Starring… some ABT dancers.
And here are some photos of the fashion shoot.

Via ABT’s Twitter feed.

So now Baryshnikov and supermodel Kate Moss are making a ballet movie together. I know — all of these ballet movies! Moss is reportedly taking ballet lessons in preparation. The film is by Michael Clarke and shooting will begin in July in Marseilles. It’s not clear how widely the film is to be distributed but it’s to premiere at a fundraiser in England and later will be shown in galleries as a work of art.

Interesting: according to New York Magazine via British Vogue, Moss shouldn’t have too hard a time learning to dance on pointe since toe shoes aren’t that different from 6-inch heels. Toe shoes even include padding. What do we think about that one?

Above image from Leibovitz gallery on PBS.org.

Have you guys seen this? Apparently, UK teen Rebecca Flint, aka Beckii Cruel, is the latest YouTube dance sensation — at least in Japan, where her video clips have been viewed by over eight million people.

She says she has training in ballet and modern dance. She has a dancing DVD soon to be released. Here is the interview with her on MSNBC.com where she talks about why she thinks she has become so popular in Japan.

Go here to see more of her YouTube videos.

Okay, I can’t really say “ever” since I’ve never watched the Superbowl before. But seriously, who is Mark Sanchez!

A-Rod should do this commercial during the World Series. No, not really. Can you imagine?

Here’s a video of Adam Shankman talking about the upcoming number he’s choreographing for the Academy Awards. According to SYTYCism, Jakob Karr will be performing in that number, and those auditioning included SYTYCD alums Billy Bell, Travis Wall, Katee Shean, Russell Ferguson, Jaimie Goodwin, Legacy Perez, Ellenore Scott, and Kathryn McCormick.

Photo taken from the Prix de Lausanne website.

Last weekend I went to another fabulous Guggenheim Works & Process event, this one in celebration of Frederic Franklin, the 95-year-old formerly of Ballets Russes who’s worked with American Ballet Theater for many years now performing non-dance character roles and setting ballets on the company and its studio company, ABT II. I’ve written about him here.

ABT, ABT II, and some of the Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis School students performed some ballets Franklin has staged for them. My favorite was the Hungarian Czardas section from Petipa’s Raymonda, performed by ABT II, with Irlan Silva and Meaghan Hinkis as the lead couple. So much fun — and really made me want to see the whole ballet. I’ve since gotten my hands on a couple videos — more on them later.  But for now I just want to say how wonderful I thought Silva was — how much he stands out, how much strength and discipline and precision he has, along with that ever elusive star necessity, Presence. Even doing basic heel toe steps, he just brings it to another level.

Here are a couple of videos of him at the 2008 Prix de Lausanne, where he danced for his native Brazil and placed very well. The first is of his contemporary solo, a little-seen work by Nijinsky, and the second is his classical variation, from Le Corsaire.

And here is a video I found of that Czardas, danced by others.

Also performed, by others, were the classical Raymonda variations and the Sleeping Beauty Bluebird Pas de Deux. And, ABT dancers were David Hallberg and Xiomara Reyes dancing the Giselle Act II Pas de Deux. Which was far too short! But of course one must never miss the opportunity to see David Hallberg dance up close Among other things, he knows how to make the most of a pose, to take the lines — particularly the leg lines — to their fullest and most sublime.

Photo of Hallberg dancing with Gillian Murphy, taken from here.

Wow, a film made by the dancers / choreographers – turned filmmakers, The Ballet Boyz, of the Royal Ballet’s historic visit to Cuba earlier this year, which was shown on UK television, is now available to us all via You Tube. How awesome is that.

Go here to see all eight parts.

Via You Dance Funny So Does Me.

If you missed it on PBS, you can watch Bill T. Jones as he talks about his Fondly Do We Hope … Fervently Do We Pray, celebrating Abraham Lincoln, on the Bill Moyers Journal here. Do watch — it’s fascinating.

With all of my book hysteria, I’d missed this news (which was released the same day as the novel): a favorite dancer of mine was finally promoted to soloist.

Here is a YouTube video I found of her (dancing a modern piece with a small company, not ABT):

Top photo by Gene Schiavone, taken from Time Out NY; headshot from ABT website.

