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Review: Adam and Steve2.5
Like Brokeback Mountain, New Queer Cinema icon Craig Chester's directorial debut Adam and Steve resonates from our current political moment. Both films tackle the issue of gay marriage, one more explicitly than the other, and together suggest the tensions that haunt gay men and keep them apart aren't very different from place to place or decade to decade. In the late '80s, goth boy Adam (Chester) and his obese fag hag Rhonda (a fat-suited Parker Posey) meet dancing-queen Steve (Malcolm Gets) at Danceteria. Adam takes Steve back to his apartment, where they strip, fawn over each other like the teenagers they are (the actors—one caked in white makeup, the other half-hidden beneath a Dee Snider do—allow our assumption of their characters' youth to do most of the work for them), and do bumps of cocaine unsuspectingly laced with baby laxatives. When nature calls and Steve takes an unexpected "Hershey squirt" on the floor and Adam responds with a show of projectile vomiting, Steve runs out of the apartment in horror. Seventeen years later, they meet again and fall in love, oblivious to the fact they've met before.
Compare Adam and Steve, so clumsy and unsophisticated in spots, to the false sincerity of Madonna's slick "I Love New York" from the otherwise fine Confessions On a Dance Floor. The beat is fierce but Madge's political stance is glib. People are so hung up on the song's corny rhyme ("If you don't like my attitude then you can f' off/Just go to Texas, isn't that where they golf?") they miss the singer's red-state condescension. Chester corrects such crassness in a scene where Steve's parents come to visit him and Adam. The values of Steve's parents are shocking to the highminded Adam (he scoffs at the 9/11 commemorative plate and boxed wine they bring to dinner) just as Adam and Steve's relationship makes the older couple feel uncomfortable (they tense up when the men reach for and hold each other's hands). Chester resorts to adolescent humor to give impact to his points (Steve squirts a turkey baster strategically near Adam's ass), but in spite of these slips, the audience doesn't lose sight of the fact that the actor-director is genuinely concerned with paving and having his characters navigate a two-way street of understanding.
Adam and Steve's humor, like that of any film that tries to extend the skit comedy into full-length form, comes at you with its arms flailing, and as such its tempting to measure its success in terms of the percentage of jokes that stick. A highlight includes a now-slim Rhonda literally hypnotizing Steve's straight roommate, Michael (Chris Kattan), with her feminine wile (a Philip Glass-like trance plays on the soundtrack), but the hit-to-miss ratio favors the duds by at least 1:2. Chester is a charming physical performer who expects too much from his audience (not unlike Rhonda, a comedian whose entire shtick is predicated on the idea that she's still fat), but even the film's lowliest, most exhausted gags pack valuable political or emotional insight, like Adam's fear that straight men will hit him with beer bottles should he express PDA (even in the heart of Chelsea!). Like Rhonda's routine, Adam and Steve's relationship evokes a ritual of negation. This gay rom-com—which allows Chester to cleverly conflate the personal trauma of the couple's 18-year-old incontinence nightmare with the national horror of 9/11—allows its maker to address notions of compassion, forgiveness, and emotional healing. This is a film that acknowledges that all of us, gay or straight, need to get over our shit.
Cast: Craig Chester, Malcolm Gets, Parker Posey, Chris Kattan, Melinda Dillon, Thomas Kopache, Noah Segan, Jackie Beat, Julie Hagerty, Kristen Schaal, Paul Sand, Sally Kirkland Director: Craig Chester Screenwriter: Craig Chester Distributor: TLA Releasing Running Time: 100 min Rating: NR Year: 2005 Buy: Video
Ange Lee's Gemini Man, Starring Will Smith, Gets Official Trailer
Ang Lee's three-year marriage to the 120fps format appears to be in strong shape.
Ang Lee's last film, Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk, was praised on these pages for astoundingly animating the mind of its young soldier. The film, shot in 3D at a resolution of 4K, was supposed to be some kind of game-changer. But its 120fps format, which is almost three times the 48fps that Peter Jackson used for The Hobbit, annoyed just about everyone for resembling a soap opera or football game.
Nonetheless, Lee's has remained committed to the format. His latest film, Gemini Man, tells the story of an aging assassin (played by Will Smith) who's being chased by a younger clone of himself. Admittedly, the hyper-real textures of the film look more convincing than those of either Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk or The Hobbit. But you can make your own assessment from the two-minute trailer that Paramount Pictures released today:
Paramount Pictures will release Gemini Man on October 11.
Review: Avengers: Endgame Is, Above All Else, a Triumph of Corporate Synergy
Every serious narrative beat in the film is ultimately undercut by pro-forma storytelling, or by faux-improvised humor.1.5
"Let's get that son of a bitch," says Captain America (Chris Evans) near the beginning of Anthony and Joe Russo's Avengers: Endgame, the supposed big-screen finale to the Marvel Cinematic Universe as we now know it. Cap, that sacred symbol of American might, is of course profaning Thanos (Josh Brolin), the purple colossus whose hand of fate, bedecked with the six Infinity Stones, erased half the world's population during the cliffhanger climax of last year's Avengers: Infinity War. The victims included many among the superheroic, several of whom have movies on the docket. So there's no way the remaining commodities—I mean, Avengers—are going to go down without a fight.
It'll take a while to get to the final showdown, of course. About two hours and 45 minutes of the three-hour running time, to be exact, all of it filled to bursting with goofy one-liners, aching stares into the middle distance, and lots and lots of wibbly wobbly, timey wimey digressions. Almost all of the Avengers's founding team members are on hand, with a considerably more grizzled and cynical Clint "Hawkeye" Barton (Jeremy Renner) providing most of the pathos. Also in attendance are Scott "Ant-Man" Lang (Paul Rudd) and Carol "Captain Marvel" Danvers (Brie Larson), the latter of whose won't-take-no-guff brashness is especially endearing to a certain gruff, hammer-wielding Asgardian.
I'd tell you more about the film, but then I'd have to kill myself at the spoiler-averse Marvel Studios's behest. Even noting certain elements out of context—like, say, "Nerd Hulk" or "Lebowski Thor"—might be considered too revealing by the powers that be. So, let's dance around the narrative architecture and instead ruminate on whether this 22nd entry in the MCU serves as a satisfying culmination of all that's preceded it.
That's a firm no, though the Russo brothers and screenwriters Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely certainly lean hard into the dewy-eyed, apocalyptic sturm und drang. You'd think they were putting the finishing touches on the Bible. There are allusions to The Leftovers, J.G. Ballard's The Terminal Beach, and Picasso's Guernica, though there's never a sense, as in those works, that society is truly in irrevocable decay. It's all good, even when it isn't: Death is a mostly reversible ploy, and sacrifice is a self-centered concept, a burnish to the ego above all else. It's telling that, in one scene, Captain America stops to admire his own ass.
There's some fleeting fun to be had when Endgame turns into a sort of heist film, occasioning what effectively amounts to an in-motion recap of prior entries in the MCU. Yet every serious narrative beat is ultimately undercut by pro-forma storytelling (the emotional beats never linger, as the characters are always race-race-racing to the next big plot point), or by faux-improvised humor, with ringmaster Tony "Iron Man" Stark (Robert Downey Jr., so clearly ready to be done with this universe) leading the sardonic-tongued charge. Elsewhere, bona fide celebs like Michael Douglas, Michelle Pfeiffer, and Natalie Portman are reduced to glorified extras. Even the glow of movie stardom is dimmed by the supernova that is the Marvel machine's at best competently produced weightlessness.
Cast: Robert Downey Jr., Chris Evans, Mark Ruffalo, Chris Hemsworth, Scarlett Johansson, Jeremy Renner, Don Cheadle, Paul Rudd, Brie Larson, Karen Gillan, Danai Gurira, Benedict Wong, Jon Favreau, Bradley Cooper, Gwyneth Paltrow, Josh Brolin, Evangeline Lilly, Tessa Thompson, Frank Grillo, Winston Duke Director: Anthony Russo, Joe Russo Screenwriter: Christopher Markus, Stephen McFeely Distributor: Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures Running Time: 181 min Rating: PG-13 Year: 2019
Cannes Directors' Fortnight Lineup Includes The Lighthouse, Zombi Child, and More
In addition to Directors' Fortnight, the festival announced the films that would screen as part of the ACID lineup.
Five days after Cannes artistic director Thierry Fremaux revealed the films that would be competing for the Palm d'Or this year on the Croisette, the Cannes Film Festival has announced the films that will screen as part of the prestigious Directors' Fortnight. Among those are Robert Eggers's The Lighthouse, a dark fantasy horror film starring Willem Dafoe and Robert Pattinson shot on 35mm black-and-white film stock, and Bertrand Bonello's Zombi Child, which recounts the destiny of Clairvius Narcisse, a Haitian man who was famously said to have been turned him into a zombie.
See below for the full lineup, followed by the ACID slate.
