Urban Amusements

Homepage About Us Contact Us News Urban Amusements
Earthwatch Letter From Mexico Hungry? Advertising Rates Garden Cuttings
Herbal Remedies Under the Flight Path Birdwatcher Letters to the Editor



More gems than dogs on August days

by Marty & Martha Roth

    "Ghost World" was by far the best of this month's films, an enjoyable, unpretentious rendering of Daniel Clowes's comic book in which supernatural events occur matter-of-factly in the humdrum lives of a couple of late adolescent girls living in some sprawling unnamed suburb and hating it. Thora Birch is superb as Enid and Scarlett Johansson makes a beautifully complementary Rebecca.
    The film begins with their graduation from high school. The friends kick around during the summer, waiting for their lives to start, except that Birch's character is too weird and oppositional to hold a job that would let her pay her half of the rent on a shared apartment. Instead, she meets Seymour (Steve Buscemi), a middle-aged loner whose eccentricities engage her interest (nothing else in her life does). Director Terry Zwigoff ("Crumb") has a delicate touch with postadolescent angst and a keen appreciation for the everyday-bizarre.
    The most important thing we can say about "Apocalypse Now Redux" is don't believe the title. Far from reducing the bloated original, director Francis Ford Coppola's re-cutting has replaced a lot of footage, including an idiotic subplot involving a family of French rubber planters who refuse to accept their country's defeat at Dien Bien Phu and cling to their way of life, dressing for dinners cooked by their Vietnamese chef and smoking their evening pipes of opium. We suspect that this artificial enhancement is an augury of the future, as cinema imitates DVDs and classics are repackaged with all the wrong turns and second thoughts stitched back in.
    The first hour of almost four retains a lot of power, but the film sags after the death of Mr. Clean (Larry Fishburne). Our heads hurt from this powerful immersion in the brutal folly of the Vietnam War (it was a terrible idea to restore more footage of Dennis Hopper's improvised ranting—although it struck the truest note of the '60s in the film). Still, Vittorio Storaro's cinematography makes this one of the most gorgeous films we have ever seen, though we can't help wondering whether even a work of this splendor is worth the ecological havoc its shooting must have caused in the Philippines.
    "Hedwig and the Angry Inch" comes in third. Maybe we're too old for a real, retro rock 'n' roll movie like "Hedwig," but we do appreciate drag performers, and John Cameron Mitchell and Miriam Shor are fantastic, genre-defining players. We liked the bright flashing lights and fabulous clothes, wigs and makeup—the sense of hanging on to images that hurt. But even the shiniest toy has to do something or kids will get bored with it—and these kids did. Hedwig is a drag performer from Berlin who had a sex-change operation to make it easier to get an American visa and join her GI lover—ironically, just before the Wall came down. The operation left her with an "angry inch" of flesh where her sexual organ had been, an angry inch that becomes the rock group that hammers out its pulsing rhythms behind her hard-edged freak show. And that's all she wrote.
    "The Deep End" is an unthrilling thriller starring the chilly Tilda Swinton. Before the story goes off its own deep end and has a shady East European racketeer performing heroic acts for love of her, the narrative is pretty formulaic. Swinton, an affluent Tahoe housewife who runs a ruthlessly suburban lakefront household in the absence of her husband, becomes more and more trapped in a tight web of incriminating circumstances. This should be a film-school exercise for directors, but the editing is so sloppy and Swinton so detached from her role that no tension builds. The most amusing moment comes when Swinton's character wonders how she will tell her husband, a career naval officer, about their son's probable homosexuality and muses, "He's away for such a long time ... at sea ...."
    August of course was the month of the Minnesota Fringe Festival, and while we only caught a few productions, they assured us of the continuing high quality of festival entries. "One Night at the Opera," produced by North Star Opera, featured the talented and beautiful Baldwin sisters, Christina Baldwin Fletcher and Jennifer Baldwin Peden, in a concert that ranged from Johann Strauss to Noel Coward, with Gershwin, Weill and Bernstein along the way.
