THE GAZETTE
Wednesday, February 12, 2014 z
Page B-9
AT THE MOVIES
‘The Monuments Men’: Great story, but result is no masterpiece BY
MICHAEL PHILLIPS
CHICAGO TRIBUNE
A genial disappointment about the preciousness of art amid the destructive horrors of war, “The Monuments Men” is scored to a military march by composer Alexandre Desplat. You hear what he was going for: jaunty heroics. The throwback sound of it suggests the director, co-writer and star George Clooney sat down with Desplat, gave him a smile and said: “Gimme some of that Elmer Bernstein ‘Great Escape’ magic, Al.” It almost works. The whole film, with its unfashionable techniques (slow fades and dissolves by the dozen) and uberrelaxed, old-school vibe, almost works. Yet Clooney’s attempt to honor unsung real-life heroes while recapturing the ensemble pleasures of some well-remembered Hollywood war pictures, notably “The Great Escape” and “The Guns of Navarone,” comes off as a modestly accomplished forgery at best. You keep waiting for it to kick into gear, for the odd-couple banter between Bill Murray and Bob Balaban to start clicking. The actors, including Matt Damon, John Goodman, Jean
THE MONUMENTS MEN n 2 stars n PG-13; 110 minutes n Cast: George Clooney, Matt Damon, Bill Murray, John Goodman, Bob Balaban, Jean Dujuardin, Hugh Bonneville and Cate Blanchett n Directed by George Clooney
Dujuardin, Hugh Bonneville and Cate Blanchett as a Parisian curator based on Rose Valland, are present and ready for duty. It’s “Ocean’s Eight,” this time with serious historical import. The script by Clooney and Grant Heslov offers the actors an outline and some functional scenes, mostly two-handers. But at some point during filming in Germany and England, Clooney must’ve realized behind the camera that his own script needed another rewrite or two to make dramatic and comic sense of its mission. “All hell’s broken loose here,” his character says at one point, traveling through another frontline scene of mass destruction. You see it, you don’t feel it, and while it’d be crazy to expect a movie such as “The
CLAUDETTE BARIUS
(From left) Dimitri Leonidas, John Goodman, George Clooney, Matt Damon and Bob Balaban in Columbia Pictures’ thriller “The Monuments Men.” Monuments Men” to dive into wartime miseries, its calculated breeziness veers perilously close to a State Department tour. It’s a wonderful subject, which makes the engagement level all the more frustrating. The curators, architects, art historians and artists of the FDRsanctioned Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives crew scrambled around Europe during the war, saving what they could, finding Nazi-looted and culturally priceless Rembrandts and
Picassos and frescoes, many of them crated deep within Hitler’s salt mines. Largely fictionalized, the film compresses events and cooks up dramatic death scenes, even as it asks the audience to chuckle through a scene of Damon’s character trapped atop an unexploded land mine. That scene is followed, abruptly, by the discovery of barrels of gold teeth extracted from Jewish concentration camp prisoners. The change-up is jarring, intention-
THEORY
WORK
Accompanying her on piano is her musical collaborator, pianist and producer Charlie Barnett, who underscores her monologues. “He improvises [while I’m] speaking. ... We have a symbiotic relationship,” Mora said. A Colorado native whose father plays jazz guitar, Mora stated singing and performing from age 3. She also started writing plays early, later earning an undergraduate degree in screenwriting and playwriting from the University of Colorado. “I’ve always loved writing, but good writing is extremely hard,” she said. “Singing comes more naturally to me.” She also became an actor and dancer, performing in the Washington, D.C. area for six years at the Round House Theatre, Woolly Mammoth Theatre, MetroStage and other venues before moving to Los Angeles two years ago. Over the years, Mora has written and performed several cabaret shows, mostly about the intersection of politics and romance, before taking on the origins of the universe. About year ago, she happened to hear an NPR “Science Friday” radio program featuring a dialogue between cosmologists and a novelist who incorporates science into his stories. Astrophysics and love have things in common, she said. “There’s the Big Bang Theory [about the origin of the universe] ... where everything collides and explodes,” she said. Cosmic dust coalesces into planets, and things start to settle down a little, much like falling in love and entering into a relationship over time. “I dived into it and thought, ‘This metaphor could really work,’” said Mora, who started reading up on everything from multiple universes to particle accelerators. Mora launched her “Einstein’s Girl” act in Los Angeles in February 2013, and it wasn’t long before it got the attention of Jennifer Ouellet, writer of the blog “Cocktail Party Physics: Physics with a Twist” for Scientific American. “[Mora] explores old-fashioned romance in the digital era, marked by snappy patter in between songs and lyrics peppered with allusions to ... cosmic inflation, singularities and of course, relativity and Albert Einstein, a.k.a.
