AN EXCLUSIVE CITYARTS CRITICS DISCUSSION OF WALTER HILL’S COMEBACK

Bullet to the Head is an event. It is director Walter Hill’s first theatrical film since 2002’s Undisputed and the most meaningful Sylvester Stallone acting vehicle since Rocky. On this occasion, I discuss the significance of Bullet to the Head with CityArts film critic Gregory Solman, author of the definitive essay on Hill’s oeuvre, as a good movie, an essay on masculinity and an advance in contemporary cinema aesthetics.

AW: Stallone’s performance as career hitman Jimmy Bobo reminded me of Charles Bronson’s streetfighter in Hill’s directorial debut Hard Times. The same grizzled features, the same masculine ethos. The plot of Bobo teaming up with policeman Taylor Kwan (Sung Kang) recalled Hill’s buddy movie 48 Hrs. Hill and Stallone’s cinema histories are combined, and the action genre is updated.

GS: It’s the ideal comparison, I agree, because Hill makes the essential emotional connections to character lesser directors ignore—directors, I might add, who are all worse at directing action than Hill, yet are no better than him with actors. I like reminding people that when Bronson’s performance stunned everyone in Hard Times, it was Bronson’s 60th movie—and Hill’s first. I won’t forget Bruce Willis in Last Man Standing, either. Stallone’s saturnine mood and weathered face are alone more interesting than his revivals of Rocky and Rambo combined, because Hill understands the power of genre and, more than anyone else in contemporary filmmaking, takes to heart F. Scott Fitzgerald’s crystalline bromide: “Action is character.” Have new filmmakers learned from Hill in Exile, or from Neveldine/Taylor, for that matter?

AW: Hill in Exile is an interesting way to describe the past decade of inept action movies. From David Fincher to Steve Soderbergh and the Bourne movies, most filmmakers don’t know how to film action with meaning or action heroes with ethics. Hill has been sorely missed. Remember the pop culture fun of Streets of Fire, which updated pop nostalgia and genre refinement?

GS: It was cinematic celebration from start to finish, and gets at Hill’s great advance in comic-book form. The sledgehammer fight anticipates the fire-axe battle between Bobo and mercenary Keegan (Jason Momoa), but beneath that lies the inevitability of one-on-one confrontation between, in this story, the two breeds of ex-military mercenary: Bobo and Keegan, who has an embittered idealism defined by codes of manhood.

AW: This movie has the best dialogue in years. Hill knows how make a few words matter. He evokes personal ethics and sums up genre ethics.

GS: He brought back his signature single-exchange scenes, too, which I love. I’m not a fan of Bobo’s final, or rather, penultimate riposte [“That’ll be the day”], though I like the recapitulation of Jack Cates, the cop in 48 Hrs., in Kwon’s challenge, and imagine Bobo to be a fan of John Wayne in general, Ethan Edwards in particular. To be clear, it’s not the line itself, or the association, but it strikes me as an over-articulation.

AW: I disagree. The Searchers is a famous cinema touchstone. I love that Hill rescued Wayne’s line from a pedestal.

The Walter Hill dialogue continues at www.CityArts.info

This week, America’s most overrated filmmaker, Steven Soderbergh, gets booted out of the arena by the country’s most underrated great filmmaker, Walter Hill.

The simultaneous release of Hill’s Bullet to the Head and Soderbergh’s Side Effects perfectly contrasts the art of genre filmmaking with the pretense of art filmmaking as genre. After a decade off, Hill returns to cinema with a Sylvester Stallone action movie that streamlines moral complexity and aesthetic mastery while Soderbergh pretends another exploration of topical issues while dully manipulating thriller clichés.

Side Effects’ story of medical malfeasance involves a pill-giving psychiatrist (Jude Law) and his waif-victim patient (Rooney Mara)—the girl with an insider-trading monkey on her back. Really, it’s much less interesting than a law-breaking hitman forced to regulate his conscience in relentless tests of his manhood. The former is schlock, the latter is art—if you appreciate the depth and creativity of kinetic, poetic narrative. That legacy has always inspired Hill’s artistry.

