FILM - "Babel"

Crash is to Babel as artificial flavoring is to the real thing. Alejandro González Iñárritu, who proved his artistic chops in the violently beautiful Amores Perros (only to dull his vision for the monotone 21 Grams) is back atop his game with a film that’s more interested in character than charting political undercurrents (Syriana), giving different perspectives on the same incident (Traffic), or demonstrating the human talent to uselessly connect random events (Magnolia). These characters, linked only by their humanity, anchor the globetrotting narratives (Japan, Morocco, and the thin line between Mexico and California).

Read on at [Film Monthly]

MUSIC - Carina Round, "Slow Motion Addict"

Carina Round may be a talented singer, but when she acts like a petulant girl who wants to scream and show off her range in the same breath, she’s not a very pleasant one. For the majority of her album Slow Motion Addict, she’s stuck in a blend of dance, rock, and pop—a rather large niche these days—and none of them work for her. Her voice, even at its fleshiest and raspiest, can’t compete with the drums and guitar at full strength, and her beautiful falsetto is fragile enough that it could drown in an inch or two of water. When she gets to her titular roots and slows the action down, the mellow tracks are mellifluous, and it turns out that for all her catchy production techniques, she actually has stuff to say.

Read on at [Silent Uproar]

FILM - "The Prestige"

Forget the magic trick at the heart of The Prestige, “The Transported Man,” a trick that brings two rival London magicians to blows. Christopher Nolan’s new film—in which he is the great celluloid prestidigitator—pulls off a greater trick: “The Transported Audience.” For over two hours, Nolan sustains our imagination and curiosity: he makes his film into a magic trick. The first minute, a series of cryptic images voiced-over by Cutter (Michael Caine), explains the three-part trick, but the pledge still hooks us: what goes wrong in Rupert Angier’s final magic trick, and did Alfred Borden kill him? The subsequent act, the turn, is actually a series of turns, a feat accomplished through a clever narrative that uses the two rival magician’s journals to trace their fractious history. Even though we’re told to look for the secret, even though we know their magic isn’t—can’t be—real, we want so badly to be fooled, that the third part, the prestige, is smooth as silk.

Read on at [Film Monthly]

BOOK - "Special Topics in Calamity Physics"

Special Topics in Calamity Physics is a roundabout novel that couples the Marisha Pessl’s (and hence the narrator’s) exquisite knowledge of the literary canon with a coming-of-age murder mystery. Whether or not that’s any good, it is a true or false question that should appear in the Final Exam (Pessl, p. 509). The playful use of citations and the references to popular films is a means of distancing the character from the emotion (L’Avventura meets Gone with the Wind meets Jude the Obscure), but it’s only as enjoyable as the reader wants it to be. Even then, the play on novels (not just words alone) grows routine: too clever by half and then half as clever as it was. Strive as it might for epic qualities, the plot itself never rises above that of a smarter-than-your-average-noir, and Pessl’s characters come across as either too mysterious or as an intellectual gloss of a real person.

There’s nothing wrong with Pessl’s technique: her story begins with a perfunctory hook, (one year after Blue van Meer’s finds her overly friendly teacher, Hannah Schneider, dead) and then galvanizes the audience with its rapid introduction to Blue’s Tragic Past and her educational but distant relationship with her father, Gareth. The pace doesn’t slow, though the passage of time does, and up through the first half of the book, it’s a dazzling smorgasbord of showboat smarts, a soupcon of stories. By the second half, the mystery is no longer as captivating, and its resolution—purposely frustrating—is, naturally, frustrating.

Now, I’m not against the use of so many sources—it gives the clever literary archeologist many a bone to find when reading between the lines—but does the canon need to be presented as if it were a canonball [sic]? The goal of fiction is, undoubtedly, to reveal as many inner truths as non-fiction, and is thus entitled to its clever appropriations:

“I wanted to take a fire poker to his too, too solid flesh (anything hard and pointy would do) so his hard-bitten face would deform in fear and out of his mouth, not that perfect piano sonata of words, but a strangled soul-ripped Ahhhhhhhhhh!, the kind of sob one hears reverberating through damp chronicles of medieval torture and the Old Testament. Hot tears had begun their exodus, making their slow, stupid way down my face.” But for all that run-on, not to mention the Shakespearean and Biblical styling, where’s the heart?

