"It's Certainly Cheaper Than a Tranny"

Last night on my way to safety meeting, I went to turn right and suddenly my car wouldn't go anywhere. I thought maybe I had accidentally bumped the car into neutral, because that's what it felt like. I shifted the car into neutral and then into drive, but the car wouldn't move. I shifted into reverse: nothing. Back into drive: nothing. So I shifted it into neutral, got out and pushed the car into a parking lot, sort of steering the wheel and pushing at the same time. I don't know how I got the thing over a curb by myself, but somehow I did. Then I walked over to the bar (it was only about a block away) and got two of my friends to help me push the car the rest of the way into the lot.
All of this shifting meant that I was pretty sure it was the transmission that was the problem. So I had the car towed to my usual mechanic. They open at 8:00a on Saturdays, so I figured I'd leave them the key with a little note in their night drop-box and then call them around 8:15 or so to tell them about the car.
They called me at 8:05 to tell me that it wasn't the transmission at all, but the right axle, which they could fix for $200.00. "Certainly cheaper than a tranny," he said. He called me again at five minutes after nine to tell me that it was fixed and I could pick it up whenever I was ready.
So no new-car shopping for me this week. My car is just fine. It is a piece of junk, of course, but as the AAA man wisely said to me as he hoisted my Honda Civic onto his tow-truck, "They all have their problems."
True story, tow-truck man. True story.

Working

As you probably know, I do not watch television (except for the occasional American Idol episode. Okay all of them.) But a couple days ago there was some television news worth sharing. The cast for the new 90210 spinoff has been revealed:

All the way to the right: my friend from college Michael Steger.

So exciting!! Hopefully this means that my boy is about to make it big.

Tiny Update

Rehearsal still going very well. Slight hiccup today with one of the actors (who decided not to pay attention to his call time). But still a very good rehearsal. I am having a blast. And it isn't even that good of a play.

The class is going well too. All of the students passed the quiz on Hedda, which means all of them read it. My only problem here is: what on earth am I going to teach them tomorrow? I honestly don't know. Some of the days on my calendar we have nothing to talk about. I guess that means I let them go super-early.

Scary Movie Night #2 & #3

In 2005, a guy named David Lee Fisher decided to remake the 1920 German film Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari. Fisher's remake used all the Expressionistic sets from the original silent, but recast the film with English-speaking actors and reshot the film with a script that he penned himself. Now, I have never seen the original film in its entirety, but I suspect I would like it a lot. Not just because of the cool set and lighting effects, but--I imagine--because of the very intriguing plot twists and psychological drama. For 1920, I am sure this was all extremely cool. The 2005 remake, however, is terrible. The dialogue is stilted and awkward. The characters are far prettier (very Los Angeles) than they ought to be. The pacing is too slow. And there is a serious disconnect between the (admittedly, very cool) old two-dimensional set behind the actors, and the bad acting and false emotion in the three-dimensional world we're asked to focus on. All that to say: stick to the original movie. The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, 2005 edition, is a total mess.

Tobe Hooper's Poltergeist, however, still works like gangbusters. The effects are not as cool as we're all used to in 2008, but this film from 1982 boasts some great performances, a fantastic, troubling score by Jerry Goldsmith, and some disgusting, really awesome sequences. There were plenty of times when I was completely, totally creeped out, and at least three or four times where I was scared out of my wits. I really liked it.

Last night, I missed the first film from Scary Movie Night #3 because of rehearsal, but all signs point to its having been really bad, anyway, so I'm not too sad about it.


But after the bad movie, we all sat down to watch Alejandro Amenábar's The Others, which I had never seen. It's a spooky film set in the early half of the twentieth century in a house where Nicole Kidman lives with her two kids, who have some kind of photo-sensitivity where they can't be in the light or they will get really sick. So all the curtains have to be shut all the time. It's creepy and it works for the most part, but it's not quite as scary as it could be. I expected to really jump a bunch of times, but there are only one or two big jumps, and the film ends up being more of a mystery that the audience needs to figure out à la The Sixth Sense. Amenábar's film is not so much a rip-off, but it has similar elements and it seems to welcome comparisons. Anyway, The Others was alright.

