BYU's Production of "Tartuffe"

After I saw The Bakkhai at the University of Utah last semester, I have been kind of weary with and lacking faith in avant garde college productions of classics. My trepidations continued into the opening of Tartuffe. I had heard that it was a rather musical interpretation with a Tim Burton flare. (Tim Burton show-tunes would be my personal circle of hell, by the way.) But to my surprise and delight, the production was, by and large, a success.

Like most BYU productions, the set design and staging was mind-blowingly good. The walls of the main room were two stories high and comprised of frames of various sizes and shapes holding blank canvas. At various points throughout the play, the actors made excellent use of those frames by standing behind them with a light shining from behind, revealing silhouettes of the players. And although there was lots of music, it was almost exclusively back-ground music. (Occasionally a player might sing about two lines.) Plus, it was good music. It really fit the the mood of the visuals. And they made excellent use of the piano

My only real complaint with the whole Tim Burton vibe was the eye makeup. Everyone looked a little too much like Rocky Raccoon. But they did a fairly good job of avoiding the whole Goth/Hello Kitty aesthetic which comprises Burton's style. One writer for the Daily Universe commented that it was similar to Brett Helquist's illustrations for A Series of Unfortunate Events, which I think is a more apt comparison.

Of course, the best thing about any production of Tartuffe will be the lines themselves. There are some great zingers in the mix. (And Moliere is also amazing at the dramatic set-up in the play. I love how long it takes us to actually see Tartuffe. By the time he comes on stage, there has been so much expectation and tension about him. Also, I love how Tartuffe can almost convince us that he's not guilty of things we've just seen him do.) But I thought most of the actors had a very fresh take on the characters while still being true to the work. The maids were especially good. I thought that Tartuffe himself did an admirable job, but I do enjoy a morose Tartuffe more than a giddy one.

If you, dear reader, have happened to see both the Bakkhai production and this version of Tartuffe, you may think me simply biased or hypocritical, because one of the things that irritated me so much in the U of U's play is that everyone screamed ALL their lines. Tartuffe was also a rather loud performance. But the critical difference is that the former is high-drama in the classic, tragic tradition, while the latter is a farce. It worked for the BYU performance, because it knew what it was and what it was doing. The U's play was never sure if it was farce or tragedy, and never knew its limits. Tartuffe was sexy while the Bakkhai was whore-ish.

And finally, good on the BYU drama department for picking this play. I don't think it's an inappropriate pick for an institution like BYU (they started the performance with a prayer), but I do think it's risky. Tartuffe is deliciously irreverent, and I could hear audible manifestations of some of the audience's discomfort over some of the lines/events. But I think it's all in good fun, and the play, ultimately, has a pretty solid message. Well done, BYU.

2009: A Year in Film

It might just be because I hadn't seen a single movie all throughout 2007 and 2008 and therefore was wanting a fix real, real bad, BUT I thought that this was an amazing year for movies--especially children's movies. Let's have a re-cap:




UP!
This is one of the best movies I've ever seen for playing an audience. From the moment the movie starts, you care about those characters, and although there are jokes with talking dogs, the immediacy of the characters' crises are ever present. How can that tension survive all the squirrel jokes? Because those characters are real and complicated and MEAN something to us. This is a movie that dealt with infertility, society's treatment of the elderly, dead-beat dads, industrialization and bereavement. And using a bunch of balloons to take your house to South America. It is a hilarious, beautiful and profound journey.







WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE
Like Pan's Labyrinth, this film was a masterful balance of puppetry and CGI, and took away CG as an excuse for a lack of drive for innovation in other fields of special effects. Plus, it was a thoroughly daring movie, successfully expanding on themes found in the original book, while slicing into and making significant commentary on the issue of the self and other. Like UP!, it has complex emotions: goofy, terrifying, tragic and hopeful.









THE FANTASTIC MR. FOX
I would not at all be disappointed if Wes Anderson decided to do nothing but kids' movies after this. I may have enjoyed this movie more than any other I saw this year. It was, like my last two selections, so refreshing. The humor was sharp, the soundtrack perfectly suited, and the look of the movie was just a delight. I hate to pick favorites, but this movie is definitely a contendor.



