soon. My heart goes out to Paul, Kaija, Peter, and Martin. Their loss is unfathomable, but I’m glad her husband and children had the opportunity to bring her home and be with her as she passed.