Midsummer & Script Analysis

For some reason, I don't feel guilty just sitting down and watching one movie after another at home if other people are doing it with me. Lately, because my roommates are obsessed and because the rest of the grad students stuck in Tallahassee have next-to-nothing to do, we have been celebrating scary movies at my house. Shutting off all the lights and watching one and then another scary movie and then all dispersing into the nights thinking about creepy children and ghosts and mysterious spiritual entities. But before I get to the rest of the scary movies I've been watching, a small report:

I am teaching a class right now. It meets Monday through Friday, five days a week, from 11:00a-12:15p. The class period is a little long, but so far I am having a lot of fun in the class. All of the students are theatre majors, so they have been trained to be talkative and share their opinions on things. The class is called Script Analysis, so it is supposed to be a class where we learn how to analyze plays. I don't know about you, but I am of the opinion that you don't need to learn HOW to do this, you need to DO it. So, in this six-week course, we are reading twelve plays. That's two plays a week. And I am giving them a quiz each time I assign a play, to make sure that they read the play. I have also made the quizzes worth 45% of their grade. So they basically HAVE to read, or they will not do well in the class. Since the most important thing in the class is whether they read or not, I wanted to put a little teeth in my request that they do all the reading.
Anyway, the class is going well so far (we have only met two days as of yet). Today we talked about Gustav Freytag and his analytical model of exciting force, rising action, climax, falling action, catastrophe, etc. Best part of today: one of the students mumbled something to her friend and I called her out on it. She apologized and then I said, "No, it's not that I don't want you to talk, I DO want you to talk; I just want everyone to be able to hear it." Turns out, she had mumbled something about Bambi. Everyone giggled and then I got the idea to have the class make Bambi fit into Freytag's analytical model. Of course, it does. So we talked about Bambi for at least fifteen minutes. And we all laughed. And then I asked them to talk about Iron Man in the same way. We debated it. The class was alive and excited. It was really fun. And they completely understand Freytag's model. It was really cool. And tomorrow, we're talking about Hedda Gabler. I am having a really good time.

Speaking of good times, I had my first rehearsal for A Midsummer Night's Dream last night. This is going to be fun for sure. I haven't directed anything in over a year (since last February!) and I'm not sure I totally remember what I'm doing, but half the cast met last night and we started working through the lovers' story and the Oberon/Titania plot. Our rehearsal was three hours. I was never bored. And I even got them on their feet at one point and started blocking them. I only have five weeks to put this show together, but I think I can manage. The actors are all quite good and all excited about the show. Some of them are still a little skeptical of me, but they will come around.

Horror Movie Night!

A bunch of the grads who are still in Tallahassee had a horror movie night a couple nights ago and we rented two movies I had never seen. First: Roman Polanski's 1968 feature Rosemary's Baby (love that poster!) which I had ridiculously never seen. It was shocking and horrible and the ending was creepy and disgusting. I completely loved it.

And then we rented Teeth, the comedy-horror film about a woman who has vagina dentata, or to be blunt: she has teeth inside of her vagina. They are some seriously powerful teeth, too.

Teeth is hilarious in a "2 girls 1 cup" kind of way. It's totally tasteless, vile, relentlessly campy, and
very very funny. The film tries very hard to be a feminist piece, as well. For starters, the heroine's vagina only attacks men who attempt to sexually abuse her in some way, which is cool. The film isn't about hating men; it's about how much men hate women and feel like they can take advantage and abuse them whenever they feel like it. The vagina dentata attacks when the woman is being sexually violated. And she is sexually violated constantly through the film. It got me thinking about how much women have to put up with. How constantly, women have to battle men who think that they have earned the right to exert sexual power over women. Teeth really upset me in a way, because of this.

Of course, I am analyzing the film rather more deeply than it is probably asking to be analyzed. I mean, Teeth is also crass and shocking, totally hammy and utterly shameless. There are some ridiculous shots of pseudo-vaginas: a tree trunk with a wide opening, a dripping scorpion's mouth, etc. And lots of making fun of groups that preach abstinence. But be warned. Men get their penises cut off in this film and the filmmakers are not afraid to show severed penises in their movie. Teeth is not for the faint of heart. I thought it was hilarious fun, but I could see how it could be very troubling to some.

