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.

Murder on the Orient Express at HCT

I am a huge fan of Agatha Christie (I made a goal to read all of her books when I was a teenager) and one of my favorites is Murder on the Orient Express. I've seen several screen adaptations but never the stage play so I was really excited about HCT's production! I was able to see it last night (closing night) and I thoroughly enjoyed it!  After finishing a case in Syria, the famous Belgian detective Hercule Poirot (Mark Knowles) is called back to London on urgent business. Despite the fact that it is fully booked, a compartment is found on the Orient Express for Poirot by Monsieur Bouc (Benjamin "BJ" Whimpey), the director of the railway. Poirot is immediately approached by Samuel Ratchett (Kelton Davis), an odious American businessman on board, who asks him to investigate some threatening letters he has been receiving but Poirot declines. The train becomes snowbound on the first night of the journey and in the morning Ratchett is discovered dead, having been stabbed multiple times, in his locked compartment. Knowing that the murderer must still be on board the train, Monsieur Bouc asks Poirot to investigate. There are numerous clues which Poirot finds puzzling but, as he interviews his fellow passengers including a Hungarian Countess (Natalie Peterson), an aging Russian Princess (Heidi Scott), her Swedish companion (Wendy Oltmanns), Ratchett's secretary (Zachariah Combs), a Minnesota housewife (Tamari Dunbar), a Scottish colonel (Kelton Davis), an English governess (Lisa Zimmerman), and a French conductor (James Bounous), he discovers that they all have an alibi for the time of the murder and that they all have a connection to the infamous kidnapping and murder of Daisy Armstrong by Bruno Cassetti (who is believed to be Ratchett). Poirot eventually discovers evidence of a mysterious second conductor with a grudge against Ratchett but is he the real murderer? The big plot twist is a lot of fun and the resolution is a thought-provoking examination of retribution vs. revenge. The ensemble cast does a really great job, especially Whimpey, but the stand-out in this production is the rotating set featuring both the interior and exterior of a full-size railway car. The interior space includes an opulent club car and several first-class compartments which rotate to give periodic glimpses of action taking place in a narrow corridor between the two areas. The attention to detail is absolutely amazing, with Art Deco light sconces, peacock blue velvet upholstery on the chairs and sofas, cut glass lamps, mahogany paneling, and, my personal favorite, giant murals featuring dancing swans. The turntable allows for very quick transitions and seeing characters move from the club car to their compartments is a brilliant bit of staging. The sound design also creates the illusion of a real train and the costumes do much to add to the characterization (I loved Mrs. Hubbard's fox stole). This was such a nice evening out but, unfortunately, the run for this show is now over and many of the upcoming shows are sold out because of stricter Covid-19 guidelines.

Suk's Serenade for Strings

Last night I had the opportunity to attend an incredibly interesting and innovative concert with the Utah Symphony!  What set this concert apart from the others I've attended is that there was not a conductor.  Rather, Concertmaster Madeline Adkins led the strings through two pieces during the first half.  I absolutely love the fact that the concertmaster is a woman!  I've actually met Adkins very briefly at a Utah Symphony after-party (yes, I sometimes attend Utah Symphony after-parties) and she is so cool!  It was really fun to see how she kept the musicians together with very subtle gestures.  A small chamber group began the evening with Battalia by Henrich von Biber.  I really enjoyed this piece because it mimics the sound of muskets and cannons firing during a battle without the use of percussion.  The musicians stomped their feet several times and the basses plucked their strings very dramatically among other unorthodox techniques.  Then the entire string section performed Serenade for Strings by Josef Suk.  I loved this piece because, while it is very beautiful and lighthearted, I think there is a tinge of melancholy in it, especially in the third movement.  The second half of the concert (after the stage was completely reconfigured in a matter of minutes) featured different groups within the orchestra.  A quartet of percussionists, including Keith Carrick, Eric Hopkins (sigh), Michael Pape, and Gavin Ryan, performed Ku-Ka-Ilimoku by Christopher Rouse which features more than fifty different percussion instruments (some of which are quite unusual).  Ku is the god of war in Hawaiian mythology and this piece brings to mind a savage war dance and it is extremely exhilarating.  I loved it and it was definitely my favorite of the evening.  The concert continued with the final movement of Masque: Incidental II by Toru Takemitsu which features a duet of flutes.  This performance was very dramatic with two musicians, Mercedes Smith and Caitlyn Valovick-Moore, slowly walking onto the darkened stage from either side and circling each other as they played.  I found it to be very mysterious.  The final piece of the evening was Serenade No. 12 by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart featuring an octet of two clarinets, two oboes, two horns, and two bassoons.  This piece is both somber and tempestuous which is why I love Mozart so much!  Other than Mozart, I was totally unfamiliar with the composers featured on the program but I enjoyed this introduction to their work.  I really appreciate this opportunity to hear some lesser-known selections from the classical repertoire during these re-imagined concerts!  This program will be performed again Friday and Saturday (go here for tickets) and I highly recommend it.