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"content": "\u003cp>Romantic comedies didn’t always carry with them the air of immediate dismissal, that eye-rolling weariness born of dozens of interchangeable boy-meets-girl plots and posters featuring stars playfully leaning into or on one another. Romance at the movies wasn’t always overfilled with cliches, stuffed with safe jokes heard a hundred times before. The rom-com can be a place for actual characters instead of cardboard theater-lobby displays, right? People you actually want to see get together for reasons other than the fact that that’s what’s supposed to happen in these movies?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>What If\u003c/em> doesn’t ask “what if” that were true. It just answers with a confident “yes.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The film was originally titled \u003cem>The F Word,\u003c/em> and it still carries that title in most markets that aren’t the U.S., making one wonder just how easily offended the distributor thinks we are (the F-word in question is “friends”). Fortunately, the newer, blander title is really the only thing generic about \u003cem>What If\u003c/em>. Adapted and expanded by screenwriter Elan Mastai from a fringe festival play by Canadian playwrights TJ Dawe and Mike Rinaldi, the film manages a neat trick of sticking close to formula while still being unexpectedly fresh.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Part of that is just how self-aware Mastai’s script is, without really wandering into self-referential navel-gazing. Everything is familiar, but slightly off-kilter, like walking into your home to find all the furniture shifted a few inches from where it normally sits. Daniel Radcliffe plays Wallace, a med school dropout who meets Chantry (Zoe Kazan) at a party and falls for her quickly; only to find out after he walks her home that she lives with her boyfriend and is just looking for new friends, though the connection between them is undeniable.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It takes a long time to reveal that boyfriend, and when we do finally meet up with Ben (Rafe Spall), we’re treated to a quick moment of (not so) irrational jealousy before we discover that despite being the long-term boyfriend we’re supposed to be rooting against, he’s actually not really a bad guy. The film keeps teasing us with moments where it might make him into a cheater, a neglecter, a monster of some sort; and then director Michael Dowse refuses to let us off the hook. It has to be just as hard for us to hate Ben as it is for Chantry to throw him over for Wallace, no matter how charming he is.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And he’s plenty charming, as is she, as we’re treated to their lengthy, quirky, noncourtship courtship through the streets and storefronts of Toronto. The two are almost impossibly cute together — setting their second meeting at a screening of \u003cem>The Princess Bride\u003c/em> basically puts their adorability factor off the charts. It might border on too twee for some, but Radcliffe and Kazan’s chemistry is too endearing to write off that easily, and the film cuts the sweetness by giving the pair a slightly gross shared sense of humor centered on discussions of peanut butter, jelly, and bacon sandwiches and celebrity feces. It still plays on the cuter side of disgusting, but just try to imagine, say, McConaughey and Parker having anything remotely like this banter in something like \u003cem>Failure to Launch\u003c/em>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Wallace’s best friend (and Chantry’s cousin) Allan (Adam Driver, riffing effectively in the same awkward oddball territory as his role on \u003cem>Girls\u003c/em>) also provides alternate programming for those averse to the gentler interactions of the central pair. At the same party where those two meet-cute, Allan has more of a meet-carnal with Nicole (Mackenzie Davis), and their horny romance hilariously provides the sexual spark that Wallace and Chantry’s can’t have. But their love is also genuine, giving their characters a depth that goes beyond silly (but great) jokes like Allan’s overriding love of post-intercourse nachos.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>What If\u003c/em> doesn’t escape common tropes — tragicomic misunderstandings getting in the way, a poignant wedding sequence, grand romantic gestures gone both right and wrong — but it also isn’t really trying to get away from them. The film recognizes and sticks close to the comforting romantic comedy blueprint while remaining aware that the best romantic comedies have their own personalities. The resulting movie gives us what we need from a romantic comedy instead of what the averaged opinions of a focus group might claim we want from one. \u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">Copyright 2014 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?utmac=UA-5828686-4&utmdt=%27What+If%27+Brings+Flair+And+Fun+To+The+Rom-Com+Formula&utme=8(APIKey)9(MDAxOTAwOTE4MDEyMTkxMDAzNjczZDljZA004)\">\u003c/div>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>Romantic comedies didn’t always carry with them the air of immediate dismissal, that eye-rolling weariness born of dozens of interchangeable boy-meets-girl plots and posters featuring stars playfully leaning into or on one another. Romance at the movies wasn’t always overfilled with cliches, stuffed with safe jokes heard a hundred times before. The rom-com can be a place for actual characters instead of cardboard theater-lobby displays, right? People you actually want to see get together for reasons other than the fact that that’s what’s supposed to happen in these movies?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>What If\u003c/em> doesn’t ask “what if” that were true. It just answers with a confident “yes.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The film was originally titled \u003cem>The F Word,\u003c/em> and it still carries that title in most markets that aren’t the U.S., making one wonder just how easily offended the distributor thinks we are (the F-word in question is “friends”). Fortunately, the newer, blander title is really the only thing generic about \u003cem>What If\u003c/em>. Adapted and expanded by screenwriter Elan Mastai from a fringe festival play by Canadian playwrights TJ Dawe and Mike Rinaldi, the film manages a neat trick of sticking close to formula while still being unexpectedly fresh.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Part of that is just how self-aware Mastai’s script is, without really wandering into self-referential navel-gazing. Everything is familiar, but slightly off-kilter, like walking into your home to find all the furniture shifted a few inches from where it normally sits. Daniel Radcliffe plays Wallace, a med school dropout who meets Chantry (Zoe Kazan) at a party and falls for her quickly; only to find out after he walks her home that she lives with her boyfriend and is just looking for new friends, though the connection between them is undeniable.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It takes a long time to reveal that boyfriend, and when we do finally meet up with Ben (Rafe Spall), we’re treated to a quick moment of (not so) irrational jealousy before we discover that despite being the long-term boyfriend we’re supposed to be rooting against, he’s actually not really a bad guy. The film keeps teasing us with moments where it might make him into a cheater, a neglecter, a monster of some sort; and then director Michael Dowse refuses to let us off the hook. It has to be just as hard for us to hate Ben as it is for Chantry to throw him over for Wallace, no matter how charming he is.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And he’s plenty charming, as is she, as we’re treated to their lengthy, quirky, noncourtship courtship through the streets and storefronts of Toronto. The two are almost impossibly cute together — setting their second meeting at a screening of \u003cem>The Princess Bride\u003c/em> basically puts their adorability factor off the charts. It might border on too twee for some, but Radcliffe and Kazan’s chemistry is too endearing to write off that easily, and the film cuts the sweetness by giving the pair a slightly gross shared sense of humor centered on discussions of peanut butter, jelly, and bacon sandwiches and celebrity feces. It still plays on the cuter side of disgusting, but just try to imagine, say, McConaughey and Parker having anything remotely like this banter in something like \u003cem>Failure to Launch\u003c/em>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Wallace’s best friend (and Chantry’s cousin) Allan (Adam Driver, riffing effectively in the same awkward oddball territory as his role on \u003cem>Girls\u003c/em>) also provides alternate programming for those averse to the gentler interactions of the central pair. At the same party where those two meet-cute, Allan has more of a meet-carnal with Nicole (Mackenzie Davis), and their horny romance hilariously provides the sexual spark that Wallace and Chantry’s can’t have. But their love is also genuine, giving their characters a depth that goes beyond silly (but great) jokes like Allan’s overriding love of post-intercourse nachos.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>What If\u003c/em> doesn’t escape common tropes — tragicomic misunderstandings getting in the way, a poignant wedding sequence, grand romantic gestures gone both right and wrong — but it also isn’t really trying to get away from them. The film recognizes and sticks close to the comforting romantic comedy blueprint while remaining aware that the best romantic comedies have their own personalities. The resulting movie gives us what we need from a romantic comedy instead of what the averaged opinions of a focus group might claim we want from one. \u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">Copyright 2014 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?utmac=UA-5828686-4&utmdt=%27What+If%27+Brings+Flair+And+Fun+To+The+Rom-Com+Formula&utme=8(APIKey)9(MDAxOTAwOTE4MDEyMTkxMDAzNjczZDljZA004)\">\u003c/div>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"content": "\u003cp>Jonathan Liebesman’s \u003cem>Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles\u003c/em>, a reboot of the franchise following three live-action movies from the ’90s and 2007’s computer-animated \u003cem>TMNT\u003c/em>, courted controversy in 2012 when the film’s producer, Michael Bay, announced the title of the film would be reduced to the simpler \u003cem>Ninja Turtles\u003c/em>. Much of the ensuing criticism became part of a wider denunciation of another comment by Bay indicating that Liebesman’s turtles would be members of an alien race rather than unnaturally evolved reptiles.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The less remarked upon but equally disastrous possibility, though, was losing the “teenage” element. According to a \u003ca href=\"http://mentalfloss.com/article/30862/complete-history-teenage-mutant-ninja-turtles\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">recent history\u003c/a> of the Ninja Turtles published by \u003cem>Mental Floss\u003c/em>, series creators Peter Laird and Kevin Eastman originally imagined\u003cem> \u003c/em>their heroes as fearsome and violent. But the Ninja Turtles in popular culture have always tended toward the goofy, unfocused and juvenile. The ’90s films, hardly masterpieces, are at least unabashedly childish. The original 1990 film featured not only teenage turtles, after all; it also populated the villainous Foot Clan, also the enemy in Liebesman’s movie, with delinquent, runaway youth.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The new \u003cem>Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles\u003c/em> is removed from such a youth-oriented universe. Liebesman and Bay ultimately dropped the truncated title and the more radical plot changes, but the resulting film still reflects a shift from the first films\u003cstrong>.\u003c/strong> Its origin story, while not launched into outer space, has been recast to fit a familiar world domination plot. Michelangelo (Noel Fisher), Donatello (Jeremy Howard), Leonardo (played by Pete Ploszek and voiced by Johnny Knoxville), Raphael (Alan Ritchson), and their rat sensei Splinter (Danny Woodburn, voiced by Tony Shalhoub) are now the products of experiments carried out by Eric Sacks (William Fichtner) and Dr. O’Neil (Paul Fitzgerald) in order to create a mutagen that would heal humans’ injuries and cure diseases. Of course, by the time the story really kicks off,\u003cem> \u003c/em>the mutagen’s positive properties are being used for more nefarious purposes.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles\u003c/em> takes place decades after the experiments, with Dr. O’Neil dead from a fire at Sacks’ laboratories and survived by his daughter, April (Megan Fox), a budding journalist tracking the story of the Foot Clan that is tormenting New York City. It’s April who first catches sight of the Turtles when they repel a Clan attack, ultimately realizing that they are the same turtles and rat that she saved from her father’s lab years ago.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I’m hesitant to subscribe to any notion of origin stories as sacrosanct, particularly since \u003cem>Ninja Turtles \u003c/em>is an uninspired but not offensively bad film. The changes, though, do remove one of the more charming elements of the Turtles, at least as they appeared in the original movies. The Turtles have always been urban vigilantes, but when their mutation was a result of bathing in a pool of discarded radioactive ooze they also tapped into an essential aspect of city life: the filthiness. Emerging from the sewers, the Turtles were products of urban waste disposed with little worry of its consequences. Now they’re just another science experiment gone wrong.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Liebesman’s rebranding also shifts the franchise into a slightly more serious register: the Foot Clan are now a well-armed militia, with their leader, Shredder (Tohoru Masamune), resembling a cross between Darth Vader and a Swiss-Army-knife-inspired Transformer. The stakes are impossibly high (“the entire course of human history depends on it,” says Sacks at one point in reference to the mutagen) and the Turtles have turned from pizza-obsessed surfer-types who speak of “dudes and dudettes” to steroid-pumped bros: from stoners to the kind of turtles you might expect to find at a Skrillex concert.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This doesn’t mean the Turtles have gone full Dark Knight. Stupid remarks about cat videos courtesy of Michelangelo and a random sing-along are just some of the token reminders of the Turtles of old. There’s also one scene focused on pizza and the obligatory, but heavily restrained, use of the word “cowabunga.” None of these elements is a defining characteristic anymore, though. They’re just traits that Liebesman and the film’s trio of writers (Josh Appelbaum, André Nemec and Evan Daugherty) were loath to completely remove from the script, but which, as employed here, bear little of their original appeal.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That leaves the film resting not quite at dark and brooding but having strayed too far from foolish fun. Ultimately, there’s a generic blandness to this incarnation of the Ninja Turtles, a derivative quality that the film’s self-aware pop culture references (one Turtle’s gruff voice is described as “his Batman voice”) only underline. The positive aspects of the movie are only those where less forgivable mistakes were avoided.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Compared to other bloated action movies, Liebesman keeps things going at a relatively quick pace. And even while deploying adrenaline-pumped cinematography, with a hyperkinetic camera continuously zooming, retreating, and spinning in circles, he doesn’t let scenes devolve into incoherence. There’s no lack of craft here, but there’s certainly an absence of character. \u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">Copyright 2014 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?utmac=UA-5828686-4&utmdt=Old+Shells%2C+New+%27Turtles%27%3A+Tinkering+With+The+Insides+Of+A+Famous+Franchise&utme=8(APIKey)9(MDAxOTAwOTE4MDEyMTkxMDAzNjczZDljZA004)\">\u003c/div>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>Jonathan Liebesman’s \u003cem>Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles\u003c/em>, a reboot of the franchise following three live-action movies from the ’90s and 2007’s computer-animated \u003cem>TMNT\u003c/em>, courted controversy in 2012 when the film’s producer, Michael Bay, announced the title of the film would be reduced to the simpler \u003cem>Ninja Turtles\u003c/em>. Much of the ensuing criticism became part of a wider denunciation of another comment by Bay indicating that Liebesman’s turtles would be members of an alien race rather than unnaturally evolved reptiles.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The less remarked upon but equally disastrous possibility, though, was losing the “teenage” element. According to a \u003ca href=\"http://mentalfloss.com/article/30862/complete-history-teenage-mutant-ninja-turtles\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">recent history\u003c/a> of the Ninja Turtles published by \u003cem>Mental Floss\u003c/em>, series creators Peter Laird and Kevin Eastman originally imagined\u003cem> \u003c/em>their heroes as fearsome and violent. But the Ninja Turtles in popular culture have always tended toward the goofy, unfocused and juvenile. The ’90s films, hardly masterpieces, are at least unabashedly childish. The original 1990 film featured not only teenage turtles, after all; it also populated the villainous Foot Clan, also the enemy in Liebesman’s movie, with delinquent, runaway youth.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The new \u003cem>Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles\u003c/em> is removed from such a youth-oriented universe. Liebesman and Bay ultimately dropped the truncated title and the more radical plot changes, but the resulting film still reflects a shift from the first films\u003cstrong>.\u003c/strong> Its origin story, while not launched into outer space, has been recast to fit a familiar world domination plot. Michelangelo (Noel Fisher), Donatello (Jeremy Howard), Leonardo (played by Pete Ploszek and voiced by Johnny Knoxville), Raphael (Alan Ritchson), and their rat sensei Splinter (Danny Woodburn, voiced by Tony Shalhoub) are now the products of experiments carried out by Eric Sacks (William Fichtner) and Dr. O’Neil (Paul Fitzgerald) in order to create a mutagen that would heal humans’ injuries and cure diseases. Of course, by the time the story really kicks off,\u003cem> \u003c/em>the mutagen’s positive properties are being used for more nefarious purposes.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles\u003c/em> takes place decades after the experiments, with Dr. O’Neil dead from a fire at Sacks’ laboratories and survived by his daughter, April (Megan Fox), a budding journalist tracking the story of the Foot Clan that is tormenting New York City. It’s April who first catches sight of the Turtles when they repel a Clan attack, ultimately realizing that they are the same turtles and rat that she saved from her father’s lab years ago.