Through a “Floor,” Schizophrenically

If I want to hold true to my personal pledge to evaluate movies on this blog “for what they are,” then I can’t really write what I want to write here—mostly because “Burn the Floor” isn’t a movie; it’s a Broadway show. But that’s a problem which is easily overcome, simply by saying, “To hell with my subtitle and the four people who read this.”

The other half of the problem is a little thornier: as always, I don’t want to evaluate anything unfairly. I see it done all the time. When a reviewer bashes something by evaluating it as a piece of Art when it’s pretty obvious that the producer was not interested in being artistic, it pisses me off. In movies, for example, evaluating “The Hangover” based on anything other than how funny it was would make as much sense as evaluating an apple pie as a cheesecake. I don’t support it.

However, I am of two minds when it comes to “Burn the Floor.”  I sort of expected it to be artistic, so I really want to chide it for its ostentation and Xerxean excess and for generally being a whore of a production, but I can’t, because I initially forgot to factor into my expectations that it’s a Broadway show, and Broadway’s very signature (excepting a few) is whoredom and Xerxean excess. What can I say—glitz is a great way to entertain.

The only way around this, then, is to write a dual, schizoid review—one reviewing it as Performance Art, and one as a Broadway Show.

“BURN THE FLOOR” AS A PIECE OF PERFORMANCE ART

It’s too bad. There was some real talent up there.

But in Broadway Production for Money-Hungry Invertebrates, it is clearly stated on page 86 that “talent is never enough; there must be dry ice and partial nudity.” And so it was written. And so it was overproduced.

Aesthetically modeled after the seasonal kitsch-a-thon of Dancing with the Stars, “Burn the Floor” is the relatively new Broadway production featuring twenty or so talented dancers from around the world performing wide-ranging ballroom(ish) numbers in several different styles.

Don’t get me wrong: the dances themselves are great. But they are eclipsed in a gale of cheese and sequins. To render it palatable to the average NYC Broadway-goer, the people behind this show apparently felt the need to “sex it up,” and thus we are left with slinky dresses, white fur boas, half-open shirts, hairless male busts, ubiquitous ground fog, and every other dance-related cliché you might be able to call to mind.

The cheesiness hits its peak with a number that centers around a blond woman in a silver-sequined dress in a foggy night-scene who’s joined on stage by two shirtless men. They waltz around for a while and are joined by another shirtless man. Then another. Then another. Then another. Until there are six men on stage dancing with one woman, spinning her between them, lifting her, dipping her, and spiraling around her like so many spray-tanned moons. Then they blindfold her and dance with her some more. Is this a harlequin romance novel? I was half expecting another shirtless guy to emerge on a horse, maybe with a broadsword and hair extensions. Maybe we’ll be so lucky in “Burn the Floor 2.”

“BURN THE FLOOR” AS A BROADWAY SHOW

I haven’t looked forward to anything in a long time as much as I looked forward to “Burn the Floor.” There’s nothing sexier than a good, edgy ballroom routine. All the marketing was covered with the word “Sizzle!” I’m a fan of “sizzle.” I don’t know who isn’t.

For those who seek premium dancing and captivating special effects, the show does not disappoint. It starts and ends at a breakneck pace, slowing down only a few times for a Waltz or two (which make the old people happy). Dances vary from Rumba to Jive, running the  style spectrum and sometimes bleeding into each other. I wouldn’t say it was enough to live up to its slogan, “Ballroom. Reinvented.” but the blending certainly produced some exciting fusions.

 Swing may have been the favorite of the night, as evidenced by the collective gasp every time we were sure one of the females was going to end up paralyzed from being dropped on her head, only to see her stop an inch from the floor.

I occasionally had trouble focusing on the dancers, though, as excellent as they were, having fallen hopelessly in love with Rebecca Tapia, the lead female vocalist, who strutted around in a magnetic sort of way, wearing sparkly things. She and male vocalist Ricky Rojas sang extremely well and effectively added the dimension of live music to the show (which is a dimension you don’t often get at dance performances, for obvious economic reasons).

This is a show that hits hard and often, with a lot of glitter and skin and occasional endearing Broadway cheesiness. I’m always glad to see Dance being popularized in such a way—expanded from weekday television. Any attention the dance community can get is a good thing. I will make this suggestion: if you see this show, have somewhere to go afterward, because you won’t be able to sit still for at least two hours.

New York, I’m with you mostly for your money

The word “exploitative” comes to mind.

