Another shoe...

With Van Johnson, aka The Minstrel, and Earth Kitt, aka Catwoman, having sadly passed in this season, is there a third to come...  The old saying is that things like this will happen in threes.

Follow-on

So Lisa, what do you think of Gypsy from your personal experience with it?  Did your 12-year old self like the musical?  Do you think back on it otherwise?

Jeri Westerson's Veil of Lies continues to chug away in Boston, another 19 copies the week ending the 21st according to Nielsen Bookscan.  That Globe review is really a gift that keeps on giving. 

Oliver Twisted, Bollywood Style

Slumdog Millionaire, seen Thursday October 23 at the  Landmark Sunshine, Aud. #1,  Part of the Variety Screening Series, 3.5 slithy toads.

This was already a highly touted movie off of its screenings at the Toronto Film Festival and elsewhere even before I saw it, a few weeks before its opening.  And as you can see from the generous # of toads I am giving it, I think it's one of those movies that lives up to the acclaim.  My sister also liked it a lot, though a friend I was talking with on Monday night did not.  Well, the more people who read your book or see your movie the more people you can find who won't like it, but it's clear it is striking a chord.  The movie's been doing very well at the box office with signs of very good word of mouth, slowly broadening from being on very few screens to being on several hundred, and making the top 10 at the box office against films, up there with films that are playing at five times as many theatres.  Well, good!

If you're not yet familiar with the movie, it's set in Mumbai (nee Bombay) India.  It's like Oliver Twist meets Strictly Ballroom, game show meets Bollywood, East meets west.  A contestant on the Indian version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire is doing surprisingly well and on the verge of winning a million dollars worth of rupees, and nobody can quite understand why or how, so the contestant ends up spending his overnight leading up to the final question in police custody, trying to explain how he knows the correct answers.  The answer to that question is revealed in a series of flashbacks beginning in earliest childhood, and it's that part of the movie that's extremely Dickensian.  Dickens himself might find the poor man's upbringing to be a little bit harsh.  The answer to one of the earliest question emerges from a great outhouse adventure, homelessness leads him first to the ultimate girl of his dreams but soon thereafter to a Fagin character whom Fagin himself would find cruel.  Alas not unbelievably so; I live in a city where deaf Mexicans were enslaved into begging on the subway line that runs thru Sunnyside.  His escape from that fate comes with a large price tag, as he's separated from the woman he loves and estranged from his brother. 

So you're saying this doesn't sound like the feel good uplifting movie of the season?  Well, it is.  As grim as the story can be at times, it's far from unrelenting.  The outhouse adventure is full of brio, enthusiasm, and joy.  The escapades include a delightful interlude at the Taj Majal.  We're never too far from flashing forward to the game show, where that million dollars creeps ever closer.  The love story is a classic, one which I was far more involved with (and almost in spite of myself) than the one between Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett in Benjamin Button.

The filmmaking is full of life and energy and passion throughout.  I'd say director Danny Boyle has around a 75% success rate, and that's pretty darned good.  Shallow Grave was pretty much the progenitor of the British caper film that's ended up being way overdone in the ten years since, and I recall it having an integral zest and panache which a lot of the subsequent films in the genre have imitated without ever matching.  Trainspotting is the rare film about drug users that I quite cottoned to, and I even purchased the soundtrack album.  28 Days Later is one of the best zombie movies ever.  Millions is an underrated kind-hearted family movie which is well worth renting.  Sunshine, a sci-fi epic, falls apart in the final act and isn't as good as the other movies, but before it falls apart it's an interesting amalgam of a lot of other sf movies, kind of a more upscale seriously intentioned Stargate, with some stunning visual imagery.  There are a couple complete misses like A Life Less Ordinary which I've not seen, and which very few people have, and then there's The Beach, which I did see but don't remember much about either good or bad.  But by and large any film I've seen from Boyle has been crafted with verve and passion, and at least been interesting and often much much more than that.  I wouldn't rank him as high as Kubrick. I don't know if he's crafted a great movie for the ages like Scorcese's Goodfellas, but he's certainly been much more consistent in the overall quality of his movies than Scorcese or Altman.

He's come up with a real find in Dev Patel, a young British actor supposedly auditioned at his daughter's insistence, who displays even more It than David Kross in The Reader.  I was so thrilled Patel was present at the Q&A with Boyle and am very happy he has been nominated for Supporting Actor from his peers in the Screen Actors Guild.  He's very charismatic, has a nice combination of vulnerability and strength, and I expect to see him in more movies.  I hope he won't too quickly go the action star pay check route.

For all my enthusiasm for the movie, I've deducted a half toad because it did take me a while to warm up to the movie.  The characters were slow to gel.  I don't mind subtitles but found myself distracted by these.  I'm not sure I even got the whole romance thing, except that ultimately it was depicted with so much verve by the director and his team and acted with such fervency that I did eventually find myself falling entirely under the movie's spell.  The friend I was talking with earlier in the week was just the opposite.  He liked the movie at first but then felt it drowned in contrivance.   You all can let me know what you think if you see this movie, which I highly recommend doing.  When it came time for the big Bollywood dance number at the end, I wanted to dance in the aisles and I wanted to see the number go on for a long long long time, kind of like how I hated to see the last dance at Kellerman's eventually end in Dirty Dancing.  

