cityArts
Edited by Armond White
New York’s Review of Culture . CityArtsNYC.com com
Locked Inside the Kubrick Cult Room 237 lets nerds shine By Armond White
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ollowing the IFC Center’s very canny “The Films of Stanley Kubrick” series, comes the documentary Room 237 which sums up the Stanley Kubrick cult. Comprised of theories spoken by five different Kubrick nerds over an assemblage of movie clips and diagrams by director Rodney Ascher, Room 237 pretends to dissect Kubrick’s 1980 movie The Shining. Ascher’s film—a true mockumentary if ever there was one—is named after the Overlook Hotel suite where little Danny sees Kubrick’s most disturbing visions due to his gift for “shining.” Every nerd wants to shine. But Room 237 is an even more disturbing vision of post-cinephilia asininity. The theories proposed by the five unseen nerds and elaborated by Ascher, (whose fondness for eccentricity suggests Escher), are not just wildly different from each other, they demonstrate a current style of cinematic illiteracy that has replaced critical thinking. Actually an embarrassment to the highbrow Kubrick, Room 237 shows that the Kubrick cult consists of that breed who like to think they think. However, the hypotheses presented, (and seemingly validated by use of actual— pirated?—Kubrick clips), resist rationality. I’ve long realized that Kubrick’s stature among film geeks certified a paradigm shift from the Hitchcock era when the legendary master of suspense—and of montage—inspired a different, popular breed of film enthusiast than Kubrick whose esoteric, post-WWII misanthropy fed recent generations of kiddie nihilists who, considering themselves especially smart, responded to his stiff (non-sensual, thus anti-Hitchcockian) compositions. (They’re now the Fincher/ Nolan kids.) Recall Kubrick’s tracking shots from Paths of Glory and Lolita to Full Metal Jacket that were more deterministic than Max Ophuls who tracked to observe transitory life while Kubrick’s steadicam tracks bore down and confined life’s possibilities. No Kubrick film exemplified this determinism like The Shining, a horror movie about existential claustrophobia that seems angled to mean much more. But whatever it is exactly, (and that fastidious Stephen King adaptation is surprisingly, unexpectedly sloppy), brings the Kubrick cult of Room 237 to weird ecstasies of obsessive overthinking. Watching Room 237 you can’t avoid the problem of contemporary film criticism shallowness. Unlike Wim Wenders’ Room 666, a celebration of cinephilia where a range of filmmakers discussed their inspirations at the Cannes film festival, Room 237 is strictly concerned with the
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fantasies produced by nerds’ uneducated responses to the Kubrick myth and the irrationality of The Shining. Fans seem unable to recognize the film’s failings and so try to make virtues of its mistakes. “Kubrick often in many of his movies would end them with a puzzle so he’d force you to go out of his movies saying ‘What was that about?’” So says one zealot who responds to cinema the way a child reacts to a video game, trusting that a manufacturer cares about his response. Another nerd says “[Kubrick] is like a megabrain for the planet who is boiling down, with all of this extensive research, all of these patterns of our world and giving them back to us in this dream of a movie.” Sorry to say but this inanity redounds to the global reach of Roger Ebert’s TV reviewing. Room 237 doesn’t raise one’s appreciation of The Shining (cue laff track), instead, it confuses response. It features reenactments of Kubrick placing a Calumet baking powder canister, paranoid shots from All the President’s Men, shots of Tom Cruise cruising in Eyes Wide Shut and, for seriousness, there are even purloined images from Schindler’s List to justify the suggestion that Kubrick was actually expounding upon timeless examples of genocide. It is Ebert’s pretense of “criticism” that moves these nerds to insist that The Shining must be important because it is more than just a horror movie. Their theories concentrate on gaffes and continuity errors which is exactly the sort of “criticism” that Ebert made available to couch potato cineastes. One enthusiast claims “Its contradictions pile up in your subconscience.” Another recidivist viewer claims “When you see things over and over again their meanings change for you…He’s playing with your acceptance of visual information and also your ignorance of visual information.”
