by Jason Clark on March 22nd, 2010 at 9:50 am in Theater
A naked girl hula hoops and asks unsuspecting audience members if they will buy her some candy. There's a naked male roller skater. A man gets lowered on stage by a great big giant gold dong. A live band performs Led Zeppelin's "Kashmir" while patrons imbibe free beer from the lobby. And that's just in the first 10 minutes of Caligula Maximus, a rowdy, rude, loud, and eventually wearying retelling of the legend, only this time with female bodybuilders, acrobats, and full-on dance numbers with a cast that is seemingly endless.
Playing the titular, self-created deity Caligula with a cheeky, pervy, party-boy hauteur not unlike Cabaret's furtive emcee, the brave, highly attention-catching Ryan Knowles lords over a most unruly evening, and your enjoyment of the show is probably most dependent on how anarchic your sensibilities are. This is down-and-dirty downtown theater of the crudest kind, which is highly commendable in this era of prefab junk-food theater and would be even more so if the whole enterprise (envisioned by Classical Theatre of Harlem's Alfred Preisser and nightspot impresario Randy Weiner) didn't feel so slickly disjointed. Continue Reading »
Tags: Alfred Preisser, Alice in Slasherland, Caligula Maximus, Carlo Alban, Ellen Stewart Theater, HERE Arts Center, La MaMa, Randy Weiner, Ryan Knowles, Vampire Cowboys Theatre Company
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by Tom Stempel on March 22nd, 2010 at 3:00 am in Film
COMING UP IN THIS COLUMN: The Book of Eli, Valentine's Day, Theater of War, Hamlet 2, Test Pilot, Prince Valiant, In the Line of Fire, Life Unxpected, Temple Grandin
THE BOOK OF ELI (2010. Written by Gary Whitta. 118 minutes)
A stranger comes into town…: I am not normally a fan of post-apocalyptic movies. My left brain always has trouble with the reality of the details. For example, if it is all arid and dusty, where do they get their food? Where do they get their refined gasoline to drive their motorcycles and trucks? Where do they get the bullets they fire off in great numbers? And so on. I had some of those problems with this movie, especially the bullets, but Whitta has thrown in a nice scene when The Man With No…, sorry, Eli, comes into a rundown town. He has not said much so far, as one might gather when one learns from Peter Clines's article on the writing of the film in the January/February 2010 issue of Creative Screenwriting that Whitta is a big fan of Sergio Leone and Toshiro Mifune samurai films. By the time he gets to town we already know he is a whiz with an industrial strength machete, having dispatched several hijackers on the road. We also know he doesn't say much. Hey, if it worked for Eastwood, why not? So he goes into a store and negotiates swapping various stuff he has picked up along the way for other stuff he needs. I don't know how much of the dialogue is in the script—most of it I would guess—but Denzel Washington as Eli and Tom Waits as the Shopkeeper get a nice rhythm going and we get a sense of what is now valuable and what is not any longer. If the rest of the film appeals to post-apocalyptic action junkies, this scene appeals to my left brain. Continue Reading »
Tags: Hamlet 2, In the Line of Fire, Life Unxpected, Prince Valiant, Temple Grandin, Test Pilot, The Book of Eli, Theater of War, Understanding Screenwriting, Valentine's Day
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by Aaron Cutler on March 22nd, 2010 at 12:30 am in Film
[Editor's Note: In honor of the Brooklyn Academy of Music's (BAM) ongoing Montgomery Clift series, we here present an altered version of a previous House article. Wild River screens today, Monday, March 22nd, at 6:50 and 9:15pm. And it’s not on DVD.]
If 1960's Wild River is director Elia Kazan’s most successful film, it’s because this is the most successful example of how Kazan liked to contrast actors. The wrestling matches are the most exciting parts of his movies: Carroll Baker paddling her husband's neck flab in Baby Doll, or James Dean throwing his brother at their mother in East of Eden, or Brando shoving the door in to get to Eva Marie Saint, say far more about characters' relationships than the film's overwritten scripts do. The best moments in Kazan's films are inevitably full two-shots, bespeaking his theatrical training. Unlike the work of the great film stylists, we watch Kazan not for the shots but for the struggles in them. The acting style he favored doesn't work in abstraction—the actors need something concrete to push against.