I Have So Much Time!

Well, not really, but still. I wish I could spend every day watching at least one movie. It would be great.
I spent most of today painting the new roommate's room. His name is Ryan and he is an MFA director here and a very good friend. The last roommate Tim had done a little damage to the walls of the room, so it needed to be repainted and we spent the day painting it a lovely rich brown color called "Crunch Granola." We're all about the Earth.

BUT, I wanted to talk abut the movies I've seen recently, because there have been some good ones.

First off, I saw Jon Favreau's blockbuster Iron Man on Sunday morning for $4! And I really liked it. Those kinds of movies are not usually my kind of thing (Transformers, Spider-man 3, and even better ones like Casino Royale) because they don't have enough action in them. They get bogged down in sentiment and romantic subplots. The studios have also tended to cast very young actors in the parts lately, as well. And I lose interest when Superman and Lois Lane look younger than me. For my money, Iron Man fell into none of those traps. I thought it was nicely plotted, interesting, and never boring. There were about two minutes total of sentimentality. It wasn't always action-packed, but the times when stuff wasn't blowing up were filled with suspenseful moments and good acting. I liked this movie a lot. I know it made millions of dollars last weekend and hardly needs my blessing, but I think it deserves its millions. I'm a fan.

And a couple days ago I watched Edward Dmytryk's film noir (I've been on a kick lately) Crossfire. It's a kind of whodunit story where we know who the killer is after the movie is about half over. The rest of the film is about catching the bad guy: trapping him in his own lies. The film stars Robert Ryan, Robert Mitchum, Robert Young, George Cooper, and Gloria Grahame. What's cool about this film (from 1947) is that it's a movie about anti-semitism. Robert Young has this fabulous monologue near the end of the film that talks about hate and how it is like a loaded gun waiting to kill someone. I was worried that it was going to be preachy (like 1947's Best Picture winner, Gentleman's Agreement) but it's not; it's really great. I got a little teary-eyed during the speech, because it's about anti-semitism specifically, but it's also about homophobia or racism or prejudice of any kind that makes people hate one another instead of allowing people to live freely in the way they wish to live. Robert Ryan (who plays the film's main bigot) got an Oscar nomination for his work in the film, but Mitchum and Young are both great and Gloria Grahame is fabulous. My favorite performance in the film is a much smaller one from a much lesser-known actor, though. His name is William Phipps and he had a long career in television after this film, but his work in Crossfire is excellent and I wish he had made more films.

I also caught the great Lindsay Anderson's first film This Sporting Life, which stars Richard Harris as a British footballer who knows all the rules on the field, but can't seem to figure anything out off the field. It's a classic angry-young-man film and a really great one. I totally loved it.

Auto Insurance Drama, Spiderwick & George Washington

So I spent a lot of time yesterday trying to figure out some auto insurance. Turns out, if you let your auto insurance lapse, you have to pay a penalty (what they mendaciously call a surcharge) even if you go with a new company. That is dumb. Anyway, I changed auto insurance providers yesterday. I was with GEICO, but I am going to save $115 every six months with AAA, so I am changing. It's the exact same coverage for so much cheaper! I am all about it. I am having the laziest week! When the most exhausting thing you do all day is change auto insurance providers, you are definitely living the high life in Talla-classy. Today I am going to Costco. That might be the most exciting thing I do all day.

Two movies:
I finally saw David Gordon Green's 2000 feature George Washington and it is flat-out brilliant. I completely, totally loved it. If you haven't seen it, it's a poetic meditation on a small, impoverished town in the South, following five kids as they poke around during a summer. The film also features Paul Schneider (who I loved so much in The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford and Lars and the Real Girl). The film has one real gasp-worthy moment that works brilliantly, but mostly its just a slow, poetic piece of cinema that I was completely in love with after the first ten minutes. Not to be missed, if you haven't seen it. Green's next feature, All the Real Girls is on its way to me right now, so I will review that one soon.