THE PRINCESS AND THE FROG
I was so happy that this movie was not a dud. The future of Disney's 2D animation (and therefore, all 2D animation in the West) hung desperately on this film. I have to say that it was largely a triumph. I don't think the songs will be as classic as Elton John's in The Lion King or Tchaikovsky's in Sleeping Beauty, but they were enough to convince the world that we still want to see this kind of Disney film. This was a genuinely funny movie. I laughed out loud several times, and I have to say, that in terms of look and sound, it does great justice to New Orleans. That's because of the extensive research and time they spent in the city, as well as hiring locals like Randy Newman and Dr. John to pay homage to their native city. Well Disney, keep up the Renaissance.



AVATAR
This was not a great film, but James Cameron showed us what $300 million can look like. It can look awesome, and I mean that in the original sense of the word--inducing awe. If I laughed out loud in The Princess and the Frog, I audibly exclaimed "Wow!" just as many times while watching Avatar. I don't know if this will be a "movie that changes movies...forever," but it did temper my hatred for CGI and 3D. This film managed to do both--dare I say it--gracefully. It's really a beautiful movie, if just a touch predictable and anti-human. But hey, aren't we all?




SHERLOCK HOLMES
This is a stupidly fun, smart movie. The dialogue is so crisp and fresh. Somehow, despite all the dirty and at times repulsive imagery on screen, the one-liners and comebacks between Holmes and Watson felt like a hot shower. Or a really, really good episode of House. The actual mystery is engaging enough, but the real draw of the movie is the chemistry, wit and delivery between the actors. I honestly did not care for the fight-scenes--especially The Big Climactic Fight Scene necessary in all blockbusters. But I guess people like that kind of thing. Also, this was, by a LONG shot, my favorite Hans Zimmer score ever. Now I just need to wait and see who he plagiarized it from.


(In no way is this list supposed to be exhaustive, because since time and money are factors in my life, my movie attendance is not exhaustive. Invictus is probably a great film, but I haven't seen it. Same thing for Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs. Also, go see Gentlemen Broncos like your life depended on it.)

Social Hyperbole--The Worst Thing Ever

Recently, I've noticed a lot of social hyperbole in both pop culture and (big surprise) politics.

I find the most nauseating source of social hyperbole in commentary on Twilight. It's consistently compared to Harry Potter, and today I even read a comparison to the Beatles in my university's newspaper. Twilight is NOT the new Harry Potter. For one thing, the last Harry Potter book had the largest first printing of any book in the history of ever. New Moon may have broken a record for Fandango's opening day pre-sales, but that might say more about the growing trend to purchase tickets online than it does about wide-spread excitement. Also, how well a movie does on its opening day has everything to do with marketing, and actually very little to do with the film itself, and how well it will do as time goes on. Look at Napoleon Dynamite.

Furthermore, the Twilight series does not approach Rowling's works in terms of quality. The latter explores and expands the monomyth, asks and answers serious questions about society, prejudice, morality and the human experience.

Stephenie Meyer writes about hormones. Her books are an entirely physical experience, and to further that argument, I call her as my witness. In a recent interview, she said that the biggest problem in adapting her books to film was casting Edward. Why was that such a problem? Because, what human could possibly look that good? Yeah, that's the depth of your book right there. Nobody is as hot as my vampire.

It really reminds me of Faulkner's Nobel Acceptance Speech. He expressed his fear of what the future author would become:

"He writes not of love but of lust....Not of the heart, but of the glands."

Change the pronouns to "she," and you've got yourself a rather eloquent and concise indictment against the Complete Works of Stephenie Meyer.

I predict that in no more than ten years from now, the pop-culture consciousness will wake up with a headache, chuckle and say, "Man, can you believe we took those books seriously?"

Harry Potter, on the other hand, will last for centuries.

And the Beatles? Really? I mean, Twilight definitely has a fan base, but come on.

Another social hyperbole that (like the Beatles comparison) hardly requires refutation, is the constant comparison of this recession to The Great Depression. Sorry kids. That's a no contest.