In River, he gets two performers that are as concrete as they come. Montgomery Clift plays a 1930s Tennessee Valley Authority rep who comes to a small town to buy out a family's home so the TVA can build a dam. The family lives on an island that he has to row to, and as he's pulling away after a visit, one of the group's young women (Lee Remick) leaps onto his raft. He stares at her, amazed, and she explains hurriedly: She barely ever leaves, and she's lonely. Continue Reading »
Tags: Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM), Elia Kazan, Lee Remick, Montgomery Clift, Wild River
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by Dan Callahan on March 21st, 2010 at 12:30 pm in Photos
March 18th, at 5:55pm or so, there was already a sizable group of people waiting to get into Ryan McGinley’s new show of black and white photographic portraits at Team Gallery, Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere (through April 17). Mainly they were young people, and some of them were the subjects of the nude photos themselves.
Some of them even shyly stood next to their nudes, but a few of them looked sweetly skittish when anyone asked them to pose with their portrait. McGinley is known for his nude subjects, but he skirts all obvious sexual appeal; he likes physical awkwardness, and if this awkwardness is erotic, it’s disarming, pimply, bad breath eroticism, the kind that emerges from low expectations, good weed and the ability to laugh at practically anything.
McGinley achieves his distinctive romanticism in a roundabout way that depends on killing any idealized ideas about people and their skin and the images they present the world. I was born in 1977, the same year as McGinley, and I spent my early twenties hanging out in New Jersey, so I feel like the world of most of his photos is a world I know and love. What sets his work apart is the little stab at utopia that McGinley is trying to provide, the kind of utopia where we don’t care if we’re gay or straight or beautiful or homely but we all dissolve into each other as a group of arms and legs and blissfully stoned minds. At his best, his work reminds me of the films of Jacques Demy, another gay dreamer who did his best work in praise of heterosexual love fantasies of both triumph (Lola, 1961) and defeat (The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, 1964).
To read the rest of the article at the L Magazine, click here.
Tags: Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere, Jacques Demy, Lola (1961), Ryan McGinley, Team Gallery, The L Magazine, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964)
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Last week, two forgotten gaming masterpieces appeared on two separate downloadable services—one a decade too early, the other a decade too late. Yet with both Out of This World (a.k.a. Another World) and Castlevania: Rondo of Blood now on Good Old Games and the Wii’s Virtual Console, these gems can finally be given the attention they deserve.
Out of This World was ahead of its time in many ways. Originally released in 1991, it was marketed as a "cinematic platformer." While the industry as a whole was content to cash in on mascot based platformers, Out of This World was a game that attempted to be so much more. Developed and designed by Eric Chahi, it was one of the first games that attempted the marriage of gameplay and storytelling as a single, cohesive experience. Industry legends such as Hideo Kojima (the creator of the Metal Gear Solid series) and Fumito Ueda (the creator of Ico and Shadow of the Colossus) mark this game as an inspiration for many of their groundbreaking projects. Sadly, while the game did get praised by various outlets for pushing the possibilities of the medium, lackluster sales condemned it to "forgotten masterpiece" status. Luckily, Good Old Games (a downloadable service for old PC games) has brought it back, making it compatible with today's PCs. For only $10, and with additional extras like a "making of" documentary and production documents, you would be doing yourself a disservice to pass it up a second time. Continue Reading »
Tags: Another World, Castlevania: Rondo of Blood, Eric Chahi, Good Old Games, Hideo Kojima, Out of this World, Virtual Console, Wii
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Isn’t it odd that a simple state like Oklahoma could have so many affinities with New York theater? When people think of Broadway shows, they might not realize how much of Oklahoma has elbowed its way in there. Did you know that:
- Kristen Chenoweth first portrayed Cunegonde in a Lyric Theater production of Candide?
- Matthew Alvin Brown’s stage adaptation of Rainbow Around the Sun recently played in the New York Musical Theater Festival.
- August: Osage County, Tracy Letts' 2008 Tony Award winner for Best Play and the Pulitzer Prize winner for Drama, was written by an Oklahoman about Oklahoma.
- The Reduxion Theater group is building an OK – NY bridge right now.
- There’s also that musical about Oklahoma that seems to never go away. Hillbillies do have a proclivity for singing and dancing.