Directors' Fortnight Lineup:
Opening Film
Deerskin (Quentin Dupieux)
Official Selection
Alice and the Mayor (Nicolas Pariser)
And Then We Danced (Levan Akin)
The Halt (Lav Diaz)
Dogs Don't Wear Pants (Jukka-Pekka Valkeapää)
Song Without a Name (Melina León)
Ghost Tropic (Bas Devos)
Give Me Liberty (Kirill Mikhanvovsky)
First Love (Takashi Miike)
The Lighthouse (Robert Eggers)
Lillian (Andreas Horwath)
Oleg (Juris Kursietis)
Blow It to Bits (Lech Kowalski)
The Orphanage (Shahrbanoo Sadat)
Les Particules (Blaise Harrison)
Perdrix (Erwan Le Duc)
For the Money (Alejo Moguillansky)
Sick Sick Sick (Alice Furtado)
Tlamess (Ala Eddine Slim)
To Live to Sing (Johnny Ma)
An Easy Girl (Rebecca Zlotowski)
Wounds (Babak Anvari)
Zombi Child (Bertrand Bonello)
Closing Film
Yves (Benoît Forgeard)
Special Screenings
Red 11 (Roberto Rodriguez)
The Staggering Girl (Luca Guadagnino)
Two Sisters Who Are Not Sisters (Beatrice Gibson)
The Marvelous Misadventures of the Stone Lady (Gabriel Abrantes)
Grand Bouquet (Nao Yoshigai)
Je Te Tiens (Sergio Caballero)
Movements (Dahee Jeong)
Olla (Ariane Labed)
Piece of Meat (Jerrold Chong and Huang Junxiang)
Ghost Pleasure (Morgan Simon)
Stay Awake, Be Ready (An Pham Thien)
ACID Lineup:
Blind Spot (Pierre Trividic, Patrick-Mario Bernard)
Des Hommes (Jean-Robert Viallet, Alice Odiot)
Indianara (Aude Chevalier-Beaumel, Marcello Barbosa)
Kongo (Hadrien La Vapeur, Corto Vaclav)
Mickey and the Bear (Annabelle Attanasio)
Solo (Artemio Benki)
As Happy as Possible (Alain Raoust)
Take Me Somewhere Nice (Ena Sendijarevic)
Vif-Argent (Stéphane Batut)
Third Annual ACID Trip
Las Vegas (Juan Villegas)
Brief Story from the Green Planet (Santiago Loza)
Sangre Blanca (Barbara Sarasola-Day)
Review: Carmine Street Guitars Is a Beautiful Portrait of an Everyday Paradise
The film celebrates the thingness of things, as well as the assuring clarity and lucidity that can arise from devotion to knowledge.3.5
The concept of Carmine Street Guitars is simplicity itself. Director Ron Mann documents the legendary Greenwich Village guitar store of the film's title over a period of five days, watching as mostly famous customers stroll in to peruse and play instruments and shoot the breeze with guitar maker Rick Kelly. There's no voiceover, no overt narrative, and little orienting text—and none of the encounters in this film are structured or presented as info-bite-style interviews. Mann artfully sustains the illusion of someone who's just hanging out, capturing whatever draws his attention. Consequentially, the documentary communicates the magic of this place even to someone who's never been to New York City.
Mann has a knack for telling you more than he appears to be. Fashioning intimate compositions, he surveys Kelly and his apprentice, Cindy Hulej, as they build guitars together in companionable silence. Kelly and Hulej are a poignant study in contrasts: Kelly is a graying sixtysomething man with a bit of a belly, while Cindy is a lean twentysomething woman who, with her bright blond hair and multiple tattoos, suggests a rock star. Occasionally, Hulej will solicit Kelly's approval for one of her designs or for the artwork or poetry she's burning into the back of a guitar, which he grants with a humble hesitation that subtly says, "You don't need my approval." Meanwhile, up front in the store, Kelly's mother answers the phone. At one point, she says she's happy to be here, though, at her age, she's happy to be anywhere.
Shots of Kelly and Hulej working also allow one to savor the tactility of Carmine Street Guitars itself. Hulej works to the left of the back of the store, while Kelly stays to the right of it. Above Kelly is a storage of wooden planks taken from various landmarks of New York, such as Chumley's and McSorley's. Kelly poetically says that he likes to build guitars from the "bones of New York." The resin dries out in older wood, allowing for more openings in the material which in turn yields greater resonation. Such fascinating details arise naturally in the film's images and conversations. Over the course of Carmine Street Guitars, Kelly fashions a McSorley's plank into an incredibly evocative guitar, as the gnarled wood gives it the appearance of possessing scar tissue. Near the end of the documentary, musician Charlie Sexton walks in and plays this guitar, and the idea of scar tissue takes on a different meaning. Sexton, Kelly, and the store itself are textured survivors of another era.
This is never explicitly stated in Carmine Street Guitars, but the film offers an analogue daydream in a 21st century that's been nearly gentrified to death by corporations. The building next to Carmine Street Guitars was once used by Jackson Pollack and is now being sold by a yuppie real estate agent for six million dollars. The yuppie walks into the guitar shop, drooling over the potential sales opportunity, and his entrance feels like an obscenity—a return to the reality that we frequent stores like Carmine Street Guitars, and films like Carmine Street Guitars, in order to evade. It's only at this point that Kelly's democratic bonhomie hardens into defensive contempt, as he virtually refuses to speak to the agent. This episode haunts the film, suggesting a fate that can only be bidden off for so much longer.
Carmine Street Guitars celebrates the thingness of things, as well as the assuring clarity and lucidity that can arise from devotion to knowledge. Kelly's guitar shop is a cocoon, a place of contemplation, and so it feels inevitable when Jim Jarmusch walks into the store. After all, Jarmusch's recent films, like Only Lovers Left Alive and Paterson, also celebrate creation and erudition while ruing the arrival of a new culture that's hostile to such desires. Kelly and Jarmusch talk about the filmmaker's new guitar, which is partially made from Catalpa wood, leading to a riff on the trees that have been formative in each man's life. In another moving interlude, Wilco guitarist Nels Cline searches for a guitar for frontman Jeff Tweedy, settling on an instrument that reflects Kelly's own characteristic design: a telecaster with a dropped horn. Such moments reveal artisanship to be a form of communion, as a personal object for Kelly has been refashioned into a symbol of another artistic partnership.
These themes and associations bob under Carmine Street Guitars's surface, as musicians noodle around with Kelly. This pregnant sense of implication is Mann's supreme achievement, and as such the film risks being taken for granted as a charming little diversion, when it should be celebrated as a beautiful portrait of an everyday paradise. When Hulej weeps in gratitude, on her fifth anniversary of working for Carmine Street Guitars, you want to weep with her.
Review: Hyènas Brilliantly Chips Away at a City's Colonialist Architecture
Djibril Diop Mambéty's 1992 film resonates primarily for its lacerating comedic writing and pacing.4
Djibril Diop Mambéty spared no one when mercilessly depicting populations who were simultaneously eating themselves from within and being exploited by the economic interests of outside forces. Mambéty's great Touki Bouki from 1973 viewed this dual process through the prism of the postcolonial relationship between Senegal and France. And in Mambéty's second feature, 1992's Hyènas, Senegal is pitted against larger global institutions, such as the World Bank, that prey on small nations whose financial instability makes them more likely to embrace warped logic and false promises at their own expense.
Mambéty confines the proceedings to Colobane, a small commune in Dakar, where its population and governmental order are turned upside down by the return of former resident Linguere Ramatou (Ami Diakhate), whose newfound wealth has become a subject of much dispute and angst within the community. The woman, who's said by locals to be "richer than the World Bank," becomes Mambéty's stand-in for how an institutional form of thinking, with its financial rather than human emphasis, corrupts local interests by vacuously promising short-term riches to citizens that, in turn, produce long-term financial crises.
One of Mambéty's primary strengths is how his sense of detail instantly brings the locations of his films to life. Hyènas opens within the market owned by Dramaan (Mansour Diouf), a beloved local merchant whose generosity with patrons is almost immediately apparent, as he allows several customers to purchase expensive goods on credit rather than having them pay up front. Mambéty establishes each nook and cranny of the market's space through a series of static shots that gradually reveal the amount of people—none of which offer payment for their acquisitions—toiling around the premises. When Dramaan's wife (Faly Gueye) appears, and Dramaan says, out of her earshot, that she disapproves of his business practices, it's the first suggestion in Mambéty's carefully plotted script that mutual trust is the first casualty in the exchange of money between people linked to differing motivations. As the Colobane community takes even greater advantage of Dramaan later in the film, Hyènas further turns the man's plight into an absurdist tale of capitalism's follies.
Linguere's return to Colobane provides the film with its driving plot device, as she announces to the population that she will pump hundreds of millions of dollars into the community in exchange for Dramaan's murder. Linguere was abandoned by Dramaan years prior after giving birth to their daughter and has come back with the sole intention of wreaking havoc on the man's life. At least, it initially seems that way; in a later scene, Linguere explains, "The world has made me a whore," and so she plans to "turn the world into a whorehouse."
