MOVIE - "School for Scoundrels"

Todd Phillips has sure come a long way since Road Trip.

No. Wait. No, he hasn't.

His latest, School for Scoundrels is a straightforward revenge comedy that lacks the charm of Starsky & Hutch's unadulterated chemistry and Old School's irrepressible spunk. Like Benchwarmers before it, Jon Heder rises up for the nerds of the world...but honestly, is there anybody who isn't sick of this kid yet? To the film's credit, it makes the supporting cast of hacks like Horatio Sanz look great, but the few talents actually in the movie (like David Cross and Sarah Silverman) are stuck playing shades of themselves. Only Billy Bob Thornton, as the self-professed "doctor" winds up looking good (unlike Michael Clarke Duncan, who must just be desperate for cash). Suave and with a real fire in his eyes, Thornton brings out shades of both Steve Martin and Michael Caine in that other Scoundrel movie, which, considering he's the only life to this film, is almost a prerequisite.

Read on at [Film Monthly]

THEATER - "The Man Himself"

What good is a passive political play? The Man Himself, adapted and modernized by writer Alan Drury and director/performer Ami Dayan from Drury’s original 1975 monologue, is still apt for the socio-political problems of today's America, but it isn't likely to hold today's America rapt. The play unfolds with little plot or activity: a man named Michael sits in a chair, in a theatrical spotlight, and recounts his life. There is no shift in pace, and the tone only occasionally wavers as we leap from the technical (his job as a parts manager for Component and Supply Inc.) to the anecdotal (his encounter with a Mexican gang of teenagers) to the charmingly mundane (his living situation). Perhaps the weary disaffection is meant to portend character. More likely, Dayan finds it difficult to direct himself in what is already a very challenging role.

Read on at [Show Business Weekly]

BOOK - "Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman"

“Sometimes we don’t need words,” reads a line of dialogue in Haruki Murakami’s collection of enigmatic short stories, Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman. “Rather, it’s words that need us. If we were no longer here, words would lose their whole function. Don’t you think so? They would end up as words that are never spoken, and words that aren’t spoken are no longer words.” This particular story is “Where I’m Likely to Find It,” an psychological detective story about a man who goes missing between the twenty-fourth and twenty-sixth floors of his condominium and the man hired to find him. It’s a good enough representation of all Murakami’s work: quixotic things happen in the truest sense, for they are both imagined and real at the same time, like the eponymous Quixote.

These stories aren’t trying to build new worlds so much as to look at the existing one in a new light, an induced jamis vu. Accordingly, more time is spent on the mundane than the tragic, and both melodrama and emotion are held back to keep the storytelling unbiased. Reading a work in which the author is not trying to smack you over the head with a message is a little disconcerting at first, but like his American doppelganger, Paul Auster, Murakami’s work is a rich exploration of humanity’s ever-surprising nature.

As for his prose, he writes with a mysterious frankness, a Zen author writing prose haikus: “A man’s death at twenty-eight is as sad as the winter rain.” Or, “One cold rainy night just before Christmas, she was flattened in the tragic yet quite ordinary space between a beer-delivery truck and a concrete telephone pole.” Both sentences are deliberately normal—he even uses the word “ordinary”—but the context, the pacing, and the overall Murakamian mood of metaphysical happenstance make the stories anything but ordinary.

The subject matter tends to be the same, too. The majority of the stories use a relationship between a man and a woman to launch into a surprising new direction. In the excellent “Crabs,” a bout with food poisoning pollutes true love, and in “A Perfect Day for Kangaroos,” the small talk, colorful anecdotes, and subtle routines reveal whole shades of character. Throw in an underlying metaphor about the longed-after security of a mother’s pouch, and you’ve got a ninja-like story, sneaking up where you least expect it. Subtext and character subsume the plot, like in the story “Man-Eating Cats”:

“I wonder if your child will think of you that way when he’s grown up,” Izumi said. “Like you were a cat who disappeared up a pine tree.”
I laughed. “Maybe so,” I said.
Izumi crushed out her cigarette in the ashtray and sighed. “Let’s go home and make love, all right?” she said.
“It’s still morning,” I said.
“What’s wrong with that?”
“Not a thing,” I said.

Pithy, perhaps, or reflective of the fact that sometimes you really don’t need words. Murakami knows where and when to use them though. In “Tony Takitani,” a story that involves an obsession with buying clothes, he says little about the outfits; in “The Kidney-Shaped Stone,” he pauses the narrative to describe every inch of a woman’s appearance. Where appropriate, the author chooses to let introspection describe things: the inner self is what he's more interested in after all. “Why were people so different from one another? he wondered. He had been with any number of women, all of whom would cry, or get angry, each in her own special way.” All of a sudden, there’s perspective on the freakish crying of “Airplane: Or, How He Talked to Himself as if Reciting Poetry.”

