EXTRA CRITICUM

Irving Berlin & Lady Gaga: Some themes never get old

Just back from seeing Twyla Tharp's Come Fly Away, her Frank Sinatra tribute. Midway through Act II, an Irving Berlin song started playing and I found myself thinking of Lady Gaga, of all things. This song, in particular:

01 Just Dance

Hear the similarities?

Famous Faces: What to make of 'em?

OK. So celebrity and the oddities associated with it, has been a frequent topic on this blog. [See: Point Counterpoint: Licata & Teco on Fame, for example] However, after seeing Sex and the City 2, it dawns on me there is a golden rule about using famous faces in a film. Or perhaps there ought to be.

Famous faces populate Sex and the City 2 in a fun way through a number of cameo appearances by the likes of Liza Minelli, Tim Gunn and Miley Cyrus, all of whom appear as themselves. Then, in an odd and somewhat jarring twist, Penelope Cruz makes an equally brief cameo in a party scene playing... a character! Not herself, but a character. A character we never see again.

What's up with that?

The first Lilly of spring: women playwrights recognize themselves (as fabulous)

Five o'clock on a Monday on an overcast May day; Broken-field running down 42nd St. to get to Playwrights Horizons at the appointed time. Spring is the time when all your invites and dates get so compacted that you'd have to bend the time-space continuum to get everything in: the reading of a new play at Coyote Rep; the benefit for WOW on E. 4th St. On this overcast day I picked the Lilly.

A month ago, The Lilly wasn't even an idea; but May's also the time when nominations and awards are announced. Of the plays racking up honors and mentions, and trophies and afterlifes in the regionals, that clamoring silence you heard was when they announced the names of plays written by women. 

Which TV Finale Is Your Favorite?

With LOST giving it up Sunday night in a pop culture gorge-fest, naturally I started to think of other notable finales.

The best, of course, the mother of all final episodes, is MASH. Moving, funny, incredible and sometimes painful (if your heart doesn't break for Hawkeye and the "chicken", you are dead), it rounded out the moving, funny, incredible and sometimes painful (particularly in the last couple seasons when Preachy took over from Funny in the writer's room and minor characters were given major roles too often - there's a reason that some of them were written to be minor - Klinger is only funny/interesting in a dress - out, not so much of either).

Each character got an ending that fit them (such as Charles, who had always been the music snob, could no longer listen to his records without remembering the quartet of musicians who died from a roadside bomb), and nothing felt off or rushed. 

Werner Herzog Tribute Mash-Up

Chances are if you're my friend and interested in film, we’ve exchanged words about Werner Herzog. He seems to come up a lot. Rather than me writing something about him, I thought it might be more interesting if I asked these friends of mine to write one or two sentences about the man or his work and then mash up these responses. Here’s the result.

Gr. (Please, help me help you, give me a synopsis...)

So, I'm reading scripts for a competition.  The competition requires a twenty page sample. 

They don't say WHAT twenty pages, true.  And that's cool.  Any twenty pages from a play, I'm cool with that.

Hey, we've been nominated for a Kreativ Blogger Award

Anne Mini, of the fabulous Author! Author! blog has nominated EXTRA CRITICUM for the Kreativ Blogger Award. Thanks, Anne! Anne's a wonderful writer and one of those few generous souls who isn't content to just enjoy the fruits of her own gifts; she devotes herself to helping other writers blossom through her savvy editorial and business advice. And now she's nominated us for this award so we luvh huh even more!

Two requirements of accepting this honor are: revealing seven things E.C. readers may not know about us and nominating seven other wonderful blogs. So here goes:

From the sublime to the sublime: Tennessee Williams at 7:30, Jackie Beat at midnight

Last night was one of those what-a-great-town-this-is kinda nights. My friend Evan and I started out at the Laura Pels [B] at 7:30PM seeing Roundabout's gorgeous production of Glass Menagerie, then headed over to the Westway Diner [C] where we met Andrew after his own performance for a quick dinner, then walked a block and a half to the Laurie Beechman Theatre (underneath the West Bank Cafe) [D] to catch Jackie Beat's show. Actually, I left something out. The evening started at 6PM when Evan and I threw down a couple of shots of Quervo at Happy Hour at Posh [A], a cute little gay bar whose name is apparently meant to be ironic. (In the Alanis Morissette usage, of course.)

All of it -- tacky gay bar, Judith Ivey in a classic Tennessee Williams masterpiece, greasy diner food and completely inappropriate and wildly irreverent drag humor -- was within easy walking distance. How great is that? Here's a little map of our trajectory to drive the point home. (Just think of this as a little bloggy Powerpoint expression.)

Shameless Plug: I want you to see my film when it screens at USC

If you're going to be in Los Angeles, Monday June 7, I hope you'll join us for the LA premiere of We Pedal Uphill: Stories from the States at USC. More info on the film at: wepedaluphill.com

More info on the screening (and to make reservations) at the USC Film School website. Cast members Paul Outlaw (an E.C. contributor) and Carl Palmer will be joining me for a Q&A.

Killer Line-up for BREVITY FEST II

Make your reservations today! The last Brevity Fest sold out. Don't be left out in the cold. 

Read This If You're an Artist and Go to MoMA More than Once a Year

[cross posted at http://alifesworkmovie.com/blog/]

The other day I took a break from transcribing an interview for the film and went to MoMA with my friend Danica N., a graphic novelist. We were eager to see the William Kentridge show before it left. (The show is amazing, and I suspect as you're reading this, it's no longer there.)

I Am SO 1976

I’ve been looking back at my film commentary for this here blog, and it didn’t surprise me that most of the films I wrote about were not current releases. “So what’s up with that?” you ask.

Here's what’s up with that:

The Joy and Luxury of Continuous Work in an Ensemble: God, how I miss it :(

So I had this old Mac G-3 tower that had been cluttering my closet for years. I'd been putting off taking it in to Tekserve to have all the files on it transfered to DVD. Don't know why. Maybe because it ways a ton? Who knows? Anyway, I finally took it in and had them retrieve all these old files. And as I put the DVD into my computer to see what I'd been missing all these years, a big chunk of my history came flashing before my eyes and ears in the form of HTML for old long-discarded web pages, MSWord docs of rehearsal notes and schedules, press releases, outlines of shows and a handful of mp3s of tracks recorded for a CD we put out in nineteen-ninety-something...

It was the opera company we'd built and nourished for over a decade in Boston back when such things as a nine-month developmental rehearsal process for a new show didn't seem insane.

Well, I'm moving.

It's been decided and it's been put into effect.

I'm moving.

To Los Angeles.