Okay I know this has nothing overtly to do with dance but I love these two and couldn’t help posting it anyway. So cute in their youthful innocence And those voices! Seriously, don’t they sound like characters out of West Side Story?

Via The Score.

to everyone who celebrates is. I found this video from my friend, the great writer Michael Northrop I love it.

It reminds me of a scene in my favorite novelist Andrei Makine’s Once Upon the River Love, where two Siberian boys wake up to find their entire town covered in snow, as they often do during winter there, and they have a blast burrowing their way up and out.

And I can’t wait to see it.

Rasta Thomas’ new Bad Boys of Dance show, “Rock the Ballet,” opens tonight at the Joyce Theater. I’ll be there later in the week. Here’s what I wrote last time I saw Bad Boys; below is a video of some footage of the current show, in Barcelona, interspersed with audience interviews (in Spanish).

And here’s one from the group’s performance on a Spanish TV show:

It looks like they’re including women this time (at least one, at least one human ). I can never tell if he’s being ironic or not with the choreography… In any event, the reason to see this show is the man himself, Rasta Thomas, brilliant brilliant dancer.

Above image taken from here.

Oh cool — Dwight Rhoden and Desmond Richardson, founders of Complexions Contemporary Ballet, are returning to  So You Think You Can Dance for this Tuesday’s finale. They’re to choreograph a piece for one set of finalists (press release doesn’t say who). Exciting! Press release doesn’t say Desmond will dance, like last time, but who knows!?

Well, if not, here’s a vid of him in Episodes (which, coincidentally, Alvin Ailey is also performing this season at City Center, and which members of that company performed earlier this season on this show).

Photo above by Heidi Schumann, from NY Times.

For people who missed it this past Wednesday, here is our Paloma Herrera on So You Think You Can Dance:

From what I can tell through Google, it looks like nearly all responses from the gen pub have been positive

Some people mentioned they’d have preferred a pdd (since SYTYCD is about partnering, after all) — something more like this:

Dancers above are our studly Jose Manuel Carreno and the Royal’s lovely Tamara Rojo.

I miss Jose; he hardly danced with ABT this past Met season…

There were rumors swarming around that NYCB’s Ben Millepied would be choreographing for the upcoming film starring Natalie Portman and Mila Kunis, and they appear to be true.

Says Director Darren Aronofsky:

“My sister was a dancer growing up and I was always in the background, so I always thought it would be a really interesting world to film in. And after wrestling and working with maybe the lowest form of art [in 'The Wrestler'], it was kind of interesting to move to the highest form of art,” he said, adding that dance appreciation can be an acquired taste: “It’s taken a long time to develop an understanding of the details, and the more you get exposed to it, the more complexity you see.”

Click on that first link, by the way, for an interesting script analysis.

SLSG has been named a top law blog in the criminal law category by Attorney.org, likely for my previous coverage of the Sean Bell shooting trial and some other related posts. This is particularly exciting because my soon-to-be-published novel is in part about the life of a young female criminal appeals attorney. I also plan to write more about the Sean Bell case. So I’m very honored!

And apropos of criminal defense attorneys, the movie Disturbing the Universe is a must-see. It’s a documentary about the life of civil rights / criminal defense attorney William Kunstler, made by his daughters. Since he was involved in practically every major trial of his time — disorderly conduct sit-ins protesting racial segregation, the Chicago Seven, the Attica Uprising, the standoff at Wounded Knee, the Central Park Jogger case, the trials of those accused of the 1993 WTC bombing — it ends up being, above all, an immensely informative history of late 20th Century race-relations in this country.  See it!

There’s an excellent interview with young, newish ABT virtuoso (and very intelligent-sounding) Daniil Simkin at the Ballet Bag. Simkin talks about his experiences thus far with American Ballet Theater, dancing with major stars at the World Ballet Festival over the summer in Japan, and a gala he’s organizing next month in Athens. He also talks about how dance professionals can use social media to connect with fans and what he thinks ballet companies need to do to keep ballet alive. Excellent interview, superb questions, “bag ladies”!

