Robocaller

You may have to call in The Terminator if you find yourself in a film called Robocaller. Yes your warranty is expiring and no you don’t have a student loan or a low interest mortgage and um yes you, you may no you don’t want the chance to win a free Disney cruise to the Bahamas, but pause….hello, hello, who is this? Does anyone realize you were just in the process of taking a whizz when you stopped, held it in, thinking it was your thirty-year-old daughter, your sixty-year-old year old partner or your ninety-year- old uncle who all needed you, when the call came in from the Cyclides. You've never heard of them? They’re the recently discovered Pacific atoll whose major industry is offshore banking, phone banking that is. Acres and acres of the Cyclides are filled with phone banks whose workers are housed in complexes with their own modern malls in which those work stations are themselves receiving constant calls from the national association of police chiefs in countries you have never heard of or even games like Second Life, in which virtual industries pump out calls that come in staccato bursts, like machine gun fire. Have you serviced your car, your vacuum cleaner? Are you philanthropic or interested in philately? Do you know that for as little as $13 a month you can have final expenses insurance? Do you realize how expensive funerals can be? Do you want to leave your relatives with expenses that will kill them? Call now, call then if you don’t want to lose all your documents, files and connections to everything or if you want to help out a friend, you know whose wallet has been stolen in, you yourself said it, Gibraltar. Hello, Hello…hello, hello, Kemosabe…your order, your delivery, your peace is ready or threatened.

The Final Solution: Death of a Salesman

It’s not just Trump. There’s a whole category of individual that doesn’t feel badly about things that would disturb most others. The Republicans lost the House of Representatives, but Trump has been exuberant about the election results basing his view of the midterms on the Republican control of the Senate. His glass is not only half full. His cup runneth over. Willy Loman, of Death of a Salesman fame, would not have felt the same way about the election results were he in Trump’s shoes. That’s why he’s a tragic and emblematic character who has left such an indelible impression on generations of theater goers. “Attention must be paid,” is the expression that the playwright employs in regard to his character’s plight. It’s not something anyone would worry about in relation to Mr. Trump, who gets plenty of coverage. The one thing that differs Willy Loman from Trump, for example, is the overactive conscience piece. While Willy is haunted and full of introspection, Trump walks out of defeat and declares himself the victor. It’s procrustean and unstoppable, a flow of words that literally buries anything that gets in its way. Even if you're someone who finds solace in Miller’s character, you might have a longing to be someone else, the successful salesman who’s undaunted by anything, the kind of person with a Midas touch who makes you want what he or she has. That may be the selling point for Trump's base.

The Price of Everything

At one point in the Nathaniel Kahn’s The Price of Everything, the 93 year art collector and former plastics manufacturer Stefan Edlis (who donated $500 million worth of art to The Art Institute of Chicago) quotes Oscar Wilde to the effect that "there are a lot of people who know the price of everything and the value of nothing." Brecht would have had a feast with the cast of Kahn’s documentary about the art world to the extent that you have what’s essentially value free economics applied to judgments relating to the beauty and value of artistic creation. Imagine Jeff Koons as a character in Mahagonny whose famous line “so gross war die achtung fur gelt in dieser zeit,” could easily appy here. Koons is the person every purist loves to hate, along with Damien Hirst, but the beauty of his work is that it’s so much about both the manufacturing and rape of art. A cut from The Wolf of Wall Street appears in the film and Koons is definitely a creature whose esthetic was formed at the trading desk. It’s really not hyperbole to compare his works to derivatives both literally and metaphorically. Nor is it being critical of the filmmaker to say that all the emotion that characterized Kahn’s previous film about his father, the elusive Louis Kahn, My Architect,” is absent from this documentary about the sterile way money and art have become inextricably tied together like as one of Kahn’s subjects says, “siamese twins.” You have neuro-economics. Is "economic esthetics" the term for this latest evolution of art history? Clement Greenberg  was the ideologist for abstract expressionism which he looked at as a necessary by-product of history much the way the withering away of the state would be for Marx in the dialectical materialism paradigm. Perhaps the art critic Barbara Rose, who appears Cassandra-like in the film, can be relied on as his alter ego. But here's a question that the film doesn’t pose. What would you prefer, a non-existent art market, in which artists had patrons like the Medicis (during the Renaissance) or the  present situation where conglomerates run galleries in a $56 billion dollar a year business that has little interest in or appreciation of the work of artists confronting demons in the solitude of their studios?

A Private War

Matthew Heineman’s A Private War is an example of how a movie can be both searing and truthful while remaining totally unbelievable. Even in the face of a barely fictionalized reality, it's hard to suspend disbelief.The portrait of the Marie Colvin (Rosamund Pike), the chain smoking hard drinking war correspondent who emanated from Oyster Bay and broke major stories like the murder of civilians at Homs for the London Times is doubtless true. Yet what to do with a character who emerges as a pure stereotype. The same problem, by the way, plagued Margarethe von Trotta’s biopic of Hannah Arendt where the philosopher never appeared without a cigarette hanging out of the side of her mouth. In A Private War this reaches epidemic proportions when the subject, with bombs falling all around  her and with shards of concrete raining down on her laptop, is still lighting up. By the way where does one get the constant supply of cigarettes in a war zone where there's no food or water? Did Colvin have a special armored van which transported cartons of these distructive little missiles wherever she intrepidly went. No matter how documentary the intent, no fiction film convey actual dialogue. 
And it doesn’t help that the exchanges in Arash Amel’s script whether on the subject of the momentous events occurring or Colvin’s own private war with PTSD or addiction are totally leaden and perfunctory. Nor is the clumsy narrative structure with its laborious and predictable countdown to the events culminating in Colvin's own death in Homs any help. It's always discomforting to poke holes in a hagiography (particularly one like his which is well-merited). But it needn't detract from Colvin's legacy to point out that A Private War fails to do justice to its subject.