Soderbergh’s Traffic, Erin Brokovich and Magic Mike reigned over an era of cynical banality, while Hill’s sharp, inventive technique seen in The Warriors, Geronimo and Undisputed went unappreciated (and underground in TV projects like Deadwood and Broken Trail). Bullet to the Head is an exhilarating revival of efficient, expressive storytelling while Side Effects combines Psycho trick-casting and deceptive plot devices to disguise indifference to its characters’ moral crises.

Soderbergh is callous about “the culture,” offering an insincere money and class critique as shallow as his underlit videography. Hill’s critique is inherent in the efficacy and splendor of his action and montage. Fanboys raised on CGI won’t notice the difference, but true movie lovers will thrill to it (and to dialogue like “You had me at ‘Fuck you’”—beat that, Tarantino).

Soderbergh replaces the topical, medical subject of Nick Ray’s Bigger Than Life with nihilistic cynicism while Hill explores post-9/11 ideas of conflicted morality: Stallone gives a new iconic performance as a man at odds with the law, and Hill distills his story in the most exuberant American kinetics of the past few years.

If Side Effects is Soderbergh’s last film (as promised), give him an urgent farewell. Bullet to the Head’s excitement inspires a “welcome back” for Hill.

VAN SANT AND DAMON’S PROMISED PROPAGANDA

Gus Van Sant must really be out of imagination (or horniness) to make the drab, politically slanted Promised Land. That’s two phony films in a row for Gus, following the 2010 Restless. Promised Land takes on the fracking controversy about drilling for gas in underground shale deposits, using Gus’ Good Will Hunting star Matt Damon as a gas company stooge trying to trick Pennsylvania farmers into leasing their land. As an exposé of the fashionable dilemma, the film is unconvincing politically and fraudulently sentimental about the average American’s skeptical response to technological progress.

When Damon, as corporate shill Steve Butler, tries hoodwinking rural folk (“‘Fuck you money’ is the ultimate liberator” he tells a landowner), his dishonesty recalls George Clooney’s self-pity in Up in the Air. Damon’s a shrewder actor, so he eschews Clooney’s false empathy and portrays a man who corrupts the American Dream while refusing to lose the American rat race. This frick-or-frack quandary turns Promised Land into a reverse-Capra movie in which the little people convert the bad protagonist—reviving his buried good instincts.

But Steve’s transformation is half-ass; his heart isn’t in the job anyway, only his contempt—the phony common-folk stance the Environmental Left prefers. In Promised Land, the anti-fracking controversy seems to be about class superiority as much as about the environment.

Van Sant, Damon and co-screenwriter, co-producer and co-star John Krasinski (portraying Dustin Noble, an antagonistic environmentalist) pretend that political position is more important than complicated truth. Using pretzeled logic, these filmmakers twist their story into unbelievable shapes to make the self-righteous point that Americans’ greed outweighs their truest values. Easy for millionaire filmmakers to say.

The love triangle between Steve, Dustin and local schoolteacher Alice (Rosemarie Dewitt) lacks the gay sexual tension typical of Van Sant; this is just a propagandistic gimmick relying on the sentimentality of white-picket-fence heterosexual normalcy. (You can hear sheep bleating behind Steve’s confidence game, and an American flag is used as backdrop.) Van Sant, Damon and Krasinski present what amounts to anti-fracking propaganda without deciding which side they are on. It’s as if the industrial revolution—and unbiased cinema—never happened.

Victoria Mahoney’s debut feature, Yelling to the Sky, updates the literature of writers like Gayl Jones, Alice Walker, Toni Cade Bambara, J. California Cooper and Nella Larsen, yet it isn’t at all literary. It is entirely cinematic, a presentation of emotion and social circumstance that communicates visually more than verbally. Mahoney started out as an actress, and her filmmaking is sensitive to showing. She emphasizes—through visual illustration and emotional rhythm—a young woman’s gradual understanding of her personal feelings. Here the personal is not only political, it’s also poetic.

Sweetness O’Hara (Zoe Kravitz) lives in a broken home with a mentally frail dark-skinned mother (Antonique Smith), a white, depressed father (Jason Clarke) and an older sister (Yolonda Ross) coping with her own adolescent bad decisions. Sweetness’ story reveals not merely a history of violence but a condition of violence that is physical and psychological, inflicted from outside and internally. Mahoney delves into the pain of light-skinned black women struggling to fit in. This territory has been exclusive to literature (marginalized in Imitation of Life). Before Obama, Sweetness’s identity would be called biracial, but Mahoney starts with a scene of social hostility basic to unspoken tensions in American communities.

