EXTRA CRITICUM

Cartoon: Accentuate The Positive

Athena Film Festival opens Feb. 9

Thanks to our pals at Indiewire for drawing our attention to this inpsiring festival trailer. If you're going to be in Manhattan in February, head uptown to Barnard College for the Athena Film Festival - a celebration of women and leadership.

Is it just me? Or is this poster creepy?

And why would I not be surprised if the entire book to this musical contained not one instance of the word "died," as in "he or she died," rather than the more socially acceptable yet ultimately vague and pointless verb "pass." Homosexuals sometimes pass for straight. Some Jews pass as Gentiles. But when we breathe our last breath, we die, we don't pass.

Is there a backlash against single-camera sitcoms?

Salon's Kartina Richardson doesn't like this season's live-audience sitcoms (few critics do), but she's hoping for a rejuvenation of the format:

When we watch these shows, we are part of an audience in a way that we aren’t in the more intimate viewing experiences that single-camera shows offer us. The theater-like form of the multi-camera show requires us to embrace artifice in an era where performance and deliberate creation are hidden.

As our society continues to create new ways to communicate while we remain in individual isolation, the multi-camera sitcom might be one of the last places many of us participate in a communal viewing experience (even if it’s a simulated one). Movies are increasingly viewed at home and hardly anyone can afford to go to live theater. As I struggled through “I Hate My Teenage Daughter,” I felt a tingle of that camaraderie that arises when we’re part of an audience.

Top 100 sitcom episodes of all time (a list in progress)

After months of bugging acquaintances for suggestions, I've finally started posting my list of the “100 Best Sitcom Episodes of All Time” at my personal blog. Each episode will get a separate blog post, counting backward toward No. 1.  A list of the programs revealed so far is here. 

I'll be posting the entire list at Extra Criticum, but please visit my blog if you're interested in the meantime. And I welcome comments from the insightful E.C. audience!

Here is the introductory post:

When I decided to make a “best sitcom episodes” list last year, I had two goals in mind. One was to make the case for the sitcom as an art form to people who were unfamiliar or dismissive of it. The second was to contribute to the making of a canon, or a consensus set of episodes that critics should be familiar with so that we have some shared points of reference.

A Boy Who Really, Really Liked His Horse

So…War Horse.

It’s a juggernaut. It won six Oliviers. It won five Tonys. It won Best Play on both sides of the pond. It has been made into a giganto new movie by Steven Spielberg that was nominated for two Golden Globes. It didn’t win any, but hey, you can’t have everything.

“Jooooooooooooooeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy!!!!!!!”

A New Novel Gives Actors a Hug

If creativity is an inheritable trait then Esther Freud certainly benefited on that account.  The 48-year old British novelist is the great-granddaughter of Sigmund, yes that Sigmund; daughter of the famous painter Lucien Freud (who died last July, age 88); and sister to fashion designer Bella Freud.  Esther Freud’s seventh novel, Lucky Break, was published recently to mostly positive reviews. 

Before picking up the pen Ms. Freud put on the greasepaint.  She studied at the Drama Center London where after two years she was informed that she lacked sufficient talent and was asked to leave.  She soldiered on and worked as an actress.  It is that experience that Freud draws on as she portrays the ups and more frequent downs of an actor’s life in Lucky Break.  The novel follows a group of actors from a sadistic drama school, where “they break them down to build them up,” to their various career paths.   

Seven years after drama school Ms. Freud began to write.  Her first novel, Hideous Kinky, depicted her itinerant childhood in Morocco with her counterculture mother, and was made into a film starring Kate Winslet as the mom.

The Color of Our Audience

I have a dream that we will one day live in a nation where our choice of play will not be based on the color of the skin of the actors on stage but by the stories told and the questions grappled with by the playwright.

Saw Katori Hall's Mountaintop yesterday. It's a wildly ambitious play. And I'm really glad I went. Even though I'm not black.

The Show Must Go On (Hawaii style)

[Ed note: This post was co-written by Chuck Babbitt]

We stay up too late Saturday night and Lisa awakens too early and can't  get back to sleep.  That afternoon she has the final showing of the play The House of Blue Leaves.  Her head is as noisy as the chattering early birds outside the window, wondering how she can spend a day on the boat and still get back, prepare and do the play on so little sleep.  We are planning to take our old friends Rick and Debbie Reynolds out for a day of cruising and dolphin watching  on the other side of Oahu.  When I wake up I can feel that Lisa has been awake for a while.  It's really best that she stay home and relax, rest her voice, exercise a bit, run her lines, and prepare to become the loud and energetic New Yorker Bunny Flingus for the last time.  I head off to meet the Reynolds and Lisa, with the pressure off, falls back asleep.

When Lisa wakes I am at the helm of the Willa Mae III off of Kahe Point with Rick and Debbie watching the playful Nai'a, Hawaiian spinner dolphins, put on a spectacular show.  Planning to take a jog, she put on shorts, a sports-bra and t-shirt and heads upstairs. She pours a cup of coffee and sees the flowers are dry.  She puts fresh water in the vases and hydrates our little Christmas tree.  Stepping out on the lanai the spatial arrangement of the flower pots catches her eye. " It would look better if I swap these two plants and put the tall one down there" she thinks.  As she moves the pot from the railing it catches the string of Christmas lights and the next pot over drops, falls, and crashes onto her left foot, the terra cotta pot shattering into jagged pieces. 

Photo Essay: Mr. Brainwash Art Show 2011

A few months ago, word got out that street artist (and sort of accidental Shepard Fairey protégé) Mr. Brainwash (of questionable credibility) was taking over an abandoned warehouse on LaBrea in LA.

Given my interest in urban exploration and abandoned buildings, I was intrigued.

Interview with Filmmaker Aimee Madsen

In the spring of 2010, a Google Alert mentioned a documentary in production about Paolo Soleri that wasn't A Life's Work. I was curious and reached out to the filmmaker, Aimee Madsen. We've communicated since about each others' work and supported each others' efforts the way filmmakers do, or at least should. I'm thrilled that she agreed to answer a few questions about her film, Before Form.

Tell me about your documentary, Before Form.

The Portrait of a Failed Playwright

“It’s a strange, compulsive business, the urge to make plays.  To act in them, or write ‘em, or produce ‘em.  It’s no use appealing to reason.”  That’s Henry James counseling a friend in Author, Author, a novel (2004) by British writer and retired literature professor David Lodge.  I just read this well-told tale about the failed playwright and posthumously esteemed novelist Henry James (1843-1916). 

James, frustrated at midcareer with his fiction’s lack of popularity, tried to find success and improve his income by turning to the stage.  Oh, what fools these mortals be!