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Arts
Tuesday, February 10, 2015 — 5
Red carpet recap:
Trends of 2015
Grammys fashion
showcases boob cages
and metallics
By KATIE CAMPBELL
For The Daily
The top trends at the Grammys
this year spanned all across the
fashion spectrum. Some were new
(shoutout to colored metallics)
and some were beyond old (take
a shot for every silver dress stum-
bling down the red carpet, you’ll
be drunk enough to headbang to
AC/DC’s opener). Sirens played
peek-a-boo
with
cutouts
and
floundered with volume. Unfor-
tunately, simplicity was tossed out
of the metaphorical window, with
the exception of the gorgeously
sleek Jennifer Hudson in a white
column dress by Tom Ford. Boob
cages, calf-length hemlines and
dangerously over-the-top fabrics
overwhelmed on the red carpet
this year. Let’s pray the stars learn
from the following mistakes and
take a note from the scarce tri-
umphs in time for Oscar night.
Metallic
Metallic was seen on almost
every typically risk-taking starlet
this year, most notably Lady Gaga
and Katy Perry. Both were disap-
pointing, but for different reasons.
Gaga’s custom design from stylist
Brandon Maxwell looked like an
ill-fitted, low-budget Broadway
costume. The deep v-cut neckline
made a mockery of her endowed
chest and the high slit only served
to emphasize her short stature.
Gaga could have pulled it off with
more classic styling, perhaps a
softer smoky eye and a cleaner
blow out. However, no one wants
to look like a bar crooner that was
kicked out at 4 a.m. It was the
ultimate contrast to Nicki Minaj’s
stunning low-cut fringed num-
ber, courtesy of Tom Ford. Minaj’s
dress nailed the metallic look with
a play on texture with a soft, spar-
kling sheen.
Luckily, a new variety of metal-
lic made its way onto the scene
from the good graces of couture
designer Elie Saab. Taylor Swift
took on the carpet with a beauti-
ful, shimmering aqua structured
gown. The dress featured cutouts
on the shoulders and a blink-and-
you’ll-miss-it high-low hemline.
It was like a futuristic, mermaid
Marie Antoinette — and it rocked.
I’ve seen this look be knocked
around for having prom dress ten-
dencies, however, with great risk
comes great reward and Swifty
knocked it out of the park with this
look.
Cutouts
Cutouts have been a trend since
prom girls decided they wanted
tighter dresses and higher heels,
which is to say they’ve been
around for the last four years. This
trend is becoming its own worst
enemy. When it was scarce, it was
a playful and flirtatious look, worn
only on risk-taking women who
flirt with danger. Now, the trend is
becoming more and more unflat-
tering with each snip of the fabric.
Highlights from this game were
Chrissy Teigen in a white Gucci
number with symmetrical square
cutouts highlighting her figure.
Teigen gets bonus points for hubby
John Legend’s Dolce & Gabbana
sleek gray suit and gentle soul.
I’m hesitant to add Miley Cyrus
in Alexandre Vauthier to the mix
since the whole showing off the
pelvic bone thing is generally
unflattering. However, it was a risk
that stood out on the carpet, and
she looked radiant with soft styl-
ing, seemingly low-impact make-
up and a pulled back hairstyle.
Lowlights go to “American Idol”
star Katharine McPhee in Emilio
Pucci and Miranda Lambert in
Gabriela Cadena for the unflatter-
ing boob cages.
Volume
The sheer amount of exuber-
ant volume that fluffed its way
down the carpet was enough to
cause an uproar online. Rihanna
in Giambattista Valli Haute Cou-
ture was a specifically hot topic.
Ciara, however, was not. RiRi
has proven to be able to pull off
pretty much anything, from the
oversized men’s suit-jacket she
wore in her performance with
Kanye West and Paul McCartney
later in the night to her nearly-
nude mesh dress at last year’s
CFDA Awards. Yes, Rihanna
looked like a super buoyant pink
cloud combined with an eight-
year-old’s Barbie pink cake dress,
but she had so much fun with it
and brought some much-needed
enthusiasm to the carpet. She
made fashion fun and she made
the dress hers and that’s what is
so great about it. Ciara, though,
looked like she was dragging a
trash bag down the aisle, which
was neither fun nor enthusias-
tic. There’s a difference between
wearing the volume and working
with it and letting it overwhelm
you.