How Mahoney achieves this shocking moment of cultural memory (and nightmare) demonstrates that the indie movement rarely ventures beyond politically correct sentiment. She begins with social taboo then burrows into its personal sources and internal effects. Most other indie filmmakers look for mainstream approval by pushing politically correct buttons; Mahoney’s existential cry risks complexity for a healing, not self-congratulatory truth. It’s an encouragingly odd movie—only a literary analogy describes its daring, its poetry. It should remind some of Lorca’s House of Bernardo Alba (particularly Eleo Pomare’s 1967 black ballet version as much as the original play). And moviegoers may recall Dito Montiel’s similarly poetic debut A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints, a movie where the social and personal were powerfully blended.

Several memorable scenes (a sisterly pietà, a quiet handball court fracas, a trio of girls sashaying) shame the heinous exploitation of Precious and the rank sentimentality of The Help. These experimental, impressionistic scenes knowingly combine rebellion with self-destruction, a caring sense of a girl’s difficult maturation and the ache of imperfect parenthood. I also applaud Mahoney’s tasty musical themes (including a haunting Joni Mitchell original and remake) and her casting of Kravitz (Lenny Kravitz and Lisa Bonet’s daughter), who has natural ease onscreen. Here, she unavoidably accesses Bonet’s sullen, unpredictable temperament, which, like it or not, is part of our cultural awareness—and part of the valuable insight Mahoney brings to the screen.

Follow Armond White on Twitter at 3xchair

By Elena Oumano

Harold Holzer calls himself an “opportunist,” but this is true only in the most positive sense—he embraces all promising opportunities that cross his path. “If a project comes along that sounds exciting, it doesn’t matter how impossible it is,” he says. “I try to dive into it.” The opportunities have come fast and furious for him, leading to a career-balancing act few others could manage.

As senior vice president for external affairs at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Holzer “transforms curatorial visions into direct appeals to the press and public” alongside the 150 people he leads in handling “public relations, communications, marketing, advertising, multicultural audience development and outreach, internal communications, government relations and visitor services.” Weekends, vacations and the stray free evening feed Holzer’s insatiable curiosity—first sparked by a fifth-grade project—about all things Lincoln. The result is 43 books—many award-winning—he’s either penned himself, co-authored or edited on the 16th president of the United States. This includes his latest, Lincoln: How Abraham Lincoln Ended Slavery in America, commissioned by Steven Spielberg as the companion young adult book to his new film,Lincoln.

Holzer’s understanding of his real-life “protagonist” and the society of his times is profound, and driving his writings is a mission to illustrate lessons found in the horrors and achievements of a part of our history that mirrors keenly the issues of our own contemporary culture. Somehow Holzer also speaks and appears on television frequently; he even performed a nationwide tour with actor Sam Waterston of their theatrical piece. And he also squeezes in family life with his wife, two grown daughters and grandkids.

“It’s the best of both worlds,” Holzer says of his work with the Met and the president, and he is careful not to let one seep into the other. The few intersections include a portrait of Lincoln painted from life in Springfield, Ill., in June, 1860, that the Met hung in Holzer’s office, and visiting celebrities such as Tony Bennett, who count Holzer as yet another of the museum’s countless treasures. “They come to the Met because of its standing in the world,” he says modestly. “I happen to be standing at the door.” That’s sometimes literally true. During the Met’s landmark Alexander McQueen exhibit, notorious for up to four-hour waits to get in, Holzer stayed until 2 a.m. during the final weekend, scouting the lines of people winding throughout the museum to cull out seniors and others he felt should be escorted inside.