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I’m hesitant to subscribe to any notion of origin stories as sacrosanct, particularly since \u003cem>Ninja Turtles \u003c/em>is an uninspired but not offensively bad film. The changes, though, do remove one of the more charming elements of the Turtles, at least as they appeared in the original movies. The Turtles have always been urban vigilantes, but when their mutation was a result of bathing in a pool of discarded radioactive ooze they also tapped into an essential aspect of city life: the filthiness. Emerging from the sewers, the Turtles were products of urban waste disposed with little worry of its consequences. Now they’re just another science experiment gone wrong.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Liebesman’s rebranding also shifts the franchise into a slightly more serious register: the Foot Clan are now a well-armed militia, with their leader, Shredder (Tohoru Masamune), resembling a cross between Darth Vader and a Swiss-Army-knife-inspired Transformer. The stakes are impossibly high (“the entire course of human history depends on it,” says Sacks at one point in reference to the mutagen) and the Turtles have turned from pizza-obsessed surfer-types who speak of “dudes and dudettes” to steroid-pumped bros: from stoners to the kind of turtles you might expect to find at a Skrillex concert.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This doesn’t mean the Turtles have gone full Dark Knight. Stupid remarks about cat videos courtesy of Michelangelo and a random sing-along are just some of the token reminders of the Turtles of old. There’s also one scene focused on pizza and the obligatory, but heavily restrained, use of the word “cowabunga.” None of these elements is a defining characteristic anymore, though. They’re just traits that Liebesman and the film’s trio of writers (Josh Appelbaum, André Nemec and Evan Daugherty) were loath to completely remove from the script, but which, as employed here, bear little of their original appeal.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That leaves the film resting not quite at dark and brooding but having strayed too far from foolish fun. Ultimately, there’s a generic blandness to this incarnation of the Ninja Turtles, a derivative quality that the film’s self-aware pop culture references (one Turtle’s gruff voice is described as “his Batman voice”) only underline. The positive aspects of the movie are only those where less forgivable mistakes were avoided.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Compared to other bloated action movies, Liebesman keeps things going at a relatively quick pace. And even while deploying adrenaline-pumped cinematography, with a hyperkinetic camera continuously zooming, retreating, and spinning in circles, he doesn’t let scenes devolve into incoherence. There’s no lack of craft here, but there’s certainly an absence of character. \u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">Copyright 2014 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?utmac=UA-5828686-4&utmdt=Old+Shells%2C+New+%27Turtles%27%3A+Tinkering+With+The+Insides+Of+A+Famous+Franchise&utme=8(APIKey)9(MDAxOTAwOTE4MDEyMTkxMDAzNjczZDljZA004)\">\u003c/div>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"slug": "when-all-your-steaks-have-hot-sauce-a-case-against-nebraska-in-color",
"title": "When All Your Steaks Have Hot Sauce: A Case Against 'Nebraska' in Color",
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"content": "\u003cp>The latest indignity seemingly imposed by commerce upon art is \u003ca href=\"http://blogs.indiewire.com/thompsononhollywood/color-version-of-nebraska-to-show-on-epix-that-alexander-payne-hoped-would-never-be-seen-20140805\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">the news\u003c/a> that the cable movie channel Epix would air, in addition to the original black-and-white version, a color version of Alexander Payne’s \u003cem>Nebraska\u003c/em>, which was nominated for Best Picture earlier this year and stars Bruce Dern and Will Forte as a father and son on a somewhat discursive road trip nominally aimed at retrieving a cash payout to which the father believes he’s entitled.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This is not a colorized version ginned up after the fact; \u003ca href=\"http://variety.com/2013/film/news/alexander-payne-hopes-no-one-ever-sees-nebraska-in-color-1200861306/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">it’s existed all along\u003c/a> as a contractual necessity facilitated by digital shooting, according to a \u003ca href=\"http://variety.com/2013/film/news/alexander-payne-hopes-no-one-ever-sees-nebraska-in-color-1200861306/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">\u003cem>Variety\u003c/em> interview\u003c/a> with Payne last fall, in which he openly hoped it would never be seen. There’s not necessarily anything \u003cem>wrong\u003c/em> with the color version of the film — it’s not the optimal way to appreciate what the director and the rest of the creative team were going for, but “suboptimal” doesn’t mean “terrible.” It’s hard to imagine why anyone other than perhaps those with challenges seeing black and white images would want to watch a movie in what its creator considers an inferior form when the superior form is equally convenient. But if that were all this story suggested, that might not be such a big deal.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The real threat of this kind of thing, though, might be the way that digital presentations of content in general make it a lot easier to deliver things in lots and lots of different ways. It’s good to have flexibility, but it also means there might be a point where it becomes almost impossible to make your vision available to people without agreeing in advance to make it customizable to the point where it ceases to be art at all. You can imagine a future in which films are released from the outset in PG and R versions, or in black-and-white and color versions, or in longer and shorter versions, or in versions with two different scores.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>There’s something to be said for choosing your own adventure, as it were, but there’s also something to be said for leaving the creative decisions to the creator of the piece, and accepting that that surrender of control is part of immersing yourself in somebody else’s work.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>An analogy: If you order a steak and you want hot sauce on it, I am the last person to say you can’t have hot sauce, but I also believe it might be to your benefit \u003cem>not \u003c/em>to demand hot sauce by default on every steak you ever eat. And I believe it is to your benefit — our benefit — that a restaurant focused on the creativity of chefs not announce on the menu, “Did you want hot sauce? Did you want an egg on top? Did you want a peanut butter sandwich instead?” It is one thing to grant special requests when you can; it is another to present the creative choice of a creative person as something to take or leave casually, according to what you think you already want.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>If we are at a point where we cannot allow directorial choices to stand, even in films not intended to be \u003ca href=\"http://blogs.indiewire.com/shadowandact/inside-a-hollywood-studio-movie-marketers-playbook\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">four-quadrant blockbusters\u003c/a>, even with things that take up no more of our time, don’t require us to read subtitles, don’t make our lives harder, but simply \u003cem>feel\u003c/em> different — like black and white — then we are, in a word, hosed. And goosing people to consider a more familiar-feeling alternative instead of trusting them to deal with the piece as it was composed seems a bit cynical and sad.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That’s particularly true, and this is all particularly puzzling, since anyone not prepared to deal with a black and white film is going to have trouble with \u003cem>Nebraska\u003c/em> on many fronts. If a black and white movie makes you feel like you’re being forced to endure something inadequately modern, you’re not going to enjoy this particular film’s patient, contemplative tone anyway. Most people are not that afraid of black and white, in my experience, and addressing them as if they are has a whiff of condescension.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>At its best, digital filmmaking makes it possible for directors to be more agile and mobile, to shoot more cheaply, and to try more things. But it also makes it easier to undo those choices, or re-present them to audiences like everything you ever see has to come with an on-screen menu.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>There is a certain thrill to how helpless you are in a theater when it’s dark and you get the first flicker; there is always, for me, a moment in which I think, “Here we go.” Even now, even after all this time, “Here we go.” I’m happy to be a passenger. I’m happy not to be driving. I’m happy to be looking out the window. I don’t want to be offered black and white or color, classical or jazz, 120 minutes or 150. I want everybody sitting there to take the same ride, and when I’m at home, I may not be able to get the theater ride, but I certainly don’t want to be building the movie myself. That’s what the director is for.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Crowdsourcing is wonderful. Interactivity is wonderful. But I’m not looking for a line-item veto, and I’m not sure it’s beneficial to offer one. \u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">Copyright 2014 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?utmac=UA-5828686-4&utmdt=When+All+Your+Steaks+Have+Hot+Sauce%3A+A+Case+Against+%27Nebraska%27+In+Color&utme=8(APIKey)9(MDAxOTAwOTE4MDEyMTkxMDAzNjczZDljZA004)\">\u003c/div>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>The latest indignity seemingly imposed by commerce upon art is \u003ca href=\"http://blogs.indiewire.com/thompsononhollywood/color-version-of-nebraska-to-show-on-epix-that-alexander-payne-hoped-would-never-be-seen-20140805\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">the news\u003c/a> that the cable movie channel Epix would air, in addition to the original black-and-white version, a color version of Alexander Payne’s \u003cem>Nebraska\u003c/em>, which was nominated for Best Picture earlier this year and stars Bruce Dern and Will Forte as a father and son on a somewhat discursive road trip nominally aimed at retrieving a cash payout to which the father believes he’s entitled.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This is not a colorized version ginned up after the fact; \u003ca href=\"http://variety.com/2013/film/news/alexander-payne-hopes-no-one-ever-sees-nebraska-in-color-1200861306/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">it’s existed all along\u003c/a> as a contractual necessity facilitated by digital shooting, according to a \u003ca href=\"http://variety.com/2013/film/news/alexander-payne-hopes-no-one-ever-sees-nebraska-in-color-1200861306/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">\u003cem>Variety\u003c/em> interview\u003c/a> with Payne last fall, in which he openly hoped it would never be seen. There’s not necessarily anything \u003cem>wrong\u003c/em> with the color version of the film — it’s not the optimal way to appreciate what the director and the rest of the creative team were going for, but “suboptimal” doesn’t mean “terrible.” It’s hard to imagine why anyone other than perhaps those with challenges seeing black and white images would want to watch a movie in what its creator considers an inferior form when the superior form is equally convenient. But if that were all this story suggested, that might not be such a big deal.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The real threat of this kind of thing, though, might be the way that digital presentations of content in general make it a lot easier to deliver things in lots and lots of different ways. It’s good to have flexibility, but it also means there might be a point where it becomes almost impossible to make your vision available to people without agreeing in advance to make it customizable to the point where it ceases to be art at all. You can imagine a future in which films are released from the outset in PG and R versions, or in black-and-white and color versions, or in longer and shorter versions, or in versions with two different scores.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>There’s something to be said for choosing your own adventure, as it were, but there’s also something to be said for leaving the creative decisions to the creator of the piece, and accepting that that surrender of control is part of immersing yourself in somebody else’s work.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>An analogy: If you order a steak and you want hot sauce on it, I am the last person to say you can’t have hot sauce, but I also believe it might be to your benefit \u003cem>not \u003c/em>to demand hot sauce by default on every steak you ever eat. And I believe it is to your benefit — our benefit — that a restaurant focused on the creativity of chefs not announce on the menu, “Did you want hot sauce? Did you want an egg on top? Did you want a peanut butter sandwich instead?” It is one thing to grant special requests when you can; it is another to present the creative choice of a creative person as something to take or leave casually, according to what you think you already want.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>If we are at a point where we cannot allow directorial choices to stand, even in films not intended to be \u003ca href=\"http://blogs.indiewire.com/shadowandact/inside-a-hollywood-studio-movie-marketers-playbook\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">four-quadrant blockbusters\u003c/a>, even with things that take up no more of our time, don’t require us to read subtitles, don’t make our lives harder, but simply \u003cem>feel\u003c/em> different — like black and white — then we are, in a word, hosed. And goosing people to consider a more familiar-feeling alternative instead of trusting them to deal with the piece as it was composed seems a bit cynical and sad.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That’s particularly true, and this is all particularly puzzling, since anyone not prepared to deal with a black and white film is going to have trouble with \u003cem>Nebraska\u003c/em> on many fronts. If a black and white movie makes you feel like you’re being forced to endure something inadequately modern, you’re not going to enjoy this particular film’s patient, contemplative tone anyway. Most people are not that afraid of black and white, in my experience, and addressing them as if they are has a whiff of condescension.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>At its best, digital filmmaking makes it possible for directors to be more agile and mobile, to shoot more cheaply, and to try more things. But it also makes it easier to undo those choices, or re-present them to audiences like everything you ever see has to come with an on-screen menu.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>There is a certain thrill to how helpless you are in a theater when it’s dark and you get the first flicker; there is always, for me, a moment in which I think, “Here we go.” Even now, even after all this time, “Here we go.” I’m happy to be a passenger. I’m happy not to be driving. I’m happy to be looking out the window. I don’t want to be offered black and white or color, classical or jazz, 120 minutes or 150. I want everybody sitting there to take the same ride, and when I’m at home, I may not be able to get the theater ride, but I certainly don’t want to be building the movie myself. That’s what the director is for.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Crowdsourcing is wonderful. Interactivity is wonderful. But I’m not looking for a line-item veto, and I’m not sure it’s beneficial to offer one. \u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">Copyright 2014 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?utmac=UA-5828686-4&utmdt=When+All+Your+Steaks+Have+Hot+Sauce%3A+A+Case+Against+%27Nebraska%27+In+Color&utme=8(APIKey)9(MDAxOTAwOTE4MDEyMTkxMDAzNjczZDljZA004)\">\u003c/div>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"slug": "maturity-and-improvisation-in-happy-christmas",
"title": "Maturity And Improvisation In 'Happy Christmas'",
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"content": "\u003cp>Reckless immaturity in young people is generally diagnosed across generations, most often by parents worried about their supposedly underachieving kids. That makes the premise of Joe Swanberg’s \u003cem>Happy Christmas\u003c/em> relatively refreshing, even as it covers well-known ground.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The film opens with Jeff (Swanberg) and Kelly (Melanie Lynskey) preparing for the arrival of Jeff’s sister, Jenny (Anna Kendrick), who is moving into their basement after breaking up with her boyfriend. Jeff and Jenny are of the same generation, only years apart in age, but clearly standing on separate sides of a line we might, for convenience’s sake, call “responsible adulthood.” On her first night living with Jeff and Kelly — who have a 2-year-old son named Jude (played by Swanberg’s son, also named Jude) — Jenny goes to a party with her friend Carson (Lena Dunham), blacks out from drinking too much, and requires Jeff to come drag her home in the middle of the night. The next day, a disappointed Kelly rejects Jeff’s argument that they may have been equally reckless at that age: “I had some semblance of propriety,” she scoffs.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>http://youtu.be/njsI7SZGom8\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>What’s most interesting at first about \u003cem>Happy Christmas\u003c/em> is that the differences between Jeff and Kelly on one hand and Jenny and Carson on the other are obviously recent and superficial.\u003cem> \u003c/em>Jenny is not adamantly making a case for never growing up; life, rather, just seems to not have given her a reason to do so yet. Still, she is a perfect foil for Jeff and Kelly, who are both only beginning to get comfortable with their adult lives.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Across such a flimsy divide, it’s only a matter of time before shared sentiments emerge. The film’s best scene occurs shortly after Jenny has successfully babysat Jude for the first time. Kelly joins her and Carson for a beer and begins opening up about her dissatisfactions with her marriage, particularly the fact that she has had to give up her writing completely while Jeff continues to work.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>All the film’s most compelling scenes are those where Swanberg lets the dialogue flow, his camera panning from character to character with relatively few cuts. With \u003cem>Happy Christmas, \u003c/em>Swanberg has again relied on improvisation to flesh out the script. The charm of the technique as Swanberg, Dunham, Kendrick and Lynskey pull it off here is its easygoing execution and the empathy that underlies it (whether or not it also feels “real,” as many like to argue when discussing Swanberg’s approach, is beside the point). This is a comedy that, at its best, eases you into its comfort zone and massages laughs out of you.