MOVIE-TV: REVIEWS
DIARY 12229
8/20/77
"EARTH" AS A CLASSIC FILM
More pretentious than classic, there are endless vignettes of heads staring at other heads, as Simon asks Peter about how he's dying, and then he eats a pear and lies back with his arms crossed piously. There's a meeting of the "party group" that the father dislikes until the son has the wisdom to say "You're just getting older," and the father finally admits "That's some son." It seems they STEAL the land from the rich landowner, just beating down the fences with a tractor that arrives over portentous views over empty landscapes and titles of "It's coming," and "It's here," obviously referring as much to the social revolution as to the dumpy tractor. Amusing image when it runs out of water and "Let it fly!" they piss into it to get it going. Landowner looks rather like the son, so it's hard to tell who's dancing down the road, and then someone kills someone, and a plump NAKED woman throws pillows and tits around screaming for "Basil" in a surely surprising sequence. Then there's the obligatory crowd sequence as they request the body to be buried WITHOUT a priest, and the priest invokes the wrath of god down on the farmers, so since the wrath doesn't come, obviously God doesn't exist. HERE there's interesting inter-cutting of marching-singing farmers, invoking priest (without any icons in close-up for relief), and raging naked woman, with an old woman wondering "What if there IS a god?" and the landowner going out of his mind from killing the hero, rotating his head in the soil, begging to be killed. Then someone kisses at the end, and one doesn't know if the hero'd come back to life or others are starting new life. Oh, the obligatory children playing as the old man died for more heaviness. The music was very ponderous and Shostakovichian, though no credits for it were given that I saw, and it seemed SO long starting that I was sure it must be an hour over when only a half-hour had passed. True, at the end, when it got going, it moved with fervor and élan, but there was a long time to wait. Probably that's why I don't remember anything from it from 1959 when I last saw it, and why I don't remember many of the Eisenstein secondary films until I see them a second time. LOTS of concentration on waving grain, sunflowers, and apples hanging on trees in sun and rain and moonlight, but the film was SO grainy it was hard to tell how much was art and how much TV engraining of image.
DIARY 12253
9/1/77
DISNEY'S "CINDERELLA"
(Glad I had included the ruined xeroxes (first so the company didn't see that someone was xeroxing a whole book from somewhere) because I could write on the huge pages in the dark): 1949 movie (but didn't win ANY Oscars), starts with Father dying, stepmother's "true nature came out afterward." Fortune squandered on stepsisters. Birds wake her up; SONG: "A Dream Is a Wish Your Heart Makes" to birds and mice. Birds help her dress---adults and kids TALK throughout movie. Gus-Gus hides in a cup, Mother bitches. Cinderella put to harder work. King wants to marry Prince off, Klutzy Duke as Minister. SONG: "Sing Sweet Nightingale" with scrub-bubble chorus. SONG: (by mouse): "Cinderelly." Mice and birds fix dress. Sisters tear OFF pieces mice sewed on, leaving it in ruins, and animals are sad as she cries. Mice had to get beards and sash away from Lucifer in a funny scene. Godmother sings "Bibbity Bobbity Boo" as she's 1) making carriage of pumpkin, 2) mice to horses, 3) horse to coachman, 4) dog to footman, and 5) gown (with hair UP, glass slippers, and makeup, too). Coach lights up roadway as it passes houses and kids applaud delightedly. GRAND staircase in a set-piece. Stodgy waltz when he finds her "So This Is Love" their duet, ugh! Idyllic scenes of love get loudest raucousness from audience. The midnight and the transformation back, and next day she starts sighing and hands clothes back to daughters at the sound of the declaration. Mother suspects and locks her in her room. Mice have to get key from Mother's pocket, they take key upstairs, Lucifer catches them, birds go get Bruno, who's lifted by birds, and he attacks cat, who falls from HIGH window and we ASSUME dies. "Madam, my orders were EVERY lady," gets applause, Mother TRIPS minister, shoe breaks, Cinderella says "But you see, I have the other slipper," and Mother gasps, audience goes wild, and they instantly marry, off in a chariot, chorus singing, she waves back at mice dressed as courtiers, and the ending kiss with "And they lived happily ever after" written in the closing book as chorus sings "Your wish will come true." 74 minutes without a real FANTASY piece, Mother not NEARLY so nasty as various witches, stepsisters only ludicrous, Lucifer best villain, sometimes-funny accented mice, but no real pizzazz, invention, imagination, or EVEN any great BEAUTY.
DIARY 12303
9/18/77
FANTASTIC ANIMATION FESTIVAL
I miss "French Windows," which must be the music by the Pink Floyd, and short (9:55-9:58).
ICARUS has cute clay figures pulling themselves out of earth and flying, but it would be neater to see them TRANSCEND men: grow new limbs, develop FURTHER.
A SHORT HISTORY OF THE WHEEL is very confusing, rather 2001ish and FOOLish, with a cosmic jukebox accepting a wheel that falls to earth as a given. Bad.
COSMIC CARTOON uses Holst music, glaring chromocolor, but drawn women (and Dennis observes it's all BY women) are horrible, a LACK of imagination.
THE LAST CARTOON MAN is just silly: man taking himself apart---why it would win a prize at the Zagreb Festival is beyond me---maybe we didn't see it all?
CAT'S CRADLE is the Mohammed-spider story taken through seven size-changes and ludicrously funny people and monsters and spiders and camels, one of the brilliant ones of the evening, from Paris, with bright colors and GREAT sound.
MOODSHADOW has a song by Cat Stevens about a child's fantasy of riding on the moon, and some of the images are PRETTY, but it's rather boring at length. The boy, Teaser, and his cat seem too directed to children's cuteness for their good.
NIGHTBIRD is VERY slow, bird-hitchhiker being nailed to lamppost after he drives her to a sunlit enclosure where stumpy angels fly about. BORING!!
ROOM AND BOARD has an interesting person growing up quickly, beating at a door that turns out to hide an IRONING board, funniest laugh of evening.
BAMBI MEETS GODZILLA, aside from a reeling off of credits for the same person, has only a gentle fawn nibbling grass until stepped on by FOOT, thanks to City of Tokyo.
MOUNTAIN MUSIC IN 3-dimation has good depth, intricate sets of thousands of clay trees, interesting music, but developing until a volcano erupts and wipes out electronics, FUN with clay, but cursing "Progress" and noise. Will Vinton did.
LIGHT by Jordan Belson is typically pretentious, going-nowhere, and fuzzy.
SUPERMAN V. THE MECHANICAL MONSTERS is fun from 1933, battling them for Lois Lane against arch-fiend inventor, perfectly in character, a minor masterpiece.
LEVI ad starts gray, turns colors for Levis, cute but nonsexy and imaginative.
7-UP ad is bubbly, girly, butterfly-y, and moves nicely, one of the best.
MIRROR PEOPLE is second best by Kathy Rose, sound by Carter Thomas, of people moving in and out of dimensions and mirrors and images and imaginings---where cartoons SHOULD be.
ASBESTOS/KICK ME is simple, drawn on film directly, visible sound-track, interesting.
CLOSED MONDAYS I'd seen before, why do they try to imitate PEOPLE, rather than FUN??
DIARY 12323
10/9/77
MORE ANIMATION
FLAMINGO BOOGY (8) is a series of primitive yearnings and graspings for the sun.
MARGUERITE (4) is sketchy feminist Dada with simpy "Babette" voice in background.
MINDSCAPE (8; 1976) by Jacques Drouin is done with a pinboard, FABULOUS black-and-white movement-chasing picture-framing and stepping-into, with picture turning into real, leaves turning colors, shadows handled MARVELOUSLY, great.
THRU THE MIRROR (8; 1936) has Mickey Mouse battling cards with ink and fan in what looks like a rehearsal for the card scene in "Alice," but it's OLD.
ARABESQUE (7; 1975) is computer-designed with simplistic arrangements of simple figures: slow and little is best, with some marvelous transitions.
TETE EN FLEURS (3; 1969) is drawn by myriad dots in lines and forms, and it may also be with pinboard, and my notes end with a "ltive" word I can't read.
SONOMA (8; 1977) re-photographs a static drawing of gone-gray pretensions into colors into people into pyramids, to the word Sonoma, the end. Ugh.
DUE CONCERTANTES (10) is VERY ponderous and unfunny, old-style decoupage which looks rather like bad Monty Python, and Larry Jordan and the "Serious Business Company" are both names to avoid in the field of cartooning.
SNOW SOUND (1) has silly whiteness with a few pencil lines and tinkly music. Why?
OPENING AND CLOSING (5 minutes) of washing machine doors. TOTALLY silly but for the realization of the camera's reflection, and it took PEOPLE to do this junk.
THE 40'S (3) Boogie-woogie Bugle Boy with silly collages of images from 40's.
THE NOSE (12) Pinboard from Gogol's story, it's TOO long, but the figures are quite grotesque and there's a FEELING that the others didn't have, and the image of the nose being put back on the face is arresting enough for me.
FEASTING (5) has Jacques Brel's "Carousel" music to too-slow montages of pop art and violence, and only in the last SECONDS did it speed to excitement.
DREAMSTEALER (3) has simple-minded balloon-images coming from head, cock, and foot, and sadly it only concentrated on the images from the HEAD, damn.
MUSIC OF THE SPHERES (9; Jordan Belson), and he's still trying with all his catalog of set images: Kiluaia, Busby Berkeley, Universe, Moire, Glass patterns, bubbles, and swirling colors with pretentious music that doesn't go FROM anywhere TO anywhere, so there's no sense of a TRIP involved at ALL.
DIARY 12350
10/10/77
"MARRIAGE OF FIGARO" ON TV
With Hermann Prey looking electrifyingly handsome in his extreme close-ups of his glaring eyes against the tall, arrogant, supercilious count of Dietrich Fischer-Diskau, warring over the affections of Mirella Freni and disgusted with the machinations of a Geraldine Pagish Heather Begg as Marcellina, whom I'd forgotten turns out to be Figaro's father (HA!), or mother, or some such, and a totally convincing bumpkin (male) of Maria Ewing's Cherubino, there's still something drastically lacking in the PIECE, though not in the production, which seems to take place in authentic settings, so much so that Figaro can parade through a series of back alleys, stables, washing areas, and end up with a striking tableau in front of a bleaching or tanning shed with white sheets draped artistically around the back. The singing is marvelous, even though I missed it when it was simulcast, but STILL there's no excitement, even though I didn't remember the plot. Part of it was the arrogance of the count, so you couldn't care for him; the simpery quality of the countess, the dumbness of Susanna, and the wiliness of Figaro made ALL of them vaguely unlikable, so there wasn't really any CARING for the characters, and the fact that EVERYONE, but the three simple men in the cast, got married or were reunited in the end, made it even sillier. But even with the perfection of technique in filming it, it was still so woefully old-fashioned that there wasn't any possibility of getting interested in it: and certainly female liberationists would shudder at the using of women as stupid objects, the blatant superiority of ALL the male characters, and the fact that the men didn't know the women enough to RECOGNIZE them even on hearing their voices (though Figaro does), or even their lips and techniques on KISSING them. Then it was MUCH too long, so that I can't imagine how they produce it if there are three intermissions and even WITHOUT intermissions it runs for 3½ hours, so it would go to at LEAST 4½ hours, which would be 7:30 to midnight, rather long for anyone but Wagner, where the richness of the melody would hold the attention. This didn't seem like incredibly good Mozart that everyone keeps talking about, either.
DIARY 12375
10/20/77
"ZARDOZ" FOR THE THIRD TIME
Hadn't even NOTICED before that the floating head of Arthur Prine, or whoever his name was, exactly mimicked the floating head of "Zardoz." This time I get the continuity, and when Dennis asked for my interpretation of a plot line, I would have to say: Zed is an exterminator who hides away in the head, shoots his own god, enters the land of the Immortals, is caught and brain-probed by them to reveal that Prine had lured him into his library, where he read and learned, but then was given "The Wizard of Oz" and found that his god was false, so THEN he hid in the head and was captured. But his tests show that he's physically and intellectually ahead of the Immortals, and it turns out that Prine CONSTRUCTED him genetically from his forebears to bring death to the Immortals, who's gotten bored by their eternity of nonliving, and he let in the Exterminators who killed off the Immortals and introduced fresh blood to the world. He went in to the ruins of the crashed head with Consuela and bore a son who left them to rule the new world, while they were left behind with only handprints and a pistol on the wall. Longish, but it WAS complicated. He only caused time to go backward ONCE, to get out of the statuary hall, and only foresaw the future once, when he killed the girl who spoke Nordic. But so MANY features I totally FORGOT: the funny episode that the Immortals couldn't get an erection, and Zed got one looking at Consuela; implanting him with all knowledge in a fabulous scene of information-slides on faces speaking languages and mathematics; finding the crystal that was their central information bank, then ENTERING it and destroying it, breaking down the walls, their immortality, and all of society. Some segments seemed LONG, though, particularly the interminable number of reflections when he was in the crystal, which didn't further the plot any that I could see, and merely showed fun by the director, John Boorman, who WAS pretentious and long-winded, but he had so many lovely layers in his film, so many analogies: Zed, last letter, last man, Zardoz, and still the marvelous scene of rebellion by Friend, turning old with the outcasting of the group around the table, and the lovely SENSUALITY that Dennis spoke about, which I expanded to the WARMTH of the people at the table with kissing the bread and blessing the wine and enjoying the food, and their FURY searching out Zed, too!
DIARY 12390
10/24/77
"MANON" ON TV
Beverly Sills looks radiantly innocent with her big eyes and large simple movements during the first act, and Henry Price is almost matinee-idol beautiful, and I would have fallen in love with him. The costumes look quite authentic, and the lighting with the storm-clouded backdrop is so fine that the whole thing looks like some Revolutionary artist's rendition of a stagecoach advent in the 1800's. Lovely close-up of some of the characters, too, and the singing now has SUBTITLES, which makes it possible to see what is stretched out, what is repeated, what's being said, who's reacting in what way, and even though the diction is as good as can be expected, even with the subtitles, with the exaggerated singing, sometimes it's still not possible to hear what words are actually being sung, so the subtitles are a GREAT help. Intermission interviews with Nico Castel, the Guillot, and Rudel and Kitty Carlisle and Sills (not with Price, sadly), and then with Governor Carey, who says that EVEN politicians can be interested in the arts today, are pretty good under Robert MacNiel's direction. The sets aren't the best, and the ballet in the fourth act is rather a joke, with Sandra Ballestrachi as a white-tighted Eros and Komogodorov, or whoever, as a black-draped Oberon (where DO they get such droopy drawers?) aren't so great, and the ACTION is so silly, with Guillot getting his "revenge" though there's no hint they DID cheat, and then Manon getting sick, and I keep thinking throughout about security, about MY pursuance of the Primrose Path which oft turns awry, and such thoughts haunt me through the evening, and I guess I'd better do another page on them (see DIARY 12392) to get rid of them. But the camera work is quite perfect, the interviews seem quite natural, and the music, particularly the "La Jeunesse" gavotte, is quite beautiful, as is the perfectly pictorial and frozen stance she takes at the end of it, looking REALLY beautiful, and the idea that youth should be enjoyed is repeated in the fourth act, and again I'm plunged into thoughts of security, money, and how I'll have to sell off possession and collections as my life collapses around me as I reach into the 80s and 90s of my life---NOT of the century.
