Reviews
Friday, May 18, 2012
- Photo courtesy of Magnet Releasing
- Tara Lynne Barr and Joel Murray
* * stars
Opens Friday at Colony Theatres
Screechy-voiced comedian-turned-dark-comedy auteur Bobcat Goldthwait once again attempts to mix the extreme with the profound in his new, bullet-ridden satire God Bless America.
He casts Joel Murray (Bill’s brother and Goldthwait’s co-star in that long-lost ’80s comedy One Crazy Summer) take the lead as Frank, a miserable divorcée whose life goes down the drain even more emphatically once he gets fired from his job and receives news that he has a brain tumor.
Already holding a pretty strong contempt for the uncivil times we live in, Frank forgoes putting a bullet in his brain in favor of putting one in the head of some spoiled-brat teen he sees on a reality show. This spur-of-the-moment execution gets him a fan in the form of Roxy (chipper newcomer Tara Lynne Barr), an enthusiastically antisocial teen who wants to tag along and join him on a righteous murder spree.
Together, these two roam the highways of America (surprisingly undetected by the authorities), busting caps in the asses of rabid right-wingers, reality-show douches, people who talk in movie theaters (my fave!) and dickheads who take up two parking spaces.
With God Bless America, Goldthwait gives us both a bloody indictment on our shallow, self-centered society and his very own, serial-killer road movie, occasionally getting his two stars to resemble classic, cinematic criminal couplings. (Am I crazy, or does Goldthwait have Murray and Barr dress up like Pumpkin and Honey Bunny from Pulp Fiction in one scene?)
It appears that Goldthwait has a lot on his mind about how cruel, mediocre and asshole-ish our culture has become; he’s written preachy monologues that enable Murray and Barr to rant about our decaying society and its most corrosive inhabitants. However, for a director that has no qualms depicting the blasting away of a wailing baby in the opening minutes, Goldthwait seems to cop out when it comes to taking down bigger fish. Since we’re living in an age where 99 percenters want to see bankers, Wall Street tycoons and greedy corporations royally get theirs, aiming at easy targets like Bill O’Reilly and American Idol feels so 2008.
As with most of Goldthwait’s post-Shakes the Clown directorial work, God Bless America’s transgressive premise is merely window-dressing for the sympathetic, humanistic story that’s lurking underneath. And yet, this mash-up of violently unnerving shock and heavy-handed sincerity is uneven. You get a sense that Goldthwait—who, as weird as this may sound, is quite the impressive filmmaker—would rather make a movie where he didn’t have to do some quasi-anarchic, crazy shit to get people’s attention.
While Goldthwait’s heart is in the right place, it’s unlikely the blood spilled in his film will make annoying, loathsome people finally straighten the fuck up. Besides, some of us would rather see those people bitch-slapped instead of gunned down. Now, that would’ve been an awesome movie!
Thursday, May 10, 2012
Bloody capitalism: The missed opportunity of Johnny Depp and Tim Burton's "Dark Shadows"
* * stars
Opens Friday
Usually, a plot synopsis does not service either a decent movie review or the movie in question. But speaking of Tim Burton’s Dark Shadows, it might just do the trick.
Barnabas Collins (Johnny Depp) is out to get his. He wakes up from a centuries-long slumber to find out that the market in the fishing town his family once controlled has been monopolized by the same witch who cursed him to immortality and locked him in a coffin way back in the day.
Under the cover of perceived good intentions, he sets out to put the wayward Collins clan back on top. He enters in on a secret pact with the family’s reluctant matriarch (Michelle Pfeiffer) to keep his immortality a secret (oh yeah, he’s a vampire), hypnotizes some of the town’s best fishermen away from the competition, receives blood transfusions and oral sex from the family psychiatrist (Helena Bonham Carter, a real sport), and kills construction workers and hippies without regret. This dude is busy: he does all this while simultaneously courting the Collins’ barely legal governess (Bella Heathcote, yawn) and having airborne intercourse with the witch who’s cornered the market (Eva Green, hubba hubba).
