The Fool Doth Think He Is Wise

Oscar Contenders #6: Life, the Universe, and Everything

2012-02-13T14:46:00.002-05:00

Review: The Tree of Life

Yes, there are dinosaurs. They pass by quickly, like many images in Terrence Malick's fifth film The Tree of Life. Their time is fleeting--blink and you'll miss it! And once you see dinosaurs, you know Malick doesn't intend to explain everything. His film captures an essence: pieces of lives as they're lived, memories imagined and real. Does it need to be more than that?

Most of the story focuses on a 1950s family in Waco, Texas: Mr. O'Brien, the engineer father with twenty-seven patents (Brad Pitt); his gentle wife (Jessica Chastain); and three adolescent boys. We see scattered childhood memories as their son Jack looks back (Hunter McCracken at 10; Sean Penn in the present day). The images feel like pure cinema; too much plot would be intrusive. Malick's screenplay feels like the beginning and endings of scenes, with conversations left on the editing-room floor.

Brad Pitt fleshes out a father conflicted between sternness and affection for his sons. Jessica Chastain's mother is more archetype than character--earth goddess, free spirit--but she's filmed with a gossamer beauty that's hard to resist. The story that's told is very male-oriented. But juxtaposed with the Big Bang, all the hangups of patriarchal society seem arbitrary, and I bet Malick intended that.

Every frame is full of light. We feel the stifling fifties suburbia waiting to be opened up, just as we see the universe expand. (This definitely owes a debt to 2001: A Space Odyssey.) But the son Jack grows up to be a corporate worker (Penn), stuck inside a glass elevator, imagining his own escape. Penn's brief scenes were probably fuller in the script; his present-day role is a cameo that doesn't contribute very much to the whole. Where has Jack gone since childhood? Is the beginning the only part of life that Malick wants us to see? Why does Penn look so sad?

The emotions we experience are sometimes outside the story, but each image fills in the larger canvas. Sure, sometimes it reaches too far, as in Jack's afterlife reunion on the beach with his parents, transcending time and space. But focusing on just the O'Brien family in the fifties would have deprived The Tree of Life of its wonder. And this is a wonderful film, if you let it wash over you. What better subject for a sprawling epic than creation itself?

Let's Talk about Something Really Important...

2012-01-31T14:12:00.001-05:00

Musicals. Yes, musicals.

People either (a) love them because they can sing along on road trips, and guess which Glee character will cover each song; or (b) hate them for the same reasons. Though try singing along to Adding Machine or Marie Christine, and you'll see that not all musicals are what you expect them to be.

Many people rail against the musical because it’s not a realistic form. Why would characters express their feelings in song? Well, to them I say, why do Madonna or Radiohead express their feelings in song? Isn’t that what songs are for, to express things?

Myth vs. Truth #1: Just because some musicals are silly does not mean all musicals are silly.

There are two musicals in the works that we should discuss. One stars Hugh Jackman, Russell Crowe, Anne Hathaway, Helena Bonham Carter, and potentially Taylor Swift. It's incredibly bombastic, and they sing the whole damn time. The odds are strongly against it.

Myth vs. Truth #2: Audiences find singing in movies uncomfortable.

I don’t think anyone has a problem with singing in the Rodgers and Hammerstein films. The writers knew how to move from dialogue to song and back without apologizing.

Whereas in Rob Marshall’s Nine, the director made so many apologies that the songs felt irrelevant. Nicole Kidman was forced to sing the lovely “Unusual Way” in a basement key, in a fantasy sequence on a movie set with a fantasy fountain, with every verse interrupted by dialogue. See it for yourself:

Audiences do find singing uncomfortable when the singing is really bad. This affects modern musicals more than the classics.

Into the Woods (a.k.a. the second musical I’ll discuss)

Somehow, I’m not worried about Into the Woods. It will translate to the screen more easily than Les Miz. The songs are character- and plot-driven. Granted, Stephen Sondheim will probably make some rewrites. Some of the soliloquies are more "tell" than "show," and the group numbers are intricately plotted for a lot of characters simultaneously.

The film needs three big stars in the Witch, the Baker, and his Wife. So I thought about casting and here's what I came up with:

The Witch needs pipes and a lot of presence. We’re talking Barbra Streisand, 1980s. She’ll need to switch between legit ballads, belting… and rap. I could see the Witch cast older: Meryl Streep (turned down Sweeney Todd, but she’d be a hoot), Emma Thompson, Toni Collette. But she's supposed to turn youthful and beautiful, so they might go younger. What about a pop star... Academy Award-winning actress Jennifer Hudson? Catherine Zeta-Jones and Queen Latifah are Rob Marshall-friendly; Charlize Theron would be more fun.

The Baker will probably be cast as a leading man rather than a character actor. I bet they'll ask Johnny Depp, though he seems entirely wrong. I’d like to see Ewan McGregor myself. Joseph Gordon-Levitt if they want to go young. This will be the hardest role to cast.

The Baker’s Wife has challenging music, but doesn’t need a professional singer. Kate Winslet, Amy Adams, and Carey Mulligan could all get by (though they're ingenues). I’d love to see her cast in her 40s (since she’s desperate to have a baby). I wonder if Frances McDormand, Laura Linney, or Julianne Moore can carry a tune.

Cinderella: Pretty, young, solid soprano. Amanda Seyfried and Anne Hathaway will fight it out on the Les Miz set. Can Mia Wasikowska sing? Or they could grab someone who actually does theater. (Please, not Lea Michele.)

The Princes: Oh, boy. I can see the usual names (Hugh Jackman, Neil Patrick Harris), but let’s have fun with this one. I vote for Michael C. Hall and Joaquin Phoenix, if he’s willing to act again. Or go older and grab Colin Firth. (Please, not Matt Morrison.)

Narrator/Mysterious Man and Jack’s Mother: Geoffrey Rush and Imelda Staunton. Done.

Give Us More to See

2012-01-19T09:58:00.002-05:00

Review: Red
Wimberly Theatre, Boston
January 11, 2011

Mark Rothko, No. 14, 1960

In 1958, abstract expressionist painter (and rising star) Mark Rothko accepted a commission to create murals for The Four Seasons in Manhattan. "I wanted to paint something that would ruin the appetite of every son-of-a-bitch who ever eats in that room," he said. "If the restaurant would refuse to put up my murals, that would be the ultimate compliment. But they won’t." Josh Logan's new play Red studies Rothko over two years as he and his assistant ready paintings for the restaurant.

What Logan captures best is Rothko's unerring emotionalism. He has accepted the Four Seasons gig to let the work transform the space, to turn an overpriced, commercialized hotspot into a cathedral for his expression. As Logan presents him, Rothko is not godlike, and does not think of himself that way. He's human to a fault, bubbling over with anger at the slightest provocation, but also thoughtful and willing to open up. Thomas Derrah finds this balance easily in the Speakeasy's current staging in Boston: his Rothko is not enigmatic, nor is he impossible to connect with. For all of his philosophizing, he simply believes the power his colors hold, revolutionizing the tradition of Joan Miró and Salvador Dalí.

Logan stumbles on one key moment: Rothko's boyish assistant Ken, an enterprising painter himself, has a dark childhood secret. This comes after a breathless tableau, the two men priming a canvas blood-red, and Ken's sudden confession feels like Logan is forcing emotions after they'd just been summoned with only paintbrushs.

Ken gains chutzpah over their two-year collaboration, and him battling Rothko over the crassness of the commission is one of the play's pleasures. Karl Baker Olson pushes Ken's naivete too much at first, but he soon becomes a confident opponent. He's part of the young crowd, pushing their mentors aside to create something new. The trend is Pop Art, which Rothko dismisses, quietly fearing that he'll soon be snuffed out. Red casts a remarkably level-headed look at the painter Logan enlivens. Like the paintings, layered rectangles of searing color, it's not what the play says, it's how it feels.

Win Win for Comedies

2012-01-09T09:50:00.000-05:00

Let me interrupt my steady movie reviews for a few notes on awards.

1. And now, for something completely different...

2011 was a year for comedies. Three of them are in Gold Derby's top 10 Oscar predictions for Best Picture: frontrunner The Artist, Midnight in Paris, and Bridesmaids. In Original Screenplay, Beginners (I'd call it a comedy), Young Adult, Win Win, and 50/50 compete the three films above.

Not all comedies are getting Oscar love...

2. For once, the Golden Globes don't seem so strange.

Of the Golden Globe comedy nominees 50/50, The Artist, Bridesmaids, Midnight in Paris, and My Week with Marilyn, two vie for Best Picture and four are primed for Original Screenplay. Even though there are no Adapted Screenplay comedies, 2011's dramas were still light (The Descendants, Moneyball, and Hugo... not quite Schindler's List). More portentous Oscar bait (i.e. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close and J. Edgar) sits on the sidelines.

3. Who do you have to sleep with at the WGA?

The Writers Guild continues to surprise. The films ineligible by their strange rules look just as good as those recognized.

Nominees: Bridesmaids, The Descendants, 50/50, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The Help, Hugo, Midnight in Paris, Moneyball, Win Win, Young Adult

Not eligible: The Artist, Beginners, Drive, Margin Call, Martha Marcy May Marlene, My Week with Marilyn, Shame, The Skin I Live In, Take Shelter, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy

Oscar Contenders #5: Women's Edition

2012-01-01T23:42:00.002-05:00

Review: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo + Young Adult

Lisbeth Salander is a rock star. Eerily thin, tattooed and pierced, with jet-black hair, she's both a fierce punk cybergenius and a vulnerable little girl. In the riveting The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, magazine publisher Mikael Blomkvist calls upon her surveillance services to aid his search for the long-lost Harriet Vanger, likely murdered 36 years before by her family. Lisbeth joins him in work and even in bed, but keeps her distance, forthcoming with research and withholding emotionally. Relative unknown Rooney Mara accentuates Lisbeth's waywardness. She wears the clothes, but underneath the hardened outside, she looks so impossibly young and fragile. Mara's Lisbeth is a palimpsest: a blank state she keeps erasing, to lose herself in.

The character is interesting enough, and Daniel Craig so quietly appealing as Blomkvist, that we don't think too much about the central mystery. The elderly Henrik Vanger (Christopher Plummer, sly as always) recruits him to figure out which family member killed Harriet. To work, Blomkvist takes up residence on the island, a windy wasteland where we expect violence to erupt any moment. And does it ever.

Director David Fincher has never been squeamish, and he doesn't hold back from the more upsetting moments of the books--including sexual violence. Steig Larsson's novel (originally Men who Hate Women in Sweden) depicts a misogynistic world where "an eye for an eye" prevails. How should we react to Lisbeth's comeuppance against her sexual aggressor? Fincher surely revels in her coolness, but does he want us to cheer or cringe? Since he can't sink too deep into the mystery and its twenty-odd suspects, he instead propels the pace forward. The script feels like an adaptation, sure, and the last half-hour's epilogue is a long-drawn-out tangent, but Fincher has a certain touch. He's a rock star, too.

Charlize Theron will have you know she's also a badass. She stretched herself with her 2003 Oscar win for Monster, and hasn't pushed for many huge, A-list blockbusters since. Would she be caught dead in P.S. I Love You or New Year's Eve? Her character in Jason Reitman's new film Young Adult, delusional Mavis Gary, likewise follows her own path. She moves out of her Minnesota small town to glamorous St. Paul, writing a wildly popular YA series. Or so she tells people.

Reitman and screenwriter Diablo Cody lampoon the Midwestern hicks who aren't capable of leaving town, as well as the arrested development (wink wink) we usually see in Judd Apatow's nerd-bros. They've given infantilism back to the ladies. The problem is that Theron's anti-heroine is one of only two real characters. She shares the movie's best moments with Patton Oswalt's self-pitying Matt, victim of a hate crime in his youth. This odd couple bond (quickly!) over not letting go of their high school woes. Oswalt (sweet and soulful) is the only one Young Adult empathizes with.

Mavis doesn't earn sympathy; she's so deluded in her pursuit of old flame Buddy (Patrick Wilson) that she shouldn't. But Wilson has nothing to play. The filmmakers disdain the small-town Midwest so much, they don't give us real resistance to Mavis's bad spirits. She gets driven out of a bland community she hated to begin with; no big loss. And so Cody's script feels superficially subversive. But Theron, at least, has a knack for finding the comedy within her character's nearly psychotic behavior. When Mavis's man-hunger seems most sad, Theron plays it off with wry nonchalance. A few years back, she might have made a fine Lisbeth Salander.

Oscar Contenders #4: Embracing Our History

2011-12-26T18:21:00.001-05:00

Review: The Artist + The Descendants

If The Artist isn't the greatest silent film, it may be the best you've seen. Or the only one you've seen. Writer and director Michel Hazanavicius has an assured touch, moving almost seamlessly from melodrama to comedy to romance. This is classic silent cinema of the Charlie Chaplin variety--a wink to the camera accompanies each tug at the heartstrings. We rely on actors more than ever: their faces, their sighs and smirks. To this end, The Artist mostly succeeds.

The physicality hasn't quite been mastered. The comedians and tragediennes of the 1920s relied on their bodies, nimble with a gag, drooping like a wilted flower at each tragic intertitle. No one beyond the two leads seems to inhabit a truly silent world, where movement and mime is everything. For the film-within-the-film director, John Goodman has the dour face of a beloved pug, but the script feeds him line after line to orate silently. We don't need to see them speak; we need action.

Jean Dujardin is marvelous at playing this. As silent film star George Valentin, pushed out of pictures to make way for talkies, he is dashing as Errol Flynn and elegant as Fred Astaire. In the more menacing third act, as Valentin's career fades and his self-loathing consumes him, we take his menace as seriously as Orson Welles in Citizen Kane. For all this impersonation, Dujardin feels like an original. Bérénice Bejo is charming, full of buxsome energy as rising "It" girl Penny Miller. These girls are always smitten with the hero, and that cat-and-mouse game is why we bought tickets, isn't it? The Artist may yet appeal to folks who've never seen Intolerance or Sunrise. Imagine how good modern rom-coms could be if the actors shut up and let their eyes do the work.

Alexander Payne shows the same confidence in The Descendants, a superb follow-up to Sideways. In fact, it's my favorite film of 2011 (so far). Land mogul Matt King (George Clooney) learns that his comatose wife isn't going to wake up after her boating accident--and that she was in love with another man. Payne places his unblinking camera close on Matt as he takes it in. He barely keeps his hurt and anger in check, but we see it all in Clooney's weary face. Often closed-off, Clooney invites us in here; his performance feels spontaneous.

Payne may be one of the best dramedy directors we have. The Golden Globes stuck Sideways in comedy and The Descendants in drama, but both films occupy the liminal space between. This isn't just a director's quirk, but it fits as the King family struggles with their memories of their mother. Should they laugh it off, burst into tears, or get angry? All the above, and then some. The script by Payne and Nat Faxon doesn't hurry through emotions (its only flaw is narration stating the obvious, later abandoned). The whole cast sinks into Payne's rhythm, and some surprise us. Who knew Shailene Woodley as his daughter Alexandra was capable of this maturity? Take note, too, of Judy Greer and Matthew Lillard in dramatic roles.

While Matt mourns his wife and does some reconnaissance on her lover, he also must choose which investor he and his cousins should sell acres of undeveloped property to. The Hawaiian land is sumptuous, and Payne shows it off proudly. He takes shots at both native Hawaiians and the newcomers, but we sense the movie's on the island's side all along. The land is the Kings' connection to their ancestors, and though they grapple with Mom's poor parenting, they owe it to her and the long departed. As The Descendants ends, Matt and his daughters have come to accept their dependence on each other, and learn to let go.

Oscar Contenders #3: Come Together

2011-12-15T16:18:00.000-05:00

Review: Shame + Melancholia

Brandon Sullivan (Michael Fassbender) glances at a woman across the subway car, prolonged glances. She adjusts herself, averts her eyes, stands to exit the train. He follows her through the car doors and up the stairs, expecting more, but she gets away before he can reach her. This is one of the most erotic scenes of Shame, director Steve McQueen's study of sexual addiction, but we can read it as a metaphor for the whole experience. After a breathless, enticing first hour, the movie (and Brandon) seem to get away from McQueen.

As confident as Fassbender's performance is, the central character is New York City. For an intimate film, McQueen stays on location often (especially several erotic trysts at the exhibitionist Standard Hotel). Counteracting Brandon's private routine, bare white walls and soulless office job, the streets of New York are both empowering and stifling: just look at that shot halfway through of Brandon running several blocks late at night, ultimately stalled at a red light, jogging in place. There's no real escape in this Manhattan. To this end, Carey Mulligan as his sister Sissy sings a melancholy "New York, New York" in a relentless close-up. Mulligan is surprisingly extroverted; but her childlike qualities are still her most interesting feature.

Writers McQueen and Abi Morgan don't move toward psychological understanding or redemption. But they don't offer anything to fill the void. The final sexual encounter we see is overwrought, even ridiculous; should we think a menage a trois is cathartic or extraordinary for a sex addict? And Brandon and Sissy's sibling relationship, which (effectively) shows some disconcerting boundary issues, leads to a predictable climax. Suddenly, the movie passes moral judgment on Brandon's addiction and his neglect of the people that matter.

Fassbender, thankfully, has proven himself so assured that a film like this would hardly be possible without a performance like this. He's charismatic and desirable, which helps; emphathetic even at his cruelest; unafraid of baring himself (emotionally, of course). Feels like he's become a major actor in just one year.

Kirsten Dunst has taken longer to grow into adult roles, but here she is in Melancholia, working with one of the most eccentric (even undisciplined) directors. The gamble paid off: Lars von Trier has found a maturity in Dunst, whose character Justine grapples with overwhelming depression on her wedding night. The wedding sequence plays like a comedy of errors, with Dunst as the fading figurehead, trying to keep it together. Her family guilts her for the money they spent on her; the groom (Alexander Skarsgard) is in over his head; her disapproving mother (the deliciously dry Charlotte Rampling) sours the wedding toast. She's even a slave to von Trier: a mannequin trapped in a vibrant series of oil paintings: conveying electric currents from her fingers; drowning with her bouquet in a frog pond; fleeing with tree roots clinging to her dress. Simone Grau's art direction is a wonder, especially in the apocalpytic bookends.

Yes, the world is ending. Everyone's nervous about the irregular planet Melancholia, whose path may collide with or just barely miss the Earth. This anxiety consumes Justine's sister, Claire, played by French musician Charlotte Gainsbourg, who watches the skies for the oncoming planet. With the director's fascination over depressive Justine, Claire isn't as developed. Their family background is hastily sketched; we only see her frantic reactions to Melancholia's approach.

But there's a smart balance between the sisters--the put-together Claire unravels when she's up against celestial forces beyond her control, while Justine awaits (even provokes?) its coming. Lars von Trier doesn't degrade his female protagonists like in some previous films. He seems in awe of the mighty universe he's created, and finds compassion even in its destruction.

Oscar Contenders #2: End Times Are Coming

2011-11-30T22:42:00.000-05:00

Review: Take Shelter + Beginners

I'll wager that Take Shelter will be swept under the rug in the tidal wave of major winter releases. Michael Shannon is a risky gamble; Jessica Chastain looks familiar to fans of The Help, but not enough to sell tickets. Cards on the table: I'm going to back it for a Best Picture nomination that it will not receive. Director Jeff Nichols provokes an astonishing intensity as he follows a man who readies his home for a terrifying storm. To his wife and daughter, it's the occasional Midwestern tornado; but for Curtis, the end of days approaches.

This twister is not the sort that Helen Hunt and Bill Paxton once chased; it comes from within. Curtis, paralyzed by visions that storms are brewing, obsesses with building a high-tech underground shelter, so much that he (and his family) start questioning his state of mind. He assembles his hideaway like a prophet called by a higher power. Nichols stays away from disaster-movie cliches in his script and direction; the suspense builds up slowly, eerily, like a horror flick without of the ghosts that jump out. The final scene to me pushes the film away from its heightened realism to more overt symbolism (i.e. more esoteric), though it doesn't really spoil the fun.

We aren't privy to what makes Curtis tick; and Shannon reads like he isn't even sure himself. It's a wonderful performance, and it wouldn't work in most actors' hands. Michael Shannon certainly plays crazy men often, but beneath the bug eyes and uneasy smile, he grounds his modern-day Noah in human uncertainty. With his hulking form and gruff mumbles, he's vulnerable and still intimidating. Supporting him is Jessica Chastain as his wife Samantha, protecting their daughter Hannah as dad sinks further into madness. Though it could be enlightenment.

Meanwhile, in Beginners out on DVD, Ewan McGregor deals with a more traditional family loss. His father Hal (Christopher Plummer) has recently passed away, and in flashback, we witness him as a widow who finally comes out as a gay man. His son Oliver (McGregor) questions his younger boyfriend, who has other lovers, but as Hal says, "You always dreamed of getting a lion. And you wait... but the lion doesn't come. And along comes a giraffe. You can be alone, or you can be with the giraffe."

At this early date, Plummer might have a chance at Best Supporting Actor. Though it's a sentimental vote, it's also a reassuring one. He gives the film its spark of life. Plummer's had a long run on stage and screen, and he keeps things honest as a man free to start a new chapter, no regrets. To see him smile offers the deepest glimpse into Mike Mills' directorial debut. Mills writes and directs, just as Jeff Nichols did with Take Shelter, this sweet if lightweight affair. After the unshakeable tensions of Nichols' film, Beginners may help you move past your worries about mortality.

Oscar Contenders #1: Topical Storms

2011-11-16T22:03:00.000-05:00

Guess who's written in his blog barely at all this autumn? It may take a hiatus here and there, but I thought you dear readers (the few, the proud) deserved my thoughts about the movies coming out this season. I'm looking forward to a heap of interesting indies, and a Best Actress race hot enough to boil bunnies.

I'm kicking off the season with two films about the most topical of events: the onset of the financial collapse, and the elections to restore faith in American institutions.

Review: Margin Call + The Ides of March

"These people have no idea what's about to happen," Peter Sullivan (Zachary Quinto) says as he gazes out the windows of his investment firm. The office is a fishbowl: everyone under scrutiny from the outside, trapped in a bubble. The employees watch through glass doors as layoffs pick up, and everyone's on the lookout for a scapegoat.

But as Sullivan's research that the company has borrowed more than it can chew rises higher in the company, so does the realization that nobody knows how they got here. The firm calls in CEO John Tuld (an unsurprisingly villainous Jeremy Irons), and he begs Sullivan to explain the problem in plain English. One of the film's running jokes is pointing out the increasing ineptness at the top of the office chain: "I don't get any of this stuff," Tuld admits.

Director and writer J.C. Chandor moves Margin Call forward with focused velocity. He keeps the atmosphere claustrophic, confined to board rooms, offices, and technical financial lingo that lay viewers never have a real chance to parse. All the vocabulary hits us too quickly, and appropriately so. Even the morning sunrise portends the impending collapse more than the inkling of hope. Even timely material like this wouldn't be as riveting if it didn't take a step back. Chandor lets us emphathize with these blindsided leaders; for all their corporate greed, they're as clueless as the rest of us.

We don't feel bad, of course. One man breaks down his salary until nearly $70 thousand is left over, just for booze and hookers. But it helps that there's such a good cast: Zachary Quinto's furled brow is the intelligent minion at the center of the beehive, with convincing, non-showy performances from Kevin Spacey, Paul Bettany, and Stanley Tucci.

The Ides of March, on the other hand, fools us at first into thinking that politicians are nice guys. We believe financial institutions are soulless and corrupt, but George Clooney's presidential candidate Mike Morris is a Democrat's dream Obama 2.0. He's beautifully spoken, well-answered, polished but still spontaneous. But when trusted staffer Stephen Meyers (Ryan Gosling) discovers the secrets of the man behind the curtain, he starts to get his political sleeves dirty.