Pessl’s novel actually conveys the majority of its wisdom through the bonhomous lectures of her Father Figure, a man whose maxims populate the pages with originality and style. When the story segues into a violent scene, Blue quotes her father:

“All worthwhile tales possess some element of violence...Simply reflect for a moment on the utter horror of having something threatening lurking outside your front door, hearing it huff and puff and then, cruelly, callously, blowing your house down. It’s as horrifying as any story on CNN. And yet where would the ‘Three Little Pigs’ be without such brutality? No one would have heard of them, for happiness and placidity are not worth recounting by the fire, nor, for that matter, reporting by a news anchor wearing pancake makeup and more shimmer on her eyelids than a peacock feather.”

This is such an energized, rhapsodic character, that though he stands at the periphery of a story that mainly focuses on Blue’s relationship with a pack of kids known as the “Bluebloods” and their teacher, Hannah, he is the one who dominates the novel.

Ultimately, Pessl falls prey to a desire to be the next Nabokov, and while Special Topics in Calamity Physics may be an original presentation, if its glitter is all gold, some of it’s just pyrite. It’s also not that original—Pessl may be the only author to use the names of other novels as her chapters, and she may call her table of contents the “Required Reading,” but none of this actually ties into the story; at least not in any significant way. Jonathan Safran Foer’s delightfully loopy chapter headings and narrative tone fit the scope of his work in Everything is Illuminated, and if you’re looking for a young intellectual’s attempt to grasp the world around him, David Mitchell’s proven to be the go-to writer for bountiful prose, and Black Swan Green isn’t too far off from Calamity Physics.

If you’re a reader who favors inelegantly used elegance or an abundance of the mundane, Calamity Physics is a smart, wicked beach read. But if you’re looking for deep literature; something that goes beyond the surface of the text, you might want to read elsewhere, or just crib the answers to her Final Exam off someone else—there’s no need to read 500 pages for such an untidy ending.

THEATER - "The Fortune Teller"

Just in time for Halloween, HERE Arts Center has put together the delightfully evil new show The Fortune Teller. It’s the equivalent of seeing several short episodes of Tales from the Crypt, only performed by marionettes—creepy in of itself—and scored by Danny Elfman, channeling the sinister mystery of Batman or The Nightmare Before Christmas. Though the show is performed in miniature, it is amplified by the marvelous gothic dollhouse of a set, and given substance by the creaking mechanical sound effects. These elements mask the triteness of the plot and the sloppiness of some of the puppetry, but considering that The Fortune Teller gets the majority of its laughs from one-liners, this simplicity helps to sustain the illusion.

Read on at [New Theater Corps]

THEATER - "Neglect"

It’s often said that hell is a place on earth—if that’s true, then Neglect, a marvelous new play by Sharyn Rothstein, takes place there: Chicago, 1995, the height of record-setting mid-July heatwave. Like a good modern playwright, Rothstein isn’t interested with demons or clear-cut evil: in this level of hell, there are just two ordinary people who—we hope—might overcome their loneliness. The writer’s penchant for natural dialogue would carry this show even with poor actors: thankfully, Rose and Joseph find their perfect matches in Geany Masai and William Jackson Harper.

