Upside Down Tango

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Upside_Down_(2012_film)

Frank Scheck found the film confusing, saying, "You practically need an advanced degree in physics to fully comprehend the convoluted physical machinations depicted in Upside Down, Juan Solanas' dizzyingly loopy sci-fi romance. Depicting the Romeo and Juliet-style romance between lovers from twin planets with opposite gravitational pulls, this head-scratcher boasts visual imagination to spare even as its logistical complexities and heavy-handed symbolism ultimately prove off-putting."

Naked Tango :: Feature Length Film (1990) :: Starring Vincent D'Onofrio

Hmm. I never knew about this one. From 1990, the really very early days of the spread of Argentine Tango in the U.S.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DD9Zz1LpEas

And the Wiki page on the Zwi Migdal, another bit of history I didn't know about: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zwi_Migdal

IMDB for the film: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0100222/

Plot summary: Returning by ship to South America, a young girl escapes her elderly husband by swapping places with a girl committing suicide. She believes her new life will be that of an arranged marriage but finds it is in fact a trick to get her working in a brothel...

El Ultimo Bandoneón

Marina Gayotos makes a living playing the bandoneon on buses and at various pick-up gigs. When she auditions for the tango master Rodolfo Mederos, he informs her that though she has talent, her bandoneon is too far gone to play. But if she can find a better bandoneon, she can play in his tango orchestra. This leads Marina to go on a quest for another instrument, one that takes her to instrument makers, dancers and an array of memorable characters from the tango world, all while searching for "the last bandoneón."

Thanks go to Steve @ Tejas Tango for the find - although I had seen a few people sharing the link on Facebook this past week as well.

Here is the link to view the full length film - 80 minutes long.

Note that apparently the film can't be viewed from within Argentina - I'm not sure about other countries.

You can also buy it on Amazon.com and possibly other sources.

The film was produced in 2005 and released in 2006.

Frida Tango

Here are Salma Hayek and Ashley Judd dancing "tango" in the film Frida. The choreography is very loosely based on tango...it's a pretty sexy same-sex "tango" scene.

Tango in Tango

Here's a tango scene, one of the many I'm sure, from Carlos Saura's film "Tango" from 1998. My copy is broken. The director's narrative is the only audio I can get on it. So, I don't think I've ever watched the entire film.

I've included the tag/label "tango in feature length films", which "Tango" was, but not very widely distributed.

Disaster Tango from "Love and Other Disasters"

This is a good example of why Argentine tango has to fight so hard against the stereotypes and clichés running rampant in today's culture.

I can't wait for the day that a producer/director has the balls to include a tango scene with milonguero/close embrace tango. Hell, maybe there already is one...?

Tango with the Flintstones :: The Mis-use of Tradition

I watched this the other day, somewhere. I can't remember who to credit for the find - a Facebook friend, or perhaps another blogger. It's a miracle I was able to find it again. My brain apparently isn't functioning as poorly as sometimes I would like to think.

This YouTube clip appears to be a segment from the 1988 movie "Tango Bar" (which I haven't yet seen) with Raul Julia, showing tango scenes from several films, etc. It includes Rudolph Valentino in "Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse", Fred Flintstone dancing with Wilma's mother I think, Charlie Chaplin dancing a tango parody, Laurel and Hardy dancing a tango in the Old West, and finally, I think that's a young Gene Kelly gallivanting around the way he does.

Ever since I read "Tango, The Art History of Love" by Robert Farris Thompson, I am always struck by how tango is caricatured and.or generally made fun of in film, especially in early films. Newer, truer versions of Argentine tango are being seen these days. Sally Potter's "The Tango Lesson". Robert Duvall's "Assassination Tango". Adam Boucher's "Tango, the Obsession". Carlos Saura's "Tango, no me dejes nunca".

It is because of this that my interest in Sandra Bullock's "Kiss and Tango" (the film) is piqued. Take a bad book and inject it with the Hollywood formula and you are very likely to end up with yet another stereotypical maltreatment of Argentine Tango, once again pervading our cultural misconceptions about Tango.

Oh well. It is what it is. All we can do is hope for the best from Ms. Bullock. That is, if the film is ever made.

Here is a great excerpt from Thompson's book -- where he discusses the film "Last Tango in Paris" starring Marlon Brando:

The misuse of tradition intensified in Bernardo Bertolucci's "Last Tango in Paris" (1972). Forget, if possible, the auteur's ambition to blur art into pornography and vend it as a revolution, with a world-class actor, Brando, securing the way. Forget the breakthrough promiscuities that Bertolucci has Brando commit with a smashing ingenue, Maria Schneider. Forget, as well, expectations aroused by the strange, sensual tango danced by Stefania Sandrelli and Dominique Sanda in Bertolucci's earlier film "The Conformist" (1970). Forget if you can, all of that and cut to a long, famous scene:

Interior: bar, dancing; day
Jeane is hiding behind dark glasses. Behind them in the room there is a small tango contest. The jury, in front of a long table, follow with their eyes the couples dancing with numbers on their backs.
PAUL [BRANDO]: You know the tango is a rite...And you must watch the legs of the dancers.

