— Editorial Reader

Via The Huffington Post

Austrian director Michael Haneke’s Amour has captured five Oscar nominations, including an unprecedented sweep of both Best Picture and Best Foreign Film. The majority of critical praise for the film focuses on its balance of compassion and brutality in presenting the final days of an elderly French couple as they endure the sordid demands of dying.

Anne and Georges Laurent are retired music instructors in their eighth decade of life who have shared a long, loving marriage. After a stroke Anne begins a trajectory of physical and cognitive decline and Georges is forced to shift exhaustively from the roles of lover, husband, father, and peer, to caretaker. Each new medical requirement marks the end to a piece of life they’ve shared.

If this sounds like a brutal examination of the perils of growing old, it is. However, Amour accomplishes vastly more than paint a picture of aging and dying, and to reduce its scope to such is to relegate the story of Anne and Georges — their memories and idiosyncratic behaviors, their achievements and contributions as wife and husband, parents, music teachers, and citizens, their singular love for each other — to a dusty place alongside the Arcadian landscapes that decorate their apartment walls.

[Read more]

Via The Huffington Post

A slew of current projects — ranging from young adult novels to television to a rumored Anne Hathaway film — aim to make Shakespeare accessible to a contemporary audience.

Merit Press, a new Young Adult imprint headed by best-selling author, Jacquelyn Mitchard (The Deep End of the Ocean), is basing two of its first five debut releases on Shakespeare retellings.
Exposure, a modern retelling of Macbeth set in an Alaska high school, was published January 18th. It’s the second book of what will be at least three titles in co-authors Kim Askew and Amy Helmes’ Twisted Lit series.

Tempestuous, a humorous reimagining of The Tempest with a lead character named Miranda Prospero, was released in December.

A recent study out of the UK revealed that almost a third of schoolchildren under the age of 13 had never heard of their country’s most famous writer. The statistics for adults 18-34 were equally dismal. Five percent believed Shakespeare’s most famous play was Cinderella, and nearly half (49 percent) were unable to complete the line “Romeo, Romeo…” with the correct response “wherefore art thou Romeo” from Shakespeare’s best known play, Romeo and Juliet.

[Read more]

Via The New Yorker

I have to face it: Quentin Tarantino’s “Django Unchained” is his most entertaining piece of moviemaking since “Pulp Fiction.” Some of it, particularly in the first half, is excruciatingly funny, and all of it has been brought off in a spirit of burlesque merriment—violent absurdity pushed to the level of flagrancy and beyond. That’s the place where Tarantino is happiest: out at the edge, playing with genre conventions, turning expectations inside out, ginning up the violence to exploitation-movie levels. The film is in two parts: the first half is a mock Western; the second is a mock-revenge melodrama about slavery, set in the deep South and ending in fountains of redemptive spurting blood. “Django” is a crap masterpiece, garrulous and repetitive, rich with jokes and cruelties, including some Old South cruelties that Tarantino invented for himself. It’s a very strange movie, luridly sadistic and morally ambitious at the same time, and the audience is definitely alive to it, revelling in its incongruities, enjoying what’s lusciously and profanely over the top.

What’s even stranger than the movie, however, is how seriously some of our high-minded critics have taken it as a portrait of slavery. Didn’t they notice that Tarantino throws in an “S.N.L.”-type skit about the Ku Klux Klan, who gather on their horses for a raid only to complain petulantly that they can’t see well out of their slitted white hoods? Or that Samuel L. Jackson does a roaring, bug-eyed parody of an Uncle Tom house slave in the second half? Or that the heroine of the movie, a female slave, is called Broomhilda von Shaft? Could Mel Brooks have done any better? (“Lili von Shtupp,” I suppose, is slightly better.) Yes, we are told that Broomhilda’s German mistress gave her the name and taught her German, but Tarantino is never more improbable than when he supplies explanations for his most bizarre fancies. Some of his characters spring from old genre movies, some spring full-blown from the master’s head. None have much basis in life, or in any social reality to speak of. (Remember the Jews who killed Nazis with baseball bats?) Yes, of course, there were killers in the Old West and cruel slave masters in the South—central characters in the movie—but Tarantino juices everything into gaudy pop fantasy. I enjoyed parts of “Django Unchained” very much, but I’m surprised that anyone can take it as anything more than an enormous put-on.