The Lincoln-related opportunities have snowballed over the years, but Holzer, who started out as a journalist and then flacked for Bella Abzug, never considered scaling back his Met position, one he describes as a “combination graduate school, museum, fishbowl of society, diplomatic center—it’s extraordinary, everything I ever imagined it would be and much more.” That is, until he was recently appointed the first Roger Hertog Fellow at the New York Historical Society. He assumes residency in January and, along with lecturing there, will continue working on his next book, one that explores the relationship between Lincoln and the press. “I will continue to represent the Met as my top priority,” he says, “but I will be letting go of day-to-day branding, marketing and promoting of exhibitions and programs after 20 years in order to focus on strategic press issues and government relations, which I enjoy very much. We have wonderful relations with the city, state and federal governments, including leaders—many of whom I’ve known for years.” This includes former governor Mario Cuomo, with whom he co-authored 1990’s Lincoln on Democracy (which sports a Tony Bennett watercolor of Lincoln gifted to Holzer by the artist/singer on its front cover). “I’ll continue making the argument during these last weeks of fiscal-cliff negotiations that the uniquely American idea of giving charitable donors tax deductions for contributions to health, cultural, scientific and religious institutions and universities is crucial for a society that doesn’t provide government funding for these things,” Holzer goes on to say. “That’s an advocacy we want very much to make, not only on our own behalf but for, say, Bellevue, which needs charitable contributions to rebuild. There’s no Bellevue Hospital in New York for the first time in 200 years!”

Harold Holzer will appear with playwright/screenwriter Tony Kushner on Jan. 29 at the New York Historical Society (170 Central Park West) for a discussion following a 7 p.m. screening of the movie Lincoln. Checkwww.nyhistory.org or call 212-485-9268 for more information.

Jade Townsend’s “Beastly” Installation

By Melissa Stern, for CityArts

Jacques Rivette’s Celine and Julie Meta Movie Returns

CITYARTS EXCLUSIVE: LOOKING AT A CLASSIC THAT CONFOUNDS FILM CULTURE

BY VALERIE GLADSTONE

When Alonzo King established LINES Ballet in 1982 in San Francisco, few believed he could maintain a new company in the city where the San Francisco Ballet had long captured the area’s ballet audience. Moreover, King did not conform to the typical ballet artistic director—he grew up in Santa Barbara in a distinguished family of movers and shakers in the African American community, trained at both the school of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater and American Ballet Theater and performed with Dance Theater of Harlem. Even more unlikely, he wanted to start his venture on the West rather than the East Coast.

Quickly, he proved all the doubters wrong.

Today, King is one of the top choreographers in classical contemporary dance, with a wide-ranging repertory that includes collaborations with numerous international composers, musicians and visual artists, including China’s Shaolin monks, actor Danny Glover and jazz saxophonist Pharoah Sanders. Plus, the company has an enviable tour schedule and a vibrant school.

It has been featured at the Venice Biennale, the Edinburgh Festival, Montpellier Danse and the Holland Dance Festival, and King has been commissioned by the Swedish Royal Ballet, Frankfurt Ballet, Les Ballets de Monte-Carlo, The Joffrey Ballet, Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, Hong Kong Ballet and North Carolina Dance Theatre, among others.

Asked the secret of his success, King says, “I try to choreograph beautiful works that resonate with universal truths.”

In LINES Ballet’s upcoming season at The Joyce Theater May 8-13, King’s choreographic gifts and widely heralded dancers will be on display in a program including Scheherazade, commissioned by the Monaco Dance Forum to inaugurate the centenary of the Ballet Russes de Monte Carlo and set to a new score by tabla master Zakir Hussain after Rimsky-Korsakov, and Resin, an exploration of Sephardic music with songs and field recordings from Yemen, Turkey, Morocco and Spain.

A true scholar of the world’s cultures and music, King mines relationships between diverse groups of people, bringing them subtly to light in works like those that will be presented at The Joyce Theater. The character of Scheherazade particularly fascinated him. He explains that she had to convince the ruler not to kill her and save her sisters by healing him with her voice.

“It wasn’t simply her stories,” he says, “but her voice. It transported him. Your voice is the key to who you are. I had to show this through movement, how her lovingness transformed him. In a sense, she represents the divine mother.”

While he likes the Rimsky-Korsakov score, he also thrives on working with living composers, and so asked Hussain for a new score. “It’s a partnership when I collaborate with a composer, just as choreographing is a partnership with my dancers. Artists are givers. They inspire me,” King explains.

Dancer David Harvey joined LINES five years ago. “Alonzo sees endless possibilities in dance and his dancers,” he says. “It makes it challenging but also rewarding—you never reach the point where you are finished.

“He’s never abandoned ballet; he’s committed to fulfilling its potential. He’s a purist in the best sense—no flash, no glitter, just honest and courageous dance.”

