Master Class: Lumet’s "Network"

Thirty-five years ago, a controversial film captured the zeitgeist. It was a heavily dialogue-driven indictment of a powerful new medium that was influencing people’s views of the world. It also had the word “network” in the title although, unlike The Social Network, it was about television. Directed by the late Sidney Lumet and written by the great Paddy Chayefsky, Network is one of the seminal films of the 1970s. It has been selected by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant", in addition to being named one of the American Film Institute’s Top 100 American films of all time. 

Network is about a fictional fourth-place television network called UBS that has been lagging far behind the major “big three” networks. Fox had not yet come into being at that time, but its antics and shocking, controversial choice of programs before it became household-friendly with American Idol and Glee closely echoed the fictional stunts on Network. One wonders if Rupert Murdoch intended this to happen or if it were merely delicious coincidence.

The "mad prophet of the airwaves"

The three central figures in Network include its news anchor, the aging and recently fired Howard Beale (Peter Finch, in an Oscar-winning performance of a lifetime), ambitious and ruthless UBS executive Diana Christensen (Faye Dunaway, also in an Oscar-winning turn) and the former news division head Max Schumacher (William Holden). Howard suffers a vivid mental breakdown including a pronouncement that he will kill himself on the air, and another featuring a rant so monumental that it became a catchphrase when UBS rehires him and re-jigs its news hour around him. Everyone seems to ignore the fact that Howard is clearly mad and claims to be guided by what he believes to be the voice of God. No matter: he’s simply branded as “The Mad Prophet of the Airwaves”, and he’s a hit!

Diana, who is described as being “raised on Bugs Bunny”, pursues Max, the film’s conscience, and woos him away even though he has a wife and grown daughter. She’s so focused on business that while they make love, she is still busy talking about her business plan: the world’s first “homosexual soap opera, "The Dykes”.

Network is also noted for Beatrice Straight’s performance as Max’s scorned wife, on note as the shortest Oscar-winning role in history. It lasts barely six minutes in its entirety, most of which is contained in this one scene, but every last second of it remains overwhelmingly powerful.

Sarah Brightman Lost Her Heart to a Starship Trooper

Sometimes, the line between kitsch and camp is blurred.

In 1978, a very young Sarah Brightman, then still in her teens, was chosen to sing with the British dance troupe Hot Gossip. Together, they created a disco single intended to make the latter a legitimate musical act. Hot Gossip is known to nostalgic Brits as being one of the first successful ventures for late 80s pop sensation Sinetta, AKA Simon Cowell’s girlfriend before he became famous. The resulting single, light years (pun intended) away from Brightman’s future classical music output and stint as the original Christine in Phantom of the Opera, was “I Lost My Heart to a Starship Trooper”.

The single is a frothy disco track that opens with a rather cheeky sample of Strauss’s Also Sprach Zarathustra. It then spins a tale of intergalactic love / booty call between a supple young woman and the unseen “Captain Strange”, presumably a cross between Captain Kirk, Han Solo and / or Luke Skywalker. Given that the single was released in 1978, it is no coincidence that this was thematically produced to cash in on the Star Wars craze. For the purposes of this article only, I will refer to the speaker as “Lana”.

Having been lustily rejected (in both senses of the word) by Darth Vader and Flash Gordon, Lana is for some reason aching for a moment of intense passion with the Captain before Starfleet Command finds out where they are and, one presumes, summons them back to work. This is all set to a series of danceable bleeps and bloops and then-fashionable “futuristic” laser keyboard emissions. “Starship Trooper” contains much innuendo, a sample of which is contained here:

Sound Advice: Adriano Celentano’s “Prisencolinensinainciusol”

Warning: This blog post may contain images and sounds that will cause you or parts of yourself to boogie at your desk. Please refrain from doing so, unless everyone else around you is free to join you in wild, abandoned glee.

Sometimes, pure genius doesn’t have to be deep or profound. Sometimes, genius can manifest itself in nothing more than words and sounds that mean nothing at all.

In the early 1970s, politically charged Italian singer-songwriter Adriano Celentano, having written some scathing and incendiary pop music, decided that he needed to loosen up, or at least for four minutes. The result is his hit single “Prisencolinensinainciusol”.

What does the title mean? Why, nothing, of course.

Celentano stated that after writing densely, thematically-packed music, he wanted to produce something playful. "Prisencolinensinainciusol" is his brainchid. The lyrics are an approximation of what English may sound like to non-Anglophone ears. When presenting the song on Italian national television, Celentano stated that he wrote the song to show how people in modern times cannot communicate effectively with one another. (He succeeds.) The above-noted clip is amalgamated and edited from two separate TV appearances of the song. Here they are:

What makes these four minutes such an absolute joy to behold is the audacious way in which Celentano delightfully, deliberately creates joyful nonsense for the sheer hell of it. His Wikipedia page indicates that two of his biggest influences are none other than Elvis Presley and Jerry Lewis. Given the way he contorts his face and swivels his hips in the clip, his performance has clearly been informed by both icons.