Anyone remember that song, “Mambo #5”? Remember how bad it was, but how everyone you knew named Monica or Erica or Tina or Rita or Sandra or Mary or Jessica kind of had a thing for that song? And remember how it got to #3 on the charts?

It makes me suspicious when people give shout-outs in their art. Are they doing it because they really do love the object of their bullhorning, or are they including boisterous apostrophes toward popular names/places/things to make dough off those who also love them/are them? And what is “New York, I Love You” if not one giant shout-out to one giant city? Is this a proclamation of love for NYC, or is this an exploitation of the same?

At one point, as Gus (Bradley Cooper, forever the guy who played the asshole boyfriend in “Wedding Crashers”) stands outside The Slaughtered Lamb waiting for his new lover, I nudged my friend and said “Oh, I’ve been there quite a bit.” And then I knew I had totally fallen for it. Damn. Well, it’s human nature.

Comprising around a dozen narratives produced by different writers and directors, “New York, I Love You” gets its fragile coherence from three salient themes: New York City, Love, and Cigarettes. (Just kidding about that last one, but damn, I now feel like I have to start smoking to meet a nice girl around here. Or at least carry a lighter.) It’s difficult, therefore, to evaluate the movie as a whole. I did have my favorites, though.

The most enjoyable was the simple narrative of Mitzie and Abe on their 63rd wedding anniversary. Unlike most of the others, this Joshua Marston-directed vignette doesn’t take place in Manhattan, but on the way to Coney Island, where, after a relentless barrage of hilarious bickering and nagging (“Pick yah feet up!”), Mitzie and Abe watch the waves crash from the boardwalk in silence, content in their obvious and enduring love. That is, until some skateboarders nearly scare the old couple into voiding their bowels. The fact that Marston’s vignette unfolds in the less touristy area of New York makes it feel more authentic, at least to me. It didn’t feel like he was trying to capitalize on something.

But beautiful people in Manhattan isn’t necessarily unrealistic. It can happen.

Ethan Hawke, who’s been blessed with some of the finest filmic lovers in existence (Jolie, Delpy, Paltrow, Thurman, Tomei…), is denied an additional one in his slice of the film. His wildly audacious, logorrheic, and downright impressive courting of a beautiful woman outside a bar is classic, and is Hawke at his best. However, he’s at a loss for words when the woman informs him that she’s a prostitute, hands him a card, and tells him that, if he’s interested, weekdays are best.

Natalie Portman’s contribution, which she wrote and directed (but did not appear in), is a story of a mocha-skinned man played by dancer Carlos Acosta and a cute little girl having a day of fun in Central Park. Down by the fountain, two women tell him that he is “so good with her” and how hard it is to find a good Manny these days. After they explain that a “Manny” is a “male nanny,” the man nods and smiles. Shortly thereafter, he drops Maggie off with her mother and tells her that Maggie misses her. It then cuts to a scene is of this “Manny” performing a dance solo on stage in front of a large audience, the few seconds of which are just incredible–to the point where you will Youtube this dude. In the audience is Maggie, who we hear scream “Yay Daddy!” and then there’s that “ahh” moment where we’re supposed to realize we’re all racist.

Portman’s portion, surprisingly, was the only one that took on racial issues directly. There was another about forbidden cross-cultural love (which Portman starred in), but that one had to do more with religion than race. Given the diversity and tensions of New York, one would think that there would’ve been fertile ground for racial issues to be at least tangentially explored. Or, in short, WHERE ARE ALL THE BLACK PEOPLE? Compared to real-life New York, this movie was a bit of a whitewash. It also left out homosexual love, I realized, having attended this film with a heartbroken lesbian.

But then again, if the movie had included that stuff, I might’ve trashed it for being too PC.

The remaining vignettes ranged greatly in story and quality, covering everything from a “successful” prom night to a phone-only courtship to a role-playing married couple to a painter obsessed with a girl he sees in Chinatown to a weird story of a wealthy aging former singer and a slightly deformed bellhop (Mr. Shia LeBeouf, who actually wasn’t that bad) who may or may not have been a figment of her imagination. Some, like the prom story, are fun but shallow. Others try too hard for the label of “poetic” and miss the boat with overwrought dialogue. Even with the good parts, I couldn’t help but check my watch and wonder what the playing time was.

People will go see this movie, though. Because people love New York. And people love Love. It’s a formula. We can’t know what the motivations were for making this movie, but we do know that it was an unofficial follow-up to “Paris, Je T’aime” and will be unofficially followed-up by “Shanghai, I Love You” in 2011. Weird how these filmmakers have so much love for so many different citie$. (Oh whoops, a typo!)