That being said, I’d like to
remind everyone of Anna Win-
tour’s red carpet commentary
from last summer: “(Celebrities)
have all these teams of people
telling them what to do, what
to wear, how to do their hair,
make-up. And they’re so scared
of being criticized, whereas, you
know, what’s wrong with looking
different? How many mermaid
fishtail strapless sequin gowns
can we see?”
Taking this into consideration,
let’s hope the stylists bring their
all for Oscar night.
Don’t criticize Kanye
for Beck comments
By ADAM DEPOLLO
Managing Arts Editor
I’ll come right out with it
— I didn’t watch most of the
Grammys.
That might be a bold admission
to make for the Co-Managing
Editor of the Daily’s Arts section,
but I honestly don’t think you
can blame me for it. I mean, let’s
be real, any organization that
was still nominating the Dave
Matthews Band for Album of
the Year in 2010 clearly exists in
some sort of dystopian mytho-
poetic realm where — as they say
in “Whose Line Is It Anyway?”
— the rules are made up and the
points don’t matter.
Every
single
year,
the
nominations for the myriad
Newspeakian
Grammy
categories
are
announced
(“Urban
Contemporary”
anyone?),
the
public
makes
known its revulsion toward
the various irrelevancies that
invariably make their way into
those categories, and we then
let loose a paradoxical torrent
of blind rage and complete
dejection when the awards go to
the wrong people.
So why do we keep watching?
I ask myself that question every
year, and I struggle to find any
answer other than that, at this
point, we’re just in the habit of
doing it. Or, even worse, maybe
we like it.
But I’m not really here to talk
about why we keep engaging
in the sadomasochism that is
watching the Grammys. That’s
a question for psychologists, or
maybe E. L. James.
I’m here to talk about the one
interesting thing that did happen
at the awards show on Sunday
night, which, unsurprisingly,
came from one of the few
consistently interesting people
in the constellation of modern
pop culture: Kanye West.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the
Grammy
Award
for
Album
of the Year went not to the
obvious winner in that category
Beyoncé),
according
to
any
possible criteria by which to
judge it, but to Beck’s Morning
Phase.
The incredulity in the room
was palpable as the 44-year-
old rocker walked on stage, his
eyes darting nervously from the
audience to the presenters — he
would later state that he thought
Beyoncé was going to win the
award — when, suddenly, Kanye
walked up in front of him,
reached his hand toward the
microphone and then stopped
short. He held up his hand in a
gesture of pause, flashed a smile,
turned around and went back
to his seat. It was over almost
as soon as it began, but those
brief moments (and Beyoncé’s
stunning homage to “Selma”
and, by extension, the entire
“Black Lives Matter” campaign)
were without question the most
memorable, the most real things
that might be drawn from such
a vapid and out-of-touch affair.
I would think that the beauty
of
Kanye’s
“interruption”
should speak for itself, but the
response from social media and
a good number of pop culture
commentators — the real reason
why I’m writing this piece — has
astonishingly focused on the
supposed audacity of doing what
every halfway honest consumer
of pop music wanted to see
happen in the first place.
In an interview with E! after
the awards show, Kanye clearly
explained his motivation for the
silent outburst:
“I
just
know
that
the
Grammys, if they want real
artists to keep coming back,
they
need
to
stop
playing
with us. We ain’t gonna play
with them no more. And Beck
needs to respect artistry and
he should’ve given his award
to Beyoncé, because when you
keep on diminishing art and
not respecting the craft and
smacking people in their face
after they deliver monumental
feats
of
music,
you’re
disrespectful
to
inspiration.
And we as musicians have to
inspire people who go to work
every day, and they listen to
that Beyoncé album and they
feel like it takes them to another
place.”