the next person for them to write or draw something. At the end, the last person would open up the paper and read what was written or show what had been drawn. In the case of “The Exquisite Corpse Project,” the writers — Chioke Nassor, Joel Clark, Adam Conover, Dave Segal and Raphael Bob-Waksberg — would only pen their part of the script if Popik agreed to make the movie, no matter how bad it turned out. “My background is in sketch comedy,” Popik said. “That’s where we came up as a group. We started in [Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y.] and then after college we moved to New York City to pursue comedy professionally.” Popik, along with the other writers, were part of the comedy group “Olde English,” which filmed sketches that became popular on YouTube and throughout the Internet. While in New York, the group performed at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre, which is a jumping off point for many “Saturday Night Live” comedians. During one of the shows, the guys assigned each other rules by which to write sketches. As the writers learned of their rules, they were filmed and the video was shown to the audience that night. “One of the writers, one set of constraints I gave him was he had to combine his three most embarrassing memories into one sketch,” Popik said. “Rule No. 2 was that he had to write the sketch in five minutes and rule No. 3 was the five minutes starts right now. So the audience got to see me assign those rules to him … and then got to watch him scramble to write something in five minutes.
Continued from Page B-5
Continued from Page B-5
GIA MORA
Gia Mora will bring her cabaret show, “Einstein’s Girl,” to Bethesda Blues & Jazz on Saturday.
‘Albie,’” wrote Ouellette on Feb. 25, 2013. “Albie” plays a role in “E=mc2,” a song Mora co-wrote with Brad Brown, an English teacher at the Chelsea School in Hyattsville. In it, she asks Einstein, “What is love?” “He said, “Well, my girl, I know a lot about physics. “And I’ve studied me a little bit of chemistry, too. “But nothing in mathematics can explain love’s boogie woogie for two.” Mora also throws in songs about romance and social media, such as “Oh Internet,” “I Google You” and “The Facebook Song,” as well as a song she wrote called “Missing David B.-w4m-41” about missed connections on Craigslist. Mora also weaves in the latest developments in science and high-tech, such as China’s lunar rover and Google Glass. At Bethesda Blues & Jazz, she will also be singing a “quirky song” written by the composers of the musical “Orphie and the Book of Heroes,” premiering from Feb. 8-25 at the Kennedy Center. Mora sings the part of Persephone in the show. She is also working on new songs for her next cabaret show and album, and inspired by the likes of multi-faceted entertainers such as Hugh Laurie and Tracey Ullman, is working on some television pilots. In the meantime, she’s still focused on the connection between relationships and universes. “They’re explosive, momentous, life-altering events, and they take time to develop,” she said.
