Author: Woody Weingarten

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Pick! ASR Film ~~ “The Crime Is Mine”—French Screwball Satire Carves Up Justice, Feminism

By Woody Weingarten

Screwball comedies satirizing traditional love stories peaked in the early 1940s — after having begun to gain popularity during the Great Depression.

New examples of that romantic comedy sub-genre would manage to pop up every few years thereafter, but they’d usually fail to be as funny or polished as those of yesteryear.

But now comes The Crime Is Mine, a French-language satire (with subtitles, of course) that stands up with the best of them. The one-hour, 42-minute film time-warps back to 1930s Paris and provides a Duisenberg-speed storyline that repeatedly twists and turns as it focuses on a sexy, penniless actress who figures she can become famous by confessing to a murder she didn’t commit.

 … “The Crime Is Mine” ain’t subtle, but delightfully tasty it is …

Scheduled for release on Christmas Day by Music Box Films, the flick lays onto the marvelous comedy, an equally marvelous carving up of feminism, the class system, show biz antics, and courtroom machinations.

In the final analysis, though, within weeks after watching the movie, you’re likely not only to have forgotten slices of the plotline but exactly who is who, especially when it comes to lesser characters such as the judge, the prosecutor, the police inspector, and a boyfriend (even though all are amusing) and exactly what who said to whom.

Madeleine, played by Nadia Tereskiewicz, is tried for murder in “The Crime Is Mine, a screwball comedy.

Nadia Tereskiewicz merrily plays blonde bombshell Madeleine Verdier, a talent-less wannabe who desperately craves stardom and her close-up. She’s aided in her quest for fame by her brunette BFF and starving garret roomie, Pauline Mauléon (played by Rebecca Marder), a young lawyer with no other clients who launches a campaign based on the notion of self-defense against sexual assault.

Supporting their skillful acting chops is Isabelle Huppert, a French icon who, while chomping on the scenery, portrays silent film star Odette Chaumette, the real killer turned blackmailer.

All the main characters, each of whom is self-serving, mug a lot (except the murdered producer) — and every now and then, Madeleine’s combined flightiness and earthiness may remind a filmgoer of Renee Zellweger playing Roxie Hart in Chicago.

 … Rotten Tomatoes gave it a 100% rating …

François Ozon’s direction of this adaptation of a 1934 stage play is almost as perfect. Rotten Tomatoes gave it a 100% rating with 22 credits so far.

Best buddies and roomies — Madeleine (Nadia Tereskiewicz) and Pauline (Rebecca Marder) — hatch a scheme to beat the system in “The Crime Is Mine.”

With humor ranging from dry to frivolously farce-like, it’s virtually impossible not to like the film—whether or not you can relate to kooky but intelligent women who easily outmaneuver the men in their lives.

The Crime Is Mine ain’t subtle, but delightfully tasty it is — a cinematic soufflé that never falls.

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ASR Senior Contributor Woody Weingarten has decades of experience writing arts and entertainment reviews and features. A member of the San Francisco Bay Area Theatre Critics Circle, he is the author of three books, The Roving I; Grampy and His Fairyzona Playmates; and Rollercoaster: How a Man Can Survive His Partner’s Breast Cancer. Contact: voodee@sbcglobal.net or https://woodyweingarten.com or http://www.vitalitypress.com/

ProductionThe Crime is Mine
Directed byFrançois Ozon
Run DatesOpens December 25, 2023
VenuesTBA
Reviewer ScoreMax in each category is 5//5
Overall4.25/5
Performance4.25/5
Script4/5
Pick?YES!
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PICK! ASR FILM ~~ ASR Film: Hite Documentary Details Woman Sexologist’s Rapid Rise and Exile

By Woody Weingarten

Cancel culture wasn’t a concept in the 1980s, but slinky sexologist Shere Hite became victimized by something exactly like it.

The feminist author of a 600-page 1976 blockbuster, The Hite Report on Female Sexuality, was not only lambasted as a man-hater because of her writings but partially because, being broke, she’d posed nude for Playboy and modeled for paperback covers and ads that objectified women. She was slut-shamed even though that phrase hadn’t been coined either.

Hite became so distraught at her treatment, mostly at the hands of male critics who felt threatened, she ultimately fled from the states to Europe, mainly Britain and Germany, and relinquished her American citizenship.

… “The Disappearance of Shere Hite” is fascinating throughout …

Now, The Disappearance of Shere Hite, an R-rated biopic by Nicole Newnham, resurrects the researcher’s life by cobbling together frequent rolling texts of her basic material (and a voice-over by actor Dakota Johnson) with sometimes fuzzy newscasts and archival footage, next to interviews with the Missouri-born writer, her ex-lovers, her detractors, and her friends and supporters, including Kate Millett, author of the groundbreaking Sexual Politics, who bemoans Hite’s public erasure and self-exile and points out that the academic social scientist could no longer earn a living in the United States.

Shere Hite as she appears in new documentary. Courtesy of Mike Wilson. An IFC Films release.

The nearly two-hour documentary strikingly shows Hite being ambushed by tabloid-type television journalist Maury Povich, causing her to leave the interview almost as soon as it started (with the interviewer’s aide forcibly trying to stop her), as well as her haughtily blowing smoke in talk show host Mike Douglas’s face, and trying to cope with a rude, all-male Oprah audience that couldn’t wait to take pot-shots at her research.

It further connects disparate items such as Anita Bryant attacking gay rights, a conference of the National Organization of Women (NOW), Anita Hill testifying at a Supreme Court confirmation hearing that Clarence Thomas had sexually harassed her, Hite’s neighbor and KISS co-lead singer Gene Simmons reflecting on her New York parties that collected endless celebrities, and a James Bond poster for the movie Diamonds Are Forever with two sexy women flanking Sean Connery (Hite had posed for both, one featuring her signature strawberry blonde hair, the other with tousling pure blonde tresses).

Disappearance, which is being distributed by IFC Films, also builds a sense of a whole woman by stitching scenes of raw but lovely sexuality with staged images of women with tots, women cooking dinner, women strolling.

The film was written by director Nicole Newnham, who’d co-directed the Oscar-nominated Crip Camp, an amazing, feel-good 2020 doc that had a 100% Rotten Tomatoes critics’ rating after 99 reviews. That flick managed to link a summer camp for the crippled to both the American disability rights and civil rights movements, making sure to note along the way that the disabled are also sexual beings.