Not that Murakami shies from the challenge of a creative sentence: his descriptions are fantastic, and always relevant to the plot. Have you ever heard something as absurdly appropriate as “[T]he parasols at each table all neatly folded up like slumbering pterodactyls”? This Japanese author makes no attempt to hide his literary fiction, but like Borges and Auster, he justifies it. The only weak stories in this one are allegorical; their overt thoughtfulness of “Dabchick” takes all the fun out of decoding what’s really happening to this man, trapped in a secret location, trying to riddle out a password from a dimwitted guard. “The Ice Man” is frigid with its own cleverness, and “The Rise and Fall of Sharpie Cakes” is a resounding illustration that satire is not his strong suit.

Murakami is a narrator first, so you’ll have to forgive the similarity in tones between stories. The casual treatment of tales like “The Mirror,” “A Folklore for My Generation,” or “The Year of Spaghetti,” makes them seem like long anecdotes, and “Chance Traveler” stretches our patience with the introductory sentence, “The ‘I’ here, you should know, means me, Haruki Murakami, the author of this story.” At least with this last story, there’s a nice little payoff:

“[M]aybe chance is a pretty common thing after all. Those kinds of coincidences are happening all around us, all the time, but most of them don’t catch our attention and we just let them go by. It’s like fireworks in the daytime. You might hear a faint sound, but even if you look up at the sky you can’t see a thing. But if we’re really hoping something may come true, it may become visible, like a message rising to the surface.”

Like fireworks in daytime, Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman is filled with explosions that skim just below the surface of our consciousness. If we follow Murakami’s yellow brick road, we can start to make out the substance of this collection—and for what it’s worth, his short stories are far more accessible than novels like Kafka on the Shore. Just remember: there’s no wizard behind the curtain. Every sentence is upfront and clear, which ultimately only makes it all the more mysterious.

MOVIE - "Wordplay"

It was inevitable that Will Shortz, the crossword editor of The New York Times (and uber-puzzler), would become the subject of a documentary. Not only is he the herald of what is called "the gold standard of crosswords" but he's a proud major in the little-studied field of enigmatology. If this funny looking man of the mustache is the "Errol Flynn of crossword puzzles, then this film, Wordplay, is his Captain Blood. It is a film studded with celebrity cameos (if you consider Jon Stewart, Bill Clinton, and the Indigo Girls to be celebrities) and with the adult versions of those adorably quirky spellers from Spellbound.

It is a film as solidly constructed as any New York Times crossword, complete with a themed gimmick (in this case, a split-screen that lets you solve clues along with the "professionals" of the crossword championships). In fact, it is so solid that people like Jon Stewart, with their exuberant showmanship ("Bring it Shortz, bring it!") wind up being the crudest parts of the film. A good documentary gives you a glimpse into the lives of real people, like long-time puzzler Ellen Ripstein, or crossword whiz Trip Payne. And while the whole movie may only serve to stress a point about the accumulation of useless knowledge, it also shows a tightly knit community of people who find solace on a gridded, symmetrical page.

Read on at [Film Monthly]

THEATER - "Songs of the Dragons Flying to Heaven"

Songs of the Dragons Flying to Heaven is a show born of confusion: a Korean-American narrator (Becky Yamamoto) is trying to come to terms with her culture, and winds up losing herself even more in a messy, experimental play. Given that the disconnect is purposeful and that Young Jean Lee succeeds in confusing the message and both discomforting and cracking up the audience, this is one of the few "wrecks" worth seeing. However, while hybrid theater is different from, say, a hybrid car, this show could've used a light tune-up: exploring artistic possibilities is nice, but improving on them is nice, too. The comedy works, but Yamamoto's dramatic confession isn't believable, nor is the final scene's test-tube emotion (i.e., emotion generated by the circumstance rather than the character).

Read on at [New Theater Corps]

THEATER - FRINGE 2006 ENCORE: "Perfect Harmony"

At last, a show that recognizes a capella for what it is: "a cult of pressure and perfection." Just as The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee took a cute, musical approach to a somewhat geeky field, Perfect Harmony has arrived to make high school a capella cool again. Or at least something that you can laugh with, not at. (Full disclosure: I was a high school a capella-ist.) The fact that this was a workshopped play means that it plays for the laughs, and riddles the characters with superficial problems that make them both easy to identify and full of easy humor. What's surprising are how good so many of those jokes are, and how the confessional monologues actually work their way into the show. What's more, beneath the cheesy songs (actually the weakest part of the show) and riotous humor, there's an actual plot that explores friendship, competition, and whether or not art has any place in music anymore. This is not a perfect play (much as that'd help my tagline) but it's close: a PG-rated, feel-good, semi-musical blast.

