Movies - Woody, Lepage, Ai Weiwei, Fokkens

Theater is slow in August Off-Broadway, so with some evenings free, I was able to pick up a few 2012 movies. 

Last Monday, I finally caught up with Woody Allen's To Rome with Love.  My immediate reaction was “a fluff, vacuous and vapid” without the recognizable and interesting characters from the 20s that populated Midnight in Paris; still, on reflection, I give the director a credit for his masterly control editing the seemingly haphazard narrative segments to flow into a continuously entertaining entity.  Rome’s sights were washed out and lacked visual excitement unlike the Midnight’s Paris.

Susan Frömke’s Wagner's Dream is a documentary on the new production of the Ring at the Met, an extravagant venture by Robert Lepage, who got flacks from critics, a damage control and publicity relations effort to promote how the Met is adventurously and successfully keeping the Met abreast the technocratic 21st century and justifying the project as a full realization of Wagner’s dream of Gesamtkunstwerk for the Ring, the proposition that rings false if we remember his own production at Bayreuth where music reigned supreme and would not have allowed a spectacle to overrule it.  I would call the film Lepage’s Fantasy.  But a glimpse into the process of a production in the making, especially in the Met’s backstage made a good Wagnerian drama. 

Then, I saw Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry, a documentary on this dissident artist in China, which, if a bit fawning overall, still powerful thanks to the artist’s inimitable persona and presence; it is a familiar story but for a non-TV owner like myself it was good to see the person, his cohorts, his studios, and demonstrations, exhibitions, and interviews. 

The fourth film, a Dutch import, Meet the Fokkens, the original title of which is Ouweheuren (old whores), is another documentary on two 70-year old twin prostitutes, one retired and the other still working, in the notorious De Wallen, Amsterdam’s Red Light district. I found it charmingly uninhibited and noteworthy for the two aging women’s contagious joie-de-vivre and their dedication to each other heartwarming.