I may see the movie again myself.  As sometimes happens at these Q&A screenings, when they're running  late or on a tight schedule they'll instruct the projectionist to cut out of the end credits so they can get an extra two or three minutes into the evening.  That happened here, and I feel as if I didn't get to properly enjoy the entire movie, beginning to end.

& in the interests of time, a quick post which I maybe should have included in Movies that Begin with the Letter W:

The Wrestler.  Seen Thursday December 4 at the Landmark Sunshine, Aud. #1.  Part of the Variety Screening Series.  1.5 slithy toads.

This is another movie that's been highly touted, especially for Mickey Rourke's performance.  It's just opened in limited release and hopes to follow in the footsteps of Slumdog Millionaire by slowly going wider.  It didn't work for me.  It's an archetypal story about a professional wrestler, once a star and now hanging out at the fringes of the sport 20 years later, playing in smaller arenas.  Can he reconcile with his daughter?  Find love with a stripper?  Find a life outside of the wrestling ring when health issues arise?  This kind of story has been done a million times before, though I have a hard time naming all the many movies I should be able to say this is exactly alike.  I think it's because there are so many of them that end up being at the Rocky III level that those I've seen drift into a kind of haze.  And would anyone want to say that Rourke's performance is up there with Paul Newman's in The Color of Money, which is a particularly good example of the faded-star movie?  I can actually hold a pool stick with the cue facing the right way, and though I'm no fan of pool and have no talent for it maybe the fact that I might at least consider playing a round to be fun to do every five years while going down for a 3-count on a wrestling mat is way too high-school-gym I never want to think of every ever again biases me against The Wrestler.  Still, I think I could put aside my dislike of the sport for a movie that were a little more interesting than this.  Personally, I think there were a lot of people who were ready to anoint Mickey Rourke as a great American actor 20 years ago even though he was never really close to it.  I saw Angel Heart.  I saw Barfly.  I saw The Pope of Greenwich Village.  I don't think these were good movies even then and yet somehow Rourke was perceived as being a great new actor.  And sometimes when the critical establishment decides something it never wants to admit its wrong.  So even though Rourke has been acting steadily in supporting roles in movies for the past 20 years without etching an indelible portrait in any of them (The Rainmaker, Point Break, Get Carter, there's a good long list), it's become the perceived wisdom that he's disappeared for 20 years and has suddenly emerged in this classic performance.  It's like Rourke is living for real the kind of existence that Fast Eddie Felson was living fictionally in The Color of Money, and just like Paul Newman doing the "I'm back" line as he hits his break at the end of that, Mickey Rourke can do it as he carts home his statues for The Wrestler.  Sometimes these stories feed on their own momentum, and maybe Rourke will end up taking in a Golden Globe and a Saggy and an Oscar and a this and a that.  We'll all find out soon enough.  But as far as the Brillig Blogger is concerned, The Wrestler ain't worth your time.  I'm tempted to say to see it nonetheless if you're a big wrestling fan, but if you are do you really want to look at the sordid underside of it?

Theatricality

January tends to be a bad time for live theatre in New York City.  The tourist trade dries up after the holiday season, and with maybe some action around President's Day doesn't seriously revive until the warmer weather and the Easter holidays and spring vacations.  Even the locals get out and about a little less during the coldest days of the year.  This year the economy is adding an extra burden.  A full-price seat to a Broadway musical is $120 now, a play a few dollars less.  Even a half-price ticket will run $65 when the TKTS booth surcharge and the "theater restoration fee" are added, and "cheap" seats in the back of the mezzanine $45 or more.  This isn't the best time to hunt down people with $100 or $250 to spend for a couple of seats.  Hence, the usual slate of shows planning to close after New Year's rather than try and wait out the winter for the more profitable spring and summer months is particularly robust.  I decided to spend some of my time this weekend getting in some of the soon to be dearly departed.

My first priority:  Spring Awakening, seen at the matinee on Saturday afternoon Dec. 20, 2008, at the Eugene O'Neill.  4 Slithy Toads.

I had first seen Spring Awakening in 30 months ago just ahead of its off-Broadway opening at the Atlantic Theater.  Sentimentalist pack rat that I am, I save my Playbills and jot down on the cover some notes on when I saw the show, what I thought of it, maybe other interesting notes.  This was what I wrote on my Playbill in 2006:  "The best new musical I've seen since, if not quite as good as, Parade.  It grabs me instantly, doesn't let go.  Establishes a fresh idiom in its staging and its musical style.  It does what a musical should without being cloying or predictable.  Many of the young cast are making off B'way debuts, and they're working so hard and so enthusiastically to sell this.  So SO SO good."  Most reviewers were equally taken with the show.  Behind the good reviews and good audience reaction, the show did a very quick transfer to Broadway, where it was by no means a sure thing because younger audiences are not the core theatregoing crowd.  The show built on good word of mouth, became a contender for the Tony Awards in spring 2007, and won several of them.  I was rooting for it, and I yearned to see the show on Broadway, but what's the rush when it's there every night?  Well, now, the show is going after January 18, so I suddenly had reason to do it instead of thinking about it, and I am still head over heels in love with this wonderful musical.  If you live in NYC, go see it.  Visit Broadway Box for your discount offer, and go.  See the show on tour.  Go, go, go.  The only change I'd make on my second viewing is to say that this may be better than Parade, which was the last musical to excite me as much.  I saw Parade twice and loved it, but I don't know if I'd have happily seen it five or ten times.  Having seen Spring Awakening on Broadway, I want to see it again before January 18, and again and again and again.

