Out of Focus

Here are just a bunch of random items/links/what-have-you that have been jostling around my head over the past couple days:

• I actually ran across this a couple weeks ago and laughed my ass off, but then I forget about it until I saw Wonkette had linked to it. It’s a mock profile by commercial director Russell Bates apparently for Comedy Central of someone named “Harlan McCraney” (portrayed by Andy Dick). McCraney is the man apparently responsible for all of President Bush’s linguistic screw-ups. You see, it’s all perfectly choreographed because, as McCraney says in the video, “The American people of today’s Americas want a politician who can speak their language and speak it badly.” The video is absolutely hysterical. Check-it-out. (Update: Shocker, I’m only eight months behind. Lindsay had this back in December.)

• I suppose it only makes sense. Seacrest OUT! moves closer to his ultimate dream. Maybe MTV should produce New Year’s Rockin’ Eve on behalf of ABC since this version might as well be an episode of Becoming. Ryan, I’ve watched Dick Clark; I’ve screamed from the street at Dick Clark; Dick Clark was … well, he wasn’t a friend of mine, but he’s been around forever and looks not so much older than you. Ryan Seacrest: you’re no Dick Clark.

• Anyone else wondering what it is that makes Ben Affleck think he can write a whole TV series on his own? (sub’n req’d.) According to the Variety story, the series is called Resistance and it “will be set in the not-so-distant future, imagining a United States that’s been divided into separate countries following a pair of catastrophic terror attacks.” The cast will be a bunch of people trying to reunify the country. The story goes on to say, “One person familiar with the pitch said the show ultimately will be a hopeful hour because of its pro-democracy bent.” Sure, who doesn’t love a pro-democracy bent. But won’t the tireless hours of TV writing and production take away from Benny becoming a good daddy? And you just know this show will get picked-up by some network to terrorize viewers for an episode or two before execs are reminded that the name Affleck actually isn’t such a big draw after all.

• I know this is from last week but Bill what the hell are you thinking?!?! If you don’t want to do a third Ghostbusters fine, but the first Garfield movie was so horrible, please don’t lend your name and cache — which I’m sure Fox is depending upon before giving the goa head — to a sequel. Nobody needs that.

• And finally, I suppose now that TV Newser has suspended its waterfall of “Remembering Peter Jennings” tributes and posts, ABC News has decided it’s time to take his name off the program as well. The only reason this is strange news is because they made such a big to-do last week about how the program would remain ABC World News Tonight with Peter Jennings for the foreseeable future. I suppose it was a nice honor — although also a little creepy, actually — to leave his name on the show for the rest of last week, but why not decide then that it would be the remainder of the week and then off. It hasn’t been that long and to suddenly now decide, “It’s time,” is just bizarre.

  Meanwhile, if you didn’t catch the Remembering Peter Jennings broadcast ABC News produced last week, you missed out. It was really a wonderful tribute, presented in the same distinguished and elegant yet straightforward style of the man it honored. ABC dedicated two commercial-free hours to what essentially amounted to a big thank you, and if it hadn’t been for The Walt Disney Company’s annoying and callous intrusions, that really amounted to commercials saying, “Hey, we own ABC, and we want you to know we’re really sad, and thanks Peter,” that would repeat between segments roughly every 20 minutes, it would have been perfect. In fact, it’s a bit shocking that Disney would have placed such a demonstrative memorial commercial — the company name had its own solo title card that faded into black and the bumper is accompanied by somber narration — considering that they generally offer very classy “In Memoriam” ads in the trades when industry vets die. It would have been much nicer and more subtle had they simply transferred these trade ads — which usually simply have the person’s name, dates of birth and death, and then a picture of Mickey sulking with a tear falling from his eye — to a brief, silent, 15 second card appearing on screen. It doesn’t matter that Jennings was a newsman and Mickey a cartoon. That would have been a just memorial from ABC’s corporate parent. Instead, it was all about Walt Disney Co. bringing attention to itself and how gracious it is to dedicate this valuable airtime.

  And you wonder why people hate Michael Eisner and Bob Iger.