I was cool with The Spiderwick Chronicles for most of its length. It's an unpresuming kid's film intended to scare and be sweet, starring Freddie Highmore, Sarah Bolger and Mary-Louise Parker, with Nick Nolte, Seth Rogan, David Strathairn, Joan Plowright (!), and Martin Short. It's a cute story about goblins and fairies and a magic book and all of this business that we are all very used to. The trouble with Spiderwick is that it does not play by its own rules. This didn't bug me at all until the film's last three minutes, when Joan Plowright turns into a little girl and walks off with her dad to fairyland. It was a sweet moment, but completely impossible in the world of the film. One of my companions said "But it's a Nickolodeon movie! There are fairies and goblins. And you won't accept that she turns into a little kid?" My answer to that was that I will accept a film on its own terms. In the world of Spiderwick there are fairies and pig-demons that eat birds and griffins and salt has magic powers and all that. I buy into all of that, but when a film tells me that there is no time travel and that certain things cannot happen because there is no time travel and then someone goes back in time without explanation, I cry foul. The trouble is that once I start thinking about something that makes no sense in a movie, I start thinking about other things that make no sense in the movie. And then I start to get bugged by the movie's shoddy storytelling. All this to say that Spiderwick is not that great, really.

P.S. I still like Freddie Highmore a lot. I haven't really liked many of his movies, but I still like him.

Sunburnt Barbary

I've been nursing a sunburn the past couple of days, but I've been working too. I have almost finished my syllabus for my Play Analysis class that I begin teaching on May 12th, and I finished cutting the script for Midsummer, which has its first rehearsal on May 12th.

I've also watched a couple films. First, Torch Song with Joan Crawford as a crazy bitch actress/dancer/singer woman who hates everyone and is mean to everyone. Then a blind piano player walks into her life and everything changes. And by everything, I mean nothing. But she loves the piano player. It's a weird movie because it isn't that interesting, and the whole blind love-interest thing comes across as more token than anything else. Director Charles Walters doesn't understand points of view, either, and he gives us Joan's and then her lover's and then the other people in Joan's world. Because of this we never really feel for Joan and her bitchy self; she just comes across as a gorgon. There is a bizarre blackface number that might be worth the price of a rental, though. Joan sings a song called "Two-faced Woman" in blackface with a chorus in blackface and I have no idea why.

P.S. Marjorie Rambeau was nominated for Best Supporting Actress for her role as Joan's mother in this movie. Again, there is no explanation that suffices. The part is no more than a cameo and Rambeau's acting is hardly remarkable. So strange.

Today I watched Henry Hathaway's Kiss of Death from 1947 with Victor Mature and the late Richard Widmark. It's a fairly good noir about a crook who decides to go good and rats out some other criminals, specifically Tommy Udo, a grinning, giggling murderer of old ladies played by Widmark. The plot of this film is cool and Hathaway does a great job with both light and tension, but the dialogue doesn't quite sparkle, the plot lags near the halfway point, and it felt a tad predictable at times. Still, the performances are really superb. Victor Mature gives what is probably his best performance (the scene when he first squeals is extraordinary) and it gets better the more I think about it. Richard Widmark has the flashiest part and his is the one you really remember when the picture is over. This one is definitely worth the rental if you're into film noir.

In Old Chicago

Watched this old flick from 1937. Henry King's In Old Chicago is a kind of un-integrated musical flick about Ma O'Leary and her boys Dion and Jack. One is a gambler and runs a club in the seedy part of town (where all the buildings are made of pine... oh the foreboding) and the other is the mayor and a straightedged kind of guy. Ma O'Leary is played by Alice Brady and it's a lovely performance. The other actors are Tyrone Power (so pretty) as Dion, the gambler, his love interest Alice Faye (of course) who is a night club singer and his partner, and Don Ameche, who plays the brother. Power, Faye and Ameche would all come together again for the following year's Alexander's Ragtime Band (read my review of that here).

Anyway, the plot of In Old Chicago is not really important, but Alice Fay sings a bunch of songs (including "In Old Chicago," bizzarely sung in Old Chicago). These are interspersed with Irish-styled family songs sung around the O'Leary hearth. While these songs are mostly forgettable, the high point of the film is the big fire in 1871. It is directed splendidly. There are seemingly thousands of people on this set, and the fire looks real: none of this easy, fake-looking CGI stuff from nowadays. Of course, Mrs. O'Leary's cow knocks over a lantern, and that's how the fire starts, but there are amazing explosions and the fire burns the entire city. The shots of this are truly awesome. The movie goes total cheese in its final moments, but the big fire in this movie makes In Old Chicago worth the rental.