Spring Awakening is based on a German play by Frank Wedekind, and is about young people experiencing their sexual awakenings in an era in 19th century Germany when these sorts of things were not supposed to be discussed.  It doesn't sound like a cheerful topic, and I don't suppose that is is, but it's a beautiful story beautifully told by young men in the starchiest and stuffiest school uniforms who whip out handheld microphones to sing their innermost thoughts, and the young women in long dresses who find something stirring but know not what.  The musical score rocks, especially in major group #s like The B***h of Living and Totally F*****, but it's also got songs of remarkable delicacy like "The Word of Your Body," the closing number "The Song of Purple Summer," and the opening song "Mama Who Bore Me."  Some shows take pride in having a variety of musical styles that get to showcase the broad talents of the composers.  Parade is one of them, as is Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat.  Spring Awakening takes a different approach.  The music by Duncan Sheik is variations on a theme, in which the whole achieves something larger than any one song, while the lyrics by Steven Sater are gently poetic without going for easy rhymes.  In the aforementioned "Word of Your Body," there's a resonance between the long "o" sound in the words wound and bruise.  And I doubt you'd believe me if I said that a song driven by the long "o" in "wound" and "bruise" was a love song, you'd probably be dubious, but yet that's what it is.  It's a gorgeous and tender love song in multiple ways.  Furthermore, moderns musicals tend not to have scores as memorable as those of old classic shows like The Sound of Music, but Spring Awakening manages to achieve some level of resonance.  Not perhaps in a Carol Channing belting show tunes sort of way, but murmuring beneath the surface like blood pulsing just beneath the skin.  I haven't spent the past 30 months singing the songs of Spring Awakening, but when the band struck its music cues the tunes burbled up like water from a spring freshly uncovered.

The production is essentially the same as that which opened at the Atlantic.  The cast I saw at the Atlantic moved pretty much intact to Broadway, though as  I mentioned in an earlier post it was a plus that the role of the adult women in the show was recast.  That replacement Christine Estabrook continues in her role, and she hams up some of her parts a little bit more than I remembered but still nails it emotionally in the darker moments for her role.  Over the past year that original cast has drifted away, part out of necessity since the show requires that the actors not be too old for their parts.  Jonathan Groff and John Gallagher, Jr. have turned their roles into springboards for what should be promising careers.  Groff's lead role as one of the male students is now being played by Hunter Parrish.  I'm not familiar with Parrish, but he's a star of the Showtime series Weeds, and he's made a great career move by showing his chops on stage in Spring Awakening.  I had a very good view of his perch on stage when he wasn't singing (the cast intermixes with some audience members who have seats on stage to either side), and he seemed so happy to be in and part of the show, and he's really quite good when he's on.  But the current cast is good throughout.  Now, many of them are making Broadway debuts instead of off-B'way, but they're all still selling it with joy and verve and enthusiasm and talent to burn.

I'm glad the show had its two-plus years on Broadway, but sorry it isn't going to be more.  

In the evening, the half-price TKTS booth managed to cough up a great 6th row center seat for me at Gypsy, seen Saturday evening Dec. 20, 2008 at the St. James.  2 slithy toads.

Gypsy is considered by some to be one of the great American musicals, and I'd seen an earlier revival just four and some years ago with Bernadette Peters in the lead role, that of a stage mother, Rose, who won't take "no" for an answer as she oversees the vaudeville careers of her two daughters.  The older and more talented, June, eventually leaves her, and with her some of the more talented members of the small act she's formed around them.  The younger and supposedly less talented Louise then becomes the center of her mother's attention, and when she succeeds beyond her mother's imagining as a burlesque show stripper (the show is based on the memoirs of the stripper Gypsy Rose Lee), it becomes a hard cross for mama to bear.  Rose is a very brassy character, and unfortunately Bernadette Peters for all her considerable talents (and I've seen her perform masterfully in shows like the original Sunday in the Park with George) does not have a lot of brass.  The production I saw four years ago simply wasn't very good.  One example:  this is considered to be a great American musical and does have some great songs that you may know, without knowing they're from Gypsy.  "May We Entertain You" is a good one that can get trotted out on an award's show at a moment's notice.  Then there's Together Wherever We Go.  "Wherever we go, whatever we do, we're gonna go through it together."  You might know the tune without realizing it, and have it come to mind just by reading the words.  In the Gypsy with Bernadette Peters, this famous number was tossed off with no joy as if an afterthought, when you want to at least have some sense in watching in an "ooooh, a famous song" kind of way.

That production was directed by the young and hip Sam Mendes, who directed the film American Beauty.  This new production is directed by the 90+ year old Arthur Laurents, who wrote the "book" (for those of you not in the know, the script for a musical is called the book, and consists of the spoken parts that aren't part of the music which would be supplied by a lyricist.  In some shows like Spring Awakening, the book and lyrics are by the same person, and in others like Gypsy not) for the production and is still at it now working on a new revival of West Side Story.  He brings more life by far to the material than does Mendes, who is less than half his age.  I'm still not totally satisfied with their approach to "Together Wherever We Go."  Both productions still rely on the choreography of the original by Jerome Robbins, who might not have known at the time which songs would be the keepers, but there's nonetheless more spring in the step of the actors and the orchestra in this song, and really in all of them.  More important, the star of this revival is Patti Lupone who is very much a diva and full of brass and who takes charge of the role and the stage and the audience.  