DIARY 12413
10/31/77
ESP PROGRAM WITH BURT LANCASTER
Jean-Pierre Gerard showed psychokinesis, moving a glass and a lipstick, and changing his heart rate from 105 to 125 to 160 at the end. "Before it happens, he SEES it happening." Masuaki Kyoto creates light energy and puts a picture of the Tokyo Tower on an "unused" Polaroid film. A functionally blind person heads a company perfecting prisms for his tunnel vision and a speech-clearer and remote typewriter for a spastic, thanks to communication from dead scientists and philanthropists whose directions "always work." An overactive painter from Sao Paulo paints from the disembodied dead around him, smiling that he's saying "It means we all live forever," and creates lousy images that look like cheap Modigliani and Renoir. A healer affects severely someone in the next room, whose leg tingles and feels better. A Philippine sample was proved to be HUMAN blood, but his throat still hurts. A weird Russian doctor sets up a man on a weighing mattress and causes him to lose 5 pounds for about 5 seconds. A woman deflects a laser beam by weaving her body close to it. Partly looking like a circus, partly being too Godly when Lancaster feels impelled to add "Or it could be prayer," or "Who knows the power of inspiration?" or some other sanctimonious shit. Nothing was CONVINCINGLY ruled out as being a hoax, since none of the elaborate prevention-schemes was DETAILED. And of course trickery on film is always possible. But the guy walking over 1100° coals said that he did it by THINKING about it, physicists talked of new forces and how the random energies in the air could be ORGANIZED by the brain into a force that could be directed, and it seems that people are LOOKING INTO this, not directly on the basis of the Russians doing the same research "for war and peace." Woman who went back in time to 1190 talked of a crypt that was only found LATER when the church was being repaired. But it was just as I'd said before, there probably IS something, but I don't know WHAT. Reading Dianetics on engrams and hearing est that we remember everything and seeing here that there may be powers we don't know, I'd LOVE to be in the forefront of the movement somehow, but have no idea how I could GET to be there.
DIARY 12426
11/2/77
FILM AS ART AT DONNELL/ORGANISM
STREET was drawn in gray mud, with interesting changing perspectives, about guy getting Grandma's room after she died, with Hubley-child type voices.
ORGANISM was a fabulous simile of the cars and people and lights of city's streets as the corpuscles and organisms in a large body, and some of the cutting-back and forth was brilliant: platelets DO look like taillights waiting to get into a blood vessel. The photography was super, watching the sun rise and set in a minute, clouds scuttling past, planes taking off looking like flying saucers in streaks of light, planes lining up for landing like strange insects attracted to a sweet runway, shadows of the World Trade Center or the Empire State Building shooting past streets and buildings, lights going on or coming off as the dawn approaches, or in some cases going off, coming on BEFORE dawn, and then being washed out by the brilliance of the day. Lots of subway shots, highways, trucks being loaded and unloaded while the sound track talked about storage and utilization of foods by the body. Absolutely fabulous, and one of the rare films that I'd like to HAVE. Hilary Harris one of directors of 1975 or 1976 classic.
PENNY SUITE was much too saccharine with pretty-pretty music and pastel colors about a merry-go-round set of animals swallowed by moon and sent to whirling inside head, carousel, and other transformations---TOO puerile.
AUCASSIN AND NICOLETTE was too long at 16 minutes, but very beautiful with bright colors for backgrounds and fairly awkward silhouettes for the people.
OWL WHO MARRIED A GOOSE is in brown mud this time, but VERY cute about how all the children were geese, flying away in formation to HAUNTING sounds by Eskimo children in this tale from the National Film Board of Canada.
MAN: THE INCREDIBLE MACHINE is the National Geographic Special, but it's better than I remember: good shots down trachea, into stomach, but not like the brilliant other into brain, gall bladder, rectum, and why show a WOMAN athlete?
HORSE FLICKERS struck me as VERY self-indulgent about a multitude of ways of showing a horse in stop-motion, but with author and family in there too.
VIVA LA TOUR by Louis Malle about a French bicycle race, leaves me wondering why people want to TORTURE themselves so much for MACHO reasons. Good footage and ironic narration about pushing, drugging, winning, and the strain.
DIARY 12435
11/6/77
OLIVIER'S "OTHELLO"
The color from 1965 is quite good, but the sound is pretty awful, many of the speeches being so garbled that it's impossible to say what's going on. But Frank Finlay is quite good as Iago, hardly the ugly bastard, but quite attractive in his own way. The BLACKNESS of Olivier is a shock, and he adapts sort of an American Negro accent and swagger that seems rather odd, but his body is quite good for 58 years old, and he's aged far more in the past 10 than he had in the previous 30. And the play is still gripping to the emotions, particularly thanks to the simplicity and straightforwardness of Maggie Smith as Desdemona. But there was a feeling that emotions were LARGER then (see DIARY 12434), that jealousy couldn't POSSESS someone so much now (though of course maybe it couldn't have in Shakespeare's time, either, and he just heightened for effect, as Albee does), and there's simply not so much KILLING now, though percentage wise, even, that might not be accurate. But the RHYTHM of the words, the STRENGTH of the concepts and similes, the SCOPE of the emotions and BREADTH of image (sounding seas, emotions ripped from hearts, jealousy, reputation, weeds smelling sweet, heart on sleeve) again beguiles and makes one wonder. Where today is the playwright who can work with a changing cast of characters, polishing here and there over a year, observing the audience's reactions, acceding to the demand for a prettier speech, a more padded part, a bit of jest or murder? Where are speeches that balance so exactly on the tongue, that every saying seems inevitably right and true? Can writers today employ such high-flown speech and not be laughed at? Do strings of rhetorical questions sound silly? Though there were things wrong with the movie, still the play is powerful, moving, gripping. Though it seems to smack of the stage, still there are close-ups and camera fades and lighting cues that heighten the illusion of reality. True, much of the action seems stagy and the speeches seem too studied, but much of the speech seemed contemplated just then, particularly from Iago and Desdemona. And how well Olivier orchestrated his madness, risking going too far, perhaps doing so, but on the way still producing moments of more power than he would have effected had he NOT tried so widely.
DIARY 12468
11/14/77
"RIGOLETTO" ON TV
Slow pans over the exterior and interior of the Met are imposingly simple and convincing, and there aren't any of the people standing up to block the cameras as there were at the City Opera in the State Theater. The intermission features were stuffier, with details of the life of Verdi, than the City Opera features, however. The Met retained the three-act improvement that the City Opera did, but they added the gimmick of leaving Rigoletto ONSTAGE and the curtain UP during the rotating scene-change, so that he could moan there after the curse and then get up and go home. Cornell MacNeil was a more unsympathetic jester, still acting very broadly for the Met audience, which looked almost addled on the TV set. Placido Domingo was so entirely flattered by a skeleton-outlining of white lace on his black suit that I came to a whole new idea of "loving everybody" (see DIARY 12469), and his singing was out of this world. Some of the men in the background were nice, too, but the opening ballet was virtually ignored by the TV cameras in order to show the coming and going of the main characters, which seemed a bit of a cheat, since muscles and tights and crotches were all over during the brief glimpses. Ileana Cotrubas wasn't as pretty as the beautiful blond at City, but Isola Jones was, as some critic said, an X-rated Maddelena because of her VERY low-cut gown that pushed up her tits so that you were SURE they'd pop out. It seems they must have cut the storm, because it didn't seem to go on NEARLY as long as at City. The costumes were all lavish, particularly the one that made Domingo look REALLY like a sexy bastard in black with enormous chest, small waist, and good legs, and a sexy neck under a kissable face, not NEARLY as good as he looked in the offstage interview. The revolving set sort of faded into the background, except for lightning flashes at the end, but it was better than the omnipresent chair that incongruously pervaded the City's production. The puzzle distracted me from the boring parts, but the final quartet WAS nice, and some of the other areas were very well done, but it's not the kind of thing like "Tales of Hoffman" or "Traviata" to have you go wild with melodic intensity.
DIARY 12495
11/20/77
"CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND"
I joke that the crowd pressed in by the rain going in is a "Close Encounter of the Fourth Kind" and am glad that the air-conditioning system of the theater works well enough to take care of all the moisture. And to draw up all the myriad joints being smoked openly in the audience. There's a droning build-up to a sudden flash of light, then the desert sequence, the beautiful fetus-2001-eyes of the little boy in Muncie, and the first fabulous shock of seeing the tail-lights behind Dreyfuss's truck RISING and then the good effects of the rattles, jostles, and magnetization of everything. I sort of question the MYRIAD shapes of the saucers, and what IS that little red thing that sort of tags along like a mascot? Amazed at Soho the next day to find that EVERYTHING that happened has happened a number of times. Think that the Obsession about Devil's Mountain is a bit overdone, especially by Dreyfuss building a model in his living room to everyone's disgust, and can't stand his yapping children. Also depressed by the obvious blame put on the military as trying to mislead everyone about the project, but the ploy of the wreck and gas was nicely handled, even to the drugged cattle on the roadside. Then the climax, with a ludicrous variety of shapes tumbling past, and hard-to-believe businesslikeness of the scientists taking the readings while history was being altered. THEN, from behind the Tower, rose the enormous mother-ship, and it was so BIG and the sound (oppressively heavy before) was so GOOD that I started marveling at the skill, and noticed that in the midst of lots of people WITH sunglasses would appear extraordinary eyes WITHOUT sunglasses, at whom everyone looked without realizing, and that set the stage for the large, liquid-filled eyes of the alien, so that you stared at THEM rather than at the too-thin, dampish, poorly articulated body. There WERE tears in my eyes, and I thought it had to do with the eyes, even though my respect was mitigated by the silliness of the music exchanges with the obviously trumpet-like ship-tones. But the SIZE was good, and Dreyfuss being escorted into the ship by dozens of little people made me think that the alien WANTED to be taken, too, but no one would take (as I thought of) her. Then it lifted off, became a beautiful Manhattan, leaving more room for a sequel, and I even liked the translating for Truffaut, and EVEN Melinda Dillon, no gift.
DIARY 12550
12/8/77
"THE MERRY WIDOW" ON TV
Again, Sills looked trim around the waist in some of her costumes, and she paraded SO convincingly in her white-pleated cape that you could BELIEVE she was one of the fabulous women of the world. Alan Titus, however, looked as if he'd gained a number of pounds, though his belly when he reclined on a couch to sing wasn't bad at all. Told Dennis to look at the rousing finale, but it didn't go on very long at all, and where THEY gave a reprise of "The Merry Widow" waltz, the production I saw must have done the final chorus over and over, louder and louder, since I remember THAT best of all. The opera itself is rather silly: there's nothing except piddling detail between their getting married, and the idea that she'll lose all her money comes only at the END, to be quickly resolved by its being left to the state, which needed it from the start, and though the San Diego production was lavish enough (with a large black circle on the floor that would lead one to expect a revolving stage where there wasn't any), some of the plot lines were rather obscured on TV, as when Beverly Sills was spirited into the pergola to take the place of the wife of the minister. Oddly too, the Sheldon Harnick translation changed "Pontevedro" to "Petrovania" as close as I could have made out, making one think it's somewhere west of New York with lots of oil. Probably for terminal rhymes. Sills was marvelously natural (sounding JUST like herself) in the recited lines, but Titus didn't seem to come off with any charm of his own. The "grandes dames" of the first two acts reappeared as the grisettes of the last act, which seemed to make for a certain amount of confusion, particularly with the minister's wife so prominently displayed one would think she was being unfaithful AGAIN. With the absence of actual PLOT there was a dearth of real SINGING except for the marvelous "Velia" ballad and the "Merry Widow" waltz that didn't go on nearly long enough, except that it was the turning point of the opera since Titus resolved never to SAY "I Love You" and the song proclaiming "Every Step SAYS I Love You." But neither of them could dance worth tuppence, they DIDN'T have good dancers for the cancan, and though some of the men in the background were cute, they didn't have form-cut clothes to show.
DIARY 12594
12/19/77
MY WASTED DAY WATCHING TV
See that the 8-9 am "All New Superfriends Hour" has good sexy Marvel-Comics style crotches and musclemen, but "Space Sentinels" at 9 is a Hanna-Barberra type sexless muscularity. "Scooby's All-Star Laff-A-Lympics" is cartoons of the worst kind, while in the morning "The Hardy Boys" is also a cartoon. At 9:30, "Superwitch" is a cartoon based on whoever the witch was, and this has a little troublemaker that ALL of them now seem to have, since the Batman now has Batgirl and Batmite, a sort of buzzing, lovable fiend that even RITA told me about, and the Tarzan and Batman were cartooned in the sexless style, too, unfortunately. Tarzan from 10-11 was live, but the GUY wasn't that sexy: sort of an aging surfer with lank blond hair and a waistless tanned body that seemed geared to NONsexuality, not to mention that the plots of ALL these were the most stereotyped, puerile, inane possible, with just DREADFUL acting in most of them, particularly "The Krofft Supershow '77" from 11-12, which had the worst actors and actresses in a take-off of "Star Wars" with the hairy monster, combined with a Wonder-Woman-type mind-control headband, with old-western sets and acting that would have been hooted off the stage in a HIGH SCHOOL production. "Thunder," "Space Academy," and "Search and Rescue" were all live-action things for kids, which meant that even if they DID have heroes, they were dressed sexlessly, were aiming more at being CUTE then acting, had the clichés of drawling old-timers, sardonic older professors, the jokers, the serious little kids, and dialogue that constantly made me wince, so I kept turning channels, until there was no where else to go, and everything was awful, except for the LITTLE I saw (and maybe it didn't give the CHANCE for me to be bored with it) of the Super-friends. Didn't bother to watch the travel/animal shows in the afternoon, but after a whole morning of that, I was content to watch the movies and go through the list of movies. But in the future, hopefully, one will have cassettes of movies, like they're selling now for $20, that can take the place of the insane movies that they make NEW for kids: when will they ever learn that NEWNESS isn't NEARLY as good as keeping alive what's good from the past!
