Saturday, July 19, 2014
A free film series is a great thing, so I don't know why I rarely get out to the Tuesday-night showings at Burlington's Main Street Landing. Last week, though, I drove downtown to watch David Lean's 1946 version of Great Expectations, a film I'd never seen before.
(All cinephiles have the "I Ought to Have Seen This By Now" list; Great Expectations had been on mine. Though these lists needn't be sources of shame, in the age of streaming video it's harder to justify certain oversights. For instance, I've not yet seen some work by Robert Altman, one of my favorite filmmakers. What's on your "Shoulda Seen It" list?)
I recall my grad-school friend Mike once saying, after we'd watched some particularly grim drama of the "Kitchen Sink" school of filmmaking, that he was pretty well done with British films. And I knew what he meant: Many British films seem a little colorless and boring — though perhaps only to jaded American eyes.
But those descriptors don't fit Great Expectations at all. I have not read Charles Dickens' novel, so I can't assess the accuracy of the claim that Lean does the best possible job of condensing the long, complex narrative into a two-hour film. But the film's story is engaging and lively enough to keep anyone riveted.
More interesting to me is that Great Expectations is visually impressive. I don't put much stock in the Academy Awards, but it seems like this film's Oscars for art direction (black and white) and cinematography (black and white) were well deserved.
Tags: film , movies , what i'm watching , great expectations. david lean , national cinema , british cinema , continuity editing , Image , Web Only
Friday, July 18, 2014
For the past several years, Next Stage Arts in Putney has worked to transform an 1841 church owned by the Putney Historical Society into a state-of-the-art, 180-seat performance space. The nonprofit tapped state, regional and national funding sources and squirreled away about $300,000 toward an $860,000 capital campaign goal for renovations and equipment.
Then, in late June, Next Stage won a $370,000 mega grant from ArtPlace America, a national organization that supports community art projects and creative spaces to the tune of $14.7 million a year, according to its website. That brings Next Stage to less than $200,000 from its goal.
Tags: dance , arts , putney , next stage arts project , ArtPlace America , Image , Web Only
This week in movies you missed: I watch "the weirdest feature film ever to make an Oscar shortlist," according to Steve Pond of the Wrap.
What You Missed
We are somewhere in Greece, in a house with a garden surrounded by a high wall.
Three teenagers listen to a tape introducing them to new vocabulary words. The tape gives glaringly incorrect definitions. The kids, a boy (Hristos Passalis) and two girls (Aggeliki Papoulia and Mary Tsoni), aren't fazed. They plan a new game: They'll see who can keep his or her finger under burning hot water the longest.
Dad (Christos Stergioglou) returns home from work, bringing a young woman named Christina (Anna Kalaitzidou). She goes into the boy's room and has mechanical sex with him, then leaves. The two sisters greet her as one might greet a cleaning woman.
The non sequiturs continue. The brother (none of these characters have names) speaks to someone invisible through the hedge. A plane buzzes overhead, and Mom (Michele Valley) encourages the kids to run and catch it if it falls. A wandering cat in the yard inspires bloodcurdling terror.
The more the film progresses, the more it becomes clear that the rules of this family are not our rules. The parents know this — it's by design. The kids, raised in isolation, do not. By the end, the teens' struggle to achieve independence — and their parents' countermeasures — will have led to genuinely disturbing transgressions against everything most of us consider "natural" and "right."
Tags: dogtooth , Giorgos Lanthimos , Movies you missed , Image , Web Only
Here's a little bit of local trivia: Before they were THE LUMINEERS, Grammy-nominated folk-pop band the Lumineers graced the pre-expansion "stage" — it was really just the floor with some tables moved out of the way at that time — at the Skinny Pancake in Burlington. Bonus trivia: They also played SP owner Benjy Adler's birthday party. Nifty, right?
Anyway, this Saturday, July 19, a former member of that band, guitarist Maxwell Hughes, will return to SP. In truth, Hughes was only briefly a Lumineer. He met the band at a Denver open mic and toured with them as a mandolinist for a spell. He did, however, contribute a few songs to the band's gazillion-selling debut record, including "Stubborn Love." Check out his solo acoustic version below. (As well as a special bonus video, because it's Friday.)
