Screen Time #1
This post is inspired by Howard Karren’s “Indie Screen” column in the Provincetown Independent.
I recently binged all three seasons of The Umbrella Academy on Netflix. A friend had recommended it to me because of thematic parallels to my project Organologies (see post).
The show is, in most respects, mediocre. But I ate it up like flavor-blasted goldfish.
The Umbrella Academy is based on a comic strip by Gerard Way, the lead vocalist of My Chemical Romance.
In it, Elliot Page plays a violin-playing superhero who can harness the power of sound.
The latest season handles Page’s transition with endearing awkwardness. But I can’t help but mourn a missed plot opportunity.
In the original comic, Page’s character transforms into “the White Violin,” a human-instrument hybrid. What could be more trans-coded than that?
The appearance of an autistic character in the second season feels disappointingly one-dimensional.
I’ve been struggling with what to write about Tár since seeing it last week at Lincoln Square’s AMC (a fact funny considering my comments about David Geffen Hall’s décor, which I stand by.)
The theater was surprisingly packed. It turns out, Cate Blanchett is all you need to turn people on to classical music.
In the film, Blanchett plays the (fictional) female conductor of the Berlin Phil. (For a Tár synopsis, read Howard Karren’s excellent review in this week’s Independent.)
Her character is situated in the real-life classical world, with allusions to Leonard Bernstein, James Levine, and Marin Alsop. A suggested Google search: “Is Lydia Tár real?”
Like in Carol, the straight Blanchett plays a lesbian (the subject of a rather topical Them article.)
As Tár’s life unravels, the film takes on a paranoid surreality. Her metronome’s clicks and neighbor’s thumps grow unbearably loud. (Noise sensitivity is also a trope in The Umbrella Academy)
The film’s morality, complicated by Tár’s gender, is purposely ambiguous. Is it bolstering #metoo or bemoaning cancel culture?
I applaud Field for casting an actual cellist, Sophie Kauer, to play the Elgar cello concerto. Hildur Guðnadóttir’s artful score forms part of a concept album (released, coincidentally, the same day as Taylor Swift’s Midnights).
Will Tár inspire more classical listeners? I somehow doubt it. But the New York Times wrote hopefully of a Mahler resurgence.
My favorite part of Tár was (spoiler coming) the bleakly funny ending. After Tár’s fall from grace, she conducts a concert somewhere in Asia. You soon realize it’s a youth orchestra.
Not only that: audience headsets betray that it’s a video game concert. Lydia Tár is the classical equivalent of a “washed up celebrity.”
The brilliance of this might be lost on some. I heard the people next to me go, “What??”
For an even more twisted movie about classical music, see Netflix’s The Perfection. It is so bad it’s good. Or it might just be bad.
Watching it felt as if someone had taken disparate aspects of my life and turned them into a horror movie. A fever dream involving cellists, queer sex, and a deadly virus.
The leads’ unconvincing cello miming accompanies terrible, nonsensical music. The convoluted plot features sexual assault and body horror, including several amputations.
Sorry in advance.