15-21May2011 :: This Week

22May2011 [weekly]

• imdb:tt0086312
• imdb:tt0765447
• imdb:tt0955308

This week was Silkwood, Evening, Mahler 9, Trinity, Robin Hood, and A Visit From the Goon Squad.

• Watched Silkwood (imdb); a well-told and acted story, but awfully long, and takes its time to really get a feel for what's going on; it's curious to see where a lot of a generation's nuclear panic comes from.
• Watched Evening (imdb); great acting from a great multi-generational female cast (the males really do just have bit parts and minimal characterisation, which is an interesting twist); takes a little bit to get used to the different stories being told; a nice reflection on memory and dreaming and lives constructed.
• Saw Sydney Symphony performing Mahler 9; they opened with a Mozart piano concerto, which I found a bit boring, though it was curious to try and dissect just what makes Mozart so different to Mahler, when not long ago I'd have bundled them together as just "classical"; Mahler's Ninth is a beautiful piece, with a long strong opening looking back on life and on the world, and a long drawn-out closing saying goodbye to the world; the close is full of silence, which is incredibly powerful, with individual instruments or sections of the orchestra dropping in and out for a few notes at a time, feeling like nothing so much as dying breaths; you can feel the whole audience catching its own breath in those silences too, which is incredibly affecting.
• Read Trinity (Batman/Superman/Wonder Woman) (comiXology); a so-so story, but Matt Wagner very cleverly plays with the dynamic between the three superheroes and their different approaches to justice.
• Watched Ridley Scott's Robin Hood (imdb), but gave up after an hour, nothing actually having had happened; there are a couple of plot points that could've made the story unique (assuming the identity of Locksley, Marion running the farm alone in the absence of her husband, the French manipulating John's rise to power), and it's obvious they've put a lot of effort and attention into the production, but it makes no sense for the movie to be so long, nor to put off the part of the story we're actually expecting.
• Read Jennifer Egan's Pulitzer-winning A Visit From the Goon Squad (amazon); it's written almost as a collection of short stories, but with overlapping characters as the stories jump through time, and textual variations between the stories; the textual format may have gotten in the way but works really well, with each chapter or story individually resolving nicely, and with the pay-offs developing as we discover more about each character's life in each new story; it's dark and there's plenty of loss and despair but it's beautiful too, and fascinated with life in the modern world.