The Hite Report on Female Sexuality — which had started as a post-grad thesis at Columbia University — was based on questionnaires filled out anonymously by 3,000 women. Hite, an admitted bisexual, defended the anonymity of her interviewees by insisting the women wouldn’t have been honest had they been required to list their names because they feared negative reactions from their male mates and other men.

That approach, however, gave major ammunition to vilifiers who claimed her methodology was flawed.

The tome drew as much public attention as those by Kinsey and Masters & Johnson and earned a ranking as the 30th best-selling book of all time. It became a key element of feminist history by stressing that most women felt unsatisfied sexually with their male partners, that women achieved orgasm through clitoral stimulation and masturbated often, that rampant infidelity existed, that 95% of women faked orgasm, that sexual equality was possible, and that few people (men and women) knew much about the female genitalia.

Despite her instant best-seller and subsequent titles (including her first follow-up, The Hite Report on Men and Male Sexuality) that were believed to have advanced the so-called Second Wave of feminism, Hite, because of the extended backlash, never reached her goal of overcoming both gender and class bias — even after having sold 20 million books overall.

Shere Hite. Courtesy of Mike Wilson. An IFC Films release.

The sex educator was criticized heavily for virtually everything she peddled, especially such statistics as 84% of women being unsatisfied emotionally and only 13% of women still loving their husbands after two years of marriage.

Whether you think Hite an innovator or fraud, The Disappearance of Shere Hite is fascinating throughout — and offers viewers an opportunity to see how she flaunted her body and flamboyant costumes at the same time as it provides dramatic insight into her original, creative mind.

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ASR Senior Contributor Woody Weingarten has decades of experience writing arts and entertainment reviews and features. A member of the San Francisco Bay Area Theatre Critics Circle, he is the author of three books, The Roving I; Grampy and His Fairyzona Playmates; and Rollercoaster: How a Man Can Survive His Partner’s Breast Cancer. Contact: voodee@sbcglobal.net or https://woodyweingarten.com or http://www.vitalitypress.com/

ProductionThe Disappearance of Shere Hite
Written byNicole Newnham
Directed byNicole Newnham
Production DatesOpens Dec. 1st
Production AddressLandmark Opera Plaza
601 Van Ness Ave.
SF, CA
Websitehttps://www.landmarktheatres.com
Telephone(415) 771-0183
Reviewer ScoreMax in each category is 5/5
Overall4.5/5
Aisle Seat Review Pick?YES!

 

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PICK! ASR Theater ~SF Playhouse Bends Genders in Superb “Guys and Dolls”

By Woody Weingarten

It’s virtually impossible to rate the new San Francisco Playhouse production of Guys and Dolls as anything but almost perfect, not quite as good as God’s long-running comic-tragedy, Mankind.

Sanitized, slang-spouting characters lifted from two 1920s and ‘30s Damon Runyon short stories remain extremely likeable 73 years after the Tony Award-winning musical comedy debuted on Broadway — New Yawk gamblers and gangsters mostly, but also a couple of inept Chicago crooks/crapshooters. And then, of course, there’s Sarah Brown, the Save-A-Soul missionary heroine who proves that love can conquer all.

… it’s the cast of the superb show …

Frank Loesser’s music (and lyrics) for this rendition — accompanied by a sprightly, hidden-onstage band under the direction of Dave Dobrusky — reaches the epitome of peppy, ideal for the holiday season.

Sky Masterson (David Toshiro Crane, center) and gamblers roll the dice.

Choreography by Nicole Helfer, even if somewhat derivative, hits an exciting high (with each dancer sublimely connected to all the others). Costumes designed by Kathleen Qiu appear both authentic to the era and playful (especially numbers in the Hot Box burlesque hall where Adelaide comically struts her stuff), augmented by sundry wigs concocted by Laundra Tyme—some straightforward, some whimsical.

Adelaide (Melissa WolfKlain, center) performs with the Hot Box Girls (from left, Malia Abayon, Alison Ewing, Jill Slyter, and Brigitte Losey) in “Guys and Dolls.”

The frequently revolving sets by scenic designer Heater Kenyon come across as exceptionally imaginative, a proverbial wonder to behold. Yet it’s the cast of the superb show — which is labeled a fable, but which adroitly delves into how one segment of society has trouble understanding another — that shines brightest.

Audience faces light right up, for example, each time Melissa WolfKlain, who delightfully and deliberately squeaks as Adelaide steps onto the stage, a stripper-star who’s been engaged for well over a decade to Nathan Detroit a guy whose livelihood stems from running a long-haul floating crap game. She’s particularly marvelous rendering “Adelaide’s Lament” (“In other words, just from worrying if the wedding is on or off, A person can develop a cough”), “Take Back Your Mink,” and “Marry the Man Today” (a duet with Abigail Esfira Campbell, as puritanical but seducible Sgt. Sarah Brown).

Campbell sings with a purity that can make most other vocalists jealous. She’s top-drawer on “I’ll Know” and “I’ve Never Been in Love Before,” with her acting chops becoming an ideal accompaniment to her vocals (her slinky drunk scene in Cuba is most noteworthy). Both melodies are performed, by the way, in duet with David Toshiro Crane as charismatic, cocky, sexy gambler Sky Masterson.

Crane gives the Masterson character a sturdiness that makes you believe he can change from a high-roller to a guy high on life and love. His voice, too, soothes while delivering whatever emotion is required.

Joel Roster acts appropriately oblivious to his doll as Nathan Detroit, the guy who can’t bring himself to commit to her but who’s committed to finding a gambling site somewhere.

Kay Loren, who uses the pronouns they/them, rounds out the frontline performers as Nicely-Nicely Johnson, a part usually filled by a man. Director Bill English and casting director Kieran Beccia, in fact, carefully gender-bent other actor-singers (such as having Kay Loren and Jessica Coker play Nicely-Nickely Johnson and Big Jule, respectively). They ethnic-bent, too, with Asian Alex Hsu assuming the slick role of Irish cop Lt. Brannigan.

But it takes only a minute or two for a theatergoer to fully suspended his or her disbelief and enjoy the binary and racial tampering.

Underscoring what unison truly means — musically and with a racial mix — is the praiseworthy chorus.

Sgt. Sarah Brown (Abigail Esfira Campbell, center) tries to enlist sinners for the Save-A-Soul Mission.

The major plot device is about finding a location for that dice game. The subplot feels terribly familiar: Guy meets and courts girl (because he bets the then huge sum of $1,000 that he can); girl is attracted to and then turned off by guy; guy gets girl.

