Tag: Cate Blanchett

4,106 words

Gore Vidal once said to Dwight McDonald, “You realize we have nothing more to say; only to add.”

I feel the same way in this review of Todd Field’s Tár, the recent film so artfully described in Trevor Lynch’s review (“The Talented Miss Tarr”), but the film made an immediate impression on me in terms of how it dealt with life and power when applied to art. I recall Lynch’s discomfort with Tár’s opening monologues which could, by virtue of their length and the fact of there being two in sequence, could easily kill a film. (more…)

1,354 words

Todd Field’s Tár is the story of the rise — or perhaps I should say “social climb” — and fall of Lydia Tár, a pioneering ethnomusicologist, conductor, and the first female Music Director of the Berlin Philharmonic, who is brilliantly played by Cate Blanchett. Shot on location in New York and Berlin, Tár very effectively conjures up the world of contemporary classical music, from the concert halls and conservatories to the journalistic latrine flies. (more…)

2,785 words

One of the great unexpected pleasures of the Covid lockdown last spring was discovering oddball television series you otherwise wouldn’t have approached with a barge pole. Producers and programming executives detected a nice angle here, so they moved up launch dates by a few months. This is what happened with Mrs. America, a nine-part FX series with Cate Blanchett that debuted on Hulu last April and May, instead of its originally scheduled launch in July and August. (more…)