I went to see Avenue Q with Sarene, Mike, Clarence, Adrian and a few other people I didn't know.
When I arrived, I learned that Deborah, Patrick, Eugene, Mallory and a few other people I did know were already coming to see it.
This is because Kira, whom I didn't know that well but know a bit better now, is in the show.
The show was amazing.
I'd been looking forward to seeing it since the early 2000s, and in the time I'd been waiting:
1. I'd bought my mother the soundtrack CD
2. I'd tried and failed twice to see it on trips to New York City
3. Everyone I'd sung in choirs with had seen it and kvelled ceaselessly
4. I'd given up my seat to see it in Toronto years later, to a friend who deeply regretted seeing it in my place, having found it uninspired and upsetting
5. I'd started singing and acting in community theatre
6. I'd gone from being an early-twenties B.A. graduate to being a mid-thirties double-bachelor, gainfully employed and in a stable relationship with a girl and two cats
7. I'd loved and lost and loved and lost and loved
8. The Internet has gone from just being used for porn to being used for farmville as well.
Many other things have happened in that time, but sticking to the "working memory" rule of 7+/-2. I decided to stick with that list.
So let's talk about what happens when I finally see the show. Sitting in the seats, they pipe in only the finest of Muppet-and-CTW-related music - from "Put down the Duckie" to "Reading Rainbow", my youth and early adolescence descended upon me in waves, disarming me to any immediate shortcomings of the show.
Not that the show really had shortcomings. The one substitute player, in the role of Trekkie Monster, delivered flawless timing and tone. All of the performers were amazing, though it took me a moment to warm up to Adam Proulx's portrayal of Princeton (his "Rod" was immediately charming, however, and that made it much easier for me to get into the spirit of Princeton). Brian was lost a little bit in the sound balancing - his voice didn't have the same piercing quality as the puppet performers, which threatened to drown him in the cartoony soundscape. And I was also a little guarded about the necessarily-racist portrayal of Christmas Eve. Honestly, her lines are written exchanging Ls and Rs; she's sort of an amalgam of every crass bit of Full Metal Jacket, South Pacific and Mickey Rooney from Breakfast at Tiffany's.
There's something resonant, however, about the initial disgust with the broad portrayal of the human characters. The audience is presented with an immediate cognitive dissonance. You are asked to overcome your initial revulsion with the portrayal in the show, approaching it from a critical perspective. You overcome your aversion to the subversive messages in the songs - that racism is A-OK (in small doses), that the Internet is for Porn, that Schadenfreude is natural and to be celebrated - and start to listen to them like you would a stand up comedian.
Now, no comedian asks you to take their messages and preach them out in the world. But they do, at their best, challenge you to think of their absurd conclusions and what your own absurd opinions were on the subject matter when you walked in and took your seat. The late Patrice O'Neal and Chris Rock are particularly adept at this, getting the audience to follow them down a winding path, accidentally drawing a horrifying conclusion about themselves. It's not that they mean it; it's just that self-examination yields some troubling outcomes.
So, dark comedy would shine out of the writing.
But the greater part of the magic was the effortless way that the players directed my gaze - I started, as an actor, obsessively trying to watch their presentations, their faces, their body language - to the puppets themselves. With their eyes focused on their puppets, Kira and Adam and the rest were clearly stepping out of their own shoes and investing themselves in the puppets' stories. I couldn't help but follow along.
I'm glad I saw the show when I did. Had I been who and where I was when the show premiered almost ten years ago, I would have squirmed my way through it. This time I just watched, and laughed -- too loudly -- and occasionally gave in and sang.
Thursday, January 26, 2012
Thursday, November 03, 2011
Drive
A little like Brick in a car, via Parker.
A lot less talking. A lot fewer characters. Less stylized; less affected. (Not saying that's universally good or bad; it worked for this story, is what I'm saying.)
The bottom line is that you've got young master Ryan Gosling being a guy-good-at-a-thing, driving a car around LA, and he gets "mixed up" (to put it glibly) in a series of elaborate relationships regarding money, power, obligation and ultimately life and death. You've got Carey Mulligan as a girl on the edge of his perception. And you've got Bryan Cranston, Albert Brooks and Ron Perlman using their veteran acting skills to build an amazing tapestry of criminal hierarchy, with just a hint of affectionate Jewish comedy bubbling under the blood-streaked surface.
It's an excruciatingly intense two hours. You could cut yourself on Gosling's precision, and in this sense it's almost worth watching right after Brick to contrast with Joseph Gordon-Levitt's scattered, obsessive, brainy mile-a-minute internal patter.
But it was suggested to me that a much better way to dull the edge of this film's knife-twisting atmosphere in LA is to follow it with The Big Lebowski. And that is what I'm going to do the next time I host a movie night: Drive and Lebowski.
I'm so excited for this notion I could plotz.
A lot less talking. A lot fewer characters. Less stylized; less affected. (Not saying that's universally good or bad; it worked for this story, is what I'm saying.)
The bottom line is that you've got young master Ryan Gosling being a guy-good-at-a-thing, driving a car around LA, and he gets "mixed up" (to put it glibly) in a series of elaborate relationships regarding money, power, obligation and ultimately life and death. You've got Carey Mulligan as a girl on the edge of his perception. And you've got Bryan Cranston, Albert Brooks and Ron Perlman using their veteran acting skills to build an amazing tapestry of criminal hierarchy, with just a hint of affectionate Jewish comedy bubbling under the blood-streaked surface.
It's an excruciatingly intense two hours. You could cut yourself on Gosling's precision, and in this sense it's almost worth watching right after Brick to contrast with Joseph Gordon-Levitt's scattered, obsessive, brainy mile-a-minute internal patter.
But it was suggested to me that a much better way to dull the edge of this film's knife-twisting atmosphere in LA is to follow it with The Big Lebowski. And that is what I'm going to do the next time I host a movie night: Drive and Lebowski.
I'm so excited for this notion I could plotz.
Monday, August 22, 2011
Attack the Block
Predator.
Bromwell High.
Assault on Precinct Thirteen.
The London Riots of 2011.
Doctor Who.
I really, really wasn't ready to enjoy this movie quite so completely. I really reacted viscerally, emotionally to the mugging at the beginning of the movie. I fell right into the director's trap, almost rooting for the invading alien when the kids to whom my friend, a teacher, referred as "the kind of kids I teach" - meaning poor, at-risk, with violent tendencies - were up against it.
Beautiful manipulation, and it barely took anything.
Of course, the movie was much more topical than may have been intended. Once the cops get involved, in callous opposition to the embattled erstwhile antiheroes, you start to feel unusual about your convictions. Should we be so cavalier about the arrival of "the cavalry"?
A little like Moon and Hobo with a Shotgun, this movie is part of a growing body of evidence that the cheaper you make it, the more personal and the freer from the machinery of spectacle-building, the more awesome the overall experience.
It's why the first Iron Man felt like a real movie, and the second one like a colouring book.
Bromwell High.
Assault on Precinct Thirteen.
The London Riots of 2011.
Doctor Who.
I really, really wasn't ready to enjoy this movie quite so completely. I really reacted viscerally, emotionally to the mugging at the beginning of the movie. I fell right into the director's trap, almost rooting for the invading alien when the kids to whom my friend, a teacher, referred as "the kind of kids I teach" - meaning poor, at-risk, with violent tendencies - were up against it.
Beautiful manipulation, and it barely took anything.
Of course, the movie was much more topical than may have been intended. Once the cops get involved, in callous opposition to the embattled erstwhile antiheroes, you start to feel unusual about your convictions. Should we be so cavalier about the arrival of "the cavalry"?
A little like Moon and Hobo with a Shotgun, this movie is part of a growing body of evidence that the cheaper you make it, the more personal and the freer from the machinery of spectacle-building, the more awesome the overall experience.
It's why the first Iron Man felt like a real movie, and the second one like a colouring book.
Tuesday, June 14, 2011
X-Men: First Class
This was a film with an end in mind - somewhere it had to reach, beats it had to establish before its runtime was up. Xavier had to be crippled, Magneto evil, Beast blue, the lines drawn. This definitely detracted from its fundamental goal, as a movie, of being coherent and not shattering suspension of disbelief (how did Mystique know to put a dopey helmet on Shaw in order to perplex Azazel?) but not interfering with the other fundamental goal of providing a set of action set-pieces, tearful dramatic beats, and superpowered soap opera that near-summer movie-watchers and X-Men fans craved like taquitos.
So it was fun in the theatre, in a '60s James Bond or Austin Powers sort of way. Some lazy storytelling and trope-indulgence - killing Darwin, really?! why didn't he "adapt to survive" by not being the lone African-American in an action movie - and some really half-assed characterization (Rade the eternal Russian, and Ironside acting like Ric Olie from The Phantom Menace) made me roll eyes and grit teeth, and invoking the power of Hannukah Magic was really silly.