Since I'm Almost Done with School...

I've been watching some movies lately, along with going to recitals. There's about one every day this week and next, it seems.

So I added Robert Z. Leonard's The Divorcee with Norma Shearer to my queue recently. It's packaged as a "pre-code" Hollywood film, but it's from 1930 so, of course, it's incredibly tame by today's standards. The film follows Norma Shearer as she gets married and then divorces her husband because he's a philandering jackass. Well, first she cheats on him to settle the score and then he divorces her because he can't deal with his manhood being impugned. The film had me at this point. Norma Shearer calls her husband on his sexist double standards and then divorces his ass. Then she goes about town with numerous other men and tries to have a little fun. The movie winds down with her realizing that her life is empty (all that partying: so exhausting!) and meeting an old flame who still pines for her. She is planning on marrying him and moving to J-pan, but then his wife (who was tragically disfigured in act one) comes into the scene and Norma Shearer realizes what she really wants to do is not to marry the man who could make her happy, but find her husband (now living in Paris) and try to make a go of it with him again. The film ends happily (of course) with the sanctity of marriage being upheld, etc, etc. It's a lot like The Love Parade in this way--and similarly disappointing. Still, Norma Shearer is fabulous. If you've never seen her in anything, you're missing out. She won an Oscar for The Divorcee and it's because she played against type with this role and she's superb in it.

Today I continued my 1984 kick by watching Francis Ford Coppola's gangster-flick-slash-musical-revue film The Cotton Club. The movie stars Richard Gere, Gregory Hines and Diane Lane. As I said, it's a gangster film about the Cotton Club, so interspersed with the Godfather-style murders and meetings and kidnappings are musical numbers starring very light-skinned black people. It's a weird movie anyway, but it's treatment of race is a little odd, to say the least. Gregory Hines is second-billed in the movie, but the Hines plot and the Gere plot intersect only very rarely, and I began to wonder why we were following his story at all. Obviously, the film means to follow a white man and a black man as they navigate the politics and seamy underbelly of the Cotton Club, but the film is only truly committed to its white lead, and whenever the film turns its focus to its black lead it feels like an afterthought. This is so pronounced that The Cotton Club is really two movies, and because it divides its time between the two, the film never really gets off the ground. There is at least one really good scene in the picture, but it's mostly eye candy. The period is beautiful to look at and Milena Canonero's costumes are gorgeous. But that is pretty much all The Cotton Club has going for it.

I Received This Email Today:

The final clearance of your manuscript has been approved!



Congrats!

Jack Tyndall
Manuscript Clearance Advisor
Academic Program Specialist
Florida State University
Office of Graduate Studies

**
But I am in a bad mood nevertheless. We had convocation today in the School of Theatre, where they recognize the graduates for the year. I just couldn't get into it. I spent the whole time wanting to escape. I felt awkward and silly.

Ace in the Hole

I previously wondered aloud why Kirk Douglas wasn't nominated for the Best Actor Oscar in 1952 for his excellent work in William Wyler's film Detective Story, but I got my answer today.

That's because I finally watched his other film from the 1951 awards season: Billy Wilder's Ace in the Hole. Kirk Douglas clearly gave two of the best performances of 1951, because he is fucking brilliant in Ace in the Hole. The film also happens to be stellar: bold, unforgiving, beautifully filmed in a film noir style even though it follows a newspaper man, not the typical leading man for a noir film. Ace in the Hole is an extremely intelligent satire of media and reportage. Except that it isn't funny. Ever.

Instead it's pointed and smart, skewering sensationalist news media, their corrupt tactics, and the people who buy into their kind of journalism. The DVD of Ace in the Hole was only recently released by the Criterion Collection, so this gem of Billy Wilder's oeuvre has gone largely unseen. Now is the time to check it out. It's a great film with some great performances.

Integration?

Okay, I just got back from a conference on musical theatre, so I am feeling kind of updated on the scholarship and there's something I don't understand: What is all the brouhaha about integration about?