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Happy Christmas\u003c/em> also, if fitfully, belongs to a class of romantic comedy that filmmakers like Swanberg and Lynn Shelton have helped define. Romantic fulfillment is a central worry and theme in these films, but only as it relates to the characters’ individual self-actualization. Swanberg’s previous film \u003cem>Drinking Buddies\u003c/em> worked particularly well within such a context; it was an alternate version of \u003cem>When Harry Met Sally\u003c/em>, one in which no one declares off the top that men and women can’t be friends, leaving the options for its characters and relationships confusingly but also liberatingly more open.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Unfortunately, \u003cem>Happy Christmas\u003c/em>‘s characters and conflicts are generic compared to \u003cem>Drinking Buddies\u003c/em>. The problem is largely with the script, and offers a warning about the central risk that comes with Swanberg’s improvisational method: not so much that individual scenes will meander (none here do), but that they won’t propel the plot forward in any meaningful way.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Much of the middle of \u003cem>Happy Christmas \u003c/em>is taken up by Jenny and Kelly’s attempts at writing an erotic novel they half-jokingly hope will bring Kelly instant riches, through which the two bond after their initial conflict. The scenes where they brainstorm ideas and discuss the best words to use when writing sex scenes are as funny as any in the movie, but they are freestanding — more sketch comedy than part of a narrative.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>So as the film shifts back to focusing on Jenny’s supposed immaturity and her cautious steps at dating a friend of Kelly and Jeff’s, the more dramatically charged scenes that result feel rushed and forced rather than organically produced. Jenny, it seems, is supposed to have been emotionally disconnected throughout the movie, but we only realize that when Kelly points it out. Similarly, it’s only when Jenny relapses into immature behavior that we remember that this was the crux of her character to begin with.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Swanberg has said that \u003cem>Happy Christmas\u003c/em> grew out of conversations between him and his wife about the difficulties of balancing parenting and their careers, which only raises the question of why the film ultimately focuses on Jenny rather than Kelly, a more finely drawn character who demands greater attention. That the decision is even there to be made, though, indicates the slow shift that has been occurring in Swanberg’s movies recently. Jenny is a recognizable personality from many of Swanberg’s films. Kelly, meanwhile, hints at terrain that he has only just begun to explore. \u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">Copyright 2014 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?utmac=UA-5828686-4&utmdt=Maturity+And+Improvisation+In+%27Happy+Christmas%27&utme=8(APIKey)9(MDAxOTAwOTE4MDEyMTkxMDAzNjczZDljZA004)\">\u003c/div>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>Reckless immaturity in young people is generally diagnosed across generations, most often by parents worried about their supposedly underachieving kids. That makes the premise of Joe Swanberg’s \u003cem>Happy Christmas\u003c/em> relatively refreshing, even as it covers well-known ground.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The film opens with Jeff (Swanberg) and Kelly (Melanie Lynskey) preparing for the arrival of Jeff’s sister, Jenny (Anna Kendrick), who is moving into their basement after breaking up with her boyfriend. Jeff and Jenny are of the same generation, only years apart in age, but clearly standing on separate sides of a line we might, for convenience’s sake, call “responsible adulthood.” On her first night living with Jeff and Kelly — who have a 2-year-old son named Jude (played by Swanberg’s son, also named Jude) — Jenny goes to a party with her friend Carson (Lena Dunham), blacks out from drinking too much, and requires Jeff to come drag her home in the middle of the night. The next day, a disappointed Kelly rejects Jeff’s argument that they may have been equally reckless at that age: “I had some semblance of propriety,” she scoffs.\u003c/p>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003cspan class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__embedYoutube'>\n \u003cspan class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__embedYoutubeInside'>\n \u003ciframe\n loading='lazy'\n class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__youtubePlayer'\n type='text/html'\n src='//www.youtube.com/embed/njsI7SZGom8'\n title='//www.youtube.com/embed/njsI7SZGom8'\n allowfullscreen='true'\n style='border:0;'>\u003c/iframe>\n \u003c/span>\n \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003cp>What’s most interesting at first about \u003cem>Happy Christmas\u003c/em> is that the differences between Jeff and Kelly on one hand and Jenny and Carson on the other are obviously recent and superficial.\u003cem> \u003c/em>Jenny is not adamantly making a case for never growing up; life, rather, just seems to not have given her a reason to do so yet. Still, she is a perfect foil for Jeff and Kelly, who are both only beginning to get comfortable with their adult lives.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Across such a flimsy divide, it’s only a matter of time before shared sentiments emerge. The film’s best scene occurs shortly after Jenny has successfully babysat Jude for the first time. Kelly joins her and Carson for a beer and begins opening up about her dissatisfactions with her marriage, particularly the fact that she has had to give up her writing completely while Jeff continues to work.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>All the film’s most compelling scenes are those where Swanberg lets the dialogue flow, his camera panning from character to character with relatively few cuts. With \u003cem>Happy Christmas, \u003c/em>Swanberg has again relied on improvisation to flesh out the script. The charm of the technique as Swanberg, Dunham, Kendrick and Lynskey pull it off here is its easygoing execution and the empathy that underlies it (whether or not it also feels “real,” as many like to argue when discussing Swanberg’s approach, is beside the point). This is a comedy that, at its best, eases you into its comfort zone and massages laughs out of you.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Happy Christmas\u003c/em> also, if fitfully, belongs to a class of romantic comedy that filmmakers like Swanberg and Lynn Shelton have helped define. Romantic fulfillment is a central worry and theme in these films, but only as it relates to the characters’ individual self-actualization. Swanberg’s previous film \u003cem>Drinking Buddies\u003c/em> worked particularly well within such a context; it was an alternate version of \u003cem>When Harry Met Sally\u003c/em>, one in which no one declares off the top that men and women can’t be friends, leaving the options for its characters and relationships confusingly but also liberatingly more open.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Unfortunately, \u003cem>Happy Christmas\u003c/em>‘s characters and conflicts are generic compared to \u003cem>Drinking Buddies\u003c/em>. The problem is largely with the script, and offers a warning about the central risk that comes with Swanberg’s improvisational method: not so much that individual scenes will meander (none here do), but that they won’t propel the plot forward in any meaningful way.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Much of the middle of \u003cem>Happy Christmas \u003c/em>is taken up by Jenny and Kelly’s attempts at writing an erotic novel they half-jokingly hope will bring Kelly instant riches, through which the two bond after their initial conflict. The scenes where they brainstorm ideas and discuss the best words to use when writing sex scenes are as funny as any in the movie, but they are freestanding — more sketch comedy than part of a narrative.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>So as the film shifts back to focusing on Jenny’s supposed immaturity and her cautious steps at dating a friend of Kelly and Jeff’s, the more dramatically charged scenes that result feel rushed and forced rather than organically produced. Jenny, it seems, is supposed to have been emotionally disconnected throughout the movie, but we only realize that when Kelly points it out. Similarly, it’s only when Jenny relapses into immature behavior that we remember that this was the crux of her character to begin with.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Swanberg has said that \u003cem>Happy Christmas\u003c/em> grew out of conversations between him and his wife about the difficulties of balancing parenting and their careers, which only raises the question of why the film ultimately focuses on Jenny rather than Kelly, a more finely drawn character who demands greater attention. That the decision is even there to be made, though, indicates the slow shift that has been occurring in Swanberg’s movies recently. Jenny is a recognizable personality from many of Swanberg’s films. Kelly, meanwhile, hints at terrain that he has only just begun to explore. \u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">Copyright 2014 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?utmac=UA-5828686-4&utmdt=Maturity+And+Improvisation+In+%27Happy+Christmas%27&utme=8(APIKey)9(MDAxOTAwOTE4MDEyMTkxMDAzNjczZDljZA004)\">\u003c/div>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"content": "\u003cp>The worst thing about making a post-\u003cem>Avengers \u003c/em>Marvel movie is how far ahead of the game you are when you start. Your film will be marketed with brute force, treated as arguably the biggest opening of the summer, reviewed everywhere, and very likely to land among the most commercially successful films of the year, whether or not you do anything interesting with it. From a professional development standpoint, it wouldn’t be unreasonable to describe your task as “don’t screw up.” There’s no reason for that \u003cem>not \u003c/em>to inspire cautious tiptoeing, for it \u003cem>not \u003c/em>to motivate a precise tonal copy of what’s worked in films like \u003cem>Iron Man \u003c/em>and \u003cem>The Avengers\u003c/em>, and ultimately for it \u003cem>not \u003c/em>to lead to a zillion-dollar effort to ensure a solid, uninteresting base hit, creatively speaking.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>So it’s particularly surprising how often \u003cem>Guardians Of The Galaxy\u003c/em> feels very unlike other Marvel movies and other comic-book movies.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>http://youtu.be/89q_HH-3ghk\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Directed by James Gunn (who also directed the offbeat superhero comedy \u003cem>Super\u003c/em>) and written by Gunn and Nicole Perlman, \u003cem>Guardians \u003c/em>introduces us to Peter Quill (Chris Pratt), a capable and ambivalent wisecracking thief still working for the aliens who abducted him from Earth as a little boy, shortly after the death of his mother. As wisecracking thieves always do, Quill finds himself in a jam, and not long after, he’s in jail with the mysterious and fearless Gamora (Zoe Saldana), the grief-stricken and huge Drax (Dave Bautista), a big walking tree named Groot (voiced by Vin Diesel) and the particularly mercenary Rocket Raccoon (voiced by Bradley Cooper). They soon find a common purpose, and we’re off. There’s an orb – oh, there’s \u003cem>always\u003c/em> an orb – and there’s a preening and pronouncing bad guy (Lee Pace) who speaks at all times as if he’s an action figure being waved around and given voice by a growling kid who’s just recently discovered comics, and there’s a message about the importance of friendship and teamwork.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>What distinguishes \u003cem>Guardians Of The Galaxy \u003c/em>is its tone, which arrives early in the form of the ’70s mixtapes that Quill got from his mom, which he still blasts on his adored Sony Walkman. After the brief prologue, we first find him kicking and cool-guy-dancing through the puddles of a faraway planet while Redbone’s “Come And Get Your Love” plays. He’s very much a Marvel hero, but Pratt – a tremendously charismatic actor whose work as the huge-hearted and slightly foggy-headed Andy Dwyer on \u003cem>Parks And Recreation\u003c/em> foreshadowed some of what he’s doing here – gives him both a shaggier charm and a much more specifically comedic carriage than most Marvel heroes. This is not the suave, swaggering wit of Tony Stark; it is a much more uncertain and blithely goofy thing.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The simple fact that \u003cem>Guardians Of The Galaxy \u003c/em>is closer to a pure comedy is what distinguishes it most. \u003cem>Iron Man \u003c/em>and \u003cem>The Avengers \u003c/em>certainly are witty, but they’re not comedies, and this is. Where those films largely depend on well-timed ironic understatement and the occasional Hulk-on-Loki beatdown for their chuckles, this movie has \u003cem>jokes\u003c/em>. Lots of jokes. Plain old jokes. Laugh lines. Punchy cuts between serious action sequences and bone-dry, deadpan takes. It has wonderful face-pulling. It has mechanical-eyeball comedy.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>What comes through so delightfully is a balance between the weary, sometimes skeptical but deeply affectionate good will of adults who love an enjoyable blockbuster and the campy, self-serious exploration of good and evil that kids can happily bathe in before they start to think of comics as fundamentally a capitalist enterprise. You could see this movie and then have a long debate over exactly what Pace is doing, how in on the joke he is, and how much he knows that intensity-wise, he’s doing Release The Kraken MULTIPLIED by Emperor Palpatine TIMES Loki PLUS everybody who gets a mask pulled off his head at the end of a Scooby-Doo cartoon. It’s not that he’s not doing a real villain, but he’s also doing \u003cem>the \u003c/em>villain, the \u003cem>idea \u003c/em>of a comic-book villain. While he’s giving it all he’s got when it comes to menace, his delicious super-ferocity is meant to work hand-in-glove with the more obviously comedic stuff that Quill’s team is doing. (Interestingly, the constantly joke-cracking Rocket is probably the least successful invention on the team; Groot’s limited capacity for comedy – he’s a tree, remember – becomes the funniest bit of all.)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>There’s plenty of heart in \u003cem>Guardians\u003c/em>, but it gets its emotional heft largely from the warmth that this kind of comedy inherently contains. Genuinely funny people engender sympathy (see the witty Hans in \u003cem>Die Hard\u003c/em>), so comedy isn’t just for giggles, it’s also for resonance. But here’s the thing: it’s fun. F-U-N. Remember F-U-N? The thing that blockbusters used to be before they started crushing cities full of innocent people and seemingly forgetting all about them? The thing that the Richard Donner \u003cem>Superman \u003c/em>was? The thing that used to at least be \u003cem>one \u003c/em>of the most important big-money-movie elements, alongside bloodletting, franchising, and an unrelenting, ashen grimness that could be rounded off to approximate seriousness of purpose?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Yeah. Fun! I missed it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>On the downside, \u003cem>Guardians \u003c/em>is probably least inventive in its aesthetic: it doesn’t play like a Marvel movie, but its visuals sure look like one. Orbs, explosions, huge spacecraft … all of this has been seen. There are a handful of very pretty shots – Gunn seems to have a fondness for floating and uses it in several places to lovely effect – and there’s a nicely manic fight sequence between Quill and Gamora early on. But the branding of the Marvel Universe is certainly more consistent and more easily felt visually than tonally.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That music, on the other hand, is deftly chosen. Everybody from Stanley Kubrick to Michael Moore has done the bit where you play upbeat music over downbeat images for a kick of irony, but there are a few places in \u003cem>Guardians \u003c/em>where songs, including “Hooked On A Feeling” (admittedly a well-worn weapon at this point), create a more complex sensation than the expected orchestral soundtrack would have. And while the other Marvel movies are similarly contemporary, they’re also much more Earth-bound; it’s a funny feeling – in a good way – to see people having epic battles over ancient artifacts in space and have the music create such a temporal link to this particular man’s lost life on Earth.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It’s easy to create a clean break between the satisfaction of popular entertainment and the rewards of great art, and that divide, while not quite as easy to define as it seems, is certainly genuine. What’s much shakier is the idea that the satisfaction of popular entertainment is valueless while the rewards of great art matter. There’s always been a place for F.U.N. – it’s always been one of the reasons people seek out culture. To see it done really, really well, with purpose and energy and wit, is itself awfully rewarding. \u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">Copyright 2014 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?utmac=UA-5828686-4&utmdt=%27Guardians+Of+The+Galaxy%27%3A+Let%27s+Hear+It+For+F.U.N.&utme=8(APIKey)9(MDAxOTAwOTE4MDEyMTkxMDAzNjczZDljZA004)\">\u003c/div>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>The worst thing about making a post-\u003cem>Avengers \u003c/em>Marvel movie is how far ahead of the game you are when you start. Your film will be marketed with brute force, treated as arguably the biggest opening of the summer, reviewed everywhere, and very likely to land among the most commercially successful films of the year, whether or not you do anything interesting with it. From a professional development standpoint, it wouldn’t be unreasonable to describe your task as “don’t screw up.” There’s no reason for that \u003cem>not \u003c/em>to inspire cautious tiptoeing, for it \u003cem>not \u003c/em>to motivate a precise tonal copy of what’s worked in films like \u003cem>Iron Man \u003c/em>and \u003cem>The Avengers\u003c/em>, and ultimately for it \u003cem>not \u003c/em>to lead to a zillion-dollar effort to ensure a solid, uninteresting base hit, creatively speaking.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>So it’s particularly surprising how often \u003cem>Guardians Of The Galaxy\u003c/em> feels very unlike other Marvel movies and other comic-book movies.\u003c/p>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003cspan class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__embedYoutube'>\n \u003cspan class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__embedYoutubeInside'>\n \u003ciframe\n loading='lazy'\n class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__youtubePlayer'\n type='text/html'\n src='//www.youtube.com/embed/89q_HH-3ghk'\n title='//www.youtube.com/embed/89q_HH-3ghk'\n allowfullscreen='true'\n style='border:0;'>\u003c/iframe>\n \u003c/span>\n \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003cp>Directed by James Gunn (who also directed the offbeat superhero comedy \u003cem>Super\u003c/em>) and written by Gunn and Nicole Perlman, \u003cem>Guardians \u003c/em>introduces us to Peter Quill (Chris Pratt), a capable and ambivalent wisecracking thief still working for the aliens who abducted him from Earth as a little boy, shortly after the death of his mother. As wisecracking thieves always do, Quill finds himself in a jam, and not long after, he’s in jail with the mysterious and fearless Gamora (Zoe Saldana), the grief-stricken and huge Drax (Dave Bautista), a big walking tree named Groot (voiced by Vin Diesel) and the particularly mercenary Rocket Raccoon (voiced by Bradley Cooper). They soon find a common purpose, and we’re off. There’s an orb – oh, there’s \u003cem>always\u003c/em> an orb – and there’s a preening and pronouncing bad guy (Lee Pace) who speaks at all times as if he’s an action figure being waved around and given voice by a growling kid who’s just recently discovered comics, and there’s a message about the importance of friendship and teamwork.