Other don’t-miss tunes include the title tune, “Luck Be a Lady,” and “Sit Down, You’re Rockin’ the Boat” — and two exhilarating all-dance numbers, “Havana” and “The Crapshooter’s Dance.”

The only thing absent from this two hour-plus version is the thick, unpolished Lower East Side of New Yawk accents — along with the “deses” and “doses” — that instantly tell visitors from Boise, Idaho, that they’re in the Big Apple.

Guys and Dolls has been considered by many as the ultimate musical comedy. The SF Playhouse production shouldn’t disavow that opinion.

Dancers Chachi Delgado and Malia Abayon move fast but sensually in a Havana nightclub.

A Footnote: I’ve told the tale of my wife’s obsession with the show for about 20 years — ever since the last time we saw it.

Before watching a touring company at another San Francisco theater, she’d played the entire score for me on our piano at home. She’d followed by humming most of its tunes during our trip into the city from San Anselmo. And, as I did, she loved the show itself.

But then she inserted a CD of the score on the way back from that performance. I knew she’d adored the show penned by famed theatrical storyline fixer Abe Burrows and Jo Swerling ever since as a pre-teen she’d seen the original with Robert Alda, Alan’s dad, playing Sky Masterson — that final over-the-top fangirl action was much too much for me to handle.

Ergo, I had some trepidation about leading her to the SF Playhouse, even as a MysteryDate, something we’ve been doing for all 36 years we’ve been wed. A MysteryDate, FYI, is an almost-certain way to help keep the sizzle in a relationship — an activity you arrange without your partner knowing where she or he is going until you get there. Or vice versa — that is, one arranged with you in the dark.

After five years of working on it, not incidentally, I’ve just finished writing a book about MysteryDates, one that can double as a travel guidebook while clobbering the myth that long-term relationships are inevitably doomed to become unexciting, monotonous, or drab. The book should be available in January. Check out https://woodyweingarten.com to be sure.

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ASR Senior Contributor Woody Weingarten has decades of experience writing arts and entertainment reviews and features. A member of the San Francisco Bay Area Theatre Critics Circle, he is the author of three books, The Roving I; Grampy and His Fairyzona Playmates; and Rollercoaster: How a Man Can Survive His Partner’s Breast Cancer. Contact: voodee@sbcglobal.net or https://woodyweingarten.com or http://www.vitalitypress.com/

ProductionGuys and Dolls
Book byAbe Burrows and Jo Swerling
Directed byBill English
Musical Direction byDave Dubrusky
Choreography byNicole Helfer
Music/Lyrics byFrank Loesser
Producing CompanySan Francisco Playhouse
Production DatesThru Jan 13th, 2024
Production AddressSF Playhouse
450 Post Street
San Francisco, CA
Websitewww.sfplayhouse.org
Telephone(415) 677-9596
Tickets$15 - $125
Reviewer ScoreMax in each category is 5/5
Overall4.75/5
Performance4.75/5
Script4.75/5
Stagecraft4.75/5
Aisle Seat Review Pick?YES!
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Pick! ASR Theater ~~ Delightful, Funny Radio Play of “It’s a Wonderful Life” at RVP

By Woody Weingarten

I may not believe in angels, especially bumbling ones, but I do believe in redemption. It’s a Wonderful Life: A Live Radio Show fits snugly with that concept.

With at least two major wars raging at the moment, the charming 95-minute throwback is, because it’s mostly cornball, a major relief — and totally delightful.

Yes, this buoyant production by the Ross Valley Players — just like its classic Frank Capra holiday film predecessor starring Jimmy Stewart — toys with a viewer’s emotions. And because I welcome a good cry, I give the trip into Nostalgia Land four-and-a-half handkerchiefs.

The heart-warming, intermission-less play still focuses on George Bailey’s tale of love and loss (and, yes, of course, redemption). But this version also emphasizes wacky sound effects that might have been used by a snowbound 1940s radio station.

That makes the whole enchilada a lot funnier.

For a good chunk of Joe Landry’s play, Clarence Oddbody, George’s 292-year-old apprentice guardian angel, is more likeable than the guy he’s supposed to help. As anyone who’s ever turned on a TV set anywhere near the winter holidays knows, he’s sent to Earth to rescue George, whose father had willed him the family’s moribund savings-and-loan business.

For the three people on our planet who don’t yet know the storyline, heed this spoiler alert: Clarence accomplishes his mission by showing George, who’d been champing at the bit to get out of Bedford Falls where he grew up, what the town and his loved ones would have been like had he not been born. And by convincing the suicidal guy to do the right thing, the angel second class also manages to earn his wings because his actions also wrest control of the town from Mr. Potter (a purely evil dude who aims to deconstruct the savings-and-loan).

If for some demonic reason you’re looking to fault Adrian Elfenbaum’s direction, don’t waste your time — it’s almost impeccable. Rarely can a theatergoer be confused by rapid switches from one character to another to another all mouthed by a single actor.

Loren Nordlund takes a break from tinkering with the piano to voice one of 15 characters he plays. Photo by Robin Jackson.

Outstanding in the five-member ensemble are Evan Held, who flawlessly captures George and each of his changing emotions, and Loren Nordlund, who adeptly plays 15 parts and the piano. But the other three thespians — Molly Rebekka Benson, Elenor Irene Paul, and Malcolm Rodgers — are at most a quarter step behind in excellence.

Malcolm Rodgers reads from script of It’s a Wonderful Life: A Live Radio Showwhile Elenor Irene Paul ponders with some sound effects gadgets. Photo by Robin Jackson.

Each actor grabs items from two large tables to concoct sound effects that range from a big tin sheet that becomes a thunderous gong to sundry women’s and men’s shoes that are used to simulate footsteps. The cast’s dexterity not only eliminates the usual need for a Foley artist onstage but adds to the fun of the production by having everybody move hither and yon with fluidity.

In unison, the quintet twice breaks into the storyline to jointly present comic singing commercials — for a Brylcreem-like hair product and a soap that can clean bugs off your windshield.

Forming a chorus in “It’s a Wonderful Life: A Live Radio Show” are (from left) Molly Rebekka Benson, Elenor Irene Paul, Malcolm Rodgers, Loren Nordlund, and Evan Held. Photo by Robin Jackson.

