AFTER THE EXPERIENCE OF listening to and reading many voices of many People of Color, especially in the Black Lives Matters movement and its related eye-opening and shattering effects - what Republican-fascists are harnessing and whipping up a backlash to so to keep People of Color and gulled white people under their heel - the other day I found I couldn't read Eudora Welty's Christmas story A Narrow Path. I don't think there's anything wrong with the story, from what I can know to judge it but to have a white author, even one as masterful as Welty creating a Black Character to be the center of a story isn't a comfortable thing in 2021. I would wonder how Black commentators would experience reading it. I was, of course, aware of the ambiguity of that from the first time I read the story decades ago. Just as I was aware of the even more problematic situation of Mark Twain inventing and his use of the character Jim in Huckleberry Finn.
That's a little introduction before I answer the question of whether or not I'm going to see the Spielberg-Kuschner retread of West Side Story which I never intended to see. The answer is no.
I didn't like the music of the musical when it first came out on LP, I didn't like the movie that they made of it in the 1960s. I'm not a big fan of Bernstein's musicals, or much of any others and I pretty much am through with the movies perhaps with a few exceptions. I certainly wouldn't pay for the experience of watching it, either in money or in two of the dwindling hours of my life. I didn't like the story and other than Rita Moreno, I hated the performances. Marni Nixon's dubbed in singing was great too but I'd rather hear her recording of Ives Songs or Webern any day.
I've looked at several reviews since the taunting comment showed up in my comments to be moderated file and those seem to fall into two categories, those which actually cast a critical eye on the movie and those who promote it like a press agent.
- The New Yorker slam of the movie made it seem just as I'd have feared, if I had thought to think about it, adding a layer of pop sociology and psychology and aspirational drivel and taming the sexual drive in the original dance scenes. I will say that of the music for the musical the dances that Bernstein turned into a little suite of sequences are the best music in it. I have very occasionally heard the song Somethin's Coming well sung outside of the context of the musical and kind of like it. I gather, as I'd expect, Spielberg is too Hollywood for the material, Kushner may have caught the syndrome from his time working on the movies. If so I hope he recovers. He's got too much talent to turn into another of Hollywood's causalities.
- The New York Times gives it a plug. Most of the big and establishment media can be counted on to do that in reviews of prestigious movies turned out by prestigious directors, especially when there's an alleged higher purpose to the lower-middle-brow project. I think most of their reviews of commercial entertainment is written with an eye on ad revenue that should be on the thing being reviewed.
This isn't a review because other than maybe seeing Rita Moreno in something, I couldn't care less about it. If it turns into another brainless icon of lower-middle-brow adulation the way Hamilton has, largely through review-promotion, especially that in the NYT , wouldn't surprise me. Musicals are as bad at presenting relatively recent or present day reality as they are honest treatment of history. And they're dangerously bad at that. The piety that that musical is treated with doesn't seem to me to be as sincere as the piety many a WWII veteran I knew of held South Pacific in, especially those who were in the battles of the South Pacific. I don't know what kind of connection the, no doubt, largely white, largely middle-class and above audience for WWS finds to have a real attachment for it. The original was a bunch of affluent gay white guys putting their fantasies about darker rough trade on the stage and making it dance and sing. It still is that. Maybe that's what the white, safe, affluent audience gets from it, too. Aspirational porn.
I doubt that anyone who goes to see it will much be open to any kind of messaging that the thing is supposed to hold, I think any messages embedded by the authors and composers and directors of musicals is swamped by the characters, their sex appeal, the plots the sets and, most of all, the sex appeal of the actors. I've read so many assertions of what plays, movies, musicals, etc. "really mean" that they're really about "the McCarthy era" "the cold war" that they're about anything but what the story is about and what easily 95% of the audience will think it's about. Making a hundred-million dollar movie to make a point is one of the most ridiculous extravagances in the history of the world, any of the very passionate, very articulate, often very angry Black Lives Matter protestors I heard explain for free why they were doing what they were doing was entirely more substantial, articulate, to the point and effective if that message getting across was the point of it. That testimony was the highest level of rhetorical art, no fictitious song and dance show can compete with that.