I don't think personally that Gypsy is a great American musical.  It has a lot of talent behind it, including Laurents and Jule Styne and Stephen Sondheim, all of whom are icons of the American musical theatre.  But to me, the first act drags on without much happening after a point.  I'm not sure there's enough fondness for either vaudeville or burlesque to make a memorial to them of much interest to my generation, and certainly not for any younger.  I can remember HBO doing some burlesque shows in its earliest years in the late '70s or early '80s and not many people any younger than me will remember.  It's got a lot of plot problems because it's hard to find a rooting interest in the domineering Rose or the mousy young Louise.  I'm happy to have at least seen a production that brings out the strengths of the show, but that the show will close even before Lupone's year long contract is up does say something about the show's ability to move an audience moving forward.  It's the kind of thing where you really probably should see a good production of Gypsy if you consider yourself a serious fan or devotee or acolyte or whatever of the American musical theatre, but we're kind of getting close to the edge of the "great books" debate here, where you're supposed to do it because it's good for you.

And then, Boeing Boeing, another revival, seen at the Longacre at the Sunday matinee, Dec. 21, 2008.  1 slithy toad.

This is a farce.  Comedy is hard, and good farce is very hard.  It's a kind of comedy of the extreme in which an outlandish situation develops and then builds and builds toward a hopefully very fast and very funny finale, often helped by an abundance of doors to make for well-timed entrances and exits to great humorous effect.  The best farce I've ever seen and perhaps the best farce ever is something called Noises Off, in which a British play is seen falling apart during performance from both sides of the stage to ever-increasing heights of hilarity.  I first saw it in my youth and enjoyed the first act immensely and then the second act not so much; when I found myself throwing up a bad meal into a trash can at the Port Authority Bus Terminal while making my way to the Shortline bus home, I had to come to the reluctant but firm conclusion that I may not have been in the best shape for judging the second act.  When the play was revived in late 2001, it was the perfect tonic to the 9/11 blues and I can confirm that the play is in fact quite delightful in all its acts.  An example of good farce is Lend Me a Tenor, in which the star of a Cleveland opera is tranquilized and a replacement must be found on short notice.  An example of the farce that dare not say its name is any episode of Scooby Doo in which Shaggy, Scooby and the villain are going in and out of the rooms in the old mansion.

Boeing Boeing is not a good farce.  It ran very briefly in an original Broadway run a long time ago, and this revival will have lasted less than a year, and that probably several months too long.  There are some laughts in it, so I don't want to be too harsh, but it's not well constructed and it takes way too long to go nowhere.  The premise is far more promising than that of Lend me a Tenor.  It's France, and a man is engaged to be married to a Lufthansa flight attendant.  And a TWA flight attendant.  And an Alitalia flight attendant.  This is set in the heyday of luxurious air travel when it was a glamor job to be an air hostess with a glamor uniform and a glamor tote, and he juggles the three of them by carefully tracking the flight times so that each will be in town for two days of the week.  When bad weather and faster planes arrive, all three of the flight attendants will be in town at the same time, along with an old college friend just visiting.  Alas, it's very slow to get going.  A good farce should establish its premise as quickly as possible and then build upon it.  In this play it takes something like 40 minutes for the third flight attendant to appear.  Why the wait?  We can figure out the idea within ten minutes, so get a move on...  The first two attendants having appeared together, you would expect to have the third coming back to the apartment, and the form dictates this would be a good way to close the first act.  As indeed it does.  But you've got all of those doors.  Have the stewardess walk in a door and surprise the three-timer and then bring the curtain down.  Here, we find out via phone call that the third is on her way.  I'd been wondering how the mechanics of having all three in one room would be handled to  humorous effect because it's a situation that isn't entirely funny and needs to be handled delicately.  Here, the solution is that you never actuall have all three in the apartment at once but just deal with them in different combinations of two, so the play never builds situationally beyond what we've already gotten in the first act.  And then instead of the bad guy having to rise to the occasion of digging himself out of a hole, the stewardesses resolve it for him.  One goes for the best friend, and another turns out to be playing a triple game of her own and finds true love with her boy in another city.  Good farce develops quickly and ascends the heights.  This builds slowly and then goes very flatly.  You have an abundance of doors to the foyer, the kitchen, the bathroom, the bedroom, the guest bedroom, and more, but the most action you get is at the most basic person A out door 1 right as person B is coming in door 2, never 3 doors at once.  The cast tries very hard and wrings I'm sure as much laughter as there is to be wrung, but it's not a very good play.

Neither is Speed-the-Plow, seen Sun matinee October 14, 2008, at the Barrymore.  .5 slithy toads.  David Mamet has done some great things, but this isn't one of them.  A Hollywood parable of something, act one shows us a smaller big-time Hollywood producer and his acolyte who have the chance to move up a notch with a big action movie.  In act 2, the big guy is seduced by a temp and agrees to spike the action movie for some artsy-fartsy thing.  In act 3, the younger producer can't believe this and restores order to the universe by throwing a hissy fit.  Mamet has explored the male bonding better in Glengarry Glen Ross, the battle of the sexes better in Oleanna, and it's not a very good play.  The role of the secretary is an awful one but nonetheless is a favorite for stunt casting.  Madonna played it in the original Broadway production, here Elisabeth Moss from AMC's "Mad Men."  It's still a bad role, and having actresses unfamiliar with the stage doing it doesn't make it any easier.  I recall Madonna being better.  Jeremy Priven (Entourage) plays the top dog producer.  OK.  Raul Esparza is the highlight.  He's a young Broadway actor who is capable of wonderful things, probably the best Bobby in the history of Sondheim's Company, and he makes the third act his own with a wonderful indelible hissy fit that should live in the annals.  But it's just not a good play.  I knew that from having seen the first time, only went again because it's included in my Atlantic membership, kind of wish I hadn't because of the opportunity cost.