Tags: Skinny Pancake , the Lumineers , Maxwell Hughes , Image , Video , Web Only
"It's an elegant curve before it's a sundial," says Kate Pond, considering her 2010 sculpture "Come Light, Visit Me." On a recent overcast morning, it appears to float in a bed of tall grass and wildflowers on the campus of Champlain College. "It's abstract before it's functional," Pond adds.
The "elegant curve" that Pond, 75, refers to is a gnomon — the piece of a sundial that casts a shadow and enables viewers to figure out the hour. Specifically, the vertical shadow cast by one end of the sculpture's curve is close to Eastern Standard Time, while the shadow cast by the opposite end is close to Daylight Savings Time. (Solar time is slightly different from clock time since the sun's position differs by longitude and latitude even within time zones.) Circles etched into the metal mark the passage of time. At noon on the year's two equinox days, a horizontal shadow hits the exact midpoint of the steel piece.
Sponsored by Burlington City Arts, Pond is leading a retrospective bus tour this Sunday, July 20, to view about a dozen of her public and private works across the state, dating from 1973 to 2010. These include recent work such as the sundial at Champlain College and public art such as "Kiss II," the pair of interlocked "F" shapes outside of the Fletcher Free Library in downtown Burlington. Pond has also installed privately commissioned pieces on properties in Burlington, Stowe, Orwell and Whitingham.
Tags: kate pond , sculpture , burlington , vermont , Image , Web Only
Wednesday, July 16, 2014
Since hearing a trio of emerging artists from the Green Mountain Opera Festival sing Mozart’s “Soave sia il vento” (from Così fan tutte) last month at Burlington’s Cathedral of St. Paul, I've had a hard time recalling why any music not by Mozart is worth listening to. Is there a more moving, restrained, perfectly balanced, purely beautiful piece in music history? I’d wonder, trolling YouTube for yet another version of the farewell song.
OK, so maybe I got a little carried away. Fortunately, longtime Burlington classical-scene fixtures Bill Metcalfe and Mel Kaplan were able to knock me out of my Mozart reverie two nights ago with some rousing Gilbert and Sullivan, at a Vermont Summer Music Festival concert performance of H.M.S. Pinafore.
Here is music that is fun, uncomplicated and eminently hummable. Fans are more likely to look up the songs’ witty lyrics on the Internet than compare videos of artistic interpretations. In fact, I wish Metcalfe, the conductor, had included a program insert with the lyrics of at least some of the light opera’s many famous songs; the singing was good but the words not always clear, and they should be in something so irreverently titled. (Essentially: Her Majesty’s Ship the Girl’s Flouncy Apron.)
The performance at St. Michael’s College drew a near-capacity audience. This bodes well for the last event of the weeklong VSMF, a concert with Metcalfe’s Oriana Singers of choral music by Britten, Vaughan Williams, Delius and Haydn on Sunday.
Tuesday, July 15, 2014
This Saturday, come rain or shine, 75 artists will set up their easels in a number of designated areas and paint all day as part of the 4th Annual Jericho Plein Air Festival. From 9 a.m. to 3 p.m., the public will be invited to pick up a map of those sites, take a stroll and chat up the artists — which include both professional and emerging painters — as they work.
Painters Barbara Greene and Jane Morgan run the event along with Emilie Alexander, owner of the local Emile A. Gruppe Gallery (named for her late father, a renowned landscape painter). All of the paintings created on Saturday will be exhibited at the gallery through August 10; it will open with a reception on Sunday, July 20, 2-4 p.m.
Alexander, Greene and Morgan dreamed up the festival five years ago with a shared desire to bring more visibility to local artists. "It’s easier for [crafters] to get into the public eye," Greene opines, referring specifically to booths at farmers markets and craft fairs, where fine art is a hard sell. "Painters usually work in isolation," she adds.
The longtime friends hatched the idea of holding an outdoor painting event, which would serve the dual purpose of getting painters out of their studios and giving the public a peek into their artistic process. Plein air painting festivals, the women had heard, were gaining popularity nationally.
Tags: jericho plein air festival , great Vermont plein air paint-out , emile a. gruppe gallery , art , Image , Web Only
Followers of the Mac Parker saga, which Seven Days and other local news outlets have covered extensively for the last several years, have come to expect curveballs. The most recent development is less of a headline-grabber, but one that will likely lend some context to the fascinating story of this man's alleged criminal activities. Two Vermont filmmakers have contributed to a new, soon-to-be-broadcast documentary that details the tale's strange twists and turns.