Forgive Barnabas if he doesn’t have the energy left to weed the clichés out of his voiceover narration: “Blood is thicker than water,” he tells us twice, in a lame iteration of (what should be) Dark Shadow’s primary concern. Heredity, no matter how long you’ve been out of the game, is the primary weapon of bite-throat, er, cutthroat capitalism. If Daddy had it, you should have it, and if some perennially single broad gets in the way for a few hundred years, you sink your teeth into the competition and get her out of the way with whatever means at your disposal. After you’ve gotten in her pants, of course.
Dark Shadows is not quite what I want it to be: a subversive commentary about the ethics of the free market and the bloodlines of the 1 percent, all masquerading as a campy soap opera. In fact, it’s hard to believe after having described it that it’s such a bombastic bore, all its compelling complexity ultimately just a simplistic pretext for childish jokes about Barnabas’ Victorian propriety and anachronistic manner of speech in the supposedly free-living 1970s.
Burton once was an artist you could recognize from the way he filled Hollywood’s weirdo quotient by telling mainstream yet personal stories. But now he's more relevant as a person inadvertently responsible for charged political and sexual content that seeps out of the otherwise sanitary and plastic commercial movie machine.
Thursday, April 19, 2012
New company has almost all the "Proof" we need: Exit Through Eden at Raleigh Ensemble Players
3.5 stars (out of five)
Exit Through Eden
Raleigh Ensemble Players
Through Apr. 22
Catherine, the bright, bewildered daughter of a deceased mathematical genius, isn’t the only one with something to prove in this current production of David Auburn’s Pulitzer Prize-winning drama. A new director at the helm of a new theater group is having to present a few bona fides as well.
This production marks the maiden voyage for director Jason Sharp’s company, Exit Through Eden. Sharp has achieved notice in a series of supporting roles in shows including Violet at Hot Summer Nights and Raleigh Ensemble Players’ Distracted, and this recombinant production largely relies on colleagues he’s worked with on stage in recent years.
For the most part, that’s a pretty good move. Betsy Henderson, a distinguished mid-career Raleigh actor, convinces here as the edgy, aching and alienated Catherine. An equally accomplished Ryan Brock ingratiates here as Hal, an unapologetic math geek and possible romantic interest. And it should shock no one that Page Purgar’s supporting work is solid as Catherine’s disbelieving older sister, Claire.
But at first Eric Hale appears to be acting more for the camera than the stage, in what initially translated into an almost deadpan, is-he-even-acting take on Robert, Catherine’s prickly father. Things improved considerably during both characters’ rewarding, dramatic argument at the start of the second act, but Hale’s later negotiation of Robert’s reversals leaves me still with questions about his range.
In such nacent independent companies, a skeleton crew is par for the course. In this show, director Sharp’s set design conveys the grungy backyard of an aging Chicago house. His lighting design, however, left us squinting at a noticeably dimmer backdoor area where several key scenes take place.
But if Sharp largely relied on the comforts of the known in casting this production, I should caution him against the same when it comes to script selection. This production marks the fifth time PROOF has been produced in the region in the past decade. For that reason alone I hesitated before committing to see the show—and I imagine some portion of this company’s potential audience did so as well.
The same point should be considered—carefully—by all artistic directors in the region now planning their fall season. Twelfth Night’s been done. Ditto for A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
And, in this credible opening bid by Exit Through Eden, so has Proof.
Friday, March 2, 2012
- Photo courtesy of Magnet Releasing
- Eric Wareheim in TIM & ERIC’S BILLION DOLLAR MOVIE
* star
Opens today at the Colony Theatre
I don’t smoke weed, which perhaps give me a slight disadvantage in enjoying things weed smokers would normally find amusing.
One of those things is the comedy team of Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim (aka Tim and Eric), the duo whose surreal sketch show Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job! has been a staple on Adult Swim, the Cartoon Network’s pothead-friendly block of nightly programming.
Like most comic performers whose weird, subversive brand of humor has found them a cult audience on cable, Tim and Eric bring their act to the big screen in Tim and Eric’s Billion Dollar Movie. In the movie, Tim and Eric are inexplicably given a billion dollars by a psychotic mogul (Robert Loggia) to make a movie, which they blow on a three-minute short starring a Johnny Depp impersonator in a diamond-covered suit.