Though higher profile, this film still feels like a passion project for Clooney. In addition to his supporting role (where he switches behind the public and private self at the turn of a coin), he directed, co-authored the screenplay with Grant Heslov and original playwright Beau Willimon, and pulled seemingly every actor on board not involved with Margin Call. Gosling's enigmatic persona fits his character well; it's hard to tell how deep into the muck he'll let himself sink, and the desperation is always near the surface.

Much of the initial conflict revolves around Evan Rachel Wood's alluring intern (need I even suggest a spoiler alert?). You get the sense these twists have played out before, and we definitely haven't forgotten the morality debates and media frenzy of the Clinton administration. So while the ensemble is top-notch, the film doesn't offer new truths, or even a sense of fly-on-the-wall excitement. I even felt it ended too soon, when Clooney et al. could have gone further over the top. But these are tried and true politics, so if you don't catch it at the theater, you might on CNBC.

My High School Reading List

2011-10-11T11:31:00.004-04:00

Did I really do a book report
on this in ninth grade?

Shame. The burden of an English major. And not just because most people use your degree as a one-liner. Unlike most other subjects, an English major requires that you have actually read (cover to cover) the essential texts of literature.* Because it's what everyone thinks--we read and we write! History majors, philosophy majors: they read texts and write to interpret and theorize just like English majors, but for some reason, our degree is knocked down. Less noble than philosophy! Less tangible than history!

So yes, I feel shame I haven't sailed cover to cover through the classics. I didn't even read classics on my own until high school was over. Suddenly, this great fear struck me: Everyone at college would have read everything! And what had I read?

The answer to that: My high school reading list, as best I can remember, after the jump:

Ninth Grade (Welcome to High School)
Animal Farm
To Kill a Mockingbird
Plays: Romeo and Juliet; The Miracle Worker


This was summer reading?

Tenth Grade (Short Stories, Introduction to Essay Writing)
Of Mice and Men
Alas, Babylon
Plays: Oedipus Rex; Antigone; Julius Caesar

Eleventh Grade (American Lit)
The Scarlet Letter
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Ethan Frome
The Great Gatsby
Their Eyes Were Watching God
Wise Blood (read solo for a research paper)
Plays: A Streetcar Named Desire; The Crucible; A Raisin in the Sun

Twelfth Grade (World Lit, Preparing for AP Testing)
Wuthering Heights
Brave New World
Native Son
Cry, the Beloved Country
No-No Boy
Ceremony
Plays: Macbeth; Hamlet

Not bad, but not very comprehensive, either. Senior year's "world" literature was, with one exception, either British or Asian American/African American/Native American (in short, American). I made a point the summer before college to sink into the classics I'd missed. There were the books every other teacher at my high school chose: Lord of the Flies, The Color Purple, The Sun Also Rises. Then the books you see on every Barnes & Noble summer reading display: How the Garcia Girls Lost their Accents, Fahrenheit 451, etc.

During college, I tried to keep it up, feeling hopelessly behind as an English major (reading The Catcher in the Rye at 20! Heart of Darkness after seeing Apocalypse Now!), even taking single-author classes to fill the embarrassing void (hey, Faulkner).

I got through Crime.
Still need to tackle Punishment.

Now I am 25, and I still have a few things to get off my chest.

1. I've never finished a Russian novel. (Anna Karenina, can we reschedule for winter?)
2. I've never finished a Victorian novel longer than 500 pages.
3. I've never started a Dickens other than A Christmas Carol.
4. I did read Ulysses. So that makes up for everything, right?

Dear readers, how was your high school reading experience? Was anyone reading Woolf or Lawrence on the bus ride home?

*I'm not sure why we still call it "the English department," if we are expected not only to know English-language literature, but also world literature in translation, as well. You can't expect to be well-rounded in literature if you're never gone near Dostoyevsky or Garcia Marquez.

How to Win an EGOT

2011-09-23T14:53:00.000-04:00

I've been away, but I had to pop in to share thoughts I had from the Emmys. Namely, only 10 people have won the coveted EGOT... ever! (13 counting honorary awards.)

Why is this number so small? OK, it's not so easy to waltz onto Broadway and grab a Tony. Though wealth and fame can help elevate a good performance to gold (see: Catherine Zeta-Jones).

And it's not easy to win an Oscar. You have to really campaign for it, and most great actors win them early in their careers or never at all. James Earl Jones* has an asterisk on the EGOT list because his Oscar is (surprisingly) honorary only.

But here's my Surefire Oscar Advice: Start out as a singer. If you sing really well, you are almost guaranteed an Oscar just for being in a movie (see: Julie Andrews, Barbra Streisand, Liza Minnelli, Cher, Jennifer Hudson).

Trouble staying on-key? Then take my Surefire Grammy Advice: Spoken Word album. This worked for actual EGOTs Helen Hayes, John Gielgud, Audrey Hepburn, and James Earl Jones*. Or record yourself doing stand-up, a la EGOTs Mike Nichols, Whoopi Goldberg, and Mel Brooks.

All right, you worked hard and won a Tony. You sing great, so hey, pile on the Grammys. You made one movie for a lark, and bam, Oscar. What's left?

Surefire Emmy Advice (aka Piece of Cake):
1. Guest star on SNL. You can be an expert comedian (Tina Fey), an expert beloved comedian (Betty White), or 4-time-Emmy-winner Justin Timberlake. In fact, you really just should be Justin Timberlake.

2. Miniseries or Movie. Don't deign to go near those SNL hippies. Just call HBO and tell them you want a seventeen-hour movie based on some Wikipedia entry you Stumbled Upon. Meryl Streep, Kate Winslet, Helen Mirren, Maggie Smith, Al Pacino, Robert Duvall... the list of Oscar winners who casually tossed off a hit Miniseries/Movie is staggering.

3. Don't work on Mad Men. If you film even one episode of Mad Men, Best Drama Series-four-times-running, you are almost guaranteed never to win. They should really consider some HBO miniseries work.

Who's next in line? Cher and Martin Scorsese could collaborate on a musical, starring Kate Winslet and Eminem. How about a remake of On Golden Pond with Bette Midler and Dick Van Dyke? And please, Lord, let Maggie Smith record that smooth jazz album she's always talking about.

There's a Boat that's Leavin' Soon for New York

2011-08-31T11:08:00.002-04:00

Review: The Gershwins' Porgy and Bess
American Repertory Theater, Cambridge
August 23, 2011

Porgy and Bess is one of the few operas first performed on Broadway. Even in 1935, George and Ira Gershwin and Dubose Heyward tinkered, paring down the music and adding dialogue. Now A.R.T. has given us a revival of Porgy and Bess as a musical, echoing its roots on the Broadway stage. With (mostly) careful scenework by Suzan Lori-Parks and respect from director Diane Paulus for what's come before, Porgy and Bess still succeeds in a more intimate setting.

Some of the intimacy comes from lowered keys and hushed orchestrations, fitting for the openings of Porgy and Bess's duets. The approach only suffers when the actors are made to riff the ends of songs, and in the dramatic "My Man's Gone Now," which doesn't quite capture the mourning widow's despair. But with those caveats, the production moves and breathes like it always has. Porgy and Bess has always been both beautiful and tragic. Without the operatic trappings, the show feels more tender, perhaps even more hopeful.

Norm Lewis finds joy and strength in Porgy, a crippled resident of Catfish Row who takes in the wayward Bess out of compassion. Audra McDonald is a natural as Bess, using the various colors of her soprano to portray Bess's shifting identities: a loose woman and drug addict terrorized by the abusive Crown (the excellent, operatic Philip Boykin), then reborn and accepted into the community. Their duet "Bess, You Is My Woman Now" was a highlight of the evening.

The ensemble benefits from Paulus's focus on the community: how they give and take to protect each other. The preview I attended had a revised ending, though, in which everyone turns their back on Bess. Only after she leaves for New York alone does Porgy choose to leave Catfish Row and pursue her. This sounds better in principle than in execution, but they might still be working on it. Overall, the modern look at Porgy and Bess, including racial relations and stereotypes, didn't seem so modern after all. The show has always been a fable, and with all its controversy, there's been that revolutionary spark.

Update: It ain't necessarily so. The show now ends with something much closer to the original ending. Sometimes when things aren't broken, they don't need fixing.

Fly Me to the Seine

2011-08-22T11:19:00.000-04:00

Review: Midnight in Paris

I haven't really written about the summer releases I've seen (like Horrible Bosses and Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows-Part 2). I didn't see a point. Those movies accomplished what they wanted, but they weren't exactly food for thought. And it gets harder to find words for things that are perfectly fine for one viewing. Sure, you can write critically about anything, but why waste bandwidth?

The sleeper hit Midnight in Paris fits right in with the summer slate. Woody Allen's latest film is warm, affectionate, endearing, charming. The film is a light creme brulee, satisfying to sweettooths and sentimentalists, and perhaps only occasionally to Allen's most ironic, postmodern fans. None of the characters babble in intellectualisms, but there aren't really characters here anyhow.

Many have said that Owen Wilson acts as Woody Allen's stand-in, but the two are kind of opposites. Allen was a character-actor typical of the seventies, polarizing and idiosyncratic, incapable of supressing his opinion. Wilson is an innocent puppy, always casual, barely radical. Playing a frustrated novelist with an old soul, he represents what Woody Allen probably wishes he were: good-looking, easygoing, sentimental more than analytical. The film artfully fills out this wish as Wilson's novelist Gil travels back in time each midnight to the Golden Age of Paris: the gay twenties. Gil gets advice on his book from Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Stein. He finds a kindred soul in Picasso's lover (Marion Cotillard, equally adorable). And he escapes from his fiance's uncharmed family and the faux-intellectual Eurotrash she admires.

Who knows if the spell of Midnight in Paris will last for a second viewing? After a long polarizing career, Allen seems content to deliver us a nightcap. The film looks back to the romance of Manhattan--not a romance between people, but an affection for the city. Here again, the director's vision of Paris feels so evanescent that even thinking critically for a second might disturb our slumber.

Summertime, But the Livin's Not So Easy

2011-08-11T11:58:00.001-04:00

Who's afraid of Stephen Sondheim? The creators (or should I say reconstructers?) of the new A.R.T. Porgy and Bess adaptation might be after he raked them across the coals in yesterday's New York Times. If you're at all interested in theater, Stephen Sondheim is not a man to take lightly. And if you're at all interested in the history of twentieth-century American music, Porgy and Bess is not an opera to take lightly, either.

Now I see no need to preserve every great work of art in a museum, shrouded in dust and years of abandonment. But Porgy and Bess, though undoubtedly controversial, is one of those Revolutionary Works of Art that has worked since its premiere in 1935. It's an opera, sure, but one that premiered on Broadway. Revivals have omitted scenes and recitative (scored/sung dialogue not in full song form). And this is accepted: Many operas are long and have alternate recits/arias or traditional cuts.

But here are some ground rules for adapting the classics, with quotes from the Times article about Porgy in blue:

1. Don't throw in more classics to pad out your show. ("The idea was briefly floated of interpolating outside Gershwin music into “Porgy.”") Last season's Promises, Promises gave Kristin Chenoweth two more numbers to sing, "I Say a Little Prayer" and "A House Is Not a Home," but at the expense of logic. Why would she sing about houses when she lives in an apartment?

2. Don't tell audiences they used to be dumb. (Director Diane Paulus: "I'm sorry, but to ask an audience these days to invest three hours in a show requires having your heroine be an understandable and fully rounded character.")

3. Be careful with changing the ending. What if Eliza didn't leave Henry Higgins? What if Juliet felt empowered enough as a woman to stand up and walk out of the tomb? Oh, wait, that happened, in brand-new original shows called My Fair Lady and West Side Story. But saying the authors wanted an ending they didn't write is just not true. (Bookwriter Susan-Lori Parks: "If [George Gershwin] had lived longer... he would have gone back to the story of ‘Porgy and Bess’ and made changes, including to the ending.”)

I have tickets for The Gershwins' Porgy and Bess--apparently the estate's preferred title, but we'll talk about ridiculous copyright issues another day--and I am intrigued and excited and nervous. Good for them for finding new ways to balance song and dialogue. Good for them for bringing new perspectives to a classic. But if Porgy starts singing "I Got Rhythm," I'm leaving at intermission.

No Holds Barred

2011-07-27T09:17:00.001-04:00

Review: The Normal Heart

Golden Theater, New York

July 9, 2011

For a play so driven by immediacy, The Normal Heart lingers. When Larry Kramer wrote this diatribe against the AIDS crisis spreading through New York City, he was capturing the present: a time of anger and confusion, with lawmakers and medical practitioners turning a blind eye. AIDS (never referenced by name in the play; it was too early for that) had no basis in medical history. The beautiful thing about the recent revival of Kramer's play is the compassion beneath.

Protagonist Ned Weeks (a strong, grounded performance by Joe Mantello, known more as a director), is a stand-in for Kramer--a fighter who demands attention, demands to be treated with respect. Even angrier is his doctor Emma Brookner (Ellen Barkin, holding nothing back), who alone stands up in the medical profession to speak her mind. As a fly-on-the-wall look at the fear and paranoia surrounding the epidemic, the play still voices these fears. Kramer's play is more or less a soapbox; but though didactic, he provided an education to those who only got their news from The New York Times.

Ned falls in love with a Times reporter, Felix (John Benjamin Hickey, who provides the empathy and humanity the play needs), who is soon lost to the disease along with the hundreds in New York. At a time when gay marriages just began in New York, The Normal Heart feels just as necessary as it must have in 1985. Today we have more awareness about AIDS, more understanding. The revival doesn't seek to tear down walls but strives for togetherness. This may have been the strongest ensemble of actors I've seen in a play, all ten seemingly moved by the people they are portraying, acting without ego or self-consciousness. The play asks that we do the same.

You Gotta Get a Gimmick

2011-07-13T10:16:00.000-04:00

Let's talk about TV ads. Most shows seem content with commercials, web campaigns, billboards. Ah, but when you live in a city, you see some interesting ways to get your show out there.

Like two weeks ago, when I was walking home through Coolidge Corner and handed free ice cream. My Nutty Buddy (delicious on an eighty-degree day) was wrapped in a sleeve for Necessary Roughness, some new USA network drama. I flipped through the promotional booklet hidden within my napkin, and noted that Necessary Roughness (which has a idiomatic two-word name just like every USA show) was premiering that tonight.

Then last Thursday, we're looking out from the ninth-floor patio at work, and a protest goes down Newbury Street. Posters are held high, displaying "Who will save us?" over pictures that looked like Daniel Radcliffe from our high vantage point (ooh, Vantage Point... call the USA network!). Oh yeah, and the white Death Eater masks. It turns out that their banners for Miracle and eerie rally masks were not protesting the final Harry Potter film, but advertising Torchwood. Which prompted a colleague to say, "That's the first time I've thought about Torchwood in a year."

Awareness is everything. Do only third-tier cable shows pull off stunts like these? I did not watch Necessary Roughness. I did not watch Torchwood. I was too busy turning back to nab a second free ice cream cone.

Golly, Moses, Naturally They're Punks!

2011-06-30T10:46:00.001-04:00

Review: West Side Story
Colonial Theatre, Boston
June 21, 2011

The recent Broadway revival of West Side Story, which I caught on tour, set out to capture the authenticity of the much-loved war horse. But with its gang warfare built on finger snaps, pirouettes, and frabba-jabbas, West Side Story can seem like a relic from your grandmother's attic. Bookwriter Arthur Laurents, before his recent death, sought to dust off the war horse with young, virile kids for the Jets and Spanish dialogue and lyrics laced in with the Sharks.

By the time the tour arrived in Boston, some of the songs translated to Spanish had already reverted back. Maria still se siente hermosa, but she also lets us know she feels pretty in English. On Broadway, she and Anita sang "A Boy Like That/I Have a Love" bilingually, but now one verse in Spanish is all that lasts. Perhaps Laurents feared some were seeing the show for the first time. (Has anyone never seen West Side Story?) Whatever the reason, the tamped-down Spanish and the relative greenness of the cast gave the evening a nostaglic, rather than visceral, feel. You'd swear these actors never even had a pillow fight. What doesn't feel dated is the theatricality, especially Jerome Robbins's choreography: Riff convincing the Jets to stay "Cool" before the rumble; the dance at the gym where Tony and Maria meet.

Above all, the Leonard Bernstein-Stephen Sondheim score entrances. Bernstein's bent for classical-meets-Broadway hasn't been replicated in the theatre. Kyle Harris and Ali Ewoldt were fine as Tony and Maria, though both pushed to seem younger when their characters want to feel older, more mature. Harris's voice was weak on the higher notes, and Ewoldt sang most of the score in a nasally mix rather than a purer soprano sound. I worry this is how schools are training musical theater voices today. Michelle Aravena in the showy role of Anita came across the best of the ensemble (well-danced by all).

But their youth catches up with them. The Jets seemed especially callous here singing "Gee, Officer Krupke" after their leader dies. The first act felt strangely tame, almost devoid of danger until the fatal rumble, but the second act speeds to an abrupt, but pointed, ending. In this production, there is no reconcilation for the Jets and Sharks... and why should there be? Suddenly the violence feels real. Better late than never.

The 2011 Tony Awards: Now with 25% More Mormon

2011-06-12T19:44:00.025-04:00

All in all, not a bad Tonys. Some good dancing, something about Mormons... and I have seen at least five commercials for West Side Story during the breaks. Now as NPH said, go see a mother[censored] show!

Don't worry... her shoes are Jimmy Choo.

10:58 Mark Rylance gives his second poetry reading for his second Tony award, this time for Best Actor in a Play. It's a shame when actors have to accept awards at their scruffiest, while they're doing plays about scruffy people. Norbert Leo Butz (looking not at all scruffy) bests those Mormon boys for Best Actor in a Musical. I think Trey Parker and Matt Stone look a little embarrassed to get one more award, though the acknowledgment of Joseph Smith was priceless.

10:50 Lighting Design even went to The Book of Mormon? Did the other musicals give out tickets?

10:36 Best Actress Frances McDormand... jean jacket? Excellent speech, though: "I've played all three of Chekhov's sisters." Even more fantastically odd was Best Actress in a Musical Sutton Foster's shoutout to her dresser of nine years, which basically included his full bio and address in Cape Cod.

10:22 Who did the cast of Company piss off to have Christie Brinkley introduce them? Only two revivals for Best Revival of a Musical, How to Succeed and winner Anything Goes, but I think it's good that we've had so much new work on Broadway this season.

10:05 Best Play goes to The Book of M... sorry, force of habit, the winner's actually War Horse. Wonder how Patti LuPone feels watching Sutton Foster perform the same song from Anything Goes that she did twenty years ago?

9:46 Oh, random celebrities at the Tonys. Looking at you, Marg Helgenberger. Patrick Wilson must enjoy hearing the promo for his new drama: "Patrick Wilson is A Gifted Man." I wish The Motherf**ker with the Hat would win something, just to see what they'd call it. But for now, it's The Normal Heart for Best Revival of a Play.

9:35 I am pleased to write that the book of The Book of Mormon has won. Nobody is losing their Tony poll on that one. What, oh what, is Whoopi wearing on her head? Her comment on how many of her movies have become musicals is very astute.

9:21 Best line so far: "It has been confirmed by the Rev. Harold Camping that Spider-Man: The Musical opens Tuesday night." Surprisingly heartfelt shout-out by Bono and the Edge to Broadway hard work. But WTF is Spider-Man doing performing? Vying for Most Apathetic-Looking Actors? Or Worst Lead-In Dialogue?

9:17 The Hugh-Neil dance-off: I laughed at the West Side Story and Anything Goes references, especially the line about a "pre-unwrapped cough drop." Brooke Shields at the teleprompter, part 2: And she curses and gets bleeped. Perhaps Broadway is a better place for her than primetime television? Supporting Actor John Larroquette must have conned the voters into thinking he's in The Book of Mormon.

9:06 The Book of Mormon performs... we've finally seen why this show is raking in awards and $155 tickets. And this largely one-character song worked perfectly without any context! Though knowing The Sound of Music helped. "I believe/That the Garden of Eden/Was in Jackson County, Missouri."

8:58 Angela Lansbury was recruited to make the boring American Theater Wing speech sexy. Nikki M. James pulls a Mormon upset... Laura Benanti was the Supporting Actress frontrunner before tonight. But was she in a show written by the South Park bros? No, she was not.

8:52 Maybe I'm a killjoy, but I had no idea what The Scottsboro Boys' numbers was about, either. But it was pretty effective nonetheless; the closeups worked here. It's sad when closed shows don't get a chance to perform, so I'm glad there was room for the 12-Tony nominee (though it will probably win none).

8:41 The one good Spider-Man joke of the night: "I sent Bono a congratulatory cable, and it snapped." But basically everything David Hyde-Pierce said afterward was funnier. Casey Nicholaw wins most enthusiastic acceptee (as well as Best Director of a Musical).

8:35 Catch Me If You Can... if you even want to. Norbert Leo Butz's song may be the highlight of the show, but out of context, I wasn't sure what it was about. Al Pacino and Alec Baldwin looked confused, too. Like How to Succeed, the cameras didn't really know how to capture the dancing. More intimate character numbers might work better on national TV.

8:27 Nice shot of the teleprompter, with correct pronunciation of Arian Moayed--I always wondered how they will handle my last name when I win my inevitable Tony... or Oscar... Hey, let's go with EGOT! Congrats to John Benjamin Hickey for continuing The Normal Heart's loot as Best Supporting Actor.

8:20 Best Score and Best Orchestrations have gone to The Book of Mormon, marking the start of a Salt Lake sweep. I wonder if attendees felt a little bored/unenthused when Gone with the Wind or Ben-Hur won their numerous Oscars back in the day. Random thought: Does John Leguizamo deserve the adjective "incredible"? Discuss.

8:07 Alec Baldwin's beard presents the first award, to Ellen Barkin for Best Supporting Actress. Smart of the Tonys to start things off with Ellen Barkin, Edie Falco, and Daniel Radcliffe singing. On the subject of facial hair, Robert Morse looks like the only Mad Men actor without hiatus beard.

8:00 And the 2011 Tony Awards begin! Just a bare stage, with NPH in a spotlight. How many awards shows has he opened with a novelty song? "Attention, every breeder, you're invited to the theater." Brooke Shields, however, is no longer invited to the teleprompter.

Keep refreshing; new posts will appear at the top. Enjoy my annual Tonys live blog (that is, for all two of you who will read this).

One More Kiss, and Then We Break The Spell

2011-06-04T12:45:00.007-04:00

Review: Follies
The Kennedy Center, Washington, D.C.
May 29, 2011

"Look at these people, aren't they eerie? Look at this party, isn't it dreary?" That's how Sally Durant Plummer, a 49-year-old Phoenix housewife, sees her return to the theater where she performed in the Weismann Follies as a young girl. The year is 1971, and the showgirls are reuniting thirty years later in a lavish party before the theater is demolished. Over the course of the evening, watched by the ghostly spirits of decadent showgirls still haunting the wings, Stephen Sondheim and James Goldman's Follies allows the chorines one last burst of nostalgia before their memories fade into the impending rubble. Pastiche songs liven the proceedings, as old veterans of the stage relive their moments in the spotlight.

With these memories come unfulfilled lives, unstable marriages, and the loss of their careers in show business. Sally (distracted, lost in her past) and her old friend Phyllis (cool, stately) come back with their husbands, but neither has found happiness at home. Phyllis cannot connect with her bruised diplomat husband Ben, while Sally cannot shake the vivid fantasy that he will fall back in love with her. Bernadette Peters (who could've been a showgirl once) is fragile and girlish as Sally, affecting as she veers closer toward unreality. Sondheim's score, though, doesn't always sit well in her voice.