Yes, I know … I’ve failed you again. You depend on my constant reminders about the brilliance that is , and although I did do that big month ahead preview, I can’t expect you to keep going back to that. Hell, it’s not even on this main page anymore.

And who might you have forgotten about this weekend? Just Cary Grant and Glenn Ford. (sigh) My bad.

Plus, I suppose I failed you with the great, elegant, magical Fred Astaire who’s day is going on right now. In fact, as I write this, The Gay Divorcee — one of the best, and earliest, of the Astaire-Rogers ouevre — is nearing its end. But don’t fret too much: there’s still time to catch Top Hat at 8 PM and Swing Time at 10 PM, among others.

So now, here’s the rest of the week, with my original capsules regarding Astaire, Donna Reed, James Garner, Irene Dunne and, on Friday, Marlon Brando:

Continue reading “TCM WATCH: ASTAIRE, REED, GARNER, DUNNE AND BRANDO SHINE BRIGHT”

So yeah, I didn’t get to one movie this weekend. Nada. Niente. Nothing. I meant to. I even tried to. But between seeing seven Fringe shows and the other random stuff I had to do, I just couldn’t make the time to get to anything.

As I mentioned previously, I’m covering the Fringe Festival for Gothamist. Shockingly enough, more than half the shows I saw didn’t suck. I KNOW! Who woulda thunk it. I hope this doesn’t make my expectations too high for everything I’ve got left. Meanwhile, here’s my first Gothamist post of Fringe reviews. Included are thoughts on The Miss Education of Jenna Bush, Jesus in Montana: Adventures in a Doomsday Cult, The Great Official Subway Musical, The Rude Pundit in the Year of Living Rudely, Dance With Me, Harker, Shakedown Street, ScrewBall. I’ll give a quick thumb up to the first four, and down to the last three, with ScrewBall receiving an honorary prize for most unbelievably bad piece of crap I’ve seen in a very long time.

My experience with the Fringe so far this year has been interesting. It reminded me of the way you have to look at The Fringe before going to a show; you know, in order to not get pissed off at the part of your life you just lost forever. I’ve always looked at the Fringe as being very similar to Las Vegas. No, for real. See, when I lived in LA, after turning 21, I hit Vegas all the time. It’s just a four-hour car ride, you know? So at least once every six weeks to two months, I’d get myself to Vegas for the weekend. I had a very specific philosophy about gambling in Vegas in order to stay in control and sane. It went something like this:

When I go to Vegas, I expect to lose! That’s what people do — lose money in Vegas. The house has the advantage, etc. If you go expecting to lose, which you likely will, you’ve simply paid for the time of enjoying gambling. Hoping that enjoyment won’t cost too much.

Second, when I go to Vegas, I hope to break-even in the casino. By break-even, I mean pay for everything — the hotel, gas for the car, meals, etc. If you’re able to leave Vegas with the same amount of money with which you arrived, that’s a successful trip. It likely won’t happen that way most of the time, but it’s a realistic hope, and the way you act (and play!) can contribute to that happening.

Finally, when I go to Vegas, I dream about winning a bunch of money. Oh sure, it’s likely not going to happen any time soon, but at least it’s a realistic dream. You never go to Vegas expecting or even hoping to come home with more money than you had when you left. But that’s rarely what happens. Sure you can think about it; but you need to be honest with yourself, and chances are, you’re not coming home with extra money. Casinos don’t like to pay their patrons to have a good time.

So what does all this have to do with The Fringe you ask? Simple, actually. With shows in the Fringe Festival, you expect that they’re going to suck because there is ample proof that many of them do. Meanwhile, you hope that you get at least one show that isn’t bad. It may not be amazing, but it’s fun or interesting — entertaining in its own right. That is a successful Fringe ticket. And the you dream about the possibility that you’ll see something that’s actually great; something that’s going to blow up into a magnificent hit, that will transfer to Broadway, but you know you’ll always be able to say you saw it when it was just a small show trying to make it without much support. And you just want to see some good theatre.

