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 ...

Somehow or other I never posted these two play reviews from several months ago... Dinner With Friends, which first played in New York in the late 1990s into 2001, is one of the major plays by Daniel Margulies.  For a literary type such as myself, Collected Stories is perhaps the keynote. It's an All About Eve story of an aging writer and a young admirer/protege.  More recently, Time Stands Still, a play about a wartorn journalist recovering from wounds physical and spiritual at home got a lot of attention. But it's Dinner With Friends that I saw today in a revival at the Roundabout's Laura Pels Theatre, and I can't say it impressed. It's a yuppie marital drama.  A couple, probably in their thirties, are having a friend over for dinner.  She reveals that her husband is leaving her.  A few scenes that night of the aftershocks, one at her house, where he stops by when a flight cancellation keeps him from heading off to his new home.  They have sex.  Anoth...

I saw the last preview before tonight's opening of Between Riverside and Crazy, a new play by Stephen Adly Guirgis, a highly regarded playwright whose The Motherf**ker with the Hat was nominated for six Tony Awards.  I'd seen that play, somewhat flawed by tremendously well acted, at the Studio Theater in DC last year. What should I say about Between Riverside and Crazy? Bedecked with references to Game of Thrones and Whole Foods, it's a play very much of its time and moment.  It has some tremendous scenes in it.  It has lots and lots of laugh lines, and the audience was clearly having a very good time. I expect it will be popular and get some good reviews. But honestly, it's not a very good play. It takes around 40 minutes of a play that's around 2:10 with intermission to get to its point, to the extent that it has one. The lead character, name of Walter "Pops" Washington, is a former NYPD officer, who was shot six times by a white rookie officer eight yea...

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...

In my last post I dumped a little on the critical herd for film reviewers.  They ain't the only ones. I've seen a lot of theatre, this year I added a second off-Broadway subscription because it looked like a very good season at Playwrights Horizon.  I'm glad I did, not so much because all those plays have been wonderful but because the Broadway season -- there isn't a show on Broadway which I really want to see and haven't yet, so if not for the off-Broadway stuff I'd be going without. Recently, I've seen a lot of plays that have had varying degrees of critical fawning but to my eyes are falling a little bit or a lot short, though unlike things like Harper Regan , which I walked out of, or Detroit , which collapses into inanity if it doesn't start there, are interesting failures. The Whale by Samuel Hunter.  So you've got this really really fat guy brilliantly played by Shuler Hensley.   We're talking 600 lbs fat.  At first, it's hard to appr...

Talk about weird, two movies today that both have Justin Long in them, and both directed by a Jamie. Not the same Jamie, but still, it's weird. Jamie Travis was the director of For a Good Time, Call... which opened quietly on a national but limited basis before Labor Day, and 10 Years, which opened on Friday, and is written directed by Jamie Linden. Of the two, 10 Years is clearly the better. It's an ensemble movie with a lot of talent playing nice together in small roles, along with Justin Long you've got Channing Tatum and Max Minghella and Rosario Dawson and Anthony Mackie and Scott Porter and Nia Vardalos and Mimi Rogers and Ari Gaynor (more coincidence, also in For a Good Time, Call..., ) more. It's about a high school's 10th reunion, picking up as the characters start to fly and drive their ways in that morning and then have the wee hours breakfast after. You can fill in a lot of the characters from that basic description. There's the drunk guy with a...

First, let it be said that the episode of Glee after the Super Bowl was simply dreadful. I've watched some Glee, and it can achieve real heights. This contrived boring uninteresting filled-with-bad-musical-numbers of songs-nobody-would-care-about episode was nowhere near anything good. A shame. I saw three theatrical pieces in DC this past weekend. Black Watch is a play I've been wanting to see very badly. It played in New York a year-and-a-half or so ago to rave incredible reviews and multiple extensions. It's two week tour stop in DC at the Shakespeare Theatre was the main impetus for heading down. It wasn't quite like the Shakespeare-shaped cookie cutter in the gift shop wasn't more interesting than the play, but closer than I'd have expected considering the reviews, that's for sure. The Black Watch is a Scottish military regiment which dates back to the 1880s and which served in Afghanistan. This play is too many things and not enough of any of t...

