以演技突出而获得奥斯卡的Brody要去尝rap，有趣。
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Beat Generation
HIP-HOPPING WITH ACTOR ADRIEN BRODY
By Mary Melton
We are repeatedly being asked, rather politely, to put our hands in the air, to which we respond: "Woo, woo."
"Put your hands in da air."
"Woo,woo."
The hip-hop group the Beatnuts is onstage at the Knitting Factory in Hollywood. Like the actor Adrien Brody, who is calmly bopping to their rhythms in the audience, they are from Queens. They are by no means his favorite group -- his choice of concerts tonight was between this and the Jewish American Symphony -- but he appreciates their beats and likes the samples they work into their songs. He's a sampler himself, one who's always listening out for the trickle of water, the static from a TV set, the bursting of a popcorn kernel to record, rework, maybe even sell to a singer or producer. Earlier, over a Pilsner Urquell at the club's bar, he describes his passion for hip-hop. "You just give in to the melodies of it," he said. "The lyrical content is all about urban struggle and conflicts. It's like a sad story in a movie."
Sweating in a club that is full of jumping, hopping, teeming woo, woo, Brody is far as one can imagine from the life he portrays in his current film, The Pianist. Directed by Roman Polanski, the movie is based on the memoirs of Wladyslaw Szpilman, a classical pianist and Polish Jew who survived incomprehensible horrors in World War II. As Szpilman, Brody is numb, humiliated, devastated, resilient. At the film's start he wears a smart suit; by its end it has been degenerated into rags.
Tall and wiry, Brody, who is 29, is dressed this evening in a puffy black jacket and baggy cargo pants, with a fat silver chain resting on his chest. Under thick upturned brows, his hazel eyes are perpetually loaded with an expression that can be interpreted either as extreme empathy or early-morning fatigue. He is handsome, with an easy grin and a nose that could give Mammoth Mountain an inferiority complex.
To prepare for his role in The Pianist, Brody subsisted for six weeks on two boiled eggs for breakfast, a bit of chicken for lunch, and a bit of fish for dinner. "I had to diet in Paris and gain it back in Poland," he says. "That was cruel. I couldn't eat a croissant, but I could have all the borscht I could handle." During the Nazi occupation, Szpilman spent years in both hard labor and hiding. He navigated the Warsaw ghetto, deprived not only of nourishment but of any human contact. "Roman," Brody says, "wanted more than I thought I could give." The director locked him up in a Paris hotel room with a synthesizer and the portable keyboard that accompanies Brody to every location. Brody knew how to sample beats, but he had no idea how to play Chopin. "It was initially intimidating," he says. "I don't read music, and my knowledge is very slim. The piano lessons distracted me from my hunger." During the isolation, he says, he was surprised to feel "the most calm and Zen I'd ever been."
Brody is the son of Sylvia Plachy, the longtime staff photographer for The Village Voice, and Elliot Brody, a schoolteacher. His parents, he says, were "wonderfully sensitive. I was exposed to so much." Sensitivity, however, is frowned upon in boys. Trying to fit in with the kids in his neighborhood, he became a chameleon and as a result, an actor. "the local high school would have been a disaster for me," he says. He enrolled in the LaGuardia High School of Music & Arts and Performing Arts in Manhattan -- the Fame school. "It was the perfect outlet," he says. "I was free."
In previous films Brody has played variations of the gangly good-natured outsider: a teenage con artist who helps kids out of jams in King of the Hill, a bisexual punk rocker living among paranoid disco queens in Summer of Sam, a union organizer who fights for Justice for Janitors in Bread and Roses. "I grew up in front of the camera," Brody says. One of his mother's fortes as a photographer is people; her son has been one of her favorite subjects. "It's a safe place. I wasn't encouraged to act up a storm, but to remain subtle."
At the Knitting Factory the dance floor is pulsating. Brody runs into a friend, the actor Dash Mihok, whom he met on the set of The Thin Red Line. They high-five. Brody says that while the two were on location in the Soloman Islands, they'd break-dance and rap between takes. At the moment Mihok is putting his hands in the air all over the place, so Brody gives him some room. He removes his jacket, says he's fighting off a headache and is thirty as all get-out. He slowly works his way into an empty space near the wall, where he can stand alone to groove.
The thumping beats don't seem conductive to becoming lost in one's thoughts. But Brody's eyes are shut, his head is bowed, and his body is quietly rocking side to side. "It's like going into a trance," he says. "I get into a clear meditative zone."
There are long portions of The Pianist in which Brody is the only character onscreen. His character -- starving, freezing, merely existing -- finds his sole comfort in the sounds of his piano, which play only in his head. Each night after filming, Brody would retreat to his room at the Warsaw Marriott. Away from friends and family, scrubbed clean out of the mud and the filth of the re-created ghetto, he would close his eyes and concentrate on the beats he could coax out of his synthesizer.
Outside after the concert, he's left the zone. Hollywood Boulevard has been closed to traffic. A huge grid of blazing white stage lights towers over the middle of the street, where the rapper Ja Rule is filming a video full of jumping, hopping, teeming woo, woo girls in tight tops and hot pants. Brody stops to watch a dance sequence. "Yeah, I'm a white guy named Adrien who likes to make beats," he says. "I taught myself that I don't have to be self-conscious about it."
- Re: 奥斯卡男星Adrien Brody要去做个rap歌手posted on 04/17/2003
I guess the world is going straight down to the drainage. :-)
好好的脑袋扛在肩上不好，偏要作乌龟状耸动。 - posted on 04/17/2003
忙叔什么时候也变成九斤老太了？一代不如一代？脑筋是不是需要急转弯一下，接受新事物的挑战？
新的不都是好的，没有经过时间考验的东西也值得怀疑。但是新的文艺形式总有一些新鲜血液，没有完全接触理解，还是不要过早下结论。
Jazz在当初也好像今天的rap一样，但是加入进来的人非常关键，jazz发掘出一大批有极高天分的黑人音乐家， 我相信rap也能够吸引一些有文化层次的艺术家参与。这样的事是好事而不是坏事。
就好像共产党说的要在敌人中间”掺沙子“。
牛虻 wrote:
> I guess the world is going straight down to the drainage. :-)
>
> 好好的脑袋扛在肩上不好，偏要作乌龟状耸动。
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