Viewers are entertained, from before the radio show begins (via a recording of a vintage Jack Benny radio program) to a post-show sing-along (with audience participation) with the words of poet Robert Burns’ New Year’s Eve standard, “Auld Lang Syne.” Between those two events, sentimental moments are enhanced by lighting designer Jim Cave dimming the environment while costume designer Michael A. Berg ups audience pleasure with his ‘40s outfits that include vests, a bow tie, and silk stockings with seams in the back.

What also works perfectly is the conceit of the actors’ alternate personas, radio performers holding scripts, a device that helps them cover any lines they may have truly forgotten and could flub. This spin-off from the 1946 film was first performed in 1996 and has had more than 1,000 productions since then.

Ross Valley Players’ It’s a Wonderful Life: A Live Radio Show at the Barn Theatre in the Marin Art and Garden Center is clearly a holiday presentation, but its upbeat message transcends any calendar dates and should be fully absorbed by all local theatergoers (and, in fact, everyone else in our divided society).

With apologies to DC Comics and those who hate parallels, I think this Radio Play is a Superplay — dazzling as a speeding moonshot. See it!

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ASR Senior Contributor Woody Weingarten has decades of experience writing arts and entertainment reviews and features. A member of the San Francisco Bay Area Theatre Critics Circle,  he is the  author of three books, The Roving I; Grampy and His Fairyzona Playmates; and Rollercoaster: How a Man Can Survive His Partner’s Breast Cancer. Contact: voodee@sbcglobal.net or https://woodyweingarten.com or http://www.vitalitypress.com/

ProductionIt’s a Wonderful Life: A Live Radio Play
Book byJoe Landry
Directed byAdrian Elfenbaum
Producing CompanyRoss Valley Players
Production DatesThru Dec 17th
Production AddressRoss Valley Players
"The Barn"
30 Sir Francis Drake Blvd, Greenbrae, CA 94904
Websitewww.rossvalleyplayers.com
Telephone415-456-9555 ext. 1
Tickets$20-$35
Reviewer ScoreMax in each category is 5/5
Overall4.5/5.0
Performance4.5/5.0
Script4.5/5.0
Stagecraft4.5/5.0
Aisle Seat Review PICK?YES!
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ASR Film ~~ New Documentary On Joan Baez Shows Three Lives: Public, Private…and Secret

By Woody Weingarten

The documentary film Joan Baez: I Am a Noise appears to check all the right boxes, revealing three lives of the iconic singer/protester and civil rights activist.

The Public:

• Becoming world-famous overnight as a barefoot thrush at age 18 and having Time magazine plaster her face on its cover.

• Being immersed in a relationship with then unknown songwriter/singer Bob Dylan and helping catapult his career, only to have him break her heart (“It was horrible.”)

• Being married for five years to David Harris — an icon in the anti-Vietnam War movement whose outcries led him to be jailed for more than a year — and having a son with him.

• Relishing the marches where she accompanied Martin Luther King Jr. (“Nonviolent action is what I was born for”).

The Private:

• Having at least two mental breakdowns and dealing with decades of almost constant sensations of panic, depression, inadequacy, insecurity, and loneliness (she describes herself as “a personalized time bomb” and her inner life as “dark, dark, dark”).

• Experiencing midlife torment when her “career plunged into the abyss.”

• Agonizing because her two sisters, Mimi (Farina) and Pauline, distanced themselves from her, unable to live in the shadow of a star.

• Enduring racial slurs as a child because her physicist/inventor dad was Mexican and she, therefore, was “half-Mexican” and “thought I was inferior to the white kids, the rich kids.”

• Savoring a two-year lesbian relationship (“She was more feral than I”).

• Accepting the fact that her son, Gabe, still bemoans her frequent absences because she was “too busy saving the world.”

The Secret:

• Finding her father’s alleged sexual abuse (which she unearthed during hypnotherapy) “bone-shattering.”

The film stitches all that together, nearly seamlessly, yet might still leave a viewer with the sense that something’s missing, that some of the in-depth excursions into her psyche dig down only about 85 percent and that the most difficult truths are still covered. It’s not unlike checking out the headlines of a story rather than reading it all the way through.

Truly vulnerable moments are few in Joan Baez: I Am a Noise — the title, not incidentally, stems from a journal entry from her 13-year-old incarnation in reaction to being likened to the Virgin Mary, “I am not a saint, I am a noise.” Two stand out. Most moving is when she lovingly caresses her mother’s face on her death bed. Another is when she’s photographed taking off all her makeup.

But oddly absent from the film — which is distributed by Magnolia Pictures and deftly inserts Baez’s home movies, artwork (her originals as well as someone else’s animations), journal entries, and, surprisingly, therapy tapes — are:

• Her multi-tune appearance at Woodstock.

• Her two-year relationship with Steve Jobs.

• Full-song performances (the doc does contain many, many fragments).

• Humor (one rare inclusion is her imitating Dylan imitating her).

Baez, who’s followed around — almost reality TV-like — during her final tour at age 79 (she’s now 82), admits she likes being the center of attention. Even now, although she says her once pure voice has turned “raggedy.” That craving, the doc demonstrates, is evident when she dances to street drummers when no one else is dancing.

As to fame, she says, “I was the right voice at the right time.”

The singer, who attended Palo Alto High School and now lives in Woodside in San Mateo County, also enjoyed making tons of money when she was young, despite her father dissing her because he’d always had to work harder for it. She particularly enjoyed literally tossing $100 bills at him and the rest of her family.

Regarding her dad, who denied inflicting any abuse, she tells the filmmakers — Miri Navasky, Karen O’Connor, and Maeve O’Boyle (who also deserves major accolades for her editing skills) — that if only 20% of what she remembers about the abuse is true, that’s damning enough.

Baez doesn’t only point fingers at her father. She, who says she’s been diagnosed as having multiple personalities, confesses that she’s simply “not great at the one-on-one relationships — I’m great at one-on-2,000.”

When all’s said and done, Joan Baez: I Am a Noise is a fascinating portrait of somebody we thought we knew but didn’t. Though it’s possibly 20 minutes too long, it’s definitely like having a backstage pass into all three of her lives.

The film’s ending is clearly intended to show her finally at peace, but it feels too posed, too contrived, as she dances — eyes closed — with her dog as she recites lines from a Robert Frost poem that indicates she’s not done yet (“…miles to go before I sleep”).