Even though there are plenty of DVDs to watch around here, people in Oklahoma still enjoy going out to theaters to watch live entertainment. And for those of us lucky enough to attend an evening at the Lighthouse Theater in Edmond, Oklahoma, the live entertainment provided by this unique endeavor will live long past its unfortunate closure. Continue Reading »
Tags: Ed Howard, Edmond, Greater Tuna, Jaston Williams, Joe Sears, Oklahoma, The Lighthouse Theater
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11/4/08 (Jeff Deutchman). The director of 11/4/08 states that he enlisted the help of friends around the world to film their experiences on Election Day in order to "see what history looks like," but you know how the saying goes: History is written by the winners. 11/4/08 represents not what happened this past presidential election in the U.S., but rather what happened to the victors.
To Obama supporters, 11/4/08 is embarrassing in its shameless gushing, and the film comes across as ignorant fanaticism to those who opposed him. As one interviewee in the film put it, the most passionate ones on either side are usually the ones who know the least. The film doesn't necessarily reject conflicting ideas, as we see a couple of people question certain Obama fanboy claims, but when all of the videographers are firmly on the blue side of the fence, opposing views are a rarity.
They capture the occasional inspiring moment, such as a small meeting in France where a man shares his hopes that having a black president in the U.S. will open the door for a black leader in his own country. These scenes are overwhelmed by footage of Obama campaign volunteers tearfully regurgitating what they hear everyone else say—how this special, special man will lead us into the future, how he will turn this country around, how the past eight years have been hell. Thing is, I'm pretty sure they were saying the same things at Senator McCain's volunteer headquarters. (Now there's something that would've been interesting: a comparison of speeches that morning from both volunteer camps.) Continue Reading »
Tags: 11/4/08, Barack Obama, Carla Gugino, Elektra Luxx, Jeff Deutchman, Julianne Moore, Sebastian Gutierrez, South by Southwest, Women Without Men
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by Jason Clark on March 19th, 2010 at 12:00 pm in Theater
In Woody Allen's great film Crimes and Misdemeanors, Alan Alda has a whole bit about the secret of comedy ("It's…tragedy…plus time"), but does such a rule apply to the theater as well? In the case of Yasmina Reza's Tony-winning God of Carnage, the playwright would agree that her play is a tragedy (reportedly, she is often puzzled by how American audiences find it so funny). But the third cast to inhabit this play's ensemble has finally nailed the tricky challenge of playing the drama of the piece which, in effect, unearths Reza's work as a bit more than a Brooklyn elite gab-a-thon. I'll freely admit: I wasn't much of a fan of Carnage at this time last year. Despite the stellar cast and Matthew Warchus's expert direction, it seemed to me a Möbius strip of a concoction with too much contrivance at its center. (Why do the Raleighs keep heading to the door only to constantly wind up back on the Novacks' couch?) People laughed their heads off, sometimes at just the right intervals, but I had hoped for a deeper, more resonant experience that sadly never came.
Well, tonight I'm going to dine on some crow, because not only was I one of the people chuckling heartily this time, but Reza's play had sharper focus than it had ever revealed previously. Sometimes all it takes is just the right cast to modify something into fully operational machinery. And while the play still has those pesky contrivances that gnaw at you, the new quartet (Dylan Baker, Jeff Daniels, Lucy Liu, Janet McTeer) fully realize the power of words, and instead of going straight for the gut laughs, bring a more organic fluidity to the (literal) table. The tone is more contemplative this time, less manic, though startlingly, the play seems to move at an even steadier clip. Continue Reading »
Tags: Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre, Dylan Baker, God of Carnage, Janet McTeer, Jeff Daniels, Lucy Liu, Yasmina Reza
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by John Lingan on March 19th, 2010 at 9:00 am in DVD
Long-admired concert film The T.A.M.I. Show finally comes to DVD next Tuesday, almost 50 years after its original release in the gloriously named but short-lived Electronovision screening format, and the ensuing half-century has loaded the movie with enough cultural weight to nearly overwhelm the legendary performances therein. One can't avoid mentioning, for instance, that this harmonious and mutually admiring lineup of black and white musicians took place in October 1964, the exact midpoint between the Beatles's Ed Sullivan appearances and the passage of the 1965 Civil Rights Act. And the influence of T.A.M.I. on future generations of musicians and concert filmmakers remains indelible, to the point where it's hard to watch James Brown or Marvin Gaye—one absolutely on fire and the other almost boyishly bashful—and not see the precursors to Prince, Michael Jackson, or a hundred other subsequent R&B acts.