MEDIUM
Continued from Page B-5 a psychic medium, and I never wanted to be.” Although Crosby knew her maternal grandmother had psychic abilities, she mostly ignored her own childhood experiences, like seeing people — or ghosts — “out of the corner of my eyes,” and what is known as traveling clairvoyance, “being able to go back and forth in time,” she explained. Crosby’s skeptical mother credited her child with “a big imagination,” and she attributed her young adult daughter’s accurate predictions of when people would die to “women’s intuition,” dubbing her “the prophet of doom.” Still, prior to her awakening, the paranormal was rarely in evidence in Crosby’s adult life. After earning an undergraduate degree in economics from Agnes Scott College and an MBA from Georgia State University, she spent 20 years doing marketing and public relations for companies including The Weather Channel, Wachovia and CocaCola. Not long after the family moved to Montgomery County,
LAINE CROSBY
Crosby said, their house began to “feel a little strange,” and unexplained sounds and occurrences filled her days and nights. On Sept. 21, 2004, she woke up from a nap to hear “the sweet, soft voice of a woman” speaking to her and “saw the image of a beautiful woman with dark skin and an almond-shaped face.” That was the beginning of her continuing relationship with Jannette, the ghost of a slave who lived on the plantation in the 1850s. In a series of
conversations, Jannette told Crosby about her own romantic history: a love triangle with her master and another slave. She also showed Crosby visions of the locale through time and introduced her to other spirits, many of them denizens of the property’s slave cemetery. “My first event where I knowingly talked to a ghost was when I heard and saw Jannette physically in the room with me,” Crosby said. “She was there and it was two-way communication.” A dramatic acknowledgement of Crosby’s abilities occurred in February 2005 when she heard a television news report about a missing 9-year-old, and had a vision that revealed Jessica Marie Lunsford’s location. Crosby and her husband opted not to relay the information to the police because they thought it would not be credible. Once the truth of Crosby’s “remote viewing” was confirmed, that decision weighed heavily on her conscience, and, she wrote, “My life has never since been the same.” “It was the first time all my abilities came together and I knew the outcome of a crime. I could see, hear, smell and
ally. The effect feels misjudged. Clooney plays a Harvard art historian based on George Stout, a World War I veteran returning to the fields and villages of battle with a different objective this time. He’s the ringleader, and once he enlists James Granger (Damon, playing a character loosely inspired by James Rorimer of the Metropolitan Museum of Art), it’s a matter of lining up the best character men for the job. Murray’s introduced atop a Chicago skyscraper, with the Wrigley Building and Tribune Tower behind him. He plays an architect borrowing a bit of real-life architect Robert Posey’s story. One of the peculiarities of “The Monuments Men” is its generic texture; the men’s specific skills and interests are largely washed over. Clooney’s work as a director includes “Confessions of a Dangerous Mind,” “Good Night, and Good Luck” and “The Ides of March,” good films all. He also directed the period football comedy “Leatherheads,” proving his fallibility. “The Monuments Men” deals in an entirely different genre, but there’s a similar tonal indecision at work here. Now and then the film goes for the jugular, emotionally speak-
“What he wrote was bad … but the interesting effect that we noticed is that because the audience knew the context of the assignment, because they knew the constraints and they knew essentially why the piece was bad, they thought it was hilarious, which was very interesting.” Just like that, the fundamental building blocks of “The Exquisite Corpse Project” were assembled. The writers wrote their part of the scripts, cursing the previous writer for what they were given to work with, and the movie was shot. All the while, Popik was filming interviews with the writers, which he would use in the movie as well. Although it was written and filmed in relatively short time, the editing process ended up taking almost two years. “The original plan was to leave the writers’ sections completely intact,” Popik said. “We would see 15 minutes of one person’s section, then maybe we’d have three or four minutes of documentary material and then we’d see the next person’s completed section, then see three or four minutes of documentary material. Once we shot the whole thing, that’s how we edited it.” Popik said the first time through the editing process just did not work because the audience doesn’t want to go in and watch these 15 minute scenes straight through. “They’re too bad, especially Joel’s section … it’s quite tedious,” Popik said. “When that didn’t work, there was the mandatory panic — basically, ‘Oh my God, did we just waste months of our lives on this garbage?’ Then we started to just play around with ‘What if we introduce the documentary footage this way and that way …’ Eventually, through the editing process, we found a really satisfying way to work back and forth with the footage.”