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ASR Senior Writer Woody Weingarten is a voting member of the S.F. Bay Area Theatre Critics Circle. Contact: voodee@sbcglobal.net

 

 

Joan Baez: I am a Noise

  • Opens October 13
    Landmark Opera Plaza Cinema in San Francisco
    AMC Metreon 16 in San Francisco
    AMC Bay Street 16 in Emeryville
    Landmark Piedmont Theatre in Oakland
    Rialto Cinemas Elmwood in Berkeley
    Summerfield Cinemas in Santa Rosa
    Rialto Cinemas Sebastopol in Sabastopol
    3Below Theaters in San Jose
    Landmark Del Mar Theater in Santa Cruz
  • Opens October 16
    Smith Rafael Film Center in San Rafael
    ***** Q&A with Joan Baez following the November 3rd, 7:00pm screening!

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ASR Movies ~~ ‘King of Animation’ Unveils Slide, Spoof About Fighting Evil

By Woody Weingarten

An online bio of the animator notes that “Plymptoons Studios started in 1987 with the creation of the Bill Plympton’s Oscar-nominated short film ‘Your Face.’”

It neglects to mention that many fans regard Plympton as an animation and graphic design genius.

As if to prove them right, the 77-year-old’s credited with animating, writing, producing, and directing Slide, a new, dark, musical Western that acerbically spoofs Hollywood while feeling like an animated graphic novel.

…the flick’s worth looking for…

The 1 hour, 20-minute flick spotlights a slide-guitar player, the title character, who assumes multiple roles but always keeps his cowboy hat on.

Action begins quickly, when Slide faces off with two obese, evil twin brothers, Mayor Jeb Carver, who kills people without blinking, and Zeke, the town’s sheriff, whose niece Delilah is a plaintive Lucky Buck Saloon and Bordello hooker who craves a singing career. The brothers aim to cut down the forest, pave over Sourdough Creek, their 1940s Oregon logging town, and build a casino.

To make all that happen, the twins enlist the aid of an army of assassins, one at a time. One of Plympton’s most creative inventions, tangentially, is a contest for most evil laugh among the hired killers.

Slide, a combo hero/anti-hero who at one point runs a bulldozer, seemingly can do anything. He slips through a tornado, fights off a humongous Hellbug, saves Delilah from a torrent of bullets, stops a cadre of protesters who want to burn down the Lucky Buck, and, naturally, joins two other musicians onstage.

Plympton’s signature hand-drawn animation is stylistically sketchy and primitive but highly artistic. The result is either a viewer’s delight (along with multiple laugh-out-loud moments) or repulsion.

The multi-talented artiste, who funded Slide in part via an $85,000 Kickstarter campaign, is often considered the King of Indie animation. His skill set has resulted in his winning a second Oscar nomination, and collaborating with Madonna, Kanya West, and Weird Al (on videos and book projects),

Plympton has compared the music in Slide — in the style of Hank Williams and Patsy Cline — to the outrageousness of Blazing Saddles, one of his favorite movies.

He’s written that the flick “looks beautiful” and is “different from any other animated film I’ve ever seen.” Accurate, but spoof or no spoof, this feature film contains so much amusing but hardline sexual content that parents should keep their kids away.

According to the IndieWire website, Plympton noted last year at the Mendocino Film Festival that he likes “to try to break the rules as much as possible.” Clearly, Slide, succeeds in doing just that.

Slide has had difficulty finding a distributor, so it currently has no opening dates, and it was pulled from the Mill Valley Film Festival, where it was supposed to be screened in two movie houses this week.

The flick’s worth looking for, though — whenever animator / writer /  producer / director Bill Plympton pins down what he needs to pin down.

ASR Senior Contributor Woody Weingarten has decades of experience writing arts and entertainment reviews and features. A member of the San Francisco Bay Area Theatre Critics Circle,  he is the  author of three books, The Roving I; Grampy and His Fairyzona Playmates; and Rollercoaster: How a Man Can Survive His Partner’s Breast Cancer. Contact: voodee@sbcglobal.net or https://woodyweingarten.com or http://www.vitalitypress.com/

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PICK! ASR Art ~~ Ansel Adams Exhibit: Familiar and Not So. May Cause Goosebumps!

By Woody Weingarten

Ansel Adams’ environmental images are so distinctive you can pick them out from a room away despite their being intermingled with works from photographers his work inspired.

That’s the quickest takeaway from a new exhibit, Ansel Adams in Our Time, at the de Young Museum in San Francisco. The display, partnered with the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, provides the expected: It’s striking eye candy.

Ansel Adams (American, 1902 – 1984). Moon and Half Dome, Yosemite National Park, California, 1960. Photograph, gelatin silver print. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. The Lane Collection. © The Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust. Courtesy, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

But it also provides what may be the unexpected: It triggers your emotions. No matter how many times you’ve witnessed Adams’ gelatin silver prints, regardless of whether you’ve ever seen the actual pristine landscapes he’s photographed, you may find your skin filled with goosebumps.

You are guaranteed to find the familiar and the not-so-familiar.

The multi-section exhibit, which features more than 100 of Adams’ iconic black-and-whites, also showcases works by 23 contemporary artists, some of whom, like Mark Klett and Byron Wolfe, have created collages that offer a colorful time-capsule of Yosemite. Others’ shots were taken from spots that Adams had previously photographed. Also included are prints by 19th century landscape photographers who influenced him (Carleton E. Watkins, John K. Hiller, and Frank Jay Haynes, for example).

Installation view of “Ansel Adams in Our Time”. Photo: Randy Dodson.

In addition to Adams’ images from Yosemite, San Francisco, and the American Southwest that everyone’s most likely seen reproduced dozens of times (including that weird 1937 shot of his friend, artist Georgia O’Keeffe, and Orville Cox on the edge of an Arizona canyon) are an unforeseen photo shot through window bars, a marvelous still life of a decrepit fence and thistles, and the Marin headlands before the Golden Gate Bridge was erected.

In a press release, Thomas P. Campbell, director and CEO of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, of which the de Young is a component, gives the exhibit some perspective. It is “exceptional,” he says, “in underscoring [Adams’] brilliant legacy and the critical role that his works and others’ before him have played in safeguarding our national parks and other public lands.”

Installation view of “Ansel Adams in Our Time”. Photo: Randy Dodson.

Adams, who was born in San Francisco in 1902 and grew up in the Sea Cliff neighborhood, made his first trip to Yosemite at age 14; despite being a school dropout, he became one of the most prominent advocates of environmental protection and conservation from his bully pulpit within the Sierra Club, which he’d joined at 17.

His first photos were published in 1921, and his prints of Yosemite became popular the following year. In an attempt to promote so-called “pure” photography (which encouraged a full tonal range coupled with a sharp focus), he founded Group f/64, an association of 11 photographers, at the de Young.

