Arts & Culture: November 2003 Archives

On the third day of the "surprising" criminal proceedings against Michael Jackson, I am officially tired of hearing about it. On the television news, on the radio, in the newspaper...enough. The guy isn't a head of state, and he isn't even an important celebrity anymore (is "important celebrity" an oxymoronic phrase?) If he's convicted for sex abuse, there will be no societal consequences.

Greedy retirees are poised to extort $40 billion a year from working American families, using the government as the muscle man. That's a story. Radical Islamist terrorists are murdering innocent people in Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Iraq. That's a story. Yet what do the watchdogs in the press think is the most important story right now? A freakish pop star is going to be arrested for being a pervert.

If Jackson is innocent, I hope he goes free. If he's guilty, I hope he goes to jail and repents his sins. Either way, I don't want to hear about it.

I saw the movie "Master and Commander" last Friday, and I give it my warm recommendation. The climax wasn't disappointing, exactly, but it was less than one might hope; still, watching Russell Crowe is always enjoyable. Despite his penchant for rough behavior and womanizing, I'll take his unapologetic masculinity over the Men Without Chests such as Keanu Reeves, Ethan Hawke, and the other vacant male leads who wander around movie sets in southern California.

One thing that stuck out was the music on the soundtrack. Of the recurring themes, two of them weren't contemporary to the time in which the movie was set (1805). The first was "Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis," by Ralph Vaughn Williams. Normally, I require my composers to be dead prior to 1900 in order to give them a listen, but Vaughn Williams is one of the few moderns I can stomach. His "Fantasia" is a deeply profound interpretation of Tallis, and one of my favorite works ever -- but it's a 20th-century take on a turn-of-the-17th-century piece.

Likewise, the third movement of Corelli's Christmas Concerto in G minor gets a lot of eartime, and with good reason: it's got a sumptuous, rich emotional texture, but it is 1) a Christmas piece; and 2) composed well over a century before the fictional events in the movie. Which is like playing, say, ragtime in a modern-day movie: it's not wrong, but it is incongruous.

Nevertheless, the music did mesh well with the movie itself, and I seriously doubt very many people had a problem with the music.

(You can download an excerpt from the third movement of Corelli's concerto. I don't think I'm violating the Fair Use Doctrine by excerpting this wonderful CD by I Musici, especially when I'm telling everyone to hunt down this CD for Christmas -- it's a refreshing break from saccharine secular songs and wonderful but overplayed hymns.)

In this cynical, hardened world, it's kind of refreshing to see a movie that presents the most dreadful clichés without a hint of apology. A man proposes marriage to a woman with whom he has never held a conversation -- and she accepts, and the band conveniently behind her starts to play. Another man falls in love with a subordinate because she's cute and vulnerable, but they have absolutely nothing in common.

"Love Actually" has these tired motifs, and so many more. I kept expecting the filmmakers to wink at the audience, letting us know that they know we've seen this a thousand times. No wink was forthcoming. Either they didn't know they were recycling these plot points -- an improbability -- or they didn't care.

The cast includes all living, non-retired British film stars. A half-dozen plots are packed into this two-hour movie, and since many reviewers have commented on the hanging plot threads, unnecessary characters, and phony "love stories" that would never work in real life, I won't repeat it.

"Actually" is more proof that we are reverting to the pre-Shakespearean mode of storytelling where writers needn't provide any psychological motives for their characters. In "Erin Brockovich," we never learn why the Evil Corporation is poisoning the population of a small California town. They are a corporation, they are big, ergo evil. Similarly, in "Actually," the script juxtaposes several men and several women together. Like positive and negative ions, they are attracted to each other and they bond. No explanation necessary.

(Thankfully, they spared us the gay subplot that is becoming de rigeur these days. That's the only thing for which the scriptwriter needs to be thanked.)

For our DC readers: a group of students at the Pope John Paul II Institute will present a staged reading of the Pope's play "The Jeweler's Shop" at the John Paul II Cultural Center on Harewood Road in Washington, November 20 at 6:30 pm. Admission is free.