WHAAAAAAAAT THEEEEEEE FUUUUUUUUUCK?!?!?!?!
Continue reading “CONQUEST OF THE UNIVERSE OR WHEN QUEENS COLLIDE (La Mama)”
Author: Steven Strauss
MARCEL + THE ART OF LAUGHTER (Theatre for a New Audience)
Given the relatively newfound popularity of 90-minute plays, double-bills of one-acts have largely gone out of style. What hasn’t faded over hundreds of years of theatre history are works that mix farce and slapstick, with a plethora of self-aware winking thrown in.
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SUBURBICON: When Someone Other Than the Coen Brothers Makes a Coen Brothers Movie
Tony Kushner once likened a complex play to a lasagna. Much like an Italian-minded chef, a writer should try to stuff as many different ingredients as possible into their constructions to expansively deepen the flavor, yet not too many as to make the overall structure tumble under its own excessive weight – a tenuous balancing act that requires precise hands to create such complicated concoctions.
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LOVING VINCENT: Loving the Animation, Not-Loving Everything Else
I voraciously seek out any and all innovatively-designed animated movies, especially those that deviate as much as possible from the customary 3-D block-graphics popularized by Pixar, Dreamworks, Disney, Sony, etc. Given the inextricable relationship between content and form, if artists change the form that these stories take, it will open up vastly different worlds of content, desperately needed in the increasingly-tired animated sector (as I previously detailed here).
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THE LEGO NINJAGO MOVIE (Charlie Bean, Paul Fisher, Bob Logan)
The LEGO Ninjago Movie lacks the crucial comedic focuses of the first two installments in this quickly-expanding series.
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THE LAST DETAIL (1973), and a Hal Ashby Requiem
While watching 1973’s The Last Detail in preparation for Richard Linklater’s impending sequel Last Flag Flying, I realized that no one really makes FILMS like Hal Ashby anymore, which is surprising given our current age of relentless derivativeness (at best, “homage”). It’s undeniably a testament to the distinctness of Ashby’s work on multiple fronts:
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HEARTBREAK ON A FULL MOON, A Chris Brown Playlist
A mere week after writing this dissertation about the current differences between albums and mixtapes, along comes Chris Brown’s Heartbreak on a Full Moon to further defy these binary categories.
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Ty Dolla $ign’s BEACH HOUSE 3, and an Album vs. Mixtape Debate
What’s the difference between a mixtape and an album?
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MEASURE FOR MEASURE (Elevator Repair Service)
The Elevator Repair Service’s take on Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure theatrically literalizes textual fidelity.
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OH MY SWEET LAND (The Play Company)
In The Play Company’s site-specific production of Amir Nizar Zuabi’s’ Oh My Sweet Land, the thematically-resonant specifics of the site(s) contribute more to the play’s intended effect than the actual text.
