Art
"Giambattista Tiepolo, 1696-1770" (Metropolitan Museum of Art). Tiepolo
revisionism achieves critical mass. With 80 paintings and 33 etchings at three
different shows at the Met and drawings by the artist and his disciples at the
Pierpont Morgan Library, "New York is now Tiepolo town," says Wall Street
Journal critic Deborah Solomon. "These shows make it clear that the once
accepted view of Tiepolo was wrong," says Time critic Robert Hughes. (The conventional wisdom on the
18 th -century painter: He was said to be "a decadent ally of
aristocratic taste"--Solomon; "an advocate of pomposity, cynicism, and costume
drama"--Francis Haskell, New York Review of Books .) Hughes sees new
levels of wit in Tiepolo's paintings: "[T]he distanced, self-aware theatrics of
his style--his parade of visual language as a source of delight--make him look
modern." Solomon sees precocious postmodernism: "[H]ow do you achieve greatness
in an age when everything has already been done? The answer: You recycle." But
Haskell damns all efforts to make Tiepolo a painter for our time: "[We] are
most reluctant to admit that the finest art can flourish in harmony with the
ruling classes and without the tensions that beset us now, so that, where
necessary, we try to detect such tensions in the art of the past." (Check out
the Web site of a Tiepolo
retrospective held last year in Germany. It has reproductions and
commentary.)
Event
Halftime at Super Bowl XXXI (Fox TV). Madison Avenue typically debuts
its flashiest commercials during the Super Bowl, and critics predicted that
these would hold more appeal than the game itself. On the other hand, the death
of Laura "Dinky" Patterson during a rehearsal for a bungee-jumping routine led
reporters to question whether organizers had finally gone overboard. But
reviews of all the halftime spectacle were favorable. "An eventful game
combined with a cavalcade of crafty commercials kept Super Bowl XXXI lively and
entertaining yesterday," says the Washington Post's Tom Shales. According to Shales, Fox
(making its first Super Bowl telecast) proved that it could cover the big game
with as much "zest and panache" as the bigger networks. Other critics' picks:
performances by James Brown and ZZ Top (though the New York Times '
Richard Sandomir complained that they lip-synced badly); an ad showing a
digitized Fred Astaire dancing with a Dirt Devil vacuum; and a Visa Check Card
commercial starring Bob Dole. Nonetheless, the New York Times ' Stuart
Elliott complains that "too often, the effect was of ... being cajoled or maybe
bullied into being entertained by a boor repeatedly accosting you to ask,
'Having fun yet?' " (See "TheWeek/The Spin" for more on the game itself.)
Movie
Kolya
(Miramax). Critics compare Kolya , the top-grossing
Czech film in decades, to such 1960s New Wave classics as Jiri Menzel's
Closely Watched Trains (1966) and Milos Forman's Loves of a
Blonde (1965). But Kolya is also damned with condescending praise.
The plot--father comes to love adopted son--is familiar; the "directorial style
is unobtrusive and free of flourishes" (Elliott Stein, Village Voice ).
Director Jan Sverak "really knows how to give it that warm, ironic Mittel
Europa charm and subtlety," says Kevin Thomas in the Los Angeles
Times . "[S]entiment with sly political humor," says Joe Morgenstern of the
Wall Street Journal . The Voice 's Stein predicts that it will
become "this year's Il Postino ." (Miramax plugs Kolya at its
site, where you can download video and stills.)
Book
The
Island of the Colorblind
, by Oliver Sacks (Knopf). Reviews are
unusually mixed for a book by the popular Sacks. The Island of the
Colorblind , which explores both disease--achromatopsia (color-blindness)
and lytico-bodig (a disorder similar to Parkinson's)--and Micronesia, is being
dismissed as half botanical treatise, half travelogue. "Apart from observing
the unsurprising fact that color-blind weavers are skilled at distinguishing
subtle tones, Dr. Sacks can do little more than give us an
ordinary-if-well-written travel essay," says novelist D.M. Thomas in the New
York Times Book Review . "Whereas descriptions of human illness are
inherently interesting, it is difficult for most readers to get as worked up
about cycads and ferns as Sacks seems to be," says the Washington
Post 's Abraham Verghese. Sacks' eclecticism doesn't bother Slate's Luc
Sante, though: "This oddness is a measure of the personality that unifies it."
And Thomas concludes that Sacks succeeds for all the familiar Sacks reasons:
Because he shows "how patients who are truly isolated and insulated by a
disease can retain their humanity, their dignity." (Random House excerpts the book at its site.)
Theater
The
Steward of Christendom
(Brooklyn Academy of Music, Majestic Theater).
The best thing about this play, apparently, is Irish actor Donal McCann ( The
Dead , Stealing Beauty ). McCann plays a 70-year-old ex-superintendent
of the British-run Dublin police force who is now committed to an insane asylum
and brooding over his past. McCann's performance is said to be almost
unbearable. The Wall Street Journal 's Donald Lyons says that McCann
"fearlessly exposes a man like a surgeon probing his own wounds." New
York 's John Simon says, "It is all McCann's play, and can he play!" Neither
Simon nor Lyons likes Irish playwright Sebastian Barry's work ( Steward
is one of five dramas about his own kinfolk), however. "[L]ike Beckett written
for soap opera," says Lyons; its "sometimes poetic, sometimes pseudo-poetic,
and intermittently flat prose" seems a pale imitation of, alternately, Eugene
O'Neill, James Joyce, Hugh Leonard, Brian Friel, and Shakespeare, says Simon.