The strongest performances come from Danny Burstein as Sally's stage-door husband Buddy and Jan Maxwell as Phyllis, who finds the warmth and genuine care for her husband Ben beneath her icy exterior. She delivers the bracing "Could I Leave You?" like a runaway locomotive, as she finally explodes from the suffocation of living as an absent politician's plus-one. Buddy is playing around behind Sally's back, and she knows it, but Burstein makes us understand his need for attention (just like the follies girls).

Director Eric Schaeffer has assembled some fine performers for the follies veterans, notably Linda Lavin crooning "Broadway Baby" and Terri White hoofing it to "Who's That Woman?" with the rest of the ladies. Alas, despite the ghosts parading through the party, the nostaglic numbers mostly showcase fifty-sixty-something women in their prime, without the melancholy beneath. Not until the second act, with Rosalind Elias' aria from her fargone operetta days ("One More Kiss"), do we see any sadness in these Follies solos. Frank Rich once reflected that Follies represents a death of the American musical, and Sondheim's score (more than Goldman's fragmented book) both celebrates the artform and mourns its passing.

But the production blossoms as Sally, Phyllis, Ben, and Buddy are swept into Loveland, a dreamlike theatrical limbo in which they are forced to confront the follies (note the lowercase) of their youth. Burstein's "Buddy's Blues" is excellent, a vaudeville toe-tapper full of humor and anxiety. Standing eerily still, Peters shines in the femme fatale torch song "Losing My Mind," a performance that summons the desperation and disillusionment intended for the show. There may never be another perfect Follies, but isn't the point that we always regret the road we didn't take?

Something Old, Something New

2011-05-16T10:58:00.001-04:00

Review: Bridesmaids

Though we didn't know it then, The 40-Year-Old Virgin opened the floodgates of contemporary movie-making. So many movies have been birthed by the Judd Apatow factory since that I'm growing wearier with each new bromance.

But then there's Bridesmaids, a "bra-mance" (if I may) that sheds chick-flick conventions for a woman's look at a man's comedy. Star and co-writer Kristen Wiig has given us striking water-cooler talk: why can't women riff on vomit and toilet humor like the boys do? Dress shopping after a cheap Brazilian lunch, the ladies let out more than just tears, rivaling the raunchiest of any bromances.

But Wiig also makes quieter statements about love among friends. Scratch that--just between. Bridesmaids feels sincere because the women never play too nice. Wiig's character, Annie, finds herself trapped in an undesirable job, an apartment with creepy sibling roommates, and pleasure-free hookups with Mr. Wrong. Yet she's thrilled to play maid of honor to her best friend, Lillian (Maya Rudolph), until nouveau riche Helen (Rose Byrne) proceeds to steal the spotlight, the party planning, and Lillian's friendship away. We expect the tug-of-war between Annie and Helen to sabotage everything in their wake, as well as the inevitable reconciliation. Rose Byrne plays Helen with grace and an undiscovered knack for comedy: she doesn't see herself as the villain, and she's too clueless to be cold-blooded.

I'm not sold on Kristen Wiig's weird Saturday Night Live impersonations, but her portrayal of Annie is caricature-free. She's refreshing when she doesn't try too hard. Her comedy grows from her physicality: she's angular and wiry, squirming with tension that she releases in manic bursts. Some of the bridesmaids don't have much to play; the good lines go to Melissa McCarthy, who seemingly has no boundaries. Judd Apatow may have pushed too hard to integrate his signature style here--the cruder moments don't always feel authentic. The film may suit fans of Wedding Crashers or The Hangover, but beneath the laughs is a woman who's not afraid to be knocked down.

Netflix Killed the Video Star

2011-04-26T10:42:00.007-04:00

A few weeks ago, I promised another musing on the state of movies today. Or how we watch movies. DVDs gave us a film-viewing experience again. A VHS, I would argue, was a mere artifact of the viewing process, like catching a rerun, while a DVD became the original film again, complete with supplements and the correct aspect ratio. But then crashed the wave of instant video... and a seemingly endless string of options.

Netflix
I signed up in December last year and was hooked within a week. For one thing, I found a few movies streaming that weren't even carried by my Boston-area library system (which is very extensive). With some films, I can either stream now or request the DVD for later. Win win, right?

But there are caveats. Their streaming selection is so far the best available of the major online streaming sites, but I can foresee running out of movies to stream in a year. Every now and then, a Mad Men joins the ranks, but streaming movies are added at a slower rate than they should. The license for each streaming film is unclear; I usually receive an end date in my queue less than a week before the movie vanishes. Then there's the failure of "experience" with some streaming choices that are artificially stretched (The Grapes of Wrath) or out-of-sync (The Office, UK).

My biggest gripe: the Netflix DVD. New titles from the past year send what are essentially screeners, with no supplements. I rented 127 Hours to watch the thirty-minute ending cut from the film, and received a movie-only disc. Why not just stream it?

Hulu
The inception of Hulu goes back to my senior-year dorm room. You couldn't really watch anything cool yet, but what potential! Now I catch up on my weekly sitcoms through Hulu, the legal free streaming website. The new Hulu Plus beats Netflix's TV offerings by a mile, though movies are treated like the red-headed stepchild. But logically, which am I likely to choose if I only pick one? A movie rental service with streaming and DVD, or a TV streaming service for which I pay for access to shows that once aired for free? When I can stream HBO, then we'll talk.

Amazon.com
The Wal-Mart of the Internet. First Amazon vs. Barnes & Noble, then Amazon vs. Apple, and now Amazon vs. Netflix. What's left? Can they also make the world's best grilled cheese? So please understand that my skepticism isn't because Amazon can't. If they want to be huge in streaming, they will be. But with all these hats, Amazon won't concentrate on everything, and streaming will likely fall by the wayside. Right now it's just a perk, the cherry on top for Prime members. And we're supposed to use the Cloud too?

Beneath the competition are the actual movies. We're fighting over the ability to watch them, not the quality of the movie itself. What if Amazon offers them on Kindles next, all in black and white? Should we even have the option to watch Jaws on the beach? And it doesn't cease: just yesterday, YouTube announced they will make users pay for movies, too.

My vote for now: Start with the Netflix free trial, and go on Hulu to watch shows the week they air. You know, like we used to.

When Movies Were Movies

2011-04-06T13:27:00.002-04:00

The Last Picture Show: We watch them watch Red River.

Album collectors tell you vinyl's the only way. An LP has texture, from the needle's first hit to the occasional scratch. The flaws, like leather, humanize the music; we feel the grooves, the spin. And it wasn't really in our control. You never quite get the needle exactly where the song starts.

Who remembers the days when movies were like that, too? We went to the theater to see honest-to-God film stock unreel on the screen above. I'm not opposed to digitally projected movies, which offer better consistency from theater to theater--but you notice the digital creeping in. We can see the grain in the sky, the pixels in the dark shadows.

The whole world's gone pixellated in my (brief) lifetime. I still have not seen a 3D movie in the theaters. Now you can watch Blu-rays in 3D, if you have the dollars to spend or the insatiable need to upgrade your DVD collection yet again. From my viewpoint, Blu-ray won't overtake DVD outright. The format doesn't offer nearly as much improvement as DVD did over VHS. The DVD market recognized that movies should not be chopped up to fit our televisions. Gone are the days of hideous pan-and-scan hackjobs, wearing out tapes from constant play, rewinding.

To my surprise, even the classics looked better on DVD. Some that I own (like Psycho and Notorious) are loaded with grain. But the distraction is worth it when the blacks and whites are so much richer than VHS could hope to offer. Optimal viewing needs a balance, though, and I wonder if pushing 1930s and '40s titles to Blu-ray is asking too much of them.

Yes, I'm reminicising about a shift in movie-watching that happened when I was a teenager. For almost ten years, we've readjusted our movie watching in a positive direction. DVDs gave us supplemental features, so we could bury into the movie, realizing, Hey, a movie could be worth more investment than just catching a clip on TV. And we watched films in their original aspect ratios again. How did it become acceptable to crop the movie? Who stares at Michelangelo's The Last Supper and feels satisfied with just seven disciples?

While Blu-rays and HD cable channels take us in one direction, iPods/Pads and streaming jump the other way. High-def's shinier, sleeker on the surface. The other road is convenient, portable, and quality is irreverent. But maybe they aren't so divided. I wager that high-def everything's more for technology fetishists than movie buffs, just like having all the on-the-go options. Who really watches The Fighter on a cell phone? Yet it's possible (you know, just in case...). All bases are covered. We control how and where they play. Movies are ours.

Thoughts, readers? Who's buying Blu-rays?

Next time: Netflix vs. Amazon vs. Hulu.

There Will Be Blood

2011-04-03T15:23:00.001-04:00

Review: The Merchant of Venice
Cutler Majestic Theatre, Boston
April 1, 2011

"If you prick us, do we not bleed?... And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?" Shylock utters these stinging words as he comes to collect his bond: a pound of flesh from the merchant Antonio, who cannot repay Shylock's loan on time. Modern takes on The Merchant of Venice shy from making Shylock a mere villain set on vengeance. Ever more, directors have mined from William Shakespeare's "comedy" the racism and bigotry that pervade this Venice. After all, Shylock is not the only merchant in town. Money lenders make deals left and right, yet only the Jew is punished for capitalizing on the system.

Darko Tresnjak sets his characters' troubling actions in the present, a world dominated by MacBooks and Wall Street brokers. The relentless drive of the stock market and ever-ripening technology deserve blame for the degradation of Venice. F. Murray Abraham anchors the play with his wise, human Shylock. He is eloquent but fast of tongue; quick to deal but reduced to tears by the consequences. He sees how anti-Semitism runs in the blood of Venetians, and reminds in the words above that he also bleeds. And he loses his amassed wealth, first to a daughter who steals his riches, then at the hands of Portia, who cons a courtroom to save Antonio's life.

The exact law behind Shylock's condemnation feels like a deus ex machina, but I was convinced in this production that this was deliberate. Portia willingly bends the rules, certain that fortune favors her privileged, Christian class. As a Moroccan prince fails to win her hand, she says that she wouldn't marry a man of his complexion. Even once she and her maid Nerissa are matched, they toy with their men over their rings, perpetuating the lending game.

Despite the visible mechanics, Tresnjak's staging is not too cold. Kate MacGluggage as Portia radiates warmth considering her craftiness, matched by Lucas Hall's youthful Bassanio (apparently too naive to know whether he's in love with Portia or Antonio). The more comedic roles, unfortunately, are overdone, which includes Gratiano as a grating frat-boy. Better are the dramatic moments, as when Shylock is sentenced: the cast stands silent in fixed cells of light, trapped in their fear. I remain unconvinced by the final act where the lovers reunite. Who wants comedy after such a dramatic shift? But maybe Shakespeare's playing games, too: deceiving even his audience with a happy ending.

Written on the Wind

2011-03-22T14:17:00.002-04:00

Review: Jane Eyre

If the opening credits hadn't rolled for Cary Fukunaga's new adaptation of Jane Eyre, I might have guessed I was watching Wuthering Heights. Mia Wasikowska as Jane rushes through rain-soaked moors, overtaken by despair and the unceasing storm. She reaches for the house just up the hill, but collapses in the thick heather. Only later, in flashback, do we learn how this quiet, anguished girl came within the grasp of happiness. Or did she? Fukunaga brings out all the Gothic elements of Charlotte Bronte's often filmed novel, and undercuts the hope that romance will conquer.

His film magnifies the tempestuous environment of the Brontes' works. Jane Eyre comes to Thornfield House as a governess under Edward Rochester, and must stand up to his temper and disdain. As Victorian convention dictates, he comes to express his feelings for her, despite her plain, unworldly appearance. But even their first kiss turns from tender to foreboding in Fukunaga's hands. The trees shiver about the lovers, accompanied by a melancholy violin. The natural world is cold to the humans who inhabit it.

The heavy anti-Romantic strain arises logically from Charlotte Bronte's devilish plot twist that arises during Jane and Rochester's hurried wedding. Wasikowska is an apt choice for Jane, with captivating calm and certainty that sustain the heroine through the most trying times. Jane does not lapse into victimhood, even when moors and men alike threaten to overpower her. Judi Dench as Mrs. Fairfax, the Thornhill housekeeper, can be eerie enough as she emerges from the shadows and cozies up to Jane, with an almost too-friendly twinkle in her eye. But she also provides comic relief to alleviate the ominous mood.

I'm not sure if Michael Fassbender is an ideal Rochester. He portrays his conflicted feelings toward Jane well, and plays their intimacy well. But he's more dry than arrogant in his first scenes, and too tamped down (I would say) to seem like a man capable of great passions. Perhaps, though, as Fukunaga's otherwise excellent film seems to impart, the passions are not man's but God's. The true desire of this lot is to survive.

Ketchup or Mustard?

2011-02-28T14:32:00.002-05:00

Some foods evoke strong feelings. Cilantro, for one, has passionate opponents. Then there's the following anecdote from The Washington Post, June 2009:

When President Obama and Vice President Joe Biden stepped out recently for a couple of burgers... the president asked for mustard, preferably a Dijon style, while the vice president went for ketchup.

Whether we admit it or not, we define ourselves by our place on the ketchup-mustard spectrum. I am a firm mustard-arian. We are a Far Left-leaning people, open to possibilities and varieties. Mustard ranges from yellow to dark brown, from your standard bottle of French's to Grey Poupon, from grainy deli mustard to fusion with horseradish. Lest you think I'm painting mustard as stuffy, let me remind you that it need possess no whiff of class distinction. There's hot mustard in every Chinese restaurant, and honey mustard in every Chick-fil-A. Sure, it's a demanding condiment. The full-bottle shake is necessary, especially with American yellow mustard. But a little investment is necessary for maximum sandwich gain.

Worst Halloween costumes ever.

Notice how particular the mustard user is. Obama didn't just ask for mustard; he specified his preference. How could a ketchup consumer possibly compete? Is one ketchup different than any other ketchup? Ketchup is a food of consistency, familiarity, and comfort. (I know a few people firsthand who would agree that ketchup is a "food," not just a "condiment.") The ketchup lover goes for ketchup every chance he gets. I daresay that complimentary foods (i.e. French fries) might be even be ordered by the ketchup lover just so that he may eat ketchup with them. Refer back to Biden above: the president "asked" and discussed his mustard persuasion; the vice president simply "went for ketchup." No choice necessary. Simple as pie.

And what things these lovers pair with ketchup. Mac and cheese! Scrambled eggs! Note that the ketchup lover is adventurous when he finds food for his ketchup to mate with. He may not be as culinarily conservative as I implied. But with these strange pairings, there is often a slight apologetic acknowledgment: "It's actually really good, I mean it. But I would never put ketchup on this-that-the other." An aura of veiled shame has descended upon the ketchup community, as if they were afraid to expose their true nature beyond the hotdog stand.

If Joe Biden endorses it, it's a BFD. Hopefully those Far Right ketchupers will come out, one and all (the first step is admitting...), and find some middle ground with we mustard-arians. I'm willing to believe there's room on a hamburger for both of us.

Oscar Season 2010 Round-up

2011-02-15T00:32:00.002-05:00

Though the first year of the "teens" produced few Great Films, there was consistency. The top ten at the Oscars, a pack of seldom-changing wolves throughout the award season, moved from Western to lurid thriller to little-seen indie, but all were good popcorn flicks. With the possible exception of Winter's Bone (which I have not seen), ponderous, weighty "films" were off the menu. Message boards raged over the spinning top from Inception, or the was-she-or-wasn't-she psychology of Black Swan--but in the end, both aimed for entertainment. They were no more than movies.

Take The Town. Ben Affleck never seems more at home than in Boston. He assembles an impressive ensemble for an action-packed thrill ride through the streets of Charlestown. Who cares if the apex of Charlestown crime was twenty years ago? All right, the script does indulge in Beantown stereotypes, especially Blake Lively as a white-trash townie. But Affleck embraces the adrenaline of his hometown, delivered with zest by hothead Jeremy Renner and briefly by the late Peter Postlethwaite.

Need two more hours of dropped r's? The Fighter elevates what could be a standard boxing comeback narrative into a superbly acted character piece. Christian Bale chews through the most scenery as ex-prizefighter Dicky, now a crack addict training his brother Micky Ward. Bale, along with fiesty mom-manager Melissa Leo and new supportive but tough girlfriend Amy Adams, tend to overshadow Mark Wahlberg as Micky. But Wahlberg's quietness supports Micky's struggle to find his own voice amid his rambunctious but passionate Lowell community.

King George VI seeks a tutor to regain his voice, marred by a constant public stutter, in The King's Speech. When the sublimely witty Geoffrey Rush tutors Colin Firth (an assured performance) through Pygmalion-like breathing/ shouting/swearing exercises, the picture is delightful. The conflict is largely internal, though the intrusion of deliciously sinister Guy Pearce as Edward VIII (king for a hot second) hints at the external tensions that are lightly touched on--Edward's Nazi sympathies, for instance. Director Tom Hooper avoids the air of stuffy British period films, though the wide-angle lenses used make for some odd (and overstated) cinematography that jars with the subtle work of his cast and script.

Pearce also surfaces in this year's breakout Australian hit Animal Kingdom. When Joshua Cody's mother dies, he moves in with his grandmother "Smurf" Cody and her three sons, who are notorious Melbourne criminals. Jacki Weaver is eerily maternal as "Smurf," overflowing with love but unafraid to resort to any measure to protect her family. The script shuttles back and forth, sometimes lacking in clarity, but the film spins a web of violence and mistrust. Down Under, all bets are off; Animal Kingdom has an edge 2010's big Hollywood releases can't match.

The enigmatic Banksy takes some edge off a street artist's process of creation and installation in the excellent documentary (mockumentary?) Exit through the Gift Shop. Is his subject Mr. Brainwash, an amateur filmmaker, legitimately transformed into a bonafide artist by emulating Banksy, Shepard Fairey, and the rest? Street art often has an everyman charm. But the work remains mysterious even as its creators are shown covering walls with murals at night. How else could we respect it (and should we)? Banksy seems to say, catch me if you can. I make movies, too.

Let's Hear It for PD!

2011-02-01T11:53:00.000-05:00

The world may end in 2012, according to the Mayan long-count calendar and George Lucas. But book publishers are nervous about 2019... the year of great copyright change.

Most books you read (unless you're devoted to Dickens or Wharton) were published in the last ninety years, I imagine. Probably after 1923. Everything published before 1923 in the U.S. is public domain. So you can post it on your blog, tweet entire chapters from it, give dramatic readings at cocktail parties. But everything 1923 and after is... dun dun dun... copyrighted! (More or less, if copyright was renewed. But that's a whole messy can of money-hungry worms.) F. Scott Fitzgerald's This Side of Paradise (1920) is PD; The Great Gatsby (1925) is not. This works with films, too: Do whatever you want with The Birth of a Nation (1915), but hands off Gone with the Wind (1939).

As the twentieth century rolls along, copyright law gets more and more confusing. But works from 1923 until 1977 are PD after 95 years. Once their near-century is up, we can sell bootleg copies in the streets for profit. So all those books published within 1923 will cling to 2018 desperately, then bam! Up for grabs on New Year's Day.

Let's say that Disney doesn't try to renew rights to Mickey Mouse. Let's say the 95-year rule sticks. What literary gems will the copyright tidal wave release in 2019?

Honestly, not much. Willa Cather's estate might shed a tear for A Lost Lady, which will become PD. Then in 2020, all we'll really get is E.M. Forster's A Passage to India.

But 2021 is when the floodgates really start to open. Download your free e-books of An American Tragedy, Mrs. Dalloway, Manhattan Transfer, and The Great Gatsby. And soon it's on to The Sun Also Rises, Elmer Gantry, Death Comes for the Archbishop, and To the Lighthouse.

Yes, folks, it's time to plan your Oscar-winning adaptations of these classics. (Unless Baz Luhrmann gets there first.) Just keep the PD on the DL around Mickey.

Brazen Saddles

2011-01-29T15:10:00.000-05:00

Review: True Grit

Courage, tenacity, reckless determination: just a few implications of the Coens' newest film's title. The brothers' quarter-century body of work speaks to these qualities; their films throttle between comical eccentricity and bleakness verging on horror. Some are sure-headed while others quaver (often the lighter films like Burn after Reading and The Ladykillers). But they persevere into the curiouser and curiouser Wonderlands of small towns and the Wild West.

Their movies are masculine, focused on man's conviction. The film stock is often grainy, a deliberate "indie" touch. Their casts can verge on caricature, laced with colorful tics and regional vernacular. So where does True Grit land in this (simplified, of course) look at their career? It's the second adaptation of Charles Portis' novel, and a surprise major hit at the box office. Despite the prominence of notorious marshal Rooster Cogburn, True Grit is a woman's story.

Mattie looks back from middle age on her one experience riding with the men: her quest to avenge her father's murder. A girl of firmly braided hair and near-ministerial tongue, she hires Cogburn to hunt down the culprit Tom Chaney, and resolves to accompany him. Out in the wilderness, Mattie sees her Old Testament thinking realized with the eye-for-an-eye violence of their journey. Hailee Steinfeld plays Mattie Ross as an adult unaware she's only fourteen, or that she's entering a man's world. As her travel companions, Jeff Bridges and Matt Damon make ideal foils. Bridges is eager to get his hands dirty; he sputters and mumbles with comic panache, then drops the swagger instantly when the going gets rough. Damon plays the level-headed fool LaBoeuf with dignity, with a sweet paternal protectiveness toward Mattie. The story falters a little when they reach Chaney at last, the encounter too chance and the villain bland. But it's back on track with the requisite good guy-bad guy showdown.

I watched John Ford's 1939 film Stagecoach, possibly the first great Western, just after True Grit. Many reviewers find the Coens' work here more traditional than usual. They honor the genre, but with the toll that seventy years of Westerns have taken. Casualties are few in Stagecoach, and the horses are not sacrificed. But though True Grit's body count is lower than most Coen efforts, their contemporary lens records how random violence can be. Even the innocents who are spared will be wounded. Having grit wins shootouts, just like the good old days, but no one escapes the consequences.

The Razzie Hunter (Where's The Tourist?)

2011-01-24T11:20:00.003-05:00

Yawn. Ten nominees for Best Picture, and at least nine of the ten films are already locks. Mark my words, this week's noms will hold few surprises. What to look forward to instead?

THE 31ST ANNUAL RAZZIE AWARDS (with MY predictions)

WORST PICTURE
The Bounty Hunter
The Last Airbender
Sex and the City 2
Twilight Saga: Eclipse
Vampires Suck

Of all these films, Jennifer Aniston and Gerard Butler should be the most ashamed. We knew what to expect from the rest. And why is The Bounty Hunter always on my Netflix home page? Shockingly, it's the highest rated of these five on IMDB (with a lustrous 5.2).

WORST ACTOR
Jack Black, Gulliver's Travels
Gerard Butler, The Bounty Hunter
Ashton Kutcher, Killers and Valentine's Day
Taylor Lautner, Eclipse and Valentine's Day
Robert Pattinson, Eclipse and Remember Me

Hard to blame Valentine's Day or Eclipse on one single actor. But don't you get the feeling Ashton has Punk'd us once too often? This could be an award for career lowbrow acting (a.k.a. Where did your That 70's Show potential go?).

WORST ACTRESS
Jennifer Aniston, The Bounty Hunter and The Switch
Miley Cyrus, The Last Song
The Four "Gal Pals", Sex and the City 2
Megan Fox, Jonah Hex
Kristen Stewart, Eclipse

Megan Fox could win for her Mickey Rourke tattoo. But I'm giving it to the veterans. Ladies, do you need a new swimming pool? A third house in Maui?

WORST SUPPORTING ACTOR
Billy Ray Cyrus, The Spy Next Door
George Lopez, Marmaduke, The Spy Next Door, and Valentine's Day
Dev Patel, The Last Airbender
Jackson Rathbone, The Last Airbender and Eclipse
Rob Schneider, Grown Ups

Rob Schneider fills me with a rare hatred. He's long overdue; his last (well-deserved) win was in 2005.