And Beast's blue face looked like a Zathras costume, mustn't forget that.
But all of that doesn't matter. Tears in McAvoy and Fassbinder's eyes as Magneto completes his arc with the helpless, despairing Kevin Bacon looking on, reaching desperately for his helmet (and really, the superpowers in this movie MATTERED to the storytelling, in a fascinating way) felt real. Mystique's internal struggle felt honest. Submarines being torn from the water and flights of missiles being plucked from the air made up for the shocking weakness of the special-effects battles in X3.
This felt like a movie taken seriously. And while it is very important not to take everything about the X-Men seriously, it is important always to look like you are. Consequently, this worked, as an X-Men movie.
So it was fun in the theatre, in a '60s James Bond or Austin Powers sort of way. Some lazy storytelling and trope-indulgence - killing Darwin, really?! why didn't he "adapt to survive" by not being the lone African-American in an action movie - and some really half-assed characterization (Rade the eternal Russian, and Ironside acting like Ric Olie from The Phantom Menace) made me roll eyes and grit teeth, and invoking the power of Hannukah Magic was really silly.
And Beast's blue face looked like a Zathras costume, mustn't forget that.
But all of that doesn't matter. Tears in McAvoy and Fassbinder's eyes as Magneto completes his arc with the helpless, despairing Kevin Bacon looking on, reaching desperately for his helmet (and really, the superpowers in this movie MATTERED to the storytelling, in a fascinating way) felt real. Mystique's internal struggle felt honest. Submarines being torn from the water and flights of missiles being plucked from the air made up for the shocking weakness of the special-effects battles in X3.
This felt like a movie taken seriously. And while it is very important not to take everything about the X-Men seriously, it is important always to look like you are. Consequently, this worked, as an X-Men movie.
Countermeasure Public Launch
My A Cappella choir Countermeasure had a two-hour public launch concert/event that combined us with the Art Battle crowd for a visually and stylistically heterogeneous start to our career as our own thing.
The set list was ambitious, and sometimes we weren't quite able to reach our goals. Musically, I know we have a lot of work to do. But artistically, the show was a success.
This post will expand.
The set list was ambitious, and sometimes we weren't quite able to reach our goals. Musically, I know we have a lot of work to do. But artistically, the show was a success.
This post will expand.
My Fair Lady (Alexander Singers and Players)
From February to May of this year, I was involved in a production of the Alexander Singers and Players, a musical and community theatre group with whom I've now performed in six shows, going back to 2006.
It was worth my time, and to say that you have to realize just how much time I didn't have, and how much it's worth to me.
It meant that I didn't get to post here, and that I didn't see a lot of movies or read a lot of books. But I did dance a fair bit.
This post will expand.
It was worth my time, and to say that you have to realize just how much time I didn't have, and how much it's worth to me.
It meant that I didn't get to post here, and that I didn't see a lot of movies or read a lot of books. But I did dance a fair bit.
This post will expand.
Thursday, January 27, 2011
Black Swan
So it's been a couple of weeks since I've seen The Black Swan and I've calmed down a little bit. Thoughts a bit jumbled post-hoc, but here's what I thought, in no particular order.
First, that I can a bit callously but affectionately think of it as descended from Fight Club, for obvious reasons, but also from Full Metal Jacket (so I'll call it "Full Feather Tutu"). At its core, you had a message of an artist -- or a human, or a soldier -- pursuing the obliteration of self to give a truly selfless performance. As a performer, and an off-and-on Kendoka, I related very viscerally to her experience. How many times has a music teacher, coach, whatever, shouted at me to turn off my brain, to stop watching myself and just let my heart move me? At least, like, three.
At a high level, there were a number of surprises in the cast, all good. Characters came in with clear "entrances", and there were subtle, creepy inside jokes based around the casting. Winona Ryder's character is stolen from; Winona's shoplifting fiasco was massively publicized. Murders real or imagined; Mila Kunis' role in the baffling sequel to American Psycho, which originalliy featured similar ambiguity. Barbara Hershey's clearly broken character, and her visibly jarring face, subsequent to obvious plastic surgery, perhaps raising a question of a perpetuation of a cycle of abuse. And while there was no outright discussion of anorexia, the camera lingers for a moment on the loose skin and musculature of an older dancer's back midway through the film. It's impossible not to think of both character and actress, in that moment. Conflation of life and art was a loudly telegraphed theme of this movie. Perhaps unintentional was the subsequent disclosure of Natalie Portman's pregnancy by and engagement to the film's choreographer Millepieds.
Obviously this extended to the whole structure of the film, which followed most of the same dramatic beats as the ballet Swan Lake, which is sketched out by the choreographer -- as played by Vincent Cassel, whom I'd mostly known through his roles in Ocean's Twelve and Irreversible, but who's also Monica Bellucci's husband -- early enough in the film for the audience to play along with the game.
Body Horror was all over this movie. Darren Aronovsky is a huge fan of that idea -- Requiem for a Dream was wrapped around it all the way through. Interestingly, it intersects with Kafka's approach in a funny sort of way, with rather than a man becoming a cockroach, a woman becoming a swan. This invites consideration of the Ugly Duckling, although the "ugliness" of the Black Swan herself was actually a sort of repressed carnality, which then calls up all those questions so tritely trodden on in The Da Vinci Code, about sacred versus worldly, religious and intellectual orthodoxy versus the "evil" impulse of human lust. As for the "horror" itself, the movie had some amazing gimmicky shock/jump moments; tension was maintained with fairly expert acumen.
Three more things I want to touch on: first, the question of Black Swan in the context of Nicholas Taleb. Something totally unpredictable? But maybe also something you planned to happen and chose to maximize? Something only possible in "extremistan"? Something real but almost never really glimpsed? A question of a fading elite, with diminishing crowds in the ballet perhaps representing a "thanksgiving event"?
Second, the transformation. How real was Lily? Was her tattoo something that could ever REALLY be allowed on a dancer? Why did she have a tattoo so explicitly tied to a single ballet; didn't she think she'd ever dance The Nutcracker? You'd need a lot of concealer to tread that (though I suppose if Nina could have covered her scratchy scarring/emerging feathers, Lily could have obscured her wings). Pursuant to that there's the amazing transformation Natalie helps Nina undergo, by totally changing the character's physicality in the last scene of the movie, fully embracing the character and disappearing into it, but doing so twice -- both Natalie AND Nina disappear, leaving only this alien creature of supreme sensuality and power. Chilling.
And the third thing, the name "Nina". Yeah, I know it means "child". I know it's one of Columbus' three ships. I also know it's slang (at least, Dr. Dre uses it thus) for a 9mm automatic pistol, a concealed, dangerous weapon. But the weirdest thing is how it lines up with two Ninas in my own life: one of whom is a dancer, and another of whom has undergone a dramatic physical transformation. This movie is full of weird resonance with the real world and the world-within-a-world of the Swan Lake ballet's story. It's only fitting that it should still be stuck in my head weeks after I've seen it.
First, that I can a bit callously but affectionately think of it as descended from Fight Club, for obvious reasons, but also from Full Metal Jacket (so I'll call it "Full Feather Tutu"). At its core, you had a message of an artist -- or a human, or a soldier -- pursuing the obliteration of self to give a truly selfless performance. As a performer, and an off-and-on Kendoka, I related very viscerally to her experience. How many times has a music teacher, coach, whatever, shouted at me to turn off my brain, to stop watching myself and just let my heart move me? At least, like, three.
At a high level, there were a number of surprises in the cast, all good. Characters came in with clear "entrances", and there were subtle, creepy inside jokes based around the casting. Winona Ryder's character is stolen from; Winona's shoplifting fiasco was massively publicized. Murders real or imagined; Mila Kunis' role in the baffling sequel to American Psycho, which originalliy featured similar ambiguity. Barbara Hershey's clearly broken character, and her visibly jarring face, subsequent to obvious plastic surgery, perhaps raising a question of a perpetuation of a cycle of abuse. And while there was no outright discussion of anorexia, the camera lingers for a moment on the loose skin and musculature of an older dancer's back midway through the film. It's impossible not to think of both character and actress, in that moment. Conflation of life and art was a loudly telegraphed theme of this movie. Perhaps unintentional was the subsequent disclosure of Natalie Portman's pregnancy by and engagement to the film's choreographer Millepieds.
Obviously this extended to the whole structure of the film, which followed most of the same dramatic beats as the ballet Swan Lake, which is sketched out by the choreographer -- as played by Vincent Cassel, whom I'd mostly known through his roles in Ocean's Twelve and Irreversible, but who's also Monica Bellucci's husband -- early enough in the film for the audience to play along with the game.
