Dream a Little Dream of Me

Review: Inception

When Alfred Hitchcock directed Vertigo in 1958, he and his cameramen invented a new camera move, tracking back with the camera while zooming in, to capture Jimmy Stewart's acrophobia. The Vertigo effect was the wonder of its day. In many ways, Christopher Nolan's summer film Inception shares the bitter romance and disorientation of Hitchcock's movie. But special effects have advanced greatly in the last fifty years, and Nolan takes full advantage of twisting, turning CGI-scapes that would tickle M.C. Escher.

Though not as profilic, Nolan has proven himself to be a sort of modern Hitchcockian. From The Dark Knight and The Prestige to his best work, Memento, Nolan has played the showman with tricks up his sleeve, who gleefully manipulates the audience then reminds us it's just a movie. The wonder of Vertigo is that it uses the same tricks as Hitchcock's usual crowdpleasers but sinks deeper as it unfolds. Nolan goes the opposite route with Inception, trying to force profundity upon a fun popcorn flick.

Leonardo DiCaprio plays Dom Cobb, a single father in exile, gifted at extracting information from entering people's dreams. He is called upon by a Japanese industrialist to enter his competitor's dreams not to remove an idea but to add one, a process known as inception. Within the running of the film, though, the rationale behind this entry into dreams becomes the MacGuffin, glossed over in the sea of exposition that makes up the first hour. Nolan's rules for inception are complex, and slogging through them at first feels turgid because the script doesn't allow its characters to breathe. Nor does Hans Zimmer's oppressive score, which overstates with crashing timpani and wailing brass.

Just when I was wishing the whole thing would lighten up, the actual inception begins. Suddenly we're watching a different movie--an elaborate bank heist that wows more as it goes along. The inception team enters dreams within dreams, and watching these overlapping worlds line up is the real fun. Joseph Gordon-Levitt even gets a moment or two of levity, not to mention a thrilling levitation stunt in a hotel lobby and elevator. Ultimately, the scales tip in favor of Inception: all the rules that were explained pay off in the final act. But I do wish Nolan had found more ways to humanize his film.

Marion Cotillard is his secret weapon. She looks ravishing as Cobb's deceased wife, whom he recalls by revisiting his memory-box of dreams, and ironically feels the most flesh-and-blood of the cast. Everyone else is subservient to Nolan's mind games except for Cotillard. Her eyes, cruel and agonizingly sad, are something out of a nightmare. In a movie of dazzling plot twists and shifting city streets, her performance is the stuff dreams are made of.

When Book Covers Wax Poetic

They say don't judge a book by its cover. But when you're window shopping at bookstores, it can be hard to believe them (whoever they are). Book covers are marketing, pure and simple. The ideal cover matches thematic content with a sharp selling point--but like titles, sometimes sales outweigh the "art" of it. Fine by me; as long as good books sell, I don't care how their covers look.

Unless the covers are boring. Public-domain classics are the worst offenders. Have you looked for a Moby Dick you can be proud of? I searched the Harvard Coop for a good cover, but the whole batch looked unoriginal, so unfailingly historical. (Art department: "Let's go outside the box. We'll draw--wait for it--a whale.") Herman Melville is soporific enough on his own. Where's the adventure?

From the odd indie press to giant publisher Penguin: Call them Ish-fail.

But Penguin Classics has a trick up its sleeve, the Deluxe Editions. Welcome to a world of deckled edges, French flaps, and provocative cover art. They range from Jane Austen to Thomas Pynchon in style and age. They're appealing, whimsical, and often humorous. Hey, look--color! But I also wonder if the designers have ever read the books. What do you think about these?

1. Candide: Voltaire meets the comics store! Calling X-Men fans--there's a French satire with your name on it.


2. Ethan Frome: Edith Wharton might purse her lips at the title, embossed in red letters like a Harlequin paperback. The lovers look caught in the spell of winter romance--but read the book and you'll realize a much different outcome is in store.

3. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn: The most puzzling. Why is Huck walking underwater? Is this a reference to Mario Puzo (sleeping with the fishes)? The credit to Mr. Mark Twain is a clever in-joke, though.