DIARY 12623
12/26/77
MALCOLM GROOME IN "GETTING TOGETHER"
He's much thinner then, though just as sexy, and in some of the bathtub scenes he shows a very sensuous ass, but though he strips down to a muffy pouch for an S/M scene, he never shows genitals, nor does the VERY humpy Carlos, played by Tony Collado (and I get back to empty my porno-closet to find the cover of David from 1972 and it LOOKS like him, but there's no name associated with the photo other than Art Blakeley), though there's lots of tits and even cunts, though there MIGHT be a few frames of cock in the "setting into the pool" scene where the ass is right there. HE said he HATED it: to take 4 months and it took 4 YEARS. He left them 2 years ago, this WAS first showing and he refused to go to the opening. But the rest of the acting is rather miserable, particularly the female lead, though the black couple is pretty good. But the plot is so charmingly whacky when it gets going, particularly in "1985" (said only in the credits) when the family of 6 has about 30 kinds of varying colors and ONE daughter of MARVELOUS singing voice, having taken over the entire building on the northwest corner of 14th and 2nd, where we see the doorway and addresses later, and it looks like they MIGHT have taken over the whole building, and it's interesting that Malcolm and Tony can't be found in the phone book, but their names weren't the ones on the Total Impact building's mailboxes, either, though the "dining room" was, whatever THAT is. When it gets frantic with the seduction of the track team, and then the subsequent police raid, it slips into a cheerful slapstick that makes the slow beginnings pale in memory, and I define it as we leave as "being better than the sum of its parts." The sexualization of the teacher, the "bedding of women" of the exclusively gay black brother, the cock-showing scenes in Man's Country (one of the HUGE list of credits at the end, probably the longest I've ever seen, with credits to EVERYONE for EVERYTHING, one of the best parts of the film, actually, showing their increasing exuberance as they went along) is good with Malcolm seeming to enjoy the affection with the males at all times, and it's so CHARMING and INNOCENT and NAIVE that it couldn't possibly be called pretentious or over-achieving, and all the more charming and friend-feeling for that, copyright 1976, probably just BEFORE Malcolm got into Actualism at the end of 1976 with me, which is FUN.
DIARY 12651
1/2/78
"DIE FLEDEERMAUS" LIVE FROM COVENT GARDEN
Though it was only a rebroadcast of the live performance last night (then why was it dark there, it was only 3 pm!?), there was a sense of history and moist eyes for Irving Trust, who sponsored the first satellite-telecast of a live opera from Covent Garden and interrupted only when necessary for very tasteful commercials. Kiri te Kanawa (pronounced by Tony Randall: teKAHNawa in her presence, so I guess that's it) was a bit prettier than before, though her gray front tooth could be fixed, and her laconic English jokes were hugely appreciated by me and the audience in London. Hermann Prey was handsome but not sexy (no costumes were sexy except for the INCREDIBLY beautiful Wayne Eagling who partnered Merle Park in a nothing Ashton-choreographed---and I forget what---but his Greek tunic showed absolutely PERFECT legs and BEAUTIFUL broad shoulders and nice arms for a male dancer, and close-ups of his face under his blond curls showed something far more attractive than Caligula. I had the fantasy he lifted weights and would become a sensational beauty in the dance world---hope HE dances here in February!), and Someone Meinrad from Austria was a comic hit as Frosch, with his sight-gags and lean good humor. The party was extraordinarily lengthened by Daniel Barenboim playing something ungodly by Chopin for much too long a time, and Isaac Stern did the last movement of the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto with great attention, but it STILL seemed silly. "The Explosion Waltz" by Ashton had six couples waltzing around until they were blown off their feet by an explosion, and only better was the shower of balloons and silver glitter from the ceiling at the end of the performance, with tacky people swirling their capes about them as they left. With THAT kind of ambience (and the unseen-though-credited appearance of Brigit Nilssen as "Orlofsky's guest"), it was a good opera, but ("at last I've sung at Covent Garden": Frosch) what they had to DO with it (with dialogue in German, English, Italian, and a comment about "speaking Indian with the conductor" Zubin Mehta) implied that even the PRINCIPALS didn't think it would carry without being souped up. They applauded for teKanawa SO loudly they MUST have heard something I didn't, but it WAS fun to hear the Wagner, Puccini, Verdi, and others in musical quotations of liven up the Strauss sameness.
DIARY 12659
1/3/78
SHORT COMICS AT DONNELL
THE KID (1920) with Chaplin and an adorable 5-year-old Jackie Coogan has a Dreamland scene that I'd forgotten with everyone wearing wings, and Edna Purveiance leaves her child with a note which she recognizes and then sends the cop after Chaplin once she has the kid, and the finale has the door of her elegant house quietly closing behind the three of them all together.
THE RINK (1918) starts with him as a waiter serving floor brushes and paying by remnants left on clothes, then antagonizing the Mr. Stout, and then the final party with everyone running into everyone, fading off into the sunset with everyone chasing him, on skates, while he latches onto a car and trips.
ONE WEEK (1921) is said to be the first big Keaton success, and it's the one with the portable house as a wedding present that they put on the wrong lot and it's demolished by a passing train, so they put on a For Sale sign and wander off. States that Keaton made 10 features and 19 2-reelers from 1920-1928, but the Killian retrospective at Elgin in October 1970 had 10 features and 21 shorts made from 1917-1927, so they're counting differently.
LEAVE 'EM LAUGHING (1928) was photographed by George Stevens and has Laurel and Hardy starting with a toothache, to a dentist for laughing gas, which lasts them into a traffic jam where they bedevil a cop, but it's really NOT FUNNY, though possibly it's because they didn't have a sound track yet.
SATURDAY AFTERNOON (1924) has Harry Langdon leaving his wife with a dime to go off with a friend and two "peaches" one with "lamps" and then two OTHER beaux accost them and they have a battle, livened when she gives Langdon gasoline to drink by mistake and he sousts (jousts+souses?) around but can't really be FUNNY.
NEVER WEAKEN is 25 minutes by Harold Lloyd with titles as if it's ALL by Time-Life films that put together the package: no director, no NOTHING but the people from Time-Life! He gets acrobat to shill patients to girl's doctor, then mistakes her parson brother from a marrying lover and goes to commit suicide by poison, stabbing, gas, pistol, and he's scooped out of the building on a girder and spends the last 15 minutes dangling, creeping, and getting support removed from under him, finally getting the girl and another girder-lift.
WHY WORRY is over 40 minutes, but I left when it started repeating, but funny with him as a millionaire going to a Mexican-seeming Paradiso (where Easter Island is on the map) in the middle of a revolution, pulling Collosso's tooth to get a giant ally, and he even mounts a cannon on his back; but when he loses his girl for the 3rd time, I leave!
DIARY 12796
3/6/78
"CHARIOT OF THE GODS"
Great color photography flying over Uxmal and Palenque and Chichen Itza, with great shots of the huge stones in the walls of Sachsuaman, Machu Picchu, and Cuzco, with touches on the "Cargo cults" of the South Seas Islands, the stone statues and the lesser known bird-headed men of Easter Island, where creatures from the sky landed on a flat rock offshore, and then the magnifying lens in the collection of the Baghdad Museum in Iraq, the battery in the Topkapi Museum in Turkey, and a whole host of cave drawings. Looking at a photograph in a book is different from seeing the REMOTENESS of such places as Tassili in the Sahara near some oasis, and then seeing the SIZE of the 19-foot "astronaut," though it was wise that they only hurriedly showed a sketch from "ancient drawings from Uzbekistan, in Russia on the borders of China" which showed a complicated larger figure with a MUCH MUCH too explicit picture of an astronaut in a PERFECTLY CONTEMPORARY spacesuit, looking more like a cover drawing for a 30s pulp, and a VERY uncompromising drawing of a flying saucer. The juxtaposition of NASA shots with the drawings of the Mayan god in Copan, said to be the first time it was ever filmed on motion picture film, were convincing, as was the 5th or 6th century mosaic in some church whose name I've forgotten. The sheer juxtaposition of images of rockets and spacemen and drawings is almost convincing, but there's always the idea that if they'd come BEFORE, why haven't they been BACK? If anything, it makes the idea of travel even more fascinating, to see these places and things for myself, to get some "feel" of their truth or falsity, of their sincerity, of their source. Like my urge to see what the "fountain of youth" is like by going to the out-islands of Bimini, for which I just asked Michael the details of the $89 roundtrip to Freeport. But it's fun to think about, even if nothing comes from it, since it serves to unite the world more closely at its basis far back in time, showing that people have more in COMMON than they have to separate themselves, and that there may even be something new to investigate, to explore with finer and finer techniques, so that we get closer and closer to the FACTS of the past.
DIARY 12808
3/11/78
"THE TURNING POINT" AND "THE FURY"
Since I disliked the first and liked the second while Dennis ALWAYS disagreed, there seems to be some point to noting what I liked and he didn't, and vice.
THE TURNING POINT brought a convincing-from-inside Anne Bancroft as an aging dancer against the not-convinced-this-is-me surface Shirley Maclaine, who I can't see even NOMINATED for best actress. Sure, the catfight was fun, particularly how it dissolved into laughter at the end, but Shirley was too CANNY (accepting of Amelia's sex with Yuri, accepting of her "thinking about" joining the company, accepting of her husband and family) to be that BLIND to envy the awful life Bancroft obviously had. Baryshnikov was good enough to merit the un-understanding of the group watching his awful face in "Nutcracker," and his dancing was the best thing in the film: Cragun & Haydee and Martins & Farrell being on MUCH too briefly, and in uncharacteristic parts (particularly Aldous and Bujones) to even make an effect, and sadly Leslie Browne is NOT that good a dancer to have even been CONSIDERED a partner for the Don Q, and her BEST dancing was in the Ashton number lost under the credits at the end. I noted the names of the dark and sexy Jurgen Schneider as Peter, and the sexy Tom Skerritt as the once-gay Wayne, with Sibley and Danias interchangeable as "stars." Amusing that Daniel Levins, made by Feld, played the Feld part, uncharacteristically REMARKED as women-hating by someone who was NOT talked about "in his time."
THE FURY, I thought, set up sympathy for the blood-producing GILLIAN of Amy Irving (and sex for the far-seeing Robin of Andrew Stevens, though there was no "reason" for him to vengefully swoop (fabulous image) down at his father as "absolute power corrupted absolutely"), with her absent rich mother, and for wifeless Kirk Douglas who was both mother and father to his sought son. Cassavetes was a convincing heavy, and I assumed it was a government thing, while Dennis bitched about not having any background, not even recognizing Israel from the letterings on the umbrellas. The whirling-blood-doll was neat, too, and the explosion of Cassavetes at the end a SUPER gross-out! And I jumped six inches when the woman suddenly appeared at the door when she "touched" her, and it's true the "blue-eyed" characteristic calls for a sequel, and one DIDN'T remember how Douglas met Hester, another sympathetic person who was rather arbitrarily hit by a car for MORE blood near the end. But slickly made blood.
DIARY 12815
3/17/78
"SEBASTIANE"
Lindsay Kemp, bald or shaved, with darting reddened tongue, and his naked band of corybants with huge multicolored cocks sticking out about 2 feet, supported by loops around their necks, were not the best way to start a SERIOUS movie, but when Anthony and Apollo, or whoever, go into a slow-motion necking session with OBVIOUS pleasure, even to the turning away of the less-muscled of the two to see a small but uncut and very sex-rised cock, with marvelous slow sprays of crystal waters around their tanned bodies (except if they ALWAYS wore those jockstraps, why would they have untanned cheeks?! The other slow-motion, of Sebastiane pouring morning water along his body, didn't touch on his cock at all, which was too bad, but it seemed to emphasize the little-boy appeal of his smooth body and big ass, rather than any muscularity that was displayed by many of the other characters. But even in a setting where the captain, blond Severus, and everyone else was gay, why bring in the false-nosed character of Max, womanizing, obviously repressed, loud and brash, brazen cocked, who strutted and swore through whole picture? Justin was pining away for Sebastiane, too, and HE was such a poor actor that even the LATIN seemed stilted and halting on his tongue, and though there was a dubbing mixer credited, why would they DUB him so haltingly? The arrow-shooting scene was a triumph of careful special effects, with one spectacular shot of the bow, arrow, flight, piercing, and blood-spurting being continuous, so he must have shot into a hidden block just AS a bladder was released. What a pity that they couldn't line up the one through the next as he died, and what was the point of the final shot from HIS point of view, with the sea stretched out? It was a very sandy and rocky scene most of the time, with tumbling and chest-slitting and sweaty rubbings looking rather uncomfortable more than sexy. Fairly straight audience with a number of women, but some left early. Well, it was worth $2.50, from the poor reviews probably won't be shown again, but it's sort of a straight-circuit landmark, has made its money in England, and showed me that straight porno has MANY advantages to the tease of beautiful bodies and faces and no SEX at all.
DIARY 12828
3/29/78
"DON GIOVANNI" ON TV WITH SUTHERLAND
Done in only two acts, it's 90 and 100 minutes of constant singing, and it speaks for the goodness of the production that it didn't seem OVER-lengthy. Sutherland was charming during intermission, saying it was one of the few films in which she didn't get killed off, and John Brecknock was effective as Don Ottavio. Gabriel Bacquier was hardly a comic Leporello, his voice was deep and sturdy, and the last act trio of basses was VERY odd, with John Macurdy doing only average with the super-human requirements of the Commendatore. James Morris was fabulous as Don Giovanni, tall and slender and in great voice, seeming to enjoy his womanizing, and even in his hour of death not having the empty-headedness to show fear or repentance in the face of the impending doom, coming out almost as a hero. Huguette Tourangeau seemed strident and harsh-voiced as Zerlina, and certainly too old for the Masetto of Allan Monk. Julia Varady is certainly a find as Donna Elvira, being pretty and having a DYNAMITE voice and steely-sure pitch and reach for her penetrating soprano. The set seemed overly dark most of the time, and when they were supposed to dance, there was no chance to even see whether Zachary Solov did his usual pedestrian work. Some of the costumes were sumptuous, but mostly people have to wander around in black because they're mourning for something or other. His sexuality DID seem a bit frenetic, ALWAYS having to have whatever came his way, and glibly assuming that Leporello would want as many pieces as he could get also. The "flames engulfing the house" were only a few jets from the sides, not really very spectacular, and they said that the production was refurbished, so they probably didn't want too many lights to see what was still tattered around the edges. Richard Bonynge seemed to do a good conducting job. It's surprising how famous the OPERA is and how few PIECES of the opera are famous, since there are no memorable arias except for Leporello's "Mille tres" and his seduction of Zerlina in the duet. Also, Sutherland has NOT cleared up her pronunciation problem, as the critics said, since she still seems mealy-mouthed next to the brilliant clarity of best-find Julia Varady.