Visconti's Senso

Luciano Visconti’s Senso (1954) currently in revival at Film Forum begins with a riot that breaks out at a performance of Verdi’s patriotic opera Trovatore in Venice's famed Fenice, during the Risorgimento. Senso is plodding and doesn’t carry the weight of the great Visconti masterpiece The Leopard (1963), which also takes place in a similar period of Italian history. Both movies deal with the decline of the aristocracy and the rise of nationalism, but Senso is far more perverse. It’s heroine Countess Livia Serpieri (Alida Valli) falls for the reprobate Austrian Franz Mahler (Farley Granger). Visconti brilliantly frames Mahler’s reflection in a mirror as his character says, “I like looking at myself to make sure it’s me.” He’s a lady’s man and eventually a drunk and his whole life is devoted to the satiation of appetite. The countess sacrifices everything for him and also ends up betraying her ideals. In a climactic scene she finds herself demeaned and degraded by a man who mocks her as he cavorts with a local prostitute. The sexual depravity and violence of Rocco and His Brothers (1960) is prefigured in this drunken reunion. Wandering through the crowds of drunken soldiers in the streets of Verona in her elegant gown, the countess, a loss soul, recalls another casualty of the romantic agony, Truffaut’s Adele H (1975). Senso’s influence is also felt in Bertolucci’s Before the Revolution (1964) whose conflicts are also manifest in an opera house (in that case Parma) where another Verdi opera, Macbeth, is playing. The movie’s neorealist battle scenes are like paintings come to life. However, the beauty of Senso and its weakness is that it never really transcends its operatics. The current version, with subtitles by Michael F. Moore and Bruce Goldstein, includes some of the original English language dialogue written by Tennessee Williams and Paul Bowles.

What's the Difference Between the Melancholy Dane and a Stale Danish?

What is the difference between Hamlet and his culinary equivalent, the melancholy Danish? The chief one is that Hamlet is a character in a play and being a pastry, the Danish, despite its filling, will not possess the same rich inner life. On the other hand when considering both Hamlet and a melancholy Danish, great similarities may be found in the way the character and the food in question comport themselves. “Let them eat brioche” is the famed expression attributed to Marie-Antoinette. But let’s go to your average diner counter where a cheese Danish is likely to be sitting all by itself on a raised platter with a glass top. There’s always something sullen and dejected about such a Danish and the solitude may recall Shakespeare’s character to the customer who’s contemplating getting something to go with the coffee he's taking back to the office. In the old days when there were jukeboxes, you might hungrily stare at the Danish and slip a few quarters in to hear “Mr. Pitiful,” for the l00th time while deciding whether you were going for it. Ultimately, you weren’t going to waste your calories on an item that’s neither fish nor fowl. And therein lies a similarity in the existential predicament of the Danish and Hamlet who famously asks “Whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to suffer The  slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, Or to take arms gains a sea of troubles. And by opposing end them?” Though he might be plagued by doubts, Hamlet does possess agency which is what in the end will separate him perhaps not from his fellow Danes, but certainly from the average Danish. The Danish exudes a sadness due to the fact that it's caught between a rock and a hard place, being the kind of item that's chronically ignored and finally left to get stale. Hamlet’s famed words “Weary, stale, flat and unprofitable,” are a good way to describe the plight of the melancholy Danish.

Is Your Moon in Windshield?

Are you Scorpio Rising or is your moon in windshield? It’s nice to tempt or even know fate, but where are you going to turn to for answers? If you go to a storefront palm reader you’re likely to be wasting your time. Still, one is always tempted. You may walk in off the street on a rainy day, as a lark. A little knowledge is a dangerous thing, but on the other hand, if you could have a lot of knowledge and if that knowledge wasn’t necessarily positive, what would you do? Simply put your affairs in order? Another catch phrase is “knowledge is power.” Really? Some people will have none of Madame Blavatsky and Tarot. Instead they head out to the Mayo Clinic for a body scan, hoping of course to get a clean bill of health, but also, one would suppose, ready and willing to let the chips fall where they may. Oedipus tried to do precisely this and brought about everything he was afraid of in his attempt to escape the prophecy he received from the Oracle at Delphi; Faust sold his soul for knowledge. Self-fulfilling prophecies are one of the most common by-products of crystal ball gazing to the extent that people often bring about the very thing they’re most afraid of. The irrational element in “loss aversion” is one of the things that the neuro-economist Daniel Kahneman has demonstrated in his writings. Ultimately there may be enough complexity in knowable things that earthly rather than transcendental meditation may provide just the answers you're looking for.