The next stop on my quest to catch up with the January closings on Broadway that I'd really miss seeing was In The Heights, which opened almost three years ago after a successful run off Broadway, and won some Tony Awards in 2008. Alas, the things it's best at are things I don't appreciate in a musical as much as some other people, and the things I do appreciate, this one isn't so good at. It's one of the very few musicals to make it to Broadway at least so far that's heavily influence by latino culture, with a bit of african-american mixed in. The eponymous heights are the latino areas of Washington Heights, the part of Manhattan near to the George Washington Bridge which looms over the street scene, which centers on a bodega and a car service. Nothing wrong with that, exactly, just that if you took away the latino rhythms and characters you'd be left with a story that could as easily have been done and probably was for that matter with a Jewish tailor s...

So Saturday night I decided to try and catch one more of the January closings on Broadway. In The Heights sold out as I was heading in to the TKTS line, so I opted for A Little Night Music. A Little Night Music is a Sondheim show from 1973, with book by Hugh Wheeler and directed originally by Hal Prince. The same group would collaborate on the masterpiece Sweeney Todd a half dozen years after, and had done Company three years previous. It's probably best known as the show which includes Send In The Clowns. I'd seen once before, in a NY City Opera production at least 15 maybe even 20 years ago. I do not consider it his best show or score. Send In The Clowns is a classic kind of because it became a classic. After that you've got the occasional line or two that's hummable and memorable, but Company or Sweeney Todd or Assassins all have more. It's three hours inspired by Bergman's Smiles of a Summer Night, which is longer than that movie, way longer than W...

Yesterday I spoke about my Next to Normal trip on Sunday. Now to talk about the 2nd part of my theatre day. With the blizzard on hand, the offerings at the TKTS discount booth were more robust for the Sunday evening shows than might be expected, but I stuck to my game plan and got a seat for the play Time Stands Still, in part because I didn't think it fair to ask another musical to compete with my fresh memories of Next to Normal.  Time Stands Still is a drama with a strong pedigree. Playwright Donald Margulies has a half dozen Tony and Drama Desk nominations, I recollect him best for Collected Stories, an All About Eve protege drama set in the publishing world. Director Daniel Sullivan has been directing high gloss dramas for a long time, my first of his I'm Not Rappaport with Cleavon Little (Blazing Saddles, Tony for Pippin) and Taxi's Judd Hirsch some 25 years ago. It had opened in a limited engagement on Broadway earlier in the year, closed, they decided it was so go...

I ventured into Manhattan on a blizzardy day to see some Broadway shows that are closing in the coming weeks. January is always full of closings as shows attempt to cash in on the big Christmas week crowds and then get out of Dodge before the winter doldrums.  I quite liked the number from Next to Normal on the June 2009 Tony Awards show and decided I needed to see, it took only 18 months and a closing notice to get around to do it. In the end, instructive to see in the same week a show that won a Pulitzer Prize and lasted 700 performances with Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson , which lasted maybe 17 weeks. There are reasons.  For one, an emotional component. Next to Normal is about a family trying to deal with a mother's mental illness. She can't let go of the memories of a son who died young, to the extent that she has a hard time dealing with her daughter. The daughter is struggling to have a relationship with a boy she met at school within the context of a crazy mother who isn...

The most recent shows I saw were Mojo, a play from the late 1990s finally getting a full DC production at the Studio's 2nd Stage, and Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson, an unsuccessful transfer from LA's Center Stage/Kirk Douglas and NYC's Public, which closes this weekend. Mojo was an energetic and well-acted production of a play that isn't so hot, you ask me. Some seedy club, some two-bit singer who might be signing with another club, a dead body of one of the club owners. Important unanswered questions hang over the stage. Lime, how will staying in the club overnight and not reporting the body help the current manager to keep the club Why is this two-bit singer important? All ending on a very strange note of drift. Well, it's worlds better than the inert Parlour Song , also written by Jez Butterworth, but still not good. Butterworth also co-wrote with his brother the rather more successful script for the movie Fair Game , and a newer play of his Jerusalem opens on ...

