Written and directed by Richard LaGravenese, from the novel by Kami Garcia, starring Alden Ehrenreich, Alice Englert, Jeremy Irons, and Viola Davis.

A MODERN FAIRY TALE

After reviewing “The Gatekeepers” for this web site, I wanted to see some fantasy, something light, so I checked out “Beautiful Creatures.”    Another reason is that one reviewer said that Jeremy Irons and Emma Thompson make a meal of the scenery.  I love both and enjoy them in anything, and listening to Jeremy Irons’ voice with its oily, James Mason-smooth, rich delivery.   If anything, maybe this film will get teens to read.

It is a modern fairy tale in which the sought after young girl is not a princess but a witch who comes from a long line of witches and warlocks.   Except they’re not called “witches” but “casters” as in casting spells.  Not casters like wheels for moving furniture around.  “Creatures” stars two unknown (to me, anyway) actors, Alice Englert as Lena Duchannes, the caster, and her teen-age suitor, Ethan Wate played by Alden Ehrenreich, who has the endearing vocal inflections and mannerisms of a young Leonardo diCaprio.  Alice Englert is the daughter of filmmaker Jane Campion; Alden Ehrenreich is said to have been discovered by Stephen Spielberg at a friend’s barmitzvah.  If he’s never acted before, you wouldn’t know it by his portrayal of Ethan.  He’s a natural.

Ethan lives in a small, moss-covered town in North Carolina. He wants to get out, and sees college as a way.  His only escape is books- good ones- literature.  Real books- paper backs.  He reads Vonnegut, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Salinger, Bukowski, and more.  His mother is allegedly dead; his father non-compos-mentis with Alzheimer’s and never appears.  Ethan has been cared for since infancy by Amma, played by Viola Davis in a familiar role as a wise, spiritual, all-knowing woman, who lives in a spooky house in the swamps.  She is the town librarian, dresses in the latest African chic: prints, bangles, etc, and has a key to a hidden vault of secrets reminiscent of Dan Brown’s “Da Vinci Code.”  Part of the town’s history goes back to the Civil War and each year the townsfolk take part in a Civil War re-enactment of the Battle of Honey Hill.  There are flashbacks to that era shown in dreamy, surreal scenes in which a young woman a la Scarlett O’Hara, loses her young Confederate soldier to Union fire- but spookily brings him back to life.  (Could it be? . . .)

One of the things I loved about “Creatures” is that it shies away from stereotypes as much as possible in a fairy tale:  Lena, as a caster, is not a pale, anorexic, willowy girl who dresses in long, clinging, black dresses.  Though Ethan has been seeing her this way in recurring dreams, with long, black tendrils hiding her face.  In real life, Lena is the picture of rosy-cheeked health and dresses like a typical teen.   Anyway, seems she has been kicked out of every high school from here to Hades and ends up a senior at Ethan’s.  She’s the newby, and is taunted and bullied by her bland, blond classmates. (They suffer the consequences.)

Uncle Macon (Jeremy Irons) lays down the law to Lena and Ethan.

Lena lives with her Uncle Macon Ravenswood (Jeremy Irons).  From the exterior, the house looks like the Munster mansion- all ropey vines, a squeaky, baroque, wrought-iron gate, a long, winding road o’er shadowed with cypresses festooned with Spanish Moss.  Ethan pays an uninvited visit hoping to talk to her.  He is the only one willing to befriend her, having, like I said, seen her in his dreams.  The heavily carved door is, of course, somehow ajar.  He pushes his way in.  We expect to see a dark room, dimly lit with wall sconces and candelabras; overstuffed, 17^th century furniture, including a mahogany dining table with scrolled legs, ending in dragon claws, clutching amber balls. But what a delightful surprise!  It is nothing you’d expect.  When Uncle Macon appears, he is elegant- suavely dressed in cream silks, his grey mane swept back in deep waves.  He speaks in well-modulated, orotund tones.

Naturally, there is a curse that has to be broken if Ethan is to get the girl before she goes over to the dark side when she turns 16 in a few weeks, epitomized by her cousin Sidney Duchannes (Emmy Rossum), who wears slinky, red dresses, shades, and speeds around in a sporty red convertible.  You know she’s evil when she causes a squad car to suddenly career off the road and burst into flames.  Another hint is that her eyes became supra-naturally luminescent immediately before she executes an evil deed.  The introduction of Sidney was, I thought, an unnecessary element, except she was a device to influence Ethan’s best friend and get Lena to come over to the dark side.  But the family relationships got confusing.  What with shape-shifting Emma Thomson as Mrs. Lincoln, the town radical fundamentalist Christian AND Serafine, Macon’s dark, caster of a sister, and Lena’s mother, as well as a bunch of other ageless relatives:  Gramma (Eileen Atkins), Aunt Del (Margo Martindale), a little-seen brother, etc.