Farragut North, seen Sun. matinee November 16, 2008 at the Atlantic's main stage, 2 slithy toads, was  worthier part of my membership.  Names for the Metro stop in downtown DC where all the K St. types go.  John Gallagher, Jr. from the original Spring Awakening cast now plays a 20-something high up in the press heirarchy of a presidential campaign during the primary season, but he finds out that immorality is still best done morally.  When he is outwitted, outlasted and outplayed in this game of political survivor, the only decision he has left is whether to take a high road or a low road to his next stop.  Gallagher is pleasant to watch and handles his role well, Isiah Whitlock, Jr. is exceptionally good as the wizened old hand at the helm of another campaign's press operations, and the rest of the cast all do what they're supposed to.  A perfectly pleasant way to pass the time.

That, at least, is off Broadway with off B'way pricing.  The problem with the now-deceased Title of Show, seen Thu. evening Sept. 25, 2008 at the Lyceum, 2 slithy toads, is that it's no more pleasant or unpleasant but costs twice as much.  Young creatives create a musical and then see it all the way to Broadway in a very pleasant very amiable more than enjoyable musical within a musical, but there's nowhere near enough meat on the bones to think anyone would pay $100+ for it.  And in fact, I'm not sure if anyone did. I paid half price, and that was more than what Variety reported as the average ticket price for the show most weeks.  But it's hard to make a profit on Broadway when you can only charge an off-Broadway price and still struggle to fill your seats.  

Business Stuffs

So one question people ask is whether reviews sell books.  I recently had a good chance to look at that when Jeri Westerson's fine debut mystery VEIL OF LIES was reviewed in the Boston Globe.  Like a lot of in-genre debut hardcovers, the initial orders have been modest.  At the major chains, the main ordering was by B&N, which took a few copies for their better stores in the mystery category.  This wasn't the first good review for the book by any means.  It is quite a fine debut novel, and it had gotten a starred review in Library Journal and good reviews in Publishers Weekly and Kirkus, Mystery Scene and Crimespree, and the Richmond (VA) Times Dispatch and Historical Novels Review, among others.  It had a decent and steady Amazon ranking; most times I've checked it's been in the mid-20Ks as it is now, which I consider to be a very good showing for a first genre novel especially since it has been steady.  Prior to the Globe review running, it had sold 7 copies in Boston, according to Nielsen Bookscan.  In the two weeks since the review ran, 49 copies have sold in the Boston market.  So yes, the review has definitely sold some books for Jeri Westerson.    Down in Richmond, the Times Dispatch review saw sales reported to Nielsen Bookscan go up from 1 copy in the Richmond market to another 3 selling the week following.  So all told, 8 copies before, another 52 after.  It's possible to look at that and go "big whoop, 50 copies."  But I think it's pretty exciting to know that there are 50 people reading a review and picking up a book pretty much for that reason alone, and there are probably more copies than that.  Bookscan isn't capturing any sales at Kate's Mystery Books in Cambridge, MA.  There might be people in Hartford, CT or Washington, DC who are in the distant circulation areas of the newspapers that also picked up a copy.  What about the people who went to their local library, and the libraries that took an extra copy or two because of the review.  So I'm pretty psyched by this

The same week I was tracking the Boston market for Veil of Lies, I noticed another book that saw an unexpected and inexplicable 1000-copy increase in sales, a mass market paperback that had come out a few months ago where you don't expect to see sales spurt up like that.  So I did some asking around at the publisher, and found out that Target had taken a position on the book.  So now you know that reviews do sell books, and that having your book on the shelves at Target can sell even more.

Epic Movie

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.  Seen Thursday evening December 11, 2008 at Landmark's Sunshine, Aud. 1, part of the Variety Screening Series.  1.5 slithy toads.

Australia.  Seen Tuesday evening December 16, 2008 at Regal's UA Kaufman Astoria Stadium 14, Aud. 13.  2.5 slithy toads.

I'd say Benjamin Button was a disappointment except that I wasn't sure to expect very much from it.  With Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett, and directed by David Fincher (Se7en, Zodiac, others), this is an expensive big risk of the holiday season.  I doubt it's a worthwhile one, though you never know sometimes what award buzz might do, and the movie does at least have the good grace to have a better last half hour than first half hour, and is long enough you might leave with your fond recollections and have long since forgotten the less fond.  Brad Pitt plays a baby who is born as a small very old man, then grows in size as he grows "older," i.e., becomes younger even as he gets taller and bigger.  During the middle of his life he is Brad Pitt and has torrid Great Romance with Cate Blanchett, and then he grows up to become a small young man with Alzheimer's before ultimately dying.  His story is told via the lips of Julia Ormond, who doesn't yet know it (and takes far longer to guess than the audience probably will) that she's the daughter of the man whose diary she is reading to her mother (yes, Cate Blanchett in old person make-up that makes her look like one of the aliens from Close Encounters) who is the one and only Benjamin Button.