And it gives me the opportunity to post, for people who don’t have the opportunity to regularly see ABT, some of his more astounding YouTube clips. Enjoy:

And The Flames of Paris, the first thing I ever saw him do (but with Sara Lane, at ABT). Look for the barrel turns around the 5:55 mark:

For more clips, go here.
Above photo, by Gene Schiavone, taken from Simkin’s blog.

Over the weekend, the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art celebrated its 30th anniversary with an evening of performances, including one by pop star Lady Gaga, who debuted her new Speechless while members of the Bolshoi danced along. Milan-based artist Francesco Vezzoli orchestrated the pairing, telling the Daily Beast, “Gaga is one of the Nijinskys of our epoch. So I don’t know if it’s going to be great artwork. But so far I think I made a good choice.”

Hmmm, not completely sure what he means by the Nijinsky ref (unless he means she has scattered moments of genius mixed with a bit of insanity, or that she’s iconoclastic…), but anyway, here’s a sampling of what happened:

Via Black Book.

If you’re in New York, try not to miss the newly restored version of The Red Shoes (from 1948) currently showing at Film Forum (but only for a couple more days). Based on the Hans Christian Andersen tale of the girl who dons red shoes then can’t stop dancing til death does her in, it’s the story of a ballerina who stars in the ballet of the same name, and suffers the same tragic fate. It’s a bit dated in its story-line (the protagonist has to choose between a husband and a ballet career) and in its melodramatic ending, but the cinematography is stunning, the costumes and sets are glorious (I so want the turquoise dress she wears in the scene where the owner of the ballet company — a Balanchine-type — tells her he’s casting her in the lead!), and Moira Shearer’s lightning-footed dancing is just about the best I think I’ve ever seen onscreen. There’s also a little cameo by Ballets Russes choreo Leonid Massine.

It’s been called by some critics the greatest ballet film ever made, and Martin Scorcese (who helped in the restoration) calls it one of his earliest cinematographic influences.

Above photos of Shearer taken from here and here.

(photo taken from here)

Since seeing Frederick Wiseman’s excellent film La Danse a couple days ago — a documentary about the Paris Opera Ballet — I have not been able to get the fascinating etoile (star, highest level of dancer over there), Laetitia Pujol, out of my mind. The film is basically a series of rehearsals with some actual performance footage thrown in, and, unbelievably, it’s absolutely mesmerizing. If anyone’d described it that way to me beforehand — a bunch of rehearsal footage — I would’ve thought I’d be bored out of my mind, but it’s so incredibly interesting watching these dancers rehearse with top choreographers like Wayne McGregor and Angelin Preljocaj and Mats Ek. And the performances — omg – -that company does everything from the aforementioned contemporary choreographers, to Pina Bausch’s Tanztheater, to Petipa to Balanchine. Parisians are so damn lucky! We get either Petipa or Balanchine over here… not at all fair…

Anyway, Pujol blew me completely away. I’d never seen her dance before and somewhere in the middle of the film she’s rehearsing and she does the most mind-blowing series of turns all over the damn room. I’ve spent the past couple hours searching YouTube and, yay, finally found what she was doing! It’s Etudes, here:

For some reason, the spins looked a slight bit faster in the film, but you get the idea.
Here are a couple of others of Pujol:
The first, Le Baiser, which I love,

And Giselle, with Nicolas Le Riche:

One odd thing about the movie is that it’s a documentary, but there are no captions, so you have to try to guess who all the choreographers and dancers are. There are credits at the end, but you can’t possibly figure out who is who at that point, when there are all these names filling up the screen. At first I thought this was kind of a discredit to the artists not to list their names and titles or bios when they are shown in the film, but then I thought, well, it would kind of interrupt the flow of the action; this made it seem more like a narrative film, like one of those narrative films that’s shot with a handheld camera or the like to make you think you’re eavesdropping on someone’s actual life — which, it turns out, you are! Interesting filming device…

The real-life rehearsals do have their moments of (probably unintentional) humor, such as when one of the choreographers is describing to a young dancer learning the role of Medea that she’s portraying a god, a person whose intense, other-worldly powers make loving fraught with danger, and she says “Oh, like Edward Scissorhands.” At times, though, people laughed at seemingly odd things, like when a young dancer new to the company tells the director she longs to dance like Pujol and the director tells her, “Well, she has her own personal intelligence.” People in the audience seemed to think that was funny, but clearly, Pujol does have “her own personal intelligence”; dancing isn’t just about excellence of technique, it’s about using your brain. And these dancers are so fascinating because they’re so clever, they’re such powerful performers.

