Thanksgiving 2020

Yesterday my family had a wonderful holiday (as you can see from Sean's expression ha ha!).  It was a little different than usual because we put all of the food out buffet-style and ate in the living room so that we could distance ourselves a bit more.  That ended up being a lot of fun with lots of conversations and laughter!

We had turkey and ham, stuffing, cheesy potatoes (here in Utah they are called funeral potatoes), rolls, pomegranate salad (a tradition in our family), and a vegetable tray with dip.  Everything tasted delicious!  We actually had pumpkin, pecan, and cherry pies but we were all so full that we didn't even get them out!

After dinner we played a crazy game of shanghai rummy!  We have not played this together since New Year's Eve and it felt really good to be doing something so normal after the year that we have had!  We got laughing so hard that I could hardly breathe!  Kristine won but I came in second, even after a disastrous early round (we are thinking of having a tournament over the Christmas break where we all buy in and winner takes all but that might make it even more ruthless than usual).  I think this is one of the best Thanksgivings we've had!

Note:  Tashena is going back up to school in Washington state today after being home since the pandemic started.  We will miss her so much but she'll be back for Christmas!

The Last Vermeer

I have been looking forward to The Last Vermeer since I saw the trailer months ago and I was really excited to see it last night.  Weeks after the end of World War II Hermann Goring's collection of stolen art, including an incredibly valuable painting by Johannes Vermeer, is discovered in an abandoned railway car.  Captain Joseph Piller (Claes Bang) is tasked by the Allied forces with discovering who the art originally belonged to and who sold it to the Nazis.  His investigation of the Vermeer painting leads him to a painter named Han van Meegeren (Guy Pearce) and, believing him guilty of collaboration, he eventually arrests him.  When the local Dutch government, in the person of Alex de Klerk (August Diehl), takes jurisdiction of the case away from him and moves quickly to condemn van Meegeren, Piller has second thoughts about his guilt.  He enlists his assistant (Vicky Krieps) and a retired lawyer (Karl Johnson) to help him prove his innocence in court.  This movie was a bit of a mixed bag for me because the plot takes a really long time to get going.  The first half, where Piller investigates van Meegeren's involvement, is very boring and incredibly convoluted.  There are references to a vast conspiracy involving the sale of art to channel money to a German espionage ring but I didn't really understand any of this and I had a hard time keeping track of who was who because of all of the Dutch and German names.  I found my mind wandering many times.  However, the court scenes in the second half pulled me back in because the revelations about van Meegeren's actions are absolutely fascinating (it is based on a true story).  I really wish more of the narrative had focused on van Meegeren and the trial and less on Piller and his motivation (Pearce gives a much more dynamic performance as van Meegeren than Bang does as Piller).  Piller's character arc raises questions about the morality of acts committed for survival while a country is occupied by an enemy but I found van Meegeren's exploration of how the value of art is determined to be much more interesting (this theme reminded me of The Burnt Orange Heresy which also features Bang).  On a side note, I really liked the production design in the depiction of post-war Amsterdam (a favorite city of mine) and the lighting design which seems to mimic a Vermeer painting.  This is an average movie at best but I enjoyed it because of my fascination with World War II and my love of art.  It might be a bit too esoteric for most moviegoers.

Ammonite

There is nothing I love more than an atmospheric character-driven period drama and yesterday I got to see Ammonite which is a really good one!  Mary Anning (Kate Winslet) is a 19th century amateur paleontologist who spends her days roaming the Lyme coastline looking for fossils which she sells to tourists in a dingy little shop shared with her ailing mother (Gemma Jones).  She is cold, isolated, and a bit misanthropic, mostly because her discoveries are ignored by the establishment due to her gender and class.  She reluctantly agrees to teach Roderick Murchison (James McArdle), a wealthy member of the Royal Geographic Society, how to identify rocks containing ammonites (prehistoric mollusk-like sea creatures) because she needs the money.  His wife Charlotte (Saoirse Ronan) is fragile and suffering from what he calls "mild melancholia" after a miscarriage so he decides that she is too weak to accompany him on an extended expedition and must stay behind in Lyme.  He asks Mary to be her companion while he is gone but neither woman is happy about this arrangement and their interactions are fraught with tension.  Mary, however, is increasingly drawn to Charlotte when the latter falls ill and Charlotte eventually responds to her care.  They begin a passionate, if desperate, affair knowing that Charlotte must soon return to her husband.  This will inevitably be compared to Portrait of a Lady on Fire but, while they both have a similar theme, they have very different tones.  I loved the symbolism of having the women break open a seemingly ordinary rock to discover the valuable fossil within.  Both women are dismissed by the people around them but they bring each other to life by recognizing what is extraordinary in the other.  I also loved the washed-out monochromatic color palette of blues and grays that gradually becomes more saturated as their affair continues, especially in relation to the sea.  Whenever Mary is on the beach alone, the sky is gray and the water is very turbulent but, when Mary and Charlotte swim in the sea together, the water is welcoming and the sun gives their skin a luminous glow.  The images on the screen are incredibly beautiful but the performances of both Winslet and Ronan are brilliant!  Both of them are able to convey so many emotions with just their body language and facial expressions rather than through dialogue (the sound design is eerily silent through much of the duration), especially in a scene where the women attend a music recital.  The final scene between them, standing on either side of a glass case filled with fossils at the British Museum, is devastating because of the way they look at each other.  Some might say the ending is ambiguous but I found the symbolism to be quite thought-provoking and it gave me goosebumps!  I suspect that both actresses will be receiving multiple nominations during awards season.  It is definitely a slow burn but I highly recommend it!