As to it being important art pregnant with sociological, psychological, political and social meaning and, maybe even, most dangerously moral purpose, I'm reminded of what Paul Simon said when someone talked about the poetry of his popular songs, if you want poetry, go read Wallace Stevens. Now, there's an artist I can respect for his honesty and integrity.
I should add that this statement -- "I pretty much am through with the movies perhaps with a few exceptions" -- is as moronic as saying "I pretty much am through with books and literature. With the exception of The New Testament, depending on the translation." :-)
ReplyDeleteYou would add that as if you've ever read a book. Only someone not in the habit of reading them would make that claim. While there is no way to really come up with statistics, there must be scores if not hundreds of worthwhile books published every year for one worthwhile movie. I'd suggest you try reading one but after watching you in inaction for more than a decade, I'm not wasting the effort.
DeleteThis is my Christmas present to you, Simps, when I saw your challenge about the re-tread of WSS I thought maybe I should give you the chance to have a long winters snit in which you get to say the same old things that you always say, I know you like to get in a hissy fit and adjust your pinafore and stamp your little foot when someone disses the icons of lower-mid-brow piety and sanctity.
You do know that Jeremiah is in the Old Testament, don't you? I ask without any conviction of that being true, whatsoever. And Exodus and the Psalms and those other books of it I've posted about just this week. I always consult the 1916 Jewish Text Society text online before I post these days, along with a few others I occasionally check to see how they translated it. I was thinking of doing a post about that highly disputed text from Isaiah that people get upset about this time of year, on whether the Masoritic text that uses a word for "young woman" or the Septuagint with the Greek word for "Virgin" is correct. I decided not to go that way at this time though I don't know why today's scholars are any more reliable than the ones who translated the Septuagint, who knows what text probably far old er than any of our currently available ones said in that place? Not that I care. It's all the same to me if she was a Virgin or not since there's no way to know.
As to your earlier, longer and even stupider comment, I've expressed my respect for Sondheim and Kushner's work many many times and, unlike you, I'm familiar with more than their greatest hits. I really hope Tony's not going to go Hollywood all the way. He's too good for that, though he's old enough to make his own mistakes. I'd really like to talk to him about the Mortara affair, I'd like him to explain why his take or mine or anyone's should supersede the view that the man had of his own life. I twas his life, there's no more authoritative authority than he was.
"I've expressed my respect for Sondheim and Kushner's work many many times and, unlike you, I'm familiar with more than their greatest hits."
ReplyDeleteNo, you're not. Both of those statements are transparent lies. Quick -- without googling, tell me what DUEL is.
Last first, You mean that movie with Dennis Weaver being menaced by a trailer truck for reasons unknown to himself by whoever the driver is? The one where what they saved on writing dialog they saved up to spend in an exploding truck at the end? I saw it on TV decades ago. It was silly. I liked The Sugarland Express more, at least something happened in it. during the two hours of the thing.
DeleteAnyone who wants to check what I've said about Sondheim and Kushner can search the archive of this blog, I'd suggest looking for the comments where, certainly, I recall Simps dissing Send In The Clowns maybe others. I have no problem respecting very much the best that Kushner has produced without adulating him to the point where I'm not critical of everything he's said. I think I might have said that after August Wilson's death, I thought he might be our best living playwright. Though there are almost certainly great playwrights whose work I don't know because I haven't had access to the texts. Any authors who want to remedy that, I'd suggest doing a radio-play recording of their play and posting it online so we can hear their work we almost certainly will never see a production of, that would be wonderful. Of course if it doesn't have costumes and sets and make up and, preferably for him, crappy music, singing and dancing Simps won't go for it. He's not a thinker. He's not a reader. Just get a load of his non-comprehension when he tries to give the impression of having read what I write.
"Last first, You mean that movie with Dennis Weaver being menaced by a trailer truck for reasons unknown to himself by whoever the driver is? The one where what they saved on writing dialog they saved up to spend in an exploding truck at the end? I saw it on TV decades ago."
ReplyDeleteNah, you just looked it up. You're not fooling anybody, shithead. Here's how I know -- you didn't mention the genius guy who wrote it.
Stupy, me not mentioning the "writer" is more proof that I didn't look it up than if I had. I don't care if you don't think I really wasted a couple of hours watching it on TV with commercials adding to the waste of time. I think it's pretty funny to think that someone "writing" a movie script without as many words as the script to Modern Times was some kind of genius guy. But, then, you probably think Duncan's a great writer too, like so many of the rump of Eschatonians do.