‘know’ what was going on,” Crosby said about the pivotal event that opens her book. “Up until this point, I had gradually been recognizing abilities as I met Jannette and the other slaves on the plantation.” Being a medium does not conflict with Crosby’s devout Christianity. In fact, she wrote, “Over the years… with prayer and God’s help, I have assisted a number of spirits in crossing over into Heaven. That is, moving on from our physical dimension, through the tunnel of white light, into the dimension that is of God.” Crosby, who sets aside time before sleep to talk to her guides or angels, said she sees herself as “an instrument to help the other side connect to this world …. A mouthpiece — a channel, a medium — not really much different from a telephone or radio. As I experience information, I do the best I can to make sense of it, define it, and pass it on.” Instead of doing readings and offering advice to individuals, as is the wont of many mediums — “That is not what I’m here to do,” Crosby said — she devotes her time to investigative weekends at historic locales like the battlefields at Gettysburg;
leading psychic training classes and workshops; lecturing at venues including colleges, plantations and historical societies; researching, writing and marketing her books; and, perhaps most important, working with missing persons networks and police — free of charge. Three new books are in the works. A sequel to “The Awakening,” titled “The Adventures of a Free Range Investigative Medium,” is half done and Crosby expects to complete it by July 2015. Among its ghosts is Annabelle, who, according to Crosby, is “5, almost 6.” Crosby learned that Annabelle drowned in the Patuxent River and located her grave. “The last year she [Annabelle] remembers is 1812. It could be her birth year, or her death year. I don’t know. She did drown, and she is with me all the time, mostly, but when she’s in my house, she plays with the dogs (one alive, two dead) and with her cousins and also my kids.” An ebook, “Conversations with the Ghosts of Gettysburg,” consisting of four stories, is due out this month, and Crosby hopes to release “Real Daughters,” conversations with the
ing, as when Murray’s architect tears up listening to his family’s homemade recording of “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas.” That scene should kill, yet somehow it doesn’t. It’s not Murray’s fault: The scene needed a simpler, straighter attack, not all the fancy intercutting with field hospital trauma footage. Realism schmealism: This is a Hollywood movie. But that sort of scene takes you out of the movie you’re trying to invest in. The actors are quite marvelous, and a brief sequence featuring “Downton Abbey’s” Bonneville as dissolute art lover out for redemption, in which he asks a superior officer for permission to go into Bruges and save a Madonna, provides exactly what the rest of the movie lacks — namely, some snap. Clooney acts with more charm than urgency in “The Monuments Men.” He’s a far better actor than many realize; he makes everything look easy. But this time he really does just sort of George-Clooney his way through. See John Frankenheimer’s “The Train” again, the one with Burt Lancaster, for a wholly different and genuinely exciting perspective on the same historical outrage.
THE EXQUISITE CORPSE PROJECT n When: 4 p.m. Sunday n Where: BlackRock Center for the Arts, 12901 Town Commons Dr., Germantown n Tickets: $8 n For information: 301-5282260; blackrockcenter.org
Although the film highlights the movie created by the writers, the project itself feels like it’s a full documentary about the writers. “Well, it didn’t start out as a documentary about them,” Popik said. “When these guys all signed on, they signed on to ‘Hey, let’s play this silly game!’ and everybody was on board with that. By the end, we found the most interesting footage was in the documentary footage with their relationships and the way they dealt with each other.” In the end, Popik hopes audiences really get the feeling that the movie really was a labor of love and that everyone had more than one hand in helping to make it a reality. “I personally shot the movie,” Popik said. “We were all the editors. Everybody you see in the film, if they’re not on-screen, they’re off and holding a boom mic. It’s really a film we made ourselves and I hope the take-away for young people is that. I think a lot of filmmakers get intimidated by the budgets they see on the big screen … I think content is more important than polish in many cases. “I would really encourage people to go out there an experiment and make a lot of content and not get too hung up on making ‘Iron Man 4.’” wfranklin@gazette.net daughters of soldiers who fought for the Confederacy, in conjunction with Atlanta’s celebration of the Civil War’s 150th anniversary in the spring of 2015. Crosby’s books are selfpublished, she said, because not only does she have a background in digital publishing, but also she refused to work with publishers who wanted her to make her stories spookier to enhance their marketing value. Ample matter is available for additional books. “I save my findings and use them for future material for books, and I research when I can, so I have lots of ideas for books that are a bit unique,” she said. “My father wrote nine books, which are not in print now, and I would like to use his historical research to write historical fiction eventually — after I tackle what is already on my plate.” That’s a substantial meal, but no doubt, Crosby can enlist some help from the spirits that surround her. “Investigative Medium: The Awakening” is available on amazon.com and www. lainecrosby.com.