Read on at [New Theater Corps]

THEATER - "The Great Conjurer"

Writers make for good characters: they’re tortured, twisted, and vicariously fragmented people. Christine Simpson’s new play, The Great Conjurer takes one of our most irregular writers, Franz Kafka, and shows, under the expert, smooth direction of Kevin Bartlett, how to enhance a traditional play with the use of classic and contemporary flair. For example, masks are used to make Kafka’s family, S, M, and F (sister, mother, and father) seem like the fictions, and stylized movements (choreographed by Wendy Seyb) give life to the internal struggle between a man’s art and a man’s love. As for Kafka, he is split into three characters: K, the man; N, the narrator (who cites from Kafka’s fictions and letters); and G, the creative “bug”—or Mr. Samsa himself—sent to physically pull K away from the real world. Set loose simultaneously, they overlap one another, building momentum in a surge of creativity until K is no more than an amanuensis for his crazed thoughts.

Read on at [New Theater Corps]

THEATER - "Marisol"

More poetically political theater than magnificent magical realism, Dreamscape Theater’s revival of Jose Rivera’s Marisol is a solid production of an insubstantial script. Rivera’s script bounces from a girl losing her guardian angel in a dystopic interpretation of the Bronx to a story about angels overthrowing God and the existence of hope in a world where Nazis go around lighting the homeless on fire. The real-world events that inspired such imaginative riffs are clear. But staged? They grow turgid due to Rivera’s need to justify. Oblique, Rivera’s work becomes hard to judge and can be taken as an experience; when it’s made transparent, it’s just piecemeal rambling. Beautiful as the language might sound—and Marisol is filled with great lines—a script that relies so much on happenstance and the recycling of characters cannot sustain itself for over two hours.

Read on at [New Theater Corps]

FILM - "Kill the Poor"

Kill the Poor is an excellent suspense movie with social substance and a great flair for 1982 New York style. The film begins with an act of meticulous arson meant to help convince a long-term squatter to move out; it then spins through a variety of short scenes set mostly before the fire that show the motives for any one of the tenants. While a fragmented narrative could be confusing, especially one spliced so roughly (scenes frequently interrupt one another), director Alan Taylor handles the work with ease. He seems intimately familiar with the characters (his TV experience) and enamored with the Lower East Side’s naughty-but-nice atmosphere (his HBO experience). As for his screenplay, it comes from Daniel “I’m Not Lemony Snicket” Handler, whose varied experience with storytelling comes into play. It at least explains the dark humor, levity which, along with the freewheeling pace, keeps the film from being melodramatic.

While Kill the Poor is too distracted by its characters to make the statement of similarly themed films (like In America), the characters themselves keep the film alive. Though the narrator, played by David Krumholtz, is unconvincing (a tough guy in a frail body), the other characters are a lively bunch. (For instance: Delilah, the colorful gay tenant; Negrito, the local Latin tough guy; Spike, the young, hip black artist; and Butch, a student writing a dissertation on their living situation.) None of them get enough face time to be fleshed out, but their interactions are as real as anything you might see on TV’s The Wire. The person we do wind up caring for is Carlos, the squatter that all the other tenants have banded together to evict. Carlos becomes a representative of the old blood being pushed out by the newly rich, and Paul Calderon plays him so straight that our empathy for him comes mixed with fear. Taylor is evenhanded with his presentation: each new scene makes us view the characters in a new light.

There are still a few weaknesses in the screenplay, most likely leftover adaptations from Joel Rose’s novel. Joe Peltz, our semi-hero, gets married at the beginning of the film to help a French woman better her circumstances­—they wind up falling for each other, but we never find out why. They suddenly have a baby, and their history is dismissed. Though the film eventually circles back to explain the circumstances of the birth, there’s a lot left unsaid—which is fine for the film. Focus is a good thing, and stretching the narrative any further would break the fragile balance between plot and character.

Kill the Poor may not be the most provocative film, but it manages to be a very evocative one, conjuring up the feel of a dangerous urban neighborhood and illustrating the ties that band a community together. It’s a deft work by director and writer, and well worth watching for anybody looking for a less moody Scorsese.