Rob Koier, the director of the 2012 documentary Strength of the Storm, and Mark Covino, co-director of the music doc A Band Called Death, are developing a full-length film about Parker. For now, some of the footage they've shot will appear in an episode of the long-running CNBC series "American Greed." The deal to license the footage was struck in January, and the episode will air later this week.
Parker, an Addison County-based storyteller, was convicted of defrauding investors of $28 million to fund a putative film project called Birth of Innocence. Most of the money was reportedly funneled to Parker's "silent partner" and former spiritual guru, a Connecticut man named Louis Soteriou. Soteriou has been sentenced to seven years in prison; a judge recently upheld Parker's own 55-month sentence for his part in the fraud scheme.
The footage that Covino and Koier licensed to CNBC originates from three lengthy interviews that Covino shot with Parker in October 2013. In the first, Parker told the filmmakers about his background; the second, clocking in at seven hours, finds Parker discussing Birth of Innocence and his ensuing legal troubles. The third interview, says Covino, wasn't even intended to be an interview — just some shots of Parker arriving at prison in upstate New York.
Tags: mac parker , birth of innocence , fraud , mark covino , film , movie , rob koier , cnbc , documentary , doc , tv , Image , Video , Web Only
Saturday, July 12, 2014
More than 20 years ago, I recall my film-nerd friend Bill recommending to me John Boorman’s 1968 film Hell in the Pacific. Bill has good taste in films, so I filed away his suggestion. Perhaps 10 years later, I found a used DVD of the film for a few bucks, so I picked it up. It languished on my shelf for another decade, unwatched until a few nights ago, when my wife went to sleep early. (I suppose I shatter no gender-role stereotypes here: When my wife is asleep or out of town, my cinematic choices tend toward war films and Westerns.)
Not sure if it’s a blessing or a curse that I can recount my personal history with most of the DVDs in my collection.
In any case, it’s a shame that it took me so damned long to get to Hell in the Pacific, as it’s a pretty fascinating film for a number of reasons. For one thing, there are only two people in its cast, and they’re both world-class screen actors: Lee Marvin and Toshiro Mifune. Each man plays a soldier — of the Allies and the Axis, respectively — who, after undisclosed oceanic wartime disasters, happens to wind up on a deserted island somewhere in the Pacific Ocean. (Coincidentally, both men served their respective countries in World War II.)
I can think of only one fiction film with a cast smaller than this one (though I’m sure there are plenty that aren’t coming to mind): Robert Altman’s fascinating and little-seen Secret Honor (1984), in which the great Philip Baker Hall plays a delirious, rambling Richard M. Nixon.
Tags: film , movies , what i'm watching , hell in the pacific , lee marvin , toshiro mifune , john boorman , world war ii , Image , Web Only
Friday, July 11, 2014
This week in movies you missed: In our world of omnipresent cameras, it's hard to believe that a regime could starve and slaughter millions of people and leave little direct evidence of its atrocities on film. But that's what the Khmer Rouge did in Cambodia from 1975 to 1979. Among its victims were the family of Rithy Panh, this film's director, who was then 11 years old.
Panh made this documentary to fill in history's "missing pictures" with those he carries in his memory. He uses clay figures and dioramas to illustrate deportation, forced labor, "re-education" and genocide, supplementing these images with existing documentary footage (much of it from Khmer Rouge propaganda films). The Missing Picture earned an Oscar nomination last year for Best Foreign Film and was honored in the Un Certain Regard section at Cannes 2013.
What You Missed
Voice-over narration by Jean-Baptiste Phou (in the English-language version) tells Panh's story. It starts with tableaux of Phnom Penh in the early '70s — a lively city where young Panh, whose father teaches school, visits film studios and marvels at the beautiful actresses.
On April 17, 1975, the communist revolutionaries take the city. They herd the urban dwellers onto transports and bring them to the countryside, leaving the city a wasteland. They take their possessions and dye their clothes black. They force them to abandon modernity and work the land on starvation rations. They take away pens and eyeglasses. They control every aspect of their lives.
Tags: missing picture , rithy panh , Movies you missed , Image , Web Only