Mambéty imagines how Linguere's wealth co-signs her agenda of revenge; her dangling of expensive goods over the heads of locals hungry for their piece of the pie is akin to the lie of global monetary cooperation promised by organizations like the International Monetary Fund. Senegal, once again, becomes dependent on global rather than local sources of income and exchange. Mambéty, though, follows the thematic example set by Ousmane Sembène's Xala, in which a Senegalese politician's sexual impotence is a symbol of his corruption, by refusing to exonerate local officials within Senegal for their complicity in embracing Westernization. When Dramaan meets with Colobane's mayor (Mamadou Mahourédia Gueye) to discuss the bounty that's been placed on his head, the latter says, "[Leopold] Senghor himself went for a walk with the Queen of England…if we were savages, they would not come here." By implicating the mayor's deference to Western forms of knowledge and self-definition, Mambéty deftly wrestles with the complexity of corruption's reach.
Despite its rather serious and finally tragic appraisal of Senegal's quagmire within the world system, Hyènas resonates primarily for its lacerating comedic writing and pacing. As Dramaan comes to mistakenly believe that he will be elected Colobane's next mayor, only to learn that, in fact, he's more likely to be killed before an election takes place, Mambéty ratchets up the film's ludicrousness to simultaneously critique the Senegalese government and widespread consumerism, and with equal ferocity. This is best encapsulated by the moment where Dramaan realizes that everyone who isn't paying him seems to own the same, new pair of yellow boots made in Burkina Faso. Dramaan's market, filled with foreign goods ranging from European tobacco to Coca-Cola, is itself exploiting its owner; the man has paid a high price for quality only for the local marketplace to abuse his ambitions.
These ideas also propelled Touki Bouki, in which a pair of college-aged youths from Dakar, a city adored with so many Pepsi logos and Mobil oil towers, (dream of migrating to France. In a memorable scene from that film, a pair of French professors dismiss Senegal's local culture by articulating the distinctly colonialist logic of France's superiority. While Hyènas forgoes such an explicit drag of French supremacy, the film's lucid indignation and satirical take on Senegal's raw deal proves just as convincing.
Cast: Ami Diakhate, Mansour Diouf, Calgou Fall, Faly Gueye, Mamadou Mahourédia Gueye, Issa Ramagelissa Samb, Dijbril Diop Mambéty Director: Djibril Diop Mambéty Screenwriter: Djibril Diop Mambéty Distributor: Metrograph Pictures Running Time: 110 min Rating: NR Year: 1992
Review: Chasing Portraits Is Welcome Personal Testimony, but Its Scope Is Narrow
Its major contribution, as one museum curator suggests, may be to bring the works of Moshe Rynecki back into prominence.2.5
Before World War II, Poland's Jewish population was the largest in Europe, numbering over three million. Afterward, only 10% of that populace remained. Although the current right-wing Polish government prefers to suppress this fact, the 300,000 surviving Jews faced continued persecution at the hands of gentile Poles—themselves the victims (though to a much lesser degree) of Nazi persecution. Today, when the number of Jews in Poland is well under 10,000, one can visit the old Jewish quarters in cities like Warsaw and Krakow, where street kiosks sell small plastic caricatures of Hasidic Jews. On the streets, though, you're unlikely to encounter any actual Hasids.
In her trip to Warsaw in search of her great-grandfather's lost paintings, Chasing Portraits director Elizabeth Rynecki stumbles across these figurines. As she observes in voiceover, there's nothing overtly demeaning about the miniature, jovial, cartoonish Jews, but the image they project doesn't feel right, given local history. And one must agree that there's an undeniable aspect of minstrelsy to them: Unlike her great-grandfather Moshe's textured scenes of Jewish life in Warsaw, they're almost certainly not self-representations. Given the Jewish culture that was destroyed in Poland—and whose richness is embodied by Moshe's few surviving paintings—the grinning trinkets seem all the more like frivolous kitsch.
Rynecki's discovery of these unsettling souvenirs is potentially one of the most interesting parts of Chasing Portraits, given that she happens across them while on the trail of lost Jewish art. As a curator at a Warsaw museum observes to the filmmaker, Moshe's work depicts traditional moments of Jewish culture in a distinctly modern sensibility, attesting to the robustness of the Jewish culture on the eve of its destruction. In this way, his paintings are the opposite of the post-facto plastic caricatures, and Rynecki's confrontation with the mass-produced simulacra of absent Jews is a moment when her highly personal documentary almost extends toward a wider perspective. But she doesn't linger for too long on what the Holocaust and Judaism mean in Poland today, as she's on her way to ask a private collector named Wertheim about how his family managed to acquire some of Moshe's works.
Rynecki's insular approach works well early on in the film, when she, in conversations with her father, outlines who her great-grandfather was and what his surviving paintings mean to the family. Of around 800 works that Moshe painted before he was murdered at the Majdanek death camp, just over 100 survive in the possession of the family, with an unknown number in the hands of private collections and Polish museums. That much is a miracle, but Rynecki—more so, it seems, than her father, a Holocaust survivor himself—wants to discover more. In the film, we see her consult with historians, compose emails to private collectors, and read excerpts of her grandfather George's memoirs, in preparation for her trip to Poland.
Chasing Portraits is about Rynecki's investigative process rather than Moshe's paintings themselves; in voiceover, she narrates each step of her process as she takes on the role of amateur historian. And in maintaining an intense focus on her investigation—how she reads out the emails she writes to institutions, and shows us footage from each flight she takes from one corner of the world to another—the film raises probing questions that it dutifully bypasses. Her encounters with the Wertheim family are a case in point: The first Wertheim brother claims the family own paintings by Moshe because they bought it from a farmer, but the second tells the more plausible story that they have the paintings because their parents, resistance fighters hiding in the Polish woods, raided them from a bombed-out train.
In Rynecki's narrative, these conflicting stories become a personal conundrum: If the paintings were looted rather than bought, she may be able to make a claim on them. In the end, it's Rynecki's growth, her decision about whether or not to become a claimant, that structures the film. But this approach means skirting over other thematic threads that might have emerged from this project, such as the ethics of museum versus private ownership of recovered art like Moshe's, the meaning of art in desperate times, the politics of remembrance in Poland. Chasing Portraits is thus valuable as part of an expansive mosaic of personal testimonies to the legacy of the Holocaust, but it's a documentary of sometimes disappointingly narrow scope. Its major contribution, as one museum curator suggests, may be to bring the works of Moshe Rynecki back into prominence.
Director: Elizabeth Rynecki Screenwriter: Elizabeth Rynecki Distributor: First Run Features Running Time: 78 min Rating: NR Year: 2018
Review: If the Dancer Dances Diminishes Its Subject by Succumbing to Hagiography
The documentary is incessant about reminding us of the late Merce Cunningham's achievements.2
More than once in Maia Wechsler's If the Dancer Dances, a dance is described by one of numerous talking heads as existing only in the moment; once any movement or routine is complete, it essentially can never be replicated to an exacting degree. But the film inadvertently appears as if it's trying to prove that poetic and insightful observation wrong, which becomes increasingly clear as we follow choreographer Stephen Petronio as he and his dance company work on a production of Merce Cunningham's RainForest.
Wechsler's depiction of the company seems unwilling to step out of Cunningham's shadow, given the extent to which the members of the current production and Cunningham's former pupils happily provide hagiographic accounts of the groundbreaking avant-garde choreographer and his work. In an about-face from the repeated description of dance's unreplicable nature, the new RainForest's choreographers and dancers set out to duplicate rather than interpret the work. The fawning over Cunningham, and the implication from the company that they'll never be able to live up to his vision, only exposes an overbearing inferiority complex running throughout the documentary.
If the Dancer Dances really only comes to life when showcasing the company's rehearsals, throughout camera movements that match the gracefulness of the dancers and compositions that incorporate multiple points of action. Wechsler's observational methods in these sequences capture mini-dramas in themselves, such as when choreographers quietly confer, attempting to adjust the dance routine that's playing out in front of them.
Still, rather than letting the audience simply observe the company at work and letting the process speak for itself, Wechsler incessantly reminds us of Cunningham's monolithic presence via scores of interviews that laud his work process. The film's constant lionizing of the man amid so much rehearsal footage has the unintended effect of sapping the dancers of agency. Throughout, it's as if Wechsler is judging the company's artistic decisions based on whether or not Cunningham himself would consider them right or wrong.
At one point in the film, a former colleague of Cunningham's explains that the late choreographer, in an effort to ensure that his works felt fresh, tried to never be influenced by other productions. This anecdote rings of irony, given how the film includes numerous sequences of Petronio's choreographers discussing how to ape Cunningham's aesthetic in precise detail—and often in incomprehensibly abstract directions that even some of the dancers appear not to grasp. The film operates under the impression that for any present or future company to change any one aspect of Cunningham's original vision would be blasphemous and offensive, which turns If the Dancer Dances less into the insightful backstage documentary it wants to be, and more into a gushing, sycophantic love letter.
Director: Maia Wechsler Distributor: Monument Releasing Running Time: 86 min Rating: NR Year: 2018
Watch the Trailer for Ava DuVernay's Netflix Series When They See Us
Netflix will release the series on May 31.