DIARY 12850
3/30/78
VON KARAJAN: "VERDI REQUIEM"
I tune in in the middle of a duet between Leontyne Price and Fiorenza Cossotto, and their voices are so PRECISELY matched, so PERFECTLY in time with each other, so TRANSPARENTLY beautiful that I'm enraptured by the technical brilliance of von Karajan and the recording crew that would have made such an extraordinary match possible. Then Nicolai Ghiaurov has a solo, and HIS voice is resonant and beautiful and in marvelous keeping with the orchestra, which is perfectly under control, and though Luciano Pavarotti has nothing that I hear, I suspect he was just as great in the piece, and the empty seats of the La Scala Opera House appear behind their orchestra and chorus. The chorus also seemed perfectly in pitch, and the camera angles from the sides, to see the whole phalanx of them, and from the front concentrating on individuals of perfect composure, it seemed like the kind of surpassing performance that one would sit through a dozen inferior versions to revel in. Then I felt a surge of thankfulness to von Karajan for risking over-exposure in his many tapings, though I would hope that such wide audiences would make MORE of a demand on his energies than less, and put MORE people into the concert halls rather than less (at this point I would go to see him, though I'm not usually turned on by orchestras, but he seems to give SUCH a range of thoughtful dynamics to the orchestra that the piece is transformed). All the triteness seemed to be gone from it, all the ends were tied up and the flow from section to section even seemed logical, not cough-filled pauses while the orchestra fiddled and the conductor mopped his brow. It would have been nice to hear it simulcast in stereo, and I suspect tapes made available of it would have the stereo possibility indefinitely, so that the quality of the sound could be preserved. Told everyone I could find about it, thinking that they would be pleased to hear it, but no one seemed interested enough, so even among my fairly sophisticated friends there aren't many who would be an audience for the piece, which gives even more credit to the people who made, distributed, and scheduled the showing of the remarkable record of a performance.
DIARY 12891
4/12/78
TV: "CAVALLERIA RUSTICANA" AND "PAGLIACCI"
Placido Domingo is praised because he sings leads in both operas, but I don't have the idea that it's more difficult than singing something like "Don Giovanni" who's on a lot through a whole opera anyway. Tatiana Troyanos has gained an enormous amount of weight, and watching her agonizing through her part leads me to TERRIBLE thoughts about how negative-energy enforcing opera is: keeping these anguishes and agonies going through generation after generation, though slightly differently from someone in dance like Martha Graham (see DIARY 12877). I get very bored with the nobility of Alfio helping the kids up on his cart, the smugness of Lola (and Isola Jones again seems to make her mark with her breasts), and the old fogy-ness of Mamma Lucia. The set is rather spectacular from the right angle, a HUGE set of 22 stairs, rough-hewn, leading up to an impressive church that sadly looks scrawny when viewed from too close in the orchestra, with lots of buildings all around. But the unrelieved ANGST of all the characters, the pleadings of family honor and personal integrity and morality are MOST disgusting. PAGLIACCI is somewhat better with the fiery Teresa Stratas as Nedda and a sort of sexy James Atherton as Beppe, but again everyone is so UGLY and possessive and animalistic and murderous that I think there must be a BETTER way of preserving operas, though I have to admit that the music in CAV is glorious with the rising chorus in the religious scenes, even though it IS one of the negative parts of the whole thing, and the positive SCREAMS of anguish in various duets, it'd be difficult to find as much to shout about (unless there was an opera about an amusement park that had everyone screaming with pleasure---"HERE WE GO DOWN THE FIRST HILL AND MY STOMACH'S FIVE YARDS BEHIND MEEEEE."). But the PERPETUATION of these evils, killings, sorrows, heartbreaks, and groans from the heart, with furrowed brow and sweating face and straining chests and lungs, just seems so AWFUL---but I guess that would apply to the swan-death in Swan Lake, to Giselle and Romeo and Juliet as well. The Pagliacci was somewhat nicely staged, too, and the Zeffirelli production seemed very NATURAL, anyway, and he seemed quite charming in his interview with the nervous-making Francis Robinson.
DIARY 12914
4/17/78
MR. UNIVERSE BODY-BUILDING CHAMPIONSHIP ON TV
ABC makes the point that it's covered this championship since 1970, but it was only a FLASH in earlier programs, but now it's from 5:50-6:40, and they show various competitions in the three weight classes, though still they only show the three finalists, with the addition of Arnold Schwarzenegger as commentator, talking about the "flush of excitement in the final pose-off when the audience gets so enthusiastic that the bodybuilders get carried away and continue posing beyond the bell, trying to get in the best last pose, BECOMING ONE WITH THE AUDIENCE WHO BECOMES ONE WITH THEM," surely a dash of pre-constructed purpleness. At least they explain that 1/3 the points are based on SIZE; 1/3 on SYMMETRY, and 1/3 on POSING skills, which gives him the opportunity to make rather personal comments on the competitors. LIGHTWEIGHT: up to 75 kg, or 165#, third was Renato Bertagna from Italy, who is the "best man in Europe" but can't hold up in the international "amateur" competition. Second is Mohammed Makkawy, who was first last year, from Egypt, huge and black, and first is Danny Padilla from the US, who was second last year (and they talk about the team standings at the START, but even with the US winning so many of THESE titles they don't TALK about the team award at the end, so I guess we mustn't have won it?), and has an enormous chest which dwarfs his legs. In the MIDDLEWEIGHT, up to 90 kg, or 198#, THIRD IS Petr Stach, Czech, who's the only non-black, and just doesn't have the BULK of the others, second is D'Arcy Beccles from Barbados, probably the same as the "A. Beccles" from Britain in my book from 1974's time; and first is Roy Callendar from Canada, a black with "wide shoulders and small waist" which is so desirable. He talks of 3 months' training, 2-4 hours/day in two two-hour sessions, to get back into maximum shape. At last HEAVYWEIGHTS above that, third is Paul Grand from England "No fire power, poor arms," and the last two are BOTH from Santa Monica, second Mike Mentzner with INCREDIBLY cut legs that Arnold assumes will win for him, and first is Kalman Szkalak, who was Mr. California, Mr. U.S.A., and Mr. America, and now Mr. Universe, undefeated anytime he enters, who's CUTE, too, and he has 21" arms, 57" chest, and 237#, and Schwarzenegger tries to PHASE him by asking abut his "poor calves," and he's shaken but REFUSES to give in, citing progress and current symmetry, and AS seems surprised, the bastard, that he won the contest.
DIARY 12958
5/1/78
STOPPARD: "PROFESSIONAL FOUL"
It starts with marvelously urbane conversation about the realms of psychology, name-dropping, philosophy, and politics on the plane, develops into a political statement when the Czech comes wanting him to take a paper out of the country for him, inspiring one of the hardest-nosed monologues in the hallway refusing to do so that I've heard in a long time, and then goes into melodrama when he's captured and his apartment is being searched by police that I HOPE Stoppard is acquainted with (since it seems he's Hungarian or something like that) and not just making up, and then a touching scene in the park where the son tells him what to do, and then he commits a "professional foul" (as he'd heard in the apartment when they put the soccer game on for him and he later heard the phrase at the hotel from various reporters) by slipping the paper into the briefcase of a colleague who seems always to be after women. But some of the papers are delicious: the translators looking at each other in a puzzled way when the English word "well" as in "eating well" obviously doesn't translate into foreign words that MEAN the same as "doing something well," or "a lot of it," which leads one to think that the problems of linguistics are purely NATIONALISTIC and not semantic at all. There are lovely exchanges, since Stoppard is obviously more interested in the words than in the people, and some of the scenes seem rather tedious and drawn-out just to make the whole thing the 90 minutes that it occupied on TV. Having won some 1977 literary prize in England, I'm rather glad they did it on TV rather than having to pay $4 or so through TDF to see it from an extreme-side seat, wasting an evening into the bargain, and then probably not liking the actors or the set-ups nearly as much as one could on TV, where some of the scenes looked very authentic (the fire alarm in the speaker's hall, when he started giving the bad-taste paper, for example), and then the false camaraderie on the plane where the close quarters don't permit anything except intimacies. The acting was good, the diction clear, and Stoppard should be congratulated on combining his three loves: soccer, words, and politics into a very literary work.
DIARY 13006
5/21/78
"ALLEGRO NON TROPPO" AND "BETTY BOOP SCANDALS"
ALLEGRO NON TROPPO is only 75 minutes, of which only 43 minutes was animated, the rest taken up with a dippy narrator, a mustached-hero drawer who at the end flies off as a transformed cleansing lady, and a fat Laurel-and-Hardy conductor of an orchestra of dozens of old ladies, and lots of OTHER slapstick.
AFTERNOON OF A FAUN goes on for 9 minutes of an aging faun chasing after various women, ending up wandering over the body of "mother earth" unknowingly.
SLAVONIC DANCE #7 by Dvorak was 3 minutes of troglodyte building hut, others following, he progresses, other follow, even to point of going crazy, but they don't follow him over a cliff, as he'd wish, only lowering their pants in a mass moon.
BOLERO is the best for 15 minutes, going through our own evolution from a Coca-Cola bottle left by a rocket ship, turning into an eye and devouring lots of thingies sprung from it, ending with vicious apes and lines of dinosaurs marching just as in "Fantasia" which they admit they take off on. Good, but then I sat through a Betty Boop "Swing You Sinners" a second time, with the surprise gone, there wasn't enough ART to sustain my interest, so I didn't particularly care to stay, though this WAS worth waiting to see a second time.
WALTZ TRISTE by Sibelius was 7 minutes of the Keene-eyed cat wandering through a bombed house, inventing people from its past in interesting laser-images, but then oddly vanishing HIMSELF at the end, as the house is tumbled down.
VIVALDI CONCERTO IN C-MINOR is a poor bee being irritated by a necking couple for 4 minutes, with a delighted audience applauding when the guy is finally strung.
FIREBIRD is 5 minutes of a rather dippy snake eating the apple himself and encountering all sorts of flying devils and genitaled Adams and Eves. Nice.
BETTY BOOP SCANDALS had the audience delightedly singing along, with great drawings-over-movies of Cab Calloway doing his noodly dance and singing of his "cokey" friends, and her sexy adventures are better than Daisy Duck, as Dennis is quick to say, and his metamorphosing barns and heads and skulls in some of the sections were among the best of "Night on Bald Mountain," and it's a pity that Disney's "increased realism" had to drive out the fantasy that the cartoons were BEST at, and it was even better, in all, than "Allegro."
DIARY 13064
6/10/78
THE TSETSE TRAP
What a difference to watch a program that deals in INFORMATION! This lovely hour said so many things: that wild cattle in Africa are immune to the trypanosomes in their blood, but they infect a "virgin" tsetse fly that bites them, and these bites are then lethal to any domestic cattle bitten. The nomads move their cattle south to more grass when the dry season hits, forcing the flies to the south, then move north. They weigh the chances and take the cattle to infested foothills, knowing that some will die but that the others will get fatter. Vaccinations don't work because "the drugs don't come" (as he says with a smile) and they don't weigh but 300 pounds when they should be 600 for slaughter. So they research flies: finding that the adults copulate once, the female saves the sperm to build 6-7 pupae, each of which weighed OVER her post-birth weight, which burrow into the ground, come out (females in 30 days, males in 31, so they wait 30½ days and harvest males that they keep COLD so they won't be born until minutes after their temperature's increased) by pushing up with a bubble of fluid and their EYES, this fluid then used to pump up their wings. They fly on proline up to 15 mph, but then "run out of fuel" in minutes and have to wait for an hour to build up more proline. Research finds trypanosomes dent red corpuscle so antibodies will attach to dents and phagocytes will digest THEIR OWN BLOOD. Trials found they like horizontal beasties, not vertical like human, don't like human smell, like cattle smell, and from their breath, which they find acetone 1/3 effective; and pump this to build trap to catch and sterilize flies so sterile males will mate (the only time, remember) and decrease population. They build corridors where they spray and kill everything, then drop corridors since they won't fly across open spaces, and protect by fences that elephants or leopards will break and reinfect. Fields there could double U.S. meat output, BUT may destroy the groundcover, OR succeed and kill off nomad tribes by fields of cattle AND kill off indigenous cattle, as they did in Rhodesia, so flies would have to leave, and they're exterminating flies from islands for tests, and in a century the tsetse fly may be extinct, but what then will happen to Africa after its "Guardian" is gone, and what will happen that NO one has thought to predict about it?
DIARY 13065
6/13/78
KURASAWA'S "DERSU UZALA"
Sorry to have missed the first couple of minutes, and am really knocked out by the glorious colors and autumn and the snows in the Sikhote Alin Mountains between Khabarovsk and Vladivostok, where the Ussuri River forms the border between Russia and China, and below, even the two share a boundary-point in common with North Korea! Interestingly, Vladivostok is almost the same latitude as Boston, so it's not THAT frigid. Dersu is rather charming, and it looks like it might be a "guru" film, but then, in a BAD bit of editing, they wander off in the DAYTIME IN FULL SUNLIGHT and lose their direction back to the camp, implying Dersu is a fool not to have seen by the sun which way they were going, and then the editing shows it VERY dark with the sun yet, through filters, quite high, and the wind blows up and they begin cutting grass furiously and he builds a hut around his surveying tripod. So he saves his life, and brings him to Khabarovsk, where "you can't sleep outside, you can't shoot a gun, and you can't cut down park trees for firewood," and it's said to be a parable about a CITY man coming to terms with the COUNTRY, being taught tracking and wisdom by nature, but the CAPTAIN (who wrote the books on which the movie was based) is ABLE to survive in the wilderness, while Dersu ISN'T able to survive in the CITY, and either takes his own life or is killed by his present-rifle in returning to the woods. There are sights along the Trans-Siberian Railroad, lovely snow scenes, an enigmatic Chinaman reliving his past after his brother stole his wife and then wandering off into the forest, but there's no real STORY, no sense of suspense, even, except for Dersu's increasing blindness, no character change and no real climax, since his death is more a puzzle than a mystery. The Russian soldiers are mostly made to look like children, there are lots of nice sunsets and forests and rivers and some tigers and bears and deer, but there's no real story, no real MOVIE, and I guess they just gave it to Kurasawa because he'd never won an Oscar and he was a mover and doer, and the co-production Russian-Japanese, with a Chinese name, seemed to mark some sort of marvelous cooperation that brought a great bit of land into movies.
DIARY 13103
6/24/78
EVENING OF TELEVISION
A WHISPER FROM SPACE tells of the serendipitous search at NYU for an energy they found at Princeton (or somewhere like that) for the heat-radiation from the big bang, and Philip Morrison is an edgy sort of commentator. Yet they still hold out hope of going back BEYOND the "big bang" in both the before and after directions, so there's still things to work out with.
THE NORMAN CONQUESTS PART II, LIVING TOGETHER is NOT what I call a disconnected play: seeing only THAT of the three, you'd feel you were missing something, and you were! But I didn't mind not seeing what was going on upstairs when Norman said on the phone "Listen to them holler" but I DID mind hearing the argument from the kitchen, that I'd seen before, and not know in THIS play what was going on in there. But the people didn't change as I'd sort of wished they would, things seemed more "linking" than explanatory, and the huge laughs didn't come as frequently as in the first, but there's no doubt but that it's a first-rate piece of play-writing and characterization.