But the New York
Times ' Ben Brantley claims the play "bears the
rare mark of theatrical greatness: it is rooted in specific, even earthy
details but it sets off echoes that go way beyond its sad story." (The Brooklyn Academy of
Music plugs the play at its site.)
Movie
Fierce Creatures
(Universal Pictures). The verdict on Fierce
Creatures : nowhere near as funny as A Fish Called Wanda (1988).
Shots of cute animals are deemed an inadequate substitute for the cutting wit
that made the earlier film (by the same cast, and also written by John Cleese)
a cult hit. "Instead of Wanda 's delicious anti-PC nastiness (flattened
lapdogs, stuttering jokes) and bawdy high-spiritedness, Fierce piles on
sight gags as crass commercialism runs amok in the zoo," says the USA
Today's Susan Wloszczyna. "It feels like it's been directed by a
taxidermist," says the Village Voice 's Howard Feinstein. Other problems:
no story line, cheap puns, and heavy-handed sexual innuendo. "There is a
curious antiquarian feeling, in fact, to the whole leering enterprise," says
The
New Yorker 's Anthony Lane. The Washington Post 's
Desson Howe and Slate's David Edelstein insist the film still has its virtues:
Every so often, "something wickedly inspired will come along" (Howe); the
film's still "more agreeable than most of the slapdash laugh-machines around"
(Edelstein). (See the official Fierce Creatures site.)
Book
Le
Divorce
, by Diane Johnson (Dutton). Diane Johnson ( The Shadow
Knows , Lying Low ) updates Portrait of a Lady in a "comedy of
manners" about an American film-school dropout named Isabel in Paris. The novel
"reminds us that even in our own day, it remains, as Henry James said, a
complex fate to be an American," says Malcolm Bradbury in the New York Times
Book Review . In the New York Review of Books , Gabriele Annan says
Johnson's contribution to the innocents-abroad novel is her spirit of
lighthearted seriousness: Le Divorce "takes desertion, suicide, and
murder in its stride, as though they were merely obligatory literary devices."
One shortcoming: The plot "veers into melodrama that seems a bit outsize for
the scale of events that lead to it" (Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, the New
York Times ). (Click here
for the Le Divorce page on the Dutton site.)
Updates
Evita: In the New Republic , historian Enrique Krauze lists
the horrors of Perónism glossed over by the musical and film: the torture and
murder of political opponents, often under Nazi tutelage; the sheltering of war
criminals, possibly for personal profit; the destruction of the Argentine
economy; the laying of the cornerstone for the "Dirty Wars" of the 1970s and
1980s. "It must not be forgotten ... that this woman and her husband also
represented the worst of this tradition, the worst of our century," writes
Krauze. ... More on Dick Morris: In the New York Review of Books ,
Gary Wills concludes that "the real Dick Morris scandal ... has nothing to do
with sex or personality or ideology. It has to do with the bottomless demands
for cash in the technology of modern politics." ... Critics have
speculated that William Greider wrote his book One World, Ready or
Not to refute Francis Fukuyama's "End of History," an essay celebrating the
global triumph of liberalism. But Fukuyama, in the Weekly Standard , says
that the Rolling Stone editor is correct to "criticiz[e] the tendency of
many to throw up their hands in the face of the global economic juggernaut and
become politically passive in the face of its economic imperatives."
Recent
"Summary Judgment" columns:
Jan.
22: Behind the Oval Office: Winning the Presidency in the Nineties ,
by Dick Morris; The Whole Wide World; The Inauguration of William Jefferson
Clinton; One World, Ready or Not: The Manic Logic of Global Capitalism ,
by William B. Greider; Idomeneo , by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, performed
by Placido Domingo and the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra and Chorus, conducted
by James Levine; Albino Alligator ; and The Naked Truth (NBC).
Jan.
15: La Cérémonie ; The Prospect Before Her: A History of Women in
Western Europe, 1500-1800 , by Olwen Hufton; King of the Hill ; and
Tokyo International Forum.
Jan.
8: Beavis and Butt-Head Do America ; Slouching to Gomorrah: Modern
Liberalism and American Decline , by Robert Bork; Politically Incorrect
With Bill Maher (ABC); Some Mother's Son ; Christian Dior: The Man
Who Made the World Look New , by Marie-France Pochna; and Yves Saint
Laurent: A Biography , by Alice Rawsthorn.
Jan.
1: Evita ; Portrait of a Lady ; Life of Picasso, Volume 2:
1907-1917 , by John Richardson; Once Upon a Mattress (The Broadhurst
Theatre on Broadway); Hamlet ; and The Odyssey , by Homer,
translated by Robert Fagles.