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>What distinguishes \u003cem>Guardians Of The Galaxy \u003c/em>is its tone, which arrives early in the form of the ’70s mixtapes that Quill got from his mom, which he still blasts on his adored Sony Walkman. After the brief prologue, we first find him kicking and cool-guy-dancing through the puddles of a faraway planet while Redbone’s “Come And Get Your Love” plays. He’s very much a Marvel hero, but Pratt – a tremendously charismatic actor whose work as the huge-hearted and slightly foggy-headed Andy Dwyer on \u003cem>Parks And Recreation\u003c/em> foreshadowed some of what he’s doing here – gives him both a shaggier charm and a much more specifically comedic carriage than most Marvel heroes. This is not the suave, swaggering wit of Tony Stark; it is a much more uncertain and blithely goofy thing.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The simple fact that \u003cem>Guardians Of The Galaxy \u003c/em>is closer to a pure comedy is what distinguishes it most. \u003cem>Iron Man \u003c/em>and \u003cem>The Avengers \u003c/em>certainly are witty, but they’re not comedies, and this is. Where those films largely depend on well-timed ironic understatement and the occasional Hulk-on-Loki beatdown for their chuckles, this movie has \u003cem>jokes\u003c/em>. Lots of jokes. Plain old jokes. Laugh lines. Punchy cuts between serious action sequences and bone-dry, deadpan takes. It has wonderful face-pulling. It has mechanical-eyeball comedy.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>What comes through so delightfully is a balance between the weary, sometimes skeptical but deeply affectionate good will of adults who love an enjoyable blockbuster and the campy, self-serious exploration of good and evil that kids can happily bathe in before they start to think of comics as fundamentally a capitalist enterprise. You could see this movie and then have a long debate over exactly what Pace is doing, how in on the joke he is, and how much he knows that intensity-wise, he’s doing Release The Kraken MULTIPLIED by Emperor Palpatine TIMES Loki PLUS everybody who gets a mask pulled off his head at the end of a Scooby-Doo cartoon. It’s not that he’s not doing a real villain, but he’s also doing \u003cem>the \u003c/em>villain, the \u003cem>idea \u003c/em>of a comic-book villain. While he’s giving it all he’s got when it comes to menace, his delicious super-ferocity is meant to work hand-in-glove with the more obviously comedic stuff that Quill’s team is doing. (Interestingly, the constantly joke-cracking Rocket is probably the least successful invention on the team; Groot’s limited capacity for comedy – he’s a tree, remember – becomes the funniest bit of all.)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>There’s plenty of heart in \u003cem>Guardians\u003c/em>, but it gets its emotional heft largely from the warmth that this kind of comedy inherently contains. Genuinely funny people engender sympathy (see the witty Hans in \u003cem>Die Hard\u003c/em>), so comedy isn’t just for giggles, it’s also for resonance. But here’s the thing: it’s fun. F-U-N. Remember F-U-N? The thing that blockbusters used to be before they started crushing cities full of innocent people and seemingly forgetting all about them? The thing that the Richard Donner \u003cem>Superman \u003c/em>was? The thing that used to at least be \u003cem>one \u003c/em>of the most important big-money-movie elements, alongside bloodletting, franchising, and an unrelenting, ashen grimness that could be rounded off to approximate seriousness of purpose?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Yeah. Fun! I missed it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>On the downside, \u003cem>Guardians \u003c/em>is probably least inventive in its aesthetic: it doesn’t play like a Marvel movie, but its visuals sure look like one. Orbs, explosions, huge spacecraft … all of this has been seen. There are a handful of very pretty shots – Gunn seems to have a fondness for floating and uses it in several places to lovely effect – and there’s a nicely manic fight sequence between Quill and Gamora early on. But the branding of the Marvel Universe is certainly more consistent and more easily felt visually than tonally.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That music, on the other hand, is deftly chosen. Everybody from Stanley Kubrick to Michael Moore has done the bit where you play upbeat music over downbeat images for a kick of irony, but there are a few places in \u003cem>Guardians \u003c/em>where songs, including “Hooked On A Feeling” (admittedly a well-worn weapon at this point), create a more complex sensation than the expected orchestral soundtrack would have. And while the other Marvel movies are similarly contemporary, they’re also much more Earth-bound; it’s a funny feeling – in a good way – to see people having epic battles over ancient artifacts in space and have the music create such a temporal link to this particular man’s lost life on Earth.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It’s easy to create a clean break between the satisfaction of popular entertainment and the rewards of great art, and that divide, while not quite as easy to define as it seems, is certainly genuine. What’s much shakier is the idea that the satisfaction of popular entertainment is valueless while the rewards of great art matter. There’s always been a place for F.U.N. – it’s always been one of the reasons people seek out culture. To see it done really, really well, with purpose and energy and wit, is itself awfully rewarding. \u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">Copyright 2014 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?utmac=UA-5828686-4&utmdt=%27Guardians+Of+The+Galaxy%27%3A+Let%27s+Hear+It+For+F.U.N.&utme=8(APIKey)9(MDAxOTAwOTE4MDEyMTkxMDAzNjczZDljZA004)\">\u003c/div>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"content": "\u003cp>Viewers of earnest sci-fi dramas like \u003cem>I Origins\u003c/em> are required to suspend disbelief, but the scripters of such movies have responsibilities, too. They can’t introduce ideas so ridiculous, or suddenly twist their premises so illogically, that audiences are fatally distracted.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Take, for example, \u003cem>Snowpiercer\u003c/em>, set on a frozen future Earth. While a home nestled in the warm bedrock would be the logical place to wait out an ice age, let’s accept that the few surviving humans are instead circling the globe on a “high-speed” train. But then the filmmakers throw in the notion that it takes a year to make a complete circuit. That means, if the train is tracing the Earth’s widest circumference, it’s moving a little under 3 MPH. A snowpiercing bicycle could beat that.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In \u003cem>Dawn of the Planet of the Apes\u003c/em>, great care is taken to show that the CGI apes follow genuine simian psychology. So when one chimp challenges another, the two fight for dominance. But then the loser skulks off and does what he wanted to do anyway, which negates the whole setup.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>http://youtu.be/Mk4briOLrTQ\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Writer-director Mike Cahill’s \u003cem>I Origins\u003c/em> is even more cavalier about its own ground rules, although not until its second hour. In the first part, bio-researcher Ian (Michael Pitt) tries to disprove Intelligent Design proponents’ claim that the human eye is too complex to be a result of evolution. So he tinkers with the genes of blind worms, hoping to demonstrate how easy it is to give the critters sight.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Always obsessed with eyes, Ian has taken many photos of complexly colored and patterned irises. Naturally, when he encounters the Latin-French beauty who will seduce him from his lab-rat lifestyle, she’s wearing a mask, so just her eyes are visible. Sofi (Astrid Berges-Frisbey) is drawn to Ian as well, but their encounter is fleeting.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>How to find her? Of course she’s a model whose eyes are displayed on a billboard, to which Ian’s own peepers are drawn by the lucky number “11,” which is sort of “ii.” (Puns are the movie’s essential logic.)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Ian and Sofi relocate temporarily to an European art film and enjoy a half-dressed idyll, sensuously shot by cinematographer Markus Forderer. They’re almost perfect together, and this section of the film is a pleasant tumble of gently erotic images. But he’s a scientist and she’s a mystic, which might seem to be the conflict that will animate the movie’s second half.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A closer look, however, reveals trouble right at the lab. Her name is Karen, and she’s dedicated, brilliant and utterly rational — the first assistant Ian has ever taken seriously. Yes, it’s Brit Marling in another one of her too-good-to-be-true roles.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Marling didn’t co-write \u003cem>I Origins\u003c/em>, as she did the equally solemn and nutty \u003cem>Another Earth\u003c/em>, the previous feature by Cahill, her Georgetown University classmate. But she plays the figure who will, coolly and methodically, lead the movie from science-y fiction into barking-mad nonsense, complete with an after-the-credits scene set in Crazytown.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It turns out that “I” not just rhymes with “eye,” but also indicates the eternal identity some call the soul. For the story’s conclusion, Sofi exits, Karen moves in and Ian eventually goes to India, home of an actual national iris-recognition ID program that may have inspired the film. It’s also a place, by the way, where a lot of people believe in reincarnation.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>If the film’s plot is loonier than a mainstream movie would dare, the essential trajectory is one of Hollywood’s favorites: from skepticism to faith. There’s a “i” in “believe,” which is just the sort of empty happenstance \u003cem>I Origins \u003c/em>tries to spin into a mind-blowing epiphany. \u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">Copyright 2014 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?utmac=UA-5828686-4&utmdt=%27I+Origins%27%3A+There%27s+More+Than+One+%27I%27+In+%27Ridiculous%27&utme=8(APIKey)9(MDAxOTAwOTE4MDEyMTkxMDAzNjczZDljZA004)\">\u003c/div>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>Viewers of earnest sci-fi dramas like \u003cem>I Origins\u003c/em> are required to suspend disbelief, but the scripters of such movies have responsibilities, too. They can’t introduce ideas so ridiculous, or suddenly twist their premises so illogically, that audiences are fatally distracted.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Take, for example, \u003cem>Snowpiercer\u003c/em>, set on a frozen future Earth. While a home nestled in the warm bedrock would be the logical place to wait out an ice age, let’s accept that the few surviving humans are instead circling the globe on a “high-speed” train. But then the filmmakers throw in the notion that it takes a year to make a complete circuit. That means, if the train is tracing the Earth’s widest circumference, it’s moving a little under 3 MPH. A snowpiercing bicycle could beat that.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In \u003cem>Dawn of the Planet of the Apes\u003c/em>, great care is taken to show that the CGI apes follow genuine simian psychology. So when one chimp challenges another, the two fight for dominance. But then the loser skulks off and does what he wanted to do anyway, which negates the whole setup.\u003c/p>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003cspan class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__embedYoutube'>\n \u003cspan class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__embedYoutubeInside'>\n \u003ciframe\n loading='lazy'\n class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__youtubePlayer'\n type='text/html'\n src='//www.youtube.com/embed/Mk4briOLrTQ'\n title='//www.youtube.com/embed/Mk4briOLrTQ'\n allowfullscreen='true'\n style='border:0;'>\u003c/iframe>\n \u003c/span>\n \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003cp>Writer-director Mike Cahill’s \u003cem>I Origins\u003c/em> is even more cavalier about its own ground rules, although not until its second hour. In the first part, bio-researcher Ian (Michael Pitt) tries to disprove Intelligent Design proponents’ claim that the human eye is too complex to be a result of evolution. So he tinkers with the genes of blind worms, hoping to demonstrate how easy it is to give the critters sight.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Always obsessed with eyes, Ian has taken many photos of complexly colored and patterned irises. Naturally, when he encounters the Latin-French beauty who will seduce him from his lab-rat lifestyle, she’s wearing a mask, so just her eyes are visible. Sofi (Astrid Berges-Frisbey) is drawn to Ian as well, but their encounter is fleeting.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>How to find her? Of course she’s a model whose eyes are displayed on a billboard, to which Ian’s own peepers are drawn by the lucky number “11,” which is sort of “ii.” (Puns are the movie’s essential logic.)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Ian and Sofi relocate temporarily to an European art film and enjoy a half-dressed idyll, sensuously shot by cinematographer Markus Forderer. They’re almost perfect together, and this section of the film is a pleasant tumble of gently erotic images. But he’s a scientist and she’s a mystic, which might seem to be the conflict that will animate the movie’s second half.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A closer look, however, reveals trouble right at the lab. Her name is Karen, and she’s dedicated, brilliant and utterly rational — the first assistant Ian has ever taken seriously. Yes, it’s Brit Marling in another one of her too-good-to-be-true roles.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Marling didn’t co-write \u003cem>I Origins\u003c/em>, as she did the equally solemn and nutty \u003cem>Another Earth\u003c/em>, the previous feature by Cahill, her Georgetown University classmate. But she plays the figure who will, coolly and methodically, lead the movie from science-y fiction into barking-mad nonsense, complete with an after-the-credits scene set in Crazytown.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It turns out that “I” not just rhymes with “eye,” but also indicates the eternal identity some call the soul. For the story’s conclusion, Sofi exits, Karen moves in and Ian eventually goes to India, home of an actual national iris-recognition ID program that may have inspired the film. It’s also a place, by the way, where a lot of people believe in reincarnation.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>If the film’s plot is loonier than a mainstream movie would dare, the essential trajectory is one of Hollywood’s favorites: from skepticism to faith. There’s a “i” in “believe,” which is just the sort of empty happenstance \u003cem>I Origins \u003c/em>tries to spin into a mind-blowing epiphany. \u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">Copyright 2014 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?utmac=UA-5828686-4&utmdt=%27I+Origins%27%3A+There%27s+More+Than+One+%27I%27+In+%27Ridiculous%27&utme=8(APIKey)9(MDAxOTAwOTE4MDEyMTkxMDAzNjczZDljZA004)\">\u003c/div>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"content": "\u003cp>About halfway through \u003cem>Mood Indigo\u003c/em>, a film of inexhaustible creativity directed by Michel Gondry, the apartment that Colin (Romain Duris) and Chloé (Audrey Tautou) call home begins to change dramatically — the ceiling starts closing in, and a thick layer of cobweb starts covering the walls and windows. “My place is doing the same thing, but I think it’s an illusion,” says a friend when she drops in for a visit. “As you go through life, places seem smaller.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The effect is an illusion in the cinematic sense, of course — one of many that Gondry brilliantly creates in this film using visual effects (stop motion, puppetry, scale models and plain old dress-up) that hearken back more to the birth of cinema and the Méliès brothers than to \u003cem>Transformers\u003c/em>. But the illusion of shrinking rooms and changing worlds is also familiar to almost all of us from everyday life; it takes little more than a hangover, after all, for us to realize that physical spaces can appear to mutate according to our moods.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>http://youtu.be/38ugyccL5zU\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Gondry’s appreciation and insight into this phenomenon lends his special effects work more significance than mere playfulness. Adapted from a Boris Vian novel, \u003cem>Mood Indigo\u003c/em> begins with the wealthy Colin discovering that both his best friend, Chick (Gad Elmaleh), and his chef/assistant/friend/lawyer, Nicolas (Omar Sy), have recently fallen in love. “I demand to fall in love, too,” Colin exclaims, and so he does, shortly after, when he meets Chloé, with whom he embarks on an idyllic love affair: Their first date takes place on a cloud-shaped saucer that gets lifted by a crane to give them panoramic views of Paris, where the film is set.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The cute factor of Gondry’s invented world at first threatens to overwhelm the movie, as does the sheer number of effects that he unleashes, which make the project appear like a mere excuse for him to show off his visual talents. That threat is only heightened by the fact that there’s little drama at first in the story. Chloé and Colin’s love suffers no hurdles as Colin’s wealth allows him to fix any problems that he or his friends might encounter. Everything is splendid, and the whole world, as Colin puts it later, “seems to smile.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Only as Colin and Chloé’s lives begin to unravel do the pieces of Gondry’s story start falling into place. Shortly after their wedding, the story takes a darker turn. It’s just beyond this point that their apartment begins to contract, and the color begins to fade from Gondry’s world. The film’s first half, it turns out, was just a particularly naïve fantasy within a world of make-believe.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The shift connects \u003cem>Mood Indigo\u003c/em> to Gondry’s otherwise wildly different, but just as fantastic, previous film, \u003cem>The We and the I\u003c/em>. That movie was set entirely on a Bronx public bus filled with students on their way home from high school. Apart from the sheer length of the trip, the film was a visually understated work of realism. Its journey, however, also took us from artifice to authenticity: It was only as some of the students began to vacate the bus, and social pressures slackened, that the remaining kids revealed their individuality.