WORST SUPPORTING ACTRESS
Jessica Alba, The Killer Inside Me, Little Fockers, Machete, and Valentine's Day
Cher, Burlesque
Liza Minnelli, Sex and the City 2
Nicola Peltz, The Last Airbender
Barbra Streisand, Little Fockers

It's seventies pop diva reunion night at the Razzies. Alas, Cher, Liza, and Barbra, Ms. Alba has earned this one for quantity alone.

WORST DIRECTOR
Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer, Vampires Suck
Michael Patrick King, Sex and the City 2
M. Night Shyamalan, The Last Airbender
David Slade, Eclipse
Sylvester Stallone, The Expendables

Stallone is the most honored Worst Actor at the Razzies, so he could sweep this category. But don't underestimate the soul-drenching power of the "Shyamalan groan."

WORST SCREENPLAY
The Last Airbender
Little Fockers
Sex and the City 2
Eclipse
Vampires Suck

So many sequels and adaptations. If Robert De Niro, Blythe Danner, Dustin Hoffman, Barbra Streisand, and even Ben Stiller wanted a surefire hit, couldn't they work with Judd Apatow or Pixar?

Dear readers, I am proud to say I haven't seen a single movie nominated for a Razzie this year. All in all, this list is repetitive, with little anticipation like last year's Sandra Bullock speech. And Brendan Fraser was totally snubbed!

Danny Boy, You Must Go and I Must Bide

2011-01-19T17:28:00.001-05:00

Review: Rabbit Hole

Fifteen minutes in, I heard rustling behind me. Soon enough, a mother had scooped up her bags and headed out of the theater with her ten-year-old son. I suppose that there are still people in this world who go blindly to the movies, who buy tickets to Rabbit Hole assuming it's for kids, then are surprised when the film starts. Those who knew the premise of John Cameron Mitchell's film, I think, might also have registered some surprise at its often sunny execution.

Mitchell gained cult status for being outrageous, or at least boyishly defiant: the drag-rock spectacle Hedwig and the Angry Inch and overtly sexual Shortbus were his first films. He handles David Lindsay-Abaire's scenes with the restraint that Ben Brantley noted in the original stage script: "This anatomy of grief doesn't so much jerk tears as tap them."

Eight months after her four-year-old son, Danny, is struck by a car, Becca Corbett (played by Nicole Kidman) struggles to find direction. Lindsay-Abaire avoids the obvious melodramatic tics that could have marred or sentimentalized Becca's recovery. Though she and her husband Howie (played by Aaron Eckhart) fall into shouting matches, we feel an underlying stability in their marriage. But they keep their secrets: Becca follows the high-school-aged driver who caused the accident, due more to chance than his negligence; Howie smokes pot with a friend from group counseling. The film focuses closely on the Corbett family, who has been sidelined with tragedy before.

Nicole Kidman, an actress of natural restraint herself, deserves praise for producing this adaptation, one that required four distributors. She suits smaller projects better than lavish studio remakes. The cast has adopted her instinct to internalize. Kidman's dry pinches of humor flesh out a woman unconvinced by the "God talk" in group, and rankled by her mother's (Dianne Wiest) comparisons to her own grief. Eckhart and Wiest are sympathetic and understated, and Miles Teller is especially refreshing as the bright but scared driver. If much of the drama feels small and familiar, Kidman and company never overplay their hand. "Somewhere out there, I'm having a good time," Becca confesses, as if allowing the audience to feel Rabbit Hole's unexpected positive energy.

The Never-ending Story

2010-12-31T18:32:00.001-05:00

Review: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 1

Raise your hand if you rolled your eyes when Warner Bros. announced that the seventh Harry Potter book would be split in two. By the end of the franchise, I will have shelled out around sixty dollars for eight matinees, adjusting for inflation and omitting repeat visits. Imagine those paychecks. But as A.O. Scott noted, the Harry Potter film series has also been good to the audience.

If the movies aren't J.K. Rowling's originals, we have much to be thankful for. Chief among them is the studio's commitment. Despite a revolving door of directors, the actors were able to inhabit their characters across eight films, with the late Richard Harris the lone exception. Released over a ten-year period, the films mostly allowed Hogwarts students to age with their characters.

Just think of the mediocrity of other recent franchises; the Narnia films come to mind. The Potter success came at the same time as the books (and the midnight releases, costume parties, collegiate Quidditch...). After the first Harry Potter film, the rest never felt overwhelmed by CGI and special-effects wizardry. Warner Bros. was smart not to convert the seventh film to 3-D.

Good choice: Deathly Hallows, Part 1 is a quieter adventure. It makes its emotional impact by placing the three young heroes in the real Muggle world for large stretches. Stripped of constant reliance on magic, this movie lets itself be morose and even unexpected. Harry and Hermione burst into spontaneous dance to the radio, their only window to the world in their isolation. A London coffee shop shootout, with eerie silence exploding into Tarantino-sudden violence, and the Ministry of Magic infiltration show the films at their best.

Some of my generosity may be rescinded with the eighth installment. The final fifty pages do not quite live up to all that comes before. But for now, I'll enjoy this intermediate film, a film of anticipation, which satisfies (oddly enough) by continuing.

Bing Crosby's White, Weird Christmas

2010-12-23T18:32:00.000-05:00

Everyone dreams of a white Christmas. That is, until they are sitting in Logan Airport (as I am), enduring gate changes and flight delays.

But earlier this week I watched White Christmas (1954) for the first time, and zoned out a lot to think about snow. White Christmas has the most famous standard ever standard-ed, some Irving Berlin (including an homage to "Abraham"), and Vera-Ellen's freakish skinny legs, but I wondered if it was a classic for the right reasons.

Then Bing Crosby opened his mouth. Not to sing, though that's also worthwhile. But I'm convinced nobody has ever talked like Bing Crosby in White Christmas. Granted, I haven't seen all of Bing's ouerve. If his lines here are an accurate representation, though, Bing is the lovechild of Dashiell Hammett and Dr. Seuss.

Danny Kaye: I guess I just laid an egg.
Bing: An egg? Brother, you laid a Vermont volleyball!

Danny Kaye: I don't seem to have any cash.
Bing: Where'd you leave that? In your snood?

Does anyone still wear a snood? And when did Vermont reign supreme in the volleyball championships? Other classics:

I don't know what you see in this tall drink of charged water, but after you get to know him he's almost endurable.

You're lucky! You might have been stuck with this weirdsmobile for life!

The thing about Bing is that he was possibly the squarest man in America. Or so we remember him, with his pleasant boo-doo-doo baritone. But he also experimented with jazz and black music early in his career. Let's not forget that he crooned in blackface in five (!) movies. Uncomfortable now, no question, though I bet he felt some kind of musical hipness just by dressing up and getting down with it.

He's always playing himself, but it's a self that's always in character. He constantly dons roles within his films. But he's so genial and, I'll say it again, pleasant on the ears that those characters always seemed just like Bing. The Bing we could identify with. And so it's easy to overlook that he was an odd duck. Or that he tried very hard to be an odd duck. Even in Holiday Inn (1942), he was spitting out lines like "take a slug out of the mug."

Is he going for Tough Guy? Is he trying out Cool? Somehow, it makes my days merry that normal old Bing Crosby himself was a weirdsmobile.

Someone Tell Me, When Is It My Turn?

2010-12-09T00:10:00.002-05:00

Review: Black Swan

When was the last time we witnessed a truly magnificent horror film? The kind that makes you squirm in your seat, bite your nails, and grip the armrest? Darron Aronofsky's Black Swan, a thriller that elevates ballet to Grand Guignol intensity, offers one of the most exhilarating visions of sustain terror in recent memory. Given Aronofsky's emphasis on fingernails, you might not want to chew yours.

His protege is Natalie Portman, who has rarely been given the chance to play a full-fledged woman before. Over the course of a strenuous performance, she breaks free from her girlish cocoon. She plays Nina, a ballerina of technical excellence who is hired for Swan Lake in a dual role: the demure White Swan, a natural fit, and the seductive Black Swan. The company's director (a sinuous Vincent Cassel) pushes her toward letting go of her rigidity. But in her drive for perfection, she slowly transforms from controlled and disciplined to violently reckless.

Beyond her unquenched lust for the role of the Black Swan, two women propel her toward paranoia. Mila Kunis plays her nemesis Lily, a fellow ballerina who seems to befriend Nina only to steal her part. Kunis meets the challenge of a character whose every enticing smile might be imagined. While Nina battles to keep her role, she also lives with her controlling mother (an excellent Barbra Hershey), who was once a dancer herself.

Aronofsky flirts dangerously close with parody, seeing just how far he can push the horror-genre elements. Shadows give way to lurkers; doors slam and wounds bleed. As Lily adopts the movements of the Black Swan, her offstage life is overwhelmed with hallucinations and self-harm. Even though it fulfills the horror-movie quotient for jump scenes, the film locates the emotional horror of unceasing dedication to an artistic ideal. Lily becomes consumed; the script mirrors with heavy doses of manipulation.

But these gimmicks speak to the glitz and the grittiness of the ballet world. Members of the industry toil for the opportunity to exhaust themselves physically and mentally. The scariest moments are visceral; danger lurks behind every curtain naturally, but we squirm most at mutilation to hands and toes. Black Swan is a real talent showcase for Aronofsky and Portman, as well as a splashy, riveting exercise in genre.

The Great American Songbook: "Bridge Over Troubled Water"

2010-11-30T08:14:00.000-05:00

Written by: Paul Simon

First performed by: Art Garfunkel, 1970

For my Great American Songbook series, I try to spotlight songs that have become standards, not associated with just one artist. This latest entry in my desert island canon, though, was as iconic for its performers as for its timeliness. Released in January 1970 on Simon and Garfunkel's final studio album, the song captured the end of their relationship (until modern reunion concerts) and the end of the sixties.

This year's end is fast approaching. Songs like this always seem at home to me over the holidays, joining seasonal weepers like "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas." Paul Simon penned an anthem to a country losing its identity, while senseless wars raged on... sound familiar? Meanwhile, the tsuris over who would sing--Simon or Garfunkel--led to bitterness and the dissolution of a thirteen-year partnership. Their final album was due to have twelve tracks, but they cut it short bickering over the last song.

Once it went big, the usual suspects ate it up. Johnny Cash's cover, in the lowest key imaginable, gets points on simplicity; Simon's composition sounds like a back-porch church-town strummer. Aretha Franklin amped up the production with background singers and organ (sometimes accompanying herself). She changes the last verse to "Sail on, Silverboy": is this suddenly about romantic heartbreak? Then there's Elvis giving a straightforward cover, few stylistic additions, with room to breathe.

These are all fine, catapulted the song into the public consciousness, but it's tough to surpass the tension of Garfunkel's original take. The drum hit going into the third verse, like explosions; the strings building to the last chord. Heard in a demo recording by Garfunkel, the final verse was more passive originally, offering some unknown "it" as a crutch rather than the speaker:

Sail on, Silvergirl, sail on high

Your time has come to shine
Put your faith on me

And if it shines, I'll see the sun

Upon your bedroom blinds

Like a bridge over troubled water

Let it be your guide

Like a bridge over troubled water

Let it be your guide

The recorded version concludes, "I will ease your mind." A more proactive statement in the midst of uncertainty.

Mirror, Mirror on the Wall

2010-11-17T20:33:00.003-05:00

Review: Circle Mirror Transformation
Wimberly Theatre, Boston
November 10, 2010

The Wasserstein Prize, named after the late playwright Wendy Wasserstein, was supposed to be awarded this week. Every year, the prize goes to an upcoming female playwright, 32 or younger. But no award was given, causing an outcry (at least in the theater world) that the committee is suggesting no young female playwrights are worthy. What about Annie Baker, some have asked?

Baker, who is 29, won an Obie Award for her two Off-Broadway plays Circle Mirror Transformation and The Aliens. Now Boston has taken up Baker in residence, more or less, with "The Shirley, VT Plays," a trio of small-cast plays set in a small Vermont town. Though I didn't make it to all three, I caught Circle Mirror Transformation in its final week, and was impressed at the confidence and control of the author's voice.

Baker assembles five residents of Shirley, Vermont, who are taking part in an acting class led by the ebullient Marty, co-director of the community center and likely a former thespian (played with gusto by Besty Aidem). Part of Baker's charm is finding humor in the actorly rituals and exercises that fill these classes without poking too much fun. Marty's approach to theater is earnest and ebullient, though she is challenged after a few weeks by the gawky, near-silent teenager Lauren: "When are we going to do some acting?"

The play glides carefully forward without being pushed. Exchanges on break or after class set off small but electric frissons. Slowly the players who seem most together (including ex-actress Theresa, in the most grounded performance by Nadia Bowers) lose their balance, thrown off-kilter by the weight of these innocent classes. As weeks pass, the ensemble among the five breaks down, through relationships forged and failed, marriages rocked, and secrets shared. But the cast is unified, no doubt from Melia Bensussen's steady, calming direction.

Despite Lauren's plea, no genuine on-stage acting occurs. They pass around sounds and gestures, lie still and count up to ten, re-enact their childhood bedrooms or parents' arguments. Most damaging of all, they share anonymous secrets ranging from porn addiction to being in love with a classmate. Baker records all these strange intimacies without passing judgment. She discovers the worth of these theatrical efforts: not to transport but to remind us.

Have It Your Way?

2010-11-11T23:35:00.000-05:00

I'm all for customization. My job is in custom textbooks, for goodness' sake. But yesterday I'm in Wendy's, and between looking at the menu and ordering a baked potato, I overhear one of those customers.

It's safe to say the man's a few cards short of a full deck. But when he starts by asking the price of every item he's stewing over, I expect trouble. And isn't it sad that I expect this sort of thing when I'm downtown? His next point of contention: "I don't know if I want fries with my combo." The cashier suggests a salad. More grousing, then the fries are back on the table. The cashier rings up a chicken sandwich.

"How do you know what I want?" he asks. Because he ordered a number 6, and that's the sandwich in the number 6 combo, she tells him. "But no, no, no," he says. "I don't get to pick what I want on it." It comes with lettuce, tomato, and mayo. "No, I don't want that. How come I don't get to pick? Right next door, over at Burger King, it's 'Have It Your Way'. But now you're telling me I have to have it your way. I'm the customer! I want it my way."

There are several possibilities. One, he's never been to Wendy's, which includes lettuce, tomato, and mayo on everything. Two, he's never been to a fast food restaurant. Otherwise, he would know to request what he wanted up front.

Then at the theatre afterward, a woman barges into her row in a huff, winter coat in hand. The coat check is closed for the evening, and she is appalled. I remember her exact words as she sits down: "This is inhuman." Ma'am, your coat is the size of an igloo, so I understand the inconvenience, but is inhuman the best word here? On a grand universal level, it's slightly above unwrapping candies during the show.

She was agitated because she couldn't have it her way. Well, I would prefer if my audiences didn't shuffle around noisily or text, but part of buying a ticket means that I have to share the space with others. Play nicely. As the last line of The Apartment goes, "Shut up and deal." It's not about doing it My Way. That philosophy's already killed a few in the Philippines, anyway.

The Great American Songbook: Unchained Melody

2010-10-31T22:25:00.002-04:00

Written by: Alex North, Hy Zaret

First performed by: Todd Duncan, 1955

Since tonight is Halloween, I'm treating readers to a great American song in honor of Ghost. All we need to hear is that first "Oh, my love, my darling," and we are transported back twenty years, when Patrick Swayze and Demi Moore made pottery erotic.

But "Unchained Melody" was letting loose long before 1990. Alex North, film composer for A Streetcar Named Desire and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, was urged to write a song into his score for Unchained, a 1955 prison movie. (Now you understand the title, in all its creativity.) He teamed up with Hy Zaret, who was rumored to have written the lyrics for a girl when he was sixteen. Listen to how Todd Duncan (original star of the opera Porgy and Bess) croons it in his quasi-operatic fashion:

As expected, pottery wheels weren't spinning yet. The singer (a prison inmate) pined for freedom, not for sex: "I've hungered for your touch / A long, lonely time. / And time goes by so slowly / And time can do so much." Motown knew how to translate Alex North's jazz-flavored melody into a "Melody" that topped the R&B charts. Both Al Hibbler and Roy Hamilton (both videos linked) recorded North's ballad, now expanded to a full-length hit with busily swooping strings.

Still, Moore and Swayze might have spun urns in silence if not for The Righteous Brothers. Their 1965 cover has prevailed as the radio go-to, even if it owes a debt to Roy Hamilton's tremulous vocals. Bobby Hatfield, one of two Righteous Brothers, sang solo on the track, pouring out melismas and caressing every vowel. He even re-recorded the ballad after its recurrence in Ghost, insisting his falsetto had endured over time. It was strong to start with; listen to this live performance, which ends on a high G:

What keeps "Unchained Melody" in the Great American Songbook for me is that resilience. There's urgency and desperation in the lyrics: "Lonely rivers sigh / 'Wait for me, wait for me.'" The Righteous Brothers' cover is removed from the original anguish, but its sensuality convinces as the song builds to a full-voiced climax. Many artists continued to cover it, including Elvis in his later days. One thing's for sure: we haven't lost this loving feeling.

Though you might lose it looking at the album cover.

500 Million People Like This

2010-10-26T08:00:00.001-04:00

Review: The Social Network

I remember friends coercing me into joining this Facebook website my first month of college. It was fall 2004, and the gimmick was that you could compare your interests (say, that The Godfather Part II was your favorite movie) with other users. But instead of spawning campus-wide movie nights, Facebook has grown into a grimly indispensable social sphere. Now, in a truly poetic turn of fate, Facebook users will be supplementing their profiles with The Social Network, a savvy modern thriller of wits and web-smarts rather than bank heists or shoot-outs.

When the project was announced, it was hard to foresee The Social Network as more than a marketing gizmo, a movie-of-the-week. But this prognosis underestimated the team of screenwriter Aaron Sorkin and director David Fincher, as well as a top-notch cast led by Jesse Eisenberg. Sorkin is an answer to calls of why don't they write pictures like that anymore?, a holdover from the screwball days tossing off fast-paced, scalpel-sharp dialogue that illuminates the Harvard hauteur and incisiveness.

Mark Zuckerberg and his allies (soon to be enemies) inhabit the dingy dormitories and social aspirations of this Harvard community, and all are in their own way moved by the exclusivity and their entitlement of Bacchanalian fantasies like "finals clubs." Everything's vying not for connection but for betterment. Soon Zuckerberg, along with co-founder and CFO Eduardo Saverin, has launched his own website for the who's who: Harvard e-mail addresses only for the first run of Facebook. But as with successful business ventures, the end game is expansion; Facebook moves from college to college at dizzying speed, thanks to marketing guru and infamous Napster founder Sean Parker (played by eternal frat-boy Justin Timberlake).

Fincher's directoral hand is felt most in the eerie social atmosphere--the physical, non-web-based, one. The camera spies on cheerless finals club meetings, back-alley tete a tetes, and Parker's seductive Facebook parties with menace. Though the Harvard students manage to create a phenomenon and become billionaires, the film reminds us that they haven't escaped the non-stop collegian parties they longed to join. The only character who sees past the Facebook zeitgeist is Saverin, the co-founder who is ousted when Parker proves better at securing investment capital. The film doesn't try to take sides--business is business. But thanks to Andrew Garfield's earnest performance, it's hard not to feel for Saverin, betrayed by flesh-and-blood friends for online ones.

The film is not just social commentary. The ironies of Facebook friending are well-noted already. And claims of misogyny, though intentional, aren't entirely forgivable: a female second-year law associate comes across much more naively than she should. The Social Network works primarily as intrigue, showing how they got there and how tenuous the climb was. Eisenberg doesn't try to cull favor as Zuckerberg. He projects his superiority with a grimace, a permanent non-smile that hints at the insecurity beneath. What was it all for? Sorkin's supposition that it was a girl all along feels superfluous, yet it's great to see Zuckerberg longing for connection at the end. Even as the creator of the world's largest social network, he still wants to be included.

Where My Mind Went Listening to Mahler

2010-10-15T08:52:00.002-04:00

The Boston Symphony Orchestra began its 2010-2011 season last week, and I saw two consecutive Thursday night concerts. Each featured a symphony by Gustav Mahler (1860-1911), a late Romantic composer infamous for his bombast. Now, if you've ever seen a Mahler symphony, let alone two back-to-back, you know what to expect. They are long. Over eighty minutes long. And even when one enjoys the music, one's mind tends to wander. Imagine this interior monologue (condensed, of course):

Movement I. I'm glad to see James Levine has recovered. What was the face he just made at the first violins? Did they screw up before they even started playing? Ahh, the opening fanfare; I forgot how simple Mahler is. Wait... simple? What am I saying? There are enough musicians on that stage to fill Rhode Island. I wonder how they all fit. Perhaps Symphony Hall removed the first few rows of chairs. These seats are terribly creaky. I wish that kid in front of me wouldn't bob his head to the beat. Is there a beat?

And it's over. What a swell symp... oh. That was just the first movement.

Movement II. This second movement is even darker than the first. Listen to those trills, the horn solos, the high violin passages. The program notes say "tempestuous." I bet it will rain when I leave. And is there an umbrella in my bag? I can't check now. The girl next to me is practically having an affair with my armrest. Why are there more empty seats for Mahler than there were for the first half? Did everyone else get the memo about how long this is?

In the last Mahler symphony I went to (No. 6), there was a cowbell. More cowbell, please? More cowbell?

Movement III. Thank goodness, the seventeenth movement. I'll get home before tomorrow. I should go into work early tomorrow, and take the afternoon off. Or maybe I will sleep in and show up at noon; my back's been a little stiff. Grown man behind me who is kneeing my chair repeatedly--you are not helping.

The ushers are rushing about in the corner. Hope that old man's all right. Is he breathing? If someone kicked it at Symphony Hall, would the concert stop? He could be wailing in agony, but you can't hear it over that music. Oh for the love of Mahler, man in Row L, get your middle-aged knee out of my seat cushion.

Movement IV. Groceries. I didn't buy groceries this week. Groceries require a whole movement of thought.

Movement V. The finale, at last! How come it took longer for the paramedics to arrive than the last movement? At least the old man's walking out. He's probably hungry. So am I, come to think of it. Maybe I shouldn't go to the gym before BSO concerts; too much of an appetite. Who was it that thought Mahler made pastries? Just down around the corner, come get your piece of Mahler's. I see the last page on the stands. Maybe it's a trick. Maybe there's an encore hidden behind their folders. Elaine Stritch thought Mahler was a baker, that's it!

Why is everyone rising? Is all this clapping written in? No: the symphony's over! We made it to the other side. You'll have to excuse me, fawning seat-neighbor. I have to get out of here presto. I've been thinking of nothing but Mahler for the past two hours.

For your reference: Elaine Stritch on Mahler.

My Short-Lived Spelling Bee History

2010-09-30T21:32:00.002-04:00

S-E-S-Q-U-I-P-E-D-A-L-I-A-N. Sesquipedalian. Given to the use of long words. Also describing long words. Also describing itself. I wish it were a more accurate descriptor for myself.

I went to the Lyric Stage Company production of The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee two weeks ago, and it reignited my lost spelling-bee glory. Imagined glory, at least. To quote Marlon Brando, I coulda been a contender. (Of course, Blogger's spell check program dashes its red underline under "coulda" the moment the fingers type it. It's challenging me: "Are you really serious about spelling?")