FILM - "Land of Plenty"

You can strap an American flag to the back of your dilapidated van, and you can drive it all across America, but that doesn’t make you more American. You can use your own Vietnam experience to stalk innocent yet suspicious looking Arabs, and you can use 9/11 as an excuse to hide from your own problems. Wim Wenders’ film, Land of Plenty, is all about things that you can do, but it does very little. The story of a girl trying to reconnect with her last surviving relative is drowned out by the themes of patriotic paranoia, and the story of a man trying to justify his post-war purpose comes across more as unintentional comedy than drama—the film’s choices don’t compliment the message it aims to send.

As a cast, Michelle Williams and John Diehl are fine, but Williams is fodder for the camera, and Diehl, until the final moments of the movie, isn’t more than his posturing. Once Wenders finds an excuse to stick the two together in a van—the investigation of a drive-by shooting—the two have aimless conversations that blend together as much as Land of Plenty’s landscaping does. The locations are interesting, but Wenders’ shaky, low-budget technique makes everything look artificial and his focus is too sporadic to even artistically justify the action. Even if we accept that Diehl’s character is unhinged, the film goes too far when he bursts into a funeral home, carrying a corpse, and tells the owner that he doesn’t like gurneys and is on a tight schedule. That’s the hokiest form of shock, and for a film that’s trying to be serious—a film that’s deliberately trying to make something of nothing—it’s just too much. Even the musical selections when our “hero” is hunting “suspects” could be straight out of an 80s cop show, and only serve to make the film less and less plausible. Realism and spoof don’t mix.

Perhaps it’s the dialogue, which possesses too many ‘off-the-deep-end’ monologues from Diehl, or the fact that the characters seem unconnected to what they say, but Land of Plenty just isn’t very compelling. Just as Diehl’s character ultimately discovers that the pieces of his elaborate conspiracy theory don’t add up, neither does the film, and while I’m glad he doesn’t find evidence of terrorism, I wish we’d found evidence of something substantial in Land of Plenty.

THEATER - "Modern Living"

Richard Sheinmel seems like a splendid actor/playwright. He’s sincere and disarming, and his collection of plays, Modern Living, is an honest portrayal of the life of the artist as a young man. The intimate location of The Club at LaMaMa helps him connect with the audience, and the fabulous character actors of the ensemble convey even the most obvious one-liners with complete sincerity. But all three of the pieces, each a different genre, lack gravitas: they seem more like introductions to people the playwright knows than an expose on them. Furthermore, the lyrics to the musical interludes between each play, performed by Jordon Rothstein & the t.v. boys, were hard to decipher and didn’t really fit into the ouevre of Sheinmel’s storytelling. Modern Living is perhaps a bit too modern: it is so compartmentalized and scrubbed clean that for all its efficiency, it’s also a wee bit cold.

Read on at [New Theater Corps]

THEATER - "True West"

Sam Shepard’s True West is a play about two brothers, Lee and Austin, who are everything and nothing alike. Dreamscape Theater’s cartoonish production is, in turn, everything and nothing like True West—as much a riff as it is a faithful homage. Two separate plays happen simultaneously: a comic interpretation by Zack Calhoon, who plays the menacing Lee as a buffoon, and a serious one by Jordan Meadows, whose Austin is both bitter and adoring. Though I found myself put off at first by Calhoon’s antics, he sticks with it enough to present a dimension to Lee that other actors often gloss over with anger: petulant immaturity. At one point, Lee blithely remarks, “He must’ve been lying...to one of us.” He follows this with slapstick, sticking out his tongue and jabbing his finger at Austin—a needless expression of the subtext, perhaps, but also a charmingly satisfying one. I just wish it had more in common with the work director Kate Ross is doing, with her hyper-realistic kitchenette staging, her moonlit scenes, and the incessant sound of crickets.

Read on at [New Theater Corps]

THEATER - "Truce on Uranus"

Mark Lindberg has written himself into a tough spot: he's trapped on Uranus, a planet so cold that it's "too cold to live" and "too cold to feel cold," admitted that he's written himself into a corner, and been subdued by an ambivalent transexual alien who goes by the name Titania (the vocally gifted David A. Ellis). Lucky for Mark, he's only directing and writing Truce on Uranus, even luckier, the actor who plays Mark, Ricardo Perez Gonzalez, has charisma-and-a-half: that natural theatrical grace that makes us want to follow him across the stage, even when the stage, script, and underlying emotions are threadbare. When "Mark" complains to the audience about how difficult it is to write a play or to be in The Theater, it's compelling and believable. This is grounded in the artist's fundamental truth, even if the show itself, set on Uranus, is not.