As the story goes, Jerome Kern & Oscar Hammerstein's Show Boat is sort of integrated, but the true integration of songs and dialogue didn't happen for good until 1946 and Richard Rodgers & Oscar Hammerstein's Oklahoma!, after which musicals all became integrated until the advent of the "concept" musical with Hair in the 1960s. Except, of course, that none of this is true. Oklahoma! did not mean the end of unintegrated musicals, nor was it the beginning of integrated musicals. With all of these scholars trying to pinpoint the precise origin of the integrated musical, it seems to me rather odd that none of the papers I heard at the conference concerned a form that I consider had been integrated much earlier than Oklahoma!: the movie musical.

Tonight I watched Ernst Lubitsch's The Love Parade from 1929, and I defy anyone to tell me that this is not an integrated musical. Each song comes out of the plot and furthers the plot. There are character songs, the obligatory love duet (this one is called "The Love Parade," but is actually rather unengaging) and even a couple of comedic numbers from the secondary characters. I don't get it. Rodgers and Hammerstein could not possibly have thought up this idea on their own. All they would have had to do was go to the cinema. Lubitsch was doing this stuff in late '20s!

Back to The Love Parade, though. This movie is occasionally cute and sometimes very funny, but it is mostly a sexist mess with a strange performance from Maurice Chevalier (who was inexplicably nominated for an Oscar). This flick is nowhere near as good as Harry Beaumont's The Broadway Melody from the same year. The Love Parade follows the romance of the queen of Sylvania (Jeanette MacDonald--I never really liked her) and Count Alfred of Sylvania (Chevalier). She is the queen and he is the prince consort, so he doesn't feel like much of a man. She orders him around and he is to love and obey her. It is a role-reversal film, where the woman rules the roost and commands him and he has to stay home and be bored all day. I thought at first that the whole thing was ironic and funny. How droll, I thought, that we're making fun of men's expectations for their wives by putting a man in that position and seeing how ludicrous it is to expect one partner to stay home all day and do nothing while the other partner goes about her day running the country. I soon figured out, however, that this movie was serious. There was no ironic comment. The Love Parade is about a woman learning her place. The film ends with the queen promising that Alfred shall be the king and run the affairs of state and boss her around as much as he wants. It's sort of bizarre, really. The songs aren't much either, I have to say, though The Love Parade is gorgeous to look at and the comic characters are very cute and have two very cool numbers.

So much

I haven't posted in a while and I apologize. I was in New York and when I got back to Tallahassee I returned to a whole ton of work that needs to be done by Monday morning at 9:00a.

First things first: New York was fabulous. I had never been and I completely loved it. I visited with my friend Joe and my old friend Kristen who I hadn't seen in four years. The conference was really fun too. I don't know much about musical theatre that is older than 1980 and the conversation was mostly situateed in the time period before that so I learned a lot. It made me want to commit much more to investigating musical theatre as I continue to write. My paper was very well received. It probably won't be published or anything, but it was cool to give a paper and get as much positive response as I did.

Theatre I saw while in New York: The Adding Machine, a musical version of the play by Elmer Rice. It was absolutely superb. I also saw Passing Strange, which is a kind of rock-concert/musical narrative about a black man's coming of age in Culver City, Amsterdam and then Berlin. It totally rocked and I loved it. And last but certainly not least, I saw a concert version of Paul Simon's musical The Capeman at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. The music from The Capeman is sensational, heavily influenced by Puerto Rican music and was performed by nineteen singers and the Spanish Harlem Orchestra. Paul Simon himself even came out to do a song and then again for the encore. It was awesome.

Now that I am back I am busy writing a paper that interrogates the notion of Latino "identity." It has to be standard length (15-20 pages), and it is due Monday morning. But there are lots of other things to do here, too. Our new play festival at FSU, New Horizons, is going up this weekend and I want to attend the various nights of that, and the Technical Directors have a huge party in the woods tonight which they call Meatfest. It's basically an enormous barbecue in the middle of the fucking forest. So I am trying to finish my paper, but I am a little more interested in having fun. Graduation is April 25th and I will be done with most of my work on the 15th. I want this semester to be over!

One more thing: I may be directing a Shakespeare show in Tallahassee this summer. A bunch of the students are getting together and planning it and I am meeting with them about it later today. So we shall see...