One of the best aspects of Spelling Bee, the musical, was how it entered the audience. From the thrust stage and volunteer audience spellers to the trophies hanging around the exits, I felt almost immersed in the spelling competition. What would it have been like to compete in this rigmarole bee, where I might face a word like either phylactery or cow? (The judge's sentence: "Please spell cow.") What if I had gotten sesquipedalian? When I looked the word up online, I realized one of my e's should have been an i. It's always the vowels that trip me up. No trophy today.

Nor in third grade, the first year I remember our class participating in the spelling bee. You rarely hold on to the answers you get right when you're growing up, only your mistakes. Like when I had a test with the word "transparent." Choosing between pictures of a rather masculine-looking mother and a window, I settled on the woman. Maybe I was ahead of my time. But though confident in my spelling skills, acing vocabulary quizzes every week except for the zucchini incident, I never made it to the top. A minor victory in my third grade class led to my shot at the school-wide bee. They held it in my kindergarten classroom. Perhaps that's why I choked on valorous. When I asked for the definition, I imagined a mountain valley, replete with lush gardens and running waters. Two l's later, the buzzer binged.

Fourth grade remains a mystery. We lined up and one by one took our seats; my return to the school bee was eclipsed. In fifth grade, I got knocked out early, like a boxer who forgot which glove was which. "Waistband," the teacher called out. I was smart enough to know it was a compound word, but the meaning completely slipped my mind. You couldn't call for definitions in the class round--only in the bigger leagues. As I clutched my hands in cruel irony around my waist, I spelled: W-A-S-T-E. Was the word really wasteland? Had I misheard?

Needless to say, I wasted my elementary school years. And sixth grade too, where I made the fatal mistake of skipping a letter and trying to go back for it. I knew hurricane had two r's! Or maybe it was tsunami. A disaster either way. Then came seventh grade, and I needed to prove my mettle. Maybe harder words would get my wheels cranking. Round and round they went at first; I moved into the school-wide bee on account of carousel. Side by side with good friends and good spellers, I lasted five rounds. The person before me started jeopardize with a g. Rookie mistake. When my turn came, I saw what a fool I was for gloating. My word (whatever it was) also ended in -ize. But I had been so gobsmacked by the unfortunate g that I didn't listen to the end of his word. Now here I was, bouncing back and forth between -ize and -ise. One's British, one's American. I was somewhere in the Atlantic, on the verge of glory or grief.

I never reached a higher echelon of spelling. Even though I chose the s over the z, the four remaining seventh-graders all crashed and burned. Though I find vowels much trickier, that's the third way I'd lost the farm on consonants. Unlike in the musical, there was no juice box awaiting me. Just a certificate for best speller in the grade, tied five ways. A valorous end, I guess.

Words I looked up while writing this: Sesquipedalian. Phylactery. Waistband (just in case).

Applause for the Clowns

2010-09-17T09:07:00.002-04:00

Review: A Little Night Music
Walter Kerr Theater, New York
September 11, 2010

When Bernadette Peters and Elaine Stritch were announced as the replacements for A Little Night Music, anticipation was high. Isn't it bliss, it seemed, to have two prime interpreters of Stephen Sondheim's work appearing in one of his shows again? Two thrilling moments happened when I returned to the Walter Kerr. The first was a collective hush as the clarinet began "Send in the Clowns." The second was a sigh of relief: Elaine Stritch remembered her lines.

From other reports, this isn't always the case. Time takes a toll on the memory, as Sondheim duly noted in his lyrics. "Remember?" an omnipresent vocal quintet sings as they fill the roles of narrators, servants, a theater troupe. And when Madame Armfeldt sings "Liaisons," recounting the extravagant affairs she held as a young courtesan with kings and dukes, she searches between verses for the next: "Where was I, where was I? Oh, yes."

Now 84, Stritch hasn't lost her spit-and-vinegar attitude, nor her razor-sharp timing. She finds unexpected laughs, with perhaps an ad-lib or two, but also poignancy. Her predecessor, Angela Lansbury, had a crisp, Old World haughtiness camouflaging the tenderness beneath. Stritch seems cognizant of death, that the parade has passed before her eyes. She started on Broadway as Ethel Merman's standby, and what a relief to see the old girl's still got it.

Bernadette Peters was last seen in two Merman revivals, Annie Get Your Gun and Gypsy. Though she impressed in an unlikely turn as Rose, Peters is a more natural fit as touring actress Desiree Armfeldt. Her Desiree stays an actress off-stage, even around her old flame, middle-aged lawyer Frederick Egerman (Alexander Hanson, still giving a relaxed but confident performance). But as the inevitability of losing her lover sets in, her facade melts, setting up a "Send in the Clowns" for the ages. Formerly sung by the vulpine Catherine Zeta-Jones, the song now centers on the deep regret of "losing my timing this late in my career."

My opinion of the reduced orchestra and the younger members of the cast has not changed. But the two new actresses's performances alleviate some of the production's Bergman-esque chill with an added dose of comedy, which infects the other players. In place of lavishness, we get truth: from an old woman who winks at death to an actress worried she's past her prime. Make way for the clowns--they're finally here.

The Show Mustn't Go On

2010-09-10T07:44:00.001-04:00

Know how Amazon.com loves to sell you great deals you didn't know you wanted? The online seller (that maybe I visit once a day; maybe I have a problem) sent me an e-mail about Nip/Tuck: The Complete Series, daring me to turn them down. But you bought Mad Men, their theory goes, so of course you want Nip/Tuck too.

Oh, Amazon. The honest truth about my relationship with that frothy, overcooked soap opera is that there isn't one. Nip/Tuck and I parted ways seasons ago. Maybe the blame falls on me. I have expectations for TV shows. Like logic and character development. Clearly Nip/Tuck never aspired to the dramatic/nostalgic heights of Mad Men. But halfway through its run, I realized it didn't aspire to much at all. Shock factor, sure. But after separating conjoined twins, Christian and Sean's menage a trois with a prostitute resembling Sean's wife, Julia's near-murder of her mother, Matt and Kimber's drug-addled marriage, Gina's post-climax fall to her death... and of course, the incest... the territory was covered.

Oh right, and Matt was a mime who robbed convenience stores.

Originally the show was outrageous and grotesque, but it didn't take itself so seriously. The fatal move was relocating to Los Angeles, which only magnified its journey toward superficiality. If you're starting from the beginning, don't move with McNamara-Troy. Other TV shows have suffered the same fate when they jumped ship. Weeds began as a jaunty suburban satire, but the call of the Mary Jane blurred the creators' vision. Suddenly, in season four, the show has been reborn in Mexico after Nancy Botwin's drug ring burned her California suburb in a blazing wildfire.

Let's not forget Entourage, which has always been immersed in L.A. superficiality. But when I tuned in again last season, it was as if the creators hadn't felt the recession during their hiatus. Vince's first dramatic challenge was to buy new cars. And after Sushi-gate, it's hard to enjoy Jeremy Piven quite as much. Like Nip/Tuck and Weeds, I cut it off right there. No patch or gum required for quitting.

When I tuned back in this season to see if the groove was back, the hubbub was Vince's hair. Yes, dear readers, the plot revolved around a haircut. The dramatic tension? Movie re-shoots! What will he tell the director? What about his agent? If only Billy Wilder had thought to give Norma Desmond a new bob, just imagine how much greater Sunset Boulevard would be.

The season-changing hairdo. Everything you know is a lie.

TV shows these days jump the shark so easily. How many cast members will sleep together? How many children will have tragic deaths? Countless other shows (Hung, True Blood, Rescue Me, Grey's Anatomy) lost their integrity or never had any and vanished from my viewing schedule. I ask you readers: when did you sense your TV obsession was going downhill?

Murder, She Wrote: Me and Agatha Christie

2010-08-28T13:33:00.001-04:00

I'm obsessed with murder. Nothing gets me more than a gripping whodunit, a murder mystery that takes us from corpse to culprit with all the swiftness that a good, juicy offing should have. Why are murder mysteries so ghoulishly fun anyway?

When I was ten, my parents took me to see Agatha Christie's The Mousetrap in Toronto, which is the longest running play in theater history in its London incarnation. And from then, trapped I was. I can't say I've read Christie's oeuvre, but I'd wager on twenty out of her eighty detective novels. It's hard to remember exactly which ones. Most are works of instant thrills, to be read on pins and needles amid the guns and daggers. She hardly ever strays from a tried and true formula: we meet the cast, one meets an untimely demise, and in swoops the detective for interrogations, clues, epiphanies, and the explication. None of her mysteries are left unsolved. That wouldn't be very British of her.

Like afternoon tea, Christie's books feel punctual. The train to murder takes off and arrives exactly on schedule, with all loose ends tidied up and no lingering sentiments except discouragement that, once again, we've been bested. I have never successfully deduced the solution to the crime, which is precisely how the author intended. But reading more of her novels helps understand their structure, the frequent fake-outs, which details will resurface as clues for Hercule Poirot or Miss Marple.

The murder mystery that's most rewarding, I find, is the most lighthearted. The more disconnected our emotions are from the murder, the more potential arises for comedy and social critique. Perhaps this is why I prefer Agatha Christie to the endless CSI and Law and Order gristmill. At least Dame Agatha has fun, writing with the panache of Julia Child frosting a cake.

The urban crime dramas that flood television these days take murder so seriously. Their victims often deal with abuse and sexual crimes; the solution becomes faux-technical, favoring lab inventory over invention. Even the detectives by season ten will face hardship in their own lives. Hercule Poirot, on the other hand, remains as infallible as his mustache. The Christie novels--and often their adaptations--are comedies of manners. Sidney Lumet, who directed the 1974 adaptation of Murder on the Orient Express, even said he took on the murderous script because he wanted something gay.

Note: Spoilers ahead.

Christie's most-remembered murders tend to have exceptional conclusions. Though the butler done it (or some equally incidental character) in some, this isn't always the case. The title of And Then There Were None rings true. All ten visitors to Indian Island die, even the murderer. Only a treatise in a bottle reveals how he did it. In Murder on the Orient Express, Hercule Poirot unveils that all twelve passengers plotted together to kill their victim, and all go free when he elects not to tell the police. Or try Curtain, the final Hercule Poirot novel, in which the detective reveals postmortem that he was the killer. Then there's Witness for the Prosecution, a short story later turned into a play and Billy Wilder's 1957 film, probably the strongest case for the Dame on film. The man accused, then set free by the court, turns out to be the murderer after all.

Double bluffs aside, Agatha Christie never escaped the conventions she set. Nor did she seem to want to. Her experiments with point of view, for instance (as in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd and The A.B.C. Murders), are just another layer of frosting, a ganache to complement a meticulous recipe. Each clue is measured precisely, even if some are sprinkled in at the last moment. After Joan Acocella's essay in The New Yorker, I read Death on the Nile this week and felt cheated that Hercule Poirot never mentioned a second bullet hole until he revealed the solution. But that didn't stop me from reading on. Despite common tropes of the genre and functional writing, her cheeky determination to outsmart us all impresses. Maybe this time, I always think as I sink into the next one...

You Make (Us) Feel Like A Natural Woman

2010-08-17T16:11:00.001-04:00

Review: The Kids Are All Right

The opening credits to The Kids Are All Right scroll around the screen like graffiti while skateboarders cruise the California streets, over grainy indie film stock and a Vampire Weekend song. Does the movie already intend to be ironic, or is there secret joy in being part of this hip vegan eco-crunch neighborhood? It's the land of opportunity, where a scruffy motorcycle man makes enough income from his organic restaurant to afford a sprawling, self-consciously indigenous garden in his backyard. It's also the land of normalcy, where two women can share the same over-represented suburban paradise/malaise as everyone else.

Director Lisa Cholokendo straddles this line of parody and sincerity as she navigates the problems of this upper-middle-family, headed by Annette Bening and Julianne Moore. The two moms bicker over hers and hers sinks about their daughter off to college, and their son who isn't realizing his potential. Of course Bening's character Nic imposes too much, and can't please her wife Jules (Moore) emotionally or sexually. Nor does she support Jules' wandering ambition, now manifested in her new startup landscaping business.

It's harder to feel for Nic through all this. She's unfailingly uptight, while Jules' free-spirited (and somewhat free-loving) impulses befit her lackadaisical California lifestyle so well. But Cholokendo has created a comedy that finds humor in common relationship and parenting moments, such as two parents' simultaneous eagerness and reservation over the possibility their son is sleeping with his best friend. It's appropriate for a story about gay marriage that isn't really about being gay at all.

Cholokendo knows how to assemble a top-notch cast, with an especially luminous and relaxed Julianne Moore. Mark Ruffalo's leather jacket and five-o-clock shadow fit the sweet but impossibly naive sperm donor of the couple's son. His interaction with the family, over a few bottles of wine and a few more rolls in the hay, is an engaging comic premise--one laced ultimately, and realistically, with emptiness. The traditional family structure is what lasts.

This film shares some aspects of that other female-driven summer comedy, Eat Pray Love. That movie feels constantly like it's driving toward the inevitable romantic outcome; of course this independent woman will find a man. Yet the narrative wanders to get there. Maybe because the movie comes from a real-life quest for life and love, which seems manufactured but really happened as authentically as a writer with a book deal can proclaim. And though the makeup and wardrobe (not to mention culinary) budgets are many times the size of Cholokendo's, Julia Roberts has such a natural charm and radiance, we know everything's all right. Her men need her more than she needs them.

Dream a Little Dream of Me

2010-08-05T07:58:00.001-04:00

Review: Inception

When Alfred Hitchcock directed Vertigo in 1958, he and his cameramen invented a new camera move, tracking back with the camera while zooming in, to capture Jimmy Stewart's acrophobia. The Vertigo effect was the wonder of its day. In many ways, Christopher Nolan's summer film Inception shares the bitter romance and disorientation of Hitchcock's movie. But special effects have advanced greatly in the last fifty years, and Nolan takes full advantage of twisting, turning CGI-scapes that would tickle M.C. Escher.

Though not as profilic, Nolan has proven himself to be a sort of modern Hitchcockian. From The Dark Knight and The Prestige to his best work, Memento, Nolan has played the showman with tricks up his sleeve, who gleefully manipulates the audience then reminds us it's just a movie. The wonder of Vertigo is that it uses the same tricks as Hitchcock's usual crowdpleasers but sinks deeper as it unfolds. Nolan goes the opposite route with Inception, trying to force profundity upon a fun popcorn flick.

Leonardo DiCaprio plays Dom Cobb, a single father in exile, gifted at extracting information from entering people's dreams. He is called upon by a Japanese industrialist to enter his competitor's dreams not to remove an idea but to add one, a process known as inception. Within the running of the film, though, the rationale behind this entry into dreams becomes the MacGuffin, glossed over in the sea of exposition that makes up the first hour. Nolan's rules for inception are complex, and slogging through them at first feels turgid because the script doesn't allow its characters to breathe. Nor does Hans Zimmer's oppressive score, which overstates with crashing timpani and wailing brass.

Just when I was wishing the whole thing would lighten up, the actual inception begins. Suddenly we're watching a different movie--an elaborate bank heist that wows more as it goes along. The inception team enters dreams within dreams, and watching these overlapping worlds line up is the real fun. Joseph Gordon-Levitt even gets a moment or two of levity, not to mention a thrilling levitation stunt in a hotel lobby and elevator. Ultimately, the scales tip in favor of Inception: all the rules that were explained pay off in the final act. But I do wish Nolan had found more ways to humanize his film.

Marion Cotillard is his secret weapon. She looks ravishing as Cobb's deceased wife, whom he recalls by revisiting his memory-box of dreams, and ironically feels the most flesh-and-blood of the cast. Everyone else is subservient to Nolan's mind games except for Cotillard. Her eyes, cruel and agonizingly sad, are something out of a nightmare. In a movie of dazzling plot twists and shifting city streets, her performance is the stuff dreams are made of.

When Book Covers Wax Poetic

2010-08-01T18:51:00.000-04:00

They say don't judge a book by its cover. But when you're window shopping at bookstores, it can be hard to believe them (whoever they are). Book covers are marketing, pure and simple. The ideal cover matches thematic content with a sharp selling point--but like titles, sometimes sales outweigh the "art" of it. Fine by me; as long as good books sell, I don't care how their covers look.

Unless the covers are boring. Public-domain classics are the worst offenders. Have you looked for a Moby Dick you can be proud of? I searched the Harvard Coop for a good cover, but the whole batch looked unoriginal, so unfailingly historical. (Art department: "Let's go outside the box. We'll draw--wait for it--a whale.") Herman Melville is soporific enough on his own. Where's the adventure?

From the odd indie press to giant publisher Penguin: Call them Ish-fail.

But Penguin Classics has a trick up its sleeve, the Deluxe Editions. Welcome to a world of deckled edges, French flaps, and provocative cover art. They range from Jane Austen to Thomas Pynchon in style and age. They're appealing, whimsical, and often humorous. Hey, look--color! But I also wonder if the designers have ever read the books. What do you think about these?

1. Candide: Voltaire meets the comics store! Calling X-Men fans--there's a French satire with your name on it.

2. Ethan Frome: Edith Wharton might purse her lips at the title, embossed in red letters like a Harlequin paperback. The lovers look caught in the spell of winter romance--but read the book and you'll realize a much different outcome is in store.

3. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn: The most puzzling. Why is Huck walking underwater? Is this a reference to Mario Puzo (sleeping with the fishes)? The credit to Mr. Mark Twain is a clever in-joke, though.

4. The Scarlet Letter: Nathaniel Hawthorne's original subtitle was A Trip to Hot Topic.

5. Pride and Prejudice: You know, I like this one. It's a Jane Austen for those of us with Dickensian aspirations. Though it looks like the man is named Pride and the woman Prejudice. Cruel parents they had.

6. Wuthering Heights: Or, Wuthering Catherine, who hasn't eaten a meal in weeks. What's the phallic tower behind her? Is Heathcliff's home now at Mordor?

Penguin even carted out a Deluxe Edition of Moby Dick full of color, energy, and violence. And also a whale jumping over a ship. I'm pretty sure that happens in chapter thirty-one, right? Chalk it up to whimsy.

Ms. Kubelik, Shut Up and Deal

2010-07-28T22:40:00.002-04:00

Review: Promises, Promises
Broadway Theatre, New York
July 24, 2010

Promises, Promises was born from the past and the present. Even its source material, Billy Wilder's 1960 film The Apartment, conveyed the drone-like existence of corporate America. By the time the musical opened in 1968, the culture had shifted. People were shedding their inhibitions; the tribe down the street at Hair was shedding even more. What a drag to be a suit. But the show became a strange hybrid of the trusted and true--bookwriter Neil Simon--and the new sounds of Burt Bacharach. Within a somewhat conventional boy-meets-girl comedy lurked a pulsing, driving New York.

Over forty years later, the revival of Promises, Promises sinks into this rhythm like an old pair of shoes. The sleek orchestra voices and varied meters are reminiscent of days gone by. Mad Men has educated us: it was a simpler time with undercurrents of sexism and conniving. The premise begins with C.C. "Chuck" Baxter, never noticed at work until a co-worker with a hot date borrows his nearby apartment. Word spreads among Chuck's superiors, and soon enough, he finds himself a Junior Executive who rents his place to the boss, Mr. Sheldrake.

Sounds cynical, but the revival carries all the sheen of a Doris Day-Rock Hudson flick. The show still works, and the audience eats it up, though as more of a sixties nostalgia-fest. Don't forget their memories of sitcom stars. Thankfully, Sean Hayes makes an appealing Chuck Baxter. He's more Puck-like than virile, closer to the film's Jack Lemmon than Jerry Orbach in the original production. Hayes clowns his way along, milking laughs whenever Baxter's not pining over the cafeteria worker Fran Kubelik.

Which leads to the Chenoweth conundrum. It's nice to see Kristin Chenoweth stretch herself, and a thrill to hear her sing anything. But as many have written, she's an odd choice for Fran Kubelik, who lets Sheldrake seduce her and toss her back at his whim. Too old, too well-adjusted, too vocally trained. Again, rawness has eluded this revival. Such things are ephemeral, of course. (As is sound design that isn't over-processed. At least there was a full orchestra with three trumpets.) Neil Simon jokes now often land with a mild chuckle of familiarity.

But he sure knew how to craft bit parts. Take the scene-stealing lush who helps Baxter drown his sorrows on New Year's Eve. Katie Finneran, who won a Tony for this brief role, digs into it with gusto and every character voice in the book. While Chenoweth is left to her ballads, Hayes and Finneran play drunkenly off each other with Shakespearean grace. "Forget the past and think about the present," she and Baxter sing. A tall order for Promises, Promises, which can't seem to shirk the past at all.

¡Buzz Lightyear al rescate!

2010-07-17T08:52:00.001-04:00

Review: Toy Story 3

Books and TV shows depend upon the series. The bottomless pit of plots and whodunit this time have a history in serialized Dickens novels, radio shows, and Keystone-cop nickelodeons. When the summer movie season rolls around, though, we bemoan the dearth of originality. The barrage of numerals after titles can make a ticket buyer feel he's trapped in some sort of time warp: a radio station stuck in the nineties.

The trilogy has become the most stable form of movie sequel-dom, if you're in the superhero or science fiction business. Properties like the original Star Wars films, Indiana Jones, and more recently The Lord of the Rings have fused in our cultural psyche into one entity. The Ewok battle may not be a cinematic high-point, but that third installment rounds out the series efficiently. After The Empire Strikes Back, all moviegoers and filmmakers surely could hope was that the third didn't sabotage the rest. Remember the dwindling cultural opinion of The Matrix.

All of this build-up is my way of giving Pixar credit where it's due. Toy Story 3, presumably the final chapter in the Woody-Buzz Lightyear saga, doesn't try to aim for infinity and beyond. The film is content to remind us how much we'd missed those gosh-darn-lovable toys. The first film hit theaters in 1995, when I was still in single digits. In the time since, we've been at war, waited in line for iEverything, started blogs, forgotten about Tim Allen... and gone to college.

Though Andy (the kid who owns these toys, now a college student) is moving on, the movie remains deliberately old-fashioned. Sure, there's the 3-D version, for those who want to shell out next week's lunch money. But Pixar's great innovation even at the dawn of computer-animated movies was its storytelling. No matter the voice casting, no other animation studio has churned out a film as great as Toy Story yet, with the possible exception of the first Shrek.

Toy Story 3 works well as part of a package. If I hadn't grown up with these characters, I might have wanted more of a character arc. Wall-E and Up may best it for the audacity of their imagined worlds, sure, but Toy Story 3 is a delightful piece of familiarity. And who would have imagined such an emotional ending to the saga fifteen years ago? Like Andy, we've grown up since the first film, and all it heralded for movies. Sit back and watch as Pixar passes on its patented brand of wonder to a new generation.

The Great American Songbook: Over the Rainbow

2010-07-11T17:43:00.002-04:00

Written by: Harold Arlen, E.Y. Harburg

First performed by: Judy Garland, 1939

It's too well-known to even write about. Countless volumes have been written about The Wizard of Oz, about Judy Garland. Multiple "Songs of the Century" lists top off with "Over the Rainbow" (the "Somewhere" is optional).

Aunt Em tells Dorothy to find "a place where you won't get yourself into any trouble." The neglected girl leans into a bale of hay, yearning for a place beyond the rain. But though "Over the Rainbow" seems like a lark, completely organic to the film and to Judy Garland's voice, the reality was that the song created its own trouble. Studio executives at MGM wanted to scrap the ballad altogether. In 1939, pictures were rarely longer than one hour, forty-five minutes (the major exception being Gone with the Wind). The song, over which the songwriters agonized, was cut from several previews. Who wanted to listen to a teenager singing in a barnyard? their wisdom went. Arlen and Harburg fought for its inclusion, and eventually Louis B. Mayer decided the film would survive with "Over the Rainbow."

Could Oz have survived without it? Apocryphal stories credit the image of a rainbow, introduced by lyricist Harburg, with the sepia-toned look of the Kansas sequences. I saw an outdoor screening of the film last week where audience members applauded at the first splash of color. Without this traditional "I want" song, and without the two-tone opening, would the land of Oz still mesmerize?