Read on at [New Theater Corps]

BOOK - "The Fourth Bear"

For the last five years, Jasper Fforde has made a living riffing on literary genres: his Thursday Next novels are detective novels that investigate from within other classic novels (like Jane Eyre), and his most recent series, of which The Fourth Bear is the latest, reinvents Jack “ate no fat” Sprat as a hard-boiled detective who runs the Nursery Crime Division. Like Douglas Adams for sci-fi and Terry Pratchett for fantasy, Fforde has a way of filling the page with clever references and perversions of the themes we grew up with, and he’s got a genuine penchant for humor. However, The Fourth Bear is an inconsistent novel, too long by half, kept aloft by so many hurtful puns and repetitive jokes that it winds up sounding like Piers Anthony: it degenerates into making fun of itself with metajokes which—by their nature—are not nearly as clever as they proclaim themselves to be.

This is not to say that Fforde isn’t inventive: the plot here involves cuclear energy made from genetically modified prize-winning cucumbers, a McGuffin (literally), and a Ginza assassin who happens to be a seven-foot tall cake (or cookie) known more familiarly as The Gingerbreadman. But when the characters continually refer to the type of plot device they’re going to use next (“So you’re suggesting we look for him against orders, catch him, cover ourselves with glory, and the by-the-book officers look like idiots?”), the charming wit starts to erode. And it only gets worse as the book goes on: Ashley, an alien who works for the NCP (Nursery Crime Police), never misses an opportunity to make a joke in binary (his native language), and the only thing repeated more often than these jokes are accounts of the plot (which is not nearly that convoluted).

Another flaw of The Fourth Bear is that Fforde has more or less squandered his characters to churn out more of the same. Detective Mary Mary goes on a date with Ashley, and it’s one of the more charming moments in the novel—I wish there were more like it; the book wouldn’t seem nearly as cheap. The best resolution in the novel is Jack Spratt’s confession to his wife that he is a PDR (Person of Dubious Reality), but the aftermath of that is glossed right over, solved by Punch and Judy’s intermediation. And the new characters we do meet—Caliban, Dorian Grey, David Copperfield—are completely subsumed by the plot: they exist merely to add subplots or, worse, contextual jokes. This is fine for the short term, but when you build a book entirely around context, it leaves the majority of the work to the reader.

What we’re left with are jokes that strain connections and wangle words to make us laugh. When they arrest the Red-Legg’d Scissor-man at the beginning of the novel, Fforde makes sure to have him cut himself so that Jack can make the “apt” comment that he’s been “nicked.” (Fforde is a distinctly British author—his colloquial writing is more charming than confusing, but there you have it.) Occasionally, Fforde manages to make a joke resonate with the plot, such as the brilliant “right to arm bears” controversy, but more likely, something like this: fellow officer Pippa (who is glossed over completely in this installment) is pregnant. But not just pregnant, pregnant by Peck. And not just Peck, but Peck “with the pockmarked face and the twin over in Palmer Park.” See where this is going?

“Paul Peck is the Palmer Park Peck; Peter Peck is the pockmarked peck from Pembroke Park. Pillocks. I’d placed a pound in Pippa Piper picking PC Percy Procter from Pocklington."
There was a pause.
"It seems a very laborious setup for a pretty lame joke, doesn’t it?" mused Jack.
"Yes," agreed Mary, shaking her head sadly. "I really don’t know how he gets away with it.”

