Movie reports

It was Svet's first day back from his fortnight in Poland, having arrived at Dulles late Wednesday, so I let him decide what all we were going to do Thursday. They must not have movie theaters in Poland, cause the activity he picked us for Thursday evening was to go to a movie. He knows of my fascination and interest with Josh Hartnett, so he was nice and picked Lucky Number Slevin for our movie.

The movie was pretty good. Josh is actually learning how to act! And, best of all, he spends a great deal of time in the movie wearing nothing but a towel!

There was a surprisingly strong cast for the movie. Of course, Josh and Bruce Willis were the headliner stars, but the principal cast was full of major names like Morgan Freeman, Sir Ben Kingsley, and Lucy Liu. The movie isn't going to win any Academy Awards, but it was thoroughly enjoyable and I didn't regret paying for my ticket.

_________________________

I was still being nice yesterday and despite my several suggestions for alternative activities, last night he decided he wanted to go see yet another movie! I think his time in Poland must have stunted his social skills. I tried to steer him in several different movie directions, but he insisted on seeing Thank You for Smoking. All I can say is that I'm glad he paid for my ticket and I didn't have to spend any money on it.

This flick stars Aaron Eckhart as Nick Naylor, a lobbyist for the smoking and tobacco industry, and his nemesis Senator Ortolan K. Finistirre played by William H. Macy. Robert Duvall offers an excellent perfomance in the small part of "The Captain," and cameo roles are filled by Rob Lowe, Sam Elliott, and Katie Holmes. The script is filled with tired stereotypes and clichés designed for cheap laughs.

Save your money.

Public art

Beauty is one of those necessities of modern society. Certainly here in the District of Columbia, nature itself can provide beauty with springtime cherry blossoms or autumn leaves, and we have many, many old public buildings with intriguing and beautiful architecture. Modern architecture, though, tends to be rather more spare, streamlined, boring, or even downright ugly. Recognizing this and the need of the soul for beauty, especially in urban settings, Congress has enacted laws requiring a certain percentage of building construction and remodeling costs be dedicated to art.

In these days of ever-expanding defense and security spending, a lot of the art budget is being squeezed out in public buildings. Since the need of the people for beauty still exists, the private sector seems to be stepping up their efforts to fill in the void. Art is not something to be reserved solely to the wealthy.

One of the examples of this private sector public art is a sculpture I pass several times a week as I walk to and from Georgetown. The Four Seasons Hotel has a large bronze sculpture between their entry drive and the sidewalk that is both striking and fascinating.



Illuminated Crowd is a contemporary resin sculpture by British expatriot Raymond Mason (1922— ) which was installed in large scale in Montreal in 1985 outside the Banque Nationale de Paris; the Four Seasons acquired the bronze smaller scale study for the large work in 2005.

It's a great piece. Most art stuck outside businesses and office buildings is pretty boring and nondescript, usually some token geometric form with no real substance to it. Mason's work, however, has prompted me to stop and look on several occasions. It has this interesting quality of evolving from order into chaos.



The front of the sculpture shows a rather orderly crowd looking very proper and goal oriented, then as one looks deeper and deeper into the crowd, the order degenerates into passion, violence, and basal instinct.

Raymond Mason is one of the artists of the postmodern school. He moved to Paris in the years following World War II and helped bridge the post-war artists to the earlier twentieth century modernist masters. His works all have an involving quality that compels the viewer to be a part of the crowd, to participate in the artistic experience. While his people in Illuminated Crowd have a caricaturish quality to them, a wide range and variety of emotion is portrayed on the various faces.



These detail shots show some of the miniscenes depicted in the overall work.

The artist says that the crowd is gathered and looking towards the light or fire, which represents ideals, then as the light penetrates less and less into the people, the mood becomes rowdy and violent, showing the fragile nature of man and the flow of emotions.

Certainly, this is an emotional and compelling work. The style reminds me a lot of the Latin American art featuring short, squat, stylized figures which has been rather popular of late. Mason has been around long enough, though, that I don't know whether he's working in the Latin American modern style or if they are working in his style.

The nice thing, though, is that this is a piece of modern art which is accessible and which can actually mean something different to each person who views and perceives the installation.

I thank the Four Seasons for placing the piece where all of us in the neighborhood can appreciate it.

Just a brief moment of time

We watched The West Wing tonight, and we're finally down to the last four episodes which were shot in D.C. early last month. It was kind of fun to try to watch the extras in the backgrounds to see if I recognized any friends.

The thing that struck me most, though, was watching the funeral and cemetery scenes. They started that shoot up in Baltimore at 5:30 a.m. and it was a long, long day of shooting, yet the entire sequence including the opening credits and those long shots of the main characters dressing for the funeral was well less than ten minutes long!

I'm still thinking my scene will be in the final episode, but I'll be taping the last two, just in case.

Huh?

Okay, I just finished watching for the first time the Academy Award-winning Best Picture of 2006, Crash, on HBO. Can somebody please tell me why it was so allegedly good? How in the world did it win?

It seemed to me like an extended version of just another television cop drama like one of those Law and Order shows, with a lot of unrelated and disjointed story lines and no particular message to the whole film. I didn't see anything particularly complex or original in any of the story lines, editing, or cinematography.

I'm just kind of blasé now. Oh, well. I'm not one of the members of the Academy.

Love tonic

The happy, gay charm of Gaetano Donizetti's L'Elisir d'Amore ('the elixir of love") delighted patrons at Washington's John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts this past Thursday night with Washington National Opera's new production of the popular bel canto opera.

The beautiful, petite soprano Elizabeth Futral was breathtaking as Adina, handling her coloratura melismas with dexterity and finesse. Equally impressive was tenor Paul Groves, who sang Nemorino. His wide, open face made his good-hearted character believable and endearing, and his solo singing was generally top-notch; in fact, the only bravos to interrupt the performance were his after his emotional rendering of "Una furtiva lagrima" in the second act. Not all was perfect, though, especially in a duet between Futral and Groves near the end of the first act when their a capella section went flat and was terribly out of tune with the returning orchestra.

Sergeant Belcore was sung by French baritone Marc Barrard, making his WNO debut. Barrard had a strong voice, but this was not the ideal role for him; his vibrato was so wide it obscured the coloratura passages in some of his more famous arias, especially "Come Paride vezzoso". Some of his acting seemed rather stiff and stilted, but that may have been more the fault of stage director Stephen Lawless, who created a rather undistinguished and repetitive staging, especially for the massed chorus scenes.

We were particularly pleased to see our friend baritone Steven Condy, with whom we sang the world premiere of Ochelata's Wedding back in 2000, in the buffo role of Dr. Dulcamara, where he acquitted himself admirably. His "snake oil"-selling character was always accompanied on stage by a midget (what is the politically correct term these days?) character actor serving as his assistant.

Emmanuel Villaume conducted the Washington National Opera Orchestra, keeping them and the Washington National Opera Chorus together most of the time.

The farm storage building set for the production looked very impressive, with very realistic three-dimensional brickwork, which had been designed by Johan Engels. Joan Sullivan-Genthe's lighting design was interesting, though perhaps less than ideal, as it relied much of the time on great washes of yellow light from the large arched doors in the set, and could have used more proscenium lighting.

L'Elisir d'Amore is a light, comic opera delightfully done by Washington National Opera. It runs in repertory with Das Rheingold through April 17, and is well worth a look-see.