The performance itself is genius. It is choreographed nonsense combining a perfectly synched dance troupe strutting in supreme precision. There may only be a dozen dancers in the clip, but the use of the mirrors magnifies the experience and by extension the complete and total silliness of it all.

Road Show: Les Misérables

“You only get one cry in life, you’ve chosen well!” – Rip Torn to Alec Baldwin on 30 Rock, upon giving his character a promotion.

Original Broadway poster

Far too many people cry at too much trash disguised as “art”. The Blogger knows people who cry at Twilight, Britney Spears concerts and Jackie Collins novels. Too bad these people have such terrible taste. The Blogger has been known to cry at only one book, film and play in his life. These are, respectively, Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, Tim Robbins’s Dead Man Walking, and the musical of Les Misérables, or “Les Mis”, as he and millions of others affectionately call it.

Dubbed “the world’s favourite musical”, Les Mis was first performed in France in 1980 and premiered in London’s West End in 1985. The original French score was performed by Alain Boublil and Claude-Michel Schönberg, with an English language libretto produced by Herbert Kretzmer. Twenty-six years after its debut, the musical has yet to close and still plays eight performances a week. Such a feat for a long-running show is completely unheard of. The Broadway production, despite some initially mixed critical response, cleared the board at the 1987 Tony Awards and played for sixteen years in New York, with a successful revival less than three years after its closing. The libretto has been translated into 21 languages and performed over the last quarter-century in 38 countries, including Germany, South Korea, Chile, Japan, Argentina, the Netherlands, Israel, Sweden, Australia, Austria, Belgium, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Mexico, Hungary, Poland and Spain.

Colm Wilkinson, the original
Jean Valjean

Les Mis is no small production. The score demands two dozen major and featured parts. It has been greatly reduced from the original 1,400 page novel by Victor Hugo and yet performances may still run close to three hours. Set over several decades in post-revolutionary France, the main narrative thread concentrates on Jean Valjean, a man who served nineteen years in prison for stealing a loaf of bread for his starving family. This role is one of the most challenging in Broadway history and requires an operatic vocal mastery (it is often played by trained tenors). Upon release, Valjean is hounded by police inspector Javert, a man so relentless in pursuing Valjean over the decades that he’s essentially the world’s most inexhaustible parole officer. Valjean becomes a successful businessman who adopts Cosette, the impoverished daughter of the fragile prostitute Fantine. Fantine’s character is best known for singing “I Dreamed a Dream”, a now-iconic Broadway standard known popularly as Susan Boyle’s audition song for X Factor. Cosette was plucked from the brothel-owning Thenadier family, whose daughter Eponine grows up to fall in love with Marius, Cosette’s beloved. Marius’s school chums are at the forefront of the Paris Uprising of 1832, an insurrection at which thousands of rebellious, ill-equipped universe students who never held a gun in their lives were massacred. Through all this, fortunes are made and lost, the population starves and die, characters somehow survive and carry on through their hard lives together.

Lea Salonga as Fantine in the 2006 Broadway revival

Unlike most musicals, there are no dance numbers here. The musical has proven to be a draw for top musical talent over the decades, as roles have been performed by revered Broadway stars such as Colm Wilkinson, Patti LuPone, Alfie Boe and Lea Salonga. Other stars who have taken roles in various productions throughout the years and in the world include Matt Lucas, Deborah (formerly Debbie) Gibson, Daphne Rubin-Vega, Ruthie Henshall, Nick Jonas and Lea Michele. I personally know several people who each own several cast recordings produced over the last two and a half decades. In a British nationwide poll, the listeners of BBC Radio Two chose Les Mis as “The Nation’s Most Popular Musical”.

Party Girl: Rihanna’s LOUD Tour

I used to worry about Rihanna. The assault and battery charges against her now infamous ex Chris Brown, and the resulting public scandal arising from the photographs of the then-bruised and battered Rihanna, were so shocking that one wondered what effect that might have had on her music. Was one of the most promising superstars of pop music about to go into hiding?

No, thankfully, Rihanna released her fourth studio album, Rated R, a mere nine months after the ugly events of that fateful evening. The music plumbed heretofore unexamined grief, betrayal, anger and defiance. The sinister first single “Russian Roulette” became an international smash and one of the most frightening, in terms of verisimilitude, pop singles of all time. It was and is also a sonic masterpiece. The other singles on the album tell the rest of the tale: “Stupid in Love”, “Hard” and “Cold Case Love”, and added to her nearly endless coterie of smash hits.