Go see this movie if you at all can. In NY, it’s at Film Forum.

I have been called a “bad Marcelo fan” for continuously chatting about Roberto Bolle, as I did, for ex., in the last post (I don’t think any current dancer promotes himself quite as much as Roberto, and he promotes ballet with himself, so you can’t help but love him for that reason alone).

Anyway, when I first started blogging there were practically no YouTubes of any of my favorite dancers, but that’s thankfully now changed. So, here are several of Marcelo, still SLSG’s favorite ballerino!, dancing with some of SLSG’s favorite ballerinas.

Here, with Alessandra Ferri in Lar Lubovitch’s gripping Othello pas de deux:

Here with Veronika Part in Swan Lake (video quality is not the best, but oooh, the music!)

Here, his Albrecht variation from Giselle, which is timely since ABT is currently in Ocean County, CA, performing that ballet:

Here, as the wickedly sexy Von Rothbart in Swan Lake:

Here, with Gillian Murphy at the beginning of SL (again as Von Rothbart):

The guy who’s dancing the swamp-creature persona of Von Roth, above, is Isaac Stappas, whose new headshot, coincidentally, I was just sent by the amazing Jade Young, who is practically becoming ABT’s portraitist in residence!

I’ve posted it previously, but here is Marcelo’s which he did a while back:

And one more, with Gillian Murphy again in Coppelia:

I know, the videos are nothing compared the live versions, but the first, of Othello, comes kind of close, no? And the last you can see pretty well, especially around the 4 minute mark when the great one begins his solo.

Photo by Bill Cooper of the mesmerizing Drew Jacoby and Rubinald Pronk in Lightfoot Leon’s spellbinding Softly as I Leave You, which is on both Morphoses programs (currently at City Center) and which I’ve been going on about in my last post, here, and earlier here.

And look — finally an American critic has something good to say about it!!

Says Lisa Jo Sagolla of Backstage magazine, “Lightfoot Leon’s Softly as I Leave You, a stunningly inventive duet involving a frightening coffinlike wooden box, is so fiercely emotional that its impact is universally chilling.”

I couldn’t find any YouTube clips of Jacoby and Pronk in Softly but, if you’re unfamiliar with them, here are a couple of others I found: the first a sexy little music video and the second is of them rehearsing with Mia Michaels.

Review coming soon of Program B, which includes Christopher Wheeldon’s new Rhapsody Fantaisie, which I liked.

Roslyn Sulcas just reminded me that I am missing Garth Fagan Dance, currently at the Joyce Theater. I may try to go later in the run, but since they’re only on through Nov. 1 and since I’m so busy right now, I might not make it.

Anyway, here are a couple of clips I thought you all might enjoy. First is one of my favorites of his, From Before, and second is from Griota New York, which they performed at the Jacobs Pillow Festival last year.

Brazilian dance troupe Companhia de Danca just wrapped up a short run at NY’s City Center, performing Deborah Colker’s 4X4. Colker has choreographed sambas for some of the most prestigious schools to participate in the Rio Carnival, and she’s also the first woman to choreograph for Cirque du Soleil — she did their most recent show, Ovo.

You could really see the influence both of Carnival and Cirque du Soleil in 4×4. The whole program was very sexy, very acrobatic with the dancers performing feats that looked extremely difficult.

The title of the work refers to small spaces and how we humans try to adapt to them (which is very pertinent to my life right now as I try hard to tolerate the monstrous noises made by upstairs Godzilla and her mother…).

In the first piece, “Corners,” tall, thin, bare-legged, short-skirted and high-heeled women seem trapped in boxes, each within her own. Well, not really trapped though — just inside the box. Each woman climbs about her box, sometimes lying down on her back and tracing the box’s planes with her long legs, spider-like. Eventually men appear, climbing over the high backs of the boxes, then reaching down toward the women, pulling them up, eventually winding up in the box together, each couple performing a very gymnastic pas de deux that evoked a lot of oooh and aaahs from the crowd.