Body Horror was all over this movie. Darren Aronovsky is a huge fan of that idea -- Requiem for a Dream was wrapped around it all the way through. Interestingly, it intersects with Kafka's approach in a funny sort of way, with rather than a man becoming a cockroach, a woman becoming a swan. This invites consideration of the Ugly Duckling, although the "ugliness" of the Black Swan herself was actually a sort of repressed carnality, which then calls up all those questions so tritely trodden on in The Da Vinci Code, about sacred versus worldly, religious and intellectual orthodoxy versus the "evil" impulse of human lust. As for the "horror" itself, the movie had some amazing gimmicky shock/jump moments; tension was maintained with fairly expert acumen.
Three more things I want to touch on: first, the question of Black Swan in the context of Nicholas Taleb. Something totally unpredictable? But maybe also something you planned to happen and chose to maximize? Something only possible in "extremistan"? Something real but almost never really glimpsed? A question of a fading elite, with diminishing crowds in the ballet perhaps representing a "thanksgiving event"?
Second, the transformation. How real was Lily? Was her tattoo something that could ever REALLY be allowed on a dancer? Why did she have a tattoo so explicitly tied to a single ballet; didn't she think she'd ever dance The Nutcracker? You'd need a lot of concealer to tread that (though I suppose if Nina could have covered her scratchy scarring/emerging feathers, Lily could have obscured her wings). Pursuant to that there's the amazing transformation Natalie helps Nina undergo, by totally changing the character's physicality in the last scene of the movie, fully embracing the character and disappearing into it, but doing so twice -- both Natalie AND Nina disappear, leaving only this alien creature of supreme sensuality and power. Chilling.
And the third thing, the name "Nina". Yeah, I know it means "child". I know it's one of Columbus' three ships. I also know it's slang (at least, Dr. Dre uses it thus) for a 9mm automatic pistol, a concealed, dangerous weapon. But the weirdest thing is how it lines up with two Ninas in my own life: one of whom is a dancer, and another of whom has undergone a dramatic physical transformation. This movie is full of weird resonance with the real world and the world-within-a-world of the Swan Lake ballet's story. It's only fitting that it should still be stuck in my head weeks after I've seen it.
Wednesday, January 26, 2011
Twilight Imperium 3rd Edition
(originally posted to RPG.net's "Other Games Open" forum, about 10 minutes before it was posted here.)
I played Twilight Imperium last weekend and it got right under my skin. The thing is-- while I don't want to say "brilliant", or even "innovative", I do want to say "inspired". A full-on game of conquering a whole damned galaxy, or at least the important parts of it, that's not even a wargame per se: it's almost more of a "civilization" game, with "points" given for the development of technology, culture, political influence and diplomacy.
We played for three hours (and it was our first game, so we really only went up to turn three, six or so victory points) but the overall effect was absolutely breathtaking. Taking a page out of Cosmic Encounter, you have a distinct set of individual successor empires with wildly distinct feels, using only subtle variations within the rules.
But taking a page out of Race for the Galaxy and (as Third Edition calls it, "its greatest new influence") Puerto Rico, there are "non-conflict-based" ways to improve your empire and get ahead in the victory point race.
If I were to consider a fourth edition of Twilight Imperium, I'd think that the best new mechanic to roll into it would be the card-driven wargame mechanic of games like Twilight Struggle and Labyrinth. Those "influence" points on worlds all over the galaxy should be somehow factored into the way points are scored; Political Events don't seem to happen quite often enough to really make a difference. On the other hand, early expansion seems to make a really big difference. Here, racial starting numbers of ships (The N'orr, for instance, with their huge army but single carrier) can swing the game wildly.
But in its cosmic-encounter-like looseness lies a type of wide-open freedom that, even with my often analytically-paralytic group of Enderian calculator knights, allows for a tremendous amount of story-telling and role-playing in the context of a board-based strategy game about building a galactic empire. So, it wins.
I played Twilight Imperium last weekend and it got right under my skin. The thing is-- while I don't want to say "brilliant", or even "innovative", I do want to say "inspired". A full-on game of conquering a whole damned galaxy, or at least the important parts of it, that's not even a wargame per se: it's almost more of a "civilization" game, with "points" given for the development of technology, culture, political influence and diplomacy.
We played for three hours (and it was our first game, so we really only went up to turn three, six or so victory points) but the overall effect was absolutely breathtaking. Taking a page out of Cosmic Encounter, you have a distinct set of individual successor empires with wildly distinct feels, using only subtle variations within the rules.
But taking a page out of Race for the Galaxy and (as Third Edition calls it, "its greatest new influence") Puerto Rico, there are "non-conflict-based" ways to improve your empire and get ahead in the victory point race.
If I were to consider a fourth edition of Twilight Imperium, I'd think that the best new mechanic to roll into it would be the card-driven wargame mechanic of games like Twilight Struggle and Labyrinth. Those "influence" points on worlds all over the galaxy should be somehow factored into the way points are scored; Political Events don't seem to happen quite often enough to really make a difference. On the other hand, early expansion seems to make a really big difference. Here, racial starting numbers of ships (The N'orr, for instance, with their huge army but single carrier) can swing the game wildly.
But in its cosmic-encounter-like looseness lies a type of wide-open freedom that, even with my often analytically-paralytic group of Enderian calculator knights, allows for a tremendous amount of story-telling and role-playing in the context of a board-based strategy game about building a galactic empire. So, it wins.
Comics, week of January 26th.
Shortly, we'll be getting Squideye and The Bitter Guy back online for the new year. For now, these are the comic books I'll be checking out this week:
BOOM! Studios
Incorruptible #14 -$3.99
- I'm along for the ride; interested to see where it all winds up.
Dark Horse
Star Wars: Legacy - War #2 (of 6) -$3.50
- I refuse to bother with Legacy War until it's in trade. And at half-price books. SO burned out on fricking Adolescent Rebellion Skywalker and his BS.
Image
Skullkickers #5 -$2.99
- This thing is consistently awesome. Just gets better with each issue. And I like Zub; Zub's the man.
Marvel
Deadpool #32 -$2.99
- I like laughing and being happy. Anyone else interested in these things should be fed a steady diet of Deadpool comics by Daniel Way.
Fantastic Four #587 -$3.99
- This is the one where they kill off Ben Grimm, right?
New Avengers #8 -$3.99
Secret Avengers #9 -$3.99
- Immonen could draw paint drying and I'd just eat it up. Brubaker could write a story about paint drying and I'd be gripped. I wish they'd work together and make the One True Avengers comic. In the meantime, I'll keep up with both I guess.
X-23 #5 -$2.99
- I got a friend who's a pretty big fan. So I pick 'em up with some regularity. Marjorie Liu makes things more interesting than they'd be in the hands of a male writer doing a typical "Wounded Girl" comic.
BOOM! Studios
Incorruptible #14 -$3.99
- I'm along for the ride; interested to see where it all winds up.
Dark Horse
Star Wars: Legacy - War #2 (of 6) -$3.50
- I refuse to bother with Legacy War until it's in trade. And at half-price books. SO burned out on fricking Adolescent Rebellion Skywalker and his BS.
Image
Skullkickers #5 -$2.99
- This thing is consistently awesome. Just gets better with each issue. And I like Zub; Zub's the man.
Marvel
Deadpool #32 -$2.99
- I like laughing and being happy. Anyone else interested in these things should be fed a steady diet of Deadpool comics by Daniel Way.
Fantastic Four #587 -$3.99
- This is the one where they kill off Ben Grimm, right?
New Avengers #8 -$3.99
Secret Avengers #9 -$3.99
- Immonen could draw paint drying and I'd just eat it up. Brubaker could write a story about paint drying and I'd be gripped. I wish they'd work together and make the One True Avengers comic. In the meantime, I'll keep up with both I guess.
X-23 #5 -$2.99
- I got a friend who's a pretty big fan. So I pick 'em up with some regularity. Marjorie Liu makes things more interesting than they'd be in the hands of a male writer doing a typical "Wounded Girl" comic.
Wednesday, January 12, 2011
Thinking back on "Reasons to be Pretty"
I think I might actually have reviewed this site somewhere else, but as she was mentioned in a recent Ontario press release, I checked out the wikipedia page for Piper Perabo trying to remember whether she'd played a police officer in the play I saw in preview on my last trip to New York.
Looking up the play, however, I saw that it had in fact premiered before the on-Broadway run I'd seen at the Lycaeum theatre. And in its original cast? Nick Sobotka (Pablo Schreier) and Kim Pine (Alison Pill)!
Woulda been cool to see them onstage. Of course, at that point I had seen neither The Wire nor In Treatment or Scott Pilgrim, and so I wouldn't have been confronted with baggage associated with their roles. Either way, that play was pretty darned good.
Piper, of course, I knew from other work, but her character didn't ring of her Lost and Delirious role, which is cool. (She co-starred with Jessica Paré -- now a big part of Mad Men -- and, to an extent, Jackie Burroughs in that movie, which was awesome.)
Looking up the play, however, I saw that it had in fact premiered before the on-Broadway run I'd seen at the Lycaeum theatre. And in its original cast? Nick Sobotka (Pablo Schreier) and Kim Pine (Alison Pill)!