The concert tour that accompanied the disc, the Last Girl on Earth Tour, was perhaps one of the darkest-themed shows in recent pop music history. The Blogger was surprised to see such a disturbing spectacle and although impressed with the show, wasn’t sure if it was OK to really dance and let loose the way he does at other shows. Rihanna sported a severe Mohawk and sauntered angrily atop a pink tank. She was depicted on video screens as being a desexualized, militant alien figure, come to do battle with unseen evil forces. Rihanna displayed a new vocal prowess, a deep, sobering, defiant growl that showed the world she may have been knocked down literally, but not for the count. Never count out Rihanna. Given that she used to sing about giddy love on such hits as “Umbrella” and “Don’t Stop the Music”, Rihanna’s musical odyssey exploring abusive emotional love spoke of trauma that inadvertently contributed to her musical growth.

I Dream of Dada: Surrealism at the Vancouver Art Gallery

Since May 26, the Vancouver Art Gallery has been showcasing a phenomenal new exhibition for the summer of 2011. This is easily the most exciting collection assembled by VAG since their seminal 2004 Andy Warhol exhibit. Entitled The Colour of My Dreams, this year’s exhibition is a stunning collection of Surrealist art.

For the uninitiated, Surrealism was an aesthetic and philosophical movement that arose in 1920s Paris. French writer André Breton was heavily influenced by the Dadaist belief that excessive rational thought and capitalist bourgeois values had given rise to the First World War. After serving as a military doctor during WWI, Breton and like-minded artists produced writings that, although initially thought as gibberish and nonsense, were actually open-ended and open to interpretation. These were collections of essays published together with like-minded artists in the radical artist journal Litterature. The idea was to create a movement of associated art that rejected what came before it. Breton and his contemporaries called their work “anti-art”.

Use of free association, non-linear thoughts and unusual presentation of ideas was vital to the Surrealist artistic and philosophical conceits. Surrealist art maintained that this presentation of art, heavily reliant on symbolism, imagery and presented in a manner that at first defies logic, is paramount to the aesthetic. The effect is dreamlike, and as such it has its own logic and purpose, one outside of rational thought but open to interpretation. It is no coincidence that Sigmund Freud’s writings, dismissed as obscene just a decade earlier, and the unconscious reflected heavily in the Surrealist movement. It is with these visual arts and writings where much of the Modern Art movement first came to major public attention. Art was, at this point, no longer just pretty pictures and portraits. It is therefore fitting that the exhibition is entitled The Colour of My Dreams.

They’re all here on glorious display, and the list of artists whose works are presented is dizzying: Salvador Dalí, Max Ernst, Man Ray, Yves Tanguy and Joan Miró, amongst others. Edith Rimmington’s famed The Oneiroscopist, a dazzling Mother Whistler interpretation with a monstrous creature dressed in scuba gear, is the appropriate choice for the exhibit’s publicity materials. Why? Because “oneiroscopist” means “one who interprets dreams”, of course.

Modern Film Classics: The Diving-Bell and the Butterfly

So much can happen in the blink of an eye. But what can you actually do with it?

If you’re Jean-Dominique “Jean-Do” Bauby, you dictate the contents of your life story. 

In December 1995, Jean-Do was the editor-in-chief of Elle magazine. He was not a nice man. Fabulously well-connected, he had a wife he treated poorly and regularly humiliated by his affairs with models, children he ignored, and a mistress he actually loathed and suffered. Jean-Do was successful but wretched. One fine day, he was felled by a debilitating stroke and lost complete control over his entire body, becoming a human vegetable with the extremely rare condition of “locked-in syndrome”. He could not speak, feed or relieve himself, or move, but he could take in his entire surroundings and he could do just one thing … blink his left eyelid. The best analogy was that of a diver, locked in an old-fashioned diving-bell suit, unable to communicate to home base, breathing, but doing nothing else while caged in that physical constraint.

A speech therapist designed a method of communicating with Jean-Do. She developed a chart displaying all of the letters in their order of frequency of use, and not alphabetically. Using this chart, Jean-Do could “spell out words”. All he had to do was to blink at the letter he wanted when it was presented, the therapist or attending nurse would stop, and they start at the beginning of the chart again until he got to the next letter. With this unorthodox methodology, Jean-Do “spelled” out commands and his wishes and “dictated” stories and memories into what became his autobiography, The Diving-Bell and the Butterfly. The slim memoir was an instant best-seller and adapted into Julian Schnabel’s award-winning French-language film in 2007.

Schnabel’s project, like its source material, had a difficult birth. Schnabel spoke little to no French when he first embarked on production but insisted on filming the entire film in its original language (which he had to learn). To further maintain verisimilitude, Schnabel shot it in the very same hospital where Jean-Do was treated before the latter’s death in 1997. The film was shot almost entirely from Jean-Do’s point of view and the camerawork was difficult and often laborious. Much of the screenplay had to be written outside of its original source material to incorporate additional biographical details that didn’t appear in the original memoir. 

Nevertheless, although the film was not a major box office success, it received very high reviews and such accolades as BAFTA, Golden Globe and Cesar Awards, Best Director honours at the Cannes Film Festival, and four Academy Award nominations. It is consistently ranked amongst the top 250 highest-rated films on the Internet Movie Database.