larale

Devin, I am normally a big fan of your cogent film critiques, but I think it was a serious mistake to have you review the Pina Bausch 3D film.

Of course this film is for dancers and dance lovers! What did you expect?! Pina was one of the great originals and innovators and she brought a sense of the unknown and unseen back into what was becoming a stale, obvious medium.

She also brought a stylistic lineage dating back to the NYC dance renaissance of the 60's and early 70's, when Paul Taylor was giving us pieces about incest and Meredith Monk's dance company was occupying an entire building and you had to walk through tiny rooms all over for hours to really see the scope of the piece.

Dance is a very fragile medium, and dancers are like race-horses - they need to be constantly trained and exercised in order to perform at the peak of their skills. They also injure easily, and it is in this delicate balance of need and art that we sometimes (but rarely) get the innovators like Pina. Mostly it is a smoothly oiled machine that makes most of its revenue from imported stars and the annual Nutcrackers around the country. Not a fertile environment for groundbreaking work.

Pina carried the torch for the enigma, the outsider and the irreplaceable. The loss of her is a deep wound that we as dancers and dance lovers will not easily recover from. It would have been nice to have a writer who understood our grief, and allowed us to mourn her appropriately through the reverent documenting of her once-in-a-lifetime partnership with the equally eccentric and gifted filmmaker Wim Wenders.

Your review kind of reminds me of the final scene in Hesher where a drunk Joseph Gordon-Levitt crashes a funeral. In the movie, his inarticulate rant creates the catharsis for a boy and his father to exorcise their grief. In your case, you are just rudely crashing a funeral - no catharsis, and no understanding of who or what or why. Keep up the great work you do so well, but please avoid dance films next time. You are an excellent writer who is finally and truly out of your league.

(PS - Why is there no info on where to see it? Because you don't really care?)