Read on at [New Theater Corps]

THEATER - FRINGE 2006 ENCORE: "Billy the Mime"

Pantomime is the closest thing to a universal language. At the essence of this art, the human body can bring out, through exaggeration, the invisible truths of the spirit. At its most commercial, which is what Billy the Mime strives for, it can bring out, through exaggeration, the societal flaws of a culture. In a series of five-minute-long acts, Billy (the Mime) covers the current (“A Day Called 9/11”), the historical (“World War II”), and the obscure (“A Night in San Francisco: 1979”). Most of these are recognizable, even to a 22-year-old anti-culturist like me.

You can’t call Billy’s material tasteless, though it prides itself on the same shock value as South Park (it’s no surprise that both appeared in the crass documentary The Aristocrats). It’s as hard not to laugh at the parodies of Anne Frank or a priest and altar boy as it is not to be offended by them. Cringe or not, it’s an innovative adaptation of high-profile issues.

Read on at [New Theater Corps]

THEATER - FRINGE 2006 ENCORE: "Broken Hands"

Shrouded in a darkness, a man with bandages around his hands stands on a bridge, peering off into the dark and unforgiving waters of the Thames. His brother, a well-groomed shyster, climbs up to join him, holding onto a gun as if for dear life. He appears out of the shadows like a ghost, and fades back into them like a ghost, which is for the best, for he is a ghost, and the man on the bridge, a boxer, is haunted. Moby Pomerance's striking drama, Broken Hands, is haunting, too: Cory Grant and Eric Miller have such a profound and nuanced relationship that we hate to see anything bad happen to it. And though Pomerance puts the end of the play at the beginning, he handles the theatrical jumps between past and present so effortlessly that one forgets, at times, where it's all going. The credit doesn't belong to anyone in particular: the actors make us forget that we're watching a play, the smooth writing helps the actors forget that they're acting, and Marc Weitz's smooth direction helps everybody forget that there's a world outside the theater. Jay Ryan also deserves credit for his elegant palette of lighting (and his efficiently simple one-piece set): after all, the play only won the Fringe awards for Best Actor (Grant) and Outstanding Playwriting (which it shares with The Catharsis of Pathos), and everybody involved in this show deserves a round of applause.

Read on at [New Theater Corps]
Photo Courtesy/Neilson Barnard

THEATER - "Intellectuals"

Intellectuals is a strikingly conservative comedy about a strikingly liberal affair. The idea of a straight woman suddenly taking a sabbatical from her marriage of 22 years to explore her "untapped feminine potential" as a lesbian is a great device for exploring an untapped social dynamic, and when playwright Scott C. Sickles plays to the premise's inherent comedy, the show is a success. Unfortunately, when Sickles over-thinks the idea and panders for laughs, as he does with the farcical leanings of the show’s center, Intellectuals loses its appeal.

Read on at [Show Business Weekly]

THEATER - FRINGE 2006 Encore: "Open House"

Open House is an over-the-top comedy that's a little too open. The gags are obvious, the scenes are ridiculous, and the characters go way beyond stereotype. What few laughs there are, are forced, and the meanness of characters (or the shallowness of others) keeps the play too dark to be charming. As a shell, it's decent, but until the house fills with substance--comedic or otherwise--you wouldn't want to live there, much less visit.

The problem starts with the characters: characters incapable of selling this show. Alistair is a passive "dude" who feels as if he's "stuck in the last ten pages of a fairy tale." When he was interesting, he was a Prince Charming; now, especially as Bill Dawes plays him, there's too little passion and too much pathos. This is what the other characters glom onto: his wife, Beverly, begs for him to get jealous as she grinds against his neighbor, Lewis; his daughter, Sylvia, aches for his attention and devotion; when Melanie, Lewis's wife, tries to seduce him, she has every right to be enraged with his apathy. Would that Alistair had an epiphany, or changed, or in some way justified the sluggish pace of Open House. Instead, Ross Maxwell gives Alistair a less-than-thrilling climax and then tacks on a lengthy coda that ruins even that. And this play has the nerve to talk about tacky displays of art?

Beyond characters, Maxwell's script also suffers from attention-deficit disorder, a problem that I suspect springs from a general disdain for characters. The play springs from low self-esteem to patriotism, from homophobia to terrorism, from imaginary friends to sex games. None of this is interesting: Maxwell hops from absurdity to absurdity, shuffling furniture around (as if to boost the play's feng shui), when what he needs is to invest in something. Of the characters, Bess Rous's portrayal of the socially stunted daughter is the most appealing. I don't want to take anything away from her dedicated performance, but in a boring play, isn't the weird character always the most interesting, simply by default?

Open House lives up to its title: it's a house in search of an owner. Unfortunately, all that's wrong with the structure and the casting far outweigh the cute little tchotchkes left behind, and even the best director (and hey, Josh Hecht isn't bad) should bulldoze rather than renovate.

