Doctor Atomic
As part of the Cinema Nouveau series of filmed operas, John Adams’s Doctor Atomic (2005) shows until December 18. Presented in its New York Metropolitan staging, it’s about J Robert Oppenheimer, known as the “father of the atomic bomb”. As director of the Manhattan Project, he and others were hidden away in the desert during World War II to develop the bomb, which they managed to do — witness the devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Adams, composer of the contemporary operas Nixon in China and The Death of Klinghoffer, says that he and librettist (and premiere director) Peter Sellars created Doctor Atomic “by arranging pre-existing texts — first-hand accounts, memoirs, journalistic narratives, declassified government documents and, in one case, a detailed description of the construction of the plutonium sphere I’d found on an internet site, and which I set for women’s chorus. And then of course there was the poetry, verses that Oppenheimer, an immensely literate individual, loved: Baudelaire, Donne, the Bhagavad Gita.” Penny Woolcock directs and baritone Gerald Finley sings Oppenheimer.
Kiss Kiss Bang Bang: Cinema of Cult and Cool Film Festival
Running from November 28 to December 11 at the Labia in Cape Town, this festival presents 14 movies that you might not otherwise have a chance to see — or certainly not on our “big” screens. It’s a pretty mixed bag, as perhaps might be expected: films such as I Am Cuba, The Honeymoon Killers (the 1970 original) and Two-Lane Blacktop are conceivably cult films, but it’s harder to say the same of Abba: The Movie or Commando.
That said, if you view Commando as “the Greatest Gayest Raddest” movie ever, to quote the press release, you can find a “cult” way of looking at reactionary militarist bodybuilder fantasies that gives them a whole new life. I Am Cuba is a fevered dream of a documentary made just after Castro’s revolution by Russian filmmaker Mikhail Kalatazov, though it didn’t please the commie overlords. Two-Lane Blacktop is a 1971 road-race movie starring pop singers James Taylor and Dennis Wilson (of the Beach Boys) in their only film roles. Also showing are: Slap Shot, a sports comedy starring the late Paul Newman; William Friedkin’s slamming crime thriller To Live and Die in LA (one of the best car chases ever); Bertrand Blier’s 1974 black comedy, Les Valseuses (Going Places), the film that made Gérard Depardieu a star; the early Jonathan Demme charmer Melvin and Howard, about an average guy who is the alleged beneficiary of Howard Hughes’s will; and Coffy, in which you can see Pam Grier do the original 1970s blaxploitation thing that Quentin Tarantino recycled in Jackie Brown. Go to kinolabia.wordpress.com for more information.
Synecdoche, New York
In his directorial debut Charlie Kaufmann (hitherto known as a writer on such offbeat projects as Being John Malkovich and Adaptation) goes horribly awry. Synecdoche, New York is a film that gets so disjointed after the first 35 minutes that its plot becomes nigh impossible to understand.
The messy narrative chronicles several decades in the life of an eccentric theatre director (Philip Seymour Hoffman) who, after the sudden departure of his wife and child, decides to build a replica of the titular metropolis in a massive warehouse populated by actors imitating the city’s residents, including the director and those close to him. This “high concept” unfortunately means that as we enjoy a humorous, poignant or affecting scene concerning the main character, we then have to wade through a tedious, meta-fictional recreation of it. Kaufmann’s trademark black humour appears throughout, and the film occasionally touches on the profound, but the painfully convoluted plot will tire even the most analytical audience. — Shain Germaner