If you’re the type of person who gets high and talks to the magic shadow people, then this movie won’t be anything special. If you’re not well-acquainted with special brownies and hypodermic needles, this will be the closest you ever come to an acid trip. An elaborate paean to the music of the Beatles, "Across the Universe" is a string of stunning music videos cobbled together by a paper-thin (read: nonexistant) plot. For anyone who cares, the basic story follows Jude (a scruffy Jim Sturgess), who comes to America from Liverpool in search of his absentee father. Once in the states, he meets and befriends Max and his sister Lucy (Evan Rachel Wood, in a role made to define the one-note character). What else is there to do, naturally, then move in together with four or five friends and live out a counter-cultural paradise in New York City? Everything goes just swimmingly, smoking weed and attending anti-war protests, until Max gets drafted for Vietnam. Suddenly, they’re not just smoking weed, they’re smoking weed with purpose. Will Jude and Lucy manage to stay together in an ever-changing world? Will Sexy Sadie manage to keep singing without her spark o’soul bassist JoJo? Will Dear Prudence ever come out of the closet? (Answer: yes.) Does anybody care? (Answer: no.)
The truth is, director Julie Taymor cared WAAAAAAYYYYYYY more about creating a visual and musical feast than believable or empathetic characters. Taymor, who made a name for herself on Broadway as the designer behind "The Lion King" and "Aida," pulls out all the stops for the frequent musical interludes, which are not only visually spectacular but also quite clever, even witty. The viewer is swirled through a psychedelic cross-country trip to the strains of "I Am the Walrus" and dragged across Harvard while Max and his frat-boy buds regale Jude with "I Get By With a Little Help From my Friends;" then booted through the draft board with Max as Uncle Sam rears out of his recruitment poster and declares "I Want You So Bad."
The star of the show isn’t Sturgess but the Beatles’ music itself. The movie makes very free with their songs, slowing them down, speeding them up, giving the lead vocals to women, changing the instrumentation, arranging songs originally performed solo to be sung in a group and vice versa. The result is a fascinating and original take on all these old standards—everyone knows them in the original; these arrangements shake them up a bit. Add the meticulous matching of just the right character to just the right song and you have a knockout soundtrack: Sturgess and Wood, as the leads, get several selections and prove they have the vocal chops to do them justice, most notably in Jude’s wistful rendering of the title song and Lucy’s rollicking "It Won’t Be Long Now." Add genius cameos from such notables as Bono ("I Am the Walrus"), Eddie Izzard (ad-libbing a hilarious "Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite"), and Joe Cocker (as a homeless subway bum gritting out "Come Together"), plus stellar performances by torch-singer Diane Fuchs ("Helter-Skelter" "Oh! Darling"), and a gospel-choir arrangement of "Let it Be," and you have something really incredible.
But as incredible as the music and spectacle may be, the fact remains that the whole thing has a heart of fluff, and offensive fluff at that. The gratuitous sexuality completely spoils a perfectly lovely rendition of "I Wanna Hold Your Hand," sung by a girl…to a girl. The whole movie romaticizes recreational drug use with cloying naivete (go ahead! it’s fun! you get to talk to the shadow people! and have lots of sex! it’s great!). So if you can stomach the countercultural garbage, it’s worth a see simply for its magnificent music sequences (and rent something with Tom Hanks in it if you want a plot.) If you can’t, then content yourself with the soundtrack. Even non-Beatles fans won’t be able to help being exhilarated.
Thursday, July 31, 2008
Friday, May 23, 2008
Dear Enemy, by Jean Webster
Sallie McBride is perfectly content to devote her considerable energies to parties, soirees, theaters, evening gowns, and wooing her perfectly eligible suitor, thank you very much. Her friend Judy’s invitation to become the new superintendent of a sad, overcrowded, badly managed orphan asylum is met with astonishment and a laughing refusal. What could be more absurd? Her—frivolous, city-girl Sallie McBride—stuck away in a bucolic orphanage, saddled with the task of making it over completely?