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In \u003cem>Mood Indigo\u003c/em>, Gondry is more interested in the physical plane than social relations. The world’s transformations in the film signal a shift from the feverish high of finding first love to the desperation of watching it pass away. The changes also, more specifically, reflect the depletion of Colin’s wealth. His money is represented in part by objects — by the inventions he builds and the extravagant meals he can afford — but Gondry is just as interested in how we imagine spaces differently depending on levels of affluence — wealth is open expanses and sunny days, poverty is cramped living and grey tones.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Much like Wes Anderson, particularly the recent Anderson of \u003cem>Moonrise Kingdom\u003c/em> and \u003cem>Grand Budapest Hotel\u003c/em>, Gondry here uses larger-than-life visuals to embellish and fill out one-dimensional characters, not as a form of compensation but as conscious choice in style. Their work shares a children’s-book quality, a sense of wonder, and a firm belief that there’s no metaphor that isn’t better off literal. In \u003cem>Mood Indigo\u003c/em>, Colin builds a pianocktail, a machine that fashions a unique cocktail based on whatever song you play on piano. And at one point, Nicolas ages eight years before our eyes from stress. It’s a universe that’s both rudimentary and futuristic: You get the sense that if this world had mobile phones, they would just be rotary phones that followed you around on wheels.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Gondry and Anderson are among the most creative directors making movies today, both working at the peak of their powers. There is a fundamental difference between the two artists, though. If Anderson’s movies are pristine, precise and methodically arranged, \u003cem>Mood Indigo\u003c/em> thrives on clutter and near-total loss of control. And that, in turn, is reflected in their differing worldviews. Like \u003cem>Moonrise Kingdom\u003c/em>, \u003cem>Mood Indigo\u003c/em> is at heart a moving love story, but it’s one with a markedly different underlying sentiment, one where the return of things to their natural order is never preordained. \u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">Copyright 2014 NPR. 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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>About halfway through \u003cem>Mood Indigo\u003c/em>, a film of inexhaustible creativity directed by Michel Gondry, the apartment that Colin (Romain Duris) and Chloé (Audrey Tautou) call home begins to change dramatically — the ceiling starts closing in, and a thick layer of cobweb starts covering the walls and windows. “My place is doing the same thing, but I think it’s an illusion,” says a friend when she drops in for a visit. “As you go through life, places seem smaller.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The effect is an illusion in the cinematic sense, of course — one of many that Gondry brilliantly creates in this film using visual effects (stop motion, puppetry, scale models and plain old dress-up) that hearken back more to the birth of cinema and the Méliès brothers than to \u003cem>Transformers\u003c/em>. But the illusion of shrinking rooms and changing worlds is also familiar to almost all of us from everyday life; it takes little more than a hangover, after all, for us to realize that physical spaces can appear to mutate according to our moods.\u003c/p>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003cspan class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__embedYoutube'>\n \u003cspan class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__embedYoutubeInside'>\n \u003ciframe\n loading='lazy'\n class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__youtubePlayer'\n type='text/html'\n src='//www.youtube.com/embed/38ugyccL5zU'\n title='//www.youtube.com/embed/38ugyccL5zU'\n allowfullscreen='true'\n style='border:0;'>\u003c/iframe>\n \u003c/span>\n \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003cp>Gondry’s appreciation and insight into this phenomenon lends his special effects work more significance than mere playfulness. Adapted from a Boris Vian novel, \u003cem>Mood Indigo\u003c/em> begins with the wealthy Colin discovering that both his best friend, Chick (Gad Elmaleh), and his chef/assistant/friend/lawyer, Nicolas (Omar Sy), have recently fallen in love. “I demand to fall in love, too,” Colin exclaims, and so he does, shortly after, when he meets Chloé, with whom he embarks on an idyllic love affair: Their first date takes place on a cloud-shaped saucer that gets lifted by a crane to give them panoramic views of Paris, where the film is set.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The cute factor of Gondry’s invented world at first threatens to overwhelm the movie, as does the sheer number of effects that he unleashes, which make the project appear like a mere excuse for him to show off his visual talents. That threat is only heightened by the fact that there’s little drama at first in the story. Chloé and Colin’s love suffers no hurdles as Colin’s wealth allows him to fix any problems that he or his friends might encounter. Everything is splendid, and the whole world, as Colin puts it later, “seems to smile.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Only as Colin and Chloé’s lives begin to unravel do the pieces of Gondry’s story start falling into place. Shortly after their wedding, the story takes a darker turn. It’s just beyond this point that their apartment begins to contract, and the color begins to fade from Gondry’s world. The film’s first half, it turns out, was just a particularly naïve fantasy within a world of make-believe.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The shift connects \u003cem>Mood Indigo\u003c/em> to Gondry’s otherwise wildly different, but just as fantastic, previous film, \u003cem>The We and the I\u003c/em>. That movie was set entirely on a Bronx public bus filled with students on their way home from high school. Apart from the sheer length of the trip, the film was a visually understated work of realism. Its journey, however, also took us from artifice to authenticity: It was only as some of the students began to vacate the bus, and social pressures slackened, that the remaining kids revealed their individuality.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In \u003cem>Mood Indigo\u003c/em>, Gondry is more interested in the physical plane than social relations. The world’s transformations in the film signal a shift from the feverish high of finding first love to the desperation of watching it pass away. The changes also, more specifically, reflect the depletion of Colin’s wealth. His money is represented in part by objects — by the inventions he builds and the extravagant meals he can afford — but Gondry is just as interested in how we imagine spaces differently depending on levels of affluence — wealth is open expanses and sunny days, poverty is cramped living and grey tones.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Much like Wes Anderson, particularly the recent Anderson of \u003cem>Moonrise Kingdom\u003c/em> and \u003cem>Grand Budapest Hotel\u003c/em>, Gondry here uses larger-than-life visuals to embellish and fill out one-dimensional characters, not as a form of compensation but as conscious choice in style. Their work shares a children’s-book quality, a sense of wonder, and a firm belief that there’s no metaphor that isn’t better off literal. In \u003cem>Mood Indigo\u003c/em>, Colin builds a pianocktail, a machine that fashions a unique cocktail based on whatever song you play on piano. And at one point, Nicolas ages eight years before our eyes from stress. It’s a universe that’s both rudimentary and futuristic: You get the sense that if this world had mobile phones, they would just be rotary phones that followed you around on wheels.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Gondry and Anderson are among the most creative directors making movies today, both working at the peak of their powers. There is a fundamental difference between the two artists, though. If Anderson’s movies are pristine, precise and methodically arranged, \u003cem>Mood Indigo\u003c/em> thrives on clutter and near-total loss of control. And that, in turn, is reflected in their differing worldviews. Like \u003cem>Moonrise Kingdom\u003c/em>, \u003cem>Mood Indigo\u003c/em> is at heart a moving love story, but it’s one with a markedly different underlying sentiment, one where the return of things to their natural order is never preordained. \u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">Copyright 2014 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?utmac=UA-5828686-4&utmdt=In+%27Mood+Indigo%2C%27+A+Luscious+And+Literal+Feast+Of+Feeling&utme=8(APIKey)9(MDAxOTAwOTE4MDEyMTkxMDAzNjczZDljZA004)\">\u003c/div>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"content": "\u003cp>Fittingly, one of Philip Seymour Hoffman’s final performances is in a movie about role-playing. The masterly actor mutters and growls his way through \u003cem>A Most Wanted Man\u003c/em> as a spy who’s simultaneously fighting two losing wars: against the West’s enemies as well as his own putative allies.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Further deepening the movie’s ambiguity, the American actor plays a German in a story whose payoff is pungently anti-American.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Although set in Hamburg rather than London, this is familiar turf for John le Carre, whose 2008 novel is the movie’s source. Dutch-British director Anton Corbijn’s adaptation of \u003cem>A Most Wanted Man\u003c/em> is thematically linked to, and almost as good as, Tomas Alfredson’s film of Le Carre’s \u003cem>Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy\u003c/em>. Both are painstaking, rueful accounts of men who try to outthink a poisonously irrational world.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>http://youtu.be/OUyYBrlF_W8\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Le Carre placed the story in Hamburg because that’s where the 9/11 attacks were planned. The city has been on “high alert” ever since, an opening note explains. So the people who pay attention to mysterious newcomers are intrigued when a desperate-looking Chechen, Issa Karpov (Grigoriy Dobrygin), slinks out of the Elbe River.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Word of his arrival quickly reaches Gunther Bachmann (Hoffman), who runs a secret counterintelligence unit whose operations are ostensibly banned by German law. In the mode of Peter Falk’s Columbo, Gunther is disheveled and seemingly impulsive, yet actually methodical.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Gunther begins by speaking German but quickly switches to accented English, an old Hollywood trick that works here because Hoffman and the movie’s other native Anglophones — notably Rachel McAdams and Willem Dafoe — don’t overplay the Teutonic inflections. Their tones never clash with those of Nina Hoss and Daniel Bruhl, actual German stars in supporting roles.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The assumption is that Issa wants to contact Islamic terror cells in Hamburg. Instead, he moves in with some new acquaintances, who refer him to a human-rights lawyer, Annabel Richter (a blonde McAdams). After seeing Issa’s scars from Russian torture, Annabel begins an application for political asylum.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It turns out that Issa has the key to unlock a multimillion-euro inheritance from his hated father. The money is in a bank, run by Tommy Brue (Dafoe), whose operations are not strictly legal — just like Gunther’s. Issa wants to give the tainted legacy to respected Muslim pundit and philanthropist Dr. Faisal Abdullah (Homayoun Ershadi). But Faisal himself may not be entirely legit.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Gunther plans to, as they say in paranoid thrillers, follow the money. But Berlin-based Dieter Mohr (Rainer Bock), who runs the country’s officially acknowledged counterterrorism group, would rather arrest Issa straightaway. Somewhere in between, it appears, is icy CIA agent Martha Sullivan (a brunette Robin Wright).\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>While Gunther would prefer not to deal with American spies, Martha’s presence gives him more time to track Issa and Faisal. And Gunther and Martha develop a grudging rapport, illustrated by the way each offers the same half-ironic explanation for why they do the jobs they do.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Condensed by Australian scripter Andrew Bovell (who’s probably best known for \u003cem>Lantana\u003c/em>), \u003cem>A Most Wanted Man\u003c/em> retains a cogent narrative and le Carre’s weary outlook. Rather than choke the narrative with details, the filmmakers keep the story lean while adding evocative visual and aural details.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Corbijn, a former Brit-rock video maker, has a little fun by dropping Gang of Four’s “To Hell With Poverty” into a bar scene and giving a small role to soundtrack composer Herbert Gronemeyer. But the look of the movie, shot in Hamburg and Berlin locations by the great Benoit Delhomme, is serious and authentic. If \u003cem>A Most Wanted Man\u003c/em> is a parable, it’s one placed firmly in the real world. \u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">Copyright 2014 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?utmac=UA-5828686-4&utmdt=%27A+Most+Wanted+Man%27%3A+A+Parable+Grounded+In+The+Real+World&utme=8(APIKey)9(MDAxOTAwOTE4MDEyMTkxMDAzNjczZDljZA004)\">\u003c/div>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>Fittingly, one of Philip Seymour Hoffman’s final performances is in a movie about role-playing. The masterly actor mutters and growls his way through \u003cem>A Most Wanted Man\u003c/em> as a spy who’s simultaneously fighting two losing wars: against the West’s enemies as well as his own putative allies.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Further deepening the movie’s ambiguity, the American actor plays a German in a story whose payoff is pungently anti-American.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Although set in Hamburg rather than London, this is familiar turf for John le Carre, whose 2008 novel is the movie’s source. Dutch-British director Anton Corbijn’s adaptation of \u003cem>A Most Wanted Man\u003c/em> is thematically linked to, and almost as good as, Tomas Alfredson’s film of Le Carre’s \u003cem>Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy\u003c/em>. Both are painstaking, rueful accounts of men who try to outthink a poisonously irrational world.\u003c/p>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003cspan class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__embedYoutube'>\n \u003cspan class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__embedYoutubeInside'>\n \u003ciframe\n loading='lazy'\n class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__youtubePlayer'\n type='text/html'\n src='//www.youtube.com/embed/OUyYBrlF_W8'\n title='//www.youtube.com/embed/OUyYBrlF_W8'\n allowfullscreen='true'\n style='border:0;'>\u003c/iframe>\n \u003c/span>\n \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003cp>Le Carre placed the story in Hamburg because that’s where the 9/11 attacks were planned. The city has been on “high alert” ever since, an opening note explains. So the people who pay attention to mysterious newcomers are intrigued when a desperate-looking Chechen, Issa Karpov (Grigoriy Dobrygin), slinks out of the Elbe River.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Word of his arrival quickly reaches Gunther Bachmann (Hoffman), who runs a secret counterintelligence unit whose operations are ostensibly banned by German law. In the mode of Peter Falk’s Columbo, Gunther is disheveled and seemingly impulsive, yet actually methodical.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Gunther begins by speaking German but quickly switches to accented English, an old Hollywood trick that works here because Hoffman and the movie’s other native Anglophones — notably Rachel McAdams and Willem Dafoe — don’t overplay the Teutonic inflections. Their tones never clash with those of Nina Hoss and Daniel Bruhl, actual German stars in supporting roles.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The assumption is that Issa wants to contact Islamic terror cells in Hamburg. Instead, he moves in with some new acquaintances, who refer him to a human-rights lawyer, Annabel Richter (a blonde McAdams). After seeing Issa’s scars from Russian torture, Annabel begins an application for political asylum.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It turns out that Issa has the key to unlock a multimillion-euro inheritance from his hated father. The money is in a bank, run by Tommy Brue (Dafoe), whose operations are not strictly legal — just like Gunther’s. Issa wants to give the tainted legacy to respected Muslim pundit and philanthropist Dr. Faisal Abdullah (Homayoun Ershadi). But Faisal himself may not be entirely legit.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Gunther plans to, as they say in paranoid thrillers, follow the money. But Berlin-based Dieter Mohr (Rainer Bock), who runs the country’s officially acknowledged counterterrorism group, would rather arrest Issa straightaway. Somewhere in between, it appears, is icy CIA agent Martha Sullivan (a brunette Robin Wright).\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>While Gunther would prefer not to deal with American spies, Martha’s presence gives him more time to track Issa and Faisal. And Gunther and Martha develop a grudging rapport, illustrated by the way each offers the same half-ironic explanation for why they do the jobs they do.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Condensed by Australian scripter Andrew Bovell (who’s probably best known for \u003cem>Lantana\u003c/em>), \u003cem>A Most Wanted Man\u003c/em> retains a cogent narrative and le Carre’s weary outlook. Rather than choke the narrative with details, the filmmakers keep the story lean while adding evocative visual and aural details.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Corbijn, a former Brit-rock video maker, has a little fun by dropping Gang of Four’s “To Hell With Poverty” into a bar scene and giving a small role to soundtrack composer Herbert Gronemeyer. But the look of the movie, shot in Hamburg and Berlin locations by the great Benoit Delhomme, is serious and authentic. If \u003cem>A Most Wanted Man\u003c/em> is a parable, it’s one placed firmly in the real world. \u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">Copyright 2014 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?utmac=UA-5828686-4&utmdt=%27A+Most+Wanted+Man%27%3A+A+Parable+Grounded+In+The+Real+World&utme=8(APIKey)9(MDAxOTAwOTE4MDEyMTkxMDAzNjczZDljZA004)\">\u003c/div>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"content": "\u003cp>“This is Bruce Brown, thank you for watching, I hope you enjoyed my film.