[Read more]

Via The New Yorker

While President Obama’s ascent to the highest seat of government came off with magisterial smoothness, our crown-diva hasn’t fared so well in the days since: yesterday the world was shocked (!) to discover that Beyoncé may have lip-synched her performance of “The Star-Spangled Banner” over a recording that she’d made earlier. (A spokesperson for the United States Marine Band tattled. Later, the band backed off its initial statement and said that they had no way of telling whether or not she was singing live. The controversy continues.) Her critics and fans went at it on Twitter on Tuesday evening at a rate of about fifty tweets per minute. “Beyonce had to lip sync to the same song 11 yr old girls sing live at sports venues all over the U.S. #Disgrace,” wrote one outraged citizen. Others, such as Anderson Cooper, raised their voices in her defense: “Who cares if @Beyonce didn’t sing live at Inauguration. She looked and sounded amazing! More tonight in #theridiculist.” The day’s historic moments—Myrlie Evers-Williams’s stately invocation (she was the first layperson, and the first woman, to recite the ceremony’s opening prayer), Obama’s rousing assertion of a progressive second-term agenda, the presence onstage of more women and minorities than white men—seem to have receded in the wake of lip-sync-gate.

This “scandal” may seem trivial (or, as one baffled Twitterer put it “ZOMG BEYONCE LIP SYNC SCANDAL!!! 48 million people on food stamps”), but the sheer number of people interested in discussing it—the story has been reported by nearly every major American news outlet—is telling. Why should it make so many people so angry to know that Beyoncé convincingly tossed her hair and widened her eyes and shimmied her head to the sound of her very own voice? If anything, her zeal for perfection does her credit and befits the grandeur of the occasion. Not to mention the fact that Beyoncé is as skilled at lip-synching as she is at everything else: it’s all part of her carefully trained, cultivated artistry.

[Read more]

Via The Daily Beast

This year’s Academy Awards race for Best Picture is a lot like last year’s race for the Republican presidential nomination. Only the stakes are so much higher!

The early frontrunner, Argo may have peaked too early, kind of like Mitt Romney did. Next came Silver Linings Playbook (the cuckoo candidate, à la Michele Bachmann), Life of Pi (if only Rick Perry could roar like that tiger), Lincoln (as reserved as Ron Paul), and Zero Dark Thirty (as controversial as Rick Santorum). I hate to compare Les Misérables to Newt Gingrich, but they both polarized voters. And the much-anticipated The Great Gatsby pushed back its candidacy (like Chris Christie). As BuzzFeed’s Richard Rushfield observed last November, the Oscar race for Best Picture had never been so wide open.

A few weeks ago, it started to look one of the candidates had become the clear frontrunner. Even if Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln puts audiences to sleep like a C-SPAN marathon, Hollywood found parallels between the film and the second inauguration of a certain 44th president. Lincoln landed seven Golden Globe nominations and 12 Oscar nominations, more than any other film. The movie with the most nominations usually wins Best Picture at the Academy Awards.

[Read more]

Via The New York Times

When Kenan, the Bosnian physical therapist treating my back injury, saw me grading student papers between leg lifts, he asked, “What I did on my summer vacation?”

I told him that, actually, the first piece I assign my feature journalism classes is something a little more revealing: write three pages confessing your most humiliating secret.

“You Americans.” He laughed. “Why would anyone reveal that?”

“Because they want to publish essays and sell memoirs,” I said.

During my next session, Kenan handed me 900 words chronicling his Muslim family’s betrayal by their neighbors during the Balkan War. It led to his first clip and a second career.

Over 20 years of teaching, I have made “the humiliation essay” my signature assignment. It encourages students to shed vanity and pretension and relive an embarrassing moment that makes them look silly, fearful, fragile or naked.

[Read more]

From The New York Times

Something rare and wonderful happened at the opening night of the Encores! concert production of “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes” at City Center last week. At the end of the show, when the performers took their bows, the audience remained seated.

Let me hasten to add there was no doubt that this audience had mightily enjoyed what it had just seen. We had all beat our hands raw with clapping through a succession of showstoppers, including a tap sequence that would have made you swear the ghosts of the Nicholas Brothers had possessed its performers; an athletic series of variations on the Charleston; and a knockout rendition of “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend,” that immortal anthem to non-liquid assets.

That number was performed by Megan Hilty, who as the gold-digging Lorelei Lee gave an original, audacious comic performance that, for the moment, wiped out memories of Carol Channing and Marilyn Monroe, her indelible predecessors in the role. It felt like one of those fabled performances (much cherished by theatergoers) that in a single, golden night thrust its leading lady into the firmament of musical stage stardom.

[Full article here]