He gets away with it because he’s Jasper Fforde, an author with a huge fanbase that will continue to read him without holding him to any standards. And while there are other fairy tale riffs out there (like Fables, a darker, comic-book approach), Fforde is the only funny one: funny Fforde freely fields and fulfills his fiction fans by focusing on family fables. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it—but don’t let it run down either.

THEATER - "Lemkin's House"

Real-life lawyer Raphael Lemkin, the subject of the excellent and politically resonant drama, Lemkin’s House, is remembered for having coined the word "genocide" in the 1940s. If we believe playwright Catherine Filloux, not much has changed since Lemkin passed away in the late '50s: we are as passive about genocide today as we were then. To polarize her polemic, Filloux imagines what would happen if Lemkin were to return from the grave as guilt-ridden, wry, and jovial as ever. Uttering lines like "There’s no reason why you can’t continue lobbying Congress when you’re dead," John Daggett, as Lemkin, finds not only these laughable eccentricities, but also the man’s humanity, passion, and frustration.

Read on at [Show Business Weekly]

MUSIC - Carey Ott, "Lucid Dream"

Lucid Dream is the perfect name for Carey Ott's new album. Like psychedelic folk music, it’s intelligible poetry with an ethereal quality of sound. Sleep-inducing sound. Sound so calm that it brings up memories of sitting on a porch, maybe in the South somewhere, falling asleep in the lazy sun. Forgive the abundant imagery: at his best, Carey Ott pulls off the effect with succinctly breezy melodies like “It’s Only Love,” supported by xylophones and harmonicas. At his worst, which is the majority of the album, his light falsetto is washed out by the blasé guitar, a dulling throb that sounds the same alone on “Sunbathing” as it does with a band in “Virginia.” Ott’s warbling notes and short breaths might be attractive for musical purists, but it’s unexciting, sleepy time stuff.

Read on at [Silent Uproar]

MOVIE - "I Am a Sex Addict"

Presented as a tongue-in-cheek meta-documentary, I Am a Sex Addict chronicles the life of Caveh Zahedi (also the writer/director), a man who is poignantly described as "constantly falling in love at the drop of a hat" but is more realistically a fetishist for prostitutes. The film doesn't follow the poignant route—nor would we expect that of a film with such a brazen title—but it's remarkably stale with the actual sex, too. The comedy is flinchingly unfunny, and the bonus features are acutely uncomfortable, and the whole affair seems like Caveh Zahedi trying to achieve some sort of catharsis, first through comedy, then through pathos. Visually, the whole thing is so scattered, with such an on-and-off supporting cast of women, that it's hard to appreciate the film. (Ironically, the film's highlight is the editing, which smoothly splices scene after scene in synch with the narrative—more music video than movie.)

Read on at [Film Monthly]

MOVIE - "12 and Holding"

12 and Holding is a tragic coming-of-age story that strips away the expectations of security and takes a trio of young friends into some shocking territory. The film starts with a familiar setup: the loner, picked on by bullies, is protected by his twin brother, who dumps a bucket of piss on the offenders from their idyllic tree house. But nothing stays safe for long: before the tree house can be torn down by construction, the bullies burn it down, not realizing that two of the kids are still inside. One, the athletic, good-looking brother, dies, and the other, an obese and depressed boy, loses his sense of taste. As for the twin's birthmark-scarred brother, Jacob, he is lost and confused, and finds his solace in plotting a sadistic revenge on the bullies who killed his brother. And these are just set pieces for darker times...

Read on at [Film Monthly]

THEATER - "'nami"

Why is Chad Beckim going back to school for an MFA in '07? He's already co-founder and co-artistic director of the intriguing theater company Partial Comfort Productions, and his new show with them, 'nami, is a substantive showcase of urban life and social struggles. Beckim's material is intellectual, but written with the authentic voices of the working class: 'nami is more immediate and dramatic than some of the stuffy, sterile scripts that other companies put out. While not yet an epic writer, Beckim is on his way towards becoming a modern Odett (or an urban Shepard), and director John Gould Rubin shows a masterful vision (and love) of theater.

Read on at [New Theater Corps]