DICK CAVETT talks to Paul Simon and older song writers, and if some little radio station plays an ASCAP song the writer gets $150! Quite a price for a little radio station to pay. Cavett stayed out of it a lot and it wasn't bad, but it wasn't as interesting as it seems that it could have been.
A WOMAN OF AFFAIRS from 1929 had a breathtakingly beautiful Douglas Fairbanks Jr as Greta Garbo's wastrel brother drinking himself to death under the loving eyes of Dr. Trevelyan (Edmond Lowe) and idolizing Johnny Mack Brown, who jumped to his death in the suspense twist (what DID he do?) of the movie: embezzled money to pay for his marriage to Greta when John Gilbert allowed his "honor and price" father (who was obviously rich, so why didn't the SON have money?) send him off to Egypt away from his one-and-only true love, Greta, who after her husband's death proceeded to have a number of photographs of herself taken with counts and princes and earls in various spas, letting the prudes make their own conclusions. But everyone seemed to LOVE to suffer, self-sacrifice, and suppress their feelings, so it was a REAL downer of a film, though she looked GREAT at times in it.
DIARY 13127
6/30/78
WE ARE: The First Off-Broadway Gay Movie
Suzanne says that the Post won't let Archer Winston review it at all, it's been written up in "Where It's At" and another gay thing, but otherwise the Voice won't answer their phone and Soho is supposed to come tonight and probably won't, and the 7 pm show usually has about 5-6 people while the 9:30 sometimes gets about 20, where there are more laughs. I don't see that it's a comedy at all, though Suzanne has the best line "Have some tea; it may be a little tart, but then so am I," and her naturalness and her powers to LISTEN to the other person and NOT seem to be aware of the camera are not shared by too many others in the film. It takes a long time to get started "Hey, let's make a MOVIE" and the final frame of the two "producers" (none of the makers are in the cast, she said) toasting the audience with champagne doesn't add anything to it. The guy who plays Vic, probably Percyz, who's first on the credits, has a marvelous body that he shows off topless most of the time, even to the extent of doing handstand pushups, but there are no cocks, and Dennis's friend Harry, as the lover, is straight, which may explain why there's a less than convincing feel about the gay scenes. The only couple that seems to have it good is the exercising blond-and-black who sew sequined pants for Bloomingdales, and how's THAT for a non-stereotyped gay relationship? They have free disco at each other's houses where they snort cocaine and smoke grass and don't have any sex-play, they have Friday nights off and for the rest they're faithful, and some awful fellow insists on lots of footage to camp it up like a Jewish movie producer with wings, balding, and bitchy enough to turn everyone's stomach. Another old loser is related to Luiz, who satisfies the PR crowd by saying he's not wanting to work for a living and "borrows" for his apartment rent, a pock-marked narrator who worries about being too old for his new young lover, but at least there are no transvestites. The sound is amateurish, going off for bits, the "soulful" scenes empty, the fast scenes lots of fury but no thunder, and the 8 mm print is about the best thing about it, and the audience of 8 didn't seem to rave about it either. But Suzanne was the best thing, and Someone Mintoh as Barry, the newcomer, was cute, too.
DIARY 13243
8/1/78
ZAIRE'S MBUTI PYGMIES OF ITURI FOREST
Nova's "Bamiki Bandula: Children of the Forest" is a marvel of positive propaganda: "Though each man kills an elephant during his lifetime, this is a marvelous ecological service since it gives more room to his roaming," and the exact same film could have been shown to demonstrate how awful their life was and how AGAINST nature they were: chopping down leaves for mats, moving every month to build new houses in 2 hours, drinking from streams that only they know, meeting civilization only to get smallpox marks on their vaccinated arms and trade herbs with the villagers in return for spear points, which they poison to kill monkeys, net-trapped gazelles, and elephants with one blow. It was a relief to see people who don't seem to believe in misery: they don't go to war, cooperate in hunts and eating, paint their bodies rather than cicatrize them with scars, and love to play with their children, even to pelvic thrusts to teach the women how to be wives in girls' hoop-games, so none of the babies were ever seen crying, only happily sucking as the dugs get lower and lower on the women, pointed like beasts'. Only because the villagers insist do they circumcise their children, and they DON'T say that the forest is infested with missionaries, which is the only thing the African books say about the Ituri forest, other than it contains pygmies, so it's the CHRISTIANS who want that piece of flesh, though the village chief might get a kick out of "inspecting" the results of the penile butchery. They look peaceful, no one says anything about their diseases or parasites, they seem cool in their constant 100% humidity, when it's mentioned they die of heatstroke when they're moved to permanent settlements along roads, and they've already lost their native tongue, speaking a variant of Swahili or village language with only an intonation left from their original tongue. Women smoke marijuana pipes to relax, men drink a coca-bean brew that's said to affect them like "strong coffee," though it might be much more hallucinogenic than that, and they talk of monogamy with such satisfaction that it might have been forced on them, and they speak with sadness about moving out the pygmies and leaving the forest "quiet from song and dance" for the first time in thousands of years.
DIARY 13264
8/8/78
BRITTEN: "ALBERT HERRING" ON TV
Lovely guys together in the St. Louis audience, and as with Goodwin Sammel and T.S. Eliot, St. Louis cast seems more British than the British could be, and the characterizations of the people are totally perfect, but the style of singing is modernistic without any real MELODIES, just declamatory lines and some very lush group singing, and some stellar work for the Lady, though she doesn't seem quite up to some of it. Herring is a perfect dunce, not even looking physically anything above an IQ of 80, and he sings pretty well. Even the PLOT isn't bad: choosing a May King because there are no young female virgins, enemy feeding him liquor to make a fool of him because he senses the threat to his girl, and in the end they fight over her, with the idea that she seems to be going more toward Albert. Marvelous lines for the mother and the rebellious son, funny "festival" antics and group singing, great quartet of May Queen nominees and octet of mourners before he returns from his "seeing what sin was like" though it's a bit simplistic to have him return to his shop more or less like he did BEFORE he was wisened up to the ways of the world. Lavish harp plunks for the presentation of the award, singing violins and brass for the ensembles of glory for the king, great bass part for David Ward, who I think comes from City Center, and beautiful effect of silhouettes for cyclist kissing girl, Lady parading her retinue through the streets, and villagers in England in 1900 making busy. The set was marvelous too, lots of produce in the shop, though the "villain" didn't really get into it enough to pose a problem, but the lady's secretary was marvelous with her glasses hanging off the tip of her nose, and all the costumes looked very much in character, including the mother's overall dowdiness and wet apron. But nothing at all memorable (or excerptable, which might be the same thing) about the music or the singing, nothing to point to and say THAT'S nice, which is a WAY of saying it's seamless and unified, but if the unity is one of nonmemorableness, far better would it be for part of it to be UNunified and stand out for its individual beauty: solos in "Hoffman" are even MORE beautiful because the whole PIECE is beautiful. But it's the best of the current, though I begin now to question the validity of opera: if they couldn't get a good audience even with their ADVERTISING, people really DON'T like opera.
DIARY 13326
8/21/78
INFORMATION INPUT FROM TELEVISION
JOURNEY TO ADVENTURE (1-1:30) shows National Science Foundation and U.S. Navy films on Antarctica, with NO brochures being offered, and there's a geodesic dome right AT the south pole, with a US flag flying over it! The program has been on for 24 years and gets to each part of the globe every 2 years. Earlier I'd copied down some quotes from an "impressionistic drama" on BEHOLD WONDROUS THINGS, taking "Not believing is too much like not EXISTING" from Bonhoffer, "We shall never put enough hope in the growing unity of mankind" from Teilhard de Chardin, and "To long for the transcendence in your wife's arms is, to put it mildly, poor taste" from Buber, from 10-10:30.
FIRING LINE shows the constipated Buckley NOT understanding Im Vin's view that he would NOT depose the dictators in Cambodia by Vietnamese or Thai forces, though he would value a liberating army that would give the country back. Some almost-nameless talker blathered on about the differences between east and west.
GUALE, about the islands off the coast of Georgia, talked about the destruction of the Guale people, the Yackataw Indians, the roads of Oglethorpe, the succession of exploitation by silk, slavery, fishing, and cotton, the disgust of the states with the taxless-federal reserve lands that the STATE has done nothing to develop, not even build a bridge across to, and other atrocities.
SPORTSWORLD from 3-4 shows the beauty and tanned bodies of divers and swimmers, one even hitting the board, the only time I'd seen one like that on TV, and then the swim of Diana Nyad (how apropos) from Cuba to somewhere in the middle of the Gulf Stream, then having to turn around and swim back, swimming 80 miles nautically or 99.7 miles taking into account how much she was buffeted by the waves, and there was a marvelous shot of her vomit when she got seasick 4 hours out in the 6-foot waves, her moaning about how fast and far she could swim, and her resolution, it seems, to put on a good show for the TV cameras. But there must be more INTERESTING feats: swimming in a shark cage, following a white line on the bottom, listening to music on a headphone bathing cap, shivering in 81° water, getting swollen lips from eternal saltiness and stung by jellyfish (which wasn't mentioned on the program), there must be nice endurance walks on the Appalachian Trail, for example? Which would be a LOT more fun?
DIARY 13406
9/18/78
TV FRENZY OF CHANNEL-TURNING FROM 7-1 AM
The "Footsteps of Faith" seemed terribly talky and boring compared with the almost commercial-less Disney clippings (except for the bland-faced introducers who took lots of time to get it started), but at 8 the turning became more frantic: "Starship Galactica" started with great effects and 99% of the human race killed, but it started going downhill afterward, especially since you really didn't CARE who was who character-wise, and then the disco seemed to say that TODAY'S music was the farthest we'd ever to, so I took the chance to turn back to "King Kong," to find them digging the trench and overturning the chloroform to drug him, and saw him crash in, which made Rolf and Dennis ejaculate, so they liked it, and then back to some of the red herrings on the "pleasure planet" where the Ovions were obviously patsies for the Cylons, and we even got to HEAR the plot that the Cylons were invented by a race which was now extinct, and we turned back for "Pink Elephants" from "Dumbo," the best, and flicks back showed only nonsense, so it was OK. Then we got to see the scene on the ship when Kong almost destroyed everything until Lange crawled down to cater to his looks, and how he swam the river rather than crossing the bridge, what he did to the subway car, throwing away a body he thought was the one he wanted, and his rather boring climb up the World Trade Center, and he didn't STRADDLE it, he only leaped over from one to the other, and it didn't take place during the DAY, so there were no good shots of Manhattan, and the crowds at the end merely milled about, and the helicopter didn't even HIT the crowd, and you only HEARD his body hit, and he didn't even die then, only a heartbeat stopping later. "Galactica" showed the destruction of the planet, and then back to the end of "Kong" and then to "Son of Kong" unobstructed, and for many of the commercials BOTH stations were on break, so that gave me a chance to get out the plates and wine for the pizza, clear things up after and wash my face and hands from the messes. Wished I had videotape at this point, and think that all these "good" movies are ALREADY going by that I could be recording, and maybe I'll get one for myself for a Christmas present!
DIARY 13408
9/19/78
CHAPLIN: "WOMAN OF PARIS"
Though the print was brightly, silvery clear, and Adolphe Menjou played a great part: not caring what OTHER people's problems were, just looking out for himself, and the end was so SILLY: "Mother, here comes Father," and it turns out that she's operating an orphanage and there's no answer to his "And when are you going to have children of your own?" and the landau with Menjou sweeps past her and her kids on the farmer's cart with irony. The snakiness of the gigolo with "the richest old maid in Paris" was marvelous, as was the puzzled darkness of the painter's mother who almost shot Edna Purveiance until she saw her weeping over her suicided son's body, but the fact that BOTH fathers seemed opposed to the marriage for NO STATED reason, and both mothers seemed helpless, seemed more a gimmick than reasonable. (And the double feature was marvelous: both took place in amoral Paris, both featured a woman with two men: one evil (though the pimp and Menjou rather had it made: they could do WHATEVER they wanted and still have their woman), one good (though both were painters, one killed himself, one killed the woman he loved who wouldn't love him back), both were "women's" movies in that the women were the center of attention. But in the 47 years of evaluation of morals, what was shatteringly important then seems to have become trivial now, so that it's just not possible to get interested in the characters themselves. Chaplin had some nice touches (and NOT the slide at the start which said that he's not in it), but the music seemed terribly repetitive and sing-songy, just clipping along gaily with the good parts and getting morbid and chordy during the sobby sections. The women friends were fun, the reactions on the face of the masseuse as the girlfriend tattled on Menjou were fun, as were the eely gigolo's envy of the other couple. His "elegant" dance sequences had the same freneticness of his comedies, in which it's impossible to think that PEOPLE in that situation would really be having fun, but the editing seemed transparent and the acting, for the most part, was NOT dated, which I suppose is one of the trademarks of a classic. But I can see why it's a MINOR classic in the Chaplin oeuvre.
DIARY 13423
9/24/78
"WARLORDS OF ATLANTIS" AND "SINBAD" AT LOEW'S METROPOLITAN
"WARLORDS OF ATLANTIS" got its name because the Mars-sprung meteor that carried them here and buried them underwater produced people in 1898 who "predicted" that they would come to the surface and produce the Hitlerian era, and I was amused to hear that some of the monster's roars were OBVIOUSLY automotive growls and ripping roars from some sort of road race. The leaping biting fish were fun, particularly when someone protested "they're supposed to be extinct." They got their powers from a crystal helmet that told them the future, came from Mars, and had light-powers of levitation and fortune-telling, but since they were more POWERFUL people they demanded MORE POWERFUL evils to combat, which brought me to the conclusion that as man became OMEGA MAN it would probably (to keep the game fun and not boring) have to PRODUCE the DEVIL as a PERSONAL ENEMY just to keep the end of the game in doubt!! But the MOVIE was awful: sunlight and rainbows in falls without even bothering to SAY what these undersea dwellers did for a sun, and it was depressing to see that all predictions of "future advances" were in terms of MILITARY power!
"SINBAD AND THE EYE OF THE TIGER" put Margaret Whiting as Zenobia, witch in black, against the Cyd Charysse figure in WOA, so aging actresses have little to worry about. It was filmed in the Jordan, Spain, and MALTA, which I'd just been reading about, and the scenes in Petra were properly impressive. Patrick Wayne with his blue eyes and smooth chest is many steps above Doug McClure (and the producer-director must be his LOVER, otherwise NO ONE as awful acting and looking as he would get jobs so regularly) with his craggy gruffness and his flabby body. This is filmed in Malta-GOZO, which is one of the places from the Reader's Digest book I've just been reading. Then the LOEW'S METROPOLITAN is huge and wide-aisled, but the PEOPLE are again a circus: pot-smoking blacks alongside me talk conversationally throughout, commenting about EVERY female figure, while a stoned black in the third row keeps shouting back for them to shut up alternating with "all RIGHT!" when they say something that tickles him, but I can't see how ANYONE of quality would bear to go back a second time, and it's a pity such a lavish theater is so ill-used, but I'm sure they wouldn't be interested in hearing from me about improving it so that I'd return again in 5 years---they can keep their trash.