Do women have to be naked to get into the museum? The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s latest photo show suggests that—in 2012—the Guerilla Girls are still on target.

From kitschy Victorian peep show prints to mid-20th-century studies of the body’s geometry, there are memorable images in the show. Several of the finest photographs here are also among the best known. Two of Edward Weston’s pictures of his lover Charis Wilson, sprawled naked in the sand dunes at Oceano, Calif., (1936), have been admired for more than half a century. Despite their familiarity, they remain fresh, fierce and sensual.

But ultimately, The Met’s assembly of more than 60 photographs from the museum’s big collection serves up a narrow slice of a very wide field, heavily favoring male photographers and female models. “Naked before the Camera” is a survey that pays more attention to soft porn and peep-show imagery than you might expect from an art museum. Any claims that the show offers a social history of the photographed nude are belied by the sparse information provided about the context of these images, including the photographers, their models and the market for these works.

The show is divided into three sections, each addressing a different topic. The first concentrates on 19th-century photographs made as aids for painters. The second focuses on medical, ethnographic and erotic photography. Only the last focuses on 20th- and 21st-century images that would generally be considered art in their own right.

In all three groups, the vast majority of pictures were posed in studios or studio-like settings and present the nude body detached from the world beyond. In many, the face of the model is partly or completely hidden.

All too often, what remains are studies of anatomy and composition, some more beguiling than others. A beautifully composed “Ariadne” (1867), by English photographer Oscar Gustave Rejlander, recreates a pose from Titian’s “Venus and Adonis”—an attempt to measure the painter’s anatomical accuracy, according to wall notes from the curator.

Irving Penn’s intriguing “Nude No. 57” (1949-50) plays with foreshortening to highlight both the elegance and awkwardness of a female torso, knees and thighs, while Bill Brandt’s “South Kensington” (1979) offers an extreme perspective on two long legs—from shins to buttocks—stretched out like the evening’s dinner on a matte black sofa.

The few male nudes in the exhibit are treated with similar detachment. “Arm” (1935), by Man Ray, frames a masculine shoulder, bicep and elbow like a piece of abstract sculpture. A wasp-waisted male torso from the 1930s by fashion photographer George Platt Lynes twists toward the viewer to display his perfectly muscled back—a pretty pin-up picture if ever there was one, high on design value, low on content.

Most disturbing is “Sharkey” (1980) by a photographer named Jim Jager, who published soft-porn magazines featuring black men. Jager posed his African-American model with a large, wooden staff, as if he’d just emerged from the jungle with his spear. Strangely, the curator’s wall text provides no information about the race of the photographer or his clients, nor any comment about the racism inherent in the image.

One of the things missing from this show are images of naked people going about the everyday activities of their lives—swimming in lakes, diving into fountains, sunbathing, getting dressed for parties or changing out of costumes backstage. With a few notable exceptions—which include one Lady Ottoline Violet Anne Cavendish-Bentinck Morrell’s blurry shots of 10-year-old girls frolicking in her garden (circa 1916); Garry Winogrand’s memorable image of a streaker, “Easter Sunday, Central Park, New York” (1973); and John Goodman’s compelling 1976 portrait of a naked couple standing in front of their Commonwealth Avenue apartment building in Boston—there is little to suggest the wide variety of situations in which photographers have recorded people naked.

But the show’s most glaring omission is one of gender. Only eight of the more than 60 photographs in the show were taken by women.

Predictably, Diane Arbus is represented by two images, including her sourly satirical “Retired Man and his Wife at Home in a Nudist Camp One Morning, N.J.” (1963), which shows a self-satisfied, middle-aged couple sitting naked in an ordinary American house. The sags and wrinkles of their flesh offer stark contrast to the airbrushed curves of a girly picture hanging on their wall. If ever a black-and-white photo embodied a grayness of spirit, this is it.

The dramatically lit torso of a slender woman with her head thrown back, by French-Polish photographer Germaine Krull (1897-1985), offers a tantalizing glimpse of one female photographic vision that flourished in Europe between the world wars. But without other images by the artist, we are unable to make sense of the work or get an idea of what Krull might have been up to.