Autumn in Provo

So, I'm not entirely emo. We wrote two poems for class based on the style of may ayim, who was a suicidal African/German woman.

orion roams the sky too early
for this time of year
autumn had just painted the trees
and already winter has come
with her dusty self
to cover her sister’s masterpiece

how to spell winter

l
o
n
e
l
y

the letters don’t fit together
too wide
too tall
too low
bent

the blankets of white at first seem charming
welcome as a distant uncle
then dreary
they stay too long

thank God
for Christmas

and carols

really.

Where the Wild Things Are

When I first saw the trailer for this movie, I groaned. I thought the idea of turning this brief picture book into a full-length movie was irredeemably dumb. It just didn't seem like the material was there.

I was wrong. So very, very wrong. In no way did this movie lack material.

I thought Spike Jonez did such an excellent job projecting the spirit and imagery of the book onto a fleshed-out, adult retelling of the story. And be not mistaken. This is a movie for adults. Unlike Up, where children and parents are almost guaranteed to adore the movie equally, if not for different reasons, children may not like this movie at all. It's at times a remarkably harsh look at loneliness, anger, the need to be loved and acknowledged, jealousy and down right terror.

Seriously, the DVD should include a pamphlet summarizing Kierkegaard's "The Anxiety of Lowliness." When the tagline says "There's one in all of us," it doesn't mean so much that there's a zany fuzzy thing inside all of us that loves to dance. It means there's a facet of our personality that is cripplingly insecure, jealous, exclusive or hateful. The main question of the movie is how do we maintain happiness in a society full of broken individuals. Good question. Although there's hope for it on the shattered island of Wild Things, there isn't a clear resolution. But although the resolution is absent, the answer is clear: love (as we're told in the end by a smashingly good song by Karen O and the Kids).

I forgot to mention that the movie is hilarious. I had several uncontrollable laugh-out-loud moments. Keep an eye out for Bob and Terry.

And now a word about the technical aspect of the movie. CG is employed to a minimum, and I love that. To me, computer effects almost always look cheap, and they date way too fast. I was floored just like everybody else when I saw Gollum from The Lord of the Rings trilogy five years ago, but he already looks like a relic from the neolithic age. The Wild Things are actors in suits, and I honestly don't know how they did it. They had those things moving so fast and flying into each other and into wood huts and all kinds of other crazy stuff I would never dream of doing in a huge suit like that. They had some serious momentum.

In conclusion, this is a great, great movie. It rewards serious analysis, it's funny and it just looks so good. I don't think taking a kid to see this is necessarily a bad idea. Frankly, there are some scary sequences with the Wild Things which younger kids may not be able to take. But it depends on the kid. I honestly don't know what I would have thought of this movie as a child. I sure do love it now, though.

Solving Life's Mysteries

So, I've come to the realization that if everyone wrote everything in minimalist syntactic trees, there would be no more structural ambiguity, and English teachers would never again have to take off points for "misplaced modifiers."

Here's an example of a confusing sentence:

"The agitated cow killed the farmer with the axe."

As it stands, it's ambiguous. Did the cow use an axe to kill a farmer, or did the cow kill a farmer who happened to have an axe? Well, if it had just been written in a syntactic tree, there'd be no ambiguity. Ex:

Here, the farmer with the axe met his end by means of a cow. You can tell because "with the axe" is clearly an adjunct of "farmer." The other meaning, where a cow hacked the poor farmer to pieces, would be illustrated with the prepositional adjunct belonging to the verb phrase, "killed." Here you go:

For some reason, I put "enraged" instead of "agitated, but the point is the same.

So yeah, I think any important text (newspapers, novels, etc.) should now be published in syntax-tree-format to eliminate future confusion.

Report to the Academy Concerning the Trainer of Kafka’s Ape

I wrote this as an assignment for my German 340 class. We were supposed to do a creative assignment based on Franz Kafka's short story "A Report to an Academy." I fleshed out an anonymous character from the story and filled in the missing details.

Here you go:

My esteemed colleagues, it is with the greatest of honor that I accept both your grant and your challenge to observe, study and research the final, and perhaps, most fascinating trainer in a long line of men who successfully attempted to humanize the specimen in question. To be invited not only to stand in your august company, but also to present my findings is most humbling indeed. Truly I feel that I am among giants.