But Sallie is not the pushover socialite she tries to make herself seen. The eligible suitor laughs, her family pitches a fit—and the contrary Sallie sets her jaw and accepts the job. From the moment she steps foot over the threshold of the John Grier Home, the reader knows she’s hooked for good, even if Sallie herself doesn’t. Daunted and aghast at the state of life for the hundred young orphans thrust upon her care, she takes the place firmly in hand and starts instituting what seems to her the most common of common-sense reforms, beginning with the stenciling of bright yellow rabbits across the top of the gloomy, joyless dining room.
Told in a series of breezy, witty letters from Sallie to Judy, the wife of the asylum’s new president, Gordon, her politician suitor, and to the resident doctor, a morose Scotchman (the “enemy” to whom the title refers), Dear Enemy is a bright-voiced, fast-paced, deeply interesting and entertaining read. Written in the early 1900s, it seems remarkably modern and matter-of-fact on such topics as heredity (several orphans have alcoholic or retarded parents, with sad results), divorce, and women’s rights. Webster clearly did her research—the description of a girl with alcoholic parents matches exactly the modern diagnosis of fetal alcohol syndrome.
Through her letters, the reader sees Sallie’s character develop and progress. Judy and her president husband know exactly how to manage her—when she threatens to leave, they tell her they’ve found an “inefficient but kindly middle-aged person with no chin” to take her place. Sallie pitches a fit, digs in her heels, and stays—with nothing but beneficial results for the orphans. We learn of her difficulties with the stick-in-the-mud trustees of the Home, especially fractious orphans, her increasingly annoyed—and annoying—suitor, and that exasperatingly complex doctor, whom Sallie nicknames Sandy. Catastrophe strikes, of course—followed by the most unexpected plot twist of a resolution, which only a second read can fully satisfy. This, the reader finds, is no chore.
But Sallie is not the pushover socialite she tries to make herself seen. The eligible suitor laughs, her family pitches a fit—and the contrary Sallie sets her jaw and accepts the job. From the moment she steps foot over the threshold of the John Grier Home, the reader knows she’s hooked for good, even if Sallie herself doesn’t. Daunted and aghast at the state of life for the hundred young orphans thrust upon her care, she takes the place firmly in hand and starts instituting what seems to her the most common of common-sense reforms, beginning with the stenciling of bright yellow rabbits across the top of the gloomy, joyless dining room.
Told in a series of breezy, witty letters from Sallie to Judy, the wife of the asylum’s new president, Gordon, her politician suitor, and to the resident doctor, a morose Scotchman (the “enemy” to whom the title refers), Dear Enemy is a bright-voiced, fast-paced, deeply interesting and entertaining read. Written in the early 1900s, it seems remarkably modern and matter-of-fact on such topics as heredity (several orphans have alcoholic or retarded parents, with sad results), divorce, and women’s rights. Webster clearly did her research—the description of a girl with alcoholic parents matches exactly the modern diagnosis of fetal alcohol syndrome.
Through her letters, the reader sees Sallie’s character develop and progress. Judy and her president husband know exactly how to manage her—when she threatens to leave, they tell her they’ve found an “inefficient but kindly middle-aged person with no chin” to take her place. Sallie pitches a fit, digs in her heels, and stays—with nothing but beneficial results for the orphans. We learn of her difficulties with the stick-in-the-mud trustees of the Home, especially fractious orphans, her increasingly annoyed—and annoying—suitor, and that exasperatingly complex doctor, whom Sallie nicknames Sandy. Catastrophe strikes, of course—followed by the most unexpected plot twist of a resolution, which only a second read can fully satisfy. This, the reader finds, is no chore.
Tuesday, May 20, 2008
In This House of Brede, by Rumer Godden
It’s a book about a monastery of nuns, all of whom have chosen to spend their days shut away from the world, spending hours in prayer in silence, work and study, steeping themselves in the holy and the pious.
