Archives for December 14, 2007

Earlier this week Terry asked OGIC and me to put together lists of ten films released since the fall of 2005 for he and Mrs. Teachout to watch. The one caveat: “No spinach, please: I’m out for pleasure, very broadly construed, so don’t send me to anything I ‘ought’ to see (whatever that means) unless it’s also something that you loved.”
It has been fun to deliberate; and I’ve tried to be true to the no-spinach rule (“In times of crisis, we must all decide again and again whom we love.”). Here are my first five, listed in no particular order, with the rest to follow next week. I note with some chagrin that Harold and Kumar Go To White Castle came out a year too early to make the 2005 cutoff, otherwise it would have a spot here. Which is a roundabout way of saying that I think you should see it too, if you haven’t already.
1. Casino Royale: I’m a big Bond fan, so this movie was a great treat — and a relief after the franchise’s sad last installments, which were like watching video games. Lots of explosions, no feeling. This one seemed to return Bond to the physical realm. A lot of this is thanks to Daniel Craig, who plays the role rougher and with a lower center of gravity than anyone since Connery. Early on there’s a fantastic chase sequence on foot — showcasing freerunning star Sébastien Foucan — that’s so witty and exhilarating that I went back to see the movie twice. So much fun. And j’aime Eva Green.
2. Inside Man: A fresh, intelligent thriller that uses New York the way Collateral used L.A. Its bank robbery plot doesn’t quite hang together but I love this movie for the life in it: There’s a lot of delight in it for how everyday people talk and act. Plus, it’s beautifully shot. The bit where a woman brought in to translate negotiates to get her parking tickets fixed is one of my favorite film scenes of recent years: I wish more movies used their bit characters so well and shined so much around the edges.
3. Pan’s Labyrinth: Gorgeously conceived and wrought. I had to hide out for portions of it, though: It’ll wring you out.
4. Serenity: Joss Whedon presents Cowboys In Space! Rethinks and improves on the Firefly TV series. The script’s a little klunky with exposition in places but it’s a nice little ride all the same.
5. The Devil Wears Prada: I liked this comedy: It’s bitchy and tart, and there are some lovely clothes to look at (which I know matters a great deal to you, Terry). I also find it amusing to think of this film as a sort of Her Girl Friday, with Streep in the Cary Grant role. Lately, so many love stories on screen seem so neutered — all hugs and sweaters and understanding gazes (it’s like the heroines aren’t searching for love so much as a good therapist) — it’s nice to see a romance with some pepper even if it’s not, strictly speaking, a romance.

So, I was late to get a cell phone and I still don’t really get texting or my phone’s other features. Once in a while the phone will make a crazy tweet and I’ll find a message on the screen, which I’ll read and then phone or email the sender back.
Just now the phone made its crazy tweet and there was a message saying, “Fwd: We are at the hospital.” I didn’t recognize the number but managed to tap out my first-ever text message: “Sorry Wrong number.” And then the phone tweeted again with the message: “Dear Dumbass: One of your dearest friends is currently in labor. Love, her husband.”
Actually, that’s not what he typed. But he should have.

Things have calmed down–somewhat–on Broadway, so my Wall Street Journal drama column covers only two plays this week, Mark Twain’s Is He Dead? and Mark Lamos’ Lincoln Center Theater production of Cymbeline. Here’s a preview.
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“Is He Dead?” is a farce about the art world that vanished into the author’s files and didn’t reappear until it was discovered in 2001 by a scholar and optioned by a producer. Six years later, it has opened in a ritzy production directed by Michael Blakemore (“Noises Off”) and starring Norbert Leo Butz (“Dirty Rotten Scoundrels”). The results are shriekingly funny–I don’t know when I’ve heard a New York audience laugh louder or longer–in large part because of Mr. Butz, whose performance is a veritable masterpiece of mugging.
Don’t be fooled by the flackery, though: “Is He Dead?” may be “by” Twain, but it’s a quaintly amateurish piece of work that wouldn’t have run for ten minutes on Broadway had David Ives not “adapted” the script to within an inch of its life. The author of “All in the Timing” and “Mere Mortals,” is one of this country’s smartest comic playwrights, and a line-by-line comparison between the published version of “Is He Dead?” and the one currently being performed at the Lyceum Theatre is the equivalent of a postgraduate course in How to Make Large Numbers of People Guffaw. Mr. Ives has retained Twain’s original situations, most of his characters and a fair number of his lines, but he has cut, rearranged, punched up and otherwise transformed them so extensively as to deserve credit not as the play’s adapter but as its co-author….
“Cymbeline,” which Shakespeare wrote toward the end of his life, is an imaginative retrospective in which he simultaneously deployed all of the time-honored devices that drove his plots: the weak king, the spunky heroine who dresses up as a boy, the misguided husband induced by a scoundrel to test his wife’s love. George Bernard Shaw called it “stagey trash of the lowest melodramatic order,” and though that was mere envy speaking, there have been plenty of other equally knowledgeable commentators who failed to grasp what Shakespeare was up to. Henry James dismissed “Cymbeline” as “a florid fairy-tale, of a construction so loose and unpropped that it can scarce be said to stand upright at all,” and it’s true that most productions fail to weave the play’s variegated strands into a convincing fabric.
Not so this one. Greatly aided by Michael Yeargan’s sumptuously simple sets, Jess Goldstein’s gorgeous costumes and Mel Marvin’s savory incidental music, Mr. Lamos takes a cue from his parallel career as an opera director and gives us a “Cymbeline” that flows with the irresistible forward momentum of a piece of music. Resplendent pageantry, knockabout comedy, haunting lyricism: All are blended in just proportion, sweeping us toward a climax in which surprise after surprise is detonated like an extra-long string of firecrackers….
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To read the whole thing, go here.
UPDATE: I took Maud with me to see Is He Dead? To find out what she thought of it, go here.

“It is the will of God that we must have critics, and missionaries, and Congressmen, and humorists, and we must bear the burden. Meantime, I seem to have been drifting into criticism myself. But that is nothing. At the worst, criticism is nothing more than a crime, and I am not unused to that.”
Samuel Clemens, Mark Twain’s Own Autobiography