Month: February 2015

From a 1.8.10 N.Y. Times article by the late David Carr, called “Me, Campaign? Just Go To The Film”: “Mo’Nique, 42, says she cares deeply about Precious and is thrilled to be among the mentioned, but she is not about to reorganize her life or her priorities to get her mitts on an Oscar. The Mo’Nique Show, her daily talk show on BET, just began in October, and while other hopefuls are criss-crossing the country for all manner of events, chatting up Oscar bloggers and making sure that everyone knows that they want it, Mo’Nique is mostly here in Atlanta, tending to her show, this past year.

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Well, it turns out that all the bellyaching and predictions of doom about the demise of net neutrality and the advent of “fast lanes” and all those assumptions about FCC Tom Wheeler being a cable-industry toady were wrong. For this morning the Federal Communications Commission did the right thing by voting 3 to 2 to regulate broadband internet service as a public utility, which is a major milestone and a blow for equal internet access and cause for dancing in the streets.

This is excellent news for everyone out there and easily one of the proudest accomplishments of the Obama administration. If David Carr was still with us he’d write a hell of a column about this. Sasha Stone owes Wheeler an apology.

The new rules ensure that no content will be blocked and that the net will not be divided “into pay-to-play fast lanes for big media companies that can afford it and slow lanes for everyone else…[which] are hallmarks of the net neutrality concept,” in the words of the N.Y. Times story. Wheeler said the F.C.C. was using “all the tools in our toolbox to protect innovators and consumers” and preserve the internet’s role as a “core of free expression and democratic principles.” He added that interest access was “too important to let broadband providers be the ones making the rules.”

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An instinct told me to put off seeing Lone Scherfig‘s The Riot Club (IFC Films, 3.27 theatrical/VOD) during last September’s Toronto Film Festival. I had gone cold on her after enduring One Day, which I found almost shockingly tepid and underwhelming after Scherfig’s highly enjoyable Italian for Beginners and especially An Education. The Riot Club is based on Laura Wade‘s Posh, a 2010 stage play about a swaggering attitude of entitlement and imperviousness known to the sons of the British conservative upper classes. (British Prime Minster David Cameron is a former member.) The play and the film (which Wade also wrote) are based on the real-life Bullingdon Club, an exclusive all-male dining club at Oxford University, going all the way back to 1780 and known for its grand banquets and trashing of restaurants.

I think we all know about rich assholes, don’t we? Do we really need to be told again that they’re all quite arrogant and loathsome?

To non-Brits, The Riot Club “will play like Brideshead Revisited meets Donna Tartt’s The Secret History meets Lord of the Flies,” wrote Hollywood Reporter critic David Rooney. “An anesthetizing inevitability creeps into the film as damning evidence stacks up that these ‘Wild Boys’ believe they can buy their way into any pleasure of their choosing and out of any scrape of their making. The far-from-revelatory conclusion is that the deck remains stacked in the class war. Duh.”

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I said it last September and I’m saying it again: Paul Dano‘s performance as the youngish Brian Wilson in Bill Pohlad‘s Love and Mercy (Roadside, 6.5) is almost spookily great. I’m telling you straight and true this is 2015’s first must-nominate performance. “Wilson’s disturbed spirit hums and throbs in the 30 year-old Dano, who looks like he gained 35 or 40 pounds to play the genius Beach Boy maestro in his mid ’60s blimp period,” I wrote on 9.8.14. “You can really feel the vibrations and sense the genius-level ferment and the off-balance emotionality. Inwardly and outwardly it’s a stunning, drop-dead transformation and the finest performance of Dano’s career, hands down.

“Not to mention John Cusack also as the 40ish Wilson in the same film, which shifts back and forth between the mid to late ’60s (i.e., the recording of Pet Sounds and Smile) and the mid to late ’80s (i.e., “the Landy years”). For the last few years Cusack has been on a downturn, playing ghouls and creeps and psycho killers…my heart aches for the guy. True, he’s had two good roles over the last couple of years — Richard Nixon in The Butler and the husband-masseuse in David Cronenberg‘s Maps to the Stars — but this is a revelation. Cusack plays a gentle but very solemn and intimidated Wilson during the period in which he was under the firm hand of the disreputable Eugene Landy, who died in 2006. Cusack is child-like and Gentle Ben-ish, and as convincing and fully submitted to his task as Dano is to his. For the first time in my moviegoing life I wasn’t bothered by two actors playing the same character — quite a landmark.

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When I was 12 or 13 I had no tolerance for math and was flunking algebra, and so my parents sent me to a math tutor, an old guy who really smelled old and occasionally acted old. Which is to say he was rigid, autocratic and even scolding from time to time. He made me write down algebraic equations until they came out of my ears, and these late-afternoon sessions were so painful that, unfair as it sounds, I gradually came to hate the tutor as much as the math. When the sessions finally ended after a few weeks I put them in a little box and the box in a drawer, and after a decade or so I’d completely forgotten about the whole mathematical agony of it all. Algebra, trigonometry and calculus were torture, and I never once used any of my arduous math lessons in any kind of practical way. If I need to add, subtract, divide or multiply I use my iPhone calculator. The people who made me study math all those years in high school were sadists.

In any event yesterday I saw Ethan Hawke‘s Seymour, An Introduction, a documentary portrait of retired classical pianist and present-tense teacher Seymour Bernstein, who’s now 87. God help me but I almost hated it. Not because it’s badly made or uninteresting, though I wouldn’t exactly call it riveting. It’s because the more I watched Hawke’s film, the less I was able to handle Bernstein the man.

I admire Bernstein’s passion and skill and delicacy as he instructs and plays — don’t get me wrong. And I marvelled at various pearl-like insights that he passes along. He explains that the order of music reflects the order of the cosmos…love it…and that “most people don’t tap the God within” and that his most profound joy as a teacher comes when “I pour it into you,” as he says to a longtime student. Awesome. But Bernstein’s persistent and gently domineering manner reminded me of my math tutor from 7th grade, and I’m sorry but as loving and impassioned as Hawke’s film is it mainly re-ignited my rage. I started to clench up early on. Bernstein is so needling and exacting, so interruptive and particular. It made me nervous just watching him put a female student through the wringer. If I was one of Bernstein’s piano students I would go absolutely nuts. I would get up and say “thank you for your time, Mr. Bernstein” and walk out and never return.

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