Haven't spoken about theatre much on the blog, other than discussing Pinter a week or so ago.  And have to say, a good play seems much harder to fund than a good book, a good movie, a good comic book.  There was A Life in the Theatre, an old David Mamet play revived as a vehicle for the wonderful Patrick Stewart (sf community knows him best as Captain Picard of STTNG) and TR Knight of Grey's Anatomy who is not familiar to me. Yikes!  What was this doing on Broadway?  The two play an old actor and a younger doing rep theatre in a small way in a backwards place, no surprise that the younger actor will end up overtaking the older. It is very small. The bad theatre jokes -- think props that don't work or flash back to Miss Piggy in Veterinarian's Hospital -- are wan. It's beneath great acting. Its limited Broadway run ended early as audiences steered clear. No surprise there, that some critics gave mixed or even favorable reviews does.  Mamet's newer and better play...

I don't get Harold Pinter. And I don't get Mike Leigh. With Pinter, I'm not sure there's anything to get. Long long ago I remember sitting through every miserable minute of the film version of Betrayal, and I've never come across anything to make me think I'm missing anything. My most recent experience was with a twin-bill at the Atlantic Theater (playing at Classic Stage Company) of his The Collection & A Kind of Alaska. The Collection is a play about a tryst that may or may not have taken place. The costume design was wonderful. The characters were non-entities, so who really cares if there was an affair, or if that one was cuckolded or if this one was cheating. The only drama comes from the fact that it's Pinter, so that the characters are all speaking in a most stentorian way full of portent and meaning. But there is no meaning. A Kind of Alaska is inspired by the work of Oliver Sachs. Someone wakes up after being out of it for 29 years wit...

I ended up going on a bit about Animal Kingdom, let's so some quick takes. Sunday August 22 I saw Eat Pray Love at Clearview's Ziegfeld and then The Other Guys at the AMC Lincoln Square, Aud #4/Olympia. Other Guys had higher highs and lower lows and Eat Pray Love was more consistently mediocre, so I'd give a slight nod to seeing The Other Guys. The best parts of Other Guys are in the first half hour and are often genuinely good and genuinely funny. There's good chemistry between Will Ferrell and Mark Wahlberg. But as many of the reviews I read quite accurately point out, in the last half hour the movie becomes too much that which it is supposed to be spoofing, and I tuned out totally and completely. It was good to see Michael Keaton with a decent role in a mainstream movie. Where did he go? Eat Pray Love isn't without its pleasures. Julia Roberts, exotic settings, lush feel, eye candy in some ways. But it's flat. The script is kind of flat. I don't...

I mentioned here that I had gone to DC to see some theatre, and I'm overdue to talk about what I saw. Why do I go to DC to see theatre when there's so much in New York? Well, it's hard for me to make time for it when I'm home because there's so much else calling on my time, and then when some show I really regret not seeing makes its way to DC, I see it as my little last chance theatre and try and see if I can force myself to take advantage of the opportunity Before It's Too Late. So this trip was a BITL for The Four Of Us, a show about writers and writing that had played off Broadway and of course has some professional relevance. And then I decided to add in a well-reviewed show called In the Red and Brown Water at the Studio Theatre, which is my favorite DC venue, and then added in a second show at the Studio that was just opening called That Face, about which I knew very little, but in for a dime in for a dollar. In the natural way of things I liked most ...

I go down to Washington DC fairly often, often doing the same things over and over again though trying at some level to always experience something new on each trip, even if it's walking down a different block. On my latest visit I decided I wanted to try very very hard to do some things recommended to me by the Washington Post . So I went to get cupcakes at Georgetown Cupcake .  Now, this whole cupcake craze has me a little befuddled.  Illogically, because I think it's crazy to pay in the neighborhood of $3 for a little cupcake.  Why do I say that's illogical?  Because we all have things we're willing to indulge in.  I pay $6.50 every so often for a slice of Juniors Cheesecake , so why not pay $3 for a cupcake.  But logically, because Juniors is really good stuff (I think so, most people I've introduced it to think so, or have sent as a gift).   But most of these cupcakes are pretty dreary, and paying so much money for a bad cupcake?  Like this little place in Sunn...