Owen Gleiberman in his Venice Film Festival Daily Variety review wrote:
“Let me say right up front: It’s the work of a master filmmaker… Field’s script is dazzling in its conversational flow, its insider dexterity, its perception of how power in the world actually works… Tár is not a judgement so much as a statement you can make your own judgment about. The statement is: We’re in a new world.”
A. O. Scott of The New York Times writing from the Telluride Film Festival and later from the New York Film Festival stated:
“I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a movie quite like Tár. Field balances Apollonian restraint with Dionysian frenzy. Tár is meticulously controlled and also scarily wild. Field finds a new way of posing the perennial question about separating the artist from the art, a question that he suggests can only be answered by another question: are you crazy? We don’t care about Tár because she’s an artist. We care about her because she’s art.”
Two very concise and well expressed quotes about the movie Tár.
I have watched the movie twice now and suspect that there are at least two movies hiding in Tár. It’s a movie about a conductor and about social media and all that, but it is also a ghost story. A movie about a person who gets canceled and also a horror film.
Spoiler alert… the metronome that starts ticking inside her cabinet, the noises she hears, the book and the mark she finds inside. I am even wondering whether everything after her fall happens to her or is a dream, perhaps in a hospital bed. The movie definitely merits a third viewing. I like it a lot. :-)
That is the sketch I began yesterday evening. Something sounded wrong last night and I couldn’t figure it out right away. Then I watched the excellent movie Tár (LINK – wikipedia), which I started the night before… And then it came to me, my melody contained an A over the F minor chord and that created the awfulness, of course. I knew the note had to be an A flat and then I couldn’t go to sleep because I wanted to hear this change. I didn’t want to start up everything in the middle of the night but as a result I couldn’t fall asleep until after 0300.
This section will become the chorus and the piece still needs some kind of verse… but the bones are there. Doesn’t feel at all sad to me. Uplifting actually.
Backstage is almost ready and you will be able to continue to witness the process there…. soon.
Oh, and the movie Tár is most excellent. A comment on excellence but also on power and the effects of cultural prejudices. There is much to say about the film. The performances are excellent. The film is gorgeous. The writing, however, is what’s amazing. Much is brought up but little judgement is made, leaving it to us, the viewer, to figure it out for ourselves.
Yesterday afternoon I decided that the arpeggio felt too fast and re-performed it at half the speed. Much more languid now. I love how little things can entirely change the feel of a pice of music.
This time I scheduled my flights so I would have over six hours between arriving in Philly on my national flight and leaving on my international flight, because in March I had only three hours between flights and American Airlines managed to delay my national flight so much that I had to run between terminals and barely made my flight to Lisbon. There is a nice Amex lounge in terminal A and I don’t mind waiting… And yet, and yet, American Airlines managed to get me to Philly late again, and yes, I had to run again. Planning a six hours layover is crazy enough, but now that’s not even sufficient?
ENT doc gave me a prescription for a cream last week. Used it once and it made my ears well. During the flight I listened to Rain Poems on my AirPods Max at least four times all the way through. I probably used the headphones for six hours altogether and my ears are still clear. The album is coming together nicely and I really enjoyed the experience. I have a couple of melodies to finish and Jon has a few bass parts to record but it’s not long now. This is my first album record with the new mobile set up and the first album NOT recorded in my studio in Santa Fe since 1995. Oh, that’s not entirely true… most of Pedals On the Path was recorded at Jon’s studio, but I mixed and mastered it at mine.
Lisbon is hot during the day but cools off nicely during the night. The trick is to get up early because at 0600 it is 65ºF. At 0700 I walked a little over four miles and didn’t get lost. A few times I wasn’t sure where I was but at this point I just have to keep going in a direction and I will eventually find a landmark I know. Look ma, no GPS.
Watched the first half of the movie Tár last night. Wow. If the second half keeps up with the first, this is an amazing movie!!
In a statement accompanying the teaser trailer in August 2022, Field said that he wrote the script for Blanchett, and that he would not have made the film if she had declined it.
I was asked how come I had a song on the soundtrack of Groundhog Day. Funny story, that. One evening, we were working in the studio in Santa Barbara, recording The Hours Between Night + Day, when I received a call from the soundtrack division of Epic Records. We need another song for this soundtrack and would like you to record “You Don’t Know Me”, by Ray Charles. I don’t know the song, or the movie, I replied, and what’s in it for me, if I interrupt my work to record this tune for the soundtrack? Well, this is going to be a big movie and we would make sure you get more work on soundtrack albums. Of course we will pick up the studio cost for the duration of this recording, and oh, we would need the song by tomorrow evening.
I turned to Jon. He knew the song and said we could bang that out pretty quickly, if we had to. So we did. We ran after the carrot, like musicians are often made to do. Then the carrot turned a corner and another corner and then it disappeared into some crevice. And that’s how I have a song on the soundtrack album of Groundhog Day. Can’t say the tune does much for me, neither the original nor our version. I think Jon’s bass is great and I do like the electric guitar feedback I added! It was a work for hire, or the promise of hire.
I love, love, love that title: Moon is the oldest TV…
Amanda Kim’s new documentary Nam June Paik: Moon Is the Oldest TV starts somewhere in the middle. It’s the 1950s, and within the first 20 minutes, we see the artist tranquilly playing a piano composition by Arnold Schoenberg, the Austrian composer who ushered in a new kind of musical modernism. It’s hardly the Paik most people know.
Paik’s wild videos, sculptures, and performances exude a madcap creativity that’s all too rare these days. And so it feels like a relief when, a few minutes later, Paik can be seen slamming his fist against another piano, creating jolting stabs of sound. That’s more like it.
Perhaps it’s the quietness of the plot, where I know nothing is going to jump out at me, make my heart race, or leave me in a soggy puddle on the floor.
His movies are not very long but they take me hours to watch. Why? With most of them, I pause specific scenes just so I can take in everything that’s there. And there’s always a lot to take in. there’s something about Ozu – un. deux.. trois…