In the second piece, “Table,” a man and woman perform complicated lifts as a a conveyor-type belt runs atop the table, showing their impressive balancing skills.

In the third cutely funny piece, “Some People,” all the dancers take the stage. They dance and jump about joyously, full of life, while performing everyday gestures that may be natural but that you don’t really do in public — smelling, poking, grabbing / scratching your crotch — the men first, then the women almost in imitation of them.

Music to the first two pieces reminded me of Cirque du Soleil but with a Brazilian emphasis — electronics, some guitars, very percussive; music to the third was the song “Someday My Prince Will Come” by Larry Morey and Frank Churchill, which, given the crotch scratching, etc. was rather amusing.

The second half of the program consisted of one dance, “Vases,” with a short overture consisting of women dancing ballet en pointe (the only time in the show anyone’s in toe shoes) to Mozart, as played on an onstage piano by Colker herself (she’s also an accomplished classical pianist).

After the overture, several vases that appear to be made of china or another very breakable material are slowly dropped onto the floor. The vases appear to be set very close together and the dancers — now men joining the women –  must wend their ways around them — leaping, jumping, turning, partnering — at one point, the men push the women around like wheelbarrows, zigzagging in and around those crazy vases.

Soon, lights are dropped from the ceiling toward the vases and the dancers must weave around those as well. Eventually, the lights are dropped into the vases, and, each light still being attached to its wire and all the wires still attached to the ceiling, the dancers now have to dance around these delicate objects on the floor as well all these crazy wires strung from the ceiling. Talk about the need for nimbleness, agility, and amazing spacial sensibilities!

It was a sweet night. Though nothing seemed tremendously profound, I found all the dances to be humorous and cute, while involving difficult hurdles the dancers surmounted seemingly effortlessly.

Only thing, I was expecting and so looking forward to seeing Isabela Coracy (above), from this wonderful film, which I saw at Tribeca Film Festival earlier this year, but she doesn’t appear to be in the company any longer. The film’s producers were the ones who’d told us to expect to see her when Deborah Colker’s company came to town. Only When I Dance follows the lives of two dance students from the favelas (poor areas): Irlan Silva who is now with ABT’s studio company, and Isabela. I was so disappointed because she’s such a beautiful and talented ballerina, trained classically but very able to dance modern as well as the film showed, but the portions of the film devoted to her dance journey made clear how hard it is for black female ballerinas in Brazil — and, from what I’ve seen, elsewhere as well. She’s often told she doesn’t have the “right body,” she needs to diet, yadda yadda yadda — endlessly frustrating, even to you as the audience, because these criticisms seem to overtake any issues with her technique or artistry. And of course she’s not the least bit overweight.

Anyway, I was disappointed that she no longer seems to be with Companhia de Danca. I really wanted to see her dance live.

All photos except the one of Coracy taken from the company’s flickr page; the Coracy photos is taken from the film’s website.

…after the Fall For Dance finale in the FFD lounge.

Top photo from the Trocks’ website; bottom photo (Grant is in back) by Sascha Vaughn, courtesy of City Center.

I was actually pretty proud of myself for recognizing him without his makeup on! After seeing them perform in the festival last weekend — they were my favorites from Program 3 — I did some research, particularly on Grant / aka Katerina Bychkova and found this interesting article, which happened to contain the only photo I could find of the guys not in costume (scroll down, on the right side); it wasn’t hard to figure out which one was him.

Anyway I was with my friends Michael and Taylor in the FFD lounge and, when I noticed him walking around I pointed him out to them. Michael initially wouldn’t believe me that he was the “big guy” — it’s really crazy how dancers DO always look so much smaller in person!! — but I was pretty sure. So of course outgoing as he is, Michael was soon off to confirm whether I was correct! After he did so, he made me and Taylor (both of us very very shy) go over and talk to him and some of the company people at his table.

And I’m happy we did. Mr. Grant was sooo nice! I love it when favorite dancers are all warm and fuzzy He’s the type of guy you feel like you could talk to forever.