When I was a five-year-old, Margaret Hamilton's Wicked Witch of the West terrified me. Now that I'm twenty-three, the adult ambitions of Oz become more clear. Take, for instance, the satire of the Wizard bestowing brains, hearts, and courage. Every other song in the score appeals to the jolly, singsong, tra la la jingles we expect of children's musicals (though with undoubtedly great wit). "Over the Rainbow," though skyward-bound, is as down-to-earth. It's a sincere character song, outwardly hopeful but inwardly reaching, a little desperate. "Why oh why can't I?" are the final words.

Listen to how the song starts right in on the chorus. Arlen and Harburg composed a verse but never intended it for The Wizard of Oz. Hear how the orchestra seems to open up on the second "Somewhere," and how Garland's voice sounds older than her sixteen years. Some dreams are too good to be true, which she learns through the Wicked Witch and the sham Wizard. Going home makes perfect sense story-wise, but isn't it a bit deflating to see the sepia-tone again? To know that the storm destroyed their crops, and Mrs. Gulch still has it out for Toto? Like the film, "Over the Rainbow" is really about the need for escapism--not just escapism itself.

Holding Out for a Superhero

2010-06-20T21:14:00.002-04:00

Review: Iron Man 2

The ending of the first chapter used a smart segue to the impending sequel: Tony Stark confesses he's Iron Man at a press conference; fade to black. As is the way with Part Twos, when we fade back in, everything's pumped up a few notches. Crowds have increased; explosions have tripled. Villains and sidekicks who command high salaries have sprouted like weeds. Imagine the catering bills.

But while some sequels add superfluous subtitles, grow bored with their leads, or ship their characters off to Abu Dhabi, Iron Man 2 has the good sense to understand its strongest ingredient: Robert Downey, Jr. The film series (a third Iron Man is in the works) charts Downey's real-life near-biblical fall from Hollywood grace and re-establishment as a newly risen hero to the masses. While the actor keeps his high profile in check these days, Iron Man 2 presents Tony Stark as an uncomfortable hero, thwarted by his own self-destructive tendencies. Villains are inside us, too.

Nevertheless, externalized baddies are requisite to the comic book genre. Mickey Rourke swings electrified nunchucks like they've been in his arsenal for years. He's a comeback king like Downey, praised for his recent work in The Wrestler. But while Downey maintains a persona of a healed man, a team player, Rourke still plays out in left field, master of the inappropriate award-show outburst. It's fun to see their real-life personalities reversed in the film. Rourke's diabolical Russian engineer is cool and collected, not one for smalltalk, while Tony Stark throws million-dollar temper tantrums.

Iron Man and its sequel obey the classical rules of comic-book films, with a touch of witty repartee a la Nick and Nora Charles. Don't expect too much out-of-the-box from these ventures. Gwyneth Paltrow, Scarlett Johansson, and Samuel L. Jackson have been hired as the archetypal damsel in distress, sexpot, and one-eyed badass. Much of the sequel feels like filler story, dangling new threads that will wow (pow! zam!) us in future installments. After the poor taste of Transformers II last summer, though, this franchise earns cred for letting its oddball actors hog the spotlight. They're the real heroes.

The 2010 Tony Awards: Don't Rain on Memphis!

2010-06-13T19:09:00.029-04:00

11:03 The season was kinder to plays and musical revivals than to new musicals. Only one Best Musical nominee had an original score. Here's hoping that next year provides a stronger candidate pool. Could the 2011 winner be Catch Me if You Can? Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown? Or Spiderman? Tune in then for more live blog!

10:58 Bernadette Peters presents Best Musical, as usual, to Memphis. And they perform again because they won? It's like American Idol at Radio City. What if some other show had won? Did all the casts get into costume just in case?

10:50 Bebe Neuwirth and Nathan Lane are the best presenters of the night, and Catherine Zeta-Jones is adorable in her shock (I don't know why she's surprised) winning Best Actress for a Musical for A Little Night Music, and trying to drag Michael Douglas on stage, "who's a movie star, and I get to sleep with him every night." Douglas Hodge wasn't at all surprised that he won Best Actor for a Musical riding on the La Cage train.

10:42 Okay, Sean Hayes as Spiderman mumbling through "Parade"... was probably better than Spiderman: The Musical will ever be. La Cage aux Folles may be the luckiest musical ever: it won Best Musical back in 1984, Best Revival in 2005, and now Best Revival of a Musical once again. Only ten seconds for a speech so that Billie Joe Armstrong can come out and be a complete weirdo introducing American Idiot. Note to future Tony-aspiring lighting designers: strobe lights. Seizure-inducing strobe lights. (Joelle terms this number "bro overload," or for short, "bro-verload.")

10:30 This just in: Glee star Lea Michele wins Best Performance by a Barbra Streisand Impersonator for her "Don't Rain on My Parade."

10:21 Fences wins Best Revival of a Play, Red wins Best Play, and the white people get twice as much time to talk. Just saying. (Also, vibrator count: five.)

10:15 Dear Oscars: Please watch the Tonys for lessons on the In Memoriam montage. The camera did not pan all over the place, the clapping was quieted, and Sarah McLaughin did not sing "I Will Remember You."

10:10 Another win for Fela!, this time for Best Choreography. Potential mutiny against Memphis? How odd that, during the list of nominees, both Come Fly Away and Promises, Promises performed their choreography... and then neither won.

9:51 Will Smith and Jada Pinkett Smith's terrifying facelift introduce Fela!, which will not win Best Musical because it won't tour outside New York.

9:44 Sean Hayes in a curly red wig: "Did you hear? Annie's coming back to Broadway. So I dressed up like Bernadette Peters. She's the BP that isn't ruining the planet." Then Viola Davis and Denzel Washington take Best Actress and Best Actor in a Play for their work in Fences. Does their director, Kenny Leon, look angry because he's on the verge of tears?

9:39 "To a nunnery, go!" Play montages of Shakespeare and August Wilson are much better set to a rap beat.

9:30 Idina Menzel makes three cast members of Glee so far. Shame that Christiane Noll only gets to sing the second half of "Back to Before," from the closed Ragtime, but Finian's Rainbow (also shuttered) isn't performing at all.

9:25 Catherine Zeta-Jones' tips for singing on the Tonys: 1) Swivel your head wildly. 2) Take pauses in the middle of each sentence. 3) Look stunning. Seriously, though, her "Send in the Clowns" was the high point of her performance on stage. Tonight was just odd. But she still might win...

9:17 Kristin Chenoweth pretends to read a thank-you speech. Sean Hayes: "You didn't win anything." Kristin: "That's unusual for me." I definitely called Levi Kraus (and his hair) for Best Featured Actor in a Musical, Million Dollar Quartet.

9:07 Mark Sanchez introduces Memphis, and I asked, "who is he?" Sports 1, Josh 0. "Listen to the Beat" seems suspiciously similar to "You Can't Stop the Beat" from Hairspray, also using catchy period music to tell a story about racial relations. Chad Kimball and Montego Glover's voices both sounded very tired. Both Beyonce, who knows how to sing, and Melanie Griffith, who... well..., barely clapped.

9:03 The Frasier-Niles reunion leads us into the most exciting category tonight: Best Featured Actress in a Musical. Angela? Barbara Cook? The winner is much-younger Katie Finneran for Promises, Promises... even though they chose an entirely different winner to print on the screen. "I want to thank the superstar Kristin Chenoweth, who loaned me her eyelashes tonight."

8:56 "Coming up next: Angela Lansbury, David Hyde Pierce, and Paula Abdul." One of these things is not like the other. Lansbury, of course, is one of two actors who have won five Tony Awards, and now she's the honorary chairman of something illustrious.

8:51 The Best Play presentations: How many times can we say "vibrator" tonight? (Up to four.) For inventing the device, Michael Cerveris says, "You're welcome, darling." Alfred Molina and Eddie Redmayne talk about how Red explores the integrity of art and creativity, but what does Eddie care? He's got a Tony in his pocket.

8:45 Sean Hayes in a dance belt. Yep, a normal night on Broadway. For Best Direction of a Play, Antonio Banderas gives Michael Grandage (Red) a Tony, which he clings to and refuses to look away from. Look at the camera, Michael... the trophy's not made of chocolate. Then Banderas announces La Cage aux Folles in a Spanish accent. Terry Johnson, a bit perplexed, gives a short 'n' sweet speech for Best Direction of a Musical.

8:34 The theater audience goes wild for a Republican! Oh, wait--it's Kelsey Grammar in La Cage aux Folles, doing very un-Republican things like running a drag club. Douglas Hodge, singing "The Best of Times," gets seduced by Will Smith and picks up a twenty from Mr. Schuester.

8:33 Eddie Redmayne wins Best Featured Actor in a Play for Red. To think, he was only cast because of his last name!

8:27 Million Dollar Quartet performed, and all I could watch was Levi Kreis' hair. His coiffure is probably why he'll win a Tony tonight: it worked for John Gallagher, Jr. in Spring Awakening. Now to a commercial for bladder control products. For all those blue-hairs out there on the bus to watch American Idiot.

8:18 Best Featured Actress in a Play goes to Scarlett Johansson for her Broadway debut in A View from the Bridge. Jan Maxwell might push her off a bridge later, but her speech is classy (way to advertise Iron Man 2 from the stage, Scarlett). Vibrator Count: 2.

8:15 Is Sean Hayes the next NPH? "The Tony Award... or as Angela Lansbury calls it, a whippersnapper!" Way to be up for your sixth Tony, Ms. Lansbury. Greedy, greedy.

8:10 The rest of the opening medley: "I Say a Little Prayer" leads into Frank Sinatra, Motown, Afro-beat, drag queens, and punk rock. Yes sir, a typical year on the Great Multicultural Way.

8:00 2009-2010 was the season of non-traditional music on Broadway. How appropriate that Sean Hayes begins the broadcast with the Grieg piano concerto. Nice fingerwork, covering up some of the early microphone issues (please don't repeat last year!).

7:46 The official winners rules: "Be as heartfelt as you can, just do it in a minute and thirty seconds."

7:44 The rundown of the other awards: Red starts the plays sweep with Best Scenic Design and Best Sound Design. Christine Jones, who won Best Scenic Design for a Musical, thanked her husband, the love of her life and father of her children, then director Michael Mayer, "the love of my other life and father of my other children."

Robert Kaplowitz, winning Best Sound Design of a Musical for Fela!, said the Tony is "the best piece of bling ever."

7:31 Neil Austin beats... Neil Austin for Best Lighting Design of a Play in Red. Best Lighting Design of a Musical goes to American Idiot. And what music greets the Green Day winners? "If Ever I Would Leave You" from Camelot: an amusingly incongruous choice.

7:28 The Royal Family wins Best Costume Design of a Play, shocking the Memphis crew, who thought they just might conquer every category. This is the first (and surely not the last) time tonight the title In the Next Room, or the vibrator play will be spoken. Fela! takes Best Costume Design for a Musical, reassuring us that the Tony voters at least watched shows that weren't Memphis.

7:26 We're just powering through these early awards. Best Book goes to Memphis, as well. I think we can safely call Memphis as the Best Musical winner already. Good speech, though: "I never thought I'd be here tonight... The New York Times never thought I'd be here tonight." He's proud to be a theater animal.

7:24 Oh, Best Score. Two original scores: Memphis (which practically won by default) and The Addams Family, the burnt toast of critics across New York. And Enron, a play with some songs about finance and stock prices, not to mention velociraptors. And Fences, which apparently is a wonderful play revival with eleven minutes of incidental music.

7:22 First award of the pre-show: Best Orchestrations. Memphis just won, perhaps beginning the Memphis sweep of the night, a.k.a. the Only Decent Show with an Original Score This Year sweep. Is it cruel that the orchestra played the winners on with the overture to Candide, one of the best written for Broadway, and frequently played by symphony orchestras?

7:05 The Tonys have begun! At least, the Creative Arts Awards, which you can't see on CBS tonight. This is the pre-show hour where they bestow awards upon the unsung heroes of Broadway: the set designers, the orchestrators, the ticket scalpers, Catherine Zeta-Jones' chauffeurs.

Once the red carpet razzmatazz ends (who's covering these things? film students at P.S. 132?), the live blog will commence. Keep refreshing; new posts appear at the top. From Green Day to Stephen Sondheim, get ready for a melange of musical theater styles, old and new, borrowed and blue.

A Heartbreaking Reading of No-One-Cares

2010-06-06T19:31:00.001-04:00

Now that my grad school years have ended, it's time for some perspective. Newly degree-d, I saw a fiction reading recently. But in the "real world" (which must be based on some MTV reality show), I feel less beholden to honor my noble, struggling literary friends. Yes, I've sat through poetry workshops just like you. I've churned out chapters the night before. But if you're reading, I expect you to hold my attention for fifteen straight minutes. That means...

1. Make me laugh. Not the hesitant maybe that's meant to be amusing laugh, or the oh it's so silent, I'll give a little titter laugh. You know how these stories that are so original, about what you did from 9:41 a.m. to 9:43 a.m. spread out across three chapters, and we laugh kind-of-sort-of, but they're totally unlike anything that's been published? Hint: Read something that will be published.

2. Don't ask, five minutes over, if you have time left. And seven minutes over, and nine minutes over. Bring a stopwatch. Maybe an egg timer.

3. You're among people who want you to succeed and who will clap no matter what. Don't abuse their sincere desire for you to not suck.

4. I don't want to know about your sex life. Unless it's my sex life too; in which case, please don't write a story about it.

5. Consider your spot in the queue. If you are last, don't send us off to the bar with gang rape or the Third Reich. (Though because we want you to succeed, we will probably say it was "deep" or "whoa, that was... wow.")

6. Mix and match. Listening to twenty minutes of one nonfiction piece about your grandmother, who you ate breakfast with from 9:41 to 9:43 this morning, requires superhuman attention span.

7. Don't talk about your process. Unless it involves Himalayan dwarf trolls and/or Satanic goat sacrifices.

I expect a performance. You expect to sell copies of your latest book. You don't have to read your most profound work. Or Chapter 45 from your four-hundred-page opus. Just be a down-to-earth, semi-literate dude(-ette) who doesn't take yourself too seriously. Because, let's face it, everyone pre-gamed anyway.

Judging a Song by its Cover

2010-05-26T22:36:00.000-04:00

Because I am extremely cool, I read some message board post saying that George Gershwin does not write opera. Though his Porgy and Bess is a masterful blend of genres (see my post on "Summertime"), this poster felt music aficionados were ridiculous to compare it to the works of Wagner, for instance. It's a matter of taste.

Which got me thinking about how we construct taste. Before I go on, I'll confess it: I can be a snob. Though no expert on many aspects of film (foreign, indie), I will roll my eyes if you say your favorite movie is Austin Powers. I remember being coaxed into going to White Castle with Harold and Kumar back in high school. Surprise, I laughed a lot--but because I was able to construct a reason: the film cleverly subverted road-trip conventions and was self-aware of its idiocy. Others liked the pot humor. At college orientation, though, Harold and Kumar's wacky adventures were useful for bonding with other newbies who'd sated their White Castle hunger. So I allowed myself to enjoy it inwardly because it was a smart stoner movie, but around the guys, it was just totally awesome, man.

Many of us are self-aware of how others perceive our tastes. A colleague at work proudly displays posters of teen vampire books she loves, but if I mention one, she admonishes me: "Don't judge." Often diehard fans of "genre writing" equate their indulgence with guilty pleasure. But what's to say you can't elevate vampires and wizards into artful writing?

Speaking of bad taste... PhotoShop much?

At work yesterday, water-cooler discussion shifted from the Lost series finale to Glee. I found myself defending the fact that I watch Glee to a host of Lost fans. Aren't these shows cut from the same cloth? Neither is high art. Hard to say what alternative universes Glee will take up in the future; for some, glee club always is a form of purgatory. But this spring, I sense an effort by the writers to deepen the characters, while also churning out increasingly ridiculous musical spots. There have been stumbles. Shortly after an all-Madonna episode, we have to deal with a Lady Gaga tunestack. Then Neil Patrick Harris came in as yet another threat to the club, only to learn things about himself and fall back into his showbiz ways, never to be seen again. It's a sign of guest star fever. Why couldn't we have spent that time getting to know Idina Menzel's character (who had a big secret to share)? That she dreamed a dream feels less emotional than it should when she's been absent for a month.

But there are moments where Glee moves out of its inspirational box and appeals to more than the karaoke fanatic inside us. Future star Rachel, the self-absorbed spotlight-hugger of the glee club, recently lost her voice and, beyond the humor of her silence ("I'm like Tinkerbell. I need applause to live."), there was nuance to her loss. What if her fading voice were permanent? Fashionable boy soprano Kurt has dominated recent episodes; his struggles fitting in with his father formed the first genuine moments of Glee last fall.

Many of these high schoolers are going to graduate and stay close to home, never fulfilling their dreams of performing. That was the undercurrent of NPH's guest turn. Glee can be superficial--all that AutoTune!--but every now and then, there's something boiling underneath. Granted, as a theater nerd/musician/ex-college performer, this show is targeted toward my tastes. But it's not the cheesy episode themes (Bad Reputations, Dreams, Gaga). The best song choices this season have come from a real place, not just Jukebox 301. My favorite episode so far was "Home": three different plot lines and a hokey premise for exploring where we belong (the auditorium was closed to glee rehearsal). But each song was a guise characters could hide behind, grappling with displacement. Knowing his affection is not reciprocated, Kurt sang the melancholy "A House is Not a Home," later reprised by Will and April as they both yearn for unlikely companionship. And April's all-white production of The Wiz? Maybe in bad taste, but I'd sure rather sit through it than Wagner.

The Great American Songbook: "Summertime"

2010-05-12T23:14:00.002-04:00

Written by: George Gershwin, DuBose Heyward

First performed by: Abbie Mitchell, 1935

How many popular songs can you name that were composed for an opera? Sure, some would balk at just classifying Porgy and Bess as an opera when it's a vibrant hybrid of jazz, musical theater, and classical traditions. Maybe that's why so many of the numbers (or should I call them arias?) had such crossover appeal; George Gershwin wrote music across genres. And did he ever know how to place a song. Imagine the premiere in downtown Boston, September 1935: the curtain rises on Clara, who rocks with her baby and sings a lullaby.

   Summertime
   And the livin' is easy.
   Fish are jumpin'
   And the cotton is high.

   Oh, your daddy's rich
   And your momma's good-lookin'.
   So hush, little baby,
   Don't you cry.

George Gershwin's vocal line wavers on "summertime," the voice bending in the heat and finally drooping, resting on "easy." Right after the soprano relaxes into the "easy" life, Heyward's lyrics convey both restlessness (jumping fish) and the character's race, the pre-Civil War importance of cotton still weighing on Southerners' minds. Before the foreshadowing grows too heavy, the lyrics turn from the tragic to the whimsical. Clara envisions a rich daddy, not like anyone currently in Catfish Row (though it used to be where the moneyed aristocrats lived), and fashions herself "good-lookin.'" In its plaintiveness, the melody remains inventive, falling and swaying like a much-needed summer breeze.

The second verse confirms that "Summertime" is a diegetic lullaby, meaning that Clara knows she is singing a song ("One of these mornings / You're gonna rise up singing"). Little did she realize the breadth of artists who would cover it over the next century. Here are two recordings, Leotyne Pryce in the operatic vein, the second re-interpreted for jazz artists Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald.

Price takes liberties with the notes; riffing didn't begin with Kelly Clarkson, folks. She was one of the prime interpreters of Porgy and Bess in her day. Her "Summertime" is less languid, more of an undaunted spiritual. And in another blast from the past, Louis and Ella ease into Gershwin almost too well. He's full of mischief, she's warm and nurturing. Can they record every standard ever written? (Wait--pretty sure they have.)

If you search around, you might hear "Summertime" sung by everyone from Joni Mitchell and Janis Joplin to The Doors and even Scarlett Johansson. Gershwin gives room for all sorts of voices sliding across notes, lingering on syllables. Maybe it's all the gerunds, but there's a presentness to the song, and a comfort as the ending of verse one (crying) resolves with verse two (parents standing by). I imagine "Summertime" in the show like a song passed down across generations. It's always been part of our heritage.

And Isn't It Ironic... Don't You Think?

2010-05-02T10:40:00.000-04:00

The late 1980s introduced the buzzword "New Sincerity" in three spheres: post-postmodern literature, genre film, and punk rock music. Post-postmodern, because what can we call the writers who react to postmodern literature? New Sincere writers don't dismiss irony. Maintaining some ironic distance (and irony is primarily a distancing tool) does not denigrate the inherent truthfulness of their story, these writers feel. They are not cynics.

As far back as 1953, Vladimir Pomerantsev attacked both style and poor construction (farfetched plots and characters, for example) as insincere. His goal was to study everyday life "so that we might lift the reader even higher above everyday life." New Sincerity takes a similar stance. Down with absurdity and postmodern excess! A chair is just a chair.

Film critics now might call sincerity "new," but the movement really started with the 1980s. Not a watershed time for filmmaking, in my opinion, but a deeply earnest one. Many straight dramas wallowed in tears, endearment, and tender mercies. The top-grossing films of the decade made up an explosion of genre work: E.T., two Star Wars and three Indiana Jones films. An innocence started to emerge in these escape fantasies; we reverted to coming-of-age comedies and Kevin Costner films, with less of the 1970s paranoia. Auteurs of the New Sincerity took over: Pedro Almodovar, Charlie Kaufman, Wes Anderson, all steeped in irony but searching for the sentimental behind it.

A wave of alternative rockers, including The Reivers, was credited with jump-starting the New Sincerity movement against ironic punk bands around 1985. But five years later, the gig was up. Apparently people didn't buy sincerity on CD. One of the band members of Doctor's Mob remembers thinking audiences "were in on the joke." The concept of New Sincerity isn't about taking yourself too seriously as an artist; if anything, some thought these bands were parodies. They kept their ironic distance, able to step back and laugh at themselves.

Whether or not these artists wanted to be newly sincere, they all stood up for and against excess. Layering on style was useful to a point, but it had to be in service to the substance beneath. So you're ever trying to decide if your writing is sincere or ironic, realize that it's a New age: it just might be both.

How Can There Be Any Sin in "Sincere"?

2010-04-25T10:35:00.002-04:00

When Elizabeth Strout visited last week to read excerpts from Olive Kitteridge, someone asked if she considered her writing ironic. "I'm not really sure what that means," she admitted, and qualified the term irony by saying she couldn't be if it goes against sincerity. She considers herself a "deeply sincere" writer.

Relating this anecdote, I agreed instantly that Strout's fiction seems sincere, but when pressed couldn't define what exactly I meant. My best stab at a synonym was "heartfelt," which is too reductive. Sincerity in literature--which I would say is the opposite of irony--is a word familiar to book reviewers, but what does it actually signify? How do we know we're reading "sincere" literature?

Let's start with Lionel Trilling, who wrote Sincerity and Authenticity in 1972. He regards older works as sincere, starting with Shakespeare, and newer works as authentic. The modern goal is to stay true to oneself, despite the pressures of the external world. Authenticity adds a philosophical approach to writing: does this capture the "me," untainted and self-aware? Sincerity, on the other hand, doesn't come this close to existentialism, which is not to say it's shallow. Sincerity is distinctly moral, as Trilling sees it. Both authenticity and sincerity aim for truth, but as a sincere individual, you express your hopes and desires openly, without obscuring them.

Of course sincerity, then, is an older ideal: morality has waned as what governs us socially. Back in the day, from the 1500s to the 1800s, sincerity was in vogue: an artistic and social ideal. Art reflected society, perhaps more so than the self. To be outwardly honest is a difficult line to walk; Aristole regards one extreme as irony (deficient in expressing truth) and the other as undue pride (which hews close to narcissism). Being boastful indicates a lack of self-awareness, not fitting in what's appropriate. This will seem obvious to everyone around you.