The shows I saw this weekend are a perfect example. I would happily recommend people see The Miss Education of Jenna Bush, Jesus in Montana: Adventures in a Doomsday Cult, The Great Official Subway Musical and The Rude Pundit in the Year of Living Rudely. On the other hand, I would suggest you run screaming if you encounter ScrewBall; and while neither Dance With Me, Harker nor Shakedown Street are as bad, I would suggest skipping them as well.

But this serves my point: I expect every show to be bad, so there was no shocker. Then I got The Rude Pundit, The Great Official Subway Musical, Jesus in Montana and The Miss Education of Jenna Bush, and they were each all I could have hoped for. Subway is an especially good selection. It’s not a great play, nor is it a great musical — certainly the songs are all relatively weak, even if some are hysterically funny. However, Subway is still all I could have hoped for — a light, funny, entertaining hour of theater.; (Miss Education comes closes to being a “dream” show, but it’s not. That’s why I dream about it — it’s rare … maybe never going to happen.

Here’s hoping (again) that with this year’s Fringe, hope stays alive. I’ve got at least 10 more shows to see, and even if my expectations are nil, I’d still prefer to be surprised by something good than sit through 90 minutes of annoying theatrical blather.

Best casting news ever? How awesome would it be if Pope John Paul II really had been a male gigolo.

Ah the The Fringe Festival, how you torture me so. Magnificently, every year for the past nine, the Fringe has helped stage a couple hundred works of theatre in a variety of forms from straight plays to musicals to interpretive dance to puppetry to performance art, helping give theatre folk from around the world a stage (literally) on which to show their wares. But is the damn thing just too big? Are there simply not enough good shows out there to fill all the slots necessary for a festival of this size? Because in my, granted, slightly limited experience in attending the Fringe (I’ve only been to a couple shows each year), the majority of what goes up should be instantly taken down. In fact, I can honestly say that the worst show I’ve ever seen in my life — yes, even worse than my high school’s production of Hair!, which of course was pure genius anyway! — was a show I saw at the Fringe. I even had a friend in it — a talented friend, at that — and it still was absolutely the most annoying, poorly written and staged piece of trash I’ve ever had the misfortune to experience in a theatre. Making matters worse has always been the uncomfortable, small theatres often lacking air conditioning — pure genius for a festival that takes place in New York in fucking August. (Thankfully, that does not seem to be as much of a problem this year as the festival has upgraded its venue list.)

Still, what the Fringe stands for is important, especially in this city where theatre has such an enormous presence, but its lifeblood — namely the small Off-Off- productions — is too often ignored by those who aren’t actual participants in the theatre world. And plenty of the shows always sound interesting.

So this year, I decided to spend more time giving more shows at The Fringe a chance, and I’ll be doing so by covering the goings-on for Gothamist. That coverage starts today with not just the opening of the Fringe Festival but also with Gothamist’s loving preview of it which I cowrote with Gothamist’s primary theatre writer, Mallory Jensen. Go check-it-out, and try out some of the shows at the Fringe. There’s even a bunch of stuff to potentially appeal to you movie lovers who have trouble being in the same room with the life-size characters just feet away on a stage.

Wow. Another week just flew by, and here were are with an even larger selection of new and/or worthwhile films opening in our fair city. Oh sure, you wouldn’t know it from the three major Hollywood releases coming out this weekend, but there’s still plenty of potentially interesting fare. Not that I’m actually managing to get to anything. The list of personal “must-sees” is increasing faster than I’m actually seeing anything. Of course, this week I simply haven’t had the time; or rather, I’ve tried to be a bit more responsible and use my time getting things done rather than putting them off. I’ve only been partially successful.

I also have so far only seen one film this week, and it wasn’t Broken Flowers, 2046, Darwin’s Nightmare, Junebug, 9 Songs, Murderball or March of the Penguins — and I’m just about the only person I know who hasn’t seen the last of those yet. But I’m literally anxious about seeing all six of those films. I just haven’t had time. And I don’t know when I’m going to either because starting tomorrow night, I suddenly have a crazy schedule of Fringe Festival shows to endure. But that’s a topic for another post.