Woulda been cool to see them onstage. Of course, at that point I had seen neither The Wire nor In Treatment or Scott Pilgrim, and so I wouldn't have been confronted with baggage associated with their roles. Either way, that play was pretty darned good.
Piper, of course, I knew from other work, but her character didn't ring of her Lost and Delirious role, which is cool. (She co-starred with Jessica Paré -- now a big part of Mad Men -- and, to an extent, Jackie Burroughs in that movie, which was awesome.)
Saturday, January 08, 2011
Seven Wonders
I played the board game "Seven Wonders" last week with Danny, Eugene, Laura, Samy, Rob and the "team seat" of Ora and Mary-Ellen. Most of us were learning the game for the first time, but it's not terribly complicated. Eugene is a great teacher, and he was willing to step us through the rules without belabouring the details before they're needed.
If I had to fall back on the old "X+Y" paradigm for elevator pitches, I'd say that the game felt like playing Race for the Galaxy but using the mechanics of Guillotine. I love both of those games, so this isn't a bad place to be, though it doesn't quite capture the pure experience of either one completely.
Like Race for the Galaxy (one of my favourite games ever, just on the strength of its theme of "building an empire" and the extreme variation from game to game, which forces players to make a plan but improvise frequently -- strategy plus disruption!) it gives each player a distinct "starting point" -- in Race for the Galaxy it's a home world, which lessens in importance as you go, but in Seven Wonders it's the "ancient wonder" (Colossus of Rhodes, Hanging Gardens of Babylon, etc.) at the heart of a bronze-age city-state -- and lets you expand your empire using a variety of additions, represented by cards, each of which gives you the capacity to more easily acquire other additions in subsequent turns. At the end of the game, based on how much of your "wonder" you've built, and how many additions you've accrued, you score points.
But like Guillotine, every player has access to the same batch of cards, and this access rotates around the table, giving each player a crack at the cards in turn. There are three sets of cards that make their way around the table, and once these sets are exhausted, the game ends. But thematically, Guillotine is one of the most accessible, whimsical games I've ever seen. You play a bunch of executioners during La Terreur, trying to collect the most prestigious collection of heads. The nobles to be executed are lined up, the Guillotine blade makes its way around, giving players the next noble in line -- unless they monkey with things by playing the "action" cards in their hand (tripping nobles, making Marie Antoinette talk about cake and sending her to the front of the line, etc.).
Guillotine is so simple and easy to grasp, conceptually, that it's incredibly fun. Race for the Galaxy, on the other hand, doesn't make sense for the first two games while players try to figure out what on earth all the icons on the cards mean, how they interact and so fort. It's this complexity (because of the similar "empire-building" themes) that Seven Wonders shares that makes it less simple than Guillotine, and consequently not as much of a "game for everyone". And unlike Race for the Galaxy, which lets you develop wildly divergent types of empire, your Seven Wonders empires are fairly limited to libraries, quarries, marketplaces and stuff.
So it's somewhere in the middle, and not quite perfect for either geeky conquerors or unconvinced non-gamers, but it's still fast and fairly simple to play. I'd give it another try to see whether it will hold my interest like Race for the Galaxy, and I'd love to try it with people who don't play too many games. But it's not going to appeal to as many people as Guillotine, I don't think -- it's just a bit too dry -- and I don't think it's going to show itself to have as much depth as Race for the Galaxy.
But those are pretty tough acts to follow.
If I had to fall back on the old "X+Y" paradigm for elevator pitches, I'd say that the game felt like playing Race for the Galaxy but using the mechanics of Guillotine. I love both of those games, so this isn't a bad place to be, though it doesn't quite capture the pure experience of either one completely.
Like Race for the Galaxy (one of my favourite games ever, just on the strength of its theme of "building an empire" and the extreme variation from game to game, which forces players to make a plan but improvise frequently -- strategy plus disruption!) it gives each player a distinct "starting point" -- in Race for the Galaxy it's a home world, which lessens in importance as you go, but in Seven Wonders it's the "ancient wonder" (Colossus of Rhodes, Hanging Gardens of Babylon, etc.) at the heart of a bronze-age city-state -- and lets you expand your empire using a variety of additions, represented by cards, each of which gives you the capacity to more easily acquire other additions in subsequent turns. At the end of the game, based on how much of your "wonder" you've built, and how many additions you've accrued, you score points.
But like Guillotine, every player has access to the same batch of cards, and this access rotates around the table, giving each player a crack at the cards in turn. There are three sets of cards that make their way around the table, and once these sets are exhausted, the game ends. But thematically, Guillotine is one of the most accessible, whimsical games I've ever seen. You play a bunch of executioners during La Terreur, trying to collect the most prestigious collection of heads. The nobles to be executed are lined up, the Guillotine blade makes its way around, giving players the next noble in line -- unless they monkey with things by playing the "action" cards in their hand (tripping nobles, making Marie Antoinette talk about cake and sending her to the front of the line, etc.).
Guillotine is so simple and easy to grasp, conceptually, that it's incredibly fun. Race for the Galaxy, on the other hand, doesn't make sense for the first two games while players try to figure out what on earth all the icons on the cards mean, how they interact and so fort. It's this complexity (because of the similar "empire-building" themes) that Seven Wonders shares that makes it less simple than Guillotine, and consequently not as much of a "game for everyone". And unlike Race for the Galaxy, which lets you develop wildly divergent types of empire, your Seven Wonders empires are fairly limited to libraries, quarries, marketplaces and stuff.
So it's somewhere in the middle, and not quite perfect for either geeky conquerors or unconvinced non-gamers, but it's still fast and fairly simple to play. I'd give it another try to see whether it will hold my interest like Race for the Galaxy, and I'd love to try it with people who don't play too many games. But it's not going to appeal to as many people as Guillotine, I don't think -- it's just a bit too dry -- and I don't think it's going to show itself to have as much depth as Race for the Galaxy.
But those are pretty tough acts to follow.
Thursday, January 06, 2011
Louie
Louis C.K.'s new FX sitcom -- a sort of companion piece in tone to "It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia" and really, if not for Community and 30 Rock being an NBC block, would make up the best hour of television conceivable -- really works for me in a single sentence: "Dr. Katz but in live action". It's just a very patient sort of show, stunningly non-judgemental; not a lot of laughs but the kind of pathos that only humour can really evoke. It's pretty great.
Monday, January 03, 2011
Highlander: The Source
From the all-caps Papyrus opening title cards with half-assed narration to the pop-song soft-lit ending makeout with half-assed narration, this movie was a rough ride. True to its low-budget roots, I suppose, but with an insane mess of characters, an ex-nihilo macguffin involving the decay of the world and some kind of astronomical alignment (I'm sure Zeist was in there as well) to the hilarious fast-motion swordfights with the inside-joke spouting nemesis all just begging to be set to Yakkity Sax, this was brutal.
If you're in the mood for an Uwe Boll movie without the big name actors slumming it, it's worth an hour of your time. However, this entails being in the mood for an Uwe Boll movie. Fair warning.
If you're in the mood for an Uwe Boll movie without the big name actors slumming it, it's worth an hour of your time. However, this entails being in the mood for an Uwe Boll movie. Fair warning.
World's Greatest Dad
Picked this one up at a 3-for-$10 at the Rogers' Video on the way to Eugene's New Year's Eve party, but to be honest I'd been trying to see it for a while. Bobcat Goldthwait, whose comedy is a heck of a lot deeper and smarter than that high-strung Police Academy character I knew him as before (thanks, Meeplemart Steve, for showing me the way there), wrote and directed this movie as a sort of Robin Williams vehicle, and a sort of story about loneliness, isolation, and broken and reconstituted families. I heard about it on Adam Carolla's Podcast last year ('09, actually, at this point), and it sounded dark and twisted enough to stand up to Bad Santa in my "Fiasco Comedy" shrine.
Well, like I say about so many movies, it's not quite as funny or sharp as Bad Santa. That's not a huge strike against it, though; it's going for something a little bit different, though it's still morbidly fascinated with weird sexual obsessions and characters so unrepentantly loathsome that you worry how you'll be able to stand an hour and a half of them.
In this movie, though, the loathsome character is the kid, Kyle (played by Spy Kids' Daryl Sabara, who was charming and awesome in that, and is riveting and awful in this), and as most of the promotional material indicates, Kyle is more of a supporting character: it's Robin Williams' character Lance that is the focus of this film's proceedings. Lance is Kyle's frustrated father, frustrated teacher, frustrated writer who just can't make it work, but tries like crazy not to take it out on people, though Kyle pushes him to his absolute limit. Midway into the proceedings, Lance takes advantage of a horrible (if inevitable) tragedy to bolster his writing career, his teaching career, and his love life.