One of the high-lights of the film takes place at a banquet at Macon’s.  Everyone’s been called together to convince the young lovers to break it off.  Ethan finds himself seated at the sumptuous table headed by Macon, with Lena and all the relatives.  Everything’s quiet.  In the background we hear the theme from the 1959 movie, “A Summer Place.”  Broke me up.  Then the room starts spinning around.  I expected everyone to end up as butter when it stopped.

Amma shows the pair the secret vault in the library where the history of the Duchannes and Ravenswood families are kept in leather-bound tomes that only Lena is privy to.  Spells are cast, Ethan loses his memory, Lena stays in her room and pouts.  It’s as though they’d never met.  Soon they all gear up for the re-enactment.  There’s some shape-shifting going on, someone is accidentally shot dead with a real bullet and is brought back to life in another body.  Serafina?  Next time you’re in the woods and see a tangle of thick vines choking a tree, think of her.  Yes, it did get a little hard to follow.  Ethan drives down the road, off to college.  Lena is in her room studying.  She looks up.  Her eyes reveal her new state of being.  The movie ends with nothing resolved, but you come away feeling that somehow, the young lovers will end up together.

The Gatekeepers, directed by Dror Moreh who also conducted the interviews.

AN ENDLESS PROBLEM OF INSURMOUNTABLE PROPORTIONS.

By Gaetana Caldwell-Smith

“The Gatekeepers” is a riveting documentary film that reveals the behind the scenes actions of one of Israel’s key tools for maintaining its repressive rule over the Palestinian community—Israel’s secret intelligence operations: the Shin Bet (appellation for Israel Security Agency or ISA, formerly Mossad) through candid interviews with ex-leaders, including archival, black and white film clips.   The film opens with a clip of Israel’s six day war with Egypt (UAR at the time), Syria and Jorden in June 5th-10^th, 1967.  One result was that one million Palestinians were put under Israeli rule.  Shin Bet had focussed on internal affairs, but now expanded into combating foreign terrorists. A former member, Avi Dichter, shown being interviewed, was only eleven years old during the war.  He had to ask, “What is war?”

Dror Moreh was inspired by Errol Morris’s documentary, “The Fog of War,” where Morris interviewed Robert McNamara, Secretary of Defense during the Vietnam War.  Moreh’s interviewees either retired or resigned from Shin Bet having gained a conscience regarding their actions. The film contains many memorable yet unsettling images, some  seem right out of a Bond or Bourne film, such as a successful bomb in a cell phone triggered to explode in the user’s ear; and the inhumane conditions of prisons where Palestinian suspects are tortured and held without trial.

Acting under Shin Bet orders, Israeli soldiers’ actions were not unlike those of the US military in Afghanistan.  Taught simple Arabic commands, they went to Palestinian homes to count how many lived in each.  Those who didn’t comply got their doors kicked down.  Soldiers grabbed men, bound and corralled them into trucks and hauled them off, leaving wailing women and children behind.  Unfortunately, one of the commands was mistranslated by one vowel so that “We want to ‘count’ you” came out as “castrate.”

Moreh interviewed one ex-leader who spoke of the beauty of the Palestinian olive groves.  Here, he included grainy black and white shots of soldiers driving through them.  Yet soon the land was confiscated and people were sent to refugee camps.   A Shin Bet leader, curious about the camps, paid a visit and was sickened by the conditions.   Illustrated by archival film clips, we saw people who once lived freely on their land relegated to rows and rows of one room concrete blocks.  Demeaned, Palestinians protested with rudimentary acts of terrorism against Israelis they now saw as” occupiers.”  As these acts increased, a curfew was instigated and as many as a hundred people a night were arrested and tortured.  One Shin Bet member laughingly bragged that some of the methods were such that a victim would confess to killing Jesus.  Shin Bet also relied on human intelligence (HUMINT).  We witnessed films of warehouses filled with rows of file cabinets containing dossiers on hundreds of thousands of alleged suspects.  Clerks sat at Microfiche machines running countless records from which Shin Bet recruited people to betray friends and family.  I imagined that their record-keeping rivaled those of the Nazis.  Villagers, fearing for their safety, ratted on each other.

