“…but you’ve never really looked at anyone other than yourself. So watch me. Watch my heart break. Watch me jump. Watch me learn that after death there’s nothing. There’s no more watching. There’s no more following. No love. Say goodbye to Hazel for me. And say it to yourself, too. None of us has much time.”
— Sammy Barnathan (played by Tom Noonan) in Synecdoche, New York
“One of the functions of art is to remind the individual of the uniqueness of each moment.”
I recently re-watched HBO’s John Adams and liked it at least as much as I did the first time — naturally, Paul Giamatti and Laura Linney are excellent, and Tom Wilkinson’s Ben Franklin is a hoot — but I forgot just how good Stephen Dillane was as Thomas Jefferson. Really magnetic performance, specially in light of his time as Stannis Baratheon, the Least Exciting Claimant to the Iron Throne in all of Westeros. His Jefferson is basically the opposite of that.
But the part I simply cannot stop thinking about is a scene in Episode 4; John Adams — as the first American ambassador to England — meets King George (an incredible Tom Hollander) face to face for the first time. I’ve replayed the scene again and again, dumbstruck by the performances, particularly that of Hollander, who is now one of my favorite actors to watch.
During the half-assed lockdown in the early days of COVID-19, when the theaters were shut down, and live performances were cancelled, I had the good fortune to be asked to make a short film for The Catastrophic Theatre.
I submitted a short screenplay I had written some ten years earlier, and further proposed that I’d direct, design, and star in it, like some low-rent, Gulf Coast Orson Welles.
Inspired by both black and white film comedies of the 1930s and a 14-line dramatic fragment by the late East German playwright Heiner Müller’s, HERZSTÜCK is what might be pulled from the wreckage were Müller to fatally collide with the Three Stooges.
The film follows a pair of doltish musicians as they attempt to perform a duet for violin and piano. A series of accidents, distractions and interruptions leads to slaps, pratfalls, eye-pokes, and gruesome do-it-yourself amateur surgery. A bleak, slapstick meditation on the futility of love and, indeed, all human endeavor, HERZSTÜCK suggests a Laurel and Hardy short written and directed by Lars von Trier.
Anyway, the full movie is available to watch for free on YouTube.
wolveroon 