To me, that’s not a speech that
smacks of egotism and privilege
(Kanye does, after all, give up his
awards when he feels he doesn’t
deserve them). He points out,
correctly I think, that creating
a piece of artwork that sells 2.2
million copies in 2014, going on
to become a global pop culture
phenomenon in the process,
is an act of transcendence,
something that only a handful
of people have ever been able
to achieve. No matter what
might be said about Morning
Phase, Beyoncé did something
Beck can not do and will never
do in his musical career. Kanye
simply demanded that we be
honest with ourselves and own
up to that fact.
Sure,
I’ll
concede
that
there
might
be
something
presumptuous about ordaining
oneself as the universal arbiter
of pop culture. But isn’t it
obvious that getting caught
up on Kanye’s egotism ignores
the bigger picture here? Aren’t
we missing the forest for the
trees? And, again, he didn’t say
anything we weren’t already
thinking ourselves:
“I’m
here
to
fight
for
creativity tonight,” West said.
“That’s why I didn’t say nothing,
but y’all knew what it meant
when Ye walked on that stage.”
You knew what it meant,
don’t blame him for doing it.
Not ‘The Americans’
By MATT BARNAUSKAS
Daily Arts Writer
If only “Allegiance” didn’t pre-
miere after “The Americans.” Ever
since teasers first debuted on NBC
for the George
Nolfi-helmed
spy
thriller,
comparisons
have been made
(in some cases
rightly so) to
FX’s
critically
acclaimed show.
It’s
relatively
easy to see why
– both shows focus on entangling
acts of espionage between the
United States and Russia, mainly
through the eyes of a single fam-
ily who happens to spy for Rus-
sia. “The Americans” ’s success
in depicting ’80s Cold War ten-
sions has created a seemingly
insurmountable
mountain
for
the modern-day “Allegiance” to
scale. While “Allegiance” is able
to differentiate itself from its cable
rival, it still borrows other tropes,
creating a straightforward, pre-
dictable product with glimmers of
promise.
Opening with an execution by
furnace, “Allegiance,” immedi-
ately tells viewers what to think:
“Russians are the bad guys.” As
sinister-looking men dressed in
black trench coats watch a man
be incinerated, the show draws a
line in the sand labeling the Rus-
sians as villains on one side and
the Americans as the good guys on
the other. This oversimplification
of international conflicts contrasts
with “Allegiance” ’s more chal-
lenging family dynamic.
At the center of the show is the
O’Connor family. The family’s only
son, Alex (Gavin Stenhouse, “Per-
son of Interest”), is a rookie CIA
analyst assigned to help determine
if a Russian defector is legitimate
or not. Likable, yet overly famil-
iar, Alex is an investigative savant
who can read through hundreds of
pages of information in a night and
has expert-level knowledge about
seemingly any subject, including
how industrial furnaces work.
Simultaneously, he is somewhat
awkward and painted as an out-
sider. In short, he’s a relative run-
of-the-mill genius with a quirk or
two that is all too common on TV.
Alex isn’t alone in his convention-
ality, with most of the CIA charac-
ters feeling generic. This includes
no-nonsense boss Sam Luttrell
(Kenneth Choi, “Sons of Anar-
chy”) and tough female agent/
definite love interest Michelle
Prado (Floriana Lima, “The Mob
Doctor”).
However,
unbeknownst
to
Alex, the majority of his fam-
ily is Russian spies. His parents,
Russian-born Katya (Hope Davis,
“The Newsroom”) and Mark
(Scott Cohen, “The Carrie Dia-
ries”), an American brought in by
Katya, are retired and want noth-
ing to do with their former lives.
But their past comes to haunt them
in the form of walking evil Rus-
sian archetype, Victor Dobrynin
(Morgan
Spector,
“Boardwalk
Empire”) who works for the SVR,
the modern KGB. He insists that
the pair recruit Alex to be a spy as
well. When the two protest, men-
tioning a deal made years ago, Vic-
tor says there is new management:
“They don’t care about deals made
with the old management.”
The dilemma faced by the
O’Connors is the strongest part of
the episode, as Katya and Mark try
desperately to not bring Alex into
a fate that has already claimed his
older sister, Natalie (Margarita
Levieva, “Revenge”). Natalie pres-
ents some compelling narrative
possibilities considering her bit-
terness about the life her parents
reluctantly forced her into, say-
ing “You move Heaven and Earth
for Alex, what did you ever do for
me?”