“A Serious Man” – Zagat rated

As a Biblically uninformed non-practicing Catholic, I feel unqualified to review this movie. There’s all kinds of Hebrew. There’s a Yiddish parable. There’s a Mitzvah. There’s a Dybbuk. Even after a year with two Jewish roommates and another year in Crown Heights, I still suspect that half this movie flew over my head.

Therefore, to be fair to the indomitable Coens, I’m going to try something unprecedented, as far as I know, and string together a Zagat-style movie review.

Here we go:

When going to see a Coen brothers movie, it’s almost foolish not to expect a “metaphysical pie in the face,” which is exactly what they deliver with their “pitilessly bleak” new comedy, “A Serious Man.” Whether it will “floor you or drive you batty,” with its “grim narrative soil” is a matter of perspective. (Just ask the Junior Rabbi.) Like the Book of Job—its “source material”—this is a “distilled, hyperbolic account of the human condition,” but where “every cosmic joke is a black one.” True, this film, at times, “makes you feel anxious and miserable,” but it’s “impossible not to respect” a film that can manipulate your physicality like that.

Well, that was easy. Probably really illegal too. Sorry, Legitimate Media!

But really, after reading all those reviews (or at least the first paragraphs of them), I think the most apt sentence came from Todd McCarthy at Variety, who said “‘A Serious Man’ is the kind of picture you get to make after you’ve won an Oscar.” As “bleak” as it was—and that was the preeminent adjective—it also felt unabashedly celebratory.

I know: that sounds crazy and contradictory. But listen, I got a sense that the directors had always wanted to make this. There’s no discernible attempt at “broad appeal” here. One gets the sense, watching it, that there must be some autobiographical inside joking going on here to which we were not privvy–or invited. It’s set in Minnesota in 1967 and is about a Jewish family. The brothers were born in ‘54 and ‘57 in Minnesota. If you do the math and reduce the fractions, it looks like a movie that sprouted from a conversation that began with, “Hey Ethan, remember our adolescence?” And he totally did. Because no one forgets his adolescence.

And now, after they’ve won their golden folded-armed man, and after they’ve managed to stuff people like me so completely in their back pocket that they’ll just automatically shell out the money to see whatever they produce, they can make the movie they wanted to make this whole time without fear of it going unwatched. They can ask “big questions” and not answer them. They can include as much “Jew stuff” as they want. They can be cynical. They can be coy. They can be wink-winky and nudge-nudgey. They can make us cringe and cover our eyes and heave sigh after sigh and not even worry about it. They’re talented, and they deserve it.

That is not to say that this movie is bad. It’s very funny in a few scenes, and the acting  and costuming is superb. It’s just that it’s hard to watch a man trying to do right by God and family and getting screwed over so royally and consistently and relentlessly. But such is life, I guess. And from what I understand, such has been history for a certain People.

Funniest thing is, the news anchors look exactly the same.

I first encountered “Surrogates” when one of the curvy blondes hired to melt the intergalactic young brains at New York Comic Con handed me a black postcard featuring an evenly tanned, non-bald Bruce Willis. Bruce also appeared to have a metal neck. Hm. I turned it over, read the marketing copy, and immediately decided that this movie was about Facebook. Yeah, that  Facebook.

Then the preview began to show, and the posters of pulchritudinous people with titanium endoskeletons started to pop up in subway stations. And I would point to them and turn to whomever I was with and casually say, “Oh that’s that movie about Facebook.” Most of them assumed I was joking or were just plain confused. By all appearances, this was an action movie, not a montage of Jesus-fish wall graffiti and What Lawn Ornament Are You? results. (Flamingo, if you were curious.)

Having now seen it, I hold my ground: this movie is about Facebook. (OK, and Twitter and Second Life and WoW, etc.)

The concept itself, however, I’d come across in The Time Before Facebook, in David Foster Wallace’s novel Infinite Jest, which I had been reading just as Facebook was trickling its way to the Midwest. The book housed about 10 pages devoted to the hypothetical rise and fall of the hypothetical video-phone. There’s a great little synopsis at conversationalreading.com, which I’ll copy here:

Basically it works like this: First consumers flock to the technology. However, they soon notice the drawback — now the person you are talking to on the phone can see you…[C]onsumers develop horrible complexes about appearing ugly on their video phones. Soon new technology enables users to “upgrade” their appearance, and this idea runs away until eventually there is an entire industry built around providing fake appearances to hardwire into video-phones. At this point people realize that for all intents and purposes they’re right back where they started, voice-only phone communication, and the bottom drops out of the video-phone market.