So far so good. Norman Mailer loved it: "[a] near mythical species of tango palace." And the setting *is* beautiful. Vittorio Storaro's camera distills a golden light in colonnaded spaces, a light that illumines intent, moving couples. Gato Barbieri wrote the score. In sum, we savor a tango nirvana.

But not for long. Bertolucci was out to *use* the tango, not to reveal it--to use its fame and its glamour, together with Brando's, to power a dark vision.

He causes the camera to glide like a serpent through the tango contestants, transforming their Eden into hell. Pauline Kael declared the women "bitch-chic mannequin dancers." Somewhere a compliment to their integrity lies buried in that. To Kael the dancers were "automatons," posing with "wildly fake head-turns."

Bertolucci--and his critics--had misunderstood tango hauteur, which, as the gifted Julie Taylor reminds us, consists of the following: "dancers demonstrate their skill by perform[ing] like somber automatons, providing [themselves with] psychic space." The root of all this is black cool. But by 1972 the Afro-Argentine shaping of the frozen face in tango had long since been forgotten, even amongst most tangueros.

Bertolucci, in any event, definitely reduced dancers to mannequins. He turned ritual into farce. It gets worse:

PRESIDENT OF THE TANGO JURY: Now gentlemen, ladies, all best wishes for the last tango!

Note the last phrase. For some this suggested the end of the tango as a world-class tradition. As if to rub that interpretation in, Brando drunkenly sashays his way across the dance hall, mocking the seriousness of the contestants, mocking their moves, mocking their reason for being. He makes fun of their posture. He falls flat on his back, like a spread-eagled ape.

Then Schneider tells Brando she's leaving him. He chases her, corners her. She pulls out a pistol. She kills him. End of tango.

Critics rose to Bertolucci's faux-revolutionary bait. Pauline Kael pronounced "Last Tango" equal to Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring"--not the best call for someone whose judgements were normally brilliant. Another critic went so far as to denounce the tango judge, as if she were personally responsible for the Vietnam War. It was dangerous to be decent in the 1970s.

Norman Mailer, alone among critics, felt uneasy: "Did [Brando's] defacement of the tango," he asked, "injure some final nerve of...deportment."

It did. The damage was not virtual--it was real. Copes remembers, "Last Tango was the climax of films that ridiculed tango." People the world over got the impression in the 1970s that tango was "antiquated and comic." Recalling Wittgenstein's famous axiom "The meaning of a symbol is its use," tango had been defined, unfairly, by mis-use.

The mis-use of the symbol of tango. The mis-use of tradition. Now that's something to ponder. Something to worry about? Probably not. Even given the huge tango stereotypes in our culture today, the myth of tango is alive and well. Beautiful, mysterious, sensual, difficult (but within the reach of the average Dick and Jane) --our amazing dance is indeed alive, and well. Real, connected, alive tango. Not mythic at all.

Tango in Film :: Random Hearts :: Adultery by Tango

Sydney Pollack's 1999 film "Random Hearts" starring Harrison Ford and Kristin Scott Thomas has a tango component that I didn't recall from the first time I saw it. The movie was on the tube upstairs and then I heard tango music, so naturally I had to run up and see. The two characters' spouses were having an affair with each other and died together in a plane crash.

In the course of trying to figure out how long it had been going on and what they were up to, the two surviving spouses figured out that the two lovers were traveling to Miami on a regular basis to dance tango. The scene showed a public outdoor milonga with good/normal social dancing. This is one of the best portrayals in film I have seen, as a matter of fact. The only issue is the context in which it was presented - two adulterous lovers stealing away to secretly dance steamy, sultry, sensual, sexy Argentine tango in each other's arms.

Good, but not great, as far as the sociological portrayal of tango to the masses.

It also makes me wonder how many people out there in the world might be dancing tango unbeknownst to their spouse. Adultery by tango?

Sandra Bullock, if you're out there, please read this...

Please please purty please...wear Comme il Faut tango shoes in the film...

Thank you.

From me...

Sandra Bullock :: Kiss and Tango the film

Hola! Would someone mind translating this and posting it as a comment? Thanks in advance.

From LaNacion.com

Tango, un amor imposible
Sus aventuras porteñas en un film de Sandra Bullock
Miércoles 6 de febrero de 2008 | Publicado en la Edición impresa > Ver opiniones de lectores (26) Enviá tu opiniónImprimirEnviar por e-mailCambiar de tamañoPublicar en tu sitioVotar (17)Ya votaste (17) CompartirLink permanente
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Mister-Wong

Cuando Marina Palmer visitó la Argentina por primera vez, en enero de 1997, no se imaginó que ocho años después saldría de sus manos el libro Kiss and Tango , en el que imprimió sus mejores recuerdos del mundo del tango y, sobre todo, su sueño más audaz: encontrar el amor (el de su vida) en Buenos Aires, buscándolo en una milonga.