In 1989, the rape and near-murder of Trisha Meili in Central Park rocked the nation. A little over a year later, a jury convicted five juvenile males—four African-American and one Hispanic—to prison sentences ranging from five to 15 years. In the end, the defendants spent between six and 13 years behind bars. Flashforward to 2002, after four of the five defendants had left prison, and Matias Reyes, a convicted murder and serial rapist serving a lifetime prison term, came forward and confessed to raping Meili. DNA evidence confirmed his guilt, and proved what many already knew about the so-called "Central Park jogger case": that the police investigation of Antron McCray, Kevin Richardson, Yusef Salaam, Raymond Santana, and Korey Wise, conducted at the beginning of the Giuliani era in New York City, was motivated less by a thirst for justice than it was by racial animus.
Last year, Oscar-nominated Selma filmmaker Ava DuVernay announced that she would be making a series based on the infamous case, and since then hasn't been shy, on Twitter and elsewhere, about saying that she will be putting Donald J. Trump in her crosshairs. Trump, way back in 1989, ran an ad in the Daily News advocating the return of the death penalty, and as recently as 2016, claimed that McCray, Richardson, Salaam, Santana, and Wise are guilty of the crime for which they were eventually exonerated—behavior consistent with a presidential campaign that, like the case against the Central Park Five, was a full-time racist dog whistle.
Today, Netflix dropped the trailer for When They See Us, which stars Michael K. Williams, Vera Farmiga, John Leguizamo, Felicity Huffman, Niecy Nash, Blair Underwood, Christopher Jackson, Joshua Jackson, Omar J. Dorsey, Adepero Oduye, Famke Janssen, Aurora Perrineau, William Sadler, Jharrel Jerome, Jovan Adepo, Aunjanue Ellis, Kylie Bunbury, Marsha Stephanie Blake, Storm Reid, Dascha Polanco, Chris Chalk, Freddy Miyares, Justin Cunningham, Ethan Herisse, Caleel Harris, Marquis Rodriguez, and Asante Blackk.
According to the official description of the series:
Based on a true story that gripped the country, When They See Us will chronicle the notorious case of five teenagers of color, labeled the Central Park Five, who were convicted of a rape they did not commit. The four part limited series will focus on the five teenagers from Harlem—Antron McCray, Kevin Richardson, Yusef Salaam, Raymond Santana and Korey Wise. Beginning in the spring of 1989, when the teenagers were first questioned about the incident, the series will span 25 years, highlighting their exoneration in 2002 and the settlement reached with the city of New York in 2014.
See the trailer below:
Netflix will release When They See Us on May 31.
Review: The Curse of La Llorona Is More Laugh Riot than Fright Fest
With The Curse of La Llorona, the Conjuring universe has damned itself to an eternal cycle of rinse and repeat.1
Michael Chaves's The Curse of La Llorona opens in 17th-century Mexico with an all-too-brief rundown of the legend of La Llorona. This weeping woman (Marisol Ramirez) is quickly established as a mother who, in a fit of jealousy, drowned her two children in order punish her cheating husband. And after immediately regretting her actions, she commits suicide, forever damning herself to that liminal space between the land of the living and the dead, to snatch up wandering children to replace her own.
Flash-forward to 1973 Los Angeles, where we instantly recognize an echo of La Llorana's parental anxieties in Anna Garcia (Linda Cardellini), a widowed mother of two who struggles to balance the demands of her job as a social worker for Child Protective Services and the pressures of adjusting to single parenthood. One might expect such parallels to be further expanded upon by The Curse of La Llorona, but it quickly becomes evident that the filmmakers are less interested in character development, narrative cohesion, or the myth behind La Llorona than in lazily transposing the film's big bad into the Conjuring universe.
It's no surprise, then, that La Llorona, with her beady yellow eyes, blood-drained skin, and rotted mouth and fingernails is virtually indistinguishable from the antagonist from Corin Hardy's The Nun; just swap out the evil nun's tunic and habit for a decaying wedding dress and you'd never know the difference. Even more predictably, The Curse of La Llorona relies heavily on a near-ceaseless barrage of jump scares, creaking doors and loud, shrieking noises as La Llorona first terrorizes and murders the detained children of one of Anna's clients (Patricia Velasquez), before then moving on to haunting Anna and her kids (Jaynee-Lynne Kinchen and Roman Christou). But this family is so thinly conceived and their behavior so careless and illogical in the face of a known force of evil that viewers may find themselves less terrified by La Llorona than overjoyed by her reign of terror.
Once Rafael (Raymond Cruz), a curandero whose healing powers promise to lift La Llorona's curse, arrives on the scene, the film makes a few concessions to Mexican cultural rituals, as well as offers brief but welcome respites of humor. But after the man rubs down the Garcia house with eggs and protects its borders with palo santo and fire tree seeds, The Curse of La Llorona continues unabated as a rote scare-a-thon. Every extended moment of silence and stillness is dutifully disrupted by sudden, overemphatic bursts of sound and fury that are meant to frighten us but are more likely to leave you feeling bludgeoned into submission.
All the while, any notions of motherhood, faith within and outside of the Catholic Church, and Mexican folklore that surface at one point or another are rendered both moot and undistinctive in the midst of so much slavish worshipping at the altar of franchise expansion. Indeed, by the time Annabelle's Father Perez (Tony Amendola) pays a house visit in order to dutifully spout exposition about the series's interconnected religious elements, it becomes clear that the Conjuring universe is damned to an eternal cycle of rinse and repeat.
Cast: Linda Cardellini, Roman Christou, Jaynee-Lynne Kinchen, Raymond Cruz, Marisol Ramirez, Patricia Velasquez, Sean Patrick Thomas, Tony Amendola Director: Michael Chaves Screenwriter: Mikki Daughtry, Tobias Iaconis Distributor: Warner Bros. Running Time: 93 min Rating: R Year: 2019
Review: David Bordwell's Reinventing Hollywood & W.K. Stratton's The Wild Bunch
Stratton goes beyond the production of Sam Peckinpah's film, on to its impact and reception and legacy.
The 1940s were the decade in which Hollywood attained what we now term "classical" status, when the innovations and developments of cinema's formative years coalesced into a high level of sophistication across all areas—technological, visual, narrative. The narrative element is the focus of Reinventing Hollywood, film historian and University of Wisconsin-Madison professor David Bordwell's latest deep dive into the aesthetics of film.
Bordwell begins with a series of questions: "What distinctive narrative strategies emerged in the 1940s? Where did they come from? How did various filmmakers use them? How did the innovations change the look and sound of films?" He then proceeds with quite thorough answers across 500-plus pages. The narrative developments were gradual and cumulative. While the earliest narrative cinema was static and stagebound, inheriting principles of storytelling from theater and the most basic novelistic tendencies, a richer narrativity developed throughout the 1930s, when the visual language of silent cinema melded with the oral/aural elements of "talkies" to create a more systemized approach to narrative filmmaking.
As Bordwell notes at one point in Reinventing Hollywood, "[p]rinciples of characterization and plot construction that grew up in the 1910s and 1920s were reaffirmed in the early sound era. Across the same period there emerged a clear-cut menu of choices pertaining to staging, shooting and cutting scenes." In short, it was the process whereby "talkies" became just "movies." Narrative techniques specifically morphed and solidified throughout the '30s, as screenwriters and filmmakers pushed their way toward the discovery of a truly classical style.
While the idea of a menu of set choices may sound limiting, in reality the options were numerous, as filmmakers worked out a process of invention through repetition and experimentation and refinement. Eventually these narrative properties and principles became conventionalized—not in a watered-down or day-to-day way, but rather codified or systematized, where a sort of stock set of narrative devices were continually reworked, revamped, and re-energized. It's what Bordwell calls "an inherited pattern" or "schema."
Also in the '40s, many Hollywood films traded in what Bordwell terms "mild modernism"—a kind of light borrowing from other forms and advances in so-called high modernism, such as surrealism or stream-of-consciousness narratives like James Joyce's Ulysses: high-art means for popular-art ends (Salvador Dalí's work on Alfred Hitchcock's Spellbound being a notable example). These techniques included omniscient point of view, the novelistic ability to traverse time and space (ideally suited for cinema), and involved flashback or dream sequences. This "borrowing of storytelling techniques from adjacent arts […] encouraged a quick cadence of schema and revision," an environment of "…novelty at almost any price."
Such novelties included "aggregate" films that overlaid a plethora of storytelling techniques, such as Sam Wood's 1940 adaptation of Thornton Wilder's Our Town, which employed multiple protagonists, complex flashback sequences, and voiceover narration drawn from the most advanced theater. Perhaps no other film embodied these "novelties" so sharply as Orson Welles's Citizen Kane, an "aggressive aggregate" that amounts to a specifically cinematic yet total work of art, weaving together not only narrative techniques such as multiple character or "prismatic" flashbacks (screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz's term), but also drawing on elements from music, painting, and photography, as well as Welles's first loves, theater and radio. In some ways, Citizen Kane may be seen as a kind of fulcrum film, incorporating nearly all that had come before it and anticipating most everything after.
