Monday, February 20, 2012 @ 11:00pm

An interview with Wim Wenders

Wim Wenders is an Oscar nominee for his film PINA, a gorgeous 3-D documentary about a renowned choreographer.

It's playing at Seattle's Cinerama Theatre right now and I can't recommend it highly enough. Much like The Artist, that black and white silent film, PINA is mostly a visual experience, with very few words to get in the way of the dancing.

If you're unfamiliar with Wim Wenders, he along with others like Werner Herzog, burst onto the world scene as part of the German New Wave in the 1970's and 1980's. He made some of the great films of our time - like Wings of Desire, about angels in Berlin, and Paris, Texas with Sam Shepard, and The American Friend with Dennis Hopper. He also had a hit documentary called the Buena Vista Social Club about the forgotten musicians of Havana.

And now he's up for an Oscar for his latest movie - PINA.

In my interview with him, one of the things I was most struck by was his attitude toward the Oscars. You know a lot of us are pretty dismissive of the Academy Awards. They're kind of cheap and tawdry in some people's eyes. But a legend like Wenders is actually pretty stoked about his nomination.

By TOM TANGNEY

Monday, February 20, 2012 @ 11:52am

Downton Abbey - a guilty pleasure of the highest order

The British TV series (by way of PBS) "Downton Abbey" reached a fever pitch for fans last night as it wrapped up its second season with a Christmastime finale.

The latest travails of the aristocratic Crawley family in the early decades of the 20th century have captivated more and more of us here in the States. The show has consistently been rated in the top two for its time slot all season, coming in second only to the Grammys last week, for instance. In the Puget Sound region, the audience for its second season grew a full 50 per cent over its first year, and there's no reason to think it won't continue to increase when Season 3 begins this September.

I'm a second season convert to the show. After it won six Emmys for its first season, I decided I better check out the phenomenon. So I invited my Mom over to the house to join my wife and I for an all-day marathon of the entire first season, shortly before the start of Season 2. I haven't missed an episode since.

I love how "Downton Abbey" looks at world history through the prism of social history. Season 1 focuses on the relatively static divisions within British society between the aristocrats and the servant class in the early 20th century. Season 2 zeroes in on how World War One turned a lot of those conventions and expectations upside-down. Season 3 reportedly will deal with the Roaring 20's.

For me, the most refreshing thing about Downton Abbey is how articulate all of its characters are. Nearly everyone is well-spoken, no matter how ill-bred some might appear to be on the surface. And the characters are each allowed their own brand of dignity. Most everyone is allowed to plead his or her case fully enough to allow us to understand their various positions, even when these characters are in conflict with each other.

I especially appreciate the character of Mary, the eldest Crawley daughter. Although somewhat reminiscent of Jane Austen's Elizabeth Bennet (from "Pride and Prejudice"), Mary is quite a remarkable creation in the way her analytic nature overrides her emotional instincts. Rarely is a female character allowed such a tendency (and personality!) and it makes her, for me, the most intriguing of a very intriguing cast of characters.

If fans are honest, though, I think we'd have to admit the appeal of the show is aided considerably by soap-opera dynamics. Secret love affairs and even more illicit couplings, continual rounds of jealousy and heartbreak, catastrophic injuries and unexpected deaths, constant gossip and scandal, and even the old reliable "amnesia" gimmick - all of this is used to keep our interest high. I think the show's creator, Julian Fellowes, is a brilliant enough writer that he doesn't need quite so many literary crutches. But given the fact that he's created the entire world of Downton Abbey out of whole cloth, I don't begrudge him a crutch or two too terribly much.

Finally, you know Downton Abbey's cultural moment has arrived when it's being parodied on Saturday Night Live, which it was recently. SNL imagines how the show might be advertised on the male-oriented Spike TV network. It's mostly mocking Spike TV but it also nails many of the crutches Downton Abbey relies on a tad too much.

By TOM TANGNEY

Friday, February 17, 2012 @ 1:30pm

Is "Oklahoma!" racist?