When the mogul demands his billion dollars back, they try to come up with the money by skipping town and attempting to operate a shopping mall, a run-down wasteland filled with strange businesses (a used toilet-paper store?), vagrants and a wandering wolf.
Sunday, February 19, 2012
When The Spinning Stopped: LES MISERABLES' 25th Anniversary at Progress Energy Center
- Deen van Meer
- At the Barricade: Jeremy Hays, Max Quinlan and Chasten Harmon in LES MISERABLES
4 stars out of 5
Broadway Series South/North Carolina Theatre
Through Feb. 19
There’s a certain contradiction when a production celebrates the 25th anniversary of a world-wide musical theater phenomenon by completely discarding the original’s landmark defining production concept—and then cutting, according to reports, somewhere between 20 and 40 minutes from the show. That, however, is the outcome with the 25th Anniversary Tour of LES MISERABLES which stops at Raleigh Memorial Auditorium this week.
The odd result is a historical production (in more than one sense of the term) that seems entirely focused on the new instead. In addition to new orchestrations and new costumes, an entirely new set design, abetted by a new stage technology, has mandated equally new blocking as well.
Apparently producers Cameron Mackintosh and NETworks Presentations have aimed here for a LES MIS for a new generation. At least, let’s hope so: Those who remember the superlative strengths of the original (whose Raleigh performance we reviewed in Nov. 1997) are unlikely to be convinced that this brisk—or, actually, brusque—version is an improvement.
It’s amazing when you consider how much a single element of technical design can influence an entire production. But then, the original version of LES MIS was amazing by almost any measure. Directors John Caird and Trevor Nunn’s brilliant use of scenic designer John Napier’s stage-length turntable repeatedly swept us along with the flow of history. It nimbly threaded us through the veritable urban mazes that the central character, the condemned Jean Valjean, negotiated to elude his nemesis, the implacable Inspector Javert.
Cinematically, that rotating set disclosed the horrors of warfare when it displayed one side of the barricade where the student revolutionaries in the Paris Uprising of 1839 made their last doomed stand—before turning, inexorably, to reveal all that had been laid to waste beyond it. In the midst of these, a number of other scenes shifted, quite literally, from one character’s point of view to another’s. In instance after instance, the show's original design added kinetic dimensions to the story.
Monday, February 6, 2012
What the negative saw: M.J. Sharp's long-exposure photographs at Durham's Craven Allen Gallery
Say the word “click” out loud. It’s only one syllable, but its sound has a beginning, middle and end. There’s a duration, albeit brief, before its harsh, terminal consonants. Despite that fact, photographs are commonly thought of as moments of frozen time. The camera’s click doesn’t elapse, it just occurs.
M.J. Sharp’s clicks, however, last for minutes or hours. A selection of her long-exposure photographs at the Craven Allen Gallery in Durham through Feb. 11 in a show entitled Light Cache features meditative images of her home and neighborhood, and nocturnal landscapes both local and distant. But the exhibition is notable for more than just the unconventional beauty and format of the images. Sharp’s personal journey through which she arrived at this process offers an alternative to the inherent violence and closed-endedness of a pervasive point-and-shoot mentality.
That said, many of Sharp’s images look like regular photographs. Blurred outlines, light discrepancies, or other long-exposure clues are rarely present. In some, odd luminosities and hyperreal details could give the sense that the image isn’t in the simple “click” family of exposures, but never demonstratively so. They aren’t about their process. Instead, they speak to Sharp’s curiosity about seeing in a way that the human eye simply can’t. And they represent, for Sharp, how time might be experienced similarly.
Friday, February 3, 2012
- CBS Films
- Daniel Radcliffe as "Scary" Potter
** stars
Opens Friday (see times below)
The epochs of classic creature features and splatter fests have gradually given way to a contemporary horror film genre shaped by Asian influences and, more notably, the trappings of today’s technology. Starting with Hideo Nakata’s Ringu—a convenient, affecting marriage of these two influences—popular modern scare fare is the stuff of The Blair Witch Project and such progeny as Paranormal Activity. They’re the same chills and thrills, just filtered through the grainy prism of camcorder and surveillance monitors.