The screenplay is by Eric Roth, who hit the jackpot once upon a time with Forrest Gump.  That's a movie which to me was nice seeing once, especially at my beloved  Loews Astor Plaza, but which I don't think stands up much to the test of time.  For all the awards and the fuss and bother this isn't something that makes me watch when it's playing on TNT on a Sunday night.  I'm rather fonder of other movies Roth scripted like The Insider and The Good Shepherd, while Ali I remember mostly for inspiring me to get out an Analog to read during the brigher-lit scenes.  Fincher I've always found interesting, and I don't want to say that Benjamin Button isn't interesting, only that it isn't particularly good.

The essential problem for me is that there really isn't much to do with the Benjamin Button character between birth and the age of 40ish, coming or going, up or down.  So the movie introduces his family and sends him off to Paris and has him fighting the sea war during World War II, but I couldn't say I cared for any of it, and as the years slowly ticked by all I could think was "20 years down, and there are still 60 long years to go."  The great love story that finally emerges is a little better, though it's no Rose and Jack in Titanic, shall we say.  It ends tragically, and tragic ends to great romance are often worth a little emotional investment, but it ain't no Love Story, either.  There's a nifty running joke about lightning strikes, but there's also a framing device with a clock that runs backward which isn't sufficiently connected to the rest of the film to succeed as metaphor.  

The Q&A afterward was a "special" one with director Spike Jonze (Weezer "Sweater" video before going on to do movies like Being John Malkovich and Adaptation that are overrated to the extreme) interviewing David Fincher.  But why was Jonze there?  He didn't ask hardly any questions of his own, hardly seemed to have prepped, did they offer him free popcorn to come to the theatre?  So I found out that they had a really long script, which they needed to cut.  And then a really big budget, which they needed to cut.  And then a whole lot of film, which they needed to cut.  And since the movie was set in New Orleans and they couldn't decide whether to have it before Katrina or after Katrina they settled on putting it during Katrina.  

Australia is an in-between effort by Australian director Baz Luhrmann that on balance worked for me.  Lurhmann's first film as director was the delightful Strictly Ballroom.  If you're married, or dating, or something like that, rent this movie, snuggle up with your better half, and you'll enjoy yourself immeasurably and have a much nicer relationship after the two hours are up.  Then see Muriel's Wedding (not directed by Luhrmann) and you'll have a crash course in the new wave of Australian cinema that crested on these shores in the early 1990s.  That was followed by an offbeat Romeo and Juliet, the very very very very bad Moulin Rouge, and now this.  I might have gone to 3 toads with this if it had just a whiff more Strictly Ballroom to it, and a little less Moulin Rouge.

Because the thing I didn't like about Moulin Rouge was its artificiality, which is the same thing I don't like in Wes Anderson movies or Napoleon Dynamite (can that opinion be distilled to earn someone a million dollars?), and this movie starts out drowning in it.  Little planes flying around the globe in ways that make the little planes in the Indiana Jones movies look real.  Overdone acting.  Nicole Kidman prancing into Australia like a bride singing in the middle of an open pit coal mine.  When she and Hugh Jackman ride off to their home, a cattle station in north Australia called Faraway Downs, it's the most stylized car ride I've seen on screen since Kermit and Fozzie Bear started their ride to Hollywood while singing "Moving Right Along" in The Muppet Movie.  If Big Bird had said hello to Hugh and Nicole, it would've fit right in.

But ever so slowly the movie settles into a kind of grand Hollywood artificiality of the kind that works, or works for me at least.  CGI-gorgeous starry skies during the nighttime scenes.  A cute kid, in this case a half-breed Aboriginal whom Nicole Kidman wants to keep safe from the government-sponsored program of taking the half-breeds to be re-educated to serve white people.  Cattle driving across the Austalian wilderness.  A Gone With the Wind moment between Hugh and Nicole to be followed by the Cold Mountain 15 minutes.  Japanese planes bombing Darwin Harbor.  I can't believe as I'm typing that I can actually fall for this sort of stuff, but I did.  I wouldn't say this is interesting; Benjamin Button is more "interesting."  But I think Australia is funner and better.

Movies That Begin With The Letter W. Or Not

What Doesn't Kill You.  Seen Sunday Afternoon December 14, 2008 at the City Cinemas Village East, Auditorium #1.  1.5 Slithy Toads.

Were the World Mine.  Seen Sunday Afternoon December 14, 2008 at Cinema Village, Auditorium #2.  2 Slithy Toads.

Even though my movie-going is down quite a bit from its peak years when I used to do on toward 120 per year (this year will be over 80, I think, but not above 90), I do still try and see the occasional unheralded movie that gets somewhat interesting reviews that suggest it doesn't suck and may actually be an unsung gem.  So this weekend I decided I had some open weekend nights ahead to maybe visit the nearby multiplex and better to go far afield on the weekend, so I headed downtown to dsee these two movies that you've likely never heard of.