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That line, sounding a little like a proud eighth-grader closing out a book report he felt was particularly insightful, is the last piece of narration in the landmark 1964 surfing film \u003cem>The Endless Summer \u003c/em>(which didn’t receive its nationwide theatrical release until 1966). It’s a little amateurish, eye-rollingly hokey, and yet irresistibly endearing in its aw-shucks wholesome sincerity. It’s those qualities that have allowed the film to improbably endure as the most influential adventure sports documentary ever made, and warrant another \u003ca href=\"http://www.montereymedia.com/theatrical/contracts/endlesssummer/contracts/endlesssummer_locations.php\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">limited theatrical run\u003c/a> in a few dozen theaters nationwide to celebrate a half-century since it first screened.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_10139529\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\" style=\"max-width: 710px\">\u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2014/07/endless-1-e1d352d361c49d67b75e8f9b9f6ec74f64dec946.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2014/07/endless-1-e1d352d361c49d67b75e8f9b9f6ec74f64dec946.jpg\" alt=\"After the film's success,<em> </em>director Bruce Brown (pictured above during filming) directed four additional documentaries, including a sequel<em> </em>-- <em>The</em> <em>Endless Summer II</em>.\" width=\"710\" height=\"532\" class=\"size-full wp-image-10139529\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2014/07/endless-1-e1d352d361c49d67b75e8f9b9f6ec74f64dec946.jpg 710w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2014/07/endless-1-e1d352d361c49d67b75e8f9b9f6ec74f64dec946-400x299.jpg 400w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2014/07/endless-1-e1d352d361c49d67b75e8f9b9f6ec74f64dec946-300x224.jpg 300w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 710px) 100vw, 710px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">After the film’s success,\u003cem> \u003c/em>director Bruce Brown (pictured above during filming) directed four additional documentaries, including a sequel\u003cem> \u003c/em>— \u003cem>The\u003c/em> \u003cem>Endless Summer II\u003c/em>. \u003ccite>(Monterey Media Inc)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Documentaries about sports like surfing, skiing, snow and skateboarding, or mountain climbing are a niche market, often screened only at specialized film festivals before living out their existences being played in the background at ski lodges or in the homes of enthusiasts. \u003cem>Endless Summer\u003c/em> didn’t invent the genre, but it was unique in its huge crossover appeal, sparking popular interest in surf culture that has endured at the movies ever since, whether in direct descendants like the 2003 documentary \u003cem>Step into Liquid\u003c/em> (directed by Brown’s son, Dana), or Keanu Reeves’ undercover surfing “EFF…BEE…EYE…Agent!” in 1991’s \u003cem>Point Break\u003c/em>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Many of the surfing movies that rode \u003cem>Endless Summer\u003c/em>‘s wake presented surfing as the apotheosis of living-on-the-edge cool, with ripped dudes and lean ladies speaking a language all their own while devoting their days to the romantic pursuit of the perfect wave. (Spoiler alert: Brown & Co. found it while filming the movie in 1963, and it’s in South Africa.) But \u003cem>Endless Summer\u003c/em> has none of that.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Its primary subjects, Mike Hynson and Robert August — the two world-class surfers Brown takes on a trip around the world trying to follow summer all year round — are as clean-cut and full of all-American innocence as Wally and the Beaver. They’re about as dangerous as Cub Scouts. In one sequence, they’re so nervous and clumsy around a bikini-clad surfer in Australia that they can barely keep upright on their boards.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The image of laconic stoner cool surrounding surf culture — as inescapable as the cloud of smoke inside Jeff Spicoli’s van — is nowhere to be found in the film either. Mike and Robert are unreserved enthusiasts, though we never get to hear them speak. Brown only had cash enough for reels and reels of 16mm film and for travel, room and board for the minimal production. Sound recording was an unnecessary luxury for a film that was all about the visual wonder of people doing their best real-world approximation of walking on water.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>To make up for the lack of location audio, Brown fills the film with two sounds. The first is the wall-to-wall music, mostly prototypical sunny surf rock from a band called The Sandals, along with a smattering of jazz, brassy fanfares (usually for the more dangerous beaches), and some local African music during the portions on that continent. The second is Brown himself, delivering a nonstop narration that veers from the stiff tone of ’60s educational reels to filling in the dialogue we can’t hear being said onscreen, to corny jokes that only a dad could be proud of.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>If there’s anything hopelessly dated about the film, it’s that narration. At best, Brown imparts a solid background on surfing terms and techniques. More cringe-worthy are his references to a flotation device worn by one young boy as a growth on his back, or the exaggerated winking behind calling a bikini top a “chest protector.” Worst of all is the mortifying treatment of the locals in Senegal and Ghana, which includes an unironic and gleeful fascination with their perceived primitivism, and lines like, “Being good Africans, they threw a few rocks.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_10139530\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\" style=\"max-width: 769px\">\u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2014/07/endless-5-71dda1600b8aed1ee3d7e447756e7d6416fee339.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2014/07/endless-5-71dda1600b8aed1ee3d7e447756e7d6416fee339.jpg\" alt=\"Robert August hits some waves off the coast of South Africa in <em>The Endless Summer </em>(1966). The film went on to inspire surfing communities all over the world.\" width=\"769\" height=\"577\" class=\"size-full wp-image-10139530\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2014/07/endless-5-71dda1600b8aed1ee3d7e447756e7d6416fee339.jpg 769w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2014/07/endless-5-71dda1600b8aed1ee3d7e447756e7d6416fee339-400x300.jpg 400w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2014/07/endless-5-71dda1600b8aed1ee3d7e447756e7d6416fee339-300x225.jpg 300w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 769px) 100vw, 769px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Robert August hits some waves off the coast of South Africa in \u003cem>The Endless Summer \u003c/em>(1966). The film went on to inspire surfing communities all over the world. \u003ccite>(Monterey Media Inc)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Brown is so affable that it’s tempting to endure such offenses the way one does with a sweet older relative with an unfortunate tendency to spout off occasional casual bursts of racism. You mumble something uncomfortably to the friend you brought home with you for Christmas about how she grew up in a different time, and then shift the conversation as quickly as possible to how good her snickerdoodles are. The moment is still an uncomfortable one.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The cookies here would be all the fantastic footage of Mike and Robert catching waves at beaches from Hawaii to Africa to Australia, to Tahiti, to California. While it might not be as crisp or close-up as more modern efforts, Brown has an eye for making beach-bound shots of the surfers mesmerizing, and is especially adept at employing magic-hour lighting to enhance the romance of his wandering, globe-hopping project.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Endless Summer\u003c/em> serves as an effective template for adventure sports docs for decades to follow by effectively rendering his soundtrack irrelevant. As with a great silent film, one gets the picture just by watching the pictures, and the film is as good with the sound off as it is with it on.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That’s the key to its endurance; it’s part surfing film, part travelogue, occasionally even anthropological study and wildlife film, but ultimately it visually taps into the wanderlust that sends us to far-flung beaches in search of an escape from life that we can’t find at home. We don’t have to be surfing experts who can appreciate Mike and Robert’s technique, or know which new part of the globe they’re wave-hunting in. But when they balance on a board on a perfectly curling wave, they’re a portrait of the balance and serenity we all seek from the ideal summer vacation. \u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">Copyright 2014 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?utmac=UA-5828686-4&utmdt=Revisiting+An+%27Endless+Summer%27&utme=8(APIKey)9(MDAxOTAwOTE4MDEyMTkxMDAzNjczZDljZA004)\">\u003c/div>\n\n",
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"excerpt": "While corny and dated and even offensive in places, the seminal surfing film \u003cem>The Endless Summer, \u003c/em>now getting a 50th anniversary re-release, remains a rich visual exploration of the freedom of a wave.",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>“This is Bruce Brown, thank you for watching, I hope you enjoyed my film.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That line, sounding a little like a proud eighth-grader closing out a book report he felt was particularly insightful, is the last piece of narration in the landmark 1964 surfing film \u003cem>The Endless Summer \u003c/em>(which didn’t receive its nationwide theatrical release until 1966). It’s a little amateurish, eye-rollingly hokey, and yet irresistibly endearing in its aw-shucks wholesome sincerity. It’s those qualities that have allowed the film to improbably endure as the most influential adventure sports documentary ever made, and warrant another \u003ca href=\"http://www.montereymedia.com/theatrical/contracts/endlesssummer/contracts/endlesssummer_locations.php\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">limited theatrical run\u003c/a> in a few dozen theaters nationwide to celebrate a half-century since it first screened.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_10139529\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\" style=\"max-width: 710px\">\u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2014/07/endless-1-e1d352d361c49d67b75e8f9b9f6ec74f64dec946.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2014/07/endless-1-e1d352d361c49d67b75e8f9b9f6ec74f64dec946.jpg\" alt=\"After the film's success,<em> </em>director Bruce Brown (pictured above during filming) directed four additional documentaries, including a sequel<em> </em>-- <em>The</em> <em>Endless Summer II</em>.\" width=\"710\" height=\"532\" class=\"size-full wp-image-10139529\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2014/07/endless-1-e1d352d361c49d67b75e8f9b9f6ec74f64dec946.jpg 710w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2014/07/endless-1-e1d352d361c49d67b75e8f9b9f6ec74f64dec946-400x299.jpg 400w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2014/07/endless-1-e1d352d361c49d67b75e8f9b9f6ec74f64dec946-300x224.jpg 300w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 710px) 100vw, 710px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">After the film’s success,\u003cem> \u003c/em>director Bruce Brown (pictured above during filming) directed four additional documentaries, including a sequel\u003cem> \u003c/em>— \u003cem>The\u003c/em> \u003cem>Endless Summer II\u003c/em>. \u003ccite>(Monterey Media Inc)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Documentaries about sports like surfing, skiing, snow and skateboarding, or mountain climbing are a niche market, often screened only at specialized film festivals before living out their existences being played in the background at ski lodges or in the homes of enthusiasts. \u003cem>Endless Summer\u003c/em> didn’t invent the genre, but it was unique in its huge crossover appeal, sparking popular interest in surf culture that has endured at the movies ever since, whether in direct descendants like the 2003 documentary \u003cem>Step into Liquid\u003c/em> (directed by Brown’s son, Dana), or Keanu Reeves’ undercover surfing “EFF…BEE…EYE…Agent!” in 1991’s \u003cem>Point Break\u003c/em>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Many of the surfing movies that rode \u003cem>Endless Summer\u003c/em>‘s wake presented surfing as the apotheosis of living-on-the-edge cool, with ripped dudes and lean ladies speaking a language all their own while devoting their days to the romantic pursuit of the perfect wave. (Spoiler alert: Brown & Co. found it while filming the movie in 1963, and it’s in South Africa.) But \u003cem>Endless Summer\u003c/em> has none of that.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Its primary subjects, Mike Hynson and Robert August — the two world-class surfers Brown takes on a trip around the world trying to follow summer all year round — are as clean-cut and full of all-American innocence as Wally and the Beaver. They’re about as dangerous as Cub Scouts. In one sequence, they’re so nervous and clumsy around a bikini-clad surfer in Australia that they can barely keep upright on their boards.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The image of laconic stoner cool surrounding surf culture — as inescapable as the cloud of smoke inside Jeff Spicoli’s van — is nowhere to be found in the film either. Mike and Robert are unreserved enthusiasts, though we never get to hear them speak. Brown only had cash enough for reels and reels of 16mm film and for travel, room and board for the minimal production. Sound recording was an unnecessary luxury for a film that was all about the visual wonder of people doing their best real-world approximation of walking on water.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>To make up for the lack of location audio, Brown fills the film with two sounds. The first is the wall-to-wall music, mostly prototypical sunny surf rock from a band called The Sandals, along with a smattering of jazz, brassy fanfares (usually for the more dangerous beaches), and some local African music during the portions on that continent. The second is Brown himself, delivering a nonstop narration that veers from the stiff tone of ’60s educational reels to filling in the dialogue we can’t hear being said onscreen, to corny jokes that only a dad could be proud of.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>If there’s anything hopelessly dated about the film, it’s that narration. At best, Brown imparts a solid background on surfing terms and techniques. More cringe-worthy are his references to a flotation device worn by one young boy as a growth on his back, or the exaggerated winking behind calling a bikini top a “chest protector.” Worst of all is the mortifying treatment of the locals in Senegal and Ghana, which includes an unironic and gleeful fascination with their perceived primitivism, and lines like, “Being good Africans, they threw a few rocks.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_10139530\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\" style=\"max-width: 769px\">\u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2014/07/endless-5-71dda1600b8aed1ee3d7e447756e7d6416fee339.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2014/07/endless-5-71dda1600b8aed1ee3d7e447756e7d6416fee339.jpg\" alt=\"Robert August hits some waves off the coast of South Africa in <em>The Endless Summer </em>(1966). The film went on to inspire surfing communities all over the world.\" width=\"769\" height=\"577\" class=\"size-full wp-image-10139530\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2014/07/endless-5-71dda1600b8aed1ee3d7e447756e7d6416fee339.jpg 769w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2014/07/endless-5-71dda1600b8aed1ee3d7e447756e7d6416fee339-400x300.jpg 400w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2014/07/endless-5-71dda1600b8aed1ee3d7e447756e7d6416fee339-300x225.jpg 300w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 769px) 100vw, 769px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Robert August hits some waves off the coast of South Africa in \u003cem>The Endless Summer \u003c/em>(1966). The film went on to inspire surfing communities all over the world. \u003ccite>(Monterey Media Inc)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Brown is so affable that it’s tempting to endure such offenses the way one does with a sweet older relative with an unfortunate tendency to spout off occasional casual bursts of racism. You mumble something uncomfortably to the friend you brought home with you for Christmas about how she grew up in a different time, and then shift the conversation as quickly as possible to how good her snickerdoodles are. The moment is still an uncomfortable one.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The cookies here would be all the fantastic footage of Mike and Robert catching waves at beaches from Hawaii to Africa to Australia, to Tahiti, to California. While it might not be as crisp or close-up as more modern efforts, Brown has an eye for making beach-bound shots of the surfers mesmerizing, and is especially adept at employing magic-hour lighting to enhance the romance of his wandering, globe-hopping project.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Endless Summer\u003c/em> serves as an effective template for adventure sports docs for decades to follow by effectively rendering his soundtrack irrelevant. As with a great silent film, one gets the picture just by watching the pictures, and the film is as good with the sound off as it is with it on.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That’s the key to its endurance; it’s part surfing film, part travelogue, occasionally even anthropological study and wildlife film, but ultimately it visually taps into the wanderlust that sends us to far-flung beaches in search of an escape from life that we can’t find at home. We don’t have to be surfing experts who can appreciate Mike and Robert’s technique, or know which new part of the globe they’re wave-hunting in. But when they balance on a board on a perfectly curling wave, they’re a portrait of the balance and serenity we all seek from the ideal summer vacation. \u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">Copyright 2014 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?utmac=UA-5828686-4&utmdt=Revisiting+An+%27Endless+Summer%27&utme=8(APIKey)9(MDAxOTAwOTE4MDEyMTkxMDAzNjczZDljZA004)\">\u003c/div>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"slug": "a-hard-days-night-a-pop-artifact-that-still-crackles-with-energy",
"title": "'A Hard Day's Night': A Pop Artifact that still Crackles with Energy",
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"headTitle": "‘A Hard Day’s Night’: A Pop Artifact that still Crackles with Energy | KQED",