Zukerman Plays Bach's Violin Concerto

A couple of days ago Salt Lake County Mayor Jenny Wilson decided to temporarily close most performing arts venues in SLC, including Abravanel Hall, until December 31 to stop the spread of Covid-19.  This is a necessary measure because cases have been spiking out of control here in Utah.  I understand the need for this but it absolutely breaks my heart because I have been looking forward to several Christmas concerts with the Utah Symphony next month.  I really love hearing Christmas music performed live and so many of the events that I usually enjoy during the holiday season, such as the Lower Lights Christmas concert and the Tabernacle Choir Christmas concert, have already been canceled due to the pandemic so I would be lying if I said this news wasn't a blow.  Thankfully, this weekend's concerts were allowed to proceed and the beautiful program performed last night was such a solace.  Once again the string section of the orchestra was featured and the guest conductor (and soloist!) for the evening was the amazing Pinchas Zukerman, who was simply marvelous.  The concert began with a piece by a young and talented composer named Jessie Montgomery called Starburst.  I really enjoyed this piece because it is dynamic and so full of energy.  Next came Serenade for Strings by Edward Elgar.  I always think of Elgar's music as stately, elegant, and celebratory (one of his most famous works is Pomp and Circumstance) and this particular piece is just lovely.  Zukerman performed the dual roles of conductor and soloist for Johann Sebastian Bach's Violin Concerto.  This piece has some really beautiful melodies and it was obvious that Zukerman was having a lot of fun putting his own flourishes on the solo violin melody as his bow flew up and down the strings.  It was fascinating to watch him play and communicate with the orchestra at the same time.  He received a rousing standing ovation (this was the biggest socially distanced crowd I've seen at Abravanel Hall since this re-imagined season began) for his efforts.  The concert concluded with Symphony No. 29 by my favorite composer, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart!  This piece was composed when Mozart was only 18 but it is absolutely brilliant.  The first movement begins so softly that it almost takes you by surprise but, by the final movement, it is absolutely dazzling and effervescent.  I loved it!  This wonderful concert was just what I needed after feeling a bit blue this week and I highly recommend it (go here for tickets).

Hillbilly Elegy

Last night I decided to see Hillbilly Elegy on the big screen ahead of its release on Netflix next week.  I have heard many conflicting views on this movie so I was eager to see what all of the fuss is about for myself.  It is based on the memoir of the same name by J.D. Vance, which I have not read, and I gather that the book is much more political than the movie.  The Vances are a multi-generational family from the Appalachian region of Kentucky.  They are caught in an endless cycle of extreme poverty, drug and alcohol use, and physical abuse.  Mamaw (Glenn Close) and Papaw (Bo Hopkins) make it out and hope for a better life in the steel town of Middletown, Ohio but their relationship becomes abusive as the area becomes economically depressed and they end up perpetuating the cycle of violence.  Their daughter Bev (Amy Adams) also hopes for a better life, becoming the salutatorian of her high school class, but she, too, gives up her ambitions when she becomes a single mother to Lindsay (Haley Bennett) and J.D (Gabriel Basso as an adult and Owen Asztalos as a teenager).  She flits from man to man and job to job, abusing drugs to cope with the reality of her life.  Young J.D. starts hanging out with the wrong crowd and getting into mischief but Mamaw, hoping to break the cycle, takes him in and uses tough love to get him on the right path.  Through hard work and determination he makes it to Yale Law School but, as he is interviewing for a prestigious summer internship, he is called home to deal with his mother's latest heroin overdose.  Will he put his family or his future first?  The narrative is sometimes very haphazard, jumping multiple times between 1997 and 2011 (there are flashbacks within flashbacks without much thematic cohesion), and is quite superficial.  It masquerades as social commentary without delving into the underlying causes of generational poverty or engaging in any meaningful discussion of what it takes to overcome it.  The characters, while they give Adams and Close a chance to give very showy transformative performances that are already garnering a lot of Oscar buzz, are strangely one-dimensional and never really rise above stereotypes.  Honestly, I sometimes found this movie really boring because the characters don't do much more than scream each other after they make the same mistakes over and over again.  Ron Howard gives us the requisite feel-good ending but it seems very abrupt and, therefore, not earned.  I had so many questions about how Bev is suddenly able to rise above the circumstances that have plagued her for decades.  I didn't especially like this movie and I would definitely recommend waiting for it to stream on Netflix if you want to see it for yourself.