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This is hero-worship, not analysis. Another nerd says “We are dealing with a guy who has a 200 IQ.” Reverence for Kubrick overwhelms any understanding of The Shining. It is symptomatic of today’s celebrity veneration—the flip-side of the feeling of nothingness that makes nerds bow down to the likes of Nolan, Fincher, Soderbergh and Kubrick. So they fantasize about The Shining’s supposed profundity as when one professes, “We all know from postmodern film criticism that the meanings are there whether or not the filmmaker is aware of them.” This is the mess that criticism has come to. Fake erudition causes another to muse, “Why would Kubrick make the movie so complicated? Yeah, why did Joyce write Finnegan’s Wake?” This goofy exchange shows they don’t know the difference between literary and cinematic erudition. These Shining geeks don’t even know the hotel story of Alain Resnais’ Last Year at Marienbad, a truly profound expression of memory and desire. They ignore the human significance of Jack Nicholson telling his son Danny “I would never hurt you.” In this warped cathexis, the cynical gotcha coincidences carry hidden importance that means more than the clear, apparent behavior and imagery. The Kubrick cult dispenses with traditional humanist notions of art appreciation. They prize Kubrick for The Shining’s horror movie ugliness, perverting Diane Arbus’s twins, turning an elevator into a bloody diluvium (although as Pauline Kael observed “No one takes an elevator in this movie anyway”). Without any schooling in visual or literary interpretation, the Kubrick cult is left to bizarre fantasizing. One nervously giggles “I’m trapped in this hotel. There’s no escape, there’s like this endless loop.” So we’re subjected to ideas about Kubrick’s face subliminally photoshopped in clouds, an actor’s erection, a Rodeo poster turned minotaur and a Dopey dwarf decal. Ascher subjects his witnesses to humiliation that’s no better than his unidentified steal from Murnau’s magnificent Faust, where a silly narrator adds Kubrick “found the Holocaust of such evil magnitude that he just couldn’t bring himself to treat it directly.” When Ascher isn’t holding Kubrick obsession up to ridicule, his presentation yet implies the same credibility the Internet gives fanboys. Like Internet criticism, Room 237 resembles the kind of conspiracy theory mania that kooks used to put on single-spaced mimeographed sheets and pass out on street corners. The ultimate nerd testimony says “In your own life, your point of view is being altered by your study.” But this isn’t study which means to examine, this is mere obsession. Room 237 is another confirmation of the end of cinephilia.
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JA ZZ AT LINCOLN CE NTE R 25 YEARS OF JAZZ
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Return of the Poet Langston Hughes’“Ask Your Mama” gets a one night only revival By Valerie Gladstone the bad plus Photo Cameron Wittig
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BRANFORD MARSALIS QUARTET PLUS ALI JACKSON PRESENTS YES! TRIO
Saxophonist Branford Marsalis and his quartet with an opening set by jlco Drummer Ali Jackson and his yes! Trio
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THE BAD PLUS WITH BILL FRISELL The Bad Plus—pianist Ethan Iverson, bassist Reid Anderson, and drummer Dave King—is joined by guitarist Bill Frisell
KINGS OF THE CRESCENT CITY Victor Goines leads an all-star ensemble with Marcus Printup, Reginald Veal, and more, celebrating the music of Louis Armstrong, Sidney Bechet, Jelly Roll Morton, and King Oliver
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Michael Feinstein explores classics by Ellington, joined by Kurt Elling, Brianna Thomas, Jerron “Blind Boy” Paxton, and Tedd Firth
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mmy-award winning composer, Laura Karpman, started thinking about staging Langston Hughes’ twelve-part, epic poem, “Ask Your Mama: 12 Moods for Jazz” when she came across it in a bookstore six years ago. Begun by the great poet in 1960 while attending the Newport Jazz Festival, where the likes of Dizzy Gillespie, Louis Armstrong, Ray Charles, Muddy Waters and John Lee Hooker performed, it celebrates the African-American fight for artistic and social freedom. The poem was revived in Karpman’s one-night staging at the Apollo theater last weekend. “It’s gorgeous – a masterpiece,” Karpman says on the phone from Los Angeles recently. “What persuaded me to take it on was Hughes’ explicit musical direction. His hand is everywhere. He’d planned to produce it with [bassist] Charlie Mingus. The different elements, like a mash-up, actually fit more in the present than even in his own time. I thought, what an opportunity. I can work with this amazing poet.’” Inspired by the work’s passion and complexity, she transformed Hughes’ haunting poetry into a multi-media production, combining video clips, spoken word performance, samples of original jazz recordings, German lieder, gospel, Jewish liturgy and African drums with Hughes
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as the primary narrator. The Manhattan School of Music Sinfonia, under the direction of George Manahan, and a superb cast, featuring singers, Jessye Norman and Nnenna Freelon, Meshell Ndegeocello on bass and the spoken word artist, Roger Guenveur Smith, add layers of meaning and emotion to the overall concept. Karpman’s first move when she started the project was to enlist Norman as her co creator. The singer’s story somewhat replicates that of Leontyne Price, one of the first African Americans to sing at the Metropolitan Opera House and a historical character featured in Hughes’ work. Once she was on board, nothing could stop Karpman. “The poem tells an incredibly artistically nuanced story of race, slavery and poverty and who benefits in our society,” she says. “It takes everyone out of their comfort zones.” A seasoned collaborator, she not only writes music for films and television but also for video games and thrives on bringing together different artistic forms. . Freelon credits Karpman with creating a groundbreaking work, without using any tricks or sacrificing the poem’s beauty. “When Laura and Jessye put their heads together, all that talent they both have came together in a new cultural high,” she says. “Jessye’s kindness and beauty as an artist gave us all space. You come to realize that the music is more important than you are. It’s been the ride of a lifetime - and I’ve been on the road for 35 years.” “Ms. Karpman’s music, melding Ivesian collage with club-culture remixing, morphed from one vivid section to the next in a dreamlike flow,” wrote Steve Smith in The New York Times at the premiere at Carnegie Hall in 2009.