    We also admired a scrappy little theater called "Chaos Theory," which presented a difficult and intriguing script: Caryl Churchill's "The Skriker," a play about a love-hungry, child-stealing "ancient and damaged" spirit who enters the lives of two contemporary women friends. The play mixes dance, fairy tale and horror story, and director Rebecca Easton filled the stage with swirls of movement while her performers, especially Elise Kuklinca and Ann Carter, convincingly evoked the magic of worlds in collision.
    Occupying the lower depths of August were Tim Burton's "Planet of the Apes" and Takeshi Kitano's "Brother." "Sleepy Hollow" had a few flashes of the fantastic quirkiness that endeared his early films to us ("PeeWee's Big Adventure," "Beetlejuice" and "Edward Scissorhands), but "Apes" is a loud and insipid B movie that wallows in stale acting and Hollywood technology. The great point of pride in this remake was that all the apes had individual makeup designs, compared to the standard apishness of the original, but we found this a drawback, only making them look like the cats and foxes of Saturday morning cartoons. Even a dying Charlton Heston talking about the hateful power of the gun failed to amuse us.
    Kitano is also a filmmaker and performer we've enjoyed in the past but his recent film about the Yakuza coming to L.A., enlisting the brothers and taking on the mob struck us as bone-stupid with style. His signature snail pace further exposed the emptiness of the film, as the camera held for long takes on the immobility of Kitano's face. We know it's the Yakuza because lots of fingers are lopped off in the course of the film.
    The reason we could only see a few productions at the Fringe is that Martha had to go see and hear Seattle Opera's new production of Wagner's complete "Ring" cycle, and it was an amazing week of theater that came close to what Wagner must have had in mind when he imagined opera as a synthesis of the arts: musical, visual and dramatic. Under the direction of Stephen Wadsworth, the four operas, "Das Rheingold," "Die Walkurie," "Siegfried" and "Gotterdammerung" formed a complex and moving whole.
    The tenor Alan Woodrow, set to make his U.S. debut in the role of the hero Siegfried, severed his quadriceps tendon the day before, so he had to sing from the side of the stage, wearing a hip-to-ankle immobilizer. Fortunately his understudy, who sang in the two later complete cycles, acted the role which involved a lot of physical business. It was odd to have him lip-synching but we soon accepted it, and Woodrow's tenor was big and beautiful enough for the difficult music. As the Valkyrie Brunnhilde, Canadian soprano Jane Eaglen proved once again that she has no equal as a Wagnerian singer but, unfortunately, all the stage presence of a deep freeze.
    At Park Square Theatre, four golden-voiced Minnesotans gave an excellent performance of "Jacques Brel Is Alive and Well and Living in Paris," the show by Eric Blau and Most Shuman that introduced Brel's songs to the English-speaking world. Two of them, "If You Go Away" and "Carousel," have become standards, and the show has been playing somewhere for probably the past thirty years. Brel himself died in 1978, before his 50th birthday, but the exuberant melancholy of his music will live for a long time. Christopher Bloch stood out in the small cast, but Molly Sue McDonald, Natalie Moore, and William Gilness were also excellent. We hope Park Square revives this evening; it has a winning team, with these performers and Jon Cranney's direction, Rick Polenek's useful cabaret set, terrific musical direction by Anita Ruth, Myron Johnson's choreography and Michael P. Kittel's lighting design.
    "The Car Man," the latest work by British showman Matthew Bourne and his performing company Adventures in Motion Pictures, gave an enjoyable finish to the month. Not exactly a version of Bizet's "Carmen," although it used much of the familiar music, "Car Man" told a story closer to "Bus Stop" crossed with "The Postman Always Rings Twice," entirely through movement. The agile, sexy and enthusiastic performers were also such skillful actors that we were never in the slightest doubt about what was going on. Bourne's lavish production filled the Ordway's enormous stage and his dancers' huge talent spilled out over the audience. Bravo!
Back to Top