DIARY 13442
9/26/78
VERDI: "OTHELLO" ON TV
Francis Robinson makes a very good commentator and interviewer, talking during intermission to just everyone: conductor Levine, Othello Vickers, Iago MacNeil, and Desdemona Scotto, making the long intermissions seem short, and the timing was just as picture-perfect, coming just a bit faster than listed in the Opera News. Vickers was powerful and restrained in his acting, Scotto looked a bit old and some of the sounds weren't the most perfect, but MacNeil was marvelous malevolent, and the subtitles gave me a chance to appreciate the goodness of Boito's book and the appropriateness of the acting at each moment. It seems that almost none of Shakespeare's drama seemed to be missing, and Olivier seemed much too ranting compared with Vicker's controlled tension. Much of the staging was pleasant: the distance separating the two when the crowd left at the end of Act I, and their impassioned coming together concluding with his wish for a kiss; her head-over-bedside final singing mirrored by his empty-air embrace as he dirked himself; and I was not only again pleased by the Brindisi in the first act, but the Vengeance Duet between Iago and Othello at the end of the second act, "Si, pel ciel," was rousing, as was the chorus toward the end of Act III. Raymond Gibbs was appealing as Cassio, and James Morris was imposing as he deflected Othello's sword sweep with a raised eyebrow as Lodovico, not recognized until the credits as the Don Juan of last year. Jean Kraft was ugly and efficient as Emilia, but Scotto seemed so old of hand, mannered of face, and studied in posture that she didn't give the impression of anyone under 50, despite the fact that she just lost 40 pounds since her ponderous TV debut as Mimi in "Boheme." I missed the Titian-hued stage-pictures of the Salerno Opera in the Champs-Elysee Theater in Paris, but the staging looked competent, the dancer in the first scene was pretty, and the stereocast was effective soundwise, but the stage seemed much too dark most of the time to get a good look at what was going on, though the garden in the third act seemed to have pretty walls and a realistic sky, though the armor room got applause when the curtain went up with the camera stuck on Levine. Good production, and I might even want to see it AGAIN in real-life sometime.
DIARY 13496
10/9/78
ROSSINI: "A TURK IN ITALY"
I thought they changed the names from "An Italian in Algiers," but it turns out to be two different things, so I never saw this opera before! Not that I've been missing much. Though he uses lots of his "grand crescendos," they really don't GO anywhere, and even his best solos sound like any of the songs from any number of his operas. Beverly Sills as Fiorilla has a cold and her face is dark-lined and puffy, and her voice certainly DOES wobble around a lot at the top notes, though her humor and the English lines by Andrew Porter are really quite the hit of the show, though the humor-king is James Billings as Don Geronio, the same short bald fellow who made the old Greek fart in WHATEVER the opera was at the City Center so funny. Donald Gramm is pompous as Selim, highly made-up and dressed; and Henry Price is handsome as Don Marciso, who really doesn't have anything to DO but deliver a few arias. Alan Titus as the poet looks a LOT like a sly Jeff Lampl in his wide-mouthed humorousness, but he seems to be getting fat. The intermission interviews with Hal Prince mention Julius's leadership of the Buffalo Symphony (which HARDLY sounds like a step UP), and Beverly's "co-directorship" starting in 1980, but NOT while BOTH of them are on-screen. Susanne Marsee I'd almost forgotten as Zaida, but she's not on very much and her tiny upper lip make her look piqued throughout. Some of the updating of the jokes are good, Beverly's raised eyebrows when Selim's hand comes onto her breast are funny, James Billings does the classic rubber-cheeked fluster when he gets enraged, and there's a masked ball with two sets of Selims and Fiorillas, and Geronio is so addled he can't even tell the mezzo of Zaida from the soprano of his wife, the tenor of his wife's lover from the baritone of his wife's want-to-be-lover. That IS stupid! It's best in two acts, though the 1.5 hour first act might get rather tiring, but at least it doesn't let the action sink: the harlequins, the masks, the gypsies, the "ship" being pulled on accompanied by strolling men alongside, the multi-sugared coffee topped by "7 lumps or 8?" and everyone's staring at Sills's breasts and saying they liked the mountains. Even the TV Guide Close-up says "the arias aren't very memorable" but it's a kick to see a NEW opera for the FIRST time on TV.
DIARY 13526
10/15/78
"THE WORD IS OUT"
PART I the Early Years showed pictures from their youth; few pretty ones: 77-year-old female who felt best friends with Nature, few sex-partners, it seemed. Tooth-out, asylum to 18, chopping down tree, fairly mumbly, not winsome at ALL.
WAC with dishonorable discharge, dyke, waiting for new McCarthy, not mannish with FIGURE.
Teacher, intelligent, judged Miss Texas, dressed in jeans, talked at gay rallies.
Black Married, didn't want to be only female black, didn't say much interesting.
2-kid blond showgirl, astoundingly turned out to be partner of the extraordinarily mannish 4-kid woman who held dykes as role models and ended up with a crewcut.
Farm-boy Rick who may be Dick Stokes, married, shock-treated, lover David.
Fatty cried about "God Save Us Nelly Queens" and said he didn't NEED to love anyone.
Harry, an old balding 50, took up in later years with a formerly-married partner, fag.
Businessman was attractive and mustached and shown with lover on deck at Fire Island.
35-year-old fag in mirror, looked like Christ, didn't appear to be too happy, flagrant.
Black, had been married, seemed very quiet, completed the 13 introduced in first part.
PART II was Growing Up, and introduced the other half, so it's 14 men and 12 women. Wiry runner, whom it was NOT made clear, but she might have been teacher's lover?
Pretty 26-year-old honor-student, unhappy, on swing, formerly married, neatest of lot.
Indian hair with a horse in back, veterinarian with purring cat and snuffling dog.
Simpleton on bed, maybe PR, maybe Mexican, but sort of shy and charming with her lover, Rosa, sweet and open, later holding hands with the Simpleton, Nadine, cute.
Long-haired nose-ringed queen in drag, saying "we're born nude, so ALL clothes are drag!"
Bearded braced fellow was cutest of all, going with guy without sex, could be turn-on.
Young black athlete Michael shown later tussling with black lover, Earl, sexy.
Chinaman sort of really wanted sympathy, seemed a bit too self-deprecating for words.
Strawy-haired guy seemed to have ENORMOUS hands and "found who I wanted in myself." Hm.
Glasses, 7 years married with a kid who liked to play with his black lover, Andrew (Fred).
Harry came up with a great quote: to a doctor we're sick (so contagious); to a lawyer we're criminal (so voluntary); to a minister we're evil.
Teacher observed that by falling quickly into role models, we immediately try to make babies into HALF-PEOPLE.
GREAT men's group sang in a fun-looking club, sexy trio called Buena Vista, and it WAS.
Though it's a marvelous step in the right direction, it seemed a bit SELF-PITYING for me, and it'd be nice to see what SECOND movie this group could come up with for more money!
DIARY 13595
11/5/78
"MACBETH" ON TV
Norman Bailey must be one of the most non-charismatic singers ever to appear in a major TV production of this 1977 British production's title role. And Patricia Johnson has just the plain face and simplemindedness to have fit in as the actual Lady Macbeth, but Verdi had to cut the thing down to such a short 150 minutes that it became shallow and blood-directed. The black and silver costumes looked halfway between the old "Wizard of Oz" costumes for the monkeys and a modernistic production of "Boris Godunov." Nicolai Ghiaurov looked and sang about the best as Banquo, Neil Shicoff was bright-eyed and handsome as Macduff, and I guess it was Robin Leggate as Malcolm who also appeared blond and fearful for his life. The chorus of witches looked pretty awful in their scrawny limbs and tattered costumes, flinging around shrunken heads and skulls, obviously not doing the singing, and the three "fairies" that entertained were so ghastly in their skinniness that it was hard to believe they were doing their own DANCING. I tuned out most of the middle, but then at the end there was a marvelous sequence as Macbeth was rushed onto a pyramid of upward-pointing spears, then his head was cut off just below camera-range and then hoisted into view and played around with until the final curtain. None of the arias was memorable, most of the choral work seemed mainly to consist of crooning or screaming, and some of the histrionics of Patricia Johnson looked so hollow on close-ups that I just wished for the camera to turn away quickly. It needed, of course, someone with the intensity of a Judith Anderson to make it come alive, but we just got an ugly Mary Tyler Moore. Not many English subtitles throughout the singing, but it was enough to follow the PLOT, if not exactly the characters. The costumes for the coronation were marvelously mannered, but it seemed to have nothing to do with turn-of-the-millennium Scotland, but more like Busby Berkeley Hollywood. But if it had been more tame, there wouldn't have been anything to show. Hillocks of skulls, forests of spears, moving forests, topless fairies (male)---these just weren't enough to entrance me to the mediocre opera in an obviously STAGY performance by BRITISH stodges.
DIARY 13662
11/26/78
SMETANA: "BARTERED BRIDE" ON TV
Teresa Stratas is the best part of it: acting, singing, and even acrobatizing as she's being pulled around the stage. Nicolai Gedda SOUNDED like he was singing in a foreign language, and his acting was so stiff that there was no conviction of his part, so the dynamite duets I remember from "Eugene Onegin" didn't come across this time. Jon Vickers was interestingly cast as a stuttering fop, but didn't have much to do, and the rest was botched by Martti Talvela who didn't enunciate well enough in ANY language to be understood at all. Lots of interesting intermission stuff on poor Bedrich Smetana, who went deaf BEFORE he wrote "Ma Vlast" and never heard his grandchildren and went mad before he died. And awful stuff about taking opera ("it's boring") to 11-year-olds in schools. Pavel Smok did some nice choreography in some of the sections, but I guess the bright starched costumes were among the best of it, since the slit-from-bottom movie screen as constant backdrop didn't allow of much lavishness in staging. Some of the male dancers with their biceps were pretty to look at in the circus in the third act, though it was rather uncomfortable to watch the men inside the carousel laboriously pushing it around. The chorus seemed well-trained: it acted like a group of PEOPLE rather than a herd of sheep, but sometimes the cameras dwelled so much on a close-up reaction that it was impossible to get an idea of what was going on over the entire stage. This was particularly true in some of the dance sequences, which were almost wrecked by bad camerawork, and I couldn't quite be sure, but it looked like a 50ish Ivan Allen as one of the leading peasants. The plot was nice enough, about "must be wed to the son of Pavel Kucel," or whoever, and of course it was HIM, but there was still a lot of "don't tell me about it" which would have made the whole thing SIMPLER if it hadn't been said. Levine talked on and on, the translator seemed quite gay, but did a good job not KNOWING that a note or any stress in the music COULD be changed, but all that was needed was a cast that could SING it and be understood, although the BEST solution might be to retain subtitles even for the ENGLISH operas, so the SOUND rather than the WORDS could be concentrated on for a new opera heard for the first time.
DIARY 13768
12/30/78
"BERNSTEIN AT 60" ON TV
William Schuman introduces, Joel Gray moderates the first third, from 9-9:55, with Mstislav Rostropovich conducting "On the Waterfront" (which doesn't hold up as a piece, I keep wondering what was going on THEN), then Copland conducts Crista Ludwig in 3rd movement of Jeremiah Symphony, and THAT won't last, and then Foss conducts "Age of Anxiety" from Symphony 2 that Robbins choreographed (which isn't around anymore), and Christian Badea is so beautiful as the conductor for "Songfest" (from 1976) that I wonder if he's not Bernstein's lover. Then Lauren Bacall hosts the theater third from 9:58-10:53, with pretty John Molcherry conducting "On the Town," Danny Fortas from my partnership at EST (!) and Lee Roy Reams, and Treat Williams (and ONE of these two is JUST BEAUTIFUL) sing songs from "Wonderful Town," they play "Ballet at the Vortex" and INCREDIBLY BEAUTIFUL Stephen Bogardus sings songs from "West Side Story" which will surely be his biggest contribution to the American Musical history; David Morgan, a bland blond, does a piece from "Mass" and then Gianna Rolandi absolutely brings down the house with "Glitter and Be Gay" from "Candide," which might COME to be his best-loved play. The third third has an ill Lillian Hellman talking about Lillianne's death in rather surprising terms "The ugliness of the last months" for Bernstein conducting Beethoven's Triple Concerto for Violin (Yehudi Menuhin), Cello (Rostropovich), and Piano (Andre Previn) from 11:01-11:17 and then it goes on to end about 11:21, and the credits show special materials by Rick Winter, and with John Reardon singing in Songfest, I would have been to bed with TWO of the principals, though I would have certainly preferred Stephen Bogardus to either John or Rick. Yet I don't think that Bernstein is THAT great at ALL: Though he's touted as conductor, teacher, composer, writer, author, and man-of-all-seasons, I think "West Side Story" and some of his shows on "Omnibus" would live longer than he would, though Lillian Hellman kept insisting that he should now CONTINUE to produce (rather than lay around with that other guy, is she saying?), but he's lost his brashness and doesn't seem to have much left: AWFULLY old-looking at the start, but toward the end he settled down into "his" face that "I would recognize," and it's like I grew UP with him and his iconoclastic career!
DIARY 13906
1/7/79
MOVIE OF "LORD OF THE RINGS"
Though there were a few interesting moments: the "Close Encounters" type lights circling around during the encounter between Aragorn and Saruman and the fight between Aragorn and the Balrog (even though the Balrog looked like a gorilla with butterfly wings), and ONE moment when Gollum said something sarcastically which made the audience laugh, it was a humorless, spectacle-less, imagination-less waste of time and money. The "new type of cartooning" which permitted the real actors under the swatches of paint to appear were more enticing (how relieving to see REAL crotches and REAL faces instead of these vapid, pallid simulacrums---and how opposite it would have been to see a real face emerging behind the Wicked Queen in Snow White, for instance, or the face in the mirror in that movie) than the stereotypes of drawing, and the MAIN characters seemed to be mostly covered, so I never DID get the impression I wanted MORE of the ballet dancer's body under Legolas, even though some of his female counterparts in the city were just SIMPS in facial expression and carriage. And never did the "enlarged feet on the dwarfs" emerge for the main characters. The orcs certainly DID look like the barbarians from "Alexander Nevsky"; painted-over horses aren't nearly as beautiful (unless exaggerated, as in Beethoven's 6th) as real horses: they have thick, unappealing legs; there was too much reliance on REAL dust and clouds and hillsides, so where was the magic of FAIRY dust and clouds and hillsides? The most splendid scene was the REAL moon rising from behind trees. Sadly, I don't even WANT to see the next section, though I probably will---the women looked BIZARRE and not beautiful, the heroes weren't sexy at all, the heroes were just kids; and the evil wasn't even believable: sometimes it had TREMENDOUS powers and sometimes it could be vanquished so easily it didn't look like an EFFORT. A few of the red-painted eyes were impressive, but after a while they were boring: the Nazgul, for a moment, was frightening, but the two spears waving in a stable mass looked more like something out of "Monty Python" than a serious movie. Seriously disappointing, and WHERE is the imagination of "Fritz" and "Heavy Traffic" from brilliant Bakshi? Even "Wizards" had more magic than this! Quite a letdown, but then "Superman" and "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" has to be an UP from it.