4. The Scarlet Letter: Nathaniel Hawthorne's original subtitle was A Trip to Hot Topic.

5. Pride and Prejudice: You know, I like this one. It's a Jane Austen for those of us with Dickensian aspirations. Though it looks like the man is named Pride and the woman Prejudice. Cruel parents they had.

6. Wuthering Heights: Or, Wuthering Catherine, who hasn't eaten a meal in weeks. What's the phallic tower behind her? Is Heathcliff's home now at Mordor?

Penguin even carted out a Deluxe Edition of Moby Dick full of color, energy, and violence. And also a whale jumping over a ship. I'm pretty sure that happens in chapter thirty-one, right? Chalk it up to whimsy.

Ms. Kubelik, Shut Up and Deal

Review: Promises, Promises
Broadway Theatre, New York 
July 24, 2010


Promises, Promises was born from the past and the present. Even its source material, Billy Wilder's 1960 film The Apartment, conveyed the drone-like existence of corporate America. By the time the musical opened in 1968, the culture had shifted. People were shedding their inhibitions; the tribe down the street at Hair was shedding even more. What a drag to be a suit. But the show became a strange hybrid of the trusted and true--bookwriter Neil Simon--and the new sounds of Burt Bacharach. Within a somewhat conventional boy-meets-girl comedy lurked a pulsing, driving New York.

Over forty years later, the revival of Promises, Promises sinks into this rhythm like an old pair of shoes. The sleek orchestra voices and varied meters are reminiscent of days gone by. Mad Men has educated us: it was a simpler time with undercurrents of sexism and conniving. The premise begins with C.C. "Chuck" Baxter, never noticed at work until a co-worker with a hot date borrows his nearby apartment. Word spreads among Chuck's superiors, and soon enough, he finds himself a Junior Executive who rents his place to the boss, Mr. Sheldrake. 

Sounds cynical, but the revival carries all the sheen of a Doris Day-Rock Hudson flick. The show still works, and the audience eats it up, though as more of a sixties nostalgia-fest. Don't forget their memories of sitcom stars. Thankfully, Sean Hayes makes an appealing Chuck Baxter. He's more Puck-like than virile, closer to the film's Jack Lemmon than Jerry Orbach in the original production. Hayes clowns his way along, milking laughs whenever Baxter's not pining over the cafeteria worker Fran Kubelik. 

Which leads to the Chenoweth conundrum. It's nice to see Kristin Chenoweth stretch herself, and a thrill to hear her sing anything. But as many have written, she's an odd choice for Fran Kubelik, who lets Sheldrake seduce her and toss her back at his whim. Too old, too well-adjusted, too vocally trained. Again, rawness has eluded this revival. Such things are ephemeral, of course. (As is sound design that isn't over-processed. At least there was a full orchestra with three trumpets.) Neil Simon jokes now often land with a mild chuckle of familiarity. 

But he sure knew how to craft bit parts. Take the scene-stealing lush who helps Baxter drown his sorrows on New Year's Eve. Katie Finneran, who won a Tony for this brief role, digs into it with gusto and every character voice in the book. While Chenoweth is left to her ballads, Hayes and Finneran play drunkenly off each other with Shakespearean grace. "Forget the past and think about the present," she and Baxter sing. A tall order for Promises, Promises, which can't seem to shirk the past at all. 

¡Buzz Lightyear al rescate!

Review: Toy Story 3

Books and TV shows depend upon the series. The bottomless pit of plots and whodunit this time have a history in serialized Dickens novels, radio shows, and Keystone-cop nickelodeons. When the summer movie season rolls around, though, we bemoan the dearth of originality. The barrage of numerals after titles can make a ticket buyer feel he's trapped in some sort of time warp: a radio station stuck in the nineties.