Though Bordwell references the familiar culprits—Casablanca, Gone with the Wind, and, of course, Citizen Kane—he doesn't just stick with the A films, as he goes deep into the B's (and even some C's and D's), in an effort to show the wide-ranging appeal and effectiveness of these narrative models no matter their technical execution. He also alternates chapters with what he calls Interludes—that is, more intensive readings illustrating a preceding chapter's discussion, homing in on specific films, genres and filmmakers, and not always the ones which one might expect. There's an interlude on Joseph Mankiewicz, for example, a sort of intellectual master of multi-protagonist films like All About Eve and The Barefoot Contessa, and the truly original Preston Sturges, whose films pushed narrative norms to their absolute limits. There's also an intriguing interlude on the boxing picture and the resiliency of certain narrative tropes—fighter refusing to throw the fight and thus imperiled by gangsters, for example—demonstrating how Hollywood's "narrative ecosystem played host to variants."
Reinventing Hollywood is a dense read. Its nearly 600 pages of text, including detailed notes and index, isn't for the academically faint at heart. Often Bordwell offers frame-by-frame, even gesture-by-gesture analyses using accompanying stills, mining synoptic actions and tropes across multiple films of the era. The book can read strictly pedagogical at times, but overall, Bordwell's writing is clear and uncluttered by jargon. Despite its comprehensive scholarly archeology (and such sweet academic euphemism as, say, "spreading the protagonist function"), the book is leveled at anyone interested in cinematic forms and norms.
The title is telling. Clearly, narrative cinema was already invented by the time the '40s rolled around, but in Hollywood throughout that decade it became so systematized that it progressed into something new, indeed something that exists through today: a narrative film style that's evocative enough to affect any single viewer and effective enough to speak to a mass audience.
Part of the charm of what was invented in the '40s is the malleability of the product. Narrative standards and conventions were designed for maximum variation, as well as for revision and challenge. And perhaps no decade offered more revision and challenge than the 1960s, not only to film culture but world culture as a whole. By the mid-to-late '60s, the old Hollywood studio system had expired, leaving in its wake a splintered version of itself. Yet despite the dissolution of the big studios, the resilience of the classical film style engendered by those studios was still evident. Popular narrative films retained the clear presentation of action borne in earlier films, however much they shuffled and reimagined patterns and standards.
One such movie that both embraced and pushed against Hollywood standards is director Sam Peckinpah's 1969 western The Wild Bunch. It possesses such richness in both themes and execution, in form and content, that there's a lot to mine. With its tale of a band of out-of-time outlaws scamming and lamming away their fatal last days in Mexico during the country's revolution, it revels in and reveres western conventions as much as it revises them.
The film carries a personal elusive impact, particularly on first viewing. In The Wild Bunch: Sam Peckinpah, a Revolution in Hollywood, and the Making of a Legendary Film, journalist and historian W.K. Stratton quotes filmmaker Ron Shelton on this phenomenon: "Something was different about this movie…it was more than [just another shoot-'em-up] but I couldn't figure out what…I've been trying to answer that question ever since." The book examines the epic making of this epic film, and goes a good way toward explaining the reasons behind the film's unique power. Stratton is a Texan and also a poet, and both of these credentials make him perhaps the ideal candidate for exploring this pure piece of western poetry.
Stratton maps the story of the film from germ to gem. Conceived in the early '60s by stuntman Roy N. Sickner as a somewhat typical "outlaw gringos on the lam" story, the property evolved over the course of the ensuing years as much as the country itself. America in 1967 and '68 was a vastly different place than it was in '63. Stratton notes how "[t]he picture…would never have been filmed had not circumstances come into precise alignment. It was the product of a nation torn by divisions unseen since the Civil War, a nation that was sacrificing thousands of its young to a war in Southeast Asia…a nation numbed by political assassination…where a youthful generation was wholesale rejecting values held by their parents."
A film made in such turbulent times required its own turbulent setting. If America had become no country for old men, and Vietnam was no country for young men, then Mexico during the revolution was no country for either. Stratton gives brisk but detailed chapters on the Mexican Revolution, filling in the tumultuous history and social geography for what would become a necessarily violent film. But just as the film could never have been made in another time, it could also have never been made without Sam Peckinpah. As Stratton notes, Peckinpah was a Hollywood rarity, a director born in the actual American West who made actual westerns, and a maverick director who, like Welles, fought against the constraints of an industry in which he was a master. Peckinpah was a rarity in other ways as well. A heavy-drinking, light-fighting proto-tough guy who was also a devotee of Tennessee Williams ("I guess I've learned more from Williams than anyone"), Peckinpah was a storyteller who could break your heart as well as your nose. His second feature, the very fine Ride the High Country, was tough and tender; it was also, coincidentally, another story of old outlaws running out their time.
Stratton traces the entire trajectory of the film's making, from the start-and-stop scripting to the early involvement of Lee Marvin, right on through to every aspect of production: its much-lauded gold-dust cinematography (by Lucien Ballard, who early in his career worked on Three Stooges comedies "…because it gave him a chance to experiment with camera trickery"); the elegant violence, or violent elegance, of its editing; and its casting and costuming.
The chapters on those last two elements are particularly rewarding. Costuming is a somewhat underlooked aspect of westerns, simply because the sartorial trappings seem so generic: hats, guns, boots, and bonnets. Yet period clothing is so essential to the texture of westerns because it can, or should, convey the true down and dirtiness of the time and place, the sweat, the swill and the stench. The Wild Bunch, like all great westerns, feels filthy. Wardrobe supervisor Gordon Dawson not only had the daunting task of providing authenticity in the costumes themselves—much of them period—but of overseeing the sheer volume of turnover. Because Peckinpah "planned to make heavy use of squibbing for the movie's shoot-outs…[e]ach time a squib went off, it ripped a whole in a costume and left a bloody stain." Considering the overwhelming bullet count of the film, in particular the barrage of the ending, it's no wonder that "[a]ll the costumes would have to be reused and then reused again and again."
But perhaps no aspect was more important to the success of Peckinpah's film than its casting. While early on in the process Marvin was set to play the lead role of Pike Bishop, the actor, thankfully, bowed out, and after the consideration of other actors for the role, including Sterling Hayden and Charlton Heston, in stepped William Holden. As good as all the other actors could be, Holden projected more of the existential weariness of the Bishop character, a condition that Marvin's coarseness, for example, might have effaced. Stratton agrees: "There could not have been a better matching of character and actor. Holden was a…deeply troubled man, a real-life killer himself…on a conditional suspended sentence for manslaughter [for a drunk driving accident, a case that was later dropped]."
This spot-on matching of actor to role extended all the way through to the rest of the Wild Bunch: Ernest Borgnine as Pike's sidekick, Dutch Engstrom, emanating toward Pike an anguished love and loyalty; old-time actor Edmond O'Brien as old-timer Freddie Sykes; Robert Ryan as Deke Thornton, Pike's stoic ex-partner and now head of the pursuing posse; Jaime Sanchez as the doomed Mexican Angel; and perhaps most especially Warren Oates and Ben Johnson as the wild, vile Gorch brothers. (While Oates was a member of what might be called Peckinpah's stock company, Johnson was an estranged member of John Ford's.)
Along with broad, illuminating biographies of these actors, Stratton presents informative material on many of the peripheral yet vital supporting cast. Because the film is set and was filmed in Mexico, much of it verisimilitude may be credited to Mexican talent. Throughout the '40s and '50s, the Mexican film industry was second only to Hollywood in terms of quality product and critical prestige. Peckinpah drew from this talent pool for many of his film's key characters, none more indelible than that of General Mapache (to whom the bunch sell guns and, by extension, their souls), one of the vilest, most distasteful figures in any American western. For this role, Peckinpah chose Emilio Fernández, a.k.a. El Indio, recognized and revered at that time as Mexico's greatest director. Apparently, Fernandez's scandalous and lascivious on-set behavior paralleled the unpredictable immorality of his character. Like almost everyone involved with this film, Fernandez was taking his part to the extreme.
Stratton goes beyond the production of The Wild Bunch, on to its impact and reception and legacy. A sensation upon its release, the film was both lauded and loathed for its raw violence, with some critics recognizing Peckinpah's "cathartic" western for what it was, others seeing nothing but sick exploitation (including in its bloody treatment of Mexican characters). While other films of the time created similar buzz for their depiction of violence, notably Arthur Penn's Bonnie and Clyde (a film often compared to The Wild Bunch), the violence of Peckinpah's film was as much moral as physical. All one need do is compare it to a contemporary and similarly storied film like George Roy Hill's Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, a winking high-jinks movie in which, in Marvin's resonant phrase, "no one takes a shit."
Everyone involved with The Wild Bunch attributes its power to Peckinpah and the environment he fostered in its making. "[S]omething remarkable was occurring at…rehearsal sessions," writes Stratton. "Under Peckinpah's direction, the actors went beyond acting and were becoming the wild bunch and the other characters in the movie." Warren Oates confirms this sentiment: "…it wasn't like a play…or a TV show […] It was our life. We were doing our fucking lives right there and lived it every day […] We were there in truth."