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CITYARTS FILM
Out-loud Outlaw P.J. Hogan’s Mental offers a compassionate screwball masterpiece By Armond White
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.J. Hogan, Australia’s most appealing yet least heralded filmmaker, returns to prominence with Mental, a kind of musical screwball comedy about social misfits that at first seems perfectly designed for the era of “It Gets Better” nostrums. But Hogan is bolder than the politically correct pandering of TV’s fatuous Glee and The New Normal or films like The Kids Are Alright; he goes to the heart of social alienation with visionary wildness. The opening scene of Aussie housewife Shirley (Rebecca Gibney) twirling in the backyard of the suburban home she shares with five daughters and an estranged husband imitates The Sound of Music’s extravagant opening. To recognize this berserk parody is to be inside Shirley’s disaffection and that‘s the key to Hogan’s unique, antic sensibility. Still twirling, he launches into her household chaos and social rejection, using fastpaced Aussie dialect that may bewilder some before playing his wild card: Shaz (Toni Collette), a heroine-catalyst even crazier than the housewife.
The aggressive Collette, who starred in Hogan’s debut film Muriel’s Wedding, always suggested a commedia dell arte performer unfortunately stuck in neorealist contexts. She finds perfect placement here as a kind of Mary Poppins who brings balance—self-acceptance and self-defense—to the unfair circumstances of housewifery, motherhood and girlhood. Far beyond a feminist, Shaz declares herself “the avenging angel of the perpetually humiliated.” Her vengeance is both funny and scary (especially a menstrual protest that is surreal where Bridesmaids was merely gross). Shaz hates the social order that has wronged her and means to “upset the delicate balance of its vanity.” She also recalls Renoir’s archetypal anarchist Boudou come to save Shirley and her daughters from drowning in abuse. Daringly, Hogan always snaps back from Shaz’s pain with equally manic humor. Mental is driven by Hogan’s identification with the dissatisfaction of social customs (“roles give you cramp” sang Lesley Woods of The Au Pairs). Such emotional affinity also allowed Hogan to achieve his astonishing, adult-worthy version of Peter Pan in 2003 and his superb though little-known Unconditional Love where his underdog compassion was first articulated through the appeal of popular music. Like Britain’s Terence Davies, Hogan understands how pop music sustains otherwise inexpressible
longings. These artists find depth is what gets dismissed as camp (what TV’s Glee diminishes into camp). Mental staves off psychosis through the spirit of out-loud expression. Shaz is an out-loud outlaw and so is Hogan who depicts Shaz and Shirley’s world in ostentatiously vibrant colors. Mental has a frantically optimistic look comparable to Wes Anderson stylization but with an intentionally psychedelic edge—on the verge of a breakdown or break-out. Shirley’s teenage daughter’s love scene at an amusement park flume ride is a yellow and blue night fantasia reminiscent of the pubescent flying scenes in Peter Pan. (It’s balanced by Shaz’s own red-tinted underwater trance.) Hogan’s sympathy with his male characters (Anthony LaPaglia and a striking Liev Schreiber) also puts him at the forefront of gender issue artists. Gus Van Sant and Todd Haynes can’t touch Hogan’s egalitarian humanism. He doesn’t
promise that life will get better without a fight but he is most moving when he uses music as part of the personal-political arsenal. Mental also pays tribute to Stephen Elliott’s Rodgers & Hammerstein cult film Welcome to Woop Woop which similarly redefined Down Under identity in pop terms. Shaz does a hilarious monologue on exported pop stars as test mice, satirizing Hogan’s native allegiance. It’s part of Hogan’s emotional abundance and visual daring, gifts that confirm him as a major filmmaker. Follow Armond White on Twitter at 3xchair
L I V E J A Z Z N I G H T LY ‘The Best Jazz Room in the City’ —Tony Bennett R E S E R VAT I O N S 212-258-9595 / 9795 JALC.ORG / DIZZYS
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Holy Week at St. Thomas More Church 65 East 89th Street (betw. Madison & Park) (212) 876-7718 Website: http://www.thomasmorechurch.org