If I contrast authenticity and sincerity, I wonder if sincerity carries a greater sense of social responsibility. We are truthful to the greater good, the law of man. To be authentic, we look inward at ourselves. If opposed by boastfulness, sincerity seems a quiet art. I would agree that Olive Kitteridge, to bring us back, is a quieter, more character-driven piece. In general, characters propel this moral openness more than story or style. Genre writing does not aim for character first and foremost. Is it less sincere?

Trilling covers irony too: "If we speak it [sincerity], we are likely to do so with either discomfort or irony." Calling literature sincere these days, he says, means, "Although it need be given no aesthetic or intellectual admiration, it was at least conceived in the innocence of heart." Sincerity sounds like a backhanded compliment. In this light, "heartfelt" wasn't such a bad synonym after all.

But Trilling chooses to reclaim sincerity. We should not shy away: "It implies, or should imply, a profound personal self-commitment of the writer... The relevant kind of sincerity is something that has to be achieved by an inner discipline." So despite their opposition, sincerity and authenticity both uphold the authority of the author. So can we use the term in good faith? When a writer transforms into author? When said author somehow opens up, and reveals the greater world? I sincerely hope so.

Stay tuned for Part II, on the New Sincerity movement!

The Great American Songbook: "I Say a Little Prayer"

2010-04-19T00:56:00.006-04:00

Written by: Burt Bacharach and Hal David

First performed by: Dionne Warwick, 1967

I have this theory that music of the sixties spans all generations. Young and old, weddings or school dances--everyone grooves to Motown and soul... and those Bacharach rhythms. The year 1967 set off revolutions across America in the cinema we watched (Bonnie and Clyde and the censorship floodgates that reopened) and the protests we launched (the Central Park Be-In, race riots). Don't forget the sounds we heard: Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band forever changed how we listened to recorded music.

For a country in flux, the Burt Bacharach-Dionne Warwick collaboration, begun in the early sixties, stayed its course with assurance. Here was black music that finally went mainstream and sold LPs. The girl groups and choral arrangements owe a small debt to the fluttering choruses enjoyed by Bing Crosby and bandleaders for decades. Yet this new sound was unmistakably its own beast.

Listen to Warwick's original rendition of "I Say a Little Prayer." The key lowers in the introduction just before the vocal enters; contemporary Top 40 hits can thank Bacharach for propelling the please-applaud-me key change. The rhythm section pushes urgently, helped by irregular meters: the chorus ("Forever and ever, you'll stay in my heart, and I will love you") is actually in 11/4. In units of three, not the standard four, and then with the last beat missing, the singer jumps right back into the vocal without a breath.

Warwick's hit #4 on the Billboard charts in 1967. The song's exuberance (remember, the singer can't breathe!) must have matched "The Summer of Love" well. Ubiquitous now, this music was not shocking then, but revitalizing.

Soon powerful R&B singers like Aretha Franklin entered the pop charts, and white bubblegum pop was a thing of the past generation (until the Christina Aguileras of the 1990s revived the genre). She released "I Say a Little Prayer" as a B-side at first, but listeners couldn't get enough. She takes a broader tempo and lets her backup singers cover the chorus while she tosses in her own licks. As written, the ending vamps for improvisation, and Aretha runs with that.

Where haven't you heard it since? A diner breaks into spontaneous song in My Best Friend's Wedding like some revivalist worship service. Diana King covered "Prayer" in 1997--right voice but tacky, over-synthed percussion, as if the rhythms needed help. Whitney Houston has performed it in concert; I wonder if her little prayers worked re: Bobby Brown. Forever and forever, he'll be coked up. Quinn and the cheerleaders auditioned on Glee with a Valley Girl rendition. Oh, white girls taking all the funk out; was this satire or just a poor song choice? And Kristin Chenoweth (a white girl with serious vocal chops) is currently singing it on Broadway in Promises, Promises, a Bacharach-scored musical that interpolated the song just for this revival. Why not? That soul music must stay in our hearts, forever and forever.

Which Actor Has the Worst Resume?

2010-04-13T20:01:00.003-04:00

You had to know this was coming soon after my "Best Resume" post. While researching that one, I stumbled across numerous actors with less-than-stellar IMDB profiles. Oh, right, I thought, I'd forgotten how many icebergs they hit along the way. But sometimes, the movie-going public also forgets that an actor they love is notorious for poor choices.

The purpose of this assessment was not to rail against wickedly easy targets. Rob Schneider may be the least redeemable "actor" in California, but I don't want to expend more than a sentence on his deliberate mass-appeal mediocrity. Ditto nottie-so-hottie Paris Hilton and I-know-who-doped-me-up Lindsay Lohan.

I have long marveled at the stunning career path of Brendan Fraser. Here is a sturdy, regular actor; a respectable, not indulgent amount of humor; good frame and mildly rugged face. If all my compliments sound half-handed, think long and hard: When have we seen Brendan Fraser at the peak of his powers?

Last fall, my roommate and other friends kept bringing up Encino Man. Fraser's first major role in a film, and as a caveman no less: How could it not be funny? As if by fate, the movie played on TBS that night, and I found Reason #37 why I no longer subscribe to digital cable. (Though I will be fair; what else did the early '90s produce besides Hannibal Lecter and poor hair choices?)

Take any parts you can early on, proverbial wisdom suggests. So when did Fraser outgrow this trend? After a slew of misses like Twenty Bucks, Younger and Younger, Airheads, The Scout, The Passion of Darkly Noon, Mrs. Winterbourne, and a tacky Disney redo of George of the Jungle? When he followed up the overblown The Mummy with The Mummy Returns and The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor?

The Mummy franchise still has not died, nor apparently its eponymous spectre of the Sphinx. So Fraser hasn't, either; no need to worry about tomorrow's mortgage payment. But the aughts did little for his integrity. After Journey to the Center of the Earth and its abhorrent CGI, The Mummy seems close to Casablanca. You'd think he would have stayed home when Journey to the End of the Night didn't work out. Over the years, he has continually received the short end of the lollipop: Dudley Do-Right (the IMDB nadir, at 3.6), Monkeybone, the Lifetime-leaning Extraordinary Measures, and the animal caper Furry Vengeance, so awful-looking even Eddie Murphy and The Rock would turn it down.

He has a few redemptive films amid the dreck: Gods and Monsters and The Quiet American. But despite his middle-class racist turn in Crash, that 2004 Best Picture winner will be remembered for Jack Nicholson's scowl of surprise when he opened the envelope. On the plus side, Fraser owns the leftmost toe of a SAG Award for Best Ensemble for the six-degrees-of-racism story.

For an actor who has stayed on the radar, confidently B-list all these years, I find it surprising how few acknowledge his un-illustrious career. Maybe his next big Hollywood venture will help. What's that, IMDB? "Untitled Journey to the Center of the Earth Sequel"?

Zero to Anti-Hero

2010-04-06T23:08:00.001-04:00

Review: Adding Machine
SpeakEasy Stage Company, Boston
April 3, 2010

Blanche DuBois once transferred to a streetcar named Elysian Fields. But who suspected to someday see that mythical limbo on stage, let alone in a musical, and have it be both deflating and buoyant?

That's the double-edged sword of Adding Machine, now wrapping its Boston run after an Off-Broadway debut in 2008. Based on a 1923 play by Elmer Rice, the show should be continually depressing. A laid-off civil employee murders his boss, confesses his hatred toward the world, and is executed only to find himself adrift in the afterlife. But this SpeakEasy Stage Company production finds its peculiar charms.

"I'd rather watch you," the secretary Daisy sings as the subway shuffles along. She's likely headed uptown, passing 42nd Street, 50th Street, 59th Street. But for the first time, the audience feels a reprieve from numbers. Our ears have been assaulted with a contemporary score: shrill quasi-arias; numbingly rhythmic chants of accounting figures; recitative sprinkled with electronica that sounds both futuristic and salvaged from 1981. The music produces the feeling of dislocation, of numerical simplicity uprooted.

Yet everything subsides when, for three brief minutes, Daisy croons an old-fashioned 1920s radio ballad. Her pressures at work and her feelings for her boss, Mr. Zero, fade away. So do our perceptions of Adding Machine as an inaccessible work, no matter how initially aggressive. Authors Joshua Schmidt and Jason Loewith dip into period pastiche just a few times--you can count them on one hand, no machine needed--but are equally playful in the dense, more atonal musical scenes.

SpeakEasy's cast is impressive, braying the music without (I hope) vocal damage while exposing their sad-sack characters' humanity. Brendan McNab doesn't turn Mr. Zero (a murderer, racist, and misanthrope, remember?) into anything redemptive. He's put-upon but still virile. He bellows with gravel in his throat, whether angry or elated, as when he receives ham and eggs in prison from his wife. Mrs. Zero nags at her pathetic husband in a brutally high soprano; Amelia Broome plays her with vigor and even warmth as she sees off Mr. Zero on death row. John Bambery plays Shrdlu, a passionate prisoner who offed his ma with a leg of lamb. His rich-voiced rendering of a gospel parody fits with the oddness around him, maybe because he seems so sincere.

Despite the industrial surroundings, pounding into us that men are cogs in the machine, the inventiveness of Adding Machine takes it beyond the bleak. I wished for more songs that evoked the gay twenties, or even the rotten sin-filled twenties, but the score doesn't compromise so easily. Only Daisy (a winsome, working-class Liz Hayes) offers the bloom of hope. When she enters Elysian Fields, though, she despairs, "I might as well have stayed alive." Thankfully, this production has enough life to make up the difference.

Out of Your Census

2010-04-03T11:58:00.002-04:00

Welcome to your 2010 United States census. It's so much easier than your taxes. No penalties, no spreadsheets, no schedules. In the census, there are clearcut, completely incontestable instructions.

Quick quiz: If you have three people living in your house, how many do you count? All of them. What if one's a baby? Count him too. Now it's time for the big, important question:

Remember, we are counting all people who live and sleep here Most Of The Time. Let's move on:

Who wasn't included in Question 1? Children? Newborn babies? (Didn't the instructions say to include babies in Question 1? Where else would children sleep--their treehouse?) I can understand visiting in-laws, but I'm flummoxed by roommates and live-in baby sitters. If they pay rent or "live in," doesn't that mean they are living here?

Okay, honey, I brought home a hobo. He doesn't have a place to stay, so he'll sleep here the night of April 1. I guess he, if anybody, fits the bill for Question 2. But wait--let's revisit the official Question 1 instructions:

So even Elmer the Homeless Man counts as "people staying here" in Question 1. We'll keep going:

There are other mysteries in the 2010 census. To determine Person 1, we will "start with a person living here who owns or rents," or "start with any adult living here." Then what helpful advice does Person 1 receive just below?

When on God's green, census-tabulated earth would Person 1 ever be a baby less than 1 year old? Person 1 has more explaining to do. See, the official Question 1 instructions also said not to count people--oh, I don't know--in college or a nursing home or jail.

So what will they ask us about Person 1's place of residence? You've guessed it by now:

I'm really curious to know "all that apply" to some people. Yes, I live here, but also in a nursing home, and, let's see, in prison too.

I spent two minutes filling out the census and about twenty compiling this blog post, not to mention scanning time. But somewhere out there, Person 1 is tearing his/her hair out. Remember, this was supposed to be quick and easy. Don't believe me? Official census survey says:

Which Actor Has the Best Resume?

2010-03-31T13:05:00.000-04:00

Quick, name the actor who had the best resume in Hollywood. Here's a hint: Just five movies, and all earned Oscar nods for Best Picture.

Many film fanatics remember John Cazale as Fredo Corleone in The Godfather and its sequel, and for his relationship with Meryl Streep. Sadly, he died at 42 of terminal bone cancer, just after wrapping his scenes for The Deer Hunter. Before that, he also portrayed Gene Hackman's right-hand man in The Conversation; starring in three of Francis Ford Coppola's greatest four ain't bad. An agitated, destructive web of paranoia, The Conversation fit Cazale's on-screen persona well: the doltish sidekick, the anxious kid caught in matters beyond his control. Sad that the rest of his career was so suddenly wrenched from his hands--but what great support he gave to five classics of the seventies (IMDB scale: from 8.1 to 9.2).

Perhaps his strongest, most poignant performance comes in Sal from Dog Day Afternoon, the Little John to Al Pacino's bank-heist Robin Hood. Cazale never appears to be acting; there's no conscious shift between humor and moroseness. His sad-sack robber is asked "Is there any country you want to go to?" and responds, "Wyoming."

No other actor can topple that consistency. A heap of first-timers won Oscars for their first performances, sure, but for every Mary Poppins, there's a Tooth Fairy on its way. But a few others come close.

Cate Blanchett has managed to secure many successful films since her 1998 breakout in Elizabeth. A partial list: An Ideal Husband, The Talented Mr. Ripley, The Gift, The Lord of the Rings, The Shipping News, Veronica Guerin, Coffee and Cigarettes, The Life Aquatic, The Aviator (Oscar win), Babel, Notes on a Scandal, I'm Not There., Elizabeth: The Golden Age (Oscar noms for the last three), and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.

Even her most successful ventures have artistic merit. Blanchett has never descended from the pedestal of Serious Actress, and unlike other acting peers--hey there, Meryl Streep--has chosen few films (beyond Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull) simply for the unfathomable amounts of money they would make.

As a leading lady, finding the right projects can be tough. So maybe it's better to do a John Cazale and latch on to surefire successes in smaller, but still pivotal, roles? Ask character actress Thelma Ritter, honored with six Oscar nods and no wins. The Academy's loss: her resume only includes one complete dud (The Farmer Takes a Wife), flanked with classics of the 1950s. Her six times at the Oscars: The Mating Season, With a Song in My Heart, Pickup on South Street, Pillow Talk, Birdman of Alcatraz, and the eternal backstage comedy All About Eve. We don't remember them all today, but in their time this was a stellar line-up.

I will always remember her for her no-nonsense maid in Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window. Has anyone ever seemed so gleeful at the scene of a crime? "Nobody ever invented a polite word for killin' yet." Don't forget her relationship advice: "When two people love each together, they come together--Wham!--like two taxis on Broadway." Though rare, some actors just seem destined to collide like that with one great film after another.

Any other actors with stellar credits top to bottom?

Male Studies: The Course Catalog

2010-03-27T19:43:00.001-04:00

Here's something American higher education needs. The Washington Post reports that Wagner College will be hosting seminars on "the declining state of the male, stemming from cataclysmic changes in today's culture, environment and global economy." Could this be the start of a Men's Studies department? they wonder.

I can just imagine the course offerings in ten years:

MALE/HIST 369: Free Love in the Oval Office
We will explore the declining state of the American president. Following the '60s era of "Happy Birthday, Mr. President" through the '90s "blue dress" media frenzy, we will analyze the president's reversion to the monogamous family-man.

MALE/LIT 301: You Will Read Bret Easton Ellis, and You Will Like It

Midterm includes stabbing random homeless man in the eye.

MALE/KIN 352: Advanced Golf Technique

Prerequisite: BUS 302 Become Famous Enough to Make Millions and Date Millions.

MALE/MUS 312: Male Studies in Music
Note: This course will recycle the same syllabus from MUS 311: History of Western Music.

MALE/SOC 407: Men-imism
This advanced theoretical seminar deconstructs women's rights movements in America, as well as the "masculine mystique," the "gays," and the perpetuation of the "glass floor." Be sure to bring necessary materials to the first class for Men's Libation and jockstrap-burning.

Oh, it's real!

Sweet Smell of Shostakovich

2010-03-19T13:13:00.009-04:00

Review: The Nose

The Metropolitan Opera, New York

March 11, 2010

I. The Music

Dmitri Shostakovich composed his first opera, The Nose, which made its Met debut this season, when he was 22. Way to overachieve. Based on a short story by Nicolai Gogol, the opera matches its supreme absurdity with savage instrumentation and leaps into atonality. Satirical and unromantic, the scenario follows Major Kovalyov, whose nose becomes detached in a barbershop. He runs to the cathedral the next morning only to behold his own nose, parading about town in the garb of a higher-ranked civil servant. After sinking into despair--and atoning for his lascivious, arrogant ways--he awakes again to find his nose reattached, and bounds back to the streets.

To counter Kovalyov, scored as a baritone, the nose sings (in his few brief solos) punishingly high tenor lines: flares of high Cs. Cashing in on the absurdity, Shostakovich writes the police inspector who seeks out Kovalyov and his nose up to a tenor E-flat. It's a frantic, devious score: bit chorus parts weave in and out, broken by percussion shatters and piercing woodwind pecks and flourishes.

In the midst of the maniacal, overpopulated surge of music, a few semi-Romantic moments emerge. Act II closes with Kovalyov's bedside lament, a lyrical pleading to return to full nasality. In Act III, Kovalyov writes to a woman who may have enchanted him to marry her daughter, against his wishes; after the shouts of men, this impassioned soprano line sounds lush by Shostakovich's standards.

II. The Production

While a minor twentieth-century opera, The Nose entrances with its speed and wit. To complement the musical frenzy, the Met chose South African artist William Kentridge to helm their premiere of this work. Kentridge's style of visual collage is full of punch and humor. Projections cover the proscenium; some supertitles flash in newscript across the backdrop, furthering the sense of alarm that spreads across St. Petersburg at the runaway nostrils. Visually busy, if continually impressive, the production could use a pause in the few lyrical moments from Kentridge's mash-up of posters, processions of caricatures, and propaganda.

Even then, he does merge the sardonic and sneakily emotive sides of The Nose: a ballerina dances gracefully against Kovalyov's Act II soliloquy--though her head is mischievously replaced with a giant nose, blending grace and bathos. Paulo Szot, making an impressive Met debut, possesses a firm, if light, baritone that delivers this solo spot compassionately. His character is a Lothario, a hopeless cad, who deserves his misfortune; yet Szot strikes such a charmingly buoyant, yet grounded, figure, I felt for the guy. It's a thrill to see someone successfully straddle musical theater (Tony-winning for South Pacific) and opera.

The smaller roles teem with first-rate singers, especially the refreshing soprano Erin Morley as the betrothed daughter. All jot off spiky solo lines, close to pitched dialogue, with brio and a wink. Everyone's in on the joke--and still Kentridge jabs us with his art of oppression. Silhouettes overpower the stage; media encircles like a CNN newscast gone cubist. He conjures a Russian society full of character and menace, well-matched to a Shostakovich that sings in sputters and snarls.

Invitation to a Behanding

2010-03-12T13:47:00.005-05:00

Review: A Behanding in Spokane
Gerald Schoenfeld Theatre, New York
March 10, 2010

Martin McDonagh has given us quite a roster of Irish plays, from the risible The Beauty Queen of Leenane to last year's revival of the intimate The Cripple of Inishmaan. His first American play, premiering in New York with four American actors, is the first time he's broken from the plonkers of rural Irish towns--and alas, the first time his writing is half-handed.

He crafts a vengeful Mephistopheles in the character of Carmichael (Christopher Walken), on the hunt for a hand severed off in his youth. On the train tracks, he recalls. We're never sure of the veracity of that tall tale, nor how off-kilter Walken's next line reading will sound. Walken's performance is a cauldron of mischief, malice, and pathos swirling together. Fascinating at every moment with him, the show suffers whenever he's off-stage.

Carmichael traps two bumbling crooks, who sought to con him with an aborigine hand, inside his decaying hotel room with a gas can soon to ignite. Alas, McDonagh's usual duplicity doesn't spring forth here: the prisoners tossing shoes (and extraneous hands) at the gas can sacrifices tension for slapstick. Anthony Mackie, as the crook digging himself further into lies, scores many laughs but through over-exertion; Zoe Kazan is miscast as his shrill sidekick. Sam Rockwell at least cloaks his dim-witted but slyly suspicious hotel manager some of the ambiguous bizarreness that perfumes Walken.

McDonagh has proven a master of manipulation in the past. By only crafting one (and a half) compelling parts out of four, the play tilts entirely toward Walken. His mother registers more as the unheard half of a telephone conversation, bringing out all Carmichael's savagery, than do the thieves. The playwright's best work feeds off power struggles--little guy overtaking big fish--but Carmichael never risks losing his patriarchal command.

Jipped, too, are we of a bloody explosive showdown, like in The Lieutenant of Inishmore, or gruesome revelation a la The Pillowman. His bent for profanity and racial epiphets runs stouter than Guinness, and is one of the few tricks that really riles us. Right now the ovations belong to Walken, but I hope that in his future American efforts, we'll have cause to give McDonagh a hand.

Bridges and Bullock at the Bat

2010-03-07T14:26:00.009-05:00

Review: The Blind Side + Crazy Heart

It's their turn, common wisdom says. Jeff Bridges has attended the Oscars four times before. Sandra Bullock's running on the Whaddaya-Know card. Tonight, they will likely take home statuettes for their 2009 work. At least for part of it; Bullock just picked up a Razzie for her other film last year, All About Steve.

Sandra Bullock hocks DVDs of All About Steve in person at the 2010 Razzies.

Be reassured: both are fine in their nominated performances. If commerce and marketing had less pull over the Oscars, Michael Stuhlbarg or Jeremy Renner would take Best Actor, and Meryl Streep or Carey Mulligan Best Actress. But I won't denigrate the gravy train they're riding. Bullock, in particular, is the saving grace of her film: an inspirational but inert "true story."

The Blind Side sticks closely to the journey of rags-to-Ravens football star Michael Oher; sometimes life works better as life than art. Actual reported dialogue, as seen in this excerpt from Michael Lewis's book, makes it onto the screen, but every line, lifted or invented, comes across with the manufactured sugar of a Fruit Roll-Up. "You're changing that boy's life," says a sweet, suspicious Memphis wife. "No," Bullock responds. "He's changing mine."

Country singer Tim McGraw has screen presence to spare, and Bullock musters up enough spit-and-vinegar to ride through the saccharine. Taking in over $200 million at the box office, The Blind Side has become the highest-ranking sports movie yet. So why doesn't a compelling life story translate better to film? We never see Michael as a character, for starters. The great biopics manipulate true-life events in search of subtext, of a person's inner workings. Michael has all his decisions made for him by rich white restaurant-chain owners: the suburban Christian elite. His path seems entirely based on the kindness of strangers, not any passions or emotions of his own.

In Crazy Heart, Bad Blake's passions are more immediate: booze, broads, and ballads. Cue every down-and-out wunderkind film of the last twenty years. The Wrestler comes to mind; with all due respect to Mickey Rourke, we expect great work from Jeff Bridges. Crazy Heart, which fought for a distributor, has gained everything from awards season; and good for it. Best of all is T-Bone Burnett's surefire score, and the actors corralled into singing (Bridges, Colin Farrell, Robert Duvall).

Crazy Heart feels more indie, less Hallmark, than The Blind Side, though both were made on tight budgets. But you can check off the familiar landmarks the film drives by: Washed-up musician. Scruffy motel room. Music journalist in lust. That one song that paves the way to recovery. Sunrise, sunset. The women in these male comeback sagas never get much to work with (Walk the Line being one recent exception), but Maggie Gyllenhaal does her darnedest. Bridges and company find a gentle rhythm and don't tug too hard on the heartstrings. It's a movie we've all seen before, but hey, it's Jeff Bridges's turn. Unlike Bad Blake, he's still in his prime.

Now Available on Amazon

2010-03-05T12:44:00.005-05:00

As seen in the picture, Deluxe Jesus (clearly better than run-of-the-mill Jesus) performs two miracles: 1) Turns water into wine. 2) Feeds the thousands with two fish and five loaves.

The key section of the product description: "this wonderful Jesus character stands 5 1/4-inches tall and features glow-in-the-dark hands!" Ah, yes. Luke 23:46. "Father, into your glow-in-the-dark hands, I commend my spirit."