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"content": "\u003cp>Back in 1964, movie audiences were treated to three hit musicals. Two of them — \u003cem>Mary Poppins\u003c/em> and \u003cem>My Fair Lady — \u003c/em>won scads of Oscars. But it was the third that announced the future, and it did so from its \u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OHas50cupCA\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">opening chord\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>What followed from that chord was what we call The Sixties.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>To celebrate the 50th anniversary of \u003cem>A Hard Day’s Night\u003c/em>, there’s a spectacular new restoration that you can now see in theaters in its Janus Films release or buy on DVD and Blu-ray from the Criterion Collection. The black-and-white photography is so gorgeous, you’ll swoon.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OHas50cupCA\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The movie is not half bad either. It was directed by Richard Lester, a filmmaker as underrated as he was influential. Lester took what was designed to be a promo film for the Beatles and — along with screenwriter Alun Owen — crammed it with ideas from the French New Wave and his own slapstick short, \u003cem>The Running Jumping and Standing Still Film\u003c/em>, which is on the DVD. The result is a pop artifact that still crackles with freshness and energy. In Lester’s verite, hyperkinetic approach to the musical sequences — and, boy, are the songs good — you’ll find the template for a million later music videos.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The movie’s title came from a malapropism by Ringo Starr that, in its paradoxical poetry, felt as inevitable as a folk saying. It fit perfectly a film that purported to capture a typical day in the life of the Beatles, who spend 87 minutes singing, clowning, hanging around a TV station, and, crucially, fleeing hysterical fans. You see, this isn’t just a movie about rock stars but about rock stars playing themselves in a movie that’s riffing on rock stardom.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Of course, even as the Beatlemaniacs sob and shriek, one of the movie’s conceits is that people over 30 don’t get it. On a train ride, the four are joined in a car by a stuffy, blimpish, mustachioed businessman who closes the window they’ve just opened and, when they turn on the radio, clicks it off.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_10139456\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\" style=\"max-width: 640px\">\u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2014/07/cta1113_original_custom-aa135c04ff8deef32599a1a57286e2f1a923fe3c.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2014/07/cta1113_original_custom-aa135c04ff8deef32599a1a57286e2f1a923fe3c-972x1440.jpg\" alt=\"Criterion Collection is selling the movie on DVD and Blu-ray.\" width=\"640\" height=\"948\" class=\"size-large wp-image-10139456\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2014/07/cta1113_original_custom-aa135c04ff8deef32599a1a57286e2f1a923fe3c-972x1440.jpg 972w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2014/07/cta1113_original_custom-aa135c04ff8deef32599a1a57286e2f1a923fe3c-400x592.jpg 400w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2014/07/cta1113_original_custom-aa135c04ff8deef32599a1a57286e2f1a923fe3c-202x300.jpg 202w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2014/07/cta1113_original_custom-aa135c04ff8deef32599a1a57286e2f1a923fe3c.jpg 1013w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 640px) 100vw, 640px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Criterion Collection is selling the movie on DVD and Blu-ray. \u003ccite>(Courtesy of Criterion Collection)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Watching \u003cem>A Hard Day’s Night\u003c/em> today, our perceptions are shot through with historical awareness. The Beatles now seem astonishingly innocent in their neat suits and ties, and it’s hard not to laugh at how the older characters harrumph at their long hair and cheekiness, for the boys are lovable mop tops — well-scrubbed, unprofane, decidedly nonthreatening. They’re so spiffy that in these days of hip-hop and piercings, parents might be delighted to have such nice young men for their sons. Yet the harrumphers \u003cem>weren’t\u003c/em> wrong. As that businessman on the train grasped, the Beatles and their followers were taking over the cultural train.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>A Hard Day’s Night\u003c/em> brims with Marx Brothers’ irreverence, if not anarchy, and like the brothers, each Beatle has a clear persona. John’s the barbed, ironical one who carries himself like a pop genius. Paul’s the handsome nice guy you wouldn’t guess was a pop genius. George is the dark horse, the quiet young one with secrets. And Ringo — the most popular back then — was the gentle, sad-eyed one. In hindsight, such personas almost predict their destinies. Even as Ringo is still having a laid-back good time into his 70s, Paul now revels in his living landmark status — he’s now photographed hanging out with Warren Buffett. With his hit records, mysticism and humanitarian work, George would become the triumphant dark horse before dying, at 58, from cancer. As for John, if any of the Beatles was fated to be murdered, it was always him — \u003cem>he\u003c/em> was the lightning rod.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But all this would come later. A few months before \u003cem>A Hard Day’s Night \u003c/em>opened, the Beatles had landed in an America shattered by the Kennedy assassination not even three months earlier, an America yearning for something alive and optimistic. The band was the ideal antidote to such grief, for the Beatles themselves had risen from an even longer, deeper darkness, the shabby funk of a postwar, post-imperial Britain with a calcified establishment, a frustrated working class, and little future to offer the young.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In the unmistakable alchemy of their sound — and in their authentic laughter as they run from shrieking fans during the film’s opening credits — the Beatles embodied the hope and vitality the world was looking for then and still loves to this day. Like Louis Armstrong, they created music that, even when sad, is bursting with joy. All those hard days and nights paid off, for more than any band I can think of, they captured the yeah-yeah-yeah of happiness. \u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">Copyright 2014 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?utmac=UA-5828686-4&utmdt=%27A+Hard+Day%27s+Night%27%3A+A+Pop+Artifact+That+Still+Crackles+With+Energy&utme=8(APIKey)9(MDAxOTAwOTE4MDEyMTkxMDAzNjczZDljZA004)\">\u003c/div>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>Back in 1964, movie audiences were treated to three hit musicals. Two of them — \u003cem>Mary Poppins\u003c/em> and \u003cem>My Fair Lady — \u003c/em>won scads of Oscars. But it was the third that announced the future, and it did so from its \u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OHas50cupCA\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">opening chord\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>What followed from that chord was what we call The Sixties.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>To celebrate the 50th anniversary of \u003cem>A Hard Day’s Night\u003c/em>, there’s a spectacular new restoration that you can now see in theaters in its Janus Films release or buy on DVD and Blu-ray from the Criterion Collection. The black-and-white photography is so gorgeous, you’ll swoon.\u003c/p>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003cspan class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__embedYoutube'>\n \u003cspan class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__embedYoutubeInside'>\n \u003ciframe\n loading='lazy'\n class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__youtubePlayer'\n type='text/html'\n src='//www.youtube.com/embed/OHas50cupCA'\n title='//www.youtube.com/embed/OHas50cupCA'\n allowfullscreen='true'\n style='border:0;'>\u003c/iframe>\n \u003c/span>\n \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003cp>The movie is not half bad either. It was directed by Richard Lester, a filmmaker as underrated as he was influential. Lester took what was designed to be a promo film for the Beatles and — along with screenwriter Alun Owen — crammed it with ideas from the French New Wave and his own slapstick short, \u003cem>The Running Jumping and Standing Still Film\u003c/em>, which is on the DVD. The result is a pop artifact that still crackles with freshness and energy. In Lester’s verite, hyperkinetic approach to the musical sequences — and, boy, are the songs good — you’ll find the template for a million later music videos.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The movie’s title came from a malapropism by Ringo Starr that, in its paradoxical poetry, felt as inevitable as a folk saying. It fit perfectly a film that purported to capture a typical day in the life of the Beatles, who spend 87 minutes singing, clowning, hanging around a TV station, and, crucially, fleeing hysterical fans. You see, this isn’t just a movie about rock stars but about rock stars playing themselves in a movie that’s riffing on rock stardom.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Of course, even as the Beatlemaniacs sob and shriek, one of the movie’s conceits is that people over 30 don’t get it. On a train ride, the four are joined in a car by a stuffy, blimpish, mustachioed businessman who closes the window they’ve just opened and, when they turn on the radio, clicks it off.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_10139456\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\" style=\"max-width: 640px\">\u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2014/07/cta1113_original_custom-aa135c04ff8deef32599a1a57286e2f1a923fe3c.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2014/07/cta1113_original_custom-aa135c04ff8deef32599a1a57286e2f1a923fe3c-972x1440.jpg\" alt=\"Criterion Collection is selling the movie on DVD and Blu-ray.\" width=\"640\" height=\"948\" class=\"size-large wp-image-10139456\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2014/07/cta1113_original_custom-aa135c04ff8deef32599a1a57286e2f1a923fe3c-972x1440.jpg 972w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2014/07/cta1113_original_custom-aa135c04ff8deef32599a1a57286e2f1a923fe3c-400x592.jpg 400w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2014/07/cta1113_original_custom-aa135c04ff8deef32599a1a57286e2f1a923fe3c-202x300.jpg 202w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2014/07/cta1113_original_custom-aa135c04ff8deef32599a1a57286e2f1a923fe3c.jpg 1013w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 640px) 100vw, 640px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Criterion Collection is selling the movie on DVD and Blu-ray. \u003ccite>(Courtesy of Criterion Collection)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Watching \u003cem>A Hard Day’s Night\u003c/em> today, our perceptions are shot through with historical awareness. The Beatles now seem astonishingly innocent in their neat suits and ties, and it’s hard not to laugh at how the older characters harrumph at their long hair and cheekiness, for the boys are lovable mop tops — well-scrubbed, unprofane, decidedly nonthreatening. They’re so spiffy that in these days of hip-hop and piercings, parents might be delighted to have such nice young men for their sons. Yet the harrumphers \u003cem>weren’t\u003c/em> wrong. As that businessman on the train grasped, the Beatles and their followers were taking over the cultural train.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>A Hard Day’s Night\u003c/em> brims with Marx Brothers’ irreverence, if not anarchy, and like the brothers, each Beatle has a clear persona. John’s the barbed, ironical one who carries himself like a pop genius. Paul’s the handsome nice guy you wouldn’t guess was a pop genius. George is the dark horse, the quiet young one with secrets. And Ringo — the most popular back then — was the gentle, sad-eyed one. In hindsight, such personas almost predict their destinies. Even as Ringo is still having a laid-back good time into his 70s, Paul now revels in his living landmark status — he’s now photographed hanging out with Warren Buffett. With his hit records, mysticism and humanitarian work, George would become the triumphant dark horse before dying, at 58, from cancer. As for John, if any of the Beatles was fated to be murdered, it was always him — \u003cem>he\u003c/em> was the lightning rod.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But all this would come later. A few months before \u003cem>A Hard Day’s Night \u003c/em>opened, the Beatles had landed in an America shattered by the Kennedy assassination not even three months earlier, an America yearning for something alive and optimistic. The band was the ideal antidote to such grief, for the Beatles themselves had risen from an even longer, deeper darkness, the shabby funk of a postwar, post-imperial Britain with a calcified establishment, a frustrated working class, and little future to offer the young.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In the unmistakable alchemy of their sound — and in their authentic laughter as they run from shrieking fans during the film’s opening credits — the Beatles embodied the hope and vitality the world was looking for then and still loves to this day. Like Louis Armstrong, they created music that, even when sad, is bursting with joy. All those hard days and nights paid off, for more than any band I can think of, they captured the yeah-yeah-yeah of happiness. \u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">Copyright 2014 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?utmac=UA-5828686-4&utmdt=%27A+Hard+Day%27s+Night%27%3A+A+Pop+Artifact+That+Still+Crackles+With+Energy&utme=8(APIKey)9(MDAxOTAwOTE4MDEyMTkxMDAzNjczZDljZA004)\">\u003c/div>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"title": "Viking's Choice: Sleep, 'The Clarity'",
"headTitle": "Viking’s Choice: Sleep, ‘The Clarity’ | KQED",
"content": "\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_10139305\" class=\"wp-caption alignleft\" style=\"max-width: 500px\">\u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2014/07/sleep-single.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2014/07/sleep-single.jpg\" alt=\"Artwork for Sleep's "The Clarity," the band's first new material in 20 years.\" width=\"500\" height=\"500\" class=\"size-full wp-image-10139305\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2014/07/sleep-single.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2014/07/sleep-single-400x400.jpg 400w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2014/07/sleep-single-300x300.jpg 300w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2014/07/sleep-single-32x32.jpg 32w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2014/07/sleep-single-64x64.jpg 64w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2014/07/sleep-single-96x96.jpg 96w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2014/07/sleep-single-128x128.jpg 128w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2014/07/sleep-single-75x75.jpg 75w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Artwork for Sleep’s “The Clarity,” the band’s first new material in 20 years. \u003ccite>(Courtesy of Adult Swim)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>It’s been 20 years since the stoner-metal caravan \u003ca href=\"http://www.npr.org/artists/92754110/sleep\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Sleep\u003c/a> wrote \u003cem>Dopesmoker\u003c/em>, a 63-minute track based on a single riff and dedicated to the mighty spliff. Unfortunately, it took \u003ca href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerusalem_and_Dopesmoker\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">three labels and a span of 16 years\u003c/a> to release it \u003ca href=\"http://sleepsl.bandcamp.com/album/dopesmoker\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">as intended\u003c/a>. So let’s just follow the smoke and meditate on this premiere of “The Clarity,” part of \u003ca href=\"http://video.adultswim.com/music/singles-2014/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Adult Swim’s singles series\u003c/a>, which has already featured new music from the likes of \u003ca href=\"http://www.npr.org/artists/181645899/speedy-ortiz\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Speedy Ortiz\u003c/a> and \u003ca href=\"http://www.npr.org/artists/142896815/tim-hecker\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Tim Hecker\u003c/a>, with Run the Jewels, \u003ca href=\"http://www.npr.org/artists/142890332/deafheaven\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Deafheaven\u003c/a> and more in the pipeline. It will be available as a free download on July 21.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The Clarity” doesn’t miss a step. It captures Sleep at its heaviest and weediest, and despite the puff of smoke that pervades these 10 minutes, it’s the band’s cleanest-sounding recording. Bassist Al Cisneros’ vocals are way out front as he intones, “Life complete / The dealer is my refuge.” Matt Pike’s guitar has somehow taken on an even headier tone, with a riff that burrows into your chest and opens your consciousness.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[soundcloud url=”https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/155247790″ params=”color=ff5500&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false” width=”100%” height=”166″ iframe=”true” /]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Since its reunion at ATP London in 2009, Sleep has been active on the live circuit here and there, with \u003ca href=\"http://www.npr.org/artists/161494305/neurosis\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Neurosis\u003c/a>‘ Jason Roeder taking over the drums. But now Sleep is a full-on band again, and its members say that “The Clarity” has inspired a new full-length album. That said, as the band emails in a brief interview exchange (“answers are from Sleep,” it writes), “It would be impossible to describe any new material from Sleep that does not yet exist.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Reunion shows aren’t uncommon these days, often welcome to those of us who missed an artist the first time around. New recordings are a different story. After the \u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OIyj--J43R0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">legal nightmare\u003c/a> that was \u003cem>Dopesmoker\u003c/em>, did you ever think Sleep would record again?\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>No.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>What inspired and encouraged “The Clarity,” nearly 20 years after \u003cem>Dopesmoker\u003c/em> was originally written? Were you approached by Adult Swim first, or was the song gestating before?\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Sleep has been sporadically writing riffs for a while now. When Adult Swim approached Sleep about a single, Sleep set aside those riffs and wrote the single in a couple days. “The Clarity” is an exercise in musical stream of thought, as all proper music should be.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>I hear there’s a new album in the works. When do you think that will come out and where? With the experience of post-Sleep bands (High on Fire, Om, Shrinebuilder) and Jason Roeder (Neurosis), what does a new Sleep album sound like?\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It would be impossible to describe any new material from Sleep that does not yet exist. There is no preconceived idea of what the new material should be. It would be an amalgamated effort of decades of riff immersion.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>I couldn’t help but notice the \u003ca href=\"http://rock.genius.com/Sleep-dopesmoker-lyrics#note-2703922\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Sinsemillian reference\u003c/a> in this new song. Is “The Clarity” a lyrical follow-up to \u003cem>Dopesmoker\u003c/em>?