Nice for them, but sounds like a real pill to read. After all, what does the word “monastery” conjure up? A church? A group of people all dressed alike? Incense and candles and Latin? Who wants to read about a group of women who look exactly the same, who do nothing that anyone would call exciting, who order their days like a prayer wheel, repetitious and meditative?
But here’s the thing. In This House of Brede is not boring. It’s not slow. It’s not even preachy, surprisingly enough given the subject matter. The nuns, so superficially alike in their encompassing veils and habits, aren’t. People tend to forget that nuns are women, real women who have their joys and fears and petty dramas. These are not saints or angels but people, strongly drawn characters to whom the reader can relate. Godden introduces and develops them like she’s building a wall out of pearls, not one word wasted, the story and its people slowly forming one glistening whole.
The story—although really the book unfolds more like the days of a life than a novel—revolves mainly around Philippa Talbot, a forty-two-year-old career woman in postwar England. The first time we meet her, she is giving her valuable gold clock to a junior secretary in her office. The sophisticated, successful Philippa is giving up not only her possessions but her job, a high-ranking position in a government office (rare for a woman in those days), to become a contemplative Benedictine nun at Brede Abbey.
Unthinkable! Who does that?
The rest of the book answers that question, but in such a way that the reader doesn’t even know it’s being answered. Godden doesn’t believe in pounding the lesson in with a two-by-four. The reader will turn the last page regretfully and with a sense that she understands the unthinkable action that Philippa—and the hundred other women in the monastery—has done.
To achieve that end, Godden weaves her reader into the book and fools us into thinking that we ourselves know what Philippa knows, we have met and made friends with her fellow nuns, we have made their problems our own. Godden’s style is deep and rich and mesmerizing. The book is long—400 pages—but how profound the disappointment upon realizing, at the finish, that kind Dame Perpetua, wise and quiet Dame Catherine, flighty Dame Veronica, shy, vulnerable Sister Cicely, and all the rest are not strolling in the garden outside, or coming down the hallway to rap upon your door.
Wouldn’t it be great if there really was a place like this?
Oh, wait….
Nice for them, but sounds like a real pill to read. After all, what does the word “monastery” conjure up? A church? A group of people all dressed alike? Incense and candles and Latin? Who wants to read about a group of women who look exactly the same, who do nothing that anyone would call exciting, who order their days like a prayer wheel, repetitious and meditative?
But here’s the thing. In This House of Brede is not boring. It’s not slow. It’s not even preachy, surprisingly enough given the subject matter. The nuns, so superficially alike in their encompassing veils and habits, aren’t. People tend to forget that nuns are women, real women who have their joys and fears and petty dramas. These are not saints or angels but people, strongly drawn characters to whom the reader can relate. Godden introduces and develops them like she’s building a wall out of pearls, not one word wasted, the story and its people slowly forming one glistening whole.
The story—although really the book unfolds more like the days of a life than a novel—revolves mainly around Philippa Talbot, a forty-two-year-old career woman in postwar England. The first time we meet her, she is giving her valuable gold clock to a junior secretary in her office. The sophisticated, successful Philippa is giving up not only her possessions but her job, a high-ranking position in a government office (rare for a woman in those days), to become a contemplative Benedictine nun at Brede Abbey.
Unthinkable! Who does that?
The rest of the book answers that question, but in such a way that the reader doesn’t even know it’s being answered. Godden doesn’t believe in pounding the lesson in with a two-by-four. The reader will turn the last page regretfully and with a sense that she understands the unthinkable action that Philippa—and the hundred other women in the monastery—has done.
To achieve that end, Godden weaves her reader into the book and fools us into thinking that we ourselves know what Philippa knows, we have met and made friends with her fellow nuns, we have made their problems our own. Godden’s style is deep and rich and mesmerizing. The book is long—400 pages—but how profound the disappointment upon realizing, at the finish, that kind Dame Perpetua, wise and quiet Dame Catherine, flighty Dame Veronica, shy, vulnerable Sister Cicely, and all the rest are not strolling in the garden outside, or coming down the hallway to rap upon your door.
Wouldn’t it be great if there really was a place like this?
Oh, wait….
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