FILM - "Children of Men"

From the naturalism of Y tu mamá también to the dark fantasy of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azakban, Alfonso Cuarón has always been a vivid director, with shots so tight they hug off the screen and angles so crisp they demand every ounce of tension from a scene. His latest film, Children of Men, is a science-fiction parable for hope and humanity that is no less gritty or visionary as his other work. It is a more deftly executed film than Babel, a more compelling work than the limited Tzameti 13, and every minute is an absolute pleasure to watch, even (or especially) at its most terrifying.

Never mind the social commentary about how a government uses terror as a weapon to police its populace, or the near-future notion of where our nations are heading. Children of Men’s catalyst is a sudden and inexplicable onset of infertility across the globe, but the premise looks more at class disparity and urban terror than at science fiction. (The few nods to the future include holographic advertising on buildings, one-handed integrated computer keyboards, and LED displays in the windshield – all things that exist already.) Our lens for the film is Theo (Clive Owen), a former activist who has been hollowed out just enough by the death of his son to pass the time as a journalist. He’s looking for hope, however, so he’s happy to help his ex (Julianne Moore) secretly transport a miraculously pregnant woman (Claire-Hope Ashitey, as the aptly named Kee) to a group of international scientists known as the Human Project. If only it were that easy: for every good-natured midwife like Miriam (Pam Ferris) there’s an ill-tempered cop like Syd (Peter Mullan) or an ideological radical like Luke (Chiwetel Ejiofor).

Clive Owen is the perfect choice for the role, a leather-skinned man with sunken eyes and a bitter voice. Because much of Children of Men is shot in action, or suspenseful quiet, Cuarón trusts the nuances of Owen’s craggy face to get across what there isn’t time to say. He also does wonders for the London atmosphere—the film looks much like Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later—creating a washed-out desolation to every scene. However, whereas Boyle’s film was of an empty London, Cuarón’s shots are crammed with people, and scene after scene is filled with abrupt and gritty violence. In the first scene, Theo buys a cup of coffee and walks outside. He pauses a moment, considering the void in his life, perhaps, and all of a sudden the coffee shop explodes.

In Cuarón’s world, violence cannot be separated from life, and even a moment of messianic calm late in the film holds for just a few minutes before the uncontrollable bullets of man start flying again. A lesser director would overdo the violence, or would lose the message to the thrill-ride moments, but Cuarón makes it all one: the blood isn’t belabored, the politics aren’t precise—everything exists in its own precisely framed moment, and this tragic future rolls on. Somehow, in the midst of this, there are moments of comedy (thanks to the wise casting of Michael Caine as an aged hippy) and the faintest glimmers of hope in childbirth.

From idyllic forest retreats to cavernous art preservation rooms to the uncomfortable grime of an internment camp for refugees, Cuarón has captured the essence of humanity, and has made an effortlessly poignant masterpiece.

First posted at [Film Monthly]

MUSIC - One Ring Zero, "Wake Them Up"

One Ring Zero’s latest, Wake Them Up, is a lot like The Arcade Fire’s Funeral, but without all the poetic lyrics: this is a distilled album more interested in experimenting with French-fusion than singing about it. When there are words, they’re half-spoken and half-sung; rarely do they shift out of a one-octave range. The result is a series of fifteen zippy songs, three minutes at most, that range from hopeful instrumental segues (“Happy New Year”) to melancholy string choruses (“Karen”) and experimental sounds, as with the eighteen seconds of vegetative percussion on “Johnny.” Other tracks are playful dirges: a low-fi tuba performance in “Lost,” depressed circus music on “The Sad Carousel.” Some songs are made up of their moods, like the eerie synthesized soundscape of “Robert Hunter’s Monster.” And then some are too good to be mistaken for the happy accident of a jam session: just listen to the melodious, surging pulse of “The Chinese Pavilion” or the haunting lyrics (those “Styrofoam eyes”) of “The Queen of Displays.”

Read on at [Silent Uproar]

THEATER - "The Coast of Utopia: Shipwreck"

Tom Stoppard’s Voyage was a very heavy play: as the first part of an epic trilogy about Russian intellectuals and their revolutions (The Coast of Utopia), it bore the responsibility for establishing characters like the exuberantly radical Michael Bakunin (Ethan Hawke), the passionate literary critic Vissarion Belinksy (Billy Crudup), and the formidable thinker Alexander Herzen (Brían F. O’Byrne). By contrast, Shipwreck, the second part of the trilogy, is light and often comically witty—it sails on the good humor and fortune amassed by the initial installment and suffers little tragedy (or emotion) until deep in the second act. That’s a little ironic, considering that the first act comprises the French revolution, but the big events always seem to happen from afar (in fact, they’re often staged far in the hollow recesses of the gigantic Vivian Beaumont theater). Stoppard is more interested with the reactions of individual cogs than with the entire mechanism, which explains why the second act of Shipwreck focuses on the fomenting of Herzen’s philosophies on life after the tragic (and offstage) death of his deaf son.