The trilogy has become the most stable form of movie sequel-dom, if you're in the superhero or science fiction business. Properties like the original Star Wars films, Indiana Jones, and more recently The Lord of the Rings have fused in our cultural psyche into one entity. The Ewok battle may not be a cinematic high-point, but that third installment rounds out the series efficiently. After The Empire Strikes Back, all moviegoers and filmmakers surely could hope was that the third didn't sabotage the rest. Remember the dwindling cultural opinion of The Matrix.

All of this build-up is my way of giving Pixar credit where it's due. Toy Story 3, presumably the final chapter in the Woody-Buzz Lightyear saga, doesn't try to aim for infinity and beyond. The film is content to remind us how much we'd missed those gosh-darn-lovable toys. The first film hit theaters in 1995, when I was still in single digits. In the time since, we've been at war, waited in line for iEverything, started blogs, forgotten about Tim Allen... and gone to college.

Though Andy (the kid who owns these toys, now a college student) is moving on, the movie remains deliberately old-fashioned. Sure, there's the 3-D version, for those who want to shell out next week's lunch money. But Pixar's great innovation even at the dawn of computer-animated movies was its storytelling. No matter the voice casting, no other animation studio has churned out a film as great as Toy Story yet, with the possible exception of the first Shrek.

Toy Story 3 works well as part of a package. If I hadn't grown up with these characters, I might have wanted more of a character arc. Wall-E and Up may best it for the audacity of their imagined worlds, sure, but Toy Story 3 is a delightful piece of familiarity. And who would have imagined such an emotional ending to the saga fifteen years ago? Like Andy, we've grown up since the first film, and all it heralded for movies. Sit back and watch as Pixar passes on its patented brand of wonder to a new generation.

The Great American Songbook: Over the Rainbow

Written by: Harold Arlen, E.Y. Harburg

First performed by: Judy Garland, 1939

It's too well-known to even write about. Countless volumes have been written about The Wizard of Oz, about Judy Garland. Multiple "Songs of the Century" lists top off with "Over the Rainbow" (the "Somewhere" is optional).

Aunt Em tells Dorothy to find "a place where you won't get yourself into any trouble." The neglected girl leans into a bale of hay, yearning for a place beyond the rain. But though "Over the Rainbow" seems like a lark, completely organic to the film and to Judy Garland's voice, the reality was that the song created its own trouble. Studio executives at MGM wanted to scrap the ballad altogether. In 1939, pictures were rarely longer than one hour, forty-five minutes (the major exception being Gone with the Wind). The song, over which the songwriters agonized, was cut from several previews. Who wanted to listen to a teenager singing in a barnyard? their wisdom went. Arlen and Harburg fought for its inclusion, and eventually Louis B. Mayer decided the film would survive with "Over the Rainbow."

Could Oz have survived without it? Apocryphal stories credit the image of a rainbow, introduced by lyricist Harburg, with the sepia-toned look of the Kansas sequences. I saw an outdoor screening of the film last week where audience members applauded at the first splash of color. Without this traditional "I want" song, and without the two-tone opening, would the land of Oz still mesmerize?

When I was a five-year-old, Margaret Hamilton's Wicked Witch of the West terrified me. Now that I'm twenty-three, the adult ambitions of Oz become more clear. Take, for instance, the satire of the Wizard bestowing brains, hearts, and courage. Every other song in the score appeals to the jolly, singsong, tra la la jingles we expect of children's musicals (though with undoubtedly great wit). "Over the Rainbow," though skyward-bound, is as down-to-earth. It's a sincere character song, outwardly hopeful but inwardly reaching, a little desperate. "Why oh why can't I?" are the final words.

Listen to how the song starts right in on the chorus. Arlen and Harburg composed a verse but never intended it for The Wizard of Oz. Hear how the orchestra seems to open up on the second "Somewhere," and how Garland's voice sounds older than her sixteen years. Some dreams are too good to be true, which she learns through the Wicked Witch and the sham Wizard. Going home makes perfect sense story-wise, but isn't it a bit deflating to see the sepia-tone again? To know that the storm destroyed their crops, and Mrs. Gulch still has it out for Toto? Like the film, "Over the Rainbow" is really about the need for escapism--not just escapism itself.