Cameron Crowe's new movie, "Aloha," is being savaged by critics; a visit with legendary LA artist Ed Moses (pictured) at his Venice compound; the arts organization Clockshop is making good use of a parcel of land on the banks of the L.A. River.
Ed Moses says he doesn't make 'art' — he makes 'magic' (UPDATED)
UPDATE: Ed Moses died Wednesday at his home in Venice Beach. He was 91. Read more about his life and career here.
ORIGINAL STORY FROM MAY, 2015:
Ed Moses hates the words "make" and "create" and "art." As far as he's concerned he's a "shaman" who engages in "magic." At 89 years old, he continues making... whatever it is he makes.
The first Los Angeles exhibition of Moses’ art was nearly 60 years ago, in a landmark show at the Ferus Gallery. From that moment, Moses and a group of his contemporaries, including Robert Irwin, Ken Price, Billy Al Bengston and Ed Ruscha came to define modern West Coast art. As he gets older, Moses says that his contemporaries are dropping off like flies.
Moses is the subject of a new show at the L.A. County Museum of Art called “Ed Moses: Drawings from the 1960s and 70s.” When we arrived at Moses’ Venice compound, we started by touring one of his two studios with his assistant, Jeff Hastings. He says that Moses loves chaos around his studio. Moses also does a lot of editing in his work, Hastings says, throwing out works that don't work.
"In the nine years that I've been here, it's something that we do on a daily basis," Hastings says. "We'll rip up a canvas, we'll rip up a waterwork, we'll rip up something. We'll even go to a painting that he worked on in the '70s and look at that painting, and it'll come to him in the middle of the night: 'Oh, this painting that I made in the '70s, that's one of 500 paintings somehow came to my head, and I need to do this one extra little thing.'"
From the studios we moved to the Japanese-styled garden where Moses was sipping a green drink that he regularly has made for him at Whole Foods. As we settled down, he reflected on how drinking this strange-looking elixir, like a lot of things in his life, is repetitive.
"There's too much tedium. Everything is tedious. Everything is the same old thing, repetition," Moses says. Similarly, Moses says that he's an obsessive painter. Every once in a while, he'll make something that he thinks is special and catches his attention.
Moses says he destroys around three-quarters of his work. How does he know what's right?
"If it lights up. It's a very subjective thing," Moses says. "It takes on a notion that says, 'That's it.'"
Moses says that, when he started, his work and that of his contemporaries came from being "pissed off." Seeing his work in a museum celebrating contemporary art — LACMA — seems ironic, he says.
"It's sort of like a dream, in a sense. It's not real," Moses says. "And I go to bed at night thinking about it, and I can't-- it's so strange, the phenomenon of this attention suddenly. Although there was semi-attention, but never to the degree now, getting an exhibition like this."
The exhibition shows Moses' obsession. He says that the work seems foolish to him now, that he could think something would materialize out of that work.
"Now I look at them as something dead, but at the time, I was very frustrated. I thought, 'I'll do another one, I'll do another one, I'll do another one.'"
He sees his art as being like early man's response to the world, which is why he likens himself to a shaman. He creates art based on things he observes and interactions with other people.
"God was creative — he made something out of nothing, he made man. We make something out of something. Hoping, which is anti-Buddhist, to hope, but the activities of daily activities are all about hope, aren't they? We hope it's gonna be better. We hope it's gonna be more beautiful — I'm gonna make something that's so fantastic, that even I will step back and look at it, and say, 'Wow.'"
Moses says that happens — on occasion. Moses has a message he'd like to deliver to anyone who goes in to look at his art.
"Just look. Don't think. Don't extract some ideas or some meaning. It doesn't have any meaning — it is what it is. You'll just look on the wall and see what it is," Moses says.
After our conversation Ed went out to the outdoor space between his studios where he works. And he started painting on five canvases at the same time
Listen to the audio for our full conversations with Moses and his assistant. His show of drawings from the 1960s and ‘70s is on view at LACMA through Aug. 2.
This story has been updated.
Watch 'Aloha's' first 8 minutes here and decide if it's better than its 14 percent on Rotten Tomatoes
Acclaimed writer/director Cameron Crowe's new movie "Aloha" has been hammered by critics — it's at 14 percent positive reviews on Rotten Tomatoes at press time. Now, in what's seen by some as a desperate attempt to draw any audience they possibly can, they're giving away the movie's first eight minutes online. (Warning: Contains adult language.)
Rotten Tomatoes sums up the critical response thusly: "Meandering and insubstantial, Aloha finds writer-director Cameron Crowe at his most sentimental and least compelling." The movie was also slammed in leaked emails from the Sony hack.
The Seattle Times' Moira MacDonald calls the movie "nearly unwatchable." Variety's Andrew Barker describes it as "unbalanced, unwieldy, and at times nearly unintelligible." And Chris Nishawaty from Entertainment Weekly, in one of the kinder reviews, writes that “the unfortunate, inescapable truth is, the movie really is that terrible.”
The beginning of the movie is a slow start — it opens with archival footage for almost the first two minutes. Then you get another minute and a half of exposition opening monologue from Bradley Cooper, combining Hawaiian music and some signature Crowe classic rock reminding you this movie isn't "Almost Famous."
The film's writer/director Crowe is the celebrated filmmaker behind “Jerry Maguire,” “Say Anything” and “Almost Famous.”, but he looks to have lost his touch in the star-studded film. The might of Cooper, Emma Stone, Rachel McAdams, Bill Murray, Alec Baldwin and John Krasinski combined doesn't appear to be enough to save this one — rarely has a movie made by an Oscar-winning director been so brutally savaged by reviewers.