There was one pleasant surprise in store.  The City Cinemas Village East is a former playhouse devoted to Yiddush Theatre.  It has four very small theatres with very small screens in its basement.  On the former stage,  it has a relatively small screen on the bottom and then a kind of interesting and larger one directly on top of it, an arrangement which I'm surprised wasn't used in more old movie palace conversions.  The UA Lynbrook and the now-deceased UA Astoria are two other theatres which plexed in the old stage area.  But to my surprise this unheralded indie movie was playing on the big and still very richly ornamented main auditorium, which is a stunningly gorgeous place to see a movie and one of the few really gorgeous places left in Manhattan for viewing a movie.  So if the drama flags, you can look up and down and all around and enjoy the surroundings.  Alas, the drama flags in What Doesn't Kill You.  It has two good lead actors in Mark Ruffalo and Ethan Hawke, both of whom count as points in deciding whether to see a movie, but the true story is just not very interesting.  It's like Goodfellas or The Departed playing at too slow a speed.  The two leads are errand boys for a South Boston hood; doing it since they're kids.  Unfortunately the pay isn't always so good, the job security isn't so good, so they start to do some stuff on the side without cutting in the boss.  They end up being arrested (probably a coincidence?) and after they do their time one of them eventually chooses to go straight and enjoy his family while the other decides to do one last big score that can give him the seed money to maybe do better things.  Even if you haven't seen this movie before, you feel as if you had.  Because the writer/director knows the movie itself is dramatically inert he tries the same trick as many of the writers I've worked with, which is to goose the start with an Exciting Prologue that will be So Exciting it will Carry You Along In Its Wake.  That rarely works in writing a novel, and it doesn't work here.  I read that the Yari Film Group, which is releasing the movie, recently went into bankruptcy court.

I was a tad upset with the Cinema Village, because the ticket seller claimed to have no knowledge of the discount for Museum of the Moving Image members.  I've written to complain.  Also, I am pretty sure that the projector in this theatre is running with a bulb that's weak than it's supposed to be.  The movie I saw there on the little theatre cut into the mezzanine area of the main screen, is called Were the World Mine.  It's a gay Shakespearean take on the High School Musical sub-genre.  It's set in a private school where a gay student suffers the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune from his jock classmates.  When he's chosen to play Puck in the senior class play production of A Midsummer Night's Dream, he finds a recipe hidden in the play for some kind of potion that turns people gay or lesbian for a bit of time, which becomes a bit of wish fulfillment that turns the town upside down.  The play must go on, the town returns to a kind of heightened normalcy, and boy gets boy at the end.  Alas, it's so 1990s or 1980s.  You have the members of a high school basketball team breaking into song and dance, but we have that now in the High School Musical movies, so we don't need it here.  The cast isn't bad, per se, and the English/drama teacher is played by Wendy Robie channeling Katherine Helmond from Soap and Who's The Boss and I will never complain to be reminded of Soap.  But Robie's biggest role was perhaps a recurring one in Twin Peaks many years ago, and that's the overall level of achievement when you look at the cast credits, so totally cheap kids movies like if you look at the IMDB bios for the cast of Benji.   I was suffering a cold this week and a little drowsier than I'd really like to be when seeing a movie, so both movies have been given an extra 1/2 toad so they don't suffer totally if my own drowsiness was unfair.

& I have to say it again:  what is this movie really adding to the world when we have big Disney movies as gay as...

High School Musical 3: Senior Year.  Seen Sunday morning/afternoon Nov. 9, 2008 at the AMC Hoffman Center 22, Aud. #1.  2.5 slithy toads.

I hadn't seen the first two movies in the series on TV because, um, I've aged some past the target audience and totally don't get why anyone would groove to Zac Efron and in fact didn't see Hairspray in part because I didn't want to see him doing Link Larkin.  But I am more inclined in general to see movies in theatres than on TV, the coming attraction for this made it seem kind of fun, I have a warm spot for the director Kenny Ortega on account of his choreography for the wonderful I'm-Having-the-Time-of-My-Life-Whenever-I-See-It Dirty Dancing (and I really should see Newsies again some day), and I do occasionally see things in order to be part of the public dialogue.

& I'd have to say that the movie wasn't as bad as I feared it could be but nor was it quite as good as I'd hoped it might be.  The plot wasn't very interesting to anyone who hadn't gotten caught up in the trials and tribulations of Troy Bolton's life from the earlier two movies, and then those uninteresting plots had to be grafted uneasily with other story-lines to help introduce new younger characters for future HSM movies.  The music wasn't all that good.  It does end up achieving a certain emotional power through sheer repetition, kind of like the way Andrew Lloyd Weber beats you into submission in The Phantom of the Opera, and there isn't anything in the movie musically that still sticks around five weeks later.  But it is full of good spirits.  There was some nice choreography as I'd hoped; I was particularly impressed with a kind of "dance worm" that was a particularly cinematic piece of choreography that took advantage of being a film musical over a stage one to provide an effect that you wouldn't get on stage.  

But can we talk about the character of Ryan Evans, played by Lucas Grabeel.  Just as a matter of talent and ability, many of the reviews I'd read for this movie singled out Grabeel's performance as being of particular note, and I do think he has more stage presence and more inate talent than Zac Efron, though my own dislike of Efron aside I do think there's a little more "It" (see my recent post on The Reader) to Efron.  But going beyond that, there's nothing gay at all about HSM 3 because God Forbid and all that, but here's a character who wears very interesting outfits and leads the cast of the high school musical in what one character terms a "yoga Fosse" thing, which is a joke that nobody in the film's target audience will remotely understand but which some of the accompanying adults might.  And to all of the characters in HSM 3, Ryan Evans isn't even worth commenting upon.  He's a part of the scenery.  