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St. Thomas More Church welcomes Priests from the Faculty of St. Joseph’s Seminary, Yonkers, NY Rev. James Massa, Rev. William Cleary, Rev. Charles Fink Holy Thursday, March 28th at 6:00 p.m. Concelebrated Mass of the Lord’s Supper Good Friday, March 29th Service of “The Seven Last Words” at 1:00 p.m. Solemn Liturgy of the Lord’s Passion and Death at 3:00 p.m. Holy Saturday, March 30th, at 8:00p.m. Solemn Liturgy of the Easter Vigil Also at St. Thomas More: Good Friday at 6:00 p.m. Stations of the Cross and Veneration of the Cross (Choral music with the St. Thomas More Choir at each service) Easter Sunday Masses Easter Vigil Mass, Holy Saturday, March 30th, 8:00 p.m. Sunday Masses 8:30, 9:45, 11:15 a.m. and 12:45 p.m. No Evening Mass on Easter Sunday
A hip-hop icon’s chronicle of reincarnated rap culture By Elena Oumano
Veterans are Honored Here We are committed to celebrating the significance of lives that have been lived, which is why we have always made service to veterans and their families a priority. Many of the men and women who protected our freedoms do not receive the proper respect they are entitled to at their passing. Sometimes this is because their families and funeral providers may be unaware of the veteran benefits available, or it may be because they simply did not know what their final wishes were. That is why we are pleased to offer you this Veterans Planning Guide. By reading the information and completing the appropriate forms, you will take an important step for your future peace of mind and at the same time secure all the Veterans burial benefits you are entitled to. To receive a complimentary Veterans Planning Guide or to learn more about preplanning options, contact us at 212-288-3500.
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apper Snoop Dogg’s not the first African-American musician to be smitten by reggae culture. For the most part, though, Black American traditions, both religious and musical, are too entrenched and compelling themselves to cede to Haile Selassie worship over the one drop riddim. Still, old school Rasta-reggae’s fiery moral rhetoric, loping beats, and marijuana-laced visions of peace, love, and equal rights haven’t lost their appeal, as evidenced by the newly converted Snoop. This well-crafted documentary, Reincarnated follows an older, perhaps wiser Snoop, now distanced from the violence of his O.G. rapper persona and his penchant for walking girls on leashes, as he explores Jamaica, the birthplace of Jah music, and joins in its effort to revive a flagging cultural dream that the universal language of reggae will bring the world together. There’s always been a Jamaican flava to Snoop, as some observe in the film, and it’s not just the permanent wreath of ganja smoke encircling his head; it’s also in his own cranked-down rhythms and the left turns in his personal style. Over the course of 98 minutes, as he divides his time between lushly filmed touristic sites such as Port Antonio’s seaside Geejam
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compound of state-of-the-art recording facilities and luxury guest cottages where he knocks out Reincarnated, his surprisingly authentic—Jafaikan accent included—debut reggae album, and the harsher realities of downtown Kingston’s Tivoli Gardens and Trench Town, he morphs from Dogg to Lion before the viewer’s eyes. It would be easy to dismiss Reincarnated, film and album, as an aging American rapper’s desperate scramble for currency. But there’s no denying Snoop’s sincerity here and the film neatly interlaces its Jamaican scenes with footage from his American experience accompanied by his perceptive commentary on the parallels between ghetto life in urban California and Jamaica. Despite on-screen interactions with reggae icons like Bunny “Wailer” Livingston and Marley’s son Damien, Snoop doesn’t come across as overly Bobish or making what would be a foolish bid indeed for Marley’s mantle. In this film, at least, he’s modest and gracious, a reformed man trying to practice the One Love he’s now preaching. A telling moment takes place in Tivoli Gardens, where over 70 people recently died trying to keep the government from extraditing their “don,” Christopher “Dudus” Coke, to the U.S. where he’s now imprisoned. When a rum-addled local gets in Snoop’s face, he smiles and mildly counters, “You need some of this Cali weed,” passes him a spliff, and everyt’ing is irie, mon.
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