From this standpoint, The Woman in Black feels more like a musty curio than a standalone frightener. This adaptation of Susan Hill’s 1983 novel—already the basis for a West End theater production now approaching a run of 23 years—pays homage to the Gothic Hammer Horror films, not coincidental as it is the first feature shot in England under the until-recently dormant production banner in over thirty years.
Director James Watkins imbues every scene with the typical tropes: creepy kids, evil apparitions, a vine-covered manse, overgrown cemeteries and an array of spooky toys and music boxes. Shadows flutter about and objects jump out of nowhere, usually accompanied by a musical flourish. It’s all a handsome showcase that taps your sense of nostalgia more intensely than your adrenal gland.
Set in Victorian England, Arthur Kipps (Daniel Radcliffe) is a widower whose wife died four years ago while giving birth to their son (Misha Handley). Now a struggling solicitor and single dad, Kipps is dispatched to Crythin Gifford, a fictitious town on the east coast of Britain, to attend to the affairs of Mrs. Alice Drablow, a recently deceased recluse. There, Kipps finds a village of the damned as townsfolk grapple with an inexplicable epidemic of their children doing fatal harm to themselves.
Tuesday, January 24, 2012
- Photo by Tamara Beckwith
- Adam Johnson
by Adam Johnson
Random House, 464 pp.
Most of The Orphan Master’s Son focuses on a North Korean man named after a government-appointed martyr whose name, Pak Jun Do, resembles “John Doe” for a reason. The book is at once a grand adventure, a hallucinatory ordeal, a deft spy story and a treatise on how the dogmas forced on people by ruthless institutions peel away truth and eventually even identity.
The book’s first section describes Pak Jun Do’s unlikely ascent to hero status. The rest of the book veers into something like magical realism gone wrong, where all the fantastical plot shifts and dreamlike moments are caused by the fear engendered by North Korea’s brutal regime.
Pak Jun Do and the others who live under Kim Jong Il are always prepared to hew to a reality in which all things glorify their Dear Leader. The stories they tell investigators and interrogators, the statements they make at work and in mandatory “criticism sessions,” and even private conversations among family members, are correspondingly nonsensical, and author Adam Johnson uses this absurdity to fuel Pak Jun Do’s bizarre journey from orphan to hero, from prisoner to politician.
Pak Jun Do’s identity is built on one such fiction, namely that, despite living in an orphanage, he is not an orphan. The boy decides he is actually the orphan master’s son mainly because the man treats him so badly: “Only a true father, flesh and bone, could burn a son with the smoking end of a coal shovel.”
The privilege of deciding which orphans do the merely menial jobs and which take the tasks more likely to be fatal also falls to Pak Jun Do—another sign, in his mind, of his true-born status—and the author implies that this may be at the root of his unwillingness to adhere completely to the rules of his society.
His ability to unmoor himself from the dogma is stymied somewhat by the simple fact that he has never known, or even glimpsed any other way of life, until he is recruited by the regime for various incursions into Japan, a mission monitoring radio transmissions from the hold of a fishing boat and, eventually, a surreal trip to Texas.
The moments when Pak Jun Do’s received knowledge collides with the reality of the wider world are stunningly effective on their own, and also as a backdrop for the catalog of humiliation that grows with Pak Jun Do’s every return home. Johnson’s presentation of the young man on the cold, cramped fishing boat, listening to radio transmissions from around the world night after night, zeroing in on the reflections of a particularly pensive American athlete who is trying to row around the globe, would stand alone as a gorgeous short story.
Sunday, January 15, 2012
Disclosing arts education dilemmas in New York, and North Carolina: "No Child..." at PlayMakers
- photo by Carol Rosegg
- Nilaja Sun in NO CHILD...
4 stars (out of 5)
PRC2
Through Jan. 15
To be truthful, I haven’t taught drama in a “worst of the worst” New York City classroom like playwright and performer Nilaja Sun, whose semi-autobiographical one-person show, NO CHILD… closes at PlayMakers Rep on Jan. 15. I taught high school drama in an economically and culturally impoverished North Carolina county during half of the last decade instead. It was the hardest—and most rewarding—job I have ever undertaken. And on the basis of the experience, I can say this much: Ms. Sun clearly knows whereof she speaks.