One of the most unsettling interviewees was Avram Shalom.  In 1982, after the Israeli war with Lebanon, the organization recruited him to head it.  He’d been an officer.   He told Moreh that he felt he could do whatever he wanted and if you didn’t go along, heads would roll.  Sitting for the camera with his glasses and argyle sweater, Shalom, looked more like someone’s grandfather than a leader of a ruthless killing machine.   One incident was the blowing up of a bus transporting suspected terrorists, killing most.  Moreh asked him about it; Shalom couldn’t remember.   When asked if he thought the attack was illegal, Shalom replied that there was no such thing as an illegal action.  Moreh pressed on, “Not even shooting people with their hands behind their backs?”  He said he ordered killings instead of trials because he didn’t want the chance of an armed terrorist in court.  (Ironically, this sounds like a sound-bite from today’s US administration speaking about the “war on terror,” especially how it dealt with Osama bin Laden.)  Impassively and coldly, he answered Moreh’s questions:, “In a war against terrorists, there is no morality.” Anyone who argues with an Israeli soldier is shot in cold blood.  When questioned about their intelligence, he snickered, “All the intelligence in the world could not have predicted the worst terrorist acts,” which made me think of 9-11- there was plenty of intelligence, but no one acted..  He actually chuckled when he said that Shin Bet reminded him of the Nazi’s handling of Jews during the Second World War.   Palestinians see Israelis as terrorists.  Another interviewee said that one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.   One of their mottos is: “Victory is to see you suffer.”  Yet in n November 2003, four former heads of Shin Bet ( Shalom, Yaakov Peri, Gillon and Ami Ayalon) called upon the Government of Israel to reach a peace agreement with the Palestinians.

Retaliation for the bombing of the bus resulted in a suicide bus bomb in Tel Aviv.  It was hard to watch the news coverage of mangled, dismembered bodies among twisted, blackened metal.   Talks about the peace process between Shimon Perez, Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat angered radical, right-wing Jews.  Rabin said, “We who have fought against you, the Palestinians, we say to you today, in a loud and a clear voice, enough of blood and tears … enough!”  Meanwhile, Israel soldiers were fighting Jews building illegal settlements in the West Bank.  Radical Jews were organizing to bomb buses carrying Palestinians.  They also plotted to destroy the Dome of the Rock, clips illustrated how they would do it.  This would bring on Armageddon and the long-awaited Messiah would appear, was their thinking.   Shin Bet infiltrated the Jewish underground to make arrests and succeeded in preventing further attacks.  Shin Bet did double-duty: investigating both Palestinians and their own people.   Yet they could not prevent the 1995 assassination of Rabin by Yigal Amir, a radical right-wing Orthodox Jew, for his signing of the Oslo Accords.

Their matter-of-fact attitude, calmness, and lack of emotion (except for Shalom’s giggles), made them appear as pathological killers.  Still, they verbalized their remorse.  Whether or not they meant it, only they would know.  With decades of stale-mated peace talks, the dismantling and building of settlements; the separation wall; promises, and on-going devastating attacks on both sides; two deadly intifadas; and the division between Hamas and Fatah, between radical, orthodox and moderate Jews; with Palestinians continuing to lob missiles into Jerusalem and Israelis retaliating with air wars and successful missile intercepts; the disagreement on the possibility of a two-state or one-state solution appear to be an endless problem of insurmountable proportions.  Shin Bet has its work cut out for them.

In 2007, the organization started a public recruitment drive with a blog where current members would answer questions; a Web site, and an international ad campaign aimed at computer savvy people.   Shin Bet’s heads stated that all this is geared towards “promoting a more accessible and positive public image for the secret service, long associated with ‘dark, undercover and even violent activity’.”

Nijinsky

Hamburg Ballet Performance at the San Francisco Ballet

February 19, 2013

This is a huge, sprawling production done with imaginative, elaborate staging and lighting and superb technical skill from the dancers.  It is inspired by the troubled life of Vaslav Nijinsky the famous Russian/Polish ballet dancer from the early 20th century.  It is not an easy ballet to follow or immediately grasp.  Some aspects of the ballet seem to refer to events and relationships in Nijinsky’s life and some aspects seem to represent states of his inner life or fantasies, and some seem to be blends of the two.  There are ambiguities that seem to working on several different levels at the same time.  I came to the performance completely unprepared.  I didn’t know anything about Nijinsky except that he was a famous dancer and I didn’t know anything about the events of his life.  The result was I found the performance rather confusing and obscure.

When I attend a theatrical performance, I am always most interested in the concept of the piece, it’s psychological import and meaning, it’s cultural and historical significance.  I think about who wrote this and why.  What were they trying to get across.

In this performance those aspects are not easy to grasp.  Unless you are an expert on the history of ballet and know a lot about the life of Nijinsky, you are not likely to get all the references and allusions in this performance.  I went with a friend who happens to hold a doctoral degree in musicology and she did not get it either, although she got a lot more of it than I did.  She at least knew who he was and his significance, and was able to make connections to some of the other ballets he had been in and she knew a most of the music that was used.  But she did not know the biographical details of Nijinsky’s life and was thus unable to understand much of what was going on.