Go watch those first eight minutes and and let us know in the comments whether a few minutes of a Hawaiian Air Force base is enough to get you to give the rest of this one a chance in theaters.
We tried to find out more about what went wrong, so the Frame's John Horn sat down with Daniel Miller, Los Angeles Times film business writer:
This is the type of film aimed at upscale adult moviegoers, who read reviews, right?
That's fair to say. This is a highly anticipated movie. People remember Cameron Crowe from hits like "Jerry Maguire" and they want to see what he's cooked up next. People opening up newspapers or reading reviews on websites today are likely to be disappointed by what they see.
"Aloha" is a Columbia Pictures release and it was discussed, sometimes not very favorably, in some private emails among Sony executives that were hacked. What did the executives say about their own studio’s film?
Amy Pascal, then the co-chairman of Sony Pictures, maligned the movie in an email to her colleague. She said, 'I'm never starting again when the script is ridiculous.' Comments like those went viral on the Internet and the hacked emails have sort of become this albatross that the movie is troubled by to this day.
There are surveys in Hollywood that gauge audience interest in upcoming releases. How do those so-called tracking surveys say “Aloha” is going to open?
If those surveys are to be believed, this movie could take in $10 million over its opening weekend — perhaps even less than that. That's a very poor start for a film that cost in the range of $37-38 million to make and, of course, many millions more to market.
What are they trying to do to make the word of mouth change?
This week, Sony made a pretty bold move and put the first eight minutes or so of 'Aloha' online so that people could watch it for free, and I suppose to decide for themselves whether they wanted to pay to see the rest of the movie. I thought that was interesting, they're looking at this movie 'Aloha,' the reviews are very poor and there's controversy swirling around it. And executives say, 'Well let's put it online, maybe we'll get some mileage out of that, maybe get some social media mileage out of it and perhaps we can convince a few people to go see it.'
There’s been backlash about how race and culture are depicted in the film. Emma Stone portrays a character who is a quarter Hawaiian and there aren’t many Hawaiian natives in the film. The Media Action Network for Asian Americans says “It’s an insult to the diverse culture and fabric of Hawaii.” Should the filmmakers have seen this coming?
It's interesting. I've read reviews — even negative reviews — that have said that the filmmakers took some care to create an accurate depiction of Hawaii. But of course in the principal cast, there are no Hawaiians, and that's something organizations can certainly seize upon. I do wonder if some of the controversy about the depiction of Hawaiians [and] Hawaiian culture in the film has been cemented simply by the other controversy connected to this film, which is those hacked emails.
Also, if you want some Baldwin, he isn't in that opening, but you can watch him in the film's trailer:
This story has been updated.
Clockshop brings dance to the banks of the LA River
Along the eastern bank of the Los Angeles River, sandwiched between the 2 and 5 freeways, there’s a place where industry and nature co-exist. Large, nondescript buildings and a railroad track sit above a rare stretch of the waterway that actually looks like a river in its natural state. This property is also home to what may be the region’s most unlikely arts venue.
“The idea is to bring people to the site, which is an almost 20-acre piece of land that lies along the L.A. River right in the Glendale Narrows section,” says Julia Meltzer, director of L.A.-based arts organization Clockshop. That strip of land Meltzer is referencing is known as the Bowtie, and it’s slated to become a California state park.
“I think it’s beautiful. The more time you spend there, there are actually so many different species of birds that come there to that area of the river,” says Meltzer.
But even before the space officially opens as a park, Meltzer wants people to convene near the banks of the L.A. River for the sake of art.
“In that space, so many different things could happen,” Meltzer says. “So that’s kind of the goal of bringing people there, to experience contemporary art projects and to actually open up people’s imagination to what could be there in the future.”
The Bowtie Project is a partnership with California State Parks. For their latest project, Meltzer and Clockshop have collaborated with a multidisciplinary group of artists to bring art outdoors, like dancer and choreographer Taisha Paggett.
Sitting in view of a bend in the L.A. River, the Glendale Freeway — and some railroad tracks — Paggett takes a break from rehearsal to explain what to expect from a dance performance she calls "evereachmore."
“I’m actually really interested in taking up the whole site and part of that will be about bringing the audience into the work somehow,” Paggett says. “Not only do we have the railroad, we also have the freeway, we also have a bike lane across, and by moving the audience through the space I hope to draw attention to all of that choreography that’s just naturally happening here.”
Hayward Bracey is one of the performers taking part in "evereachmore." Taking the audience outside of the theater allows for a much different experience, according to Bracey.
“People tend to, even if just subconsciously, shift their expectations slightly. And direct their attention differently,” Bracey says.
Bringing art to the Bowtie is another step for Bracey in getting Angelenos back in touch with the body of water that flows under our freeways and winds around industrial parks and condo developments alike.
“The L.A. River in general, it’s been overlooked,” says Bracey. “And there’s been an effort recently to draw some attention to it and to develop it, make use of it, appreciate it. To me it feels good to be a part of that.”
As Paggett’s performers snaked in a human chain, they resembled the flowing river just a stone’s-throw away. For Paggett, who has performed outdoors before, the Bowtie space is special.
“I’m used to working with lots of restrictions in doing work outdoors, and here it’s lots of openness,” she says, “Lots of ‘yes.’”
That freedom has allowed Paggett to create what she intends to be an interactive dance experience.
“I hope that the audience walks away feeling that they were part of the experience," Paggett says. "Not just viewers of something.”
Both performances of 'evereachmore' are sold out.