For now, the week ahead is chock full of cinematic goodies, both new and old, and a bunch of stuff that’s probably worth skipping too. I mean, I really would love to see everything, and if I had the time, I would happily go sit through The Skeleton Key, Four Brothers and even Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo, but really the only interesting thing about these three films is whether or not any of them will be able to knock of The Dukes of Hazzard from the box office perch. There are however several new smaller films that I’m definitely interested in catching — especially Grizzly Man and Pretty Persuasion — plus one must-see doc, A State of Mind.

Continue reading “THE WEEKEND IN PREVIEW: ENOUGH TO KEEP YOU OCCUPIED”

Another week of Gothamist Interviews comes to a close with one of (I think) the best interviews we’ve ever run. All credit goes to the subject because as brilliant as my questions are (oh yes, pure genius, of course … I definitely didn’t knock them out it 30 minutes while sitting at a Starbucks or anything), Paul Scheer‘s responses are just absolutely hysterical. The first answer alone makes me audibly laugh every time I read it, which I’ve now done at least 15 times.

Oh yeah, you read that right. Paul Scheer. The same Paul Scheer who I absolutely did not intentionally seem to stalk nearly a month ago. But it was that incident that made me think to ask him if he’d like to participate. So after writing that post, I wrote Paul, simply in order to first embarrass myself and then follow-up by saying, “Hey, how’d you like to do an interview for Gothamist?” He was nice enough to write back and say sure, and somehow, in the midst of a crazy week with him flying back-and-forth between the coasts more than anybody should have to, he managed to reply with such a great interview that it was hard to edit.

In fact, Paul followed the instructions Lily and I give everyone better than almost anybody who has participated in one of our interviews. These are light lifestyle pieces, you know? Not hard-hitting investigative. They should be fun; hopefully for both interviewee and Gothamist reader. So Lily and I generally tell everyone that we look for “irreverent as much as informative,” and Paul really managed to give both. I’ve seen Paul perform about four or five times, and each time he’s been a highlight of the show. If you only know him from VH1’s Best Week Ever, you really should try to catch him somewhere around town. He can be seen regularly at the UCB Theatre as part of the improv group “Respecto Montalban”. If you’re in LA, Paul is also heading up Best Week Ever Live on Mondays at UCB out there.

This week is just flying by, and these days, I really don’t like that. There’s definitely never enough time each day, and I’m just happy that this go ’round, Lily and I were smart enough to get all these Gothamist Interviews done ahead of time. I haven’t been going out at night; I haven’t been sitting around doing nothing; but at the same time, I feel like I’m getting nothing done. And the list of pending blog entries continues to get longer and longer. Oy, I say. The next couple weeks are going to be interesting to because here comes the Fringe Festival, and for some reason, I’ve decided to actually try contributing a bit more to Gothamist in both theatre and film, and that means sitting through a bunch of Fringe shows.

But that’s for another time. For now, we’re going to stay in the theatre and talk about someone who’s certainly not new to the theatre scene — she performed with Chita Rivera in the Original Broadway production of Chicago — but is only in the past few years making a name and big splash for herself as a musical theatre writer: Kirsten Childs. Kirsten created a semi-autobiographical musical that played at Playwrights Horizons a few years ago called The Bubbly Black Girl Sheds Her Chameleon Skin that won awards galore, and now she’s back with a new show starting on Aug. 26 at Vineyard Theatre called Miracle Brothers which just sounds ridiculously fun, energetic and exciting. In Kirsten’s own words from the beginning of the interview:

This is a story about how a rebellious Brazilian slave and his unwilling slavemaster brother rock the 17th century while overcoming differences of their race and class. The audience will be guided (by friendly toe-tapping river dolphins) into the worlds of samba, capoeira and Candomblé. There’ll be thrills, chills and excitement, all to a Brazilian groove, so prepare to order a caipirinha at that Brazilian restaurant you’ll be heading for after the show.

Kirsten has already had several careers — how many people do you know who have danced on Broadway and also worked at both the United Nations and Merrill Lynch? — and is an integral part of the NY theatre community: she’s among that exclusive club of Tony Award Nomination voters, and she also participates in TDF‘s wonderful “Open Doors” program which helps get inner-city kids to Broadway Theatre they otherwise likely would be unable to see. Her interview is a great read, so go check-it-out, along with her new show.