Stratton considers The Wild Bunch "the last Western […] It placed a tombstone on the head of the grave of the old-fashioned John Wayne [films]." One may argue with this, as evidence shows that John Wayne—especially the Wayne of John Ford westerns—is still very much alive in the popular consciousness. Yet there is a fatal finality to The Wild Bunch, a sense of something lowdown being run down. The film is complex and extreme less in its physical violence than in its moral violence, as it transposes the increasing cynicism of 1968 to an equally nihilistic era, all while maintaining a moving elegiac aura. No image or action expresses this attitude clearer and more powerfully than the bunch's iconic sacrificial end walk, four abreast, to rescue one of their own, to murder and be murdered into myth. If the film is a tombstone, Stratton's book is a fit inscription.
David Bordwell's Reinventing Hollywood is now available from University of Chicago Press, and W.K. Stratton's The Wild Bunch: Sam Peckinpah, a Revolution in Hollywood, and the Making of a Legendary Film is now available from Bloomsbury Publishing.
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Review: Avengers: Endgame Is, Above All Else, a Triumph of Corporate Synergy
Review: The Curse of La Llorona Is More Laugh Riot than Fright Fest
Review: David Bordwell's Reinventing Hollywood & W.K. Stratton's The Wild Bunch
Cannes Lineup Includes New Films by Terrence Malick, Céline Sciamma, & More
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Cannes Directors' Fortnight Lineup Includes The Lighthouse, Zombi Child, and More
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text:
Fungal blood culture
What is this test?
This test detects fungi in blood. It is used when a fungal disease is suspected[1].
What are related tests?
- Yeast identification procedure
Why do I need this test?
Laboratory tests may be done for many reasons. Tests are performed for routine health screenings or if a disease or toxicity is suspected. Lab tests may be used to determine if a medical condition is improving or worsening. Lab tests may also be used to measure the success or failure of a medication or treatment plan. Lab tests may be ordered for professional or legal reasons. You may need this test if you have:
- Candidemia
- Systemic fungal infection
When and how often should I have this test?
When and how often laboratory tests are done may depend on many factors. The timing of laboratory tests may rely on the results or completion of other tests, procedures, or treatments. Lab tests may be performed immediately in an emergency, or tests may be delayed as a condition is treated or monitored. A test may be suggested or become necessary when certain signs or symptoms appear.
Due to changes in the way your body naturally functions through the course of a day, lab tests may need to be performed at a certain time of day. If you have prepared for a test by changing your food or fluid intake, lab tests may be timed in accordance with those changes. Timing of tests may be based on increased and decreased levels of medications, drugs or other substances in the body.
The age or gender of the person being tested may affect when and how often a lab test is required. Chronic or progressive conditions may need ongoing monitoring through the use of lab tests. Conditions that worsen and improve may also need frequent monitoring. Certain tests may be repeated to obtain a series of results, or tests may need to be repeated to confirm or disprove results. Timing and frequency of lab tests may vary if they are performed for professional or legal reasons.
How should I get ready for the test?
Before having blood collected, tell the person drawing your blood if you are allergic to latex. Tell the healthcare worker if you have a medical condition or are using a medication or supplement that causes excessive bleeding. Also tell the healthcare worker if you have felt nauseated, lightheaded, or have fainted while having blood drawn in the past.
How is the test done?
When a blood sample from a vein is needed, a vein in your arm is usually selected. A tourniquet (large rubber strap) may be secured above the vein. The skin over the vein will be cleaned, and a needle will be inserted. You will be asked to hold very still while your blood is collected. Blood will be collected into one or more tubes, and the tourniquet will be removed. When enough blood has been collected, the healthcare worker will take the needle out.
How will the test feel?
The amount of discomfort you feel will depend on many factors, including your sensitivity to pain. Communicate how you are feeling with the person doing the test. Inform the person doing the test if you feel that you cannot continue with the test.
During a blood draw, you may feel mild discomfort at the location where the blood sample is being collected.
What should I do after the test?
After a blood sample is collected from your vein, a bandage, cotton ball, or gauze may be placed on the area where the needle was inserted. You may be asked to apply pressure to the area. Avoid strenuous exercise immediately after your blood draw. Contact your healthcare worker if you feel pain or see redness, swelling, or discharge from the puncture site.
What are the risks?
Blood: During a blood draw, a hematoma (blood-filled bump under the skin) or slight bleeding from the puncture site may occur. After a blood draw, a bruise or infection may occur at the puncture site. The person doing this test may need to perform it more than once. Talk to your healthcare worker if you have any concerns about the risks of this test.
What are normal results for this test?
Laboratory test results may vary depending on your age, gender, health history, the method used for the test, and many other factors. If your results are different from the results suggested below, this may not mean that you have a disease. Contact your healthcare worker if you have any questions. The following is considered to be a normal result for this test:
Adults and Children: Negative or No Growth
What follow up should I do after this test?
Ask your healthcare worker how you will be informed of the test results. You may be asked to call for results, schedule an appointment to discuss results, or notified of results by mail. Follow up care varies depending on many factors related to your test. Sometimes there is no follow up after you have been notified of test results. At other times follow up may be suggested or necessary. Some examples of follow up care include changes to medication or treatment plans, referral to a specialist, more or less frequent monitoring, and additional tests or procedures. Talk with your healthcare worker about any concerns or questions you have regarding follow up care or instructions.
It may take up to 4 weeks to receive the results of this test[1].
Where can I get more information?
Related Companies
- Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) - http://www.cdc.gov/
[1] Tietz NW (Ed): Clinical Guide to Laboratory Tests, 3rd ed. W. B. Saunders, Philadelphia, PA, 1995.
Last Updated: 7/4/2018

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Construction appeals court gives green light for extension to the Kunsthaus Zürich
The construction appeals court has confirmed the May 2013 decision approving construction of the Kunsthaus extension and dismissed in full the objection by the Lucerne-based Archicultura Foundation. The Kunsthaus extension meets all the requirements of the law. The additional costs incurred as a result of the appeal will be in the region of two million francs.
Objection to the Kunsthaus extension: commissioning body remains confident
The Einfache Gesellschaft Kunsthaus-Erweiterung (EGKE), the partnership commissioning and overseeing the project, has analysed the Administrative Court's decision recognising the legitimacy of the Lucerne-based Archicultura Foundation's objection, and considers that a substantive examination of the objection by the construction appeals court, the court of first instance, is the most direct way to obtain a building permit that has legal force. It will not therefore be taking its case to the Federal Supreme Court.
Construction was scheduled to start in December 2013. The length of the delay and the resulting additional costs will depend on the further course of the legal proceedings. Planning activities that have already begun will be completed by the end of May 2014 and the dossiers prepared so that the work can be resumed at a later date.
Administrative court allows appeal
The administrative court has ruled that the Archicultura Foundation can proceed with its objection to the construction of the Kunsthaus extension. The commissioning body regrets this decision and expects it to result in a further delay to the start of building work, and corresponding extra costs.
Archicultura to appeal further to Administrative Court
After the construction appeals court ruled that the Archicultura Foundation did not have a legitimate interest as a basis for its objection, the Foundation has now decided to appeal to the Administrative Court. The construction team regrets this step, which in all probability will lead to a delay in starting construction work on the Kunsthaus Extension, which was originally planned for the last quarter 2013. The length of the delay as well as financial implications will depend on the legal process accompanying the appeal, and are therefore also impossible to predict with certainty.
Objection to construction dismissed
The construction appeals court has ruled that the sole objector to the construction permit for the Kunsthaus extension does not have a legitimate interest. On 26 July 2013, the construction appeals court of the Canton of Zurich ruled that the Archicultura foundation for townscape and landscape care from Lucerne was not entitled to file an objection to the construction of the Kunsthaus extension, as it had no discernible geographical connection to the project and had failed to demonstrate that it was active throughout the canton. For that reason, its objection would not be considered.
Construction permit granted
At its meeting on 31 May 2013, the construction committee of Zurich City Council approved the construction permit for the Kunsthaus extension. The permit is subject to the customary conditions for projects of this magnitude. Appeals must be lodged within 30 days.
Major donation towards the Kunsthaus extension
The Walter Haefner Foundation is supporting the extension to the Kunsthaus Zürich with a donation of CHF 20 million.
Design plan comes into force
On 31 January 2013, the Canton of Zurich Building Department approved the public design plan for the Kunsthaus extension. It comes into force on 16 March.


text:
Tuesday, October 12, 2010
804: Blergerghergergh ALCOHOL
DRUNKLORIA HERE posting about comic 804 because I promised Rob even though it is TOTALLY CUTTING INTO MY DRINKING TIME.
So here we have the recurring characters of this comic doing EXACTLY THE KIND OF SHIT YOU'D EXPECT THEM TO. Beret guy acted all quirky, black hat guy acted mischievous-on-the-verge-of-homidical, archetypcal xkcd girl acted all introspective and emo, and generic xkcd guy made some reference to a semi-obscure (in that you don't pick it up in generic high school/college courses) theorem. Randall thinks that you will find this hilarious. It is not.