It's been a busy week for the PR department of Seattle's 5th Avenue Theatre. You wouldn't think a 70-year-old musical with such classic songs as "Oh What a Beautiful Morning," "People Will Say We're In Love," and "Oklahoma" could get people so worked up. But that's what a little color-blind casting will do ... or perhaps not so blind.

Amazingly, the 5th Avenue show is the first major mixed-race production of "Oklahoma!" to ever cast an African-American in the key role of Jud Fry, the villain of the piece. Just about every review of the show has taken the production to task for succumbing to racial stereotyping. Calling it a provocative but unintentional caricature, the Seattle Times pointedly asks why the show chooses to depict Jud as "a homicidal black brute, prone to quivering rages, who forces himself on a virginal white girl." And the Seattle PI says it's impossible to avoid the racial implications of Jud's violent pursuit of the white Laurey.

It's not just the reviewers - a number of people reportedly walked out at intermission on Opening Night, and it's sparked a lot of lively discussions online. Calling the show "absolutely terrible," one commenter wrote, "The multi-racial casting just felt ...racist .. and made many people I talked to afterwards uncomfortable." Another recounted that "there was a noticeable gasp from the audience when Curly took the rope off the cabin wall where Judd lived and threw it over a hook attached to the ceiling and encouraged Judd to hang himself. So not only do you have a black man playing the villain, you have him aggressively trying to date a white woman (and kiss her) and then encouraging him to hang himself. The cast was great, the singing was incredible, the dancing was wonderful but it's racist in its casting."

The 5th Avenue Theatre is so taken aback by the strong negative reactions, it's announced no fewer than four panel discussions between the matinee and night performances the next two weekends AND scheduled a Town Hall meeting to address the controversy.

I saw the show last night, and at intermission, there were a number of hushed discussions about the race angle: "That's kinda racist, right?" "It is racist, but maybe that's the point?"

It's clear that the 5th never intended to evoke quite such a strong reaction, but it did mean to stir things up a bit. Donald Byrd, the show's choreographer, says he was inspired by the history of African-Americans in Oklahoma. In 1907, there were over 50 all-black communities in the state, more than in all the other states combined. The theatre's artistic director, David Armstrong, says the intent was to have the casting amplify the inherent drama in the story.

So, is it racist? Well, it's complicated. I get what all the fuss is about. It IS disconcerting, at times. It does conjure up a lot of disturbing racial imagery from our nation's past, especially in Laurey's dream sequence which plays up her sexual and racial fears. But then that's what dreams do; they're not ever politically correct.

To me the casting adds a dimension of interest and complexity to the musical, a musical I may have seen a few too many times. I've always been disturbed by just how quickly the show dispatches with the law of the land to clear Curly of murder. Making Jud black just increases that discomfort.

Among many things, Jud Fry is an outsider, a social outcast - and who better to represent THAT in 1907 Oklahoma than an African-American? Ideally, in a post-racial world, none of this would matter. But clearly, we're not there yet.

Monday, February 13, 2012 @ 10:53am

Oscar Shorts - live and animated

Year in and year out, the animated shorts seem to eclipse their live action counterparts, but this year, I found the opposite to be true. The best of the lot is a Germany/India co-production called "Raju" about a young German couple who fly to Calcutta to adopt a 4-year-old orphan boy. In a mere 24 minutes, the film firmly establishes the distinctive personalities of both the prospective mother and father, the slippery identity of the orphan, the puzzling bureaucracy of the black market, and the swirling chaos that is India (at least to foreigners.)

Ireland has two of the five live-action nominees, both quite clever, if a bit laborious in their punchlines. "Pentecost" offers a witty treatment of a "team" of altar boys who get ready for serving at the Archbishop's High Mass as if they're a bunch of soccer players getting ready for a big match. And "The Shore" stages a 25-year reunion between two former best friends who let Ireland's troubles (and a whole lot of guilt) get in the way of their friendship. As with many a good yarn, they're both the butt of their own jokes.

Wrapping up the live-action entries is "Tuba Atlantic," a whimsical tale of a man facing death by delivering on his life-long dream of blowing one gigantic tuba, and "Time Freak," a mildly humorous sci-fi ditty about a time machine used not for exploring history but for satisfying petty grievances.

