PHIL COLLINS

The other day, at a recording session for the cast album of “Tarzan,” Disney’s new Broadway musical, Phil Collins, the drummer and singer who wrote the show’s songs, walked across the floor of a recording studio in midtown. The studio was capacious. At the far end, as at a dance in a high-school gymnasium, were a band and some singers. Collins was wearing a dark T-shirt, pale-green linen pants, and black canvas sneakers. His head is small and round, like a globe, and closely shaved, so that the dark patterns of hair suggest land and the bald parts suggest water. He was adding percussion parts to the tracks—a small task, but one that he preferred to see to himself.

Collins came to rest by a microphone and a music stand. He put on a pair of headphones, like a pilot. From a table, he picked up a cylinder about the size of a spice bottle and held it in his left hand, with his elbow bent. The cylinder was filled with pellets. Over a speaker an engineer said, “Everybody ready to run? Here it comes . . . Rolling.”

With the fervor of citizens just released from colonial rule, the actors sang, “Two worlds, one family,” while Collins moved the shaker back and forth in front of the microphone. In the control room, one man said to another, “The back was better on that one, but the front was better on the one before it.”

Meanwhile, Collins stepped to the middle of the studio and embraced a man in a dark shirt and jeans. He put his arm around him while a third man took a photograph of them. They parted. Briefly, Collins walked in circles. He picked up a tambourine. He lifted one knee, apparently to study a detail on his pants leg. Finally, he sat on a stool and rocked back and forth several times.

Over the speaker a man in the control room said, “End of measure fifty-seven, we cut to seventy-eight. No vamp.” On these takes, Collins played the tambourine. When they were finished, he walked into the control room. A young man approached. Collins lowered his head and listened to him intently. “Minestrone soup,” the man said. “We found a place that makes it.”

To eat his soup, Collins sat in a small room, with Tom Schumacher, the producer of Disney Theatrical Productions. Collins was talking about a big band that he organized a few years ago to play at the Montreux Jazz Festival. “I live in Switzerland, right down the road from the festival, and they gave me one night to do anything I wanted,” he said. “Drummers love big bands, because you get to set up pieces of music that are three or four measures down the line. Ba-ta-ba-ta-ba-ta-BAM.” To prepare for the evening, he spent hours watching a video of how to play drums with brushes. “I never had to use them before,” he said.

When someone asked Collins if he minded all the waiting around involved in a musical, he said that he was accustomed to it from having played in a band. Also, he said that his experience with the theatre began in childhood. When he was fourteen, he played the Artful Dodger in “Oliver!” in London’s West End. “By that time, I had already played drums for nine years,” he said. “My headmaster told me that I couldn’t do the whole run. My parents took me out of school and put me in drama school, and that was the end of my education. Anyway, I did the role for several months, until my voice broke. I left, then went back and, at sixteen, played Oliver. Mostly what I was doing was looking at my watch and waiting to grow up. I would have had a dance band, but there weren’t many around.”

“There was the Beatles,” Schumacher said. “They could have used a better drummer,” he added, helpfully.

Collins compressed his lips slightly. Then he nodded and said, “I’ll tell him.”
from The New Yorker

FILMS

“X-Men: The Last Stand” and “The Cult of the Suicide Bomber.”
by DAVID DENBY
Issue of 2006-06-05
Posted 2006-05-29


Once you’ve seen, in the third “X-Men” movie, Hugh Jackman hurling through the air and smashing into a tree, or Halle Berry spinning like a top as she ascends to nowhere, you don’t need to see it again. But Brett Ratner, taking over as the director of the franchise from Bryan Singer, who directed the first two movies in the series, has no fear of repetition. Anything but. Ratner, the auteur of the frenzied “Rush Hour” movies, is a crude synthesizer of comedy and action tropes, and in “X-Men: The Last Stand” he disdains the liquid beauty and the poetic fantasy of Singer’s work, and trashes his actors by repeatedly slamming them around or leaving them stranded. Famke Janssen, as Jean, the class-5 mutant who has unparalleled powers, receives an enormous buildup: the megalomaniacal Magneto (Sir Ian McKellen), who thinks that mutants should simply annihilate humans, releases Jean’s strengths as a destroyer, and she has a few man-devouring scenes that suggest what a liberated mutant woman can do. At the climax of the movie, however, Ratner leaves Janssen standing stock still—her red hair backlit in a halo—and looking puzzled. I’ve never seen an actress so obviously lost—and just when she should be taking control. Anna Paquin also stands around looking blank, and the stunning Rebecca Romijn, as Mystique, in body-fitting blue scales—the most openly erotic image in recent mainstream cinema—is quickly killed off.

Ratner revels in Sir Ian’s balcony-shaking theatrical voice (as was said of Orson Welles, McKellen seems to carry his own echo chamber around with him), but as a director he is no lover of women. He doesn’t seem to love much of anything in this movie, except for spasmodic violence. In this installment, written by Simon Kinberg and Zak Penn, a chemical cure for mutancy has been found; the President of the United States (Josef Sommer) supports it, but almost none of the mutants want to be “cured.” There’s the usual earnest plea that ethnic minorities be left alone to cultivate their otherness rather than be forcibly merged into the bland mediocrity of humankind, but the liberal social argument, such as it is, is soon abandoned. A dispute breaks out (it’s been simmering all through the series) between Magneto and the peaceable Professor Xavier (Patrick Stewart), and, in an execrably staged scene, the movie ends in a three-way war (humans and two kinds of mutants) on Alcatraz. People are blown away, cars are flung up in the air and set on fire, and so on. But you can’t see much of it, because Ratner, covering a multitude of clumsy sins, stages it in semi-darkness.