Recent fires from Canada that pushed clouds of pollution into the Eastern U.S. have reminded us that existential environmental disasters are possible every day; Adams photos clearly show the beauty and majesty of landscapes that have long been threatened.

Ansel Adams (1902–1984), Clearing Winter Storm, Yosemite National Park (detail), ca. 1937. Gelatin silver print. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. The Lane Collection. © The Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust. Courtesy Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Yes, his shots are available virtually everywhere, on postcards to send back to Peoria, on calendars to give you a different kick each month, on prints and posters that can be framed inexpensively. But the originals installed at the de Young, which distinctly show not only the photographer’s technical skill but his futuristic vision, should put this San Francisco exhibit on everyone’s don’t-fail-to-see list.

*** Featured image is: Ansel Adams (American, 1902–1984), “The Golden Gate Before the Bridge”, 1932. Photograph, gelatin silver print. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. The Lane Collection, SC69746. ©️ The Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust. Courtesy, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

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ASR Senior Contributor Woody Weingarten has decades of experience writing arts and entertainment reviews and features. A member of the San Francisco Bay Area Theatre Critics Circle,  he is the  author of three books, The Roving I; Grampy and His Fairyzona Playmates; and Rollercoaster: How a Man Can Survive His Partner’s Breast Cancer. Contact: voodee@sbcglobal.net or https://woodyweingarten.com or http://www.vitalitypress.com/

TitleAnsel Adams in Our Time
Production DateThru July 23rd
Location Addressde Young Museum

50 Hagiwara Tea Garden

San Francisco
Emailcontact@famsf.org
Webhttps://www.famsf.org
Telephone(888) 901-6645
Tickets$25 to $40
Reviewer ScoreMax in each category is 5/5
Overall4/5
Aisle Seat Review PICK?YES!
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PICK! ASR Event ~~ “Bouquets to Art” Exhibit Can Delight You — And Take Your Mind Off Bad News

By Woody Weingarten

After years of watching installations become increasingly architectural and less floral, this week’s “Bouquets to Art” exhibit at the de Young Museum in San Francisco gets back to basics — bouquets.

They’re nearly everywhere: Jumbo ones. Tiny ones. Ornate ones. Elegant ones.

I’ll posit there must be a bouquet somewhere in the 113-piece exhibit to please even the biggest sceptic, so long as he or she can revel in intricate floral arrangements and classic pieces of art.

Noovobloom, Alan Do Richard Mayhew, Rhapsody, 2002. Photo by Randy Dodson, © Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.

That doesn’t mean there aren’t any whimsical creations, any weird designs, or any befuddling fabrications. There are. Just not as profuse as in pre-pandemic years.

Your delight may well begin in the main lobby, Wilsey Court, where — below an overhanging series of bouquets that’s sweet but hardly as overpowering as past displays — a group of five manikins are gaily decorated with colorful flora and leaves that have been transformed into gowns (and, in one case, a veil of flowers).

Staring is mandatory.

Midweek visitor appreciates large bouquet in de Young Museum exhibit. Photo by Woody Weingarten.

So is smiling.

…Those installations, it’s reported, were concocted by students from the City College of San Francisco…

It’s also impossible not to appreciate an installation that stands in front of a painting of a repugnant man, piano, and house — no matter which angle you look at it. The slightly scary yet whimsical floral creation of a critter from some black lagoon, in fact, is a perfect example of what the event started out being almost four decades ago: An exhibition of bouquets inspired by the art pieces before or next to which they stood, artworks that have been part of the museum’s permanent collection.

Photo — the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.

During the decades, however, florists and designers veered from that concept, using more metal, wood, and other non-floral materials in their living statuary. More interesting sometimes. Occasionally more fun. But they never smelled better than old-fashioned bouquets.

This year is fascinating, too, in that more than a few bouquets feature a variety of painted or, well, gilded lilies. It’s hard to think of a better place to spend a few hours. It’s hard to think of a better place to spend a few hours. It can truly take your mind off the week’s headlines!

Photo — the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.

A caveat: You need to hurry to see this year’s fund-raising exhibit, the 39th: It runs only through June 11. If possible, it’s suggested that you go early in the day — foot traffic is skimpier then. Traffic into the museum’s underground garage, however, may be a different story. Midweek, there were serious backups getting in, with docents warning drivers to expect lengthy delays.

Enjoy!

 

** Featured picture courtesy SF deYoung Museum. Photo taken by Gabriela Salazar.

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ASR Senior Contributor Woody Weingarten has decades of experience writing arts and entertainment reviews and features. A member of the San Francisco Bay Area Theatre Critics Circle,  he is the  author of three books, The Roving I; Grampy and His Fairyzona Playmates; and Rollercoaster: How a Man Can Survive His Partner’s Breast Cancer. Contact: voodee@sbcglobal.net or https://woodyweingarten.com or http://www.vitalitypress.com/

TitleBouquets to Art
Production DateThru June 11th
Location Addressde Young Museum

50 Hagiwara Tea Garden

San Francisco
Emailcontact@famsf.org
Webhttps://www.famsf.org/exhibitions/bouquets-to-art-2023
Telephone(888) 901-6645
Tickets$25 to $40
Reviewer ScoreMax in each category is 5/5
Overall4.5/5
Aisle Seat Review PICK?YES!
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PICK! ASR Film & Cinema ~~ New Film About Surrealist Salvador Dalí Depicts Artist’s Craziness, Torment, and Genius

By Woody Weingarten

Sir Ben Kingsley, as Salvador Dalí, portrays crazy rather well.

Kingsley also alternates Dalí’s comic and tormented turns rather well. In fact, the actor plays all the famed Spanish surrealist artist’s extreme aspects rather well in the new movie Dalíland. Without making a caricature of him.

Ben Kingsley, as Salvador Dali, is clearly ready for his close-up. Photo courtesy Magnolia Pictures.

Yet, arguably, a smidgeon over the top.

The film’s focus is on Dalí’s final years, when his octogenarian relationship with his older, tyrannical wife and muse, Gala, is disintegrating because, as one character contends, they no longer like being with one another since it reminds them “that they’re old.”

Gala, in fact, is constantly chasing her youth by bedding down with one of her boy toys, the latest being the actor then starring in the lead role of Broadway’s Jesus Christ Superstar.

Dalí, meanwhile, is relegated to voyeurism, which he apparently prefers anyway.