There's not a whole lot to say about the narrative, as it's generally a simple morality fable about being true to yourself and the people you love, or hate, but either way being honest. There were a lot of "what does that expression mean?" moments from supporting characters -- the kind of awkward pause that can be a tremendous source of humour, but if not carefully managed can make you wonder exactly what a given expression means. I point to shows like Lost or Arrested Development, or films like Iron Man, as examples of works that are carefully enough directed and edited to ensure that no glance, no expression and no pause by an actor is divergent to the story; that they all mean something, and by paying attention to them, we get a sense of what the character is thinking or what their goals are.
But World's Greatest Dad isn't a movie about characters' calculated ambitions; unlike Bad Santa this isn't a movie about well-intentioned schemes and scams that take people into dark and dangerous places. This is a movie about messy people, their messy lives, and what can come to them if they're willing to be lying bastards and play into people's wishes and expectations. The trick, of course, is that to do so is to be so contemptibly insincere as to make honest relationships completely impossible. So there you have the movie's simple dilemma and its concept.
It's not for everyone, but it's oddly sweet. Robin Williams is a totally different kind of father from his character in Mrs. Doubtfire, and he's worth watching in this exercise in nebbishy ambition. It's a bit hard to find -- never got a really wide release, not exactly filling the video shelves and oddly not on Canadian Netflix -- but I'm glad I dug it up.
Well, like I say about so many movies, it's not quite as funny or sharp as Bad Santa. That's not a huge strike against it, though; it's going for something a little bit different, though it's still morbidly fascinated with weird sexual obsessions and characters so unrepentantly loathsome that you worry how you'll be able to stand an hour and a half of them.
In this movie, though, the loathsome character is the kid, Kyle (played by Spy Kids' Daryl Sabara, who was charming and awesome in that, and is riveting and awful in this), and as most of the promotional material indicates, Kyle is more of a supporting character: it's Robin Williams' character Lance that is the focus of this film's proceedings. Lance is Kyle's frustrated father, frustrated teacher, frustrated writer who just can't make it work, but tries like crazy not to take it out on people, though Kyle pushes him to his absolute limit. Midway into the proceedings, Lance takes advantage of a horrible (if inevitable) tragedy to bolster his writing career, his teaching career, and his love life.
There's not a whole lot to say about the narrative, as it's generally a simple morality fable about being true to yourself and the people you love, or hate, but either way being honest. There were a lot of "what does that expression mean?" moments from supporting characters -- the kind of awkward pause that can be a tremendous source of humour, but if not carefully managed can make you wonder exactly what a given expression means. I point to shows like Lost or Arrested Development, or films like Iron Man, as examples of works that are carefully enough directed and edited to ensure that no glance, no expression and no pause by an actor is divergent to the story; that they all mean something, and by paying attention to them, we get a sense of what the character is thinking or what their goals are.
But World's Greatest Dad isn't a movie about characters' calculated ambitions; unlike Bad Santa this isn't a movie about well-intentioned schemes and scams that take people into dark and dangerous places. This is a movie about messy people, their messy lives, and what can come to them if they're willing to be lying bastards and play into people's wishes and expectations. The trick, of course, is that to do so is to be so contemptibly insincere as to make honest relationships completely impossible. So there you have the movie's simple dilemma and its concept.
It's not for everyone, but it's oddly sweet. Robin Williams is a totally different kind of father from his character in Mrs. Doubtfire, and he's worth watching in this exercise in nebbishy ambition. It's a bit hard to find -- never got a really wide release, not exactly filling the video shelves and oddly not on Canadian Netflix -- but I'm glad I dug it up.
Saturday, January 01, 2011
The Fighter
So only a few days after reading The Power of One, wherein a kid boxes his way to self-esteem with really good grasp of how to describe the sport to an uninitiated observer (yeah, he has some superpowers, but the book's kinda magical realism anyway) I went with my family to see "The Fighter", a pseudo-biopic about a welterweight boxer named Micky Ward (Marky Mark) and his brother, a wired, dissipated mess of an ex-fighter named Dicky Eklund (Christian Bale). His family, his love interest and most of the town of Lowell, Massechusetts all figure into the story bit by bit, as does HBO to a surprising degree (there's a movie within the movie, which is to say the actual "America Undercover" episode about Dicky Eklund, which is right there on the IMDb for your reference).
David O. Russell directed the movie, and tonally, the film was a lot closer to Three Kings than it was to "I Heart Huckabees". And I'm very glad for that; the trademark of that earlier movie was a deep, dark scenario constantly presenting visceral bodily threat, and yet the whole time, it stayed watchable thanks to charismatic leads and weirdly-textured background players (Spike Jonze in Three Kings, and most of the population of Lowell, specifically the teased-hair, denim-clad legion of sisters in The Fighter). The sheer amount of time I spent laughing largely got me over what I saw as the sort of stock template into which the "inspiring" true events were slotted.
Acting was pretty good all-'round; Christian Bale, unlike Leonardo DiCaprio, can take a larger-than-life role with a wacky accent and, without the viewer having to suspend disbelief, infuse it with all the raw charisma and physicality that it needs. Dicky was really the titular fighter in the movie; every time you saw Bale move, you saw the razor-sharp reflexes, instincts, authority and guile that Micky couldn't find. Every time Micky went into a fight, you saw loss and failure all over his face. You saw intimidation, you saw defeat, and that was really cool; Mark Wahlberg (now that I'm not being dismissive I'll use his non-Funky-Bunch-era name) actually undergoes a journey throughout the movie; though we see it sort of in montage, the arc from "stepping stone" to "contender" is at least clearly communicated in psychological and physical language, in the way Micky stands, in his expression -- there isn't a belabouring of BIG PERTINENT DETAILS with too much third-party explication or otherwise "wackity schmackity doo".
I liked the interpolation of the HBO documentary, which made a suitably David O. Russelly sort of comment on the nature of biographical filmmaking which sort of -- in a VERY lightweight way -- echoes season five of David Simon's theming for "The Wire", without quite getting into Charlie Kaufman territory. Insofar as the way a story is told and reported can create impressions not only in the viewer but in the subject; it's sort of a Heisenberg principle for journalism, because the camera itself is a character.
I think, in fact, that that's the trouble I had with the movie. For the first half, while the HBO documentary is filming, we see a clear camera, a clear perspective; we see the director of the piece in shots with Micky and Dicky, we occasionally pull away to show the camera, and eventually it culminates in most of Lowell watching the feature on TV in bars, houses and a prison rec room. And we're aware of this representation. And then we watch as the movie morphs into a Typical Hollywood Boxing Movie, teasing us with notions that it might be The Wrestler, or maybe even Million Dollar Baby, but is really basically Rocky 2.
Maybe that's the idea -- to leave people cheering, feeling good, voting at Oscar season. But it abandoned the perceptiveness and perspective that made the first hour really smoulder.
In the end a really good flick; no damage quite as traumatic as the in viscero bullet-cam from Three Kings and lots of cute banter (much of it supplied by Amy Adams, fully loaded and unvarnished as a self-respecting, self-aware server at the local bar, and the myriad Eklund/Ward sisters). It sort of handwaves the "one to grow on" lessons about the damage crack and ambition can do to a family, a town., and so forth. Breaking Bad is out there, you can't really compete with that show's depth on the matter, so it was probably a good plan not to get too maudlin about it. And the fighting gives you the basics, though it really only comes into play in the last little chunk of the movie. I would love to have seen more attention to detail given to the camera crew of the HBO Sports team. That would have provided the sort of conceptual continuity, and believable detachment, that the movie needed in order to earn its happy ending.
Yeah, the ending comes right out of "real life". But the facts are no excuse to tell a story in a predictable, pat fashion. The actors didn't let us down, and maybe the direction didn't either, but the structure needed work. Sometimes it's not a matter of technique, it's a matter of attitude and strategy.
David O. Russell directed the movie, and tonally, the film was a lot closer to Three Kings than it was to "I Heart Huckabees". And I'm very glad for that; the trademark of that earlier movie was a deep, dark scenario constantly presenting visceral bodily threat, and yet the whole time, it stayed watchable thanks to charismatic leads and weirdly-textured background players (Spike Jonze in Three Kings, and most of the population of Lowell, specifically the teased-hair, denim-clad legion of sisters in The Fighter). The sheer amount of time I spent laughing largely got me over what I saw as the sort of stock template into which the "inspiring" true events were slotted.
Acting was pretty good all-'round; Christian Bale, unlike Leonardo DiCaprio, can take a larger-than-life role with a wacky accent and, without the viewer having to suspend disbelief, infuse it with all the raw charisma and physicality that it needs. Dicky was really the titular fighter in the movie; every time you saw Bale move, you saw the razor-sharp reflexes, instincts, authority and guile that Micky couldn't find. Every time Micky went into a fight, you saw loss and failure all over his face. You saw intimidation, you saw defeat, and that was really cool; Mark Wahlberg (now that I'm not being dismissive I'll use his non-Funky-Bunch-era name) actually undergoes a journey throughout the movie; though we see it sort of in montage, the arc from "stepping stone" to "contender" is at least clearly communicated in psychological and physical language, in the way Micky stands, in his expression -- there isn't a belabouring of BIG PERTINENT DETAILS with too much third-party explication or otherwise "wackity schmackity doo".