What a comedown, after the weirdly beautiful things Singer and his technicians did in the first two movies. For Singer, the essence of digital magic was transformation: one person’s flesh can turn into another’s, or melt and pour into a flashing metal stream. Among other things, the first two movies were a celebration of the human body brought to perfection and then pushed by super-earthly flights of imagination into mythical achievement. But Ratner’s movie is one thudding climax after another, and it left me exhausted, the way the second and third movies in the “Matrix” series did. Computer-generated imagery, an enormous breakthrough in film technology (analogous to the development of color cinematography), has existed in its mature form for little more than a decade, and already it’s threatening to become a nuisance and a bore. Where is it written that C.G.I. has to be used to enhance violence in comic-book plots? Singer and Peter Jackson have used it as artists, but they are selling violence, too. Maybe it’s time for the aesthetes—an American Cocteau or two—to create a whole new digital world.



Many of us, of course, have spent hours at the movies relishing violence and explosions as entertainment. In the documentary “The Cult of the Suicide Bomber,” we see explosions in which real people die, and the sequence comes as a kick in the gut. In 2005, Robert Baer, the C.I.A. case officer whose adventures and misadventures served as the basis for George Clooney’s role in “Syriana,” went around the Middle East with a camera crew, interviewing Lebanese and Israeli intelligence officers and politicians, and the families of suicide bombers and their victims. In between the interviews, Baer and his collaborators, the producer-directors Kevin Toolis and David Batty, drawing on news-agency footage, lay out the historical development of suicide as a weapon—first as a weapon of war, then of terror. The movie is a pageant of fanaticism, sacrifice, and death, and the most striking passage comes near the end. Some of the Lebanese and West Bank bombers were trailed by cameramen, and the footage they recorded—say, of a car bomber taking out an Israeli military patrol—was later used by terrorist organizations as a recruiting and propaganda tool. Baer shows some of those films again and again, and by the end of the sequence I wasn’t sure what enraged me more—the moviemaking terrorists, the blithe idiocy of routine commercial entertainment, or my own complacency in putting up with so much of it.

Baer, who narrates, begins by saying that he is obsessed with the terrorist bombing of the American Embassy in Beirut, in April, 1983, which killed sixty-three people and wiped out most of the C.I.A. station there. How did suicide become so potent a force? He goes through the stages: Ayatollah Khomeini, in the early nineteen-eighties, sanctified very young soldiers’ dying in the defense of Iran, which encouraged a thirteen-year-old boy to strap explosives to his body and blow up an Iraqi tank; Hezbollah used terror against Israelis occupying southern Lebanon in the eighties and nineties; and so on. The filmmakers place each development in its political context, and they trace the increasingly sinister use of religion to justify self-slaughter and murder. Baer can’t say who bombed the Embassy, but he strongly suggests that Iran was behind it, and that Iran has been waging a secret war against American interests for more than a quarter of a century.

That’s the news that Baer threads through “The Cult of the Suicide Bomber.” But the real center of interest, for me, at least, lies in the families of the young men who died. The act by which these kids have fulfilled themselves has ended any possibility that we might attain further knowledge of their temperaments or their souls. What of those who are left behind? An Iranian mother in a black head scarf, referring to her fifteen-year-old son—a photograph shows a slender boy with dark eyes and the faint beginnings of a mustache—who died in battle, says, simply, “He became a martyr for God.” In a city near Tehran, a male relative of a bomber, pointing to a photograph, says, “There’s the martyr Hossein.” Both speak as if the boys had attained a purely official identity, as if they were not their own dead children. “It was a good path for him to take. So why would we stop him?” the mother asks Baer, and there are more remarks, from brothers, sisters, and friends, in praise of the suicide’s duty and rectitude. Other families of young dead warriors may grieve, but these people do not. Did Baer choose them for their ideological purity, or were they the only ones who would talk to him?

The families must be under enormous pressure from Hezbollah, Hamas, and other such organizations to say only the approved things. Still, knowing this, one looks for a fuller response. Did at least one of the bombers’ brothers or sisters harbor such angry thoughts as “My brother was seduced into giving up his life by a cynical and vulgar fantasy of virgins in Paradise”? Or perhaps, in a more analytic vein, did one of them think, “Young men in this society feel they have no future, so why shouldn’t they give up their lives”? Those words, which would suggest a social, rather than a religious, context for the act, are never spoken, or even hinted at. Any kind of psychological explanation is ignored, too. The families utterly reject the word “suicide.” The appropriate word is “martyr,” a bomber’s sister firmly tells Baer. Suicide, it seems, implies the possibility of unhappiness or compulsion, an emotional need that has not been met, whereas martyrdom, as the families present it, is always rationally chosen, and a gift to everyone. The religious language rules out any reason for doing something other than the single reason that is given (American fundamentalists talk the same way).

Hearing this, Baer doesn’t push very hard. He’s in a precarious situation; he enjoys, we imagine, no more than a limited welcome. But his failure to get anything more out of the families frustrates his viewers, and probably frustrates him, too. Near the end of the journey, chronicling Sunni car bombers in Iraq, he talks sorrowfully of Muslims killing Muslims, and he concludes that suicide bombing has lost any coherent political meaning and has taken on an irresistible life of its own as a glamorous cult. And the word he finishes with, to describe the intentions and results of this cult, is “chaos.” But the movie suggests that some kinds of chaos, however much induced by professional terrorists, don’t come about without the consent and support of deeply religious people.