Sourly We Roll Along
The notorious 1981 musical flop Merrily We Roll Along, known mainly to now for putting an end to the remarkable decade-long partnership between songwriter Stephen Sondheim and director Harold Prince, finally achieved Broadway success this year in a much-lauded revival of a revival imported from London. But claims that the show itself has finally found its audience seem far-fetched. Continue reading
Britain and France drew lines. A century ago, there were no nations in the Ottoman Empire’s former Middle Eastern territories: not only no Israel, but no Syria, no Lebanon, no Iraq, no Jordan. All were conjured up after the Ottoman collapse by the British and French, who essentially sketched lines randomly in the sand. If you were a Kurd, say, tough luck; your people get separated into various entities with no say in their own fates. Other ethnic and religious groups were similarly bound together, however uncomfortably, at the whim of the colonial powers.
So the British and French drew lines. Cross one line today, and you get a European-level standard of living, broad ethnic diversity, property rights, gay pride parades, freedom of speech, freedom of religion, a free press, democratic elections, Nobel prizes, a fair and functioning judiciary, a thriving private sector. On the other side of the line, you get, well, the opposite. That doesn’t mean just the Palestinian territories – it includes 100% of the former Ottoman lands.
You’d think the governments of those nations would want to emulate Israel. Instead they’d rather destroy it. And just what kind of world would they leave behind? Continue reading
A piece that I posted some years back has gained new relevance with the horrific violence that has broken out across the UK. The German government had taken in over 1 million migrants in a single year, the overwhelming number of whom were young Middle Eastern males who effectively just walked across the border. That seemed a recipe for disaster. As I noted, the native population are “not there for the money or security; they’re there because that’s who they are”. Yet those people had no say in a massive demographic shift that would affect them profoundly. I mentioned that while controlled immigration is one thing, a flood of migrants on that scale was bound to have consequences. And so it has proved, albeit in the UK. I wondered what might happen “when an oppressed people rise up against their oppressors – those people being the German public, and the oppressors the German government (substitute the names of other European countries as appropriate)”. We’re now finding out.
Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders were at the time still vying to be their respective party’s nominee for that year’s presidential election. Otherwise, the references should be clear.
6/30/24 (Sun)
Koreeda’s 2009 flick, an oddity in his ouevre, is on the surface about the life and death of a blowup sex doll. But it proves much more than that. (Air Doll is a literal translation of the Japanese title. Trivia: non-inflatable plastic sex dolls in Japan are known as Dutch wives, which my American friend never tired of mentioning to his Dutch wife.)
6/7/24 (Fri)
Richard Michell’s 2020 comedy is a charmer. It’s based on the incredible true story of the theft in 1961 of a heralded Goya painting from London’s National Gallery just days after its acquisition. Writers Richard Bean and Clive Coleman delve into the circumstances behind the case. The painting had been purchased by the British state for a princely sum just weeks earlier to keep it in the UK after an American attempted to buy it, so its loss from the tightly guarded state-run museum was a national embarrassment.
The incident was apparently headline news at the time, coming unbelievably 50 years to the day – almost to the minute – of the more famous pilfering of the Mona Lisa from the Louvre. That coincidence and the apparent sophistication of the operation (based on the assumption that security was doing its job) led to widespread speculation that the robbery was carried out by an international syndicate; it featured in the first James Bond film, Dr. No a year later, where Bond does a double-take upon seeing the missing painting in the villain’s lair. The riddle remained when the painting was mysteriously returned in perfect condition in a train station locker four years later, but the museum became even more red-faced when the thief, turning himself in six weeks later after careless pub talk left him open to blackmail, proved to be an eccentric, disabled and overweight former bus driver with the odd name Kempton Bunton.
6/4/24 (Tues)
A French friend had raved about Jacques Demy’s 1970 musical fantasy and practically insisted that I watch it. The director’s earlier Umbrellas had been not only a joyous burst of song and color but a unique approach to musical film, so it didn’t take much persuading to watch this one. I had never heard of it, but it’s apparently a cult classic in France. It’s based on a fairy tale by Charles Perrault, author of, among others, Little Red Riding Hood, Cinderella, and Sleeping Beauty, all of which feature in this film in some form or other.
5/30/24 (Thurs)
I kept having déjà vu as I watched this, making me think I’ve seen it before. Apparently, though, my mind was playing tricks on me as the film reportedly had only limited release at the time and has never been shown publicly since. Peter Jackson’s three-part remix of the rest of the intended documentary footage, called Get Back, inspired a re-release of the film for the first time in more than half a century.
5/29/24 (Wed)
The title of Koreeda’s superior 2008 film is taken from Ishida Ayumi’s old pop hit “Blue Light Yokohama”. It literally means “regardless of how much [one] walks” or “despite walking and walking”, the implication here being that the person will never reach the destination. The song itself features in the film in a startling confession muttered off-handedly by the mother.
5/23/24 (Wed)
Walter Lang’s unfortunate 1960 adaptation of the Paris-based Broadway musical hit of seven years earlier. Continue reading
5/19/24 (Sun)
Genji Kuyo (Commemorative Prayer for Genji) assumes an awareness of the 11th-century Tale of Genji, the classic story of the imagined romantic life of a randy former prince. The Noh play is based on the idea that fiction, being an invention of the mind, is a violation of Buddhist strictures against falsehoods and must be atoned for. The text alludes to a Tang Chinese poet’s musings on the sin of “wild words and flowery language” (狂言綺語). The anonymous drama has been around since at least 1464, when Genji would have been over 400 years old or as far as Shakespeare is from the present day.
5/7/21 (Fri)
Fellini’s fantastically uplifting 1957 film, with an astonishing performance by his wife and muse Giulietta Masina, fresh off the previous year’s La Strada. I watched the film mainly as the source material for Sweet Charity, which turns out to have followed the bare bones of the plot fairly closely. But the musical turned the lead into a dance hall girl and played her tribulations mainly for laughs, whereas the film’s Cabiria is a girl of the streets in a gritty post-war Rome still getting back on its feet. Continue reading
5/17/24 (Fri)
Bob Fosse was evidently a controversial choice as director of this 1969 work, never having helmed a film before, but he had ample Hollywood experience as a dancer and was championed by Shirley MacLaine, who had gotten her break in the Fosse-choreographed Pajama Game. Plus, of course, he had staged and choreographed the Broadway version of this show to tremendous success just a few years earlier. Stories of his battles over the film with the powers-that-be could be a book on their own, but his vision ultimately prevailed. A pity.
sekenbanashi 