\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The Clarity” is a lyrical follow-up to a lifetime of marijuana enjoyment. \u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">Copyright 2014 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?utmac=UA-5828686-4&utmdt=Viking%27s+Choice%3A+Sleep%2C+%27The+Clarity%27+&utme=8(APIKey)9(MDAxOTAwOTE4MDEyMTkxMDAzNjczZDljZA004)\">\u003c/div>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_10139305\" class=\"wp-caption alignleft\" style=\"max-width: 500px\">\u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2014/07/sleep-single.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2014/07/sleep-single.jpg\" alt=\"Artwork for Sleep's "The Clarity," the band's first new material in 20 years.\" width=\"500\" height=\"500\" class=\"size-full wp-image-10139305\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2014/07/sleep-single.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2014/07/sleep-single-400x400.jpg 400w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2014/07/sleep-single-300x300.jpg 300w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2014/07/sleep-single-32x32.jpg 32w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2014/07/sleep-single-64x64.jpg 64w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2014/07/sleep-single-96x96.jpg 96w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2014/07/sleep-single-128x128.jpg 128w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2014/07/sleep-single-75x75.jpg 75w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Artwork for Sleep’s “The Clarity,” the band’s first new material in 20 years. \u003ccite>(Courtesy of Adult Swim)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>It’s been 20 years since the stoner-metal caravan \u003ca href=\"http://www.npr.org/artists/92754110/sleep\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Sleep\u003c/a> wrote \u003cem>Dopesmoker\u003c/em>, a 63-minute track based on a single riff and dedicated to the mighty spliff. Unfortunately, it took \u003ca href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerusalem_and_Dopesmoker\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">three labels and a span of 16 years\u003c/a> to release it \u003ca href=\"http://sleepsl.bandcamp.com/album/dopesmoker\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">as intended\u003c/a>. So let’s just follow the smoke and meditate on this premiere of “The Clarity,” part of \u003ca href=\"http://video.adultswim.com/music/singles-2014/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Adult Swim’s singles series\u003c/a>, which has already featured new music from the likes of \u003ca href=\"http://www.npr.org/artists/181645899/speedy-ortiz\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Speedy Ortiz\u003c/a> and \u003ca href=\"http://www.npr.org/artists/142896815/tim-hecker\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Tim Hecker\u003c/a>, with Run the Jewels, \u003ca href=\"http://www.npr.org/artists/142890332/deafheaven\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Deafheaven\u003c/a> and more in the pipeline. It will be available as a free download on July 21.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The Clarity” doesn’t miss a step. It captures Sleep at its heaviest and weediest, and despite the puff of smoke that pervades these 10 minutes, it’s the band’s cleanest-sounding recording. Bassist Al Cisneros’ vocals are way out front as he intones, “Life complete / The dealer is my refuge.” Matt Pike’s guitar has somehow taken on an even headier tone, with a riff that burrows into your chest and opens your consciousness.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003cdiv class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__shortcodes__shortcodeWrapper'>\n \u003ciframe width='”100%”' height='”166″'\n scrolling='no' frameborder='no'\n src='https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=”https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/155247790″&visual=true&”color=ff5500&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false”'\n title='”https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/155247790″'>\n \u003c/iframe>\n \u003c/div>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Since its reunion at ATP London in 2009, Sleep has been active on the live circuit here and there, with \u003ca href=\"http://www.npr.org/artists/161494305/neurosis\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Neurosis\u003c/a>‘ Jason Roeder taking over the drums. But now Sleep is a full-on band again, and its members say that “The Clarity” has inspired a new full-length album. That said, as the band emails in a brief interview exchange (“answers are from Sleep,” it writes), “It would be impossible to describe any new material from Sleep that does not yet exist.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Reunion shows aren’t uncommon these days, often welcome to those of us who missed an artist the first time around. New recordings are a different story. After the \u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OIyj--J43R0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">legal nightmare\u003c/a> that was \u003cem>Dopesmoker\u003c/em>, did you ever think Sleep would record again?\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>No.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>What inspired and encouraged “The Clarity,” nearly 20 years after \u003cem>Dopesmoker\u003c/em> was originally written? Were you approached by Adult Swim first, or was the song gestating before?\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Sleep has been sporadically writing riffs for a while now. When Adult Swim approached Sleep about a single, Sleep set aside those riffs and wrote the single in a couple days. “The Clarity” is an exercise in musical stream of thought, as all proper music should be.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>I hear there’s a new album in the works. When do you think that will come out and where? With the experience of post-Sleep bands (High on Fire, Om, Shrinebuilder) and Jason Roeder (Neurosis), what does a new Sleep album sound like?\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It would be impossible to describe any new material from Sleep that does not yet exist. There is no preconceived idea of what the new material should be. It would be an amalgamated effort of decades of riff immersion.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>I couldn’t help but notice the \u003ca href=\"http://rock.genius.com/Sleep-dopesmoker-lyrics#note-2703922\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Sinsemillian reference\u003c/a> in this new song. Is “The Clarity” a lyrical follow-up to \u003cem>Dopesmoker\u003c/em>?\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The Clarity” is a lyrical follow-up to a lifetime of marijuana enjoyment. \u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">Copyright 2014 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?utmac=UA-5828686-4&utmdt=Viking%27s+Choice%3A+Sleep%2C+%27The+Clarity%27+&utme=8(APIKey)9(MDAxOTAwOTE4MDEyMTkxMDAzNjczZDljZA004)\">\u003c/div>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"content": "\u003cp>Elaine Stritch — one of Broadway’s boldest and brassiest performers — has died. With that gravelly voice — and those long legs — and that utter command of the stage, Stritch was a bona fide Broadway star. Not as a classic leading lady, necessarily, but as the hardened-yet-vulnerable performer audiences couldn’t forget. Stritch died of natural causes Thursday morning at her home in Birmingham, Mich. She was 89.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In \u003ca href=\"http://www.npr.org/2014/03/01/280715944/elaine-stritch-volatile-and-vulnerable-in-shoot-me\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">an interview with Stritch\u003c/a> in March 2014, NPR’s Scott Simon observed that the stage and screen legend “may be her own greatest character.”\u003c/p>\n\u003caside class=\"aligncenter\">\n\u003ch4>Listen to Stritch’s interview on \u003ci>Weekend Edition\u003c/i> back in March: \u003c/h4>\n\u003cp>http://pd.npr.org/anon.npr-mp3/npr/wesat/2014/03/20140301_wesat_elaine_stritch_volatile_and_vulnerable_in_shoot_me.mp3\u003cbr>\n\u003c/p>\u003c/aside>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_10139241\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\" style=\"max-width: 200px\">\u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2014/07/ap5501010929_custom-d76a7bd75fab7a20dfd3ae2232640f94bd8d36fd.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2014/07/ap5501010929_custom-d76a7bd75fab7a20dfd3ae2232640f94bd8d36fd.jpg\" alt=\"Stritch first appeared on Broadway in 1944 -- and was still performing occasionally even at age 89. She is pictured above in 1955\" width=\"200\" height=\"255\" class=\"size-full wp-image-10139241\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Stritch first appeared on Broadway in 1944 — and was still performing occasionally even at age 89. She is pictured above in 1955\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>In a career that stretched back to the 1940s, Stritch did it all: theater, TV, movies. She was nominated for several Tony Awards and won three Emmys. She starred in the 1961 Noel Coward musical \u003cem>Sail Away\u003c/em>\u003cem> \u003c/em>and the 1970 Stephen Sondheim musical \u003cem>Company.\u003c/em> (With her performance of \u003ca href=\"http://youtu.be/virv-1o2KjE?t=7s\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">“Ladies Who Lunch,”\u003c/a> Sondheim said Stritch turned what he thought was “just a simple saloon song” into a “piece of theater.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Stritch was born in Detroit, where her father was a rubber company executive. She was raised Roman Catholic and when she first moved to New York City, she went to a finishing school at the Convent of the Sacred Heart. Years later, Broadway producer Hal Prince said Stritch had “the guts of a jailbird” but “the convent girl is still there.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It’s been said that Stritch could always play older than she really was. She was 20 when she sang Zip in \u003cem>Pal Joey\u003c/em> but Stritch herself said she looked 40. She had a terrific sense of humor about her looks — and her age. In 1988, Stritch told NPR’s Susan Stamberg that she didn’t mind the word “aging” at all.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It applies to everyone,” she said. “I saw a kid 16 on the street and he was aging. We’re all aging but somehow the press loves to say it when you’re over 40.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_10139242\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\" style=\"max-width: 640px\">\u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2014/07/ap541122042_enl-ead9878c3997a67b93b92eeb8596a008803656d7-e1405642663572.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2014/07/ap541122042_enl-ead9878c3997a67b93b92eeb8596a008803656d7-1153x1440.jpg\" alt=\"Stritch blows up balloons as a voice training exercise in November 1954.\" width=\"640\" height=\"799\" class=\"size-large wp-image-10139242\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Stritch blows up balloons as a voice training exercise in November 1954.\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Stritch was candid about everything — her age, her alcoholism, her diabetes. In her book \u003cem>Am I Blue?: Living with Diabetes and, Dammit, Having Fun!,\u003c/em> she wrote about being diagnosed with the disease at the peak of her career.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“More than with any other condition I know of,” she wrote, “the diabetic simply has to understand the nature of the illness and become intimately involved in treating it.” But with her trademark wit she also said: “Diabetes is great because I can say ‘My blood sugar is off. I have to go.'”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In 2002, when she was in her late 70s, she launched a Tony Award-winning, one-woman show called \u003cem>Elaine Stritch at the Liberty. \u003c/em>She continued performing well into her 80s. In 2008 Stritch won an Emmy — her third — for her role as character Jack Donaghy’s mother on NBC’s \u003cem>30 Rock\u003c/em>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Stritch once said, “I just pray that I can be at least amusing.” \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And was she ever. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>KQED’s own \u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/arts/author/marktaylor-2/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Mark Taylor\u003c/a> first wrote about Stritch’s passing this morning. \u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/arts/2014/07/17/heres-to-the-ladies-who-lunch-elaine-stritch-dead-at-89/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"> Read his article\u003c/a> for more video and anecdotes.\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">Copyright 2014 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?utmac=UA-5828686-4&utmdt=Actress+Elaine+Stritch%2C+%27Her+Own+Greatest+Character%2C%27+Dies+At+89&utme=8(APIKey)9(MDAxOTAwOTE4MDEyMTkxMDAzNjczZDljZA004)\">\u003c/div>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>Elaine Stritch — one of Broadway’s boldest and brassiest performers — has died. With that gravelly voice — and those long legs — and that utter command of the stage, Stritch was a bona fide Broadway star. Not as a classic leading lady, necessarily, but as the hardened-yet-vulnerable performer audiences couldn’t forget. Stritch died of natural causes Thursday morning at her home in Birmingham, Mich. She was 89.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In \u003ca href=\"http://www.npr.org/2014/03/01/280715944/elaine-stritch-volatile-and-vulnerable-in-shoot-me\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">an interview with Stritch\u003c/a> in March 2014, NPR’s Scott Simon observed that the stage and screen legend “may be her own greatest character.”\u003c/p>\n\u003caside class=\"aligncenter\">\n\u003ch4>Listen to Stritch’s interview on \u003ci>Weekend Edition\u003c/i> back in March: \u003c/h4>\n\u003cp>http://pd.npr.org/anon.npr-mp3/npr/wesat/2014/03/20140301_wesat_elaine_stritch_volatile_and_vulnerable_in_shoot_me.mp3\u003cbr>\n\u003c/p>\u003c/aside>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_10139241\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\" style=\"max-width: 200px\">\u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2014/07/ap5501010929_custom-d76a7bd75fab7a20dfd3ae2232640f94bd8d36fd.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2014/07/ap5501010929_custom-d76a7bd75fab7a20dfd3ae2232640f94bd8d36fd.jpg\" alt=\"Stritch first appeared on Broadway in 1944 -- and was still performing occasionally even at age 89. She is pictured above in 1955\" width=\"200\" height=\"255\" class=\"size-full wp-image-10139241\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Stritch first appeared on Broadway in 1944 — and was still performing occasionally even at age 89. She is pictured above in 1955\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>In a career that stretched back to the 1940s, Stritch did it all: theater, TV, movies. She was nominated for several Tony Awards and won three Emmys. She starred in the 1961 Noel Coward musical \u003cem>Sail Away\u003c/em>\u003cem> \u003c/em>and the 1970 Stephen Sondheim musical \u003cem>Company.\u003c/em> (With her performance of \u003ca href=\"http://youtu.be/virv-1o2KjE?t=7s\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">“Ladies Who Lunch,”\u003c/a> Sondheim said Stritch turned what he thought was “just a simple saloon song” into a “piece of theater.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Stritch was born in Detroit, where her father was a rubber company executive. She was raised Roman Catholic and when she first moved to New York City, she went to a finishing school at the Convent of the Sacred Heart. Years later, Broadway producer Hal Prince said Stritch had “the guts of a jailbird” but “the convent girl is still there.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It’s been said that Stritch could always play older than she really was. She was 20 when she sang Zip in \u003cem>Pal Joey\u003c/em> but Stritch herself said she looked 40. She had a terrific sense of humor about her looks — and her age. In 1988, Stritch told NPR’s Susan Stamberg that she didn’t mind the word “aging” at all.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It applies to everyone,” she said. “I saw a kid 16 on the street and he was aging. We’re all aging but somehow the press loves to say it when you’re over 40.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_10139242\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\" style=\"max-width: 640px\">\u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2014/07/ap541122042_enl-ead9878c3997a67b93b92eeb8596a008803656d7-e1405642663572.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2014/07/ap541122042_enl-ead9878c3997a67b93b92eeb8596a008803656d7-1153x1440.jpg\" alt=\"Stritch blows up balloons as a voice training exercise in November 1954.\" width=\"640\" height=\"799\" class=\"size-large wp-image-10139242\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Stritch blows up balloons as a voice training exercise in November 1954.\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Stritch was candid about everything — her age, her alcoholism, her diabetes. In her book \u003cem>Am I Blue?: Living with Diabetes and, Dammit, Having Fun!,\u003c/em> she wrote about being diagnosed with the disease at the peak of her career.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“More than with any other condition I know of,” she wrote, “the diabetic simply has to understand the nature of the illness and become intimately involved in treating it.” But with her trademark wit she also said: “Diabetes is great because I can say ‘My blood sugar is off. I have to go.'”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In 2002, when she was in her late 70s, she launched a Tony Award-winning, one-woman show called \u003cem>Elaine Stritch at the Liberty. \u003c/em>She continued performing well into her 80s. In 2008 Stritch won an Emmy — her third — for her role as character Jack Donaghy’s mother on NBC’s \u003cem>30 Rock\u003c/em>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Stritch once said, “I just pray that I can be at least amusing.” \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And was she ever. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>KQED’s own \u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/arts/author/marktaylor-2/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Mark Taylor\u003c/a> first wrote about Stritch’s passing this morning. \u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/arts/2014/07/17/heres-to-the-ladies-who-lunch-elaine-stritch-dead-at-89/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"> Read his article\u003c/a> for more video and anecdotes.\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">Copyright 2014 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?utmac=UA-5828686-4&utmdt=Actress+Elaine+Stritch%2C+%27Her+Own+Greatest+Character%2C%27+Dies+At+89&utme=8(APIKey)9(MDAxOTAwOTE4MDEyMTkxMDAzNjczZDljZA004)\">\u003c/div>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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