I liked the interpolation of the HBO documentary, which made a suitably David O. Russelly sort of comment on the nature of biographical filmmaking which sort of -- in a VERY lightweight way -- echoes season five of David Simon's theming for "The Wire", without quite getting into Charlie Kaufman territory. Insofar as the way a story is told and reported can create impressions not only in the viewer but in the subject; it's sort of a Heisenberg principle for journalism, because the camera itself is a character.
I think, in fact, that that's the trouble I had with the movie. For the first half, while the HBO documentary is filming, we see a clear camera, a clear perspective; we see the director of the piece in shots with Micky and Dicky, we occasionally pull away to show the camera, and eventually it culminates in most of Lowell watching the feature on TV in bars, houses and a prison rec room. And we're aware of this representation. And then we watch as the movie morphs into a Typical Hollywood Boxing Movie, teasing us with notions that it might be The Wrestler, or maybe even Million Dollar Baby, but is really basically Rocky 2.
Maybe that's the idea -- to leave people cheering, feeling good, voting at Oscar season. But it abandoned the perceptiveness and perspective that made the first hour really smoulder.
In the end a really good flick; no damage quite as traumatic as the in viscero bullet-cam from Three Kings and lots of cute banter (much of it supplied by Amy Adams, fully loaded and unvarnished as a self-respecting, self-aware server at the local bar, and the myriad Eklund/Ward sisters). It sort of handwaves the "one to grow on" lessons about the damage crack and ambition can do to a family, a town., and so forth. Breaking Bad is out there, you can't really compete with that show's depth on the matter, so it was probably a good plan not to get too maudlin about it. And the fighting gives you the basics, though it really only comes into play in the last little chunk of the movie. I would love to have seen more attention to detail given to the camera crew of the HBO Sports team. That would have provided the sort of conceptual continuity, and believable detachment, that the movie needed in order to earn its happy ending.
Yeah, the ending comes right out of "real life". But the facts are no excuse to tell a story in a predictable, pat fashion. The actors didn't let us down, and maybe the direction didn't either, but the structure needed work. Sometimes it's not a matter of technique, it's a matter of attitude and strategy.
Thursday, December 30, 2010
An Education
Because I never need to sleep, I popped "An Education" onto the XBox via Netflix tonight. Actually, this is a lie: I did it because I'd seen Rosamund Pike absolutely break my heart and kill with her eyes, her voice and just about every weapon you don't have to check on an airplane in "Barney's Version" last week, and because someone I once knew told me that it was a really, really good movie.
I think I'd agree.
I used the "star" thingy to give it four of those star thingies, because in a way I didn't think there was much to that last ten minutes after she asks Olivia Williams for a favour. Same sort of thing as in The Power of One (see my blathering about that last week), where, wonder of wonder/miracle of miracles, the smart kid gets everything they ever wanted.
Well, it's hard to begrudge certain kids that. Like The Power of One, the protagonist in An Education is standing in for a real, live person, who grew up fifty or so years ago and wanted to go to Oxford and was smart and witty and maybe teased a bit and learned his or her most important lesson from a series of adults of varying levels of duplicity and protectiveness. Jenny's stunning, flawless poise and her near-perfect rebuttal and dissection of each and every patronizing argument thrown her way was also a bit of a nice contrast to the simple solutions of Shadow of the Giant and Victim of Circumstance, about which I've blathered more recently. Every adult, from her adorable parents (yo, Alfred Molina, you make everything good, and Cara Seymour with your mix of mischief and earnestness, just spot on) to her Olivia Williams teacher (flashed me back to Rushmore, actually) to -- briefly -- Emma Thompson's headmistress just falls like domino after domino before her.
Until Emma Thompson gets to be the meanest she's ever been, though, with a single line that reached into my chest like she was Mola Ram.
Now, the whole other side of things, where you'd expect Jenny to be in over her head with Peter Sarsgaard, Rosamund Pike and Dominic Cooper's gang of worldly bon vivants, she STILL shows breathtaking poise and control, and it's very clear that Sarsgaard's enigmatic David doesn't know exactly what he's gotten into. For all that he tries to keep his own situations under tight control, he's no match for Jenny.
Really, Carey Mulligan -- Jenny -- is given every opportunity to completely carry this movie, and she does, and everyone involved looks and does great, and it's all basically very great. Nick Hornby actually wrote it, and it's very nicely written, and I suppose the pat conclusion couldn't veer that far from the memoir on which it was based. Still -- everything right up to the end was so damned good. I guess not every movie can be Bad Santa, and end with a dynamite scene that is so rock'n'roll that you just want to lift the TV over your head and sing an AC/DC song.
I think I'm gonna go watch Bad Santa again.
I think I'd agree.
I used the "star" thingy to give it four of those star thingies, because in a way I didn't think there was much to that last ten minutes after she asks Olivia Williams for a favour. Same sort of thing as in The Power of One (see my blathering about that last week), where, wonder of wonder/miracle of miracles, the smart kid gets everything they ever wanted.
Well, it's hard to begrudge certain kids that. Like The Power of One, the protagonist in An Education is standing in for a real, live person, who grew up fifty or so years ago and wanted to go to Oxford and was smart and witty and maybe teased a bit and learned his or her most important lesson from a series of adults of varying levels of duplicity and protectiveness. Jenny's stunning, flawless poise and her near-perfect rebuttal and dissection of each and every patronizing argument thrown her way was also a bit of a nice contrast to the simple solutions of Shadow of the Giant and Victim of Circumstance, about which I've blathered more recently. Every adult, from her adorable parents (yo, Alfred Molina, you make everything good, and Cara Seymour with your mix of mischief and earnestness, just spot on) to her Olivia Williams teacher (flashed me back to Rushmore, actually) to -- briefly -- Emma Thompson's headmistress just falls like domino after domino before her.
Until Emma Thompson gets to be the meanest she's ever been, though, with a single line that reached into my chest like she was Mola Ram.
Now, the whole other side of things, where you'd expect Jenny to be in over her head with Peter Sarsgaard, Rosamund Pike and Dominic Cooper's gang of worldly bon vivants, she STILL shows breathtaking poise and control, and it's very clear that Sarsgaard's enigmatic David doesn't know exactly what he's gotten into. For all that he tries to keep his own situations under tight control, he's no match for Jenny.
Really, Carey Mulligan -- Jenny -- is given every opportunity to completely carry this movie, and she does, and everyone involved looks and does great, and it's all basically very great. Nick Hornby actually wrote it, and it's very nicely written, and I suppose the pat conclusion couldn't veer that far from the memoir on which it was based. Still -- everything right up to the end was so damned good. I guess not every movie can be Bad Santa, and end with a dynamite scene that is so rock'n'roll that you just want to lift the TV over your head and sing an AC/DC song.
I think I'm gonna go watch Bad Santa again.
Shadow of the Giant
Shadow of the Giant is Orson Scott Card's swan song (well, he left one loose end) for the "Earth after Battle School" slice of what it's probably safe to call "the Enderverse", stories about a group of ambitious, self-righteous, tactically-prodigious children and the straw men they fight from time to time.
I've been a fan of the stories for a while, truth be told. The first book about child-admiral Ender Wiggin, called "Ender's Game" and read by every self-respecting kid that's ever aced an IQ test, high school entrance exam or real-time strategy game (and mandatory reading among remote pilots of USAF "Predator" drones, if my co-worker Colin is to be believed) was a fast-paced, focused story about the exigencies of war and the believably surprising emotional and cognitive maturity of six-year-olds.
Also, the author, a sometime Mormon missionary to Brazil, hadn't yet succumbed to the Brain Eater -- a condition affecting writers of primarily military science-fiction wherein their political views first veer wildly to the right, and then infiltrate their work bit by bit -- when he wrote that concise epic and its first set of sequels (though those were, admittedly, a lot less fun). Set a few thousand years down the road, the "Speaker for the Dead" books were a meditation on the nature of first contact with aliens. Some cool ideas but got dry and preachy, to the effect of "the meaning of life is Roman Catholicism".
So after entering the early stages of the Brain Eater, Card wrote a series about Ender's cooler, smarter friend Bean, a genetically-tweaked underdog who secretly made sure Ender wasn't killed or foiled or otherwise deprotagonized -- oh, wait. As expected, the "I, Jedi" approach to a, what do I call it, "retquel" maybe, is a little hamhanded and transparent, if at first harmless. It initially posits Bean as having not just a huge role in Ender's success at Battle School, but also as having an incredibly dangerous, malevolent nemesis who for some reason never appears in Ender's version of the story. The first book -- the "retquel" itself -- was called "Ender's Shadow", and the series continued from there, until it finally wound its way (as is this review; I'm getting there!) to this last book about Bean, about the kids at Battle School and their adventures/conquests back on Earth, and their collective solution to Earth's erstwhile predicament.