DIARY 13996
1/22/79
"LUISA MILLER" LIVE FROM THE MET
Renata Scotto hardly looks like a naïve kid, though she's touchingly deranged in the last scene, but I hear so MANY "I'd rather die unless..." throughout the opera (though the translator of "Don Carlo" and writer for Opera News who sat next to me said it was a LOUSY translation) that I was quickly turned off to the PLOT: for BOTH fathers (gloriously sung, however, by a striking Sherrill Milnes and a properly shitty-looking Bonaldo Giaotto) willing to give their lives for the happiness of their children, and then to constantly accuse them of being ungrateful (as Dennis would say, you don't often hear PARENTS accused of being ungrateful, though that's the way MUCH of it would seem to go, since all the parents at least SAY that they're living for their children alone, though they certainly don't ACT that way) for not obeying their word, which they keep shouting is LAW. Though there aren't what would be called "memorable arias" from the opera (despite the ridiculous commentator pointing up one or the other as being "the best" of the scene or opera), the FLOOD of sound throughout most of it WAS glorious to heard, and I'm rather surprised that I remembered so LITTLE of the April 9, 1968, performance I saw at the Met with Caballe, John Alexander, Sherrill Milnes as Miller again, and Jerome Hines as the evil Count Walter, and whoever-she-is that people were talking about that night, Louise Pearl as Federica, who didn't have much to sing anyway. Tony camped a bit during the performances, and most everyone was smoking, so that atmosphere wasn't totally opera-loving anyway, and the PLACE was so gay that the atmosphere seemed permeated with it even WITH the women. When EVERYONE except the two fathers die at the end, I couldn't help wondering if Verdi wasn't making some sort of COMMENT: the entrenched establishment killing off all the new blood, or something. But Milnes was in spectacular voice, hogging the close-ups and stretching notes gloriously and highly, and Scotto didn't seem strident, she just never made me shiver the way some of the male duets did, and Domingo looked so odd in his blond hair that I couldn't get beyond that to his singing, which seemed more loud than pleasant, but again that may have been a liability of people with stereo who liked it LOUD.
DIARY 14012
1/28/79
MOVIES AT MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY
Arnie is surprised to hear that "EXPEDITIONS, FILMS FROM THE ARCHIVES" is $2 for nonmembers, but Alan Ternes, editor of Natural History Magazine is a rather charming commentator, and the film quality was the best available.
1) Simba, the King of Beasts, is cut to 25 minutes here from the original of 2 hours, and he talks about how Osa Johnson used to carry her makeup kit into the jungles and would come to the showings here dressed fit to kill, saying that SHE was one of the first women interested in complete liberation. Martin Johnson and Carl Akeley took these films in the early 20s, before 1924, and there were pleasant scenes of bouncing over dirt roads and through streams, encounters with elephants and lions, and a lion hunt that raked the arm of one of their bearers and killed two lions, snarling, with many spears.
2) Plains Indians: Indian Communication: Sign Language of the North American Indians, from 1904, has Sioux-Blackfoot communications with arms, then has Buffalo Bill on a horse communicating with an Indian Chief, and then Sioux Chief Iron Tail; and then Chief Two Moons from the Cheyenne, who was Custer's killer, tells the story of Custer's Last Stand in SIGN LANGUAGE, by the guy who DID it, and I remember something from Smithsonian or Natural History or Art News saying there were so many REPRESENTATIONS but no one knew for SURE and here's someone who DID it TELLING the story! Also had sequences in smoke signals, old hat, and BLANKET signals, which was NEW!
3) Roy Chapman Andrews starts as a janitor and ends up leading the 1922-30 expeditions to the Gobi Desert ("redundant, since Gobi MEANS desert?), spending $1 million in Central Asia to find the first dinosaur eggs, determining that they DID lay eggs for the first time, and finding the largest land mammal, the Baluchatherm, a leg-bone of which takes 5 men to carry, and they sew a spare-tire patch onto a wounded camel's pad and use their molting pelt to store the bones they found for safe-keeping against the rocky roads that jounce their cars about! Great sequences of 150-camel lines into the dunes at sunrise or sunset, and films in a windstorm and sandstorm that tore blankets for the cars from their hands, and that was from 8:20-8:50, Indians only 10 minutes.
DIARY 14022
Also 1/28/79
SUTHERLAND-PAVAROTTI RECITAL
They're quite good: he's floating off high notes and standing in orgasm-ecstasy after each number to soak in the applause, she looks more harridan than seductress, rather edgy on the highest notes, but with a good trill at last. Their program is overwhelmingly Verdi, and AGAIN I question the whole idea of opera: people singing in languages we don't understand, pushing their voices to unruly heights and depths, physically not terribly appealing, and yet the commentator can speak truthfully about the "waves of love from the auditorium to the stage" and the "electricity in the air Live from Lincoln Center" and know that it's just not selling tickets or television concepts. But everything THEN was adopted from a book, so where's OUR operas on "Catch-22" or "Gravity's Rainbow" or "Passages" or "Red Ryder"? And the only thing SHE could find to sing in her native tongue was "I Dreamed I Dwelt in Marble Halls" by Balfe from "The Bohemian Girl" from 1849! But the people screamed and threw flowers while I turned over and watched the beefcake-guzzlers applauding the weightlifting championships while listening to the soundtrack to be sure I didn't miss anything. They couldn't appear together because the stage wouldn't hold their combined weights, they look like they'd make ludicrous lovers (and some glassed ditz sat next to Joan in the audience as Richard conducted Luciano in a rehearsal and I wondered if that wasn't Bonynge's secretary-lover?), and she sounds like she can't pronounce Italian worth a mouthful of shit. He's open and sounding like Edgardo with his Italian "Is-a" and saying that he's delighted people like to listen to him, and THAT'S the new thing: LIKING something so much that you're delighted that others are glad to pay money to attend your doing it! And the world IS progressing, we ARE creating the voices that are singing, as much out of our fantasies of what a great voice should sound like (now if we could only couple them with a fabulous face and body, like Sherrill Milnes!), like the skating thought before, but I think of the operas I've seen from their selection (Traviata/ Ernani/ Turandot/ Otello/ Macbeth/ Hamlet) and how LITTLE I remember them, I guess I can say that, except for "Mefistofele" and TV productions, I can really admit I don't LIKE opera all that much!
DIARY 14043
2/5/79
"THE LAST WAVE"
Australia is such an unknown country that it's a perfect setting for the unknown: just the strangeness of the outback, the English kids playing as if they were victims of the Depression dustbowl, the brooding prehistoric skulls of the aborigines, the strange vehicles on the roads, and the great sound effects of a rainstorm from a clear sky are brilliant, though here, as in the black rain, it's not very well done when you look into a DISTANCE and see that the special-effects cost didn't cover a LARGE area, and you can quite clearly see beyond the hailfall and the rainfall. Then the creepy death with water in the lungs (and was HE a victim of "The Last Wave," TOO?) covered by the too-beautiful Richard Chamberlain, the perfect foil in lightness and clear-eyedness and Englishness to the blackness and bloody-eyed primitives of the tribe. The father adds a note of stability, as do the wife and kids, and the SENSUOUSNESS begins to increase as he plays with the water and toys around the stopped-up bathtub, someone else runs water, there's the FEEL of the hurt and the blood from the glass and hailstones, a VERY sensuous film, heightened by the chills that ran when the house seemed invaded by the outside: trees, water, owls, branches running up and down stairs. His "Leave the city" sounded Sodom-like in solemnity, but I think mislead critics into thinking that the CITY was doomed, but maybe he said the words as Christ talked about "the temple" of his body, so Chamberlain knew that HE, HIS city, was doomed for "knowing," but even DENNIS said that it was an adventure of the positive sort when he even accepted DEATH as the consequence of knowing that he so much wanted to know. The Incaness of the archway and the Mexicanness of the mask echoed his "being from the sunrise, from South America," though the cave paintings were rather awkwardly Art Deco and much too fresh for believability, and I still don't quite know what to think of the MODERNNESS and SLEEKNESS of Gupilil's naked back: to reinforce the primitive feeling (though this might be the transfigured native, transformed by his knowledge, even SUPERIOR to ours at this point) it might have been hunched and hairy, and the beach scene showed him acting at his top, so I don't know where the critics got the idea he was "told to act as little as possible." A great film for those who have some basis on which to believe its thesis.
DIARY 14082
2/18/79
SHAKESPEARE-BBC: "JULIUS CAESAR"
The cast of 41 is mostly quite uninteresting, except for a cute Garrick Hagon as Octavius and someone Thorogood as Strato. The Brutus of Richard Pasco is almost witheringly homely, making the screen totally uninteresting to watch during his long monologues, nicely (with TV) delivered internally. David Collings is good, weasly, and changeful as Cassius, but Keith Mitchell is JUST too old to play an interesting Antony, though his toga is fetchingly lowered around his groin when he's entered in the race at the start. Virginia McKenna and Elizabeth Spriggs are both quite old as the wives, though the former comes across a bit better than the latter. The production seems to have a lot of PEOPLE, though some of them the camera concentrated on during the "Friends, Romans" speech looked terribly unRoman, but the scenic qualities were almost nil, and WHOEVER decided that thunder before lightning would be effective in the storm sequence should have his physics examined. The battle sequences seemed to be attempted with some area of scale, but sometimes the soldiers looked painted and it seemed that one gigantic rock got a LOT of play from various different angles. Some of Shakespeare's lapses showed: why should Brutus KNOW about his wife's death and then PLAY at receiving the news from one of his soldiers; and why would one of the soldiers be surrounded and "killed" only to reappear after Cassius had taken his own life? Some of his good lines seem repeats: Damning senators with a spot recalls "Out, damned spot"; he seems to have mentioned Hybla bees somewhere before; some of his word plays seem familiar, and it WOULD be fun to have a concordance and look for duplicates of lines in various plays. All the conspirators seem to have been chosen for physical ugliness, and only Jonathan Scott-Taylor as Lucius, Brutus' serving boy, had ANY degree of masculine beauty outside Octavius. He even repeats himself: we'll smile if we meet again, but our farewell will be well taken if not; and then Cassius has to repeat him almost word for word. The POLITICAL situation seemed clear in the complete production, however, which made it interesting, since I didn't clearly remember the involutions of the plot either from reading OR from various movies of the thing. And WHERE did Cleopatra come into the whole thing??
DIARY 14092
2/20/79
"SUPERMAN, THE MOVIE"
Christopher Reeve may be cute, but you really don't get to see much of his FACE behind the glasses, much of his face when he's flying in the dark, none of his body, and it takes too long to even GET to his character, having to go through white-haired Marlon Brando impassively reading his lines, a cute kid that they dwell on too long, a GREAT set of "planet-exploding" special effects for the destruction of Krypton (after an EXTRAORDINARY set of zooming-letter credits that take AGES and are ENDLESSLY fascinating), and then it explodes in front of Glenn Ford and Phyllis Thaxter and you get a tiny peek at his peepee. The young Superman isn't bad, either, but IT goes on too long in Oz-like Kansas flatness where the camera has to keep leaping into the air to give some variety to the scenes. Then he builds his Fortress of Solitude (not bad, though the polar bear looking like he was swimming in a pool, and how did he GET there?) and listened to his father (long boring sequence) and then Jackie Cooper had a lot of talking to do as Perry White, Margot Kidder WAS cute and appealing as Lois Lane, and Reeve WAS funny looking at the abbreviated phone booth, and the helicopter sequence WAS exceedingly well done, but then the fly-thief, the riverboat escapers, the mugging fainting was quickly gotten through and then the film concentrated on Gene Hackman in a drowned Grand Central MUCH too long for my taste, with the oafish sidekick and the grimacing Valerie Perrine, and WHY did he have to choose Hackensack for the bomb, where her MOTHER was?? Some suspense with the rockets, but why couldn't he just have flown FASTER? GREAT shots on the Golden Gate Bridge and some traditional dam-breaking footage but the rocks didn't look BIG enough to stop the flood, and his flying backwards around the world to rescue her from a VERY stuffy-terrifying death in her car didn't bother to put the PIECES together, and his flying her through the air was NOT believable, since she could fly finger-to-finger, but when he left go she tumbled, so you HAD to believe she was DRAGGING along. But I wanted MORE of Superman, of his activities, and LESS of Lex Luthor and the San Andreas fault line quivering and then going back in reverse footage, as WAS OK with the dam-breaking, but the earth should have opened for her car ANYWAY. But I guess it's good enough to see the sequel to, but not see IT again.
DIARY 14108
2/22/79
"FIDELIO" ON TV
Dallapozzo is cute as Jacquino and Lucia Popp as Marcelline isn't bad, but Gundula Janowitz as Leonora LOOKS like a good man, but at the top she's just NOT quite right, either abrupt or shrill or choked or flat-sounding, so it takes some of the icing off the cake. Get out my record to find that most of the first act goodies are THERE, then get out my 1966 performance sheet and find that Boehm directed the 1955 Vienna State Opera reopening with this AND my 1966 performance with Dvorakova, which I don't remember much. The Rocco seems like an amiable old man, the Don Pizzaro of Hans Sotin seems not quite menacing enough, and the production is uninteresting until the second act, after the prisoners have sung their well-sung but appallingly acted chorus and Rene Kollo has screeched his way through his vision sequence, though the excitement of "Leonora, Mein Engel" is still there in the MUSIC, and then Bernstein, like others, delays the whole second act by 15 minutes as the orchestra goes through the MUSICALLY unrelated "Leonora Overture #3" for lots of applause for the orchestra and NOTHING for the opera except a rest for the voices that don't seem to have enough to do to NEED a rest. Leonora's famed "grand scene" in the prison, lamenting, doesn't come off, though it's hard to know how much is because the advertised subtitles just aren't THERE, and I don't know German well enough to guess at what they're singing about. But then the final scenes just take off: the brilliance of the music, the chorus singing (despite the fact that each of the prisoners finds one woman to hug immediately---no brothers, no fathers?), and the mounting expressions of joy on the faces and in the voices of Leonora and Florestan increase to an orgasmic frenzy of singing and dancing around the stage (coupled with a dynamite effect of what looks to be the WALL of the prison lowering as a gate to show the SKY and the flock of village women), and they KEEP getting cheerier and cheerier, the music mounts and mounts, using ideas from his Fifth to alternate sections of loud and quiet so that each new loud SOUNDS loud, rather than just bombastic and repetitious, and tears come to my eyes and I figure I could watch the ENDING again, it's just the beginning that is rather traditional and heavy (though the orchestral music seems endless, joyously, richly Beethoven throughout).