Salvatore Dali in his studio is portrayed by Ben Kingsley. Photo courtesy Magnolia Pictures.

The movie’s point of view stems from neither Dalí nor Gala, though — we see the one-of-a-kind genius through the eyes of James, a Dalí acolyte-sycophant then fighting to un-immerse himself from the artist’s destructive lifestyle filled with ostentatious fame, bizarre parties, and erotica.

Canadian director Mary Harron starts Dalíland with an astute bit of character self-assassination, a clip of Dalí’s hysterically funny appearance on the TV game show What’s My Line? in which he answers every question with a “yes” even if it’s totally inappropriate and must be corrected by emcee John Daly. When Dalí answers affirmatively about being a leading man, panelist-columnist Dorothy Kilgallen smoothly chastises him with the comment, “He’s a misleading man.”

That stands as a touch of foreshadowing to a deep dive into the artist’s darker aspects — to wit, the scene quickly shifts to a party in which Dalí focuses on Amanda Lear, a trans, and Alice Cooper, a friend.

Harron may have been a superb choice for the biopic. Her work-life began as a punk music journalist, immediately integrating oddball characters into her sphere of influence. In 1996, her first feature film, I Shot Andy Warhol, depicted a wannabe assassin as a feminist hero. She also directed The Notorious Bettie Page, about the famous nude pinup subject.

Kingsley, of course, won a best actor Oscar for his title role in 1982’s Gandhi.

In Dalíland, the artist doesn’t come off as the least bit likeable. Rather, he’s annoyingly egocentric (“I do not compare myself to God,” he pontificates. “Dalí is almost God”) and self-indulgent (he rents space at the St. Regis Hotel in New York City at $20,000 a month).

And he doesn’t blink at the knowledge that endless prints of his works are criminally being peddled at extraordinary prices as lithographs.

The main weakness of the low-budget, 1 hour, 43-minute film is the absence of the artist’s paintings (the producers clearly couldn’t afford reproduction rights). A second flaw is an overall lack of tension. And although the costumes are effective (especially Dali’s long, ornate dressing gowns and vests that look as if they’d been replicated from an 18th century operetta), and despite a hand-held camera frantically scooting here and there during frenzied party scenes, Kingsley’s man-of-many-faces performance is so melodramatic everything else fades into near-nothingness.

Still, considering the impossibility of accurately depicting a mad, alluring, repulsive womanizer in a story that’s not unlike watching a train about to derail, screenplay writer John C. Walsh, director Harron, and Kingsley do admirably well.

A pair of flashbacks, intended to lay the groundwork for the artist’s later behavior patterns, ironically feature Ezra Miller, who identifies as non-binary and who’s faced a series of disorderly conduct and assault charges and been treated for “complex mental health issues.”

Chris Briney as James, a gallery assistant, dresses Ben Kingsley as Salvador Dali in the film “Daliland.” Photo courtesy Magnolia Pictures.

But perhaps the strongest image in the Magnolia Pictures-distributed film — which is set in Spain and New York during the mid-1970s — is when Dalí talks of a mountain peak that “appears in my painting The Great Masturbator” and remembers that “this is where [Gala] asked me to kill her, you know.”

A second memorable cinematic moment shows the artist asking James to bring him “many beautiful asses,” followed by his having the girls dip their rumps into paint and press them onto paper so he can instantly convert the images into saleable “art.”

Everything in Dali’s mind, in fact, becomes art — even his dyed, waxed handlebar mustache, which is treated as if it’s a priceless sculpture.

My own favorite moment is the chunk of a flashback where Dali wildly waves his cane as if conducting a distorted symphony of life, seemingly a summation of what his essence really is.

A personal note: Because I greatly admired Dali’s imagination and groundbreaking work when I was young, I paid $1,200 for an early lithograph — despite my being unsure at the time that lithos were truly art, and despite my being only 93.7 percent certain that the “certificate of authenticity” was actually authentic. Dalíland not only brought back a vision of that transaction but of the artist’s most famous work, The Persistence of Memory, and my own memory-regret that my ex-wife ended up with the extremely valuable litho.

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ASR Senior Contributor Woody Weingarten has decades of experience writing arts and entertainment reviews and features. A member of the San Francisco Bay Area Theatre Critics Circle,  he is the  author of three books, The Roving I; Grampy and His Fairyzona Playmates; and Rollercoaster: How a Man Can Survive His Partner’s Breast Cancer. Contact: voodee@sbcglobal.net or https://woodyweingarten.com or http://www.vitalitypress.com/

TitleDaliland
Directed byMary Harron
Screenplay byJohn Walsh
Distributing CompanyMagnolia
Production DateOpens June 9th
Runtime1 hr 56 min
ShowingLandmark’s Opera Plaza Cinema, 601 Van Ness Ave., San Francisco;
Rialto Cinemas Elmwood, 2966 College Ave, Berkeley;
Century Regency, 280 Smith Ranch Road, San Rafael.
Reviewer ScoreMax in each category is 5/5
Overall4/5
Performance4.5/5
Script3.5/5
Aisle Seat Review PICK?YES!

 

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ASR Theater ~~ Comedic Tale Parodies Shakespeare’s Creativity Via NTC Cast of 20

By Woody Weingarten

The Novato Theatre Company has chosen to thrust us into a time machine.

At the turn of the 21st Century, now disgraced Harvey Weinstein — who almost single-handedly was responsible for a major spurt in #metoo movement affiliations protesting sexual abuse — bullied Academy Award voters enough so the film he’d produced, Shakespeare in Love, won 12 Oscars.

Through June 11 of this year, a play that was based on the film and had opened in London’s West End in 2014 is likely to impress and amuse NTC audiences.

Shakespeare in Love is an ambitious, rib-tickling show (with a few serious soliloquies) that yanks us back to the 1590s (with plenteous references to Verona and Stratford) when women were forbidden by law to be actors. That detail, of course, doesn’t stop Viola De Lesseps (adroitly portrayed by Rachel Kaiulani Kennealy with a gamut of emotions) as she falls for a struggling young playwright, Will Shakespeare, and sidesteps the edict by dressing like a man.

In the process she becomes his muse and lover, leading him to turn an unwritten comedy, Romeo and Ethel, the Pirate’s Daughter, into a polished tragedy titled Romeo and Juliet.

Welcome to comedic Gender-Bending 101 — 2023 style, with the 20-member cast featuring not only women clad as men but men in drag as well. It would be remiss at this juncture, not incidentally, to not laud time-appropriate costuming by Jody Branham, who scoured the Bay Area to borrow the necessary garb.

