Trying to sell other people's great art the last few weeks. What a boring profession! Not at all 'cause of the art. Just…
I caught up finally with doyenne Brit director Sally Potter's The Party. Hmmmm…and then methought, this is my life, everyone's lie/life just in a parallel universe. Perhaps THAT is the genius of the movie?
It is sub standard every great playwright writing you can name, yet it has a cast that has enacted everyone and each of those playwright's unforgettable characters. So: there is clearly something going on. Right here and now.
It's a brisk film viewing. You think there will be another scene. There ain't. What you are left with is something very, very mortal coil. I say that, not because Sally Potter is kinda untouchable in independent Brit film circles. Simply because: one thinks again about one's life and friends.
Without that 'stellar' cast would it have been the same? We don't know. I doubt. There is such a theatricality to the movie (they even decided to be a set rather than inhabit a house 3 weeks before shooting). Every single actor brings such a wealth of being to that set. Explosion.
It's (as anyone knows…) a strange thing: recognition. I didn't watch the 2018 Emmy's last night, but there he was up there the guy who I gave a theatrical break-through decades ago almost unknown [fact], there, directing The Crown. (a sorta Brideshead Revisited without the salt for 2020!).
What am I feeling ? (no disrespect to the cast) but where is the guy who I thought just might be a new Mike Leigh (maybe never Ken Loach-no disrespect at all M.L.)
I guess that is why many people don't want me around. They fear I will see through the power and the money. NOt that hard….stay off the pills and you will see forever and ever more.
a draft…tbc…where am I going? I think I already went there….
[needs to be more caustic, Jon Stewart just emailed- please can you mention ME again!}
[Ricky Gervais emailed: what’s not to like about MONEY$%%*^^&^]
Life is banal. Medieval Latin- bannalis.
Eugene O'Neill, Odets, Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, Edward Albee, David Mamet, August Wilson, Kenneth Lonergan.
Then life once removed yet still banal: Thornton Wilder, Maria Irene Fornes, Sam Shephard, John Guare, Suzan Lori-Parks, Neil LaBute.
And then there is the extraordinary. Heaven.
You are on your own. Naturally.
Never replace, grace and beauty in her eyes.
…..
photo ©Andrew Lucre 2018
(dedicated to the legacy of Francesca Stern Woodman (April 3, 1958 – January 19, 1981)
There’s a chorus line forming in the theater foyer
(the ‘line’ is ‘round the block)
Tell me that’s not Baryshnikov first in line
Liza May Minnelli shivering in first-
Well they’re ‘friends’
There’s Lorna Luft serving coffee
‘Fore the meterorite ends
There’s Steve Carell doing ballet
Who knew: before the world ends-u got your name spelt finally right.:)
and
Stephen Sondheim doing salsa…
Who knew..
And then…
Don’t let your self go just yet….
Would you climb the mountains with me
I't’s always the belief that impresses me,
We can sit at basecamp and SING our hearts out
It’s no defeat to just sing…
