One of my favorite sounds to hear in a theater after a movie ends is no sound at all. This silence usually marks a truly special shared experience, like a hushed reverence.
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A Musical SOS
10.5 months ago, I made a New Year’s resolution to listen to every single album that cracked Apple Music’s Top 30, plus any others released by big-name artists.
JESUS HOPPED THE ‘A’ TRAIN (Signature Theatre)
Every year, I track all the major off-Broadway theatre company’s seasons to determine whose deserves to be crowned the best of, currently, 2017-2018. It’s still too early to declare a winner, but based on its three revivals this fall, the Signature Theatre looks like the odds-on favorites.
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TORCH SONG (Second Stage)
I’ve long differentiated actors from performers.
CONQUEST OF THE UNIVERSE OR WHEN QUEENS COLLIDE (La Mama)
WHAAAAAAAAT THEEEEEEE FUUUUUUUUUCK?!?!?!?!
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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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Write All Nite 