I was able to discern that it was a kind of retrospective, that many of the sequences represented the contents of the lead dancer’s mind, reminiscences of things that had happened in the past.  There was at least one and probably multiple triangles involving two men and a woman.  I’m not sure if it was the same woman in all of them.  There was a wedding, that was clear, but the character of the marriage was not clear.  The second act seemed to be a descent into psychosis with references to the war (World War 1) and many deaths.  The second act had a surreal quality that was less accessible to being grasped intellectually, but in my eyes it had a more powerful emotional and psychological impact.

This ballet should be very popular among experts on the ballet.  The general public will have a harder time with it unless a special effort is made to prepare in advance.  I studied for several months before attending the Ring of the Nibelung cycle in 2011, and that preparation paid off.   However, I don’t really want to have to do that with every performance, but this is one of that sort where significant early preparation would make a big difference.  Art should be challenging and it should push us beyond our natural boundaries of understanding and perception.  My feeling, in this case, is that the authors did not think enough about who the audience was going to be and the impact that it would have on a naive viewer, which is what most of them are going to be, at least in the United States.  Since this is a large scale production aimed at an audience made up of people who are mostly not experts on ballet and certainly not steeped in the details of Vaslav Nijinsky’s life, it could have been done in a way that would have made it more immediately accessible.  This production might have worked well as an opera.  It does seem to lend itself to that kind of grand conceptual enactment.  The verbal aspect available in opera would have helped a lot in terms of making it intelligible to a viewer not steeped in the life of Nijinsky.

Having said all of that, I still like this.  I liked that it was a big concept, that they were trying to do something with substance and powerful emotional significance, as opposed to gentle entertainment.  This was a performance with real import, although the character of it was not immediately evident.  It had narrative elements, it had subjective explorations of the inner life, it had allusions to historical events that were of relevant to the story line as well as the psychological development of the characters.  It was imaginatively staged, flawlessly executed, and superbly performed.  It is the kind of performance I like to attend.  I came to it unprepared, which was my own fault.  But even unprepared this ballet wins the audience over on the strength of its imaginative conception and first rate execution.

THE MOTHER F _ _ _ _ _ WITH THE HAT

 Reviewed by Jeffrey R Smith of the San Francisco Bay Area Theatre Critics Circle

 Now through March 16^th, the San Francisco Playhouse is performing THE MOTHER F _ _ _ _ _ WITH THE HAT by Stephen Adly Guirgis.

 If theatre was invented, as Artistic Director Bill English avers, “to fulfill a spiritual purpose in our lives,” then this play reaches a close approximation of that raison d’être.

 The characters in the play are not the kinds of people who are likely to attend a performance of THE MOTHER … , they are not likely to be people you would strike up a conversation with on BART, well Veronica yes, but for all the wrong reasons.

 The show is a high octane blend of volatility: part mystery—whose hat is it?—part comedy and part dysfunctional love story.

 Jackie who discovers the hat in his girlfriend’s apartment—played by one of the finest actors in the Bay Area: Gabriel Marin—is likely to be the rantipole carrying on a heated conversation with himself on the subway; if you accidently sat next to Jackie, you would relocate to another seat, another car or possibly exit the train and wait for the next one.

 Profanity rolls off Jackie’s tongue like it did for Pacino in SCARFACE.

 Jackie—much to Marin’s superb acting credit—speaks a staccato Bronx dialect at a rate just a notch below the red line on your audio processing speed; were the entire cast to speak as rapid fire as Jackie, the show would be compressed to a half hour.

 If Jackie is the explosive, then Veronica—played by Isabelle Ortega with self-absorbed detachment and sizzling eroticism—is the both Chiquita who lights the fuse and the detonator.

 As the Jungians remind us, when the psyche is not well, it does not call in a psychotherapist, it invites a Joker into our lives; a Joker who resonates with us and one which has the power to torment us, lancing our psychic carbuncles and reopening scars.

 Veronica is that Joker; a masterful manipulator, operating on a low budget, giving everyone what they want while extracting everything she needs via an invisible symbiosis.

 Veronica is pure contractualism dressed up as intimacy and sensuality; you might let her into your life but you will never get her out of your mind.

 Cousin Julio—played delightfully by Rudy Guerrero—is the rose in Spanish Harlem: sharp, savvy, cool, hip, funny, sensitive, buff and faithfully connected at the familial root with Jackie; he puts leavening and light into the show.

 A set design by Bill English and Matt Vuolo looks like it was ripped from the hood; somewhere north of 125 Street.

 High Speed Rail might never get to California but THE MOTHER F _ _ _ _ _ WITH THE HAT … has already pulled into the station; it is a bullet train that rips through the evening air, powered by a high tension plot line and an energized cast.

 This is high speed entertainment; the seats should have shoulder harnesses.

 For tickets, contact the Box Office at SFPLAYHOUSE.ORG or 415.667.9596.