It is with deepest regrets, then, that I must inform you that a full analysis of my data is not yet complete. Therefore, I have prepared a transcript of the interview which I hope will be of interest to this body of scholars. I have by no means abandoned the project, but I must remove myself from it temporarily so as to gain a better perspective. I have found, as I am sure we all have, that on occasion when one spends too much energy and time observing a problem too closely, one loses focus entirely.

I will now proceed to play the interview I conducted with Dr. Hartmut Barras. I remind you that he was the last to recover from the effects of the training, and although it has been decades since the occurrence, he is perhaps, regrettably, too fragile to be of any empirical use. Please feel free to follow along with the transcript:

I: Herr Dr. Prof. Barras,—
HB: You call me Hartmut.
I: Pardon. Hartmut—
HB: Yes?
I: What was your profession before you worked with the specimen?
HB: I taught literature.
I: You were a professor, correct?
HB: I taught literature at a University.
I: And how long did you fill that position?
HB: I taught for 12 years before I was asked to assist in…the specimen’s training.
I: Were you surprised at the offer.
HB: Naturally.
I: And what, exactly, did they ask you to train the specimen to do?
HB: I was to teach him how to read and write.
I: How long were you his trainer?
HB: I can’t recall clearly. A lot happened very fast.
I: Other sources say it was approximately fifteen minutes.
HB: No. Much longer.
I: Hm, well. How long has it been since you resigned?
HB: Can you really call that resigning?
I: Well, how long has it been?
HB: Years. I try not to think about it often.
I: So can you still remember your first impressions of the specimen.
HB: Oh, clearly.
[pause]
I: Would you share them?
HB: Must I?
I: Well, none of this is obligatory, but it would certainly be of great help to us.
[pause]
I: I suppose we can move on—
HB: No. Just…. I tell you this because someone must know—but please—for the love of God, man—don’t tell more people than you must. It is something I’m not proud of. [pause] When I first met…him. I thought him an ape.
I: Yes?
HB: What do you mean ‘yes?’
I: You thought him an ape, and…?
HB : Don’t you understand? There was no and! I thought him an ape. A banana-loving, tree-swinging ape. Nothing more.
I: I see.
HB: Do you?
I: What did you observe about the specimen’s behavior?
HB: Ha! His behavior. You talk about him like he’s a plant or a storm cloud or an amoeba. What did I observe about the specimen’s behavior? I’ll tell you. He is definitively not an ape—if there is such a thing.
I: Would you care to elaborate? Or perhaps you could just explain the training process.
HB: There was no process—sorry, what’s your name?
I: Dr. Schneider.
HB: No, you fool. What’s your name?
I: My first name?
HB: Yes, of course.
I: Adam.
HB: There was no process, Adam. I saw the papers he had written under the previous trainers and was horrified. That was the process.
I: I have actually read those training papers. Forgive me if I sound insensitive in my query, but what in them did you find frightening?
HB: Perhaps, perhaps by only reading them you cannot grasp the magnitude of that individual. But to be there! To see the desperation in his eyes as he tried to assimilate me—and do not mistake it for a bestial desperation. It was a caged struggle to be sure, but one not of simply trying to escape into the abyss. It was the desperation you hear in Michael’s voice as Goethe has him try to clothe God’s gentle movement of the day in words. Angelic, yes, that’s what it was. And so far beyond what I am! How it seared my soul to be consumed by a greater being—to see him look into my spirit and find it not worthy of assimilating.
I: He attacked you?
HB: Idiot! Do you listen? He pierced me only with those great black eyes. He absorbed who I was and found me wanting. I became so adrift in his…his horrible being that I lost myself entirely. Until at last I found myself in the abyss, and found myself shouting from the depths of eternity, ‘I am!’ I was the beast in the center of nothingness.
I: Yes. Thank you. How would you say he responded to traditional pedagogy?
HB: Get out.
I: Pardon?
HB: Get. Out.
I: Have I offended you sir? Or if you feel uncomfortable describing the encounter we can pause for a while.
HB: Adam. You have offended everything that I am. Leave.
I: Thank you for your time, Doctor.
HB: Hartmut.

I will now devote the rest of my presentation to questions from the body of scholars. Yes, Dr. Roberts.