ashland Shakespeare festival brings new life to twelfth night

Yesterday posted on the Ashland Shakespeare festival weak and confused hamlet production which was more than made up for by a spirited and imaginative production of twelfth night. I honestly thought I have seen enough productions of tn for my lifetime but this one took some risks and brought energy to the play that I had not anticipated.  The concept was setting the play in 1930s Hollywood w duke or sink as a studio mogul, Olivia as a petulant and spoiled star,and her household - Toby Andrew et al - as various theater people. Through this concept the extensive musical numbers that always to me seem a little tedious and false take on new life as all are performed as in a busby Berkeley musical - and it makes sense this is exactly who these characters are and how they would cavort at night. By far the best use of music and dance I'd ever seen in this play or maybe any other Shakespeare. For added Darin they double cast viola and Sebastian,a good stunt that's lots of fun - using fail projections to have them together on stage in the final scene.. Though friend aw is no doubt correct that some of these decisions dull the edge of the romance I have to say that the comic energy more than compensated and that part of the message is that the romance is nonsense - does anyone think that these marriages will last? No, only in Hollywood so to speak are marriages so ephemeral and expendable. There are some surprisingly tender moments as well such as Olivia's true pity for the far gone Toby as he stumbles up the stairs. Great show all around though as a final note: can we all agree that the sir to pas scene is the worst comic scene Shakespeare ever wrote and would be put in brackets and cut from all productions from this time forth?

Hamlet - confused

Saw Ashland Shakespeare Festival production of Hamlet last night and let's say hamlet - con kindly: it's a great play! But it was a production without rhyme (well it did have some rhyme), reason, or point of view.  The stage set interestingly included a set up for a band, for guitar solos, for singing into a standing mic - but there was no sensible use or context for any of these props - I would be interested in a hamlet who was a moody teen who expressed himself not thru sililoquy but thru Rick solos but there was no point of view at all anywhere in this mishmash. The costumes included period coutier getup, clownish pantaloons (for r and g), hamlet's inky black, ridiculous military costume for fortinbras and his men - where are we? What's the point? A woman was cast as Horatian - a big mistake, in that it's central to the play that hamlet needs a buddy (and can't find one).  The acting was histrionic and full of needless bold gestures and theatrics - exactly the kind of acting that S via hamlet despises (speak the speech I pray you...). Truly one of the most confused and poorly conceived productions of H I've ever seen.

Two movie problems (for different reasons)

Some bad luck for 2 different reasons w/ 2 different films, first, the documentary Twinsters - about a Korean-born woman adopted by a NY family now a 25-year-old actress in LA who discovers in way possible only today - via You-Tube, FB, Google et al - that she has a twin sister, adopted by a French family now an art student in London. The 2 get together via email and Skype, and that's kind of fun to see, the similarities, as w/ most twins, are striking - but the added element here is that they are just discovering each other in early adulthood - and they plan to get together. If the movie is building toward some tension, it's taking it's good old time doing so, and the first 30 minutes or so were full of online chats consisting largely of OMGs and emoticons - very cut, but I couldn't imagine its holding my attention for another hour so, exit, quit. Today tried to watch a Japanese classic, by Kobayashi, Hari Kara, a 17th-century drama about an independent samurai (a ronin) who arrives at a noble household and asks permission to commit hari kara in their forecourt. Though a bit slow-moving, it's a terrific drama, with a lot of tension building - we know this involves some kind of revenge plot, but we don't know or see exactly how it will play itself out - and in my case I may never see it because the disc was badly damaged (from the library, and it did forewarn in a handwritten note) and pretty much stopped dead at about 45 minutes. Hari Kara DVD!

British acting at its best - and Tom Courtenay still in the game

The British chamber drama 45 Years is a tight, troubling, realistic movie (Andrew Haigh) about an elderly couple - Charlotte Rampling at a youthful-looking 70-year-old retired teacher and, amazingly, Tom Courtenay (still around, and still great!) as her 80-something husband of an eponymous 45 years, living in a nice, orderly country home in what appears to me to be Norfolk - and their marriage is upended by the sudden news (not much or a spoiler here, this happens in the first 2 minutes) that the body of his long-time-past girlfriend has been recovered - she died in an accident on a glacier in Switzerland, they were hiking together, and climate change has melted the glacier revealing her body preserved in ice. That's an apt symbol for their marriage, which is at times sweet and tender but also beset by darkness and secrets, now gradually being revealed (climate change might have been a good title for the movie), leading to much conversation (movie is based on a short story, and seems it - I'd like to read the story, David Constantine's, In Another Country) and to a few powerful climactic scenes - TC's drunken breakdown after a reunion gathering at the factory where he used to work, and his speech at the celebration of their 45th anniversary (and Rampling's silence throughout). the movie shows British acting - so fine and understated and literary - at its best, and though it's not the most exciting or dramatic movie of the year it's a smart pro job all around. And added later in the day: Forgot to mention the great soundtrack, ranging from Lloyd Price and the Platters to Sibelius.