Do you guys remember the show Family Matters? If you do, you're likely familiar with a character named Urkel. Poor Urkel started out as a supporting character and then became more and more the focus of the show as producers realized audiences loved his helpless dweebiness and slapstick ways. The problem, though, is that his character never developed beyond a one-note gimmick so that by the ninth season, most people wanted to FUCKING KILL THAT BASTARD URKEL. SAY "DID I DO THAT" ONE MORE TIME MOTHERFUCKER, I. DARE. YOU!
That is the problem with this comic. It is basically the token characters doing exactly what they always do; nothing more. There's nothing clever or amusing in that. It's not even worth writing more than "this is completely fucking boring and I hate it." But I did anyway, because I am a talkative drunk.
ETA: Whoops, I linked to the wrong thing. This is because when I drink, I like to open multiple Wikipedia math articles and bask in how cool I am.
62 comments:
- AnonymousOctober 12, 2010 at 7:27 PM
Remember when Black Hat Guy was actually nefarious instead of predictably wacky?ReplyDelete
I do. Those were good times.
- AnonymousOctober 12, 2010 at 7:34 PM
Ok sure, this comic didn't have any character development... and maybe the first 3 panels were useless... but the last panel is pretty funny.ReplyDelete
And hey, at least he's no longer using high school math.
Quite honestly, I don't know what you guys want out of the math bit of this... its a semi-obscure theorem which is pretty perfect for his (original) target audience.
Aloria was never funny.ReplyDelete
Holds true now.
Damn Carl, leaving.
- AnonymousOctober 12, 2010 at 7:50 PM
I think this was probably a reference to the Banach-Tarski paradox (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banach-Tarski_paradox), which isn't that obscure.ReplyDelete
I don't know whether that's equivalent to the Uniform Boundedness thing or not, but I do know that it follows from the axiom of choice.
Mike is a meanie jerk head.ReplyDelete
Anon: 7:34: I don't have a beef with the math reference in general, nore am I expecting loads of character development. I'd just like Randall to not use his recurring characters in practically the exact same way he always does. It's like If you watched Happy Days and Fonzie never did anything more but walk onto screen, say "Eyyyyyyyy," hit the jukebox, and walk off.ReplyDelete
- AnonymousOctober 12, 2010 at 9:12 PM
Good job linking to the completely wrong theorem, Rob.ReplyDelete
- AnonymousOctober 12, 2010 at 9:13 PM
I mean Aloria. But, Rob, you are stupid also.ReplyDelete
- AnonymousOctober 12, 2010 at 9:13 PM
You should already know what to expect when the blog post is by Aloria and the title is "Blergerghergergh ALCOHOL".ReplyDelete
Having had this in mind when I started reading, I have no complaints.
Holy shit 805 is so bad.ReplyDelete
I mean not that it's surprising but I was caught off-guard by how fucking bad it is.
How the fuck do the people on the forums like this one? GOOMHR I LIKE GUNS N' ROSES TOO.
Oh well I guess it has the word "Orwellian" in it so they're probably jizzing their pants at that and the fact that it's a familiar song.
- AnonymousOctober 12, 2010 at 10:38 PM
Me and you and you and me no matter how they tossed the dice it had to be the only one for me is you and you for me so happy together.ReplyDelete
- AlsworthOctober 12, 2010 at 10:39 PM
"Jizz in my Pants" is a familiar song! Nate, you have just struck KOMEDY GOLD! GOOMHN!ReplyDelete
- JimbobbowillyOctober 12, 2010 at 11:16 PM
@805: Crap. It's like the lame "Reno" comic (206), only with slightly better art that's not worth 599 pages, five hundred and fucking ninety-nine pages to improve.ReplyDelete
805 is quite possibly the shittiest shit in the history of shit.ReplyDelete
I shittilly agree. I am so shitting pissed that I shit a shit.
where the grass is poorly rendered and the girls are meganReplyDelete
oh won't you please let me go down on you, meeeegaaaaaaaaaaaaaaanReplyDelete
I actually feel like comparing xkcd to Family Matters is an insult to Family Matters. I'm sorry but I...I LIKE Family Matters. And I don't even like sitcoms. Seriously, there are like 3 sitcoms in the entire history of television that I actually like, and Family Matters is one of them. Over on xkcdsucksredux, this comic was compared to Friends...which is ANOTHER of the 3 sitcoms in the history of TV that I actually like. (The third is Roseanne.) Possible conclusion: My taste in sitcoms sucks? Fortunately, making this comment is not cutting into my drinking time; I am drunk right now.ReplyDelete
- AnonymousOctober 13, 2010 at 12:16 AM
I can maybe understand Family Matters, and Friends is a stretch... but liking Roseanne? That's unforgivable.ReplyDelete
- UndercoverCuddlefishOctober 13, 2010 at 1:21 AM
chaos your taste in television shows would literally be the worst thing i have borne witness to all night except i have already seen 805 and it is terribleReplyDelete
- PervycreeperOctober 13, 2010 at 3:28 AM
1- It's a refernece to the Banach-Tarski paradox, not uniform boundednessReplyDelete
@/b/ -rules 1 and 2 mofo
I admit the strip wasn't really hilarious, but it was somewhat interesting. Analyzing the comic doesn't make it bad. And what exactly is so problematic in putting the token characters in a topical situation? I don't know if I'm just arguing for the sake of argument. I just feel like doing it if the comic isn't downright bad, possibly just boring.ReplyDelete
- AnonymousOctober 13, 2010 at 4:57 AM
The first panel, by itself, wouldn't be a bad comic.ReplyDelete
- AnonymousOctober 13, 2010 at 5:40 AM
@ Gone FishingReplyDelete
Nah, it wasn't terrible, really (unless panel three REALLY bothers you). Boring at worst, and even then you could very well find something there amusing.
Token characters in a topical situation falls flat for character development, but that doesn't mean they can't make a joke. Whether you find it funny depends, but I certainly got a chuckle out of panels one and four.
- AnonymousOctober 13, 2010 at 5:51 AM
I was going to write an angry review of 805 and send it to Rob "rotund" Mason and therefore earn everlasting fame and glory but fuck all there is to say about it is that it's shitty in exactly the same way that 206 was and I don't want to waste my succulent rage-juices on a rant so short.ReplyDelete
Maybe I need to get as drunk as aloria to get it done but as I also have to write a paper before class today drinking would be highly discouraged
- AnonymousOctober 13, 2010 at 6:17 AM
Aloria, I know you're the coolest writer of this blog, but, seriously? Alcohol and blog posts don't mix. THEY JUST DON'T!ReplyDelete
So, this comic. Well, the xkcdsucksredux take was quite better(and on time! ;D ), but whatevers. I like the first panel. In fact, this comic is eerily arranged in descendant order of how much I liked each panel. If Beret Man wasn't a construct of random character traits, I guess he could be a nice source of humor more frequently. But yeah.
I'll give you the credit for addressing the issue of Randall and (non-existent) character development. I really wish he developed his characters more, but I guess it'd take EFFORT, and we all know Randall Munroe is effortophobic.
And I so damn hope this comment box doesn't eat my comment again!
- AnonymousOctober 13, 2010 at 6:46 AM
Oh wow, a hole blog devoted to hating a comic. Did you ever try, oh, I don't know, NOT READING IT?ReplyDelete
Comparing aloria's post to redux is like comparing the Bernstein Bears to Slaughter House Five. I'm not saying redux is as good and complex as Slaughter House Five, I'm just saying this post is much worse and much simpler than the Bernstein Bears. So much so, that the gaps between them are quite comparable.ReplyDelete
@Anon 5:51
needs moar cunnilingus
Thanks for that. That's what I liked about Carl, he always had links like that to supplement and support his rage.
@Anon 6:46ReplyDelete
You're adorable.
Here you go sweetie
What the hell THE BERNSTEIN BEARS were the COOLEST.ReplyDelete
Actually, when I read the book about nail biting it made me want to try biting my nails. And now I still bite my nails. Damn you, Stan and Jan Berenstain! Damn you to hell.
- AnonymousOctober 13, 2010 at 7:20 AM
Looks like randy is pimping poster sales on every page now not just 802. Must be running low on cashReplyDelete
"Oh wow, a hole blog devoted to hating a comic."ReplyDelete
Yeah, but it's OUR HOLE. So get out of it now!! Go dig your own hole blog.
As for the new comic, it's oh, SO Orwellian.
Capn, you're such redux fanboy, you're almost as bad as xkcd fanboys.ReplyDelete
Well your webcomic review is almost as terrible as aloria's drunken ramblings, Timofei. So what's your point?ReplyDelete
I'm a fanboy of good writing.
Rob's posts are usually witty and insightful.
Carl's are insightful and well researched.
And redux is on time and has a lot to say before anyone else has said anything.
Timofei is a pretty cool guy. eh posts stuff and doesn't afraid of anything. But you, Aloria, and probably a good 80% of the guest posters here are none of these, you're mostly boring and not funny when you post, and you really should stick to just commenting.