Anyway, I liked all of the dancers — all of whom have superb classical technique and of course immense acting skills — but because Grant is the largest and had a main role, he stood out, and his body is naturally the most subversive for this kind of gender parody. At the festival, they performed Go For Barocco, one of the troupe’s earliest ballets, from 1974, a light spoof of several Balanchine ballets, including Concerto Barocco, after which the ballet is named. Here are some clips of it (which Grant isn’t in; he’s too new to the company):

I love their intentional humor — the way they present pretty, innocent ballerina faces to the audience but then get into little cat-fights with each other — but I also think in a way it’s more subversive when they dance seriously, especially when they dance Balanchine, who idolized / objectified women in so fervently declaring that “ballet is woman.” Ballet to him may have been woman, but of course one with a certain body type. When they do that, what I call a “group grapevine” so ubiquitous in Balanchine ballets (clip one around the 4:42-4:57 mark), of course their bodies are going to get all twisted around each other; that weaving in and out of each other in complicated patterns requires skinny, lithe little bodies. And those kind of showgirl-ish “strutting hip juts” (clip one: 3:56-4:12)– they don’t even need to give them any oomph; with their male bodies, they’re  going to look different, and funny in a way you never noticed on, for example, the ballerinas in “Rubies.” I just can’t stop laughing at the 5:18 point on clip one — it’s so Balanchine taken to a hilariously ridiculous extreme. And I love the wrapping of the hands atop each other (clip two: 2:21-3:01) that here takes on lesbian undertones, which in Balanchine’s similar patterns and gestures looks innocuously sweetly girlish. They mean everything in good fun, but because it’s not completely off the wall, it makes you think, it makes you see things in a different way.

Anyway, unbelievably I haven’t seen this troupe since college. I don’t know how I’ve missed them all these years in New York but I’m definitely going to see them more often now.

More Fall For Dance reviews coming this week.

Cuban ballet star, currently a principal at the Royal in London, has a role opposite Natalie Portman in the movie, New York I Love You, set to open here October 16. You can see him in the trailer around the :58 mark.

If you can read Spanish (and I largely can’t anymore), here’s an interview with him, and here’s another piece about the possibility of a film based on his memoir, No Way Home.

Oh how I wish Anthony Lane would have reviewed this film; unfortunately the New Yorker didn’t assign him. I always value his insights, particularly on movies I find disturbing. And I found this one so not because of the subject matter (race and gender-based violence in post-apartheid South Africa), but because of the way men, women, blacks and whites are all depicted, the extremely outmoded essentialist terms in which women and men are portrayed (ie: I am man, therefore I desire to rape women; I am woman therefore I love children and won’t have an abortion, etc. etc.)

The film is based on the Booker-prize-winning novel of the same name by Nobel-winning writer, J.M. Coetzee, a white man from South Africa who currently lives in Australia.

David Lurie (Malkovich) is a 52-year-old white professor at a Cape Town university who’s attracted to younger biracial women. As the movie opens, we see him soliciting a prostitute who fits such description, and shortly thereafter he becomes taken with one of his students, Melanie, and the two begin having an affair. It’s not clear how Melanie feels about him though. She seems completely dead during their sex scenes, and whenever she leaves his house, she always looks sad and violated. But it’s not like he’s raping her; she’s there of her own volition and she’s an adult and went into the affair knowingly. Nor is it made clear that he’s committing quid pro quo sexual harrassment — telling her he’ll fail her if she doesn’t do as he pleases; in fact it’s later revealed that the opposite is true — he passes her even though she’s truant and fails to show up for exams.

Eventually her young black boyfriend finds out about them and exposes Lurie. Students drop his classes and the disciplinary committee calls him for a hearing. Lurie seems to agree with the committee that he’s done something wrong (though it’s not clear to me what this is — again, she’s an adult and the sex seems consensual), but won’t defend himself because he can’t apologize for what he considers his (male) “nature.” The disciplinary committee dismisses him from his post and he moves to the country, into his daughter’s farmhouse.