The same can be said for the photographs of Hannah Wilke, who is represented by two prints of herself posing in an abandoned building in Queens. Both are part of her “Snatch Shot with Ray Gun: So Help Me Hannah” (1978) series. Wilke, as the wall text in the exhibition informs us, “was one of a number of artists in the 1960s and 1970s who began manipulating their own bodies in photographs and performances to call attention to rituals of self-presentation.” However, the two images chosen for the show aren’t enough to convey the context or the radical nature of what she was doing.

“Maybe female photographers simply aren’t interested in the naked body,” an elderly woman standing next to me at the exhibit mused, when she heard me exclaiming over the pitifully small number of female artists in the show.

“Do you believe that?” I asked. “No, not really,” she conceded, laughing.

Imogen Cunningham. Ruth Bernhard. Eve Arnold. Lola Alvarez Bravo. Susan Meiselas. Nan Goldin. Sally Mann. Francesca Woodman. These are just eight of the hundreds—probably thousands—of accomplished women who have photographed nudes. Each has her own, individual vision of the human body. Yet none of these important artists were included in The Met’s history of the nude in photography.

Rarely has that famous 1989 observation by the Guerrilla Girls been more apt. Women, it seems, still have to be naked to get into the museum.

Naked Before the Camera 
Through Sept. 29, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 5th Ave., 212-535-7710, 
metmuseum.org

Of course James Brown’s 1986 autobiography, The Godfather of Soul, begins outrageously: “I wasn’t supposed to be alive…I was a stillborn kid.” It’s a contradiction and a medical impossibility, but no bother. When Brown died on Christmas Day 2006, aged 73, he’d played more than 80 shows in the preceding year, many of them in Europe. He’d been a PCP addict for over two decades and still performed acrobatically enough that he required post-show painkillers. In other words: Don’t talk to James Brown about medical impossibilities. His whole life was one long affront to his potential limitations.

The stillborn anecdote might seem like typical self-mythologizing bluster, but the biggest takeaway from R.J. Smith’s new biography, The One (Gotham, 2012), is that Brown’s weapons-grade ego was the product of profound emotional scars. Smith doesn’t dwell on this fact, but it lurks behind his every page and quote. Brown was abandoned by his mother and abused by his dad and was dancing for strangers’ money before he hit puberty. He literally knew how to hustle before he knew how to love.

“Communicating basic emotional information to human beings was something [Brown] only learned later, after he found a way to make people care,” Smith writes. “The one place he did get emotionally heard, and fed, was on stage.”

Offstage, the Star Time aura faded fast. Brown routinely exploited even his most devoted band members, most of whom eventually quit in anger. He had no meaningful artistic collaborations with other artists during his prime and barely ever co-wrote a song (though he often included others, including his own children, in the songwriting credits to ease his tax burden).

In one confidant’s telling, he was incapable of anything other than sexual relationships with women and he had no one, male or female, that he’d consider a friend. He was ceaselessly creative, but creativity was just another way of asserting himself and proving his domination over others.

The key irony of Brown’s life, and the thing that has made him such a rich muse for generations of writers, is that his very pathological selfishness made him an ideal civil rights idol. By merely following his natural, surely unhealthy need to be the alpha dog, he communicated that such a desire was even possible for a black American.

His assertiveness was revelatory for a community in desperate need of self-respect. But he always reminded them who came first: When Brown taught his audience how to “do the James Brown” during his late-1960s performances of “There Was a Time,” he showed black Americans how to be themselves by acting more like him.

Brown’s relationship and importance to the Civil Rights Movement is complex enough to warrant the kind of multivolume biography that Robert A. Caro and Taylor Branch have afforded other icons of the era. The One isn’t nearly so ambitious, though Smith’s research is often stunning and his critical treatment of Brown’s music and performances is always insightful.

He neglects to mention what year Brown was born and makes no significant mention of the man’s nine kids, for example, but he situates Brown’s career within a larger African-American cultural context stretching from the plantation field to Afrika Bambaataa. He also deserves credit for his book’s title, which emphasizes the rhythmic structure of Brown’s work over his many fawning nicknames. By laying heavily into the downbeat, Brown anchored his huge bands as they chopped the rest of the bar up into jagged, staccato syncopations. The one was his organizing principle, the fundamental ingredient to his visionary style that, in Smith’s words, “created a new kind of space” in pop music.

To read the full article at CityArts click here.