BilmBlog500

I am a bit jealous of Mark Haddon's novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time. It is a novel that is indirectly about autism and which was published around the same time as Elizabeth Moon's The Speed of Dark, which is very directly about autism.  Of the hundreds of novels I have represented as a literary agent, Moon's is unabashedly the one I am proudest of.  It won the Nebula Award and has become a small part of the canon, used in a number of campus and community reading events.  But it hasn't been Curious Incident, which won many prizes and has been sold in twice as many languages and become much more of a thing. My mild envy extends to the fact that the Mark Haddon novel has been adopted for the stage, with the play by Simon Stephens getting rave reviews in London and winning the Olivier Award for best play.  And now it's on Broadway.  And jealous or not, I am somewhat curious about the Curious Incident.  If I'm still not interested in the ...

Even by the standards of early year movies, the start of 2014 has been full of a stunning array of must skip movies. I will include in that list the surprise sensation of February, the Lego Movie,  Surprisingly good reviews, robust box office indicative of strong word of mouth, and if I hadn't been attending with a friend I would have walked out after ten minutes, or retreated to a quiet corner to read on my iPad while the film played,  Thus was just another boring superhero movie with overlong fight scenes, only with Legos. Even at the end, the movie didn't have any charm for me.  Everything is not awesome. Non-Stop on the other hand was a nice action movie.  Liam Neeson lends gravitas and depth to the role of an air marshall being framed for a remarkably clever feat of airplane crime.  The movie is never terribly believable but is always just plausible enough that I was willing to buy in.  I have no idea how the bad guys got at the pilot, or now they fond...

So the first 2014 movie I saw in 2014 was Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit. Took me a while.  Even by the standards of January/February movies, this year has been off to a pretty shabby start.  Not many movies I wanted to see, not many new movies coming out that I was anticipating seeing, so I could keep shoving this aside in favor of other things. I enjoyed it. For one, I like Chris Pine very much.  He has "it," that special movie star quality.  He radiates charisma and likability, much like Denzel Washington over the course of his entire career (the two of them together in Unstoppable is a casting coup central to an excellent movie), or Tom Cruise twenty or thirty years ago, or Ryan Gosling when he doesn't do bad indie movies.  He is very Chris Pine here! I have a soft spot for Kenneth Branagh.  Oh, he's not one of the great directors of the past thirty years, but his Dead Again was a movie I liked enough to see twice, he's done some good Shakespeare movies, he...

Typically, when there's some hot new Broadway show where you need to buy tickets way far in advance and there are no discounts and etc., I wait. And wait, and wait, and wait. I live in New York City. Eventually in five years of fifteen years demand will drop. Tickets will be on TKTS. If I die before that happens -- well, if I'm dead, the fact that I missed a Broadway show will be the least of my worries. And it's New York, it's Broadway, you see the 12th replacement cast in the 9th year of the run, and odds are you're still going to see some pretty good stuff, The Phantom of the Opera is still chugging along well after Michael Crawford, you know. Charlaine Harris was in town this week to do a special pre-signing of books for select bookstore accounts. She wanted to see Jersey Boys and The Book of Mormon. A good agent would happily choose to take the client to Jersey Boys, cheaper tickets, and let the publisher take to The Book of Mormon, expensive tickets. ...

With both 24 and Friday Night Lights going off the air the past couple of years, two shows that were appointment viewing for me, I've been willing to cautiously explore finding replacements. Glee never quite cut it, too inconsistent. I've been trying Smash. The first three episodes were enh. The 4th episode the show seemed to have found its footing. The next two were OK, the 7th episode that aired this past Sunday was the best so far. I'm willing to keep going with it a bit, I'm a NYer and a theatregoer. But the show I've taken to wholeheartedly after watching a few episodes tonight is The Good Wife. I've heard a lot over the years about how good this is, and they are frequently filming at the courthouse across the street from my apartment (yes, New York City doubles for Chicago in The Good Wife). And a few minutes in to an episode I still had on the DVR from the end of January, I was totally hooked. What's not to like? The writing is excellent. Sharp c...

The Cripple of Inishman, seen Sunday afternoon January 11, 2009 at the Atlantic Theater (NY) Mainstage,  2 slithy toads. Reasons To Be Pretty, seen Saturday afternoon April 11, 2009 at the Lyceum Theatre, 3 slithy toads. Irish playwright Martin McDonagh has written one of the best plays I've ever seen, The Pillowman, which I like enough to have seen once in London, twice in NY, and once in DC, and will happily go to again if given the opportunity.  Let me know if it's playing on a stage near you, and we can do an outing.  This year he received he an Acadamey Award nomination for his very pleasant comedy In Bruges.  At the dawn of his career, he wrote The Cripple of Inishman, which was first presented in NYC ten years ago in a production that was not admired, and which now returns in a production first presented at Ireland's Druid Theatre, and which was received quite rapturously.  Enh.  Meh. McDonagh's plays specialize often in cruelties of a sort, and the Cripple is in...

Seen Tuesday evening August 26, 2008, 7:30 PM at the Music Box Theatre. 1.5 slithy toads. This play won the Tony Award and the Pulitzer Prize. Variety loved it The NY Times loved it with the current cast . And with the old cast . Why? How? Do they have a category for Best Dysfunctional Family Drama? I think the best thing about the play might be the set. It's a three-story house, living room and dining room and den at the front of the bottom floor, marked off by pieces of furniture, with a kitchen lurking in the background and the driveway and front door and porch hinted at off to one side. A flight of stairs leads up to a 2nd floor with a couple of bedrooms, and then another staircase to a third floor with another bedroom tucked under the gables. It's a very very big house, and a very very tall house. Most of the time a play might have a really big living room and not much else going on, and maybe there's a turntable or some other scenery trick to give other rooms, b...

Seen at the 3 PM matinee, Sunday March 30, 2008, at Studio 54. 1 slithy toad Seen at the 8 PM performance, August 23, 1984, at the Booth Theatre. My maximum 4 slithy toads I can't help but see this as an object lesson in both the ephemerality of creation and the subjectivity of its reception. When this opened in 1984 in New York City, it was generally hailed as a stunning achievement in the American musical. I'm surprised to see looking back at it that Frank Rich's review in The New York Times was a tad more calibrated in its praise than in my memory of it. Itself a musical about the act of creation, Sunday in the Park with George depicts the artist Georges Seurat "putting it together" (one of the song titles) for his painting A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte. There on the stage he pokes and prods various characters revising slowly into the positions they have in the painting itself, while in his personal life his obsession with getting the ...