It's got a few touching moments. Certainly the story gets the parent-and-child, brother-and-brother, husband-and-wife and teacher-and-student relationships' cathartic, climactic moments out of its system by the end, and I definitely felt a pang or two, particularly at the parts where Graff and Bean get a quiet moment over e-mail, or Ender and Peter finally reach the last chapter of the original Ender novel. I suspect some people may find the author's preoccupation with BABIES, DAMMIT to be a little bit too reminiscent of his mouth-foaming pro-Proposition 8 agitation. And this deserves a special mention: from the "ex-gay" character of Anton ("Now I'm having babies the old-fashioned way!") to the straw-man Achillophile Randi (you win no prize if you can guess whom the author is awkwardly needling here) to the bizarre pro-America digression when talking about space funding to Petra's tiresome harping on how important it is to pretend to believe in God even if you intellectually feel, at a deep level, that you don't, Card's brain eater threatens to derail everything.
Thankfully, it doesn't. Barely. His skill at keeping action, narrative, and dialogue moving gets him over those weird bumps and into the home stretch, resolving just about everything (I'd say...90% of the story, which is a joke about babies).
In particular, the gigantic game of what I will now call "Riskwank" (a genre constantly popularized and repopularized, particularly by Tom Clancy in his Red Storm Rising and later Jack Ryan books -- basically, looking at a map and imagining how World War 3 would play out if the author were running things, 'cause as a red-blooded, right-thinking American Christian he's much smarter and ballsier than the clowns in charge right now) that formed the backdrop for the story wound to its inevitable conclusion (ie. we know that Ender's brother, murderous-sociopath-but-he-grew-out-of-it Peter, will eventually become Hegemon of the world in more than a "title-only" way). It had been growing tiresome in Shadow Puppets, particularly as it had a "bad in the box" (this is how I will describe characters like the aforementioned Achilles, much like the "character" Mr. Dark from Fables 12, who pop up ex nihilo to waste our time and provide a presumably "memorale" antagonist for the overpowered, wish-fulfilling author-insertion protagonists) manipulating all the players in the game with moustache-twirling subtlety, decidedly wearing out his welcome. The Riskwank was much easier on the brain in Shadow of the Giant, because it was evolving out of a pre-existing scenario, even if we did have to trudge through Shadow of the Hegemon and Shadow Puppets to get said scenario established.
So, if you feel that you have to read any more books than the original Ender's Game (and to be fair, Ender's Shadow wasn't terrible, but it definitely didn't feel necessary) you could do worse than to kill a day or two each working through the Shadow series. Just know what you're getting into. It's like watching a season of 24: well-crafted, full of power fantasies and too-competent, too-decisive characters, and profoundly political: trying to posit a simple, logical, direct solution to the fact that the world is just too complicated for the author to understand.
I've been a fan of the stories for a while, truth be told. The first book about child-admiral Ender Wiggin, called "Ender's Game" and read by every self-respecting kid that's ever aced an IQ test, high school entrance exam or real-time strategy game (and mandatory reading among remote pilots of USAF "Predator" drones, if my co-worker Colin is to be believed) was a fast-paced, focused story about the exigencies of war and the believably surprising emotional and cognitive maturity of six-year-olds.
Also, the author, a sometime Mormon missionary to Brazil, hadn't yet succumbed to the Brain Eater -- a condition affecting writers of primarily military science-fiction wherein their political views first veer wildly to the right, and then infiltrate their work bit by bit -- when he wrote that concise epic and its first set of sequels (though those were, admittedly, a lot less fun). Set a few thousand years down the road, the "Speaker for the Dead" books were a meditation on the nature of first contact with aliens. Some cool ideas but got dry and preachy, to the effect of "the meaning of life is Roman Catholicism".
So after entering the early stages of the Brain Eater, Card wrote a series about Ender's cooler, smarter friend Bean, a genetically-tweaked underdog who secretly made sure Ender wasn't killed or foiled or otherwise deprotagonized -- oh, wait. As expected, the "I, Jedi" approach to a, what do I call it, "retquel" maybe, is a little hamhanded and transparent, if at first harmless. It initially posits Bean as having not just a huge role in Ender's success at Battle School, but also as having an incredibly dangerous, malevolent nemesis who for some reason never appears in Ender's version of the story. The first book -- the "retquel" itself -- was called "Ender's Shadow", and the series continued from there, until it finally wound its way (as is this review; I'm getting there!) to this last book about Bean, about the kids at Battle School and their adventures/conquests back on Earth, and their collective solution to Earth's erstwhile predicament.
It's got a few touching moments. Certainly the story gets the parent-and-child, brother-and-brother, husband-and-wife and teacher-and-student relationships' cathartic, climactic moments out of its system by the end, and I definitely felt a pang or two, particularly at the parts where Graff and Bean get a quiet moment over e-mail, or Ender and Peter finally reach the last chapter of the original Ender novel. I suspect some people may find the author's preoccupation with BABIES, DAMMIT to be a little bit too reminiscent of his mouth-foaming pro-Proposition 8 agitation. And this deserves a special mention: from the "ex-gay" character of Anton ("Now I'm having babies the old-fashioned way!") to the straw-man Achillophile Randi (you win no prize if you can guess whom the author is awkwardly needling here) to the bizarre pro-America digression when talking about space funding to Petra's tiresome harping on how important it is to pretend to believe in God even if you intellectually feel, at a deep level, that you don't, Card's brain eater threatens to derail everything.
Thankfully, it doesn't. Barely. His skill at keeping action, narrative, and dialogue moving gets him over those weird bumps and into the home stretch, resolving just about everything (I'd say...90% of the story, which is a joke about babies).
In particular, the gigantic game of what I will now call "Riskwank" (a genre constantly popularized and repopularized, particularly by Tom Clancy in his Red Storm Rising and later Jack Ryan books -- basically, looking at a map and imagining how World War 3 would play out if the author were running things, 'cause as a red-blooded, right-thinking American Christian he's much smarter and ballsier than the clowns in charge right now) that formed the backdrop for the story wound to its inevitable conclusion (ie. we know that Ender's brother, murderous-sociopath-but-he-grew-out-of-it Peter, will eventually become Hegemon of the world in more than a "title-only" way). It had been growing tiresome in Shadow Puppets, particularly as it had a "bad in the box" (this is how I will describe characters like the aforementioned Achilles, much like the "character" Mr. Dark from Fables 12, who pop up ex nihilo to waste our time and provide a presumably "memorale" antagonist for the overpowered, wish-fulfilling author-insertion protagonists) manipulating all the players in the game with moustache-twirling subtlety, decidedly wearing out his welcome. The Riskwank was much easier on the brain in Shadow of the Giant, because it was evolving out of a pre-existing scenario, even if we did have to trudge through Shadow of the Hegemon and Shadow Puppets to get said scenario established.
So, if you feel that you have to read any more books than the original Ender's Game (and to be fair, Ender's Shadow wasn't terrible, but it definitely didn't feel necessary) you could do worse than to kill a day or two each working through the Shadow series. Just know what you're getting into. It's like watching a season of 24: well-crafted, full of power fantasies and too-competent, too-decisive characters, and profoundly political: trying to posit a simple, logical, direct solution to the fact that the world is just too complicated for the author to understand.
Sunday, December 26, 2010
Barney's Version
Heartwarming family movie with a little bit of an edge. Nothing near the savvy, knowing vitriol of the book (which was itself rife with contradictory footnotes from the protagonist's erstwhile-estranged son) but told the same basic story, got most of the characters largely right (giving Barney's father and wife larger roles, worthy of Dustin Hoffman and Rosamund Pike, respectively, who delivered back-to-back home runs) and filled the Montreal section with the requisite urban texture.
The cameos and extras deserve comment, particularly from me. Montreal Yiddim from my Shaar Hashomayim choir days, like Burney Lieberman and Jason Lipstein, pop up vividly in the background. Canada's best directors from Egoyan to Cronenberg to Arcand, not playing themselves, are casually bullied by Paul Giamatti's abrasive almost-Richler character Barney Panofsky, to their visible delight. The Alzheimer's theme, which permeates the novel, is quietly introduced into the movie as it goes along, which costs the movie some of the novel's humour and also some of its darkness.
But more profoundly, the movie sands off some of Barney's more loserish, nebbishy qualities. He doesn't have the scene with Duddy Kravitz which shows him to be no Duddy Kravitz (and what I wouldn't give for a Richard Dreyfuss cameo to have been crammed in); he doesn't have the ongoing resentment for McIver, or the go-forward, Garp-like "rest of the story" bits for the other characters from his entourage; and Blair is no longer a draft dodger he'd taken in. Barney is not the novel's arch-schlemazel. Instead, he's more carefully blended with Richler's persona, and as the movie tends toward its climax, it wears its heart on its sleeve.