Though Stoppard is technically correct when he claims that each part of The Coast of Utopia stands alone, Shipwreck doesn’t do much by itself: it starts off as a dry exchange of idealisms in Paris and then travels to Nice for a shallow tale of adulterous passion. The former is a shadow of Voyage, the latter is a spectral stab at Chekhov—both seem perfunctory. Herzen simply isn’t as interesting as Bakunin—even when he catches his wife, Natalie (Jennifer Ehle) having an affair with the poet George Herwegh (David Harbour) his stoicism drains the danger from the scene. Such internal mystery is fine for characters who are still on the periphery, like Ivan Turgenev (an excellent Jason Butler Harner) and Nicholas Ogarev (Josh Hamilton), and we don’t have time to delve into the souls of thirty characters, but there ought to be more for the protagonist. Stoppard defines Herzen by history rather than action; consequently, O’Byrne speaks to make the words big instead of allowing the words—those dim, desperately grasped-upon ideas—to make him big. A character defined by words alone is more golem than human.

However, within the context of the entire cycle, Shipwreck is a far more enjoyable evening. It’s not often that we get to see characters grow over several decades or to see talented actors like Richard Easton and Martha Plimpton making the most of small roles. The extra layers from play to play add dimensions to otherwise static scenes, and even at its most boring, director Jack O’Brien has made The Coast of Utopia beautiful to look at. Shipwreck winds up, fittingly, like Herzen: focused more on the technical marvels of O’Brien and company than the emotional range of O’Byrne and company. (Not to diminish the cast in whole: Bianca Amato and Amy Irving, among others, are stunning.)

Because there is less meat to Shipwreck, O’Brien has flavored his theatrical stew with vibrant staging and a transformative set. The deep recesses of the Vivian Beaumont Theater are used in full to play with perspective to show us the Place de la Concorde in Paris being sacked by revolutionaries. Giant chandeliers and oppressive skylights capture the attention and focus the mood better than complex, two-ton sets. Even the simplicity of a watercolor scrim is enough to make us feel at home in Italy. And with just the faintest touch of lighting, O’Brien can plunge us into prison or carry us across the ocean. During segues, characters sing, lending an operatic quality to an already epic cycle. It’s a pity the heart of the play doesn’t match the quality of the staging.

There are, however, high hopes for Salvage. Voyage set up believable characters and breathed the great revolutionary ideas into them. Shipwreck spends its two-and-a-half hours draining these characters of their hot air. Revolution is in the air, and even if it doesn’t reach us in Salvage, we’ll at least have one final opportunity to enjoy O’Brien’s marvelous direction.

THEATER - "Strings"

Intellectual plays are only as good as they are clever, and although Strings is occasionally very smart, the majority of Carole Buggé’s text goes about reminding us of that fact. (Characters are constantly quoting poetry as if Brit-Lit were the intellectual equivalent of street cred.) The conversations about string theory are fascinating, but not when the actors have to break the fourth wall and use illustrative examples to explain it. That’s like admitting that the parallels between science and society aren’t clear enough. As for the affair at the heart of this play—June cheats on her cosmologist husband, George, with their best friend, Rory (a particle physicist)—it must not be interesting enough, because Buggé adds their scientific idols: there’s a very foppish Isaac Newton (Drew Dix), a dowdy Marie Curie (Andrea Gallo), and a very stolid Max Planck (Kurt Elftmann). Rather than fix the tedium of the train ride or the lulls in the conversation, Buggé uses fantasy to build intimate exposition. As a final element, there’s the raw emotion of June and Rory’s dead son—not just dead, by the way, but 9/11ed. (If playwrights are going to keep using 9/11 as a tragic catchall, then I can verb the tragedy.)

Read on at [New Theater Corps]

MUSIC - Rory, "We're Up To No Good, We're Up To No Good"

We’re Up To No Good, We’re Up To No Good is a rock-by-numbers release that feels more like an exercise in historical knowledge than a performance worth noting. (It’s also worth noting that their title is an accurate description of their work on this album.) As if going down a checklist, Rory has the shrill punk of My Chemical Romance, the odd techno-paranoia of Radiohead, the myriad rock influences of decades of jamming, and a little bit of dabble here and there. But it never comes together to make an album: it’s the parts alone, not their sum. This actually makes Rory’s release more frustrating than the worthless exhortations of other raging bands. You'll undoubtedly find something you like on this wildly eclectic album, but you'll just as assuredly lose it again in a stream of non sequiturs.

Read on at [Silent Uproar]

THEATER - "Heresy"

Sabina Berman’s Heresy, playing at the HERE Arts Center, is an attempt both to represent the immigration of colonists to Mexico in the 16th century and the religious persecution of the Jews, even in the New World. The cast’s blunt speechifying makes the result more like a history lesson; the black boxes, hats, and masks left scattered across the empty emphasize this schoolhouse atmosphere. But it’s not a bad play, and as educational theater (based on autobiography), it’s surprisingly solid.

Read on at [New Theater Corps]

MUSIC - The Scourge of the Sea, "Make Me Armored"

The Scourge of the Sea is either playing against archetype on their new album, Make Me Armored, or exactly to it. Lo-fi alternative meets upbeat folk music, yoked tenuously to cynical love songs. There’s no politics here, just a lovelorn melancholy, but the folk roots (far from Simon & Garfunkel, regardless of the lyrics,( “Goodbye darkness, my old friend”) are what sell this act. Jaded, but not jagged, the album is surprisingly sweet, even though the poetics are often cliché (“your summer eyes were full of grace”), cryptic (“but I tied my love to the paper bag and I tied a jackal to my leg”), saccharine (“my sweet one hurts when she goes down my throat/my sweet one is a thirty-two ounce coke”), or all three at once. But hey, if the songs stay light even when the material gets dark, then so can I.

Read on at [Silent Uproar]