ESCHER THING

This week "No Festival Required" offers, along with the 1976 Texas music documentary Heartworn Highways...

M. C. Escher: Journey to Infinity--Robin Lutz directed this deft and speedy documentary portrait of the Dutch woodcut and print artist famed for repeated symmetrical patterns; birds and lizards taking shape in the spaces between other birds and lizards; gravity-defying, dimension-bending stairways; hands drawing the hands that are drawing them and the like. It traces his life, from art school in Delft and Haarlem to artistic awakening in Italy until Mussolini drove him to Switzerland and then Belgium, where the Nazis made him uncomfortable and ultimately drove him back to the Netherlands.

There are a few talking heads: Escher's own (now elderly) kids, and Graham Nash, who's a big fan. But the focus is less on his life than on the evolution of his art, although Escher claimed he was less an artist than a mathematician. Many of us would be inclined to disagree; his style is impeccably lovely, and his visions are playful and beguiling at the same time they carry unsettling perceptual resonances. He is perhaps vulnerable to the charge of gimmickry; this may be why serious critical appraisal was slow to come, despite (or because of) his work's worldwide popularity.

But it would be hard to suppose, based on Escher's diaries and other writings from which the narration of this film is taken, that he was a crass huckster. Indeed, he seems perplexed and a bit pained by the enthusiasm of hippies and rock stars for his pictures. This narration, spoken with Cleese-worthy buoyancy and a touch of comic pomposity by Stephen Fry, is one of the movie's best assets; it's the perfect seasoning to the feast of Escher's images.

DARK LORD OF THE SETH

I understand that Seth MacFarlane has gotten poor reviews online for his stint as Oscar host last night. I’m no particular MacFarlane fan, but I thought he did just fine. He made some of the mildly tasteless jokes that were, of course, precisely why he was hired, and he made a solid effort at old-school song-and-dance showmanship. His opening routine, opposite William Shatner, went on a little too long, but I thought it was pretty funny all the same.

I maintain, as I wrote here about last year’s show, that the reason that middle-aged viewers so often react with cranky petulance toward the Oscars isn’t that the show is on the lame side—though it usually is—but that they fail to feel the excitement that the spectacle gave them as kids. Many viewers in my own circle are also show-biz wannabes, wash-outs or bush-leaguers ourselves, so there’s often an unacknowledged streak of career envy behind the Oscar-hatin’. The fault, dear Brutus, is typically not in these overhyped stars, but in our tired-ass selves.

This weekend The Kid and I also caught up with Escape From Planet Earth, a computer-animated flick that wasn’t screened for critics, in Phoenix at least, prior to its release.

It’s the story of a milquetoast, blue-skinned, nose-less alien (voiced by Robb Corddry) from the planet Baab who travels to Earth to rescue his hotshot brother (Brendan Fraser), and winds up imprisoned with him and other wacky aliens at Area 51 in Nevada by an evil General (Shatner again!) who’s running a technology sweatshop there.

The movie is watchable and pleasant but mostly routine. The conflicts are standard for the genre—caution versus recklessness, the desire to seem heroic to your kid—but there are some odd, almost free-standing episodes that struck me as curiously witty and erudite. Then, in the end credits, I noticed an “additional material by” credit, and the first writer listed was Stephen Fry. That probably explains the erudition.