“Allegiance” goes through sev-
eral of these plot points in its pilot,
never quite settling on one long
enough to reach maximum effect.
This is unfortunate, because there
are strong sources of tension over
what Katya and Mark should do
and whether Alex will find out
the truth, but they’re never given
enough time to fully grow. Hope-
fully, as the show moves forward,
it will allow promising threads to
develop further and coalesce into
a distinct identity for “Allegiance.”
STYLE NOTEBOOK
B-
Allegiance
Series
Premiere
Thursdays
at 10 p.m.
NBC
“Honey, the Motherland is not gonna approve of these grades.”
‘Project Almanac’ is
time travel done right
By NOAH COHEN
Daily Arts Writer
Maybe the only time-travel
movie in recent memory to sub-
scribe to the anthropic principle,
“Project
Alma-
nac” does the
time
travel
genre justice.
The
movie
doesn’t try to
explain
how
time
travel
works, but it
does hint at
how the uni-
verse handles
paradoxes: by deleting the wit-
nesses.
That’s the anthropic principle
at work – the philosophical con-
sideration that observations of
the physical universe must be
compatible with the conscious life
that observes it. This is why the
future-version of our protagonist
David (Jonny Weston, “Chasing
Mavericks”) is annihilated at the
end (beginning?), but the future-
version of the camera remains
intact.
“Project Almanac” takes off
in the style of “Chronicle”. It’s a
found footage film where irre-
sponsible kids come into an
unreasonable degree of power.
The content of the movie is pre-
sumably found by the protago-
nists on the second iteration of
their adventure, at the end of the
movie.
The cast is cute. David is cut-
out geek, and his posse is equally
“Breakfast Club.” Their group’s
camaraderie separates “Project
Almanac” from time travel clas-
sics like “Back To The Future”.
For the first half of the movie, the
whole group goes back in time
together. The conflict arises when
David takes it on himself to solve
the butterfly effect consequences
of previous time trips by himself.
In “Butterfly Effect” (another
time travel flick) there was a
supernatural aspect to justify
why everything always went
wrong. In “Donnie Darko” there
was only one version of actions
Donnie could ever take, and the
mood of the movie was predis-
posed toward metaphor rather
than science; the prime mover of
films like those is a supernatural
overmind. Whereas, in “Project
Almanac” the prime mover is the
vulnerable protagonist himself, à
la “Doctor Who.”
Because the time travel in
“Project Almanac” is supposed
to be pure sci-fi rather than some
crystallized narrative tapped
from overdrawn wells of Greek
pathos and “human condition”
pablum, there’s no scifi-compat-
ible reason for why things can’t
actually go perfectly in this plot.
David says there are no second
chances, but he’s totally wrong.
In proper wish-fulfillment time
travel,
there
are
arbitrarily
many chances.
The frantic jostle of a found-
footage film works well within
the cast of Instagram-age teen-
agers, but the group’s reaction
to finding a time machine in
their friend’s basement doesn’t
quite match the hugeness of
the moment, and the pseudo-
scientific babble is transparent
and reductive. Weston is charis-
matic enough to carry the movie
regardless, but there are kinks,
and they are noticeable.
Though it lacks the infectious
magic of “Back to the Future,”
“The Time Traveller’s Wife”
or “Harry Potter and the Pris-
oner of Azkaban” and though
it doesn’t mindfuck with the
intensity of “Donnie Darko” or
“Source Code,” this movie is
every bit on par with “Primer,”
“Looper” and “Groundhog Day”
and it’s a much stronger package
than “Chronicle.” Time travel
movies are a special brand of
enjoyable, and this one fits into
the genre like a cog in a watch.
PARAMOUNT PICTURES
“Where we’re going, we don’t need roads.”
To me, that’s
not a speech
that smacks of
egotism.
B+
Project
Almanac
Rave and
Quality 16
Paramount
Pictures
MUSIC NOTEBOOK
FILM REVIEW
TV REVIEW