BSO: The City & Mahler's 5th Symphony (2016)

I have had the pleasure of attending countless (I have actually lost count) concerts at the Baltimore Symphony for the last three years through the unbelievable Student Select Program. Some of my favorite concerts have been Nobuyuki Tsuji performing Tchaikovsky's Piano Concerto Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg performing Shostakovich's Violin Concerto, and the concert I heard this evening which might be my last. I don't usually write about classical music, but I will use this concert to reflect on why I love classical music, the BSO and Baltimore.

Marin Alsop led the orchestra in a fabulous rendition of Mahler's 5th Symphony. I thought his 9th was my favorite, but I totally change my mind. Every movement of the 5th is a knockout, especially the famous, gorgeous Adagietto. The difference between listening to a recording and hearing the orchestra live is that it is an experience. You are not just listening to music--you're feeling the music. There are so many moments in the 5th Symphony that give you goosebumps and make your hairs tingle. You can physically feel the music flowing into you. There are moments that allow you to just exhale and release all the stress in the world and bask in the beauty of the music. And it is incredible.

Maestra Alsop has proven herself time and again as a force to be reckoned with and has led the BSO to become a truly modern orchestra. She is a really big deal and she has done some wonderful things with this orchestra. She helped start OrchKids, a program for underprivileged youths modeled after Venezuela's El Sistema using the power of music in a humanitarian way to save children. She was the first woman (and she is openly lesbian) to direct a major American orchestra and was the first woman to conduct the Last Night of the Proms (twice!) and she is the only conductor to be a MacArthur Genius. She is a trailblazer--for sure a future Kennedy Center Honoree.

As part of the BSO's 100th Anniversary, a piece was co-commissioned (with Carnegie Hall) about Baltimore to be composed by Peabody professor and Pulitzer laureate Kevin Puts. The result was "The City" accompanied by a short film by James Bartolomeo. The piece makes great use of percussion. Instead of putting the percussion all in the back as usual, they were spread out, with a percussionist on the left and right sides of the orchestra and another in the back, spreading the sound and creating a call-and-response in the concert hall. The film cut perfectly with the rhythm of the drums. It included stills, video, news and time-lapse footage of "The Greatest City in America": Baltimore. It is ostensibly about the attractions of Baltimore at first, but it soon becomes clear that it is really about the people. While the music was amazing (the best 21st century piece I've ever heard), I was especially moved by the video and found myself tearing. I've been thinking about my final months in college but it really hit me while listening to this piece about Baltimore. I'm going to miss Baltimore. I never would have thought that I'd say that one or two years ago, but finally in my third (and final) year of college I began to explore the city more and have grown fond of Baltimore. Baltimore has a strong sense of community that is almost unheard of in New York. I regret that I wasn't more involved in the community beyond Hopkins and I wish that I had left the Hopkins bubble more and earlier. Absence, or anticipated absence, makes the heart grow fonder. The video made me feel nostalgic and I think nostalgia is the most powerful sentiment (I think that's why I like Cinema Paradiso so much). That's right, I teared even before the part about the uprising. But like Stravinsky's Firebird, Baltimore musically rises from the ashes and the people rejoice in song and dance. Meyerhoff Hall (which is beautiful) is without a doubt my favorite place in Baltimore. And I'm so lucky to have enjoyed so much time there.

Tokyo! (2008)-- Merde

Denis Lavant as Merde is so creepy and devilish that you can understand the havoc he wreaks. He speaks a made up language that only three people in the world understand. And this language is complete gibberish, but it is spoken in a very dramatic way. The movie is three times as long as it should be because we have to wait for the interpreter to translate Japanese to French to gibberish. The courtroom scene is pretty cool. We simultaneously follow three shots all within one frame in a split screen. So we see real time reactions. And we anticipate what the reaction will be because we get the translation before the audience does. The opening tracking shot is also very well done. Merde stumbles across several blocks of Tokyo, eating flowers, licking people and generally scaring the public. And the camera keeps up right in front of him. 

Harold and Maude (1971)

This cult classic is so awkward and hilarious and brilliant. The premise is so bizarre that you can't help but laugh. Bud Cort and Ruth Gordon make such an unlikely pair that their chemistry is kind of unreal. They bond over their hobby of attending funerals for fun. Harold stages elaborate suicides that are each more ridiculous than the last. It shouldn't be funny but it is. Once you get past the first suicide and you realize that he is not actually dead, you start to lighten up and laugh at Harold's misery. And he drives a hearse! The crazy old lady is a great complement to morbid Harold. Good eccentric characters like Maude can carry the whole film. While Harold drags the movie along, lingering for comedic effect, Maude moves it forward. Together they just work.

McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971)

I can't say I've ever been a big fan of the Western. This movie is the classic anti-western, a parody of the classic genre. And it is quite funny, sometimes seemingly unintentionally. Sometimes it is just funny because you don't know what to make of the unusual scene you just saw. The soft songs of Leonard Cohen are a hilarious contrast to the untame, uncouth wild west. And Mrs. Miller's Cockney accent sticks out in the Pacific northwest.

Robert Altman's signature is all over this film. He loves to use zooms, both fast and slow. The slow zooms draw your attention to a small detail that you otherwise would miss. The fast zooms have a comedic effect. They are kind of cheesy at first, but the timing and frequency is perfect as you get used to them. Altman also pioneered complex sound mixing techniques. At first, I thought the sound was bouncing off the walls making it difficult to understand and distinguish dialogue. But that is actually his technique to immerse the viewer in the scene. When everyone is talking over each other, you don't actually hear any of it clearly. Instead, you read the ambiance of the scene rather than the actual dialogue. 

Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice (2016)

There were very high expectations for this film, and I think it fell short. The first hour and a half of the movie is a total mess. It is a series of short vignettes (for an hour and a half!) of seemingly unrelated themes. It relies on you knowing the back story to draw connections between the vignettes on your own, but on the whole they do not really contribute to the overarching story in the film. Speaking of overarching story, there seems to be scenes missing or rather the movie simply skips over the explaining parts and just assumes that you know what's going on. My biggest qualm is that the movie removed these useful scenes, while keeping the useless ones that simply set up more sequels without resolution--such as that inexplicable dream sequence.

The music seemed a little stale. Hans Zimmer is usually a master of the superhero soundtrack. He rightfully recognized that this would be his last superhero movie, claiming that he has run out of ideas. His Man of Steel soundtrack was quite good. I think it might have worked better to have more "Man of Steel" music and less new stuff.

Ben Affleck plays a Batman that is fundamentally different from the Christian Bale Batman that we have come to know and adore. He really plays up the vigilante side of Batman--a back-to-basics of sorts. It is not a bad thing, just different. And I like that the Batcave is underneath Farnsworth House. Actually, more difficult for me was seeing Jeremy Irons as Alfred; for me Michael Caine will embody Alfred always. Wonder Woman was left very mysterious. There weren't really any answers and she appeared out of nowhere. If Gal Gadot's job was simply to be mysterious, then she did it well.

And if you were wondering why are Superman and Batman fighting then you were right to wonder. Don't let the super fans scold you for asking the right question. They shouldn't be fighting. They're on the same side.

And there were no extra scenes in the end credits! What kind of superhero movie is that?

I saw this movie at the historic Senator Theater in Baltimore. It is a gorgeous old movie house and it made the movie going experience well worth it.

On Your Feet! (Broadway) (2015)

On Your Feet! Is full of concert-level energy. And much of the play is reminiscent of a concert. From the very beginning, the lights surrounding the stage frame shoot out into the audience in different colors. The curtain has silhouettes of fans in the concert pit lining its bottom. Then the curtain is swiftly pulled away to reveal the band on stage banging away at their instruments, sitting on an interesting moving platform that is sometimes in view and sometimes moved behind a wall towards the back of the stage. They come and go throughout the performance.

The first scene is probably one of the strongest from a staging perspective (not so much from a story perspective). We are introduced to the intricacies of the set, including a changing Miami backdrop, moving panels that simultaneously serve as location indicators and places to hide. The first scene is full of characters moving in and out as if by magic, appearing and disappearing behind curtains and walls (and presumably down a trapdoor) And the set pieces move surprisingly quickly.

Newcomer Ana Villafane brings great energy to the role of Gloria and I think she sounded remarkably similar to Estefan. Josh Segarra plays Emilio with a heavy accent that is so good that it is borderline offensive and at times indecipherable. Alma Cuervo as Gloria’s abuela brings some comedy to the show. And the children in the cast are lots of fun. They have quick moving little feet and the little girl has quite a voice.

The story is somewhat lacking. The first act and second acts are polar opposites. The second half takes a more somber tone to depict Estefan’s 1990 accident. The accident is depicted with more bright lights shined at the audience, but I think they could have come up with something more creative (especially after seeing Curious Incident’s take on the London metro system). But I think the show’s greatest strength was in its energy as depicted through fun electric Latin dancing by choreographer Sergio Trujillo, which was unsurprisingly lacking from act two. The story jumps around a lot. It does not dwell on anything quite long enough for it to be impactful, and it skips over plot points and then infers them in hindsight. Though there isn’t too much plot to speak of. At times, it even comes off a little self-indulgent. The message of the story is basically “you’re so great, Gloria” (there’s a whole set piece devoted to it)—well, there’s not much modesty.

It ends like Mamma Mia does (though ABBA does a better job of integrating the songs into the plot) with a medley of energetic songs. These are songs that they couldn’t find a place for in the show, so they’re all sort of just thrown at us in snippets all at once. The song list doesn’t appear in the playbill where it usually does opposite the cast. Instead the songs are listed in alphabetical, not chronological, order after all the cast bios. This, too, contributed to the feeling that it plays more like a concert than a musical.

Cinema Paradiso (1988)

I cannot say enough good things about the beautiful love letter to the movies that is Cinema Paradiso. It is my new personal favorite and I will attempt to delve into why it resonated with me so much. But I have found that it is difficult to describe in words. There is something that is so magical about movies that the images simply transcend language. This is one such movie whose beauty speaks for itself.

I was deeply moved by this movie about love of cinema. I identified with Toto’s lifelong passion for movies. There is an incredible scene in which Alfredo projects a movie on a building in the public square. And the viewer watches the image travel across the walls in a beautiful tracking shot until it finally shoots out the window into the square. Of course, this is all backed by Ennio Morricone’s brilliant melodic score. The love theme has been stuck in my head all week—I particularly like the use of the violin.

Most of the movie is told as a flashback to Toto’s childhood (young Toto is adorable and a surprisingly good actor). This is significant as a major theme of the movie is nostalgia. Alfredo instructs Toto to not look back on the past and he obeys for thirty years. But I think the reason the movie evokes so much emotion is because the movie itself is nostalgic. It is nostalgic for a time in which the entire community gathered at the cinema, when the movie theater was the center of life. It is unabashedly sentimental, but I think stops just short of being too schmaltzy. The story itself isn’t inherently emotional, but the movie preys on the viewers’ own cinephilia. The prime example is the famous final scene. I have watched it back several times, and I have teared up every time. I don’t think there were any tears of sadness throughout the movie (maybe just the sadness that the movie is over and that we actually live outside of the world of film). They are tears of joy. It is hard to describe but I am overwhelmed by the love of movies. And it is incredible.