THEATER - FRINGE 2006 ENCORE: "The Deepest Play Ever: The Catharsis of Pathos"

Ever see a high-brow fart joke before? Let The Deepest Play Ever: The Catharsis of Pathos, for which Geoffrey Decas won the 2006 Fringe award for Outstanding Playwriting, show you some dancing zombies rip people to shreds. Though one could easily imagine an entire play dedicated to musical numbers involving zombies and the post-post-apocalypse of World War V, Decas's script goes way beyond easy laughs: it parodies Mother Courage, for one, on Brecht's intellectual level. If anything, the cheap laughs are there to make sure there's something for everyone: the play is so overwhelmingly full of meaning that if you blink, you'll miss something.

Read on at [New Theater Corps]

MUSIC - Margot and the Nuclear So and Sos, "The Dust of Retreat"

Right from the first track, "A Sea Chanty of Sorts," it's clear that Margot & the Nuclear So and So's have a flair for both the dramatic and the erratic. Their rich, textured sound is at times anciently instrumental and powerful, at others, mechanically rhythmic and synthetically modern. A pair of haunting, siren-like voices that hum through the reverberations anchor the piece. Transitioning into "Skeleton Key," it's suddenly anchors aweigh as the album shifts into kitsch rock. The mysterious playfulness of the rhythm remains throughout the many shifts, held together by Richard Edwards’ poetic lyrics: “Love is an inkless pen/it’s a tavern, it’s sin/it’s a horrible way to begin.” I find myself inescapably comparing this group to The Charlatans; these are storytelling singers who aren’t afraid to chart a path across unsullied waters.

Read on at [Silent Uproar]

THEATER - "Iphigenia Crash Land Falls on the Neon Shell That Was Once Her Heart (A Rave Fable)"

Iphigenia Crash Land Falls on the Neon Shell That Was Once Her Heart (A Rave Fable) is, in case you can't figure it out yet, a hypermodern work. What's less obvious from the title is that it is a multimedia adaptation of the Greek myth of Iphigenia (pronounced IFFY-IN-YA). Don't worry, that's even less obvious in the presentation: a ragtag bunch of scenes, solidly yet ambiguously performed by the One Year Lease company, a group determined to find ways to revitalize the classics. But this is shock therapy, and this production is almost too extreme to be likeable. It's easy to admire James Hunting's stunning set: televisions lie among cinderblock ruins and characters descend down metallic platforms and cross a dust-covered floor till they rest against a corroded steel fence that leans, like an abandoned anachronism, against another wall. It's a lot harder to extract anything from the text, drowned in metaphor and performance as they are. The word that best comes to mind is "abandon," both as in "the glory of reckless abandon" and as in "abandon all hope, ye who enter here."

Read on at [New Theater Corps]

THEATER - FRINGE 2006 ENCORE: "The Infliction of Cruelty"

The Infliction of Cruelty is a smart play about secrets, big secrets. It's a glossy, sleek affair for the first act, filled with the kind of quote-lobbing games you'd expect of Tom Stoppard. In the more mature and plot-driven second act, the characters finish the games and unleash the drama. Too elegant for the harsh honesty of Neil Labute, the play could be Pinter's take on Cruel Intentions. The erudite yet emotional writing (Andrew Unterberg and Sean McManus), the natural direction (Joel Froomkin), and the outstanding ensemble: what more does it take to get off-Broadway?

Read on at [New Theater Corps]

THEATER - "FRINGE 2006 ENCORE: I Was Tom Cruise"

I Was Tom Cruise doesn't feature classy writing, and it doesn't attempt a potent plot. Why should it? It has a Tom Cruise lookalike (and a Kate Holmes, Joaquin Phoenix, and Oliver Platt). That's vehicle enough, right? Alexander Poe's script and well-intentioned direction (with Joseph Varca) is just there for the ride. But the play itself is a slow ride without Jeff Berg (Tom) onstage, and even then it's still pretty turgid. It points out the shallowness but doesn't poke fun at it; that makes I Was Tom Cruise little better than the real thing.

Read on at [New Theater Corps]

THEATER: "FRINGE 2006 ENCORE: Diving Normal"

Ashlin Halfnight's contribution to the 2006 Fringe Festival, Diving Normal, makes two things abundantly clear. First, that the playwright deserves his Fulbright Award. Second, that this playwright has just graduated Columbia's MFA Playwrighting program. Halfnight has an excellent command of character, and a distinctly theatrical sense--like Albee--of the heartwrenchingly compelling. However, he lacks an even temperament: some of his lines are playfully cheap and the narrative suffers from uneven pacing and focus. Diving Normal is a pleasure to watch, but it has too much splash to be a perfect dive.

Read on at [New Theater Corps]