Sunday, April 18, 2010
Neo-Nazism alive and well in LA
I mention it because it's totally unacceptable, and because I wrote about the film The Believer the other day, about a Jewish Neo-Nazi.
Saturday, April 17, 2010
going for brokaw
I went to Southcoast Rep in Costa Mesa to see Howard Korder's new play In the Garden, and I bumped into the master director Mark Brokaw, a graduate of the Drama School at Yale and Obie Award winner, and one the the creators/synthesizers of the approach to acting that I teach at Mother of Invention. Mark was there because he was working on a new play called The Language Archive, which has since opened, and the production got a great review in the LA Times. I have seen quite a bit of Mark's work, and it has been consistently superb. Particularly memorable was a production of Kenneth Lonergan's This Is Our Youth in New York, which starred Mark Ruffalo. It was one of the most memorable nights I have spent in the theater, and I didn't even really like the play itself.
Really looking forward to seeing Mark's work again!
Ryan Gosling's tell
There is a movie that came out
Well, I recently rejoined GreenCine, a local, and I guess more environmentally friendly, version of Netflix, and The Believer was the first movie I got. It is a remarkable movie. I highly recommend it. And it has harrowing relevance to the current political moment, saturated as it is with rightwing hate talk and militia activity. It is an incredibly intelligent movie that is unflinching in its examination of the frightening ardor and intellectual passion of the leaders of these groups.
What was interesting, though, was that Gosling was not good in the role. I was suprised by this. I had admired his work in Half-Nelson, and was ready to be impressed with him here. Instead, I found him to be painfully self-conscious, all scowls and poses and no visceral engagement. Only in a penultimate scene, in which he speaks to an assembly of rightwing political benefactors, does he find his footing, and by then it is way too late.
He has a tell that he is watching himself, and that is his incessant licking of the lips. If you sit in a theater and watch acting that is truly compelling, you will notice something remarkable: no one is coughing. It is not that they are consciously preventing themselves from coughing out of reverence or respect for the actor; rather, the members of the audience have largely forgotten their own bodies and its attendant physical sensations, including the need to cough. They have been induced to project themselves into the body of the actor, and hence they have almost no awareness of their own sensations, unless such sensations are very powerful and insistent. They literally for get themselves.
Conversely, an audience watching bad actors will seek to escape the embarassing spectacle before them and retreat into their own sensations and thoughts, and their will be a superabundance of coughing, almost as if the coughing were an involuntary way of complaining to the actors about their inability to enthrall.
And an actor who is truly, viscerally, engaged in what he or she is doing, truly absorbed in his effort to affect those with whom he interacts and with the vulnerability that underwrites that effort, will not be mindful of his lips and whether or not they need moisture. Occasionally, perhaps, you will see a fully engaged actor lick his or her lips, but it is not a habit or a mannerism that happens repeatedly. Gosling, in this movie, licks his lips constantly. The lip licking is the actor's preparation to say a line, not the character's preparation to speak. Gosling also does a lot of face-scrunching.
There were some other actors who did magnificant work, most notably Theresa Russell, Heather Goldenhersh, and Elizabeth Reaser. They act circles around Gosling. The second DVD I got from GreenCine is Lars and the Real Girl, which also stars Gosling and in which he got critical accolades. It will be interesting to see whether he is good in that. It's possible that I was taken in by his charisma in Half-Nelson, but it's also possible that he had an easier time finding that character in himself. Given his role in The Believer, that would not be difficult to understand.`
Tuesday, April 13, 2010
where's the heat?
Here is a major scene from the movie in which predator and prey take a timeout in a coffee shop. I think one of the living legends acquits himself very well versus his doppleganger in the earlier film, the other one not so much.
Have a look and see what you think.
LA takedown version:
(If you only see a bunch of HTML below, click the headline above to go to my blog)
Heat Version
PS The part where they both say they don't know how to do anything else is very...resonant, to me anyway.
HT JB Waterman
Sunday, April 11, 2010
Zen and the Art of Archery and the art of acting (not to mention the art of teaching acting)
What Zen instructs is that learning is not about the outward manifestation of a skill, but the inward journey through the self. On several occasions the Master leaves Herrigel to struggle hopelessly and heroically with the fiendish difficulties of drawing a bow correctly, only giving him helpful hints when he has reached the point of desperation. Why won’t he tell him these things earlier? Herrigel asks. Because he has to exhaust all the possibilities for himself before he would be ready to take in what the Master has to say. And isn’t this the truth? How many times have I told students what they need to do, only to be met with blank stares or the insincere gestures of over-anxious acceptance. The truth only makes sense when we are ready to hear it, and not a moment before. We have to work things out for ourselves. It takes Herrigel a further two or three years to figure out the ‘right’ moment to loose his arrow, the moment when his hand will fall easily away from the bowstring, without jerking backwards. The long process to reach this point not only teaches him much that is wordless about feeling the task in hand, but it prepares him for the understanding that mastering an art like this is a spiritual activity, not one governed by tricks and predicated on the easy joy of achievement.
I especially like this part:
The truth only makes sense when we are ready to hear it.
There is a Zen parable about a teacher and a student. The teacher is pouring tea. He pours the tea until the cup overflows, and keeps pouring. The student, astonished, asks "Master, what are you doing?" The teacher replies "This cup is like your mind. How can I put anything into it when it is already full?"
Students who come to the class with genuine curiosity and eagerness to learn, and who are prepared for, and undeterred by, difficulty and failure, are the ones who succeed and are the most rewarding to teach, and the ones who make the most progress.
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