1. Today it was my turn to host our weekly family dinner.
I couldn't seem to muster up the energy to come up with a menu or to get the house ready for guests.
So, I put out a message wondering if Paul/Carol and Christy would enjoy trying out Prospector's Pizzeria in Pinehurst, a local family's recently opened business.
To my relief, everyone was on board with my idea.
We decided to meet at 1:00 this afternoon at the pizza joint, located in what used to house Real Life Ministries in Pinehurst -- and, if I'm not mistaken, this was also where Hammock's Hardware and Baskett's Saw and Cycle was located.
Christy and I both really enjoy Canadian bacon and pineapple pizza and Carol and Paul ordered an eight topping pizza featuring meats and vegetables.
I do my best to enjoy pizza that isn't my preferred style. I enjoy thin crust pizza and these pizzas had a fairly thick crust. So, once I dropped my desires and willingly surrendered myself to the pizza in front of me, I enjoyed these pies.
I also enjoyed, even I was a pain in the neck, the planning we worked on for the month of December.
2. Two things.
First, I don't remember the last time I watched a movie.
Second, I've been listening for several hours a day to classical music.
So, I thought, wouldn't this be a good time to rewatch a movie about a string quartet preparing to perform Beethoven's String Quartet Opus 131, also known as his 14th String Quartet?
My answer today was a resounding YES.
So this evening I watched A Late Quartet, a movie I had seen on my 59th birthday in 2012 in Eugene at the now shuttered cozy David Minor Theater.
Just getting Vizio warmed up again and finding the movie got my adrenaline pumping and I began to tear up as the movie got started, feeling myself back at the David Minor and knowing I was about to watch a movie that had touched me thirteen years ago. (You can read my 2012 response to A Late Quartet, here.)
Here's a briefer summation of my experience with the movie thirteen years later.
The movie features a music professor, Peter, played by Christopher Walken, who had recruited three of his students twenty-five years earlier to join him in a string quartet they named Fugue.
The other three musicians are Katherine Keener (Juliette), Mark Ivanir (Daniel), and Philip Seymour Hoffman (Robert).
We learn two salient things as the movie opens.
First of all, Peter, learns he has become afflicted with the early stages of Parkinson's disease and he tells the other three quartet members that with the help of medication he will try to play in their upcoming 25th anniversary performance, but it will be his last.
We also learn about Beethoven's String Quartet No. 14, Opus 131 which Fugue will perform at this concert.
Beethoven composed three late quartets and No. 14 was his last and favorite. Unlike the traditional string quartet written in four movements, No.14 has seven movements and Beethoven insisted that the seven movements be played without a break.
We learn that this creates disorder among the musicians. They have no pause to tune their instruments and so as the quartet grows and their instruments inevitably go out of tune, they must adjust to one another's progress and try to maintain order under performance conditions that militate against orderliness.
Not only is this disorder what happens in performing the Beethoven piece, it's what happens between Daniel, Juliette, and Robert upon having Peter tell them that the quartet that's been together for twenty-five years can no longer be what is has been.
Major tensions, having to do with their lives as musicians and in their personal lives, develop.
It made me wonder: if I knew String Quartet No. 14 expertly, would I see this movie as having seven unbroken movements? Does Beethoven's composition move through times of upheaval and conflict in the same these characters do? Is there any parallel between how String Quartet No. 14 resolves and how the movie's story resolves.
That I don't know.
But I do know that the movie explores the necessity of the players in a string quartet to put the good of the quartet above the desires of each individual. It means the individual players must make sacrifices of their individual ambitions for the good of the collective.
I also know that this movie is about the relationship between technical mastery and something like perfection in relationship to expressing passion, that is, playing music with passion.
Three key words in this movie are "unleash your passion" which, as it turns out, can be risky, disruptive, and magical, whether in the realm of performance or in personal relationships.
In the end, I experienced this as a movie about love, about the complicated ways men and women moving into different stages of middle age experience love, how they want others to express their love to them, the place of passion in love, the interaction of love and grief, and the place of suppressing passion, possibly for the sake of the collective, however exciting that passion might be for the individual.
Were these Beethoven's questions, too, as he completed this composition about a year before his death?
As of now, I don't know.
I'd like to dig into this question more, though.
3. A Late Quartet concluded and I was disappointed that Amazon Prime cut off the movie before the credits had run, which meant Amazon Prime cut off the completion of String Quartet No. 14.
Most movie viewers don't know that the music accompanying the credits after a movie is a postlude. It gives viewers a chance to sit and let the movie soak in and music can enhance this reflection, it can help review the movie, and it can add more dimension to what we've seen.
In the case of A Late Quartet, the music playing during the credits was a continuation of the movie and brought the movie to its conclusion.
I kept my calm, didn't go all movie nerd bitchy, and wondered if this movie was on YouTube.
It is.
I uttered a short prayer to the cinema gods that YouTube's broadcast showed the entire movie, including the credits.
It did.
So I rewatched the final touching five minutes of A Last Quartet and then reveled in the credits, not so much for what I could have read on the screen, but to hear this landmark Beethoven string quartet come to its completion.
I stared for a while.
It was getting late, but I was stimulated and not ready to hit the hay.
My favorite ongoing series of short films on the Criterion Channel is Adventures in Moviegoing.
(If you are still reading this rambling blog post, I thank you.)
Different women and men in the world of movies sit for an interview and tell us, in essence, their movie going autobiography.
Tonight I watched the president of Criterion Collection, Peter Becker, interview Josh Brolin -- and then I listened to Brolin talk about around six movies from the Criterion Collection that were important movies for him.
I discovered that the level of the soul, I have a brother in Josh Brolin.
Our surface lives have next to nothing in common.
But at a deeper level, we have at least these two things in common.
First of all, we watch movies primarily to experience their impact, to be moved, stimulated, astonished, saddened, frightened (I don't watch horror movies though!), inspired, enlightened, invigorated, vitalized, crushed, devastated, and so on.
For both of us, for movies to have impact, they do not have to take us into worlds we already know or are familiar with.
In fact, both of us seek out movies that take us into worlds way different than our own -- it might be the world of another country or culture. I loved teaching World Literature because when that course covered the late 19th, 20th, and early 21st centuries, I could show my students a Mongolian movie (The Story of the Weeping Camel), a New Zealand story about Maori people (Whale Rider), and movies made in Iran, Palestine, Israel, and other parts of the world.
To feel the joy and relief of a mother camel finally accepting the calf she has rejected, one does not have to be Mongolian; when Pai mounts a whale and leads a pod of beached whales back into the sea, one does not have to be Maori to feel and admire Pai's courage and the exhilaration of seeing these whales rescued; one does not have to be Iranian to enter into the very human stories of Iranians, whether in Tehran or in rural villages -- but, these movies did more than unfold the humanity of these different countries and cultures, they invite us into the details of daily life in these places, help acquaint us with worlds different (and in some cases similar) to our own.
Josh Brolin feels enriched and enlarged by entering into stories and details of places and worlds not his own. I know I have been and continue to be. I wanted my students to experience that, too.
I tried to encourage, maybe even persuade, my students to seek out movies, books, music, art, and other things that did not deal with what they already believed or already knew -- in short, what they said they could relate to.
I thought going to school was largely about learning to get outside of oneself and one's limited experience.
It was about trying on different perspectives, points of view, ways of seeing the world.
I enjoyed listening to Josh Brolin talk, not as a teacher, but as a lover of movies, about these very same things: impact and seeking the unfamiliar (and feeling the impact of doing so).
No comments:
Post a Comment