There were some stellar guest posts in the past though, I just can't name them off the top of my head.
- India N. ApolisOctober 13, 2010 at 10:54 AM
anything by Ann Apolis, M.D. for startersReplyDelete
this guy has some issuesReplyDelete
I don't mind that Capn doesn't enjoy my posts; his cereal cuts up the roof of my mouth.ReplyDelete
Speaking of me, I just posted a bunch of boobs on Carl's new website. Go see before it gets deleted or something!ReplyDelete
- AnonymousOctober 13, 2010 at 11:47 AM
Some of y'all complain too much.ReplyDelete
If Randall makes his characters behave in a way that's unexpected (e.g. when hat guy suffers existential angst over the pointlessness of his brilliant pranks) then you complain that they're acting out of character.
If Randall makes his characters behave in a way that's perfectly in-character, you complain that they're just doing the same thing they're always doing. No, it's not like Fonzie just saying "ehhhh" all the time, because they're acting in-character in novel ways and making novel jokes. You can complain about the jokes if you like, but don't complain that the whole joke is just character-being-like-character, because that's what 90% of comic strip humour is about.
Oh, and after so much complaining that Randall had degenerated into high-school mathematics, doesn't he get some credit for freaking Banach-Tarski Theorem joke?
As for 805... actually I thought it was pretty funny. I can't analyze why.
Randall has come out with some crappy comics over the past few months, but the last two were actually pretty good.
"Timofei is a pretty cool guy. eh posts stuff and doesn't afraid of anything."ReplyDelete
- AnonymousOctober 13, 2010 at 12:06 PM
Hey, this must be how Randy makes his comics; he just gets really fucking drunk.ReplyDelete
Anon 12:06PM: This comic by Ann Apolis insinuates that xkcd is the result of my binge drinking:ReplyDelete
That. Explains. Everything.ReplyDelete
haha spot how i just drew that on the back of the Carl comicReplyDelete
"As for 805... actually I thought it was pretty funny. I can't analyze why."
Now I remember why I keep coming here.
I don't think I get it? Is there some new internet meme revolving around Paradise City or something? No? So there's really nothing to else to get? Good lord, 805 is terrible.ReplyDelete
- AnonymousOctober 13, 2010 at 1:56 PM
So am I the only one that noticed that Randall was too lazy to draw music notes in all four panels so he just flipped some of them around? And that that this looks really fucking weird?ReplyDelete
Posters rise and fall, but cuddlefish are eternal.ReplyDelete
Anon 7:20- hang on, how is he selling posters of 805? how the fuck would that work as a poster? I refuse to visit that site more than once (and less whenever possible) per comic so as to deny randy the traffic.
here's to hoping friday's comic makes me good and mad enough to write a guest post that all you fuckers will be forced to read!
- AnonymousOctober 13, 2010 at 3:34 PM
Holy crap I didn't notice the awful notation the first time around because I just wanted to plough through all that text but... oh GOD. For someone who loves a nitpick he really did fuck up those notes.
For the unaware:
All single quavers in every panel have the tail 'flicking' the wrong way, the end to the tail should point toward the head of the note. A lot of people do this though, even in it's wrongness it's a lot easier to notate that way so even professionals tend to do it. Not a biggy, but still lame coming from such as 'perfectionist'
4th panel 3rd note single quaver: What the fuck. Tails always go to the right, it's not that fucking hard. Jesus fucking christ randy arrrgghhhhhhh
5th panel 3rd note single quaver: FFFFFFFFUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU stem and tail on the wrong side even someone who's never played an instrument can see this looks fucking retarded oh god
Also every panel features a minim in spite of the fact that in all the lyrics presented only the word 'home' could possibly be that long, and even then it has a shift in pitch so there would be no minims in that whole passage.
In sum: Fuck you Ransdlifnsdlklylll
- AnonymousOctober 13, 2010 at 3:36 PM
Re poster pimping:ReplyDelete
XKCD updates every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.
There's a poster of the updated communities map for preorder in the store!
is now on every page. I think it just the normal message until a few days ago.
aloria's posts are the best posts :3ReplyDelete
My god the xkcd forum is intolerable for 805. Comments like "I LOLed several times even though I probably missed the main joke" quickly give way to ::terrible:: mimicry.ReplyDelete
Cam is the smartest commenter on this blog.ReplyDelete
- AnonymousOctober 13, 2010 at 7:11 PM
Aloria I have to say that is a very flattering picture of you in your profile picture.ReplyDelete
- Cum BucketOctober 14, 2010 at 12:56 AM
wait hold on anon 11:47 thinks white hat guy has 'existential angst'?ReplyDelete
What a shitty troll
This isn't even as good as my previous comment about rob's fat face needing liposuction so the rolls of fat didn't fall over his eyes and stop him from seeing the keyboard resulting in a shapley provile picture. Which got eaten
and that was a pretty shitty comment too
- ScottMcTonyOctober 14, 2010 at 2:27 AM
Cum Bucket are you even slightly able to read?ReplyDelete
Or to speak?
- AnonymousOctober 14, 2010 at 5:21 AM
@aloria: You must have went to some pretty shitty college.ReplyDelete
Yes. Yes I did.ReplyDelete
Istanbul Was ConstantinopleReplyDelete
- AnonymousOctober 14, 2010 at 3:23 PM


text:
Celtics win 2008 NBA Championship
Celtics win 2008 NBA Championship
The Celtics defeated the Lakers to win their 17th NBA championship on June 17, 2008.
Celtics forward Kevin Garnett had some fun with teammate Gabe Pruitt during a practice a day before Game 1.
Playoff fever set in around Boston, with a giant T-shirt supporting the Celtics erected at City Hall Plaza.
Los Angeles' Ronny Turiaf faced off with Boston's Leon Powe during Game 1.
Celtics forward Paul Pierce fights through the L.A. defense for 2 points in the first quarter of Game 1.
The Lakers' Kobe Bryant drives Celtics guard Sam Cassell into the floor in the second quarter of Game 1.
Season-ticket holder Marty Joyce heckles Bryant in the third quarter of Game 1.
Pierce had to be carried off the court after suffering an injury in the third quarter of Game 1.
Pierce returned to game and finished with 22 points in the Celtics' 98-88 win.
Powe slammed home two points as the Celtics moved to a 2-0 series advantage with a 108-102 win in Game 2.
James Posey and the Celtics moved west and donned their green road jerseys for Game 3.
Boston's Eddie House battled with Los Angeles' Jordan Farmar during the fourth quarter of Game 4.
Garnett howled in disgust as the final buzzer sounded an 87-81 Celtics loss in Game 3.
The Celtics bounced back in Game 4, when Ray Allen ended up on the Lakers' bench after chasing after a loose ball.
P.J. Brown slammed home two points at the end of the third quarter of Game 4 as the Celtics cut the Lakers' lead in the game to two.
House celebrated as the Celtics finalized a 97-91 win in Game 4.
Celtics head coach Doc Rivers, center, and Lakers fan Jack Nicolson both pleaded their case to referee Dick Bavetta during Game 5.
Lamar Odom (left) and Farmar jammed up Allen as he drove to the basket in the first half of Game 5.
Celtics guard Rajon Rondo went into crowd to retrieve a ball during Game 5.
Bryant and the Lakers soared to a 103-98 win in Game 5 that kept them alive in the series.
Back in Boston, about 100 Celtics fans lined up outside the Garden hoping to score tickets for Game 6.
Bill Russell greeted fellow Celtics legend Tommy Heinsohn on the floor before Game 6.
Pierce drove to the hoop against defense from Bryant in the second quarter of Game 6.
In the third quarter, Pierce sailed out of bounds but watched his shot drop.
Garnett fought for the ball with Odom, right, and Bryant during the second quarter of Game 6.
Rondo kept the ball away from Bryant during fourth-quarter action.
Rivers reacted to a play during the second quarter, before the Celtics posted a 58-35 lead at halftime.
Allen and the crowd began to celebrate as the Celtics pulled away during the fourth quarter.
Fans at the The Stadium sports bar and grill exulted as they watched the final minutes of Game 6.
House celebrated after the Celtics closed out a 131-92 win to clinch the championship.
Garnett celebrated after clinching the first championship in his career, less than a year after arriving from Minnesota.
Pierce, left, and Garnett shared a moment with Rivers in the closing minutes of the game.
Allen, left, and Posey saluted the crowd in the celebration after the game.
Pierce cemented his legendary status in Celtics history by clinching a championship for his resume.
The Celtics celebrated a championship for the first time in 22 years.
Fans flocked to the statue of Red Auerbach near Faneuil Hall after Game 6.
The Celtics gathered for an organizational photo with the trophy after Game 6.
Garnett, left, Allen, center, and Pierce led the Celtics to a championship a year after the team won just 24 games.
Two days after Game 6, Garnett and the Celtics showed off the trophy to fans during a "rolling rally."
Pierce and the Celtics won Boston's sixth pro championship since 2002.
Tens of thousands of fans turned out to celebrate with the Celtics in the streets of Boston.


text:
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