DIARY 14117
2/24/79
"INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS"
Debate making a page for this, but the fact that Dennis wanted to see it a second time, for $4.50, and the fact that it "follows" a "classic" would seem to make worthwhile noting why it DIDN'T succeed. The acting was good throughout, with Donald Sutherland touching in his love for the girl, and the wacko Plumberg, or whoever, totally convincing. But the INCONSISTENCIES: When I first saw the "black cotton wool" in the back of a sanitation truck, I thought "are they disguising garbage?" Then the second time it was obviously the "used-up" human body when the "stuff" left it for the pod-creature. But then the pod that wasn't used for Wacko's body became "black cotton wool." THAT pod-body lay quietly, but the ones born near Sutherland SQUIRMED and CRIED, which didn't seem to make sense. Though the man-faced dog was electrifying, as Dennis pointed out it had NOTHING to do with the plot. The ending, with Sutherland ululating to give away the "last" women, was good, though thoroughly expected, since he DID seem to be "under" and "seriously" when he could look at his former loved one dripping brown stuff into a beaker. But touches of suspense were nice, sounds were nice, and the explosions and sparks when he cut the light banks over the plant-incubating factory were gratifyingly spectacular. The bagpipes playing "Amazing Grace" were evocative when he thought the ships were safe, and then the ships were being loaded with pods. The use of reverse-camera action was good: for the "ascent" of the sperm-like substance from the "mother planet" (though I didn't think the beginning was so spectacular as claimed, not after "2001" and "Star Wars" or even the TITLES of "Superman"!), the "taking over" of the sleeve of Sutherland's coat when he almost got it, and even, probably, the "blooming" of the flowers, which would have been MUCH more easily "pulled in" rather than guided to blossom in such a symmetric way. But why did they have to LOOK so phony; couldn't they have been "realer?" Why didn't they think earlier of having someone watch when they slept? How did Nimoy manage to show so much emotion THROUGHOUT and have us believe he was already taken over? WERE Kevin McCarthy's words the SAME as in the prequel? But there was something satisfyingly "other" about the pod-bodies being born and gasping for air.
DIARY 14127
2/28/79
COUSTEAU'S "SEARCH FOR ATLANTIS"
He's got a marvelous "publishing" system going where he can say anything he wants and get an AUDIENCE for it which is quite enviable! His son was enamored of the idea that Atlantis was off Bimini, so I was treated to a view of the "J road" with huge limestone blocks that are HORIZONTAL, like a ROAD, rather than vertical, like a wall, as the Reader's Digest book would suggest. Single blocks come in 5s and double blocks in 6s, which Plato said were sacred numbers in Atlantis, so that's a "coincidence." But they ARE propped up in places by small wedges, so they ARE manmade, though science says "They come from the same material"---yeah, but they've been WORKED!! So now the scientist-on-duty says "It's megalithic, like Stonehenge." They dismiss the Azores by showing the caldera-like, Thera-like island; show birds circling over the South Atlantic where some say Atlantis WAS where they used to rest on their migrations; show Coco Island off the west coast of Costa Rica which is lush and forested and HUGELY waterfalled, but no ruins; mention the Atlas Mountains but don't show them, and then go to two islands off the north coast of Crete, Dia (where they find loads of amphorae where they think it acted as a harbor for Knossos), and Spira, where they find REEFS of amphorae, and the idea that they were ships that were sunk when the final tidal wave from Thera that sent waves 350 feet high through the Mediterranean whose timbers then rotted away, allowing the sea water to agglutinate the wreckage of ceramics, sounds quite convincing. The building blocks swept into the harbor would have been more convincing if they'd showed what DIRECTION the waves would have traveled from Thera! Then a long visit to Thera, where they say the CURRENT area will be cleaned out in 50 years, and they don't know HOW far the REST of the city goes, and EVERY house has frescoes in it, so this was a wealthy seaport, they seem to conclude. Nothing seems to be open to the public yet, so there's another reason to be pleased with Cousteau and his cameras, since Thera was off the list when our ship went there, and it DOES seem reasonable that the Minoans, flourishing from 3000-1500 BC, would furnish a good basis for the Plato 500 BC "myth" of a civilization sunk in a day. And why did not one SAY that in fact this civilization WAS IN FACT sunk beneath the sea, if ONLY destroyed by a tidal wave that LATER LEFT THE REMAINS ABOVE SEA LEVEL?
DIARY 14128
Also 2/28/79
ROYAL SHAKESPEARE'S "MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM"
Though I'd seen it before, I thought it was pretty good so I watched it again, and the CONSTANT INTEREST of the text and acting was extraordinary. Derek Godfrey's Theseus was stately yet humor-filled, the Hippolyta was excellent, sort of an actressy-Birgit Nilsson, but I didn't get her name, the Oberon of Ian Richardson was homely and skinny, but the Titania was very fleshy and almost nude and actually looked GOOD in green, which is more than can be said for the Puck of Ian Holm, who stared wall-eyed lots of the time and seemed too campy by half. What a pity I couldn't get the name of the Demetrius, but his Helena by Diana Rigg was just marvelous: perfectly enunciated, so that each speech seemed thought of at the moment and ran as naturally as possible off the tongue. I guess it was Helen Mirren as the Hermia, looking dirty most of the time, and Lysander was David Warner, who seemed about the weakest of the four, but their situation seemed always believable. The clods were good, though Bottom seemed to be a bit too much for my taste, as I suppose he almost always must be. The children as the fairies were marvelously addled, except for a few who couldn't help smiling for the camera, and it would have been a lovely film if it didn't look so UNCOMFORTABLE; you positively felt they must be shivering in the cold in the evening woods, sitting in the streams or standing in the lakes, running on the leaves and weeds and being pushed back and forth on the grass. The music seemed studiedly NOT by Mendelssohn, which wasn't the best choice, and the contemporary miniskirts on the women just seemed sort of silly, rather than evocative of anything interesting. The halls and corridors inside were all quite bare, as if the plasterers had just left, so that was strange, too. Too much of the dialogue was done very close to the head, so there wasn't much chance for reactions, and some of the sequences were so broken up that I became conscious of the number of SETUPS needed for each speech. But the PLAY came out of it best: spoken intelligently, it could withstand a mannered production that seemed to take away more than it brought, and it was worth seeing something like 10 years after it was filmed in 1968 by the Royal Shakespeare Theater.
DIARY 14146
3/7/79
BBC "AS YOU LIKE IT"
Brian Stirner's Orlando seems much too young and innocent to be more than a pawn, Arthur Hewlett's Adam is admirably dog-like, but Orlando's DEMAND for food is silly, Clive Francis' Oliver's total change after having his life saved is hard to believe CUTE. Helen Mirren's Rosalind seems MUCH too old for Orlando, and only a few of her lines are delivered with anything like the imagination demanded from someone with her great reputation for Shakespeare, though generally disappointing. James Bolam's Touchstone makes us wonder how much humor has changed, since his "humor" doesn't seem funny, and "one of Shakespeare's great comic creations" seems a bit overstated. Impossible to tell how good a JOB he did, though probably bad. Tom McDonnell had a rich voice as Amiens, but his head was DOWN too much. Maynard Williams' Silvius was sturdy, underplayed, and masculine, for a good change. Richard Pasco's Jaques was too glum, dour, non-self-mocking to be likeable at ALL! Marilyn LeConte's Audrey was fresh-faced, natural, and one of the better people. Moulder Brown (lost his first name) was just a SIMP as Hymen, with his white skirt. I guess the thing NEEDS a definitive Rosalind, and Helen Mirren wasn't it, though it was better than the horrid all-white British production of it, and it WOULD be a kick to see an all-male production to see the booklet's play on "a boy playing a girl playing a boy playing a girl" though Mirren only sporadically LOOKED like a boy, which is part of the sadness of such parts. Glamis Castle made a nice backdrop, but the interiors weren't special enough to stand out as being 1000 years old, and again some of the outdoors scenes looked just plain uncomfortable: weren't they COLD in the foggy forest with their wispy costumes, didn't their feet get wet and uncomfortable from the forest wetness, and sometimes there seemed to be wind-sighings in the microphones and lots of faces seemed to be quite DARK when the bright sky cut down the camera's apertures too much to show the faces. The wrestling match was ludicrous, thanks to Darth Vader's big body (Dave Prowse) being tumbled through a matchstick fence by the delicate Orlando, but there was STILL magic in the final scene when everyone was satisfied by the newly feminized Rosalind (who didn't do well with the Epilogue at ALL), and I felt a few tears.
DIARY 14162
3/9/79
"THE DEER HUNTER"
Andre thinks that Robert De Niro is just getting more and more beautiful, growing a beard, putting on weight, though he looks trim enough when he takes off all his clothes and runs naked through the streets of Clairton. Undoubtedly a POWERFUL movie: I could FEEL the tension in my body when John Savage was so POWERFULLY afraid of the Russian Roulette going on over his head, though I didn't think the blood-geyser from the skull was such a drastic effect as some thought (though two little old ladies left who had been sitting in front of us), but I didn't get the MOTIVATION of it at all. Was it a show of dumb courage, as De Niro seemed to imply when he shook the captor when he ordered THREE bullets put into it? Was it blind obedience to orders, symbolizing soldiers' obedience when they followed their safe President into war? Was it just animal madness caused by the pressures of war? I couldn't figure why NIK would snap, why send the money to Savage, why continue the game even when he didn't have to? Why would Michael continue the game when he'd already FREED Nik, then feel so crushed when he shot his brains out? Why on EARTH would Michael shoot at John Cazale (wouldn't he have shook his head with the same emotional intensity as he shook Nik's head when HE shot himself?), just to prove a point and make him "grow up"? Is it about rites of passage? Why the "joke" of the "Fuckit" Green Beret in the bar putting on JUSTASMUCH a macho front as the steel workers? And then he DIDN'T shoot the deer, but why did he ASK "OK"? Then "God Bless America" at the end seemed to ask God, parlous at best, to bless all that was WORST of America: the senselessly-slain body of Nik, the lost legs of Savage, the confusion of Michael, the constant boozing, the sentimentality at funerals, the perpetuation of the ugliness of the town, and the baseness of the male-female lack of understanding. Yet it seems to be thought of as a HEROIC movie: kids will start playing Russian roulette, take out after more deer, continue to feel for their buddies while covering up their genitals as Nik did Michael's even after they were offered, continue to THINK they should like women, as Michael did Nik's, yet not taking it after she was offered. Perpetuation of inhibitions, obedience, machismo, female worthlessness, loyalty, duty, courage, strength, weakness, lunacy, and the American Way.
DIARY 14186
3/19/79
"ROMEO AND JULIET" ON BBC
Gielgud more or less wasted as the chorus, Patrick Ryecart not terribly effective (sort of a young Richard Dreyfuss) as Romeo, and about the only thing Rebecca Saire had going for her as Juliet was her youth, but she seemed to have messed up some of the speeches according to my version of Shakespeare. According to that version, they CUT quite a few lines, though it was still almost 3 hours long, but many of the lines were EXTRAORDINARY for their perception of the connections between things, both real and metaphorical, for their felicitousness of rhyme and rhythm, for their beauty and for their giving to the actors a look of enormous wisdom and beauty in reciting them. Part of the action was filmed in some courtyard in Bologna, and there were constant views over mist-covered green hills that evoked the hill towns very nicely. Anthony Andrews was properly cocky as Mercutio, with nicely shaped legs, while Alan Rickman's Tybalt was VERY long-torsoed and VERY short-legged, making his ass wobble strangely as he walked. Many of the cast wore codpieces, so it wasn't easy to see the REAL lineaments of the cock behind the piece. Celia Johnson was properly addled as the nurse, and it's incredible to see how WHIMSICAL she was, how UNPRACTICAL ("Well, so what if you're married, you'll enjoy being married to Paris"), and Michael Hordern made the most of the huffings and puffings of the part of Capulet. The verisimilitude of the cooking, the courtyard filled with dancers, the crowds egging on the sword fighters, and the lavishness of the gardens and courts made it a very PRETTY version, but I still wouldn't think it could rate as a definitive one with the lukewarm acting jobs by the two principals. Friar Lawrence didn't appear as stupid as he usually seems, and it seems they left IN a number of scenes that are usually cut, but they cut out a LOT of the repetition of the plot, figuring you KNEW what was going on. Again the "natural" lighting worked against it: faces in shadow while the sky blazed behind them, torches throwing red ghosts on the TV screen, and expressions missed slightly by camera angles. But it was interesting and AGAIN the magic of the words and speeches and rhythms was overwhelming.
DIARY 14189
Also 3/19/79
"EINSTEIN'S UNIVERSE"
Great models of cushion-tables where "mass warped space and space curved around mass," a great quote from him that "The price for my defiance of authority was to be made authority itself," and good blue-red-shifting motorcycle drivers illustrating Doppler effects. BUT it steered perfectly clear of that intriguing line just within 1% of the speed of light: the motorcyclists got up to 75% of the speed of light and found that the images of "real" things were rotated TOWARD them, so that you saw the BACK of the truck you were passing at 75% C. Talked of the fastest electrons being over 40,000 times the mass of "rest" electrons (but how fast are THEY going?) and how their internal clocks are slowed SO much at great speeds that they THINK they've gone 2.5 feet but have gone actually the two miles of the Stanford Linear Accelerator. Mesons that would disintegrate in fractions of a billisecond disintegrated HUNDREDS of times slower. Ustinov did not perform a service by imposing his coughs and wheezes on the accent of the Einstein spokesperson, and he really didn't seem to appreciate WHY he was growing no older near the black hole and his twin on earth was dead when he got back. They also neglected to speak of the problem of getting "images" from earth there near the black hole's boundary. Incredible that Sciama and Wheeler AND Penrose were now all at the University of Texas, which says something about the power of money, and Sciama said some marvelous things about their research into a FINITE "smallest distance and unit of time and mass" and mentioned something that they were postulating called "twisters," which at least gives me something to look up in the reference materials to see what's been PUBLISHED in this area. But they don't talk about a VERY fast electron existing FOREVER, seeing ALL THE WAY AROUND AND BACK AGAIN of all the objects in the universe, and of NEVER dying. And they talked of the difficulties of linking space and time, but they never talked about the impenetrable boundary of c, where infinitely heavy particles take an infinitely long time to travel a small distance, which they don't need to cover since they can be everywhere at once ANYWAY along their path.