His daughter, Lucy, is a lesbian whose lover has just left her. She shares the farm with a black man, Petrus – -he lives not in the main house but in a shed — who’s worked part of the land, installing pipelines and a well, and who, because of his labor, now owns part of the land. I wish the film had done more to educate viewers about this practice. It’s not clear, in post-apartheid S.A., whether Lucy is trying to help Petrus (she’s clearly liberal-minded and believes in righting historical wrongs) or whether this is the way the new system works to enable black South Africans to gain land ownership. In any event, Petrus is depicted early on as someone who’s up to no good. He’s nearly drooling at the mouth when we (and Lurie) first meet him (like a dog, I guess, since that seems to be the main — totally overdone — metaphor here).

So the dogs: Lucy houses several out back in a cage, partly for humane purposes — apparently there’s an over-population of dogs in S.A. and Lucy’s friends with a female veterinary nurse who catches them, tries to adopt them out and then euthanizes them when she can’t — and partly for protection. We’re made aware up front it’s very dangerous out on the farm — there’s been a lot of pillagings. She also keeps a loaded rifle in the house. At one point, she and Lurie are walking one of the dogs and Lurie tells her dogs are “creatures of habit.” He tells her a story of his childhood neighbor’s dog. The dog (a male) would always go nuts when the bitch next door was in heat. He’d dig holes in the yard, tear things up, etc. — create chaos basically. So his owner would punish him every time this happened. Eventually, the minute the female dog went into heat, the male dog would crouch and whine and walk around with his tail between his legs. The horror of this Pavlovian game, Lurie says, is that the dog eventually learned to deny his own nature. This is why, Lurie says, he shouldn’t be expected to deny his own nature (screwing around with young women, presumably to their detriment).

One day, Lucy and Lurie return to the farm after walking some of the dogs, to find three young black men taunting the caged dogs. Lucy approaches them and asks them to stop. They give her a story about one of the boys being stranded and ask if he can come inside and use her phone. She cages the dogs she’s walked and tells him yes; he alone can come inside. This is a ruse and after she’s caged her dogs, the boys drag her and Lurie into the house, gang rape her, lock Lurie in the bathroom where they douse him with gasoline and set him on fire, and use Lucy’s gun to shoot and kill all of the caged dogs. They also loot the place and cart off Lucy’s possessions in Lurie’s car. Lurie manages to save himself with toilet water but he’s still badly burned.

Lurie tries to get Lucy to go to police but for some nonsensical reason she won’t. Ludicrously, she tells him he doesn’t know what happened because he didn’t witness “the crime” — ie, he wasn’t in her bedroom, which, ridiculously, he doesn’t argue with. Her friend echoes her — he “wasn’t there” during “the crime.” He tells her he’d like to talk to the police, but she tells him there’s no information he could give them that she can’t, which he also inexplicably doesn’t argue with.

So a man is bludgeoned and set on fire and almost killed, but he isn’t the victim of a crime? He sees the attackers as they kill the dogs and pour gasoline on him, then throw a match at him, while Lucy is still in the bedroom, but he has “no information” of “the crime” that she doesn’t have?

Sadly, there are still parts of the world where women are considered male property, and therefore her rape is seen as the worst possible thing that could ever happen to her (or her “owners”). Worse than being set on fire. Worse than being shot and killed. I find it beyond shocking that the rape is seen as the only crime here.

It turns out Lucy is pregnant with the child of one of the rapists. Lurie tries to get her to have an abortion but she responds with, “I’m a woman. I don’t hate children because of where they came from.”

Petrus, who was suspiciously missing during the time of the break-in and whom Lurie suspects of having set the whole thing up so that he could scare Lucy away and own the farm himself, returns to the farm, with a new wife, and throws a party in the shed. At this party, Lucy and Lurie discover that one of the boys who raped her is the son of Petrus’s new wife. Lurie wants to call the police but Lucy forbids him from doing so, saying she needs to get along with these people since they’re now co-owners of the farm.