NO CHILD…is reportedly based on her years of experience as a teaching artist in New York public schools. The news is that it’s not a world apart from the challenged classrooms I saw in the rural South. Both reflect a popular culture supersaturated with sexuality, violence and speed. And if either had once cornered the market on ADHD, emotional, sexual and physical abuse or attitude, ignorance and pride, neither does now.
Yes, the quest Sun’s character faces during a short-term (and short-sighted) state grant—staging the Australian penal drama Our Country’s Good with a group of at-risk high schoolers who are theatrical beginners, in six weeks—is certainly quixotic. But it’s hardly unfamiliar in North Carolina, where a public education in the arts mandated by the state’s master Basic Education Plan still hasn’t yet been fully implemented, much less evenly distributed, across urban and rural systems—some 27 years after its ratification in 1985.
A new legislative commission tasked with finally closing that deal this Spring would give some cause for hope—had the Republican-led legislature it will ultimately report to not slashed millions of dollars from education last year and then declared open political warfare on the teachers who dared oppose them. In the meantime, the sort of inconsistent, “drive-by” arts education on display here remains hauntingly familiar, to say the least. If one of Sun’s central points in NO CHILD…concerns the wholesale abandonment of children by their families, society and the state, it bears noting that the troubled kids of New York aren’t the only ones who have suffered—and still suffer—this on a number of fronts, including public education and the arts.
Thursday, January 12, 2012
- Alex Bailey. Courtesy of Pathe Productions Ltd/ The Weinstein Company
- Meryl Streep as Margaret Thatcher and Anthony Head as Geoffrey Howe
** stars
Opens Friday (see times below)
If ever it was possible for an opening scene to buoy an entire feature-length motion picture, The Iron Lady would be it. Having wandered away from her London home and past her caretakers, a senile, octogenarian Margaret Thatcher (Meryl Streep) is shopping in a small corner mart. As loud Indian music blares over the loudspeakers, a besuited businessman pushes past her while yammering into his cell phone; a young black customer in headphones faintly rolls his eyes at the doddering old woman. There’s irony when Thatcher, a grocer’s daughter, does a double-take when told that a pint of milk costs 49 pence.
No one recognizes the iconic Cold Warrior, but what’s more, it is a world she no longer recognizes. It’s a biting collage of class and culture as brilliant as anything Stephen Frears has ever filmed.
Off this lofty perch, however, falls the rest of this biopic from director Phyllida Lloyd (who directed Streep in Mamma Mia!) and screenwriter Abi Morgan (co-writer of Shame). Told in flashback rote, the narrative oscillates throughout from the present-day senescent Thatcher to her early days as an ambitious Oxford grad with an eye and gut for politics. The former Miss Roberts (portrayed by Alexandra Roach) falls for and marries Denis Thatcher (played as a young man by Harry Lloyd), but only after he agrees to abide by her political ambition.
From there, it’s off to a whirlwind of biographical touchstones: Thatcher (now played by Streep) being elected to Parliament in 1959; unseating Edward Heath as leader of the Conservative party; becoming England’s first female prime minister in 1979; her 11-year tenure, highlighted by trade union strikes, IRA terrorism and, of course, the Falkland Islands conflict; and being deposed as party head in 1990.
The film’s true iron lady is Streep. Her role is susceptible to suspicion as it contains all three ingredients of the Oscar formula: British, biographical and disability-centric (in the case of the latter-day Thatcher). However, Streep’s depiction goes well beyond mere impersonation, ably portraying Thatcher at both her most harrowing and heroic.
Sorry about that! Here it is: http://www.indyweek.com/indyweek/may-16-cr…
by Denise Prickett, Indy Editorial Web Director on May 9 crossword puzzle (Crossword Puzzle)
wow interesting reading...I was particularly moved by the section discussing the "scalpeling away of our gender" by people.......Hahaha I really …
by Melissa Ann on How beauty pageants view transwomen (Eva Hayward)