& that creates a problem for a Were the World Mine.  In the world outside of East High, I'm still not sure how receptive the senior class would be to a Ryan Evans lookalike leading the ensemble in a Yoga Fosse thing, so insofar as the real world is concerned the issues that confront the lead in that movie are legitimately real world.  This is one reason why I give a little bit more toad to that movie over What Doesn't Kill You, which is superfluous in 68 different ways so many years after Goodfellas.  But culturally, when Disney is giving us HSM 3, and HSM 3 is giving us Ryan Evans, it becomes a lot harder to justify putting a Were the World Mine before the cameras.

A few weeks later I saw a good chunk of HSM 2 on Disney in an annotated pop-up version, and I think it may be a better movie than HSM 3, or it might just be that law of diminished expectations in watching something on TV where it doesn't have to be such an exclusive focus of attention.  But it seemed to me that the plot-line of HSM 2 was a little more universal in its appeal or use of archetype (rich v poor, etc.) than HSM 3.  HSM 2 has a little less music in it, perhaps because the made-for-TV sequel had a little less of a budget.  But I thought the baseball diamond dance in #2 was head and shoulders above anything in #3 in its creativity and verve and joy, and I'd say the same for the finale as well.

Lucas Grabeel in turn has as small role in...

Milk.  Seen Thursday Evening, November 20, 2008 at the Landmark Sunshine, Aud. #1, part of the Variety Screening Series.  3 Slithy Toads.

This is a film that's been getting some rave reviews from far and wide, and which along with Slumdog Millionaire has been leading an end-of-year box office resurgence in specialty films.  I like it perhaps a little less than a lot of the critics.

The story of Harvey Milk is a very powerful one, and this is at least the third time it's being put before us, following on the book The Mayor of Castro Street by Randy Shilts and the excellent documentary The Times of Harvey Milk.  An emigre to San Francisco from New York City, Harvey Milk organized the gay community in the Castro District of San Francisco, won a spot on SF's city council (well, they don't call it that, but...), and was then martyred along with Mayor George Moscone by a former member of the Council who subsequently helped bring national attention to the Twinkie Defense.  Moscone has a convention center named after him, but Milk's mark on US politics will likely endure longer.

This movie is directed by Gus Van Sant, who's been kind of all over the place in his career.  I'm very fond of  his Good Will Hunting (and in my usual way I could bore you with my "the night I saw..." story but won't right now), I regret not seeing his Columbine-inspired Elephant in addition to the interesting Zero Day, Drugstore Cowboy was a pioneering indie flick, but other movies of his like Paranoid Park and Last Days are elegiac odes to elegism that are acquired tastes at best.  

While Milk benefits from an amazing performance in the title role by Sean Penn and other excellent performances by Vincent Garber at Mayor Moscone and Josh Brolin as Supervisor Dan White, it suffers because it has in miniature some of the same tensions in intent that have kind of bedeviled Van Sant's career as a whole.  There's a little hint of this in the opening minutes of the movie, where you've got some very Van-Sant-y shots of gays in the Castro that are there for atmosphere but which have a little too much of the artsy-fartsy skateboarding scenes from Paranoid Park in them.  And then as the movie progresses, Van Sant can't decide whether to cater to or ignore the most conventional cliches of the biopic.

So Lucas Grabeel from HSM 3 is playing the role of Danny Nicoletta, who in real life was an important associate of Harvey Milk's but in terms of this movie (at least as it survived the editing process; I don't know what we have in the script) has hardly any role at all.  There's so little of this performance in the movie that I'd have to say it should have been deleted entirely, consolidated with some other character, something or anything other than what happened to it.  That's the kind of consolidation that happens a lot in biopics or sports movies because you want to make them dramatic and therefore do in your "based on a true story" movie the same kinds of things I might ask authors to do in tightening their novels.  Take two secondary characters that are weak, make a strong one out of them.  Van Sant doesn't want to do that here because he and the screenwriter are trying to be very true to the historic record.  Alas, just as in a novel the time and space and lines and itty bitty pieces of screen time devoted to this character with little import to the story of this movie end up taking time and space and lines and pieces of screen time away from other characters who are more important to the movie's story, and so to me the movie is weakened.  Goodness knows we could have wished for more of an effort to define Milk's relationship with Jack Lira.

And yet at other times Van Sant can't avoid some biopic cliches.  Is it really the case that there was a memorial service for Milk in city hall with all of three people attending at the exact same time that 30,000 people were marching from the Castro to city hall?  That's the way it's portrayed in this movie, where we see a couple of Milk's colleagues saying "oh, look, nobody cares," only to add dramatic heightening to them walking outside and seeing the candle-lit marchers spreading miles down Market Street, with of course some of the other major characters hand-in-hand in the front row.  Cue tears now.  In other places in the movie, Van Sant uses actual historical footage, including a scene of Diane Feinstein, now a Senator from California, announcing the news of the deaths of the Mayor and of Milk.  Here, I would have found archival footage of the memorial march to be more moving than the Hollywood recreation of it.

People should see Milk.  Many more people will find out about Milk's story courtesy of this movie than ever would by reading Randy Shilts or seeing the documentary, and that's a fact.  Sean Penn's performance is very good.  Josh Brolin's is very good, and that's a fact.  But I did see the Times of Harvey Milk, over 20 years ago in MLB 3 at the University of Michigan when the campus rep circuit hadn't yet lost out to the VCR, and in my memory that was a 4 toad movie that got me a lot more teary-eyed than today's Milk does, and even though I recommend Milk, I can't help but think you'd all be better  off finding your way to the documentary.