Thursday, October 04, 2012

enron

LOVED The Master. Loved.  Weird, not realistic in any way, not a single character is likeable or can be identified with.  I do not care. What an imagination Anderson has.  What acting.  Oscarworthy from Amy Adams (I was suprised) Phillip Seymour Hoffman and ESPECIALLY Joaquin Phoenix.  Insane. Loved the clothes and set design, too. A strange movie about very little, just up my alley.

!!! is playing tonight at Harlow's with G. Green.  I'm going to try so hard to go. It will be a valiant struggle.  If I do, I will probably have a cocktail at Shady Lady if anyone is down for that.

I saw the play Enron at Cap Stage.  It has a long run for them; I think until October 21st.  Definitely worth seeing although there are some problems, more with the play than the production.  It's a flashy play, with dancing and people in raptor masks (which is one of the most bad-ass parts) but it is too long and the last half hour or so loses the thread.  The playwright is a young British babe (31) and I am just biased about her ability to understand this American story that was going down when she was like 15 although I guess the blowup was when she was 19.  She has said she viewed it first as a musical, and then someone (teacher or something) read it and said it was a tragedy.  I don't see Enron as a tragedy, except for the workers who got screwed and they are barely present in this story. Only as tokens.  My biggest problem is with the composite female character.  She is wearing a horrible cheap blond wig, she has no range as an actress, and I don't think she fairly represents the women involved in this story, especially the only truly honorable figures - a women who blew the whistle and the female Forbes reporter who broke the story.  All of this will be so boring to you if you have no plans to see this play.

All of this is kind of a long-winded way to recommend the documentary The Smartest Guys In The Room, especially if you are going to see the play.

5 comments:

beckler said...

SNR endorsed Steve Hansen. Awesome.

The Armeniac said...

I thought the Master was sensational, I didn't think it was unrealistic, especially Joaquin Phoenix who hit it out of the park!! It was a character study on the highest degree, best movie of the year!!

beckler said...

rad!

ninja said...

At first I was stoked since I thought you were all talking about this: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0086756/

Anonymous said...

I love PTA, but I was unsatisfied with The Master.

You say the movie is "about very little." I know what you mean. I came away from the move asking myself, "What, if anything, actually happened there." Yet in actuality the movie is about many things. It's about a scientology-like organization. It's about the relationship between two dichotomous characters who mirror each other. It's about the power of repression versus the power of chaos.

Maybe the problem I had with The Master is that PTA refused to pick a central theme to focus on. The movie's mise-en-scene was nice [1], but it wasn't the point of the movie as it is in, say, a David Lynch movie. PTA is still trying to tell a traditional story, and I think he failed somewhat.

[1]

Although I didn't think PTA captured the particularity of the Cause's subculture in the way he did in, say, Boogie Nights. There wasn't a scene in The Master that crystallizes the movie's world in the same way, for instance, Eddie's audition in Jack Horner's living does.

--JM