These, like so many in T.A.M.I., are benchmark musical performances by now-confirmed geniuses from a time when they were simply pop stars, and famous primarily among teenagers at that. So perhaps the most eye-opening element of this film, decades after most of its performers have been enshrined and immortalized in the popular consciousness, is the way that director Steve Binder and a team of editors, cameramen, and choreographers manage to wrangle these artists into a document that's expressly designed to avoid any semblance of reverence or calm appraisal. For all its music, T.A.M.I. is perhaps most effective and striking as an example of pure, craven audience exploitation. Continue Reading »
Tags: Chuck Berry, Electronovision, James Brown, Jan and Dean, Lesley Gore, Marvin Gaye, Smokey Robinson, The Barbarians, The Beach Boys, The Rolling Stones, The Supremes, The T.A.M.I. Show
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by Jason Clark on March 18th, 2010 at 2:00 pm in Theater
"They see the creases, they know they're done for!" carps Vet (John Doman), a belligerent South Texas border cop pontificating on the mindset of illegals when they see the sharp indents of his pants in Suzan-Lori Parks's newest, The Book of Grace. It's an astute analogy, given that Parks—never one to give audiences an easy route through the swirling, often bizarre complexities of her characters—absolutely lets you see the creases here, and certain audiences not on her wavelength are most certainly done for. However, her blackly comic Southern gothic, despite its longueurs and occasional overreaches, is sprinkled with poetic assertions on postwar distress and home-life abuses, and in James Macdonald's first-rate production at the Public, it occasionally even manages to cast a sinister spell. Continue Reading »
Tags: Amari Cheatom, Elizabeth Marvel, John Doman, Suzan-Lori Parks, The Book of Grace, The Public Theater, Topdog/Underdog
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by Chuck Bowen on March 18th, 2010 at 12:00 pm in DVD
Last year's It Might Get Loud portrayed White Stripes frontman Jack White as a man (touchingly) concerned with stripping his music of artifice, with avoiding the privileges that success affords in the pursuit of music that's primal, pure, and unfettered by self-consciousness. The irony, of course, is that few musicians seem to be more self-conscious than Jack White; he's self-conscious of his self-consciousness. Trying to let go, to will spontaneity through unspontaneously manufactured obstacles (such as deliberately inconvenient instrument positioning on stage), White probably boxes himself in about as much as if he were comfortably produced, but that yearning for truth, which strikes one as legit, can be felt in his music, which, at its best, is vital, intense, personal. White, like many artists of all stripes of his thirtysomething generation suspects that he's lacked the hardship to produce the kind of art that's inspired him (particularly blues), and it's that doubt that gives White the spiritual friction he seeks.
The White Stripes concert movie Under Great White Northern Lights is almost entirely conceived around White's insecurities: The picture follows the band as they tour every province and territory of Canada as part of a larger tour a few years ago. White seems to see Canada—"a neighbor"—as one of those great natural lands of little towns overlooked by big corporate logo-sporting franchise concerts, and he revels in the intimate shows, as well as in the considerably even more intimate "side-shows," which are usually put together an hour or so beforehand and are attended by whoever happens to have their ear to the grapevine. White, though he never explicitly voices it, is clearly concerned with the effect of the web on rock n' roll—with the effects that iTunes, IM, email, and blogs have wrought on the communal nature of browsing through record stores and listening to local bands at coffeehouses and bars. Continue Reading »
Tags: Don't Look Back, Emmett Malloy, Jack White, Meg White, Seven Nation Army, The White Stripes, Under Great White Northern Lights
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SXSW's film festival officially ended last night (though the films continue to play just as often for a few days, for those of us who haven't seen our fill yet) and the music festival started today. Watching the mole people of the movie world get replaced by sleeker, more stylish, generally younger musicians and A&R types makes me think of a very clever bumper (one of those short films that precedes each movie to let you know it's part of the festival) for this year's festival. This one, which is by SXSW staffer Joe Nicolosi, shows a bright-eyed young woman who heads into the woods "to get some exercise" and has to fight off one horror-movie monster after another. As she's about to go down, the final supertitles say something like: "Stay indoors. Watch movies."
The People vs. George Lucas (Alexandre O. Philippe). SXSW always has a strong lineup of documentaries, and The People vs. George Lucas is one of this year's best. Smart, funny, and often impassioned, it's entertaining even when it's just exploring the filmmaker's relationship with his rebellious army of fans. But what really hooked me were its insights into why this battle matters to the noncombatants.
