I would like to go back in time and punish the studio suits who decided that it wasn't worth their while to open decent movies post-Christmas. What the hell is a cinephile to do? We don't all live in NYC where alternatives such as the Angelika or Landmark East exist to tide us over til the frost thaws. Checking out the listings for tonight, this is what I see:
1. Dr. Seuss' Horton Hears a Who aka Madagascar meets Jim Carrey's How the Grinch Stole Christmas. Gag me.
2. 10,000 B.C. Where is the Rock? This movie was better when it was called Scorpion King
3. College Road Trip, because "Are We Done Yet?" wasn't enough.
4. Vantage Point. Granted, this sounded great, so kudos to the team who cut the trailer because from what I hear, it's the best part of the movie. The rest is a yawn. I want Matthew Fox naked!
5. Doomsday aka 28 days later aka Twelve Monkeys aka about a dozen other movies who have done it better. Why?!? WHY?!
6. The Bank Job. see above. Didn't Jason Statham already make this movie? Hasn't this been done to death and by people twice as talented!
7. Never Back Down aka Tough White Kids. Like in Karate Kid. And Step Up. Except without the redeeming factors of Mr. Miyagi and sweet dance moves.
8. Semi-Pro. A carbon copy of Blades of Glory, and when is a copy as good as the original?
9. The Other Boleyn Girl. If there were ever a period piece to be rated R, it would be this. But no, just PG-13. As much of a bore as Girl with A Pearl Earring.
10. Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day-The only thing that sparks a glimmer of interest, but only in relation to the other meager offerings. I got enough of perky Amy Adams in Enchanted.
My first order of business as a studio big shot will be to throw out all the idiots who thought these movies would actually generate revenue and retool the winter season so movies that are both entertaining AND profitable make their way to the masses.
Labels: career, film, theater
Last night Julia and I went to see a reading of August Wilson’s “Two Train’s Running” at the Kennedy Center (which, I was excited to learn, featured Glynn Turman, who played “Mayor Clarence Royce” on “The Wire”). If I had any apprehensions about the fact that it was a reading–where the actors read from a script instead of from memory–those concerns were quickly assuaged by the high-quality of the set, the scoring, and even the sometimes inventive ways that the actors concealed their scripts. Set in a local Pittsburgh grill, the actors turned their scripts into menus and trays of short-ribs, while the songs of Marvin Gaye set the mood for this impassioned exploration of post-Civil Rights black life.
The entire play is superbly acted, most notably by Hassan El-Amin. What I found most interesting, though, was the strong undercurrent of a demand for reparations that ran throughout Wilson’s play. “Hambone,” the indigent, developmentally challenged character who seems to exemplify the futility of black protest, stands outside the white grocery store everyday, chanting, “I want my ham!” He ultimately gets his ham, but not until after he has any use for it. Echoing the tragic unfulfilled promise of “forty acres and a mule,” “Memphis” recounts how, back in Mississippi, he watched the gruesome killing and mutilation of his mule by whites eager to steal the land that he had made profitable. These metaphors, like the literal scars that cover the bodies of two of the play’s central figures, add the kind of symbolic depth that typify why Wilson’s vivid depictions of black life are among the most celebrated works of the twentieth century.
“Two Trains Running” is a fantastic play, and the cast and crew manage to do it justice even as a reading; it is the kind of powerful drama to which “The Wire” is undoubtably indebted.