Lurie goes to talk to Petrus. Petrus insists his new son is not one of the rapists, but tells Lurie because of what’s happened, he would still make him marry Lucy but for the fact that he is too young for her. Petrus then tells Lurie he will marry Lucy himself (I don’t know if the filmmakers forgot that Petrus is already married or whether in S.A. bigamy is legal). Lurie delivers this message to Lucy and she accepts Petrus’s marriage proposal. Lurie thinks she is completely nuts (as does most of the audience, I’d venture to say) and tries to plead with her but to no avail.

Eventually, through all of this trauma, Lurie realizes the wrongness of his ways (because, apparently, in this world, rape is equal to sex with prostitutes and consensual sex with adults). He visits the father of the student he seduced to apologize. It’s a testament to Malkovich’s enormous talents that this climactic scene actually works, based in nonsense though it is since he’s really done nothing wrong to this supposedly full-grown woman.

Lurie begins having an affair with Lucy’s friend, the humane euthanizer, and helps her put the dogs down. In the second climactic moment, Lurie sacrifices his favorite dog in order to show that he’s finally has decided to disavow his own male / dog “nature.”

By the end of the movie, Lurie has learned to accept his daughter and her pregancy. In the last shot, the camera slowly pans across the land (like in Howard’s End) to reveal the entire farm. The bright new house Petrus has built himself is a marked contrast from the shabby, broken home housing Lucy. So, through rape and pillage, black South Africans have “taken over.”

The biggest problem with the movie (apart from the bad metaphors, the infantalizing of women and the equating of sex with rape) is that all the black South Africans are portrayed either as evil or easily taken advantage of. I’m sure it can be very dangerous for whites on those farms, particularly for women living alone, and I’m sure there are many rapes. But the film doesn’t present the perspective of any of the black South Africans, the historical oppression, the conditions creating the severe inequality that have led to such hatred and violence. The film is one-sided and in my mind comes across as feeding into racist stereotypes.

The film’s only redeeming quality, to me (apart from some beautiful shots of South Africa), is Malkovich, who — I have no idea how — was able to make his way through all the aforementioned problems and create a truly sympathetic, memorable portrait of this man. He always does that though, no matter how unlikeable the character. The man is a genius.

Has anyone else seen the movie? Or read the book? I have the book, but haven’t gotten around to reading it yet. I didn’t like Diary of a Bad Year and so was putting it off but I probably should now because I have a feeling there was a lot left out. I hope there was anyway.

Photo taken from Rotten Tomatoes.

I came home from my first night at the Fall For Dance Festival and turned on Jimmy Kimmel before I had a chance to watch my tape of Dancing With the Stars. I honestly thought he was kidding when he announced who was kicked off.

Even though I liked him, I can see Ashley, but Macy? I thought she had a good attitude toward the competition but maybe people interpreted it more as haughtiness? She definitely wasn’t the worst woman Tuesday night, and that’s not what the show’s about anyway. Why vote for the best person on the first night; why not vote for someone you can watch improve? Sucks that she never got to do Latin because I think she would have been a lot better at that than Standard.

I don’t get it at all.

She didn’t end up going on Jimmy Kimmel because, as Jonathan Roberts said, she was too upset, thinking she let her fans down.

Anyway, at least my whole evening didn’t suck:

(photo from here)

Fall For Dance last night consisted of four companies, four dances (more about them all later), but my highlight was definitely Savion Glover. I know he’s been on one of the TV shows before — either Dancing With the Stars or So You Think You Can Dance — can’t remember which one. But this was my first time seeing him live and ooooh! You have to see him dance live; there’s nothing like it. This is one of the best dance performances — one of the best performances period — I’ve ever seen. And he’s such a cutie in person and he dances with so much genuine happiness, so much joy. And he’s small — smaller than I thought! Ah, I came out of City Center feeling like I often feel after seeing Alvin Ailey — I just wanted to dance all the way home.

Here’s the big dance number on tonight’s Emmys, choreographed by So You Think You Can Dance’s Tabitha and Napoleon, performed in part by Maks Chmerkovskiy and Karina Smirnoff from Dancing With the Stars. Nice to integrate the two main TV dance shows in this way. But, ah, where have I seen that costume before, Karina?…

Medarethinks Yulia moved that fringe a bit better. Although of course she had more time to dance. I do sometimes wonder if Karina were still competing today whether she’d beat Yulia.