Metropolitan Opera in HD: Aida, Turandot, etc.

I have come quite late in my life to opera, tippy-toeing from, say, Hansel and Gretel to The Magic Flute, then maybe a few years later to, perhaps, Manon, skipping past Madame Butterfly and the weeping Mimi, she of the cold tiny hands.

But now the New York Metropolitan Opera is presenting live matinees through the magic of HD and your local AMC (and other) theaters.  They're every couple of weeks, on the west coast at 10 a.m. on Saturday morning.  There's a reprise two weeks later on Wednesday evening at 6:30 p.m.  You can google all the info: Metopera.org or fathomevents.org.

If you're a senior, $20 will get you the full opera, live, on a huge screen, with subtitles, plus interviews before each opera and during each intermission.  You don't even have to dress up (although people do).  It's a super way to learn about this art, and presented this way it's very viewer-friendly.  

Michael Jackson's This is It

The music documentary, Michael Jackson's This is It, has a limited run in theaters right now. Directed by Kenny Ortega, it's a behind-the-scenes look at the preparations for Jackson's planned London show, before his untimely death a few months ago.  It includes archival footage as well as interviews, all attesting to the enormous power of Jackson the performer and Jackson the person.

While being a Jackson fan probably adds to an audience member's enjoyment, anyone can appreciate the enormous talent: he was a marvelous singer, a gifted dancer, a consummate showman.  What a loss.

A Serious Man

Those Coen brothers are at it again.  This time, they've created a modern Job story, with Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg) as a beleaguered 1967 physics professor, who does all the right things.  And yet, his wife plans to leave him, his kids keep ragging him about their tv antenna, his unpleasant drippy brother continues to camp in his guest room, and he has a particularly insistent student who demands a grade change.

Larry seeks help from three of his temple's rabbis.  One, and then the second, and finally the third: zip.  In spite of/because of his travails, you're laughing, probably because he just keeps wondering why, and really can't/doesn't take any real action to correct any of these awful messes that keep happening to him.

It's not exactly a downer of a movie; but it does defy most attempts at a full understanding.  Maybe the title is ironic: maybe Larry is just way too serious, and he'd be better off chucking everything that surrounds him and spending the afternoon watching Laurel and Hardy wrestling that piano.  Or maybe a Coen brothers movie.

Where the Wild Things Are

Director Spike Jonze has created a marvel.  From Maurice Sendak's 1963 children's book by the same name, Jonze and Dave Eggers have written a screenplay that deepens and enriches the original book.  9-year-old Max (the amazing Max Records) doesn't know how to handle his perfectly normal (to grownups) rage, anxiety, and fear.  He's only 9, after all, and how many of us grownups can handle these difficult emotions, even though we're supposed to be adults?  When, for instance, Max's teen sister won't pay attention to him and hangs with her friends, Max takes on her whole crew in a snowball fight, not realizing he's outnumbered as well as outweighed.  When in the ensuing battle the teens inadvertently crush Max's snow fort, burying him inside, he's not only terrified of being suffocated but also humiliated that he's unable to play successfully with the big boys.

This scene, like most of the others involving the "real" world, has an inversion later in the movie, when Max is King of the Wild Things.  All the enormous furry Wild Things pile onto each other, including Max in their warm tumble.  While for a moment he's in danger of more suffocation, the outcome is instead blissful, comforting, entangled sleep.

The cast includes the luminous Catherine Keener as Max's mom, and the voices of such notables as Lauren Ambrose, Chris Cooper, and James Gandolfini.  Gandolfini is particularly effective for adult audiences members, because even though he is--at least at first--playful and friendly to Max, you recognize that voice as Tony Soprano's, and you know what he's capable of.

It's a fabulous, rich, touching movie.  Don't miss it.