Some points are hammered away at too often, and the Stars Wars-style "episodes" the doc is divided into work better as a joke than an organizing principle. I could have done with a little less footage of talking heads too. But those talking heads sure can talk. Their vivid language, self-aware humor, strong emotions, and intelligent observations won me over, as did the generous sampling of impressively creative or endearingly amateurish fan edits and the footage of fans, often surrounded by merchandise or putting their own stamp on the Star Wars myth. I particularly liked a couple of guys dressed as Elvis, one of whom was also a storm trooper while the other was a Jedi. Now, that's participatory fandom. Continue Reading »
Tags: Alexandre O. Philippe, Beijing Taxi, Cameron Yates, George Lucas, Jeanette Maier, Miao Wang, South by Southwest, Star Wars, The Canal Street Madam, The People vs. George Lucas
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[Editor and Author's Note: These weekly recaps will be cross-posted over at Vinyl is Heavy. We encourage comments at either joint.]
Sawyer episodes are usually a lot of fun because he usually gets into a lot of mischief. This one proved no different. And, for once, I was totally into the sideways story where Sawyer's Jim, an LAPD detective working with Miles, for the simple fact that it played like a parody of the buddy cop genre. Sure, it was kind of cool to see Charlotte show up undamaged, and the final chase to throw Kate against a fence was lively, but mostly it was hilarious to see these two dudes play these roles. Only problem with it is that is that Ken Leung is a better actor than Josh Holloway and seems in on the joke a bit more. Not to say Holloway's no good, but he mostly scowls through the episode. Continue Reading »
Tags: Lost, Lost: Season 6, Recon, TV Recap
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"The Imperfections of Memory" is a brief quiet moment before the next two episodes, what I expect shall be a far noisier wrap-up to the first half of Caprica's season. It will return this fall to complete its first series, and the good news according to The Hollywood Reporter is that the show looks likely to be renewed. The even better news for the disenfranchised Battlestar Galactica fans who like a little "space" with their soap opera is that Syfy is hoping to get executive producer Ronald Moore to develop yet another BSG spinoff.
With Caprica's fate currently looking somewhat safe, I guess I don't have to fret that this last episode breaks the momentum which has been building. I can just enjoy some of the unusual ways this entry ventures outside some of the familiar territory it has comfortably settled in.
As the Graystone's grief over Zoe's death recedes just a bit (if not from their consciousness then from the show's and its Caprican population), Amanda starts having visions of her dead brother, Darius. These hallucinations spur some desperate, wonderful dreamlike images that run counter to the crisp, concrete world established on the series so far, even in V-world. After Clarice runs into Amanda at the MagLev memorial, she learns of Amanda's visions. This prompts Clarice to theorize that since Amanda can see the dead—and is mother to the messianic Zoe—God speaks through her the same way He speaks through her daughter. Clarice gives a rare bottle of Scorpion Ambrosia to Amanda in order to ingratiate herself, hoping to glean something from the oracular Graystone matriarch. Continue Reading »
Tags: Caprica, Caprica: Season 1, The Imperfections of Memory, TV Recap
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No One Knows About Persian Cats (Bahman Ghobadi). In Tehran, being in an indie rock band can be extremely dangerous. After stints in jail and the constant fear of being caught playing "underground music," bandmates Negar and Ashkan decide they need to go to London to play their music live. They get introduced to Nedar, a fast-talking, hyper-passionate underground music know-it-all who, after listening to their CD among his pet parrots and stacks of illegally obtained DVDs, uses his web of connections to try and get them overseas. He promises to help them on their journey to find a backup band and visas (a U.S. passport on the black market is $26,000).
Negar and Askan's search for underground musicians through windy roads, basements, secret practice spaces is fascinating. At each stop, these real-life musicians play their music as the pair listen in, studying to see what and who will work with their band. These scenes often incorporate montages of Tehran street life. One of the most interesting segments concerns a rap group meeting on a floor of an unfinished building, and overlooking the city the group raps about class struggle in Tehran.
Bahman Ghobadi's film premiered at Cannes, winning the Special Jury Prize in the Un Certain Regard section and continued on to win several International awards. The film is a delicate and beautiful portrayal of the musicians in Tehran and how they struggle to do what they love. It is my hope that it will continue to play screens around the world. Continue Reading »
Tags: American: The Bill Hicks Story, Bahman Ghobadi, Bill Hicks, Henry Joost, Jody Lee Lipes, Matt Harlock, No One Knows About Persian Cats, NY Export: Opus Jazz, Paul Thomas, South by Southwest
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