I mean, it's also a murder mystery, ish. And it pulls that part off just fine. But in the end, unlike the novel, it's not about the unreliability of memory and its two narrators. It's a movie about being a bit of a mess but still doing right by the people you love, even when you fail. My mother made it clear that it's more for "Jewish Guys" than for women, but I think the movie did a better job of protagonizing Miriam than the book, even with Minnie Driver's appropriately insane turn as The Second Mrs. Panofsky.
Polarizing? Clever? Schmaltzy? Perfect for the annual Jewish Family Christmas Movie ritual.
The cameos and extras deserve comment, particularly from me. Montreal Yiddim from my Shaar Hashomayim choir days, like Burney Lieberman and Jason Lipstein, pop up vividly in the background. Canada's best directors from Egoyan to Cronenberg to Arcand, not playing themselves, are casually bullied by Paul Giamatti's abrasive almost-Richler character Barney Panofsky, to their visible delight. The Alzheimer's theme, which permeates the novel, is quietly introduced into the movie as it goes along, which costs the movie some of the novel's humour and also some of its darkness.
But more profoundly, the movie sands off some of Barney's more loserish, nebbishy qualities. He doesn't have the scene with Duddy Kravitz which shows him to be no Duddy Kravitz (and what I wouldn't give for a Richard Dreyfuss cameo to have been crammed in); he doesn't have the ongoing resentment for McIver, or the go-forward, Garp-like "rest of the story" bits for the other characters from his entourage; and Blair is no longer a draft dodger he'd taken in. Barney is not the novel's arch-schlemazel. Instead, he's more carefully blended with Richler's persona, and as the movie tends toward its climax, it wears its heart on its sleeve.
I mean, it's also a murder mystery, ish. And it pulls that part off just fine. But in the end, unlike the novel, it's not about the unreliability of memory and its two narrators. It's a movie about being a bit of a mess but still doing right by the people you love, even when you fail. My mother made it clear that it's more for "Jewish Guys" than for women, but I think the movie did a better job of protagonizing Miriam than the book, even with Minnie Driver's appropriately insane turn as The Second Mrs. Panofsky.
Polarizing? Clever? Schmaltzy? Perfect for the annual Jewish Family Christmas Movie ritual.
The Power of One
Just got to the end of "White Messiah (with punching)", also called "The Power of One" and essentially a roman-a-clef with a little bit of magical realism, a lot of punching, and a whole mess of Avatar.
It was gripping, mostly. I mean, for the most part it was a story about surviving the depths of degradation and coming out stronger. And boy, did Protagonist Kid come out strong! Able to speak English, Afrikaans, Zulu, Shangan, and a half dozen languages fluently. A flawless boxer, mathematician, and logician, and "angel" to about a zillion African tribes. However, based on the author's website, largely biographical. Hard to believe, and at times hard to swallow, but it's clear that if there were any opportunity to show PK failing or being further humiliated, we'd get it. It's not supposed to be a hagiography, really. But it gets laid on pretty thick.
And so here we have the dilemma. In the wake of seeing Avatar, which came across loud and clear as a work of Colonial Literature or whatnot, and with a clear mandate of decrying apartheid, racism in general and colonialism, The Power of One read like a book that didn't know what it was trying to do. After a fashion it was Ashitaka-style "seeing with eyes unclouded by hate", sure. But you don't go around having every non-white character sacrifice their lives for PK's own life, for his education, for his comfort on a train ride, for his ability to impress a bunch of people with a concert, without sounding like you're writing about The Great White Hope.
The book exuded love for Africa, of course. The landscapes, the tribal cultures and language (I really would like to learn to understand Zulu, after reading about its inherent poetry). Still, for all the author's protest, there's a quiet tolerance and even quaint yearning for the braivleis and tiekkidrai and other aspects of Boer culture -- yeah, he's just a kid, but he doesn't go around saying "let's go full-on postcolonial and truly empower the Black Africans". Maybe he's trying to suggest a kind of middle ground. Maybe he's just naive.
Still, the characters were memorable, if a bit cartoonish. The boxing matches were fascinating, as good as any I've read (which doesn't extend that far -- I may need to read more Hemingway, but certainly it stands up well next to Hammett). The mysticism was potent and invigorating. And the matter-of-fact tone was at odds with the slightly unnerving themes.
I recommend reading it. But reading it, and then thinking about it.
It was gripping, mostly. I mean, for the most part it was a story about surviving the depths of degradation and coming out stronger. And boy, did Protagonist Kid come out strong! Able to speak English, Afrikaans, Zulu, Shangan, and a half dozen languages fluently. A flawless boxer, mathematician, and logician, and "angel" to about a zillion African tribes. However, based on the author's website, largely biographical. Hard to believe, and at times hard to swallow, but it's clear that if there were any opportunity to show PK failing or being further humiliated, we'd get it. It's not supposed to be a hagiography, really. But it gets laid on pretty thick.
And so here we have the dilemma. In the wake of seeing Avatar, which came across loud and clear as a work of Colonial Literature or whatnot, and with a clear mandate of decrying apartheid, racism in general and colonialism, The Power of One read like a book that didn't know what it was trying to do. After a fashion it was Ashitaka-style "seeing with eyes unclouded by hate", sure. But you don't go around having every non-white character sacrifice their lives for PK's own life, for his education, for his comfort on a train ride, for his ability to impress a bunch of people with a concert, without sounding like you're writing about The Great White Hope.
The book exuded love for Africa, of course. The landscapes, the tribal cultures and language (I really would like to learn to understand Zulu, after reading about its inherent poetry). Still, for all the author's protest, there's a quiet tolerance and even quaint yearning for the braivleis and tiekkidrai and other aspects of Boer culture -- yeah, he's just a kid, but he doesn't go around saying "let's go full-on postcolonial and truly empower the Black Africans". Maybe he's trying to suggest a kind of middle ground. Maybe he's just naive.
Still, the characters were memorable, if a bit cartoonish. The boxing matches were fascinating, as good as any I've read (which doesn't extend that far -- I may need to read more Hemingway, but certainly it stands up well next to Hammett). The mysticism was potent and invigorating. And the matter-of-fact tone was at odds with the slightly unnerving themes.
I recommend reading it. But reading it, and then thinking about it.
Impact: Victim of Circumstance
Last week I finally got to see one of Vikki Velenosi's shows outside of the context of the Alexander Singers and Players. The show, from Impact! Theatre, was in the "forum theatre" style, which was a little unusual. While there's a narrative, characters, and a linear sequence of events, there's also the opportunity for members of the audience to meddle and interfere with the proceedings.
The first time through, it was a fairly straightforward emergent fiasco. A touch of the "after school special" to the tone, but Vikki gave an insanely controlled and nuanced performance as the "voice of reason" character. I was very impressed with how controlled she was able to be -- every other bit of the play threatened to veer into the sanctimonious.
And unfortunately, on the "forum" run-through (after the "default, worst-case" run was done), people injected their most facile, after-school-special solutions to the scenario into their participation in the play. Everyone who came up to take on a role basically simplified things as much as possible, ignored character motivations and existing information, said "no", broke every rule given for the format. There was nothing safe about it; it was just an exercise in forcing a wish-fulfilling agenda onto the scenario.
Eventually, I protested when it started to ring too false. So I was called up, and all but shouted down by the other participants.
I don't know what I think, in the end. It's an interesting format, but improvisation relies upon trust. The format was just too ill-defined, the audience underprepared, and ultimately there was no trust, the rules unclear as to consequences and parameters, and it left me with a bitter taste in my mouth.
Not to say that the actors, director, writer, and so forth don't deserve credit for a compelling scenario. Definitely gave me something to think about.
The first time through, it was a fairly straightforward emergent fiasco. A touch of the "after school special" to the tone, but Vikki gave an insanely controlled and nuanced performance as the "voice of reason" character. I was very impressed with how controlled she was able to be -- every other bit of the play threatened to veer into the sanctimonious.
And unfortunately, on the "forum" run-through (after the "default, worst-case" run was done), people injected their most facile, after-school-special solutions to the scenario into their participation in the play. Everyone who came up to take on a role basically simplified things as much as possible, ignored character motivations and existing information, said "no", broke every rule given for the format. There was nothing safe about it; it was just an exercise in forcing a wish-fulfilling agenda onto the scenario.
Eventually, I protested when it started to ring too false. So I was called up, and all but shouted down by the other participants.
I don't know what I think, in the end. It's an interesting format, but improvisation relies upon trust. The format was just too ill-defined, the audience underprepared, and ultimately there was no trust, the rules unclear as to consequences and parameters, and it left me with a bitter taste in my mouth.
Not to say that the actors, director, writer, and so forth don't deserve credit for a compelling scenario. Definitely gave me something to think about.
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