DeleteSpielberg is more overrated than Bernstein was but only because so many more people go to watch the movies than ever heard of ol' Lennie. That recording of WSS he did opera singers, KTK and poor, tragically miscast Jose Cararas shows what a mixed bag it was. Tatiana Troyanos probably did the best of those they hired for that, though she didn't do any better than Rita Moreno did in the original cast. I do think that Lenny was better at conducting his own music than he was the music of anyone else. I'd rather hear Trouble in Tahiti than WSS and I don't want to hear that again, either.
You do know that silent movies were actually written by writers, right?
ReplyDeleteI read through the, um, "script" that's posted online. I also saw some of the various statements about what its "really about." Including from Spielberg. I will bet that for the majority of those who saw it it's a low grade horror flick in which, since such fan boys and gals love their 'ert regurgitated like A Christmas Carol at regional theaters and The Nutcracker at ballet companies, they're just waiting for the spectacle of the devil truck getting its due in a ball of flames. I'd rather see one of Jim Hensen's early puppet bits that ends in an explosion, it wastes less time and is better paced and conceived of. And it's probably funny, too. I think there might have been a short time very early in his career when I was attracted to Dennis Weaver, probably why I watched that thing. Boy, did my taste in men ever change over the years. I don't think I'd have watched it if he was a cowboy, always hated the TV and movie cowboy stuff.
Delete"Spielberg is more overrated than Bernstein "
ReplyDeleteYeah, SCHINDLER'S LIST -- what a piece of shit. :-)
'
It's not necessary for something to be a piece of shit, like most of what you adulate, it can merely be problematical. Here, for example Dr Nathan Abrams is senior lecturer in film studies at Bangor University and the author of ‘The New Jew in Film’ from The Jewish Chronicle, Is Shildner's List Fatally Flawed?
Deleteet Schindler’s List had, and still has, many detractors. It has been criticised for its sexualisation of female suffering. Jewish concentration camp inmate Helen Hirsch (played by Embeth Davidtz), for example, is filmed from the front, her breasts clearly visible through her negligible shirt.
Elsewhere, a group of women inmates are forced to strip and herded into a large chamber labelled “Bath and Inhalation Room”. Thinking they are about to be gassed they panic and shriek. Although they survive this ordeal, as water comes out of the shower heads, the sequence makes us very aware of their nudity, which many argued was superfluous.
Some feel the film, which won a best picture Oscar, serves to embed a narrative of Jewish weakness and passivity, in which Jews were nearly always portrayed as undeserving victims. By choosing to focus on Schindler (Neeson) and the commandant of the Płaszów concentration camp in Nazi-occupied Poland, Amon Goeth (Fiennes), Spielberg marginalised the Jews to supporting roles (with the exception of Schindler’s accountant Itzhak Stern, played by Kingsley).
Spielberg portrayed them as cardboard cut-outs, a monolithic mass of feebleness, lacking in psychological depth, to be saved or murdered at the whim of the non-Jews. From this point of view, then, Schindler’s List is not about the Holocaust or the Jews at all, but a biopic of Schindler and his conversion from ambivalent antihero to righteous gentile.
Continued:The film was also criticised for over-focusing on those who survived. By shining the spotlight in such a powerful way on the peculiar experiences of a particular set of Jews, who were not representative of the murdered six million, it gave a distorted view of the Holocaust. As the famous Jewish-American director Stanley Kubrick is reputed to have said: “Think that was about the Holocaust? That was about success, wasn’t it? The Holocaust is about six million people who get killed. Schindler’s List was about six hundred people who don’t.”
DeletePerhaps Kubrick was bitter. It is rumoured that he abandoned plans for his own Holocaust film to be called Aryan Papers, because Schindler’s List got there first.
Many thought that Spielberg’s ending in particular was inappropriately upbeat and sentimental. It showed Schindler’s Jews leaving the camp and walking over the hill in the direction of a nearby town. As they walk, the film changes from black and white to colour, and the actors dissolve into the surviving Schindler Jews in what looks like present-day Israel. Meanwhile, on the soundtrack plays Yerushalayim Shel Zahav (Jerusalem of Gold), a post Six-Day War song, written 22 years after the Holocaust, and describing the Jewish people’s 2000-year longing to return to Jerusalem. The song inscribed the film with an irrelevant Zionist, even religious narrative. It was replaced with Hannah Szenes’s less emotive song Eli, Eli for Israeli showings.