As for the animated nominees, none of them seems strong in terms of story but all of them revel in the fanciful freedoms offered by animation. As a book lover, I couldn't resist "The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore," which introduces us to a world in which books literally take flight. Pixar has another extremely polished (almost too polished) effort in "La Luna," a fanciful tale of a boy who climbs to the moon to do a bit of lunar housecleaning.

Canada has two oddball offerings, one about a young boy who's dragged off to visit his grandparents when he would really rather be putting coins on railroad tracks (Dimanche), and the other, a kind of bad-news folktale about an Englishman who tries to make it on his own on an isolated ranch in Alberta (Wild Life). Finally, the strangest of the lot is "A Morning Stroll." A random incident involving a pedestrian and a chicken is presented in three separate versions - the first is set in 1959 in a black and white world of stick figures. The second go-round jumps to a full-color and fuller-bodied world set in 2009, and then lastly, we get a post-apocalyptic scenario in 2059 ... with zombies, no less.

By TOM TANGNEY

Friday, February 10, 2012 @ 11:17am

Madonna, Wallis Simpson, and Crazy Horse - redefining sexy?

Either Madonna is experiencing a late-career resurgence or, more likely, she is just once again demonstrating her marketing brilliance. She has a new album out, she just did the halftime show at the Super Bowl, and Friday, she's debuting a movie she's directed. It's a veritable three-pronged attack by the 53-year-old prima donna.

Her movie, W.E., is about Mrs. Wallis Simpson and her scandalous love affair and marriage to David Windsor, better known as Great Britain's King Edward the VIII. (The title refers to Wallis and Edward.) It's a fascinating story about how a King throws away his crown for a woman who was not only an American but twice-divorced too.

In a small way, this movie capitalizes on last year's Oscar winner The King's Speech - Colin Firth plays Edward's stuttering brother who has to take over as King.

Often dismissed as an evil temptress, an unabashed seductress, Wallis is here portrayed with a little more sympathy - she's the object of HIS obsession, more than the other way around. She writes at one point, "You have no idea how hard it is to live out the romance of the century."

The woman who plays Wallis is a relative unknown, Andrea Riseborough, but she perfectly embodies the oddball appeal and intensity of the waif-like Baltimore socialite. And James D'Arcy is fine in the somewhat smaller role as Edward.

The real problem with the movie is that Wallis' story is only half the movie. The other half is a contemporary tale about a fictional Manhattan woman who also is named Wallis (her mother was a rare Wallis Simpson fan). She deals with her own marital problems by projecting herself into her namesake's life. She does her best to resolve her troubles with love by also resolving her obsession with "the romance of the century."

This half of the movie is simply not very compelling, especially when compared to the inherently dramatic story of the historical couple. By having to share screen time with the mopey contemporary story, the Wallis/Edward story gets short shrift. Jettisoning the Manhattanite Wallis would have meant more time for the real Wallis. As it is, she remains a character rich with possibilities but woefully underdeveloped.

A fascinating aspect to Wallis Simpson was her curious allure. The movie briefly raises the subject when she's described as certainly NOT the most beautiful woman in the world. In fact, she's deemed rather plain. When someone calls her attractive, she acidly dismisses it as just another way to say "she does her best with what she's got." So what exactly was her secret?

That question dovetails nicely with another new movie in town, a Frederick Wiseman documentary about the famous Paris nude dance revue, Crazy Horse. It recounts management's efforts to revamp the revered but tired show to appeal to a new hipper audience.

What I found most intriguing were the conversations about the definitions of "sexy." One female manager smartly suggests that eroticism for her was a careful combination of "frustration" and "imagination." And the show's artistic director talks about the difference between women under and over the age of 25. Under 25, he says, women simply count on their youth and natural beauty. It's not until they're at least 25 that they have to start "earning" or "strategizing" their looks. Under 25, women are blandly pretty; over 25, they're artistically so. In fact, he suggests, women who have been able to overcome their complexes AND their less than ideally beautiful bodies are better equipped to be seductive than their less complicated younger peers.

