By Bob Hicks
The other day I posted this essay, BodyVox cuts to the Hollywood chase, on Oregon ArtsWatch. It’s about BodyVox dance’s cannily amusing ode to the movies, The Cutting Room, which continues through May 19. In the piece, I dive into the pool where film, dance and music swim around in existential, essentially nonverbal waters, and I try not to sink. An excerpt:
What The Cutting Room achieves is to distill the essence of movie storytelling without weighting it down with any actual story. And it has fun doing it. Its a situational comedy, a comedy of mood and ritual trappings. “Stella!” a voice cries; or, “I’ll have what she’s having”; or “I know that you and Frank were planning to disconnect me, and I’m afraid that’s something I cannot allow to happen”; and we all know what the scene is and where, in Hollywood dreamland, we are. It’s as comfortable and comforting as reciting The Lord’s Prayer.
Photo courtesy BodyVox: Jonathan Krebs (top) and Jamey Hampton.
Simek, a native of Prague and chairman of the theater department at Lewis & Clark College, is also the English translator of Havel’s play The Increased Difficulty of Concentration. And although he met Havel just once, he had an intriguing connection with the legendary leader. “The funny thing is that my parents and grandparents were very good friends with his parents,” Simek tells Marty. “When I was born, the Havels gave my parents this cradle — a pink, wooden painted cradle — that Havel himself was cradled in. And I was cradled in it and it still is in my family’s possession.”
Kino Lorber, Inc.
It strikes Mr. Scatter that what Bialystok has to say about research is equally true for that branch of creativity we like to refer to as artistic. An idea takes hold. You follow it. It leads you somewhere that might utterly astonish you. But once you’ve identified it, you need to trust it to lead you where it will. It’s not blind faith. But it is faith. Which doesn’t mean it won’t sometimes lead you down a dark alley for an artistic mugging. But those are the chances you take.
Mr. Scatter noticed this pernicious form of marketing and advertising breathlessness beginning as a trickle a couple of years ago, and it’s become an all-taps-open flood. The most ubiquitous torrent is the “major motion picture event” — which means “movie that cost a lot to make and needs to make a whole lot more to recoup its costs,” or just plain “new movie” — but it’s spread to many other areas as well. A rainstorm is a “weather event.” A sale on socks at the mall is a “merchandising event.” A rational political speech is an “imaginary event.” Just kidding on that last one.
On the other hand, the Lord of the Dance 3D ad reminded Mr. Scatter that today is St. Patrick’s Day, and then he recalled where he was and what he was doing exactly three years ago: lying on a hospital operating table, his left leg splayed open like a flounder getting filleted, while a highly gifted surgeon inserted what is essentially an entirely new and artificial knee. Loyal readers might recall this post from March 17, 2009, 
Black Swan is not a film about ballet.
Beauty fades, of course, or rather, it changes. Now, at 49, McGovern is still beautiful, but in a fully mature, more experienced, less unnerving way — which, from some vantages, makes her even more beautiful: It’s a beauty anchored by reality.
You still occasionally hear people refer to it as Morris’s winking bad-boy spoof of the ubiquitous holiday story ballet, but people who think that about it (a) aren’t paying a lot of attention to the dance itself, and (b) apparently haven’t read the 
He shouldn’t have been, of course. After all, Deemer knows this stuff. He teaches screenwriting at Portland State University, and is a terrific playwright, and a pioneer in the expanded-universe form of hyperdrama, and he’d already done another ultra-low-budget film, Deconstructing Sally, which we wrote about a little over a year ago