Tampoco se imaginó que la agencia Creative Artists Agency (CAA) de Hollywood le compraría los derechos de su libro a pedido de la actriz norteamericana Sandra Bullock, que en 2009 filmará la película de Kiss and Tango en Buenos Aires. "Será un muy lindo homenaje a esta ciudad que me regaló una pasión muy fuerte", dice esta mujer greco-norteamericana en Buenos Aires, una noche antes de mudarse a Oxford, Gran Bretaña.

Entusiasmada por el proyecto, Bullock ya está tomando clases de tango en el Sandra Cameron Dance Center de Nueva York.

"Lo que le gustó a Sandra Bullock es la historia, porque habla de una chica tradicional, con una vida convencional. La actriz se enteró de mi libro a través de mi agente literario. Lo leyó y quedó encantada", dice Palmer, que ya firmó el contrato para que se produzca la película. "El guión ya está casi armado. Ojalá que no haya otra huelga de guionistas", suspira.

"No sé cómo van a desarrollar el guión ni cómo lo van a interpretar. En el libro hablo de mi búsqueda del amor, donde hubo muchos desencuentros, de amores que no prosperaron o que no se concretaron. Creo que en la película tendrán que encontrar un hombre que funcione", se ríe la autora.

Palmer tenía 30 años, residía en Nueva York y, como corresponde a una chica de "buena familia", vivía y trabajaba a la espera del momento en que encontraría la pareja indicada para casarse, tener hijos y llevar la vida que imponía su educación.

"Trabajaba todo el día como publicista, no tenía novio ni tiempo para encontrarlo. Me tomé un mes de vacaciones y vine a la Argentina", cuenta la escritora, que entonces visitó una milonga por primera vez.

"El impacto con este baile fue apasionante, fue el principio de una verdadera historia de amor. De allí fui a tomar clases, grupales e individuales, y cuando volví a Nueva York me anoté en un curso para seguir bailando", dice, y confiesa que pasó dos años tratando de hacer realidad el sueño de ser bailarina profesional de tango.

"En realidad, el libro es la historia tragicómica de este sueño. Es la búsqueda de la pareja ideal con la que realizarlo", cuenta la escritora, que vivió su experiencia milonguera bailando "a la gorra" con un grupo de bailarines de la calle Florida, ofreciendo shows en milongas y clases.

"El tango es tan adictivo, tan intenso, que suele pasar que uno quiera dejar todo para poder bailar todo el tiempo", sigue Palmer. Y fue por eso que dejó su trabajo, Nueva York y su vida convencional para volver a la Argentina y dedicarse al tango, donde durante tres años, entre 1999 y 2002, bailaba diariamente 12 horas.

Una elección difícil

"El tango tiene un lado físico que me atrapó: todo empieza con un abrazo. Es el placer de estar mimada y contenida por un hombre. Es una entrega de la mujer, cosa que tiene también su lado complicado. Es cerrar los ojos y dejarse llevar por el hombre, confiar en él. Es una manera de volver a la contención del útero materno", filosofa Palmer con brillo en los ojos.

Cuando en 2002 la Argentina entró en una de sus peores crisis, Palmer se cansó: había perdido la esperanza de encontrar el amor, la pasión, la pareja de tango y de vida.

Se fue a Grecia y en seis meses escribió el libro. En 2004 volvió a la Argentina y participó en el Festival Internacional de Tango de Buenos Aires. "Allí conocí a un chico, bailé con él mejor que nunca y llegamos a la selección final. Pensaba que iba a volver a empezar el sueño -sigue Palmer-, pero en el momento de la final el chico no apareció, y allí volvió a empezar la parte tragicómica de no poder confiar nunca en una pareja."

Y así las cosas, Palmer bailó hasta que encontró, fuera del tango, a Daniel, su actual marido. Ahí, dejó de bailar. "El era todo lo opuesto a la pareja de tango que yo había esperado. Tenía que elegir entre él y el baile. El tango fue mi primero y verdadero amor, pero me di cuenta de que era un amor imposible", dice Palmer, ahora embarazada de su primer hijo.

Se dio cuenta de que la milonga traía con ella una forma de vivir equivocada: "Cuando descubrí el amor verdadero fue todo muy distinto, muy real. En cambio, el tango es seducción y provocación, un histeriqueo de sensaciones que nunca se concretan", sigue apasionada.

Sin embargo, en las milongas suena una frase recurrente: nunca se deja el tango de verdad, siempre se vuelve.

Ginerva Visconti

No sólo baile

"No debería confiar en un Dios que no sabe bailar", dijo el filósofo Friedrich Nietzsche, y Marina Palmer lo citó en la introducción de su novela, que ya se ha traducido al chino, el húngaro, el griego, y pronto se hará al ruso. Todavía no se ha traducido al castellano, pero ya tiene título: "Quién me quita lo bailado".

Mientras, en su sitio www.kissandtango.com, Palmer ofrece buenas direcciones para quien se abandona por primera vez a la aventura del tango.