Back in June after going to see New Pornographers play in Prospect Park, my friend Sean and I went for some pizza. Not just any pizza, though — pizza at Amorina is amazing. Not just your traditional NYC slices, but some wonderful you-put-that-on-pizza? combinations and toppings as well. The restaurant is run by a friend of Sean’s, and when we got there, another friend of his was there helping out for the night. This other friend turned out to be chef in her own right, formerly partnered in her own catering company, still doing some private cooking for people, and helping out her friend, Ruth, the pizza chef when necessary. But it turned out that her day job was running the >Mayor’s Volunteer Center of New York City — which of course, I had never heard of.

It was that night that I said to Nazli Parvizi that I had to do an interview with her. If you’ve ever met Nazli, you would know that it didn’t take much prompting before she said, “Yeah!” but with an enthusiasm and possibly an expletive that apparently isn’t becoming someone in city government. (I’ll never tell! Or … whoops …) So I called Lily the next day and said I had a great subject for one of our next Gothamist Interviews. Lo and behold, that’s what we’ve got today.

Regardless of her love for Wonderbread and mayo sandwiches, she actually has a remarkably broad knowledge and love of all things food and food related, and while I have yet to be invited to one of her apparently infamous Sunday brunches (hint! hint!), I hear she’s an amazing chef. She studied “food anthropology” in college (a major of her own design), and one of the more interesting things she’s thought about doing over the years is creating some sort of art installation that would depict the actual last meals (I mean the food itself) of Texans no longer on death row. In fact, although we couldn’t include this in the interview on Gothamist, she made a comment when discussing this idea that I found particularly fascinating, maybe because it’s probably true:

I really believe in the old saying, “Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you who you are.” There is a lot you can tell about where a person lives, works, socio-economic status, race/ethnicity – just by looking at what they eat. And what I love about food is that it is a common ground between everyone – we all eat obviously. But it’s also a good way of approaching people and getting them to talk about themselves.

I don’t know that I had actually heard that “old saying” before, but I’d be scared to have what I eat analyzed for the purpose of figuring out my personality.

The few times I’ve chatted with Nazli, I’ve found a wonderfully uninhibited and lively woman who seems to squeeze a lot of work and social activity into the same day in which I never seem to have enough time to get anything done. And meanwhile, unlike all the people who talk about society’s ills while doing not much more than complaining, she’s actually doing something to make this city a better place. Plus, I so want to see Food Network pick-up the show she wants to do with friend Ruth: cooking, motorcycles, bikinis … need I say more?

Whew. The days are passing way too fast for me here. Yeah, I had a burst of inspiration with the post writing yesterday, and I meant to do a bunch more today, but I’ve run out of time. Maybe it had something to do with finally taking a day to winnow an inbox of over 1000 emails down to just over 100. (No, I’m certainly not that popular; just really lazy about deleting things I don’t take care of and/or respond to right away.)

Anyway, I digress. I’m here to talk about the next Gothamist Interview. Do you like to read? OK, good. Do you like to read good things? Obviously not as you spend your time here. But never mind that. Chris Steib hopes that if you like to read but can’t always find something good, you’ll check-out his new online literary magazine, lovingly referred to as Void Magazine, or The Void to it’s friends. He hopes you’ll be one of its friends, and if you head over to Gothamist, he’ll tell you why.

But more than just reading, Chris is looking for people to contribute. His whole purpose in starting The Void is to try to find that line between what’s considered literary and what’s thought of as commercial. Chris feels there’s a gap — maybe a, hmm … void? — there, and he’s hoping to fill it by seeking out talented writers who have been finding it difficult to get their work published. He very specifically calls The Void a magazine, as opposed to a journal, and the distinction in his mind deals with a feeling of, for lack of a better term, exclusivity. To quote Chris from the interview: “Journals have a way of making you feel like you have to be invited to read them. Why should reading have to be a chore?”

I agree. See what else Chris has to say in his interview, and be sure to check-out The Void at www.voidmagazine.com, only online and for the low-low price of your already-paid for internet access.