Billy Boy McRobert "Billy Boy," reviewing this action figure on Amazon, writes how Deluxe Jesus turned his son's G.I. Joe toys into pacifists. Mojo points out that Deluxe Jesus is waterproof. Fleaman "Welcome to your doom!" is, as his avatar implies, not a fan of action-figure Jesus. And J.H. Barnard suggests Deluxe Jesus is unsafe for pets and small children.

Deluxe Jesus sells at the retail price of $16.64.

Happy National Grammar Day!

2010-03-04T09:11:00.005-05:00

I'd like to propose a toast to National Grammar Day. One day a year when it's acceptable, even encouraged, for me to correct others' poor usage and mechanics. (We'll celebrate spelling on September 30.)

As you can see, I use fragments and parentheticals at whim. Splitting your infinitives or ending with prepositions are kosher, too: sometimes necessary tricks to simply* get your point across.

Oh, and yes, I care a lot about the Oxford comma. The serial, series, or Harvard comma; call it what you will. The Chicago Manual of Style, 15th edition, strongly recommends it in published books. Have a merry time with your AP-style newspapers; trade books don't lie and die by word (and character) count. It always helps clarity, never hurts, and usually looks better.

She went to lunch with her parents, the president and the vice-president.

Not so clear, is it? An Oxford comma would negate the chance Barack Obama and Joe Biden are her fathers. (Which is best; they'd have some explaining to do.)

Other commas I'd like to stand up for: the two surrounding an appositive. If I tell you that my first memoir, The Life and Times of America's Next Superhero, hits stores the first day of summer, which comes in June, there better be commas everywhere. So many people forget to close the appositive off; the technical term for this practice is apathy. You can't argue appositives.**

May I say a few more words?

Therefore and thus are not conjunctions. Semicolons before, commas after, please.
Sorry, Strunk and White, but hopefully can mean I hope. Hopefully you can live with that.
"It's I." Technically, yes. But when you're not lighting gas lamps in Victorian England, go ahead; say "it's me" with confidence.
If I were a Spanish teacher, I wouldn't tell my students there's no subjunctive in English. If that were true, it would require that this sentence vanish before your eyes.

*If we moved simply to the end of the sentence, it would mean with ease rather than merely, as I intended. Placing it before to get gives it unnecessary emphasis, I feel.
**Though I will concede it seems silly to set off The Life and Times... above. If I took out the word first, there would be no commas, hence no appositive. The phrase memoir would be nonrestrictive, and the title a clarification that identifies rather than just additional information.

Born to Be Wild

2010-02-28T09:30:00.008-05:00

Review: The Hurt Locker

Thirty-eight days left in Bravo Company, and the explosives men are cracking wise. But when the bomb they set off takes out one of their own, in steps Sergeant First Class William James (Jeremy Renner), a renegade with 873 diffused bombs to his credit. He stores parts from memorable explosives under his bed, one from the U.N., another that almost killed him. Right away, his recklessness gets on Sergeant JT Sanborn (Anthony Mackie), who plays by the book.

Nerves run high enough in Iraq after the 2004 invasion; director Kathryn Bigelow wisely does not turn The Hurt Locker into a maverick-versus-status quo narrative. She and screenwriter Mark Boal realize that a great war film targets no enemies beyond that inevitable, any-day-now feeling. For Sgt. James, war is adrenaline, the only way to experience life. Diffusing an explosive-laden car, he removes his safety gear ("If I die, I want to die comfortable."), striking with the bomb an intimacy he knows nowhere else.

A few cameos, some foreshortened, keep the stakes high. For James, the journey is less about endurance than addiction; he can't love his family back home in the same way. Despite the day-to-day responsibility as an insurgent, Sanborn envies his partner's risk-taking. Mackie offers strong support in the film, notably in his quiet desperation at the end: "I'm done. I want a son. I want a little boy, Will."

The Hurt Locker rides on Renner's shoulders, and he swings between wild and sedate with ease. As James ebbs in and out of paranoia, his inner turmoil flares up and recedes quickly, like bits of shrapnel piercing his surface cool. Lest I make this sound too serious, it's really a knuckle-biting action movie. Bigelow captures the electricity of each new bomb, within the grim streets of invaded Baghdad. The film can be a disjointed series of episodes; rather than building to one singular climax, it takes a near-documentary approach to the humor and anxiety with which these men pass each hour. The threat of death looms, but never as heavily as the fear of survival.

We Know That There's Always Tomorrow

2010-02-22T09:01:00.006-05:00

Review: Precious: Based on the Novel "Push" by Sapphire

All the hype, the Sundance cred, the Oprah-Tyler Perry stigma. Precious may be based on a novel, as noted by the insistent subtitle, but it’s a visceral movie experience. Ten minutes in, during the first of many eviscerating verbal beat-downs by Precious’s mother Mary (a devastating performance by Mo'Nique), I worried I wouldn't be able to watch more.

Lee Daniels deserves credit for imbuing the grimmest of urban tragedies with occasional flashes of an exterior world. Precious, sixteen and pregnant again by her father, steps away—or maybe toward—into a fantasy world: swashes of parties, red carpets, autograph signings, the latest couture. The film charts a course of transformation via Precious's imagination. When more and more weighs her down (and believe me, the heaviness never lets up): through writing, her teacher and nurse (Paula Patton and Lenny Kravitz, both on their game), the birth of her son.

I don't know if Gabourey Sidibe will sustain a career in acting, but she's very affecting here. Her taciturn face and mumbled speech form a blank slate on which she registers every hardship with tenacity. In the final scene, a tremulous showdown between Mo'Nique and Sidibe, each actress holds her own without lapsing into sentimentality.

Precious invokes many emotions, but is never maudlin. Some musical cues (gospel ballads at the end of a fight, for example) feel shoe-horned in, as if Daniels needed all the levity he could muster. It's amazing how this film has taken off since its Sundance premiere; though it's easy to blister at the horrors within, there's more than urban welfare critique. Precious, like the title character, feeds off a strain of possibility, just below the surface, that almost proves redemptive for character and audience.

"Better get rid of your accent."

2010-02-13T11:36:00.006-05:00

The Guardian recently railed against bad accents on film and on stage. Why not dispense with the whole messy business of accents, the paper suggested? Now I am not one to hate on actors who aren't gifted at accents. Many factors go into casting, and accent proficiency should not be the prime one, or even in the top five.

"The constabile's responstable."

But compared to analyzing scripts and motivations, as well as physical appearance, chemistry with costars, the accent's bottom-drawer. Films about historical events or celebrities require the accent: Cate Blanchett as the inimitable Katherine Hepburn (The Aviator), Philip Seymour Hoffman as Truman Capote. But sometimes actors use them as a crutch. Meryl Streep couldn't have pulled off Julia Child without her distinctive chirp, but did she need such a heavy cloud of Bronx dialect hovering over Doubt?

If your characters are Europeans speaking, presumably, in German, don't have them pull out the bier-und-bratwurst. Amadeus is a wonderful example of Austrian/German/Italian characters all speaking in their natural Standard American--because why should they do otherwise?

All I ask is that actors be consistent. Devise whatever Scandinavian dialect you like, but don't slip in and out of it. Or going halfway then giving up (like Kevin Costner's in-out British Robin Hood). It's easy to cite Sean Connery for his Scottish brogue no matter what role he plays; but I don't want to spend the film cringing as he butchers other dialects needlessly. Did Cary Grant, Katherine Hepburn, Humphrey Bogart, or Bette Davis let it get them down? Their own peculiar speech patterns were good enough.

Some general trends: Brits tend to think Americans hail from North Carolina. Australians are accent pros. Every movie set in Boston seems to require the whole cast to chomp through each scene like it were chowdah from the hahbah.

Memorable accents attempted gone askew:

Dick van Dyke, Mary Poppins (Cockney).
Michael Caine, The Cider House Rules (New England).
Keanu Reeves, Bram Stoker's Dracula (British). Prime example of someone who should have just gone American.
Eddie Izzard, The Riches (Southern).
Leonardo DiCaprio, Blood Diamond (South African).
Julianne Moore, 30 Rock (Boston).

Some actors are more adept, from Vivien Leigh to Kate Winslet. Toni Collette, Cate Blanchett, Heath Ledger, all from Down Under. Meryl Streep by sheer volume.

What So Proudly We Hailed

2010-02-10T20:54:00.005-05:00

What could be more American than the much-envied Snow Day? How about a snow day spent listening to various versions of our national anthem? Yes, "The Star-Spangled Banner," Francis Scott Key. This is what happens when class is cancelled.

It's somehow Super Bowl Week here at my blog. Here are my thoughts on Super Bowl highs and lows of that singer strangler, "The Star-Spangled Banner." It's a hard song to tackle, especially "the land of the free," which places the highest note on an "ee" vowel. (Rough for women if they don't have a good head voice.)*

1. Whitney Houston. 1991. Lauded all around; Rolling Stone suspects it was "the best Super Bowl ever." Her performance plays in the Smithsonian in the restored flag's exhibition. The second verse gets a bit mellow, but once those rockets start glaring, there's no turning back.

2. Jennifer Hudson. 2009. Her first public gig after family tragedy. Full-throttle the whole time. Normally I dislike the song at funeral speed, laden with vocal melisma, but she's a powerhouse and knows it. Despite her Idol start, she's really come into her own.

3. Cher. 1999. Better "Believe" it. Who knew she could pull this off?

4. Carrie Underwood. 2010. This country girl goes a cappella, with an authentic, slightly strained sound. More interesting than Jordin Sparks, Christina Aguilera, Beyonce's versions. I worried, though, she wouldn't make it to "free."

5. Billy Joel. 2007. YouTube commenters debate over if he used AutoTune or not, but it's doubtful considering how many notes he missed.

6. Mariah Carey. 2002. Before she went all padded-walls on us. She opts for hushed Sprechstimme and uncomfortable riffs ("bursting in air" just sounds bad in her voice). And that two-octave jump on "free"? B above high C whatever**--cheap gimmick, and out of place.

Enough with the female belters, dear Super Bowl. Can we shake it up*** next year? Placido Domingo could sing the hell out of it.

*From Tony Kushner's Angels in America: "He set the word 'free' to a note so high nobody could reach it. That was deliberate."

**Few women can hit a B6, so applause for that. But "four octave range"? It's not like half those notes Sound Good. And she sure can't use those four octaves to pull off the Queen of the Night.

***Within limits. No Roseanne fiascos!

I Watched the Game and I Liked It

2010-02-09T12:44:00.005-05:00

I actively watch football once a year. Until high school, I did it for the commercials. Until college, I did it for the chili con queso. Recently I've noticed that I watch the Super Bowl for, well, the game itself. When did this happen?

Because my parents watched games every Sunday afternoon of my upbringing, while I would read Animorphs in the other room, I rebelled by disliking sports. Not a good enough reason? Let's time travel further back.

Most artsy people I know were raised on piano lessons, but my Virginia home has never in 21 years entertained that instrument. I was signed up (involuntarily, I'm pretty sure) for gymnastics and tee-ball. To review my qualifications: I was inflexible and afraid of the ball coming toward me. There were few consequences to hardcore sucking: I never went more than halfway up the climbing rope, but got to jump in the foam pit regardless. When I missed the pitcher's ball, the tee was pulled out like a baseball mulligan.

Going to games, I soon learned, was better than watching them on TV. No instant replays, no commercial breaks--and overpriced cotton candy. But I wasn't destined to be a sports person. If I'd known my six-foot stature, I could have tried basketball. Or tennis--a sport without a team.

My mom would ask, when I practiced violin, how I knew the notes. Strange to think that reading music, second-nature by now, isn't a universal skill. But that's how I approached football for years, an alien in a rowdy land: What's an onside kick? Holding? Why did they just run that two-point conversion?

There's something about growing up that whittles away barriers. School pride comes into play; William and Mary had great football and basketball seasons, at last. It's also choosing the Super Bowl winner 5 out of 7 times. (In other words, every game the Colts are not in. Work with me, Peyton!) Or scarfing snacks during commercials, not game play. Though my inner nerd had its day, too--paystobecurious.com misspelled "rhymes" during airtime, and I aurally admonished them. The corrected version from their site:

(Answer: curple (horse hindquarters) and hirple (to limp).

Hope no Colts hirpled off with purple curples.)

Give 'em the old Razzie dazzle

2010-02-03T10:33:00.007-05:00

Awards season has reached its apex. Over the inevitable furor of The Blind Side blind-siding more worthy films for Best Picture, you may have missed what's vying for Worst. I bring you faithful readers my Second Annual Razzie Predictions.

THE 30TH ANNUAL RAZZIE AWARDS

WORST PICTURE
All About Steve
G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra
Land of the Lost
Old Dogs
Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen

Should I go with the mainstream choice (Transformers Dos, which raked in over $800 million) or something more indie? All About Steve has the lowest IMDB rating: 4.9. But bigger is definitely better at the Razzies. The higher you climb, the harder you fall.

WORST ACTOR
All Three Jonas Brothers (Jonas Brothers: The 3-D Concert Experience)
Will Ferrell (Land of the Lost)
Steve Martin (Pink Panther 2)
Eddie Murphy (Imagine That)
John Travolta (Old Dogs)

Lopping the Jonas Brothers in with four comedians who should know better seems unfair. Robin Williams should hold the fifth spot for Old Dogs. Murphy recently won for Norbit; Travolta will get his shot below. I say Ferrell deserves a win: everything else about his film lost (money, respect, their minds).

WORST ACTRESS
Beyonce (Obsessed)
Sandra Bullock (All About Steve)
Miley Cyrus (Hannah Montana: The Movie)
Megan Fox (Jennifer's Body and Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen)
Sarah Jessica Parker (Did You Hear about the Morgans?)

You know the Razzies want to award Bullock the year she's front-runner for an Oscar.

The Best of the Worst continues after the jump!

WORST REMAKE, RIP-OFF OR SEQUEL
G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra
Land of the Lost
Pink Panther 2 (A Rip-off of a Sequel to a Remake)
Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen
Twilight Saga: New Moon

The only one derived from a quality franchise starring comic genius Peter Sellers.

WORST DIRECTOR
Michael Bay (Trannies, Too)
Walt Becker (Old Dogs)
Brad Silberling (Land of the Lost)
Stephen Sommers (G.I. Joe)
Phil Traill (All About Steve)

Bay's resume: The Rock. Pearl Harbor. Transformers II. The Island. His first music video starred Donny Osmond.

WORST SCREENPLAY
All About Steve (Kim Barker)
"I will eat you like a mountain lion."
G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra (Stuart Beattie, David Elliot, Paul Lovett)
"General, it was our team that got wasted out there. We deserve payback."
"You don't ask to be part of G.I. Joe. You get asked."
Land of the Lost (Chris Henchy, Dennis McNicholas)
"If you don't make it, it's your own damn 'vault.' That's a bitch slap of truth right there."
Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (Ehren Kruger, Roberto Orci, Alex Kurtzman)
"I am not some alien ambassador, you know? I'm a normal kid with normal problems."
"Sam, fate rarely calls upon us at a moment of our choosing."
"You're Optimus Prime. You don't need me."
"We do. More than you know..."
Twilight Saga: New Moon (Melissa Rosenberg)
"But the absence of him is everywhere I look. It's like a huge hole has been punched through my chest. But in a way I'm glad. The pain was the only reminder that he was real."

And now for the Big Three...

WORST PICTURE OF THE DECADE (2000-2009)
Battlefield Earth (2000)
Freddy Got Fingered (2001)
Gigli (2003)
I Know Who Killed Me (2007)
Swept Away (2002)

John Travolta: "I have a special affection for this book. Hubbard was a great writer, and I had... a fantasy in my mind that lasted for years." Rotten Tomatoes: 2%.

WORST ACTOR OF THE DECADE
Ben Affleck (Gigli, Pearl Harbor)
Eddie Murphy (Imagine That, Norbit)
Mike Myers (Cat in the Hat, The Love Guru)
Rob Schneider (Deuce Bigalo II, The Hot Chick)
John Travolta (Battlefield Earth, Old Dogs)

Has done nothing for the good of film or humankind.

WORST ACTRESS OF THE DECADE
Mariah Carey (Glitter)
Paris Hilton (The Hottie and the Nottie, House of Whacks)
Lindsay Lohan (I Know Who Killed Me, all those Disney movies)
Jennifer Lopez (Gigli, Monster-in-Law)
Madonna (Swept Away, Die Another Day)

Two-way tie for "actress" (a generous word here)! Hilton is massacring the screen in 2010 witha cop movie starring Will Ferrell and The Rock, while Lohan will play "an over-achieving science scholar." Next year's already got tough Razzie competition.

The Music of Last Night... and the Night Before That...

2010-02-01T22:37:00.006-05:00

While Elton John launched the Grammys in the U.S., Andrew Lloyd Webber graced Londoners with a new excerpt from Love Never Dies (aka Phantom II. Still not sure if Phantom's part of the official title or not). As it turns out, this extract from the score was extracted from a different score. Yes, Lloyd Webber's hoping yet again our memories have faded (except for the tabby tuner "Memory," naturally; ALW needs his residuals).

What is currently "Love Never Dies" was birthed as "The Heart is Slow to Learn," as I once posted. Quick recap: The sequel stalled, so ALW rewrote the song as "Our Kind of Love" for The Beautiful Game. When that lost money, the show was rejiggered, and "Love" excised. And so the wheel turns. Now we are back at the start, and the lyrics have changed again. But for the better?

The ending chorus, version 1.0:

I'll never love as I have loved you
Why is love cruel? I wish I knew
Say what you will, it doesn't matter
Until I die, there's only you

Then, refashioned for Irish nationalists:

All kinds of love bring us together
Causes the broken heart to mend
People must love, now and forever
There's only one love in the end

And now for sadder-but-wiser Christine Daae:

Love never dies, love will continue
Love keeps on beating when you're gone
Love never dies once it is in you
Life may be fleeting, love lives on

The melodic jump to a soprano B-flat, however, virtually obliterates "Life may be fleeting." Why does Glenn Slater introduce new words so high in her vocal range? You're bound to hear "Love may be fleeting," then be puzzled when the song wraps with "love lives on."

Eh, common mistake. Slater does use the word "love" twenty-six times. Could it be an omen for the years Phantom Never Dies will run? Or for how many reprises we'll hear of "Love Never Dies," version 3.0, before the curtain? Just no disco beat, please. That's all I ask, Andrew.

(For maximum ALW water-cooler mockery, listen to the main title of Billy Wilder's black comedy The Apartment and note the similarity.)

The Great American Songbook: "Blowin' in the Wind"

2010-01-26T10:36:00.006-05:00

Written by: Bob Dylan

First recorded by: Bob Dylan, 1963

"Too many of these hip people are telling me where the answer is but oh I won't believe that. I still say it's in the wind and just like a restless piece of paper it's got to come down some." That's how Bob Dylan described his folksy protest anthem "Blowin' in the Wind" in 1962. With his ragged voice and acoustic guitar, he laid it down on record the next year.

Like most rock-and-roll standards that rack up hundreds of covers (see The Beatles' "Yesterday"), this song rode on ideologies sweeping the nation but remained general, vague, poetic. If the answer is in the wind, does that mean it will float down to us someday? And will the wind ever let up? The words are political, but against mass death and suffering, not a harangue against the establishment. Addressing "my friend" calms the existential nature of Dylan's questions:

How many roads must a man walk down
Before you call him a man?
How many seas must a white dove sail
Before she sleeps in the sand?
Yes, how many times must the cannonballs fly
Before they're forever banned?
The answer, my friend, is blowin' in the wind.
The answer is blowin' in the wind.

In the spirit of community, a song isn't a true standard until another cover hits it big. Sunny-eyed folk singers Peter, Paul and Mary released their version in 1963, just after Dylan's, and the single hit #2 on the Billboard chart instantly. Many genres have adopted Dylan's lament, from country (Chet Atkins, Dolly Parton) to jazz (Duke Ellington); chanteuse Marlene Dietrich even performed the song in German. Stevie Wonder's blues rendition charted in 1966.

"Blowin' in the Wind" kicked off Dylan's second album, The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, and solidified his strengths as a songwriter. Was this (with its "white dove" reference) a plea for civil rights? Was he criticizing American foreign policy? And was he lamenting or singing of hope? There are just three verses, no harmonic or melodic change, with some harmonica filler. We can question the meaning all we want. The song, disconsolate yet inspirited, continues a tradition of standards that have lasted through the art and politics of the last century.

One Is the Loneliest Number

2010-01-24T21:07:00.004-05:00

Review: A Single Man

British writer Christopher Isherwood, known best for The Berlin Stories that spawned the stage and film musical Cabaret, was one of the first authors to take up the gay liberation movement of the 1960s. His 1964 novel A Single Man was largely autobiographical, chronicling one day in the life of a British professor in California. The invented George Falconer, however, mourns the death of his longtime partner, while Isherwood remained with his partner until he died much later.

Fashion designer-turned-director Tom Ford floods the novel with fluid sound and imagery, carefully sculpted cinematography, and meticulous period detail. His directorial hand is omnipresent but never tacky or kitsch. His images cascade across the screen like the waters that George floats in, echoing how he sinks further into grief. It's easy to take a film like this at surface value. Colin Firth seems to play that Englishman we've seen before; yet his lack of showiness allows us to see the restless aching underneath. He appears sedate, but early on intimates that that he plans to commit suicide that night.

One feels Mad Men-inspired sixties-mania on display (aided by Jon Hamm's voiceover cameo). And the undulating music and delicate lyricism owe homage to The Hours, not to mention Julianne Moore's participation. Even she resists playing up the camp side of George's close friend Charley, who cloaks her anguish in stingers and swing. As a single woman, she tries to hide her feelings for George as much as he hides how he's lost his will to live. Ford's film feeds off the retro craze but foregrounds the alienation at its core with honesty and familiarity.

Survival of the Dumbest 3

2010-01-22T22:53:00.003-05:00

A column of ideas we should not adopt, for our national sanity.

Whitewashing - The Second Time
Try to judge the protagonist's race based on this cover for Liar. African-American likely wasn't your first instinct, yet that's the real answer for Justine Larbalestier's heroine. The problem, as is evident, is that the cover Bloomsbury first printed last summer was faithful to the title of book but not to its racial integrity. To play devil's advocate: there are light-skinned black women, and the model to your left could very well be one.

But we're talking about marketing a novel. The cover is the only image, the only "logo" or representation most see of a book. If a girl's face is our only visual, it should be spelled out so that we don't have to question or second-guess it. The karmic touch is how shrouded the girl is, as if she's hiding something beneath her hair; and beneath the cover, readers might be surprised to learn about the (forgive the expression) white elephant in the room. It's not as if, in the digital age, nobody would notice the disjunction and set off blogging about it.

Fine. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice?

Bloomsbury just retracted their cover to Magic Under Glass. Jaclyn Dolamore has also written a novel with an African-American girl as the lead, but you'd have no idea from the cover. From my view, this one is even more deceptive in appearance than the first. Clearly it's not a metaphorical image or even a complex intellectual deconstruction of race: it's just bad marketing. And why would Bloomsbury repeat their blatantly un-PC mistake six months later?

On one hand, why waste space criticizing a cover that screams "Harlequin bodice ripper"? But on the other, this can't be a mistake. The marketing staff at the publisher must have known they were intentionally misrepresenting the book. Did they hold a conversation in which it was decided that white women are more market-friendly? Oprah and Tyler Perry would disagree.

We've all seen misleading movie trailers. Book jacket synopses that barely allude to the plot. But a cover is part of the reading experience: a marketing poster but also genuine iconography for a work's themes or characters. Even beyond racial sensitivity, to think the readers won't notice the incongruity reeks more of smoke and mirrors than magic.