Maybe THAT was the secret to Wallis Simpson. (And Madonna too, she may hope. )

By TOM TANGNEY

Friday, February 3, 2012 @ 12:00pm

A Separation - the first great film of 2012

A Separation is the first great film of 2012. The fact that a small Iranian film, by a filmmaker relatively unknown even in international circles, can snag an Oscar nomination for Best Screenplay speaks to its remarkable universality.

You could say this movie makes a mountain out of a molehill, I suppose, but what a glorious mountain it is. The "molehill" is a very specific legal case in present-day Iran, a dispute between a secular middle-class man and the Muslim woman he's hired as a caretaker for his elderly father. The "mountain" is the movie-long culmination of that case, a culmination which ends up touching the lives of so many, many others, including the man's separated wife, their earnest 10-year-old daughter, his Alzheimers-stricken father, the Muslim woman's religiously strict and out-of-work husband, and their mischievous 4 year-old daughter. Each of these characters is so nuanced that, despite their furious disagreements with each other, we in the audience can empathize with them all.

A Separation starts small and even stays small but it develops its smallness to such a degree that it ends up feeling enormous in its scope, as it delves into the inevitable conflicts (and separations) between law, religion, personal ethics and social mores.

Wednesday, February 1, 2012 @ 6:43am

Dog wars are heating up in Tinseltown

Uggie, the Jack Russell terrier who stars in Oscar frontrunner, The Artist, is getting a lot of attention of late. He's been showing up on more and more red carpets. He appeared on stage at the Golden Globes, and performed tricks on The Ellen Degeneres Show.

And now resentment is beginning to build.

Listen to Tom Tangney break down dog wars in Tinseltown

Oscar nominee Christopher Plummer refused to do a Newsweek photoshoot with Uggie out of loyalty to Cosmo, the Jack Russell who stars in Plummer's movie Beginners. Plummer says he's frustrated Cosmo's being overshadowed by Uggie's PR machine.

And now the legendary director Martin Scorsese is even weighing in. In an op-ed to the Los Angeles Times, Scorsese says his Oscar-leading film Hugo is being severely slighted. How so? When the nominations for the Golden Collar Awards for Best Performance by a Dog were announced, Blackie, the Doberman in "Hugo," was not among them. And Uggie scored twice, for The Artist and Water for Elephants.

Scorsese writes "OK, let's lay all our cards on the table. Jack Russell terriers are small and cute. Dobermans are enormous and ---- handsome. More tellingly, Uggie plays a nice little mascot who does tricks and saves his master's life...while Blackie gives an uncompromising performance as a ferocious guard dog who terrorizes children. I'm sure you can see what I'm driving at."

He suggests, sure it's easy to root for heroes but what about the anti-hero? We accept, even embrace human anti-heroes, so why not a canine version?

Following a vigorous Facebook write-in campaign, Blackie was allowed into the Golden Collar Award competition against Uggie and Cosmo. The winners will be announced Feb 13.

Sunday, January 29, 2012 @ 8:26pm

The director of the silent movie The Artist...speaks!

Not long before his film "The Artist" nabbed ten Oscar nominations, including one for Best Picture and another for Best Director, Michel Hazanavicius laughed when I asked him about his chances for an Academy Award.

He said dreaming of an Oscar is like dreaming of going to the moon - you don't really believe it could ever happen. Especially for a Frenchman, with a French movie. Unless, he added, with a twinkle in his eye, it was a SILENT movie.

And of course, "The Artist" is, quite famously, a silent movie. In my interview with him below, Hazanavicius talks about the difference between his black and white silent film and the films from the silent era ("The Artist" knows it's a silent movie, the original silents didn't), the advantages of the "silent" approach to filmmaking (by having to supplying much of the dialogue, the audience can't help but become more involved), why poker-faced movie stars like Steve McQueen wouldn't be able to make it in silents, and why "The Artist" is not just for cinephiles.

Don't be surprised if "The Artist" walks away with the Best Picture Oscar on Feb. 26. And Hazanavicius has a good chance at winning for Best Director as well.