In these various ways, many argued that Schindler’s List trivialised the Holocaust.
Breaking in, it's one of the worst things about treating huge, complex, terrible events in history with a movie or even a novel, one of the reasons I don't care for using those to supposedly teach history, they are some of the shittiest ways to do it, not least of which because they are so much more seductive and compelling and absorbing than real history, which is hard and inconvenient and entertaining to research and read. Even college-credentialed dopes like you believe you've absorbed history when you watch movies, even when, as with Shakespeare in Love, it's pointed out to you THAT EVEN THE FUCKING AUTHOR SAID HE MADE THE ENTIRE THING UP. And, hard as it is to take, there are loads of people even stupider than you who are gulled. And it doesn't matter which side it is made on, there are movies that are fascist and Nazi propaganda that your counterparts will watch and believe in. Stupid people or the world unite in front of screens and they believe what they see. Orwell said it so well in a book, though Aldus Huxley said it too and probably more relevantly to affluent, Western dying democracies.
BTW, I think it's hilarious that you haven't denied your sick pathological claim that WEST SIDE STORY is about a bunch of Jewish gay men indulging in rough trade fantasies rather than simply reworking ROMEO AND JULIET.
ReplyDeleteDid I say hilarious? I meant deeply disturbed and projecting like a multiplex theatre.
But then you're a mentally ill piece of shit. :-)
I said "The original was a bunch of affluent gay white guys putting their fantasies about darker rough trade on the stage and making it dance and sing." I didn't mention Jewishness in that statement, that's your dishonest attribution. So typical of you.
DeleteAnd that wasn't a statement about what it was "about" it was about how the production happened. I can't remember the story in detail, but it was about Jerome Robbins, I think it was, going to a dance in real life where there was some tripe about roses being kicked around by the gang boys and their gang gals catching them, or some such tripe. He wanted to do it on stage and, of course, it didn't work. Sondheim was right, the thing had lots of problems. The projects Lenny was involved with tended to have those problems. The description of his bicentennial musical sounds like those involved in writing and putting it together were all taking way too many drugs when they did it. It flopped. Then there was the original Candide which was a mess, too. They had to really work on that one to get it over the mess that largely came from the original book by Hellmann. She was a crap writer.
"Some feel the film, which won a best picture Oscar, serves to embed a narrative of Jewish weakness and passivity"
ReplyDeleteAnd some don't, you low-grade moron.
Surely, Stupy, you mean to address Dr. Nathan Abrams of Bangor University when you say that, he's the one who wrote it for the Jewish Chronicle, not me. I merely quoted him. I defer to his knowledge of the controversy. I think the criticism of the focus of the movie and what Kubrick said about it are very serious things to consider, especially in light of how many idiots like you think the thing is a history lesson.
Delete"Surely, Stupy, you mean to address Dr. Nathan Abrams of Bangor University when you say that, he's the one who wrote it for the Jewish Chronicle, not me. I merely quoted him."
ReplyDeleteYou merely quoted him? Wow -- that gets you off the hook for spouting bullshit. Also -- what you know about Jews would fit in a thimble/
I'm on no hook. Now you're accusing the Jewish Chronicle for "spouting bullshit".
DeleteWell, I clearly know more about them than you do. I knew where to look up that article I'd once read.
Right -- so you think that looking up an article proves it isn't bullshit.
ReplyDeleteAstounding. :-)
In the past I might have said, "that's stupid even for you," but you've made me say that so often I can't say that, it's typically stupid of you. Me looking it up has nothing to do with the quality of it, unlike you I don't figure my paying attention to something has the effect of enhancing its worth. I noted that Bangor University apparently feels Dr. Abrams is a sufficient scholar of the topic to have him on its faculty and the Jewish Chronicle feel's he's credible enough to hire him to write such an article. I certainly suspect that both of them have more credibility, along with those other critics he quotes and alludes to, than La Simels, late of an ad flyer, his self-published blog and Ducan Black's rump communities' idea of an Athenaeum, Eschaton.
DeleteOK, that's enough fun with you till next year, if then.