A terrific film about the Afghan war and toll it takes on soldiers and others

Tobias Lindholm's 2015 film, A War, a fine, provocative, intelligent film and it makes a great pairing w/ his previous excellent film, A Hijacking - many of of the same actors, appearing in both films, suggests that Lindholm may be developing a real ensemble, as his fellow Scandinavian Bergman did in the 60s. A War is about a Danish platoon engaged in peacekeeping in a remote section of Afghanistan, and we focus on a small group of soldiers - movie starts out w/ a # of the foot-soldiers on patrol, one steps on an IED and is blown up: this entire scene seems as vivid as any documentary account of war. The after-effect is that the patrol leader is shell shocked so the platoon leader - the main character in the movie - decides to set an example and leads patrols for several weeks. Without going into detail so as not to spoil anything, in a very tense scene in which the patrol is under heavy attack - Claus - makes a quick decision that saves lives - and costs lives - and a military tribunal investigates. The movie moves back and forth very comfortably between Claus's life at war and his wife home in what I guess is Copenhagen w/ 3 young children. In this, A War replicates A Hijacking, which also moved back and forth, in that case between crew mates on a ship overtaken by Somali pirates and the corporate owner of the ship wrestling with a slew of moral decisions about negotiating the release of the crew. Though A War is almost unrivaled in the immediacy of its war footage and in the examination of the personal pressure and anguish of nonprofessional soldiers seemingly doing relatively short stints, A Hijacking has an edge - in that the moral decisions on the home front were an unsolvable dilemma, we as viewers felt the anguish of the CEO trying to figure out how much to give and when or if to give in to the hijackers' demands - there were no easy or obvious answers; in this film, A War, there's really no moral dilemma, and we're pretty much united in believing in Claus's innocence and only hoping the military tribunal will concur.

The silence of God on a summer night - Through a Glass Darkly

So many years since I first saw Bergman's 1961 "chamber" movie (i.e., like a piece of chamber music or more precisely like one of Strindberg's "chamber plays," with in this case only 4 actors for the stark b/w 90-minute film) Through a Glass Darkly (a beautiful Biblical reference but probably an inaccurate translation of the title, which I think references images seen in a mirror?) that I couldn't remember a thing about it except for one or two of the striking images - so who really saw it? Not I, I guess. Anyway, at nearly 60 it's still a great film and to the extent that it doesn't feel like a contemporary movie, rest assured it never did. It's about 4 people on an island (apparently the remote Baltic island where Bergman made his home after visiting it first for this film - much more developed, I'm sure, in later years than it seems in this film, isolated from the mainland except by private motor boats): a young woman and her seemingly older husband (the ever-dour and always excellent Max van Sydow), her teenage brother, and her father. They're at the father's summer house - we see these long Nordic nights, as they eat outdoors near midnight w/ just a few lanterns; the father is a novelist struggling to complete his book, and from all appearances he's a  pedestrian writer (he reads aloud some of his textual revisions, all of them astonishingly banal) - perhaps he's never even published (the characters in a play the children put on after dinner, an artist so pure he has no artworks to his name, seems to be a cutting blow); MVS is a physician deeply troubled by his wife's mental instability - she has some unnameable and incurable mental illness. The young brother is an aspiring dramatist, but very boyish and immature. The woman flirts aggressively with her brother and suffers strange delusions that in the end lead to a complete breakdown - but in addition to her delusions she has developed an acute sense of hearing. What to make of all this? Each of the characters is struggling with self-identity and with suffering, and as w/ so many Bergman films of the era this film is also about faith and our relation to a god who is strangely silent and distant: the woman seems at possessed, almost damned, and in an extraordinary scene at the end she and MVS are lifted away by an insect-like chopper (one of the few scenes I remember from earlier viewing, an incredibly spooky scene that may also be a Bergman homage - ina different key, to Fellini), bringing her to a hospital (she screams in terror and horror as they sedate her for the airlift: it's as if she is going through an apotheosis, which her brother and father, silent witnesses cannot comprehend. The brother (Minus) asks is father, in a final scene as which they stand before a set of window panes, the mullions looking like crosses against the white sky - and asks about God and faith and the father explains a bit of his philosophy, that love is our proof of the existence of god, and the boy's final words are something like "Papa spoke" - another kind of god, breaking his silence.

Czech invasion - the great films from the 60s

I was just a kid but I remember when the Czech films came to MOMA in the '60s and blew everyone away: who knew such great, simple, honest films were coming out of country behind the so-called Iron Curtain? How could brave directors make such subtle, anti-establishment (anti-Soviet?) films? They didn't do it for long - a few, like Milos Forman, moved west somehow and continued their careers, but it's great to look back at some of these early Czech films and appreciate them, still, today - not only for their place in film and world history but as really great examples of film art - like Forman's 1965 Loves of a Blonde: the story of a young woman working in a Czech shoe factory and hoping, dreaming, of finding love. As we see right off it's a world mostly of women, and in one of the many really funny scenes the factory foreman, an older guy, argues w/ a military leader asking him to station troops in the small factory town because there factory-girls need to have a social life. (In this and a few other scenes Forman shows the Soviet military as pleasant and jovial, something one would guess he was obliged to do - not that he doesn't get in some great satire elsewhere). Turns out they send a brigade of reservists, paunch, gray-haired guys who think they're still hot and, in one hilarious scene at a so-called nightclub try to pick up the eponymous blonde and two of her friends. The movie is sad and starkly beautiful, shot in austere b/w with many scenes that make haunting compositions and great historical documents: an honest look inside the factory dormitory (girls are at least 12 to a room) and a Prague apartment, with dingy doors, furnishings, etc - not even an attempt to glorify or sanctify life in the East. Despite the sorrow throughout the film - we wonder what kind of future this nice young woman and her friends can possible face - there is some terrific humor start to finish - e.g., the 3-in-a-bed scene when the parents of the Prague piano-player boyfriend (of fling?) refuse to let him sleep in the same room as the girl and bring him into their bed - and music itself, from the dopey "folk song" a guitar-strumming factory girl plays over the opening credits to the night-club songs, bad Soviet imitations of British pop, is hysterical, an icon of the era.