Apparently, Mr. Wallace saw it when he wrote this way back in 1994–that technology was allowing people to carefully manipulate and craft their outward appearances. He saw how easy it was for the Marketing Gods to pray on our vanities.

These days, Facebook is the ultimate tool for persona-honing. We can choose our most flattering picture. We can fake our interest in soccer. We can de-tag that one photo where our arms make us look kinda gay. We can elicit desired reactions from peers with carefully vague status updates. Moreover, we can present ourselves how we want to be seen, and almost believe that it’s true. And that’s what “Surrogates” is all about, underneath the action.

I should probably talk about the movie now.

It is not the future; it is an alternate history, and it’s now. Technology has evolved that lets us sit in a chair all day and control our better-lookin’ mechanical selves, remotely enjoying all the senses (except maybe taste?) that we’d enjoy if we were using our actual bodies. Your “surry” can look however you’d like it to look. Most people have chosen to look like Mario Lopez. I guess flawless and vacant is in. Murder rates have plummeted to almost non-existent. War has essentially become a game of multiplayer Halo. And they didn’t mention it, but I’m assuming STDs are also on the decline?

There’s also a small Ving-Rhames-helmed percentage of the population that has resisted. They live in a roped-off section of town called “The Human Quarter” or something nauseatingly cornball like that. They’re hairy and poor and they’re ugly and they don’t get invited to shit these days. But they insist that surrogacy is evil and they wave sticks around and promise Revolution. Psshh. Yeah right, Humans. What match are you for human-controlled robots?

Well, now something strange is going on. The humans might have a weapon of some kind. A very dangerous one. For the first time in many years, the police have a 187 on their hands. Somehow, some rogue human zapped a surrogate with some Star Trekish contraption, overloading its circuits and killing its controller. (In Facebook terms, this would be like someone spamming your wall until you die, bleeding from the eyes.) And that person who died just happens to be the son of the inventor of surrogate technology, Mark Zuckerberg Emilio Canter. (They didn’t actually give him a first name on IMDB, so I’m just going to call him “Emilio.”)

So Bruce Willis gets put on the case: Where did this weapon come from? And how do the “Meat Bags” have it, when it’s way too advanced for them? I mean, they’re just silly humans!

Just as he’s digging in, though, Bruce becomes involved in a dangerous chase. In the process, his surrogate is destroyed by the population of the Human Quarter and he’s nearly killed by the zapper thing. Hospitalized, he’s forced to drop the case. But c’mon. It’s fucking Bruce Willis. He’s not giving up that easy. I mean, haven’t they seen the Die Hards?

In the course of all this, though, he is becoming increasingly conflicted about his own surry. He hasn’t seen his beloved wife in forever. Just her goddamn robot. His son died years ago in a car accident, and this is how his wife is dealing with it. She hides behind her veneer. He thinks that she shouldn’t though. You can read it in his eyes when he wanders into his son’s old room and caresses his little baseball glove. Then he just goes all Zach Morris on her later, as they argue in her workplace: “Baby, I want you. This isn’t you. Come back to me.” But she’s all like “This is better.” and just “unplugs” mid-conversation. (Which makes for intriguing possibilities in connubial exit behavior. Because, really, what do you do? Continue to talk to this powered-down hot robot?)

You can probably see where this is all headed. Leather jacket comes out. Bruce Willis goes vigilante. Zuckerberg goes batshit. There’s a Revolution. There’s a Conspiracy. A Personal Epiphany. A Ticking Clock. A Decision. A Dramatic Climax, and then—what’s that I hear? Laughter? From everyone in the theater? Whoops, I don’t…uh…I don’t think that was supposed to be funny.

But it kinda was.

“Surrogates” takes itself way too seriously. It wants to be an allegory with guns like “The Matrix” was an allegory with guns. There are even what could be construed as nods to “The Matrix”—the style of running in the chase scenes, the leather jacket on the “free” character vs. the suits on the surrogates, the bolt-belching ray gun, the angle of recline in the sim chairs—but the coherence of the film’s world couldn’t approach the level of “The Matrix.” There were too many questions, too many improbabilities, and thus the alternate universe appeared thrown together. When that happens, “dramatic” becomes “ridiculous.”

The movie’s ambitions are laudable. It’s helping to get across an important message about remembering who we are (not Mario Lopez) and the necessity for real human connection, but it could’ve maybe done without the tired end-of-the-world framework. Perhaps a more even-handed, cerebral approach should be employed when implying that we’d be better off without our online communities. But then probably no one would’ve seen it. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go post this review and wait for people to tell me they care.