Shakespeare in Love toys not only with identify but with the inner mis-workings of theatrical productions (riddled with a running gag about playwriting that “It’s a mystery”). The community players manage to perfectly ham up almost everything.

Marilyn Izdebski, a tireless retiree, has produced a show that has almost too many praiseworthy participants for a reviewer to handle, beginning with co-directors Nic Moore and Gillian Eichenberger, who jointly ensure that the two-hour presentation feels shorter than that.

Chemistry between Rachel Kaiulani Kennealy’s frisky Viola and Michael Girts’ boyish, rubbery visaged Will is a marvel to witness.

Also deserving plaudits for their farcical work are Kim Bromley, whose squeaky-voiced flightiness is ideal as Viola’s nurse confidant; Michel Benton Harris, whose macho bravado is exquisite as Christopher (Kit) Marlowe, Will’s friend and rival; Michele Sanner, who turns the first Queen Elizabeth into a haughty, pasty-faced, occasionally enlightened ruler; Tomás Fierro, who embodies Richard Burbage as a selfish, volatile, bombastic benefactor; and the definitive audience favorite, fifth-grader Alexa Heftye, wildly woofing away as Spot the Dog.

The production, unfortunately, is hampered by players not being mic’d and some unable to project sufficiently to be heard easily. Also, the music (even when soft) sometimes drowns out dialogue.

In contrast, check out the marvelous mock aristocratic dancing (and joyous stomping) choreographed by Stephen Beecroft, the copious and rapid costume changes, and a bit of swashbuckling swordplay — not to mention the out-of-context and out-of-the-box references to other plays by the Bard (highlighted by “Out, out, damned spot,” an order directed at the pooch).

Although some main characters have a real place in British history, this comedy by Lee Hall (an adaptation of Marc Norman and Tom Stoppard’s screenplay) injects a playful wink hither and a mischievous wink yon.

As a result, the NTC’s Shakespeare in Love production deserves at least four winks, er, stars.

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ASR Senior Contributor Woody Weingarten has decades of experience writing arts and entertainment reviews and features. A member of the San Francisco Bay Area Theatre Critics Circle,  he is the  author of three books, The Roving I; Grampy and His Fairyzona Playmates; and Rollercoaster: How a Man Can Survive His Partner’s Breast Cancer. Contact: voodee@sbcglobal.net or https://woodyweingarten.com or http://www.vitalitypress.com/

ProductionShakespeare in Love
Written byLee Hall
Directed byNic Moore and Gillian Eichenberger
Producing CompanyNovato Theater Company
Production DatesThrough June 11th
Production AddressNovato Theater Company
5420 Nave Drive, Novato 94949
WebsiteNovatoTheaterCompany.org
Telephone(415) 883-4498
Tickets$15 – $27
Reviewer ScoreMax in each category is 5/5
Overall4/5
Performance4/5
Script3/5
Stagecraft4.5/5
Aisle Seat Review PICK?YES
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ASR Video ~~ ‘Air’ is Fun Film to See — Despite Its Flaws. Despite Its Absence of Basketball Superstar

By Woody Weingarten

I hate myself for enjoying Air, the longish film journey of how 21-year-old future basketball superstar Michael Jordan signed a zillion-dollar contract with Nike for his own line of basketball shoes.

Why? Well, because my delight, and that of millions of others presumably, stems from the feel-goodness, underdog-winningness, and Black fairytale-ness of the star-studded Amazon original — despite the movie I’m helping pay for is little more than a 112-minute, 100% unabashed commercial for the footwear company.

Matt Damon in “Air”. Photo, IMDB.

Watching the Matt Damon-headliner, I feel, is almost as bad as if I were 17 and constantly wearing Nike’s shoes, clothing, and accessories (all of which make sure no one can miss the name and/or Swoosh logo in deep red or ebony).

I gave up counting how many times the brand or shoe popped up in the fluffy comedy-drama, which also stars Viola Davis as Jordan’s mother, Deloris, and in secondary roles Damon’s longtime buddy Ben Affleck (who directed the movie) as Nike’s co-founder and chief exec, John Bateman as the corporation’s marketing director, and Chris Tucker as a mediating former player.

Ben Affleck in “Air”. Photo IMDB.

Rarely can I forget that Damon is Damon, but as usual he’s easy to watch — this time with protruding gut as Sonny Vaccaro, Nike’s consummate player-recruiter — because it never feels like he’s acting. In contrast, I always know Davis is acting, but her chops are normally so much fun to see, I don’t mind (here, she’s even better since she’s not doing her typical chewing up of the scenery).

In truth, all the acting’s as smooth as a baby’s bottom…

My guilty pleasure in liking Affleck’s kiss-kiss ode to Jordan, not incidentally, is based mostly on its high energy and high-polished entertainment. I also found it effortless to enjoy the soundtrack, which features tunes by Bruce Springsteen, Cyndi Lauper, and Chaka Khan. And pure joy can spring from a comedy scene accentuating an eardrum-busting, obscene phone conversation.

But those looking for Jordan, or his iconic ball-handling and scoring, will walk away unhappy. He’s only in a few short clips and mentioned in headlines at the end. The actor playing him in Air is hidden from sight most of the time (you do get occasional glimpses of an ear or the back of his head).

Viewers who desire ethics lessons will likewise be disappointed. The aim here seems to be to ignore philosophy and instead pay tribute to business wheeling-and-dealing, winning, and, especially, to money-making.

Viola Davis and Julius Tennon in “Air”. Photo IMDB.

Still, Air didn’t lose one bit of my enthusiasm by veering from the truth. I didn’t mind at all, for instance, that the real Sonny never traveled to the Jordan home in North Carolina, that Jordan hadn’t been the first athlete to get a piece of the merch pie (tennis players had been there, done that), or that he ultimately signed for half a million dollars a year, not $250,000.

I also didn’t care that Air deemphasized or altogether skipped over Jordan’s many controversies and difficulties, which are, to say the least, legion.

It’s probable that I’ll never be mega-rich like Jordan, who’s already netted more than $1 billion from his Nike endorsements, or like a corporate powerhouse such as Nike, whose logo symbolizes not only the winged goddess of victory but the sound of speed, movement, power and motivation.

“So what?” I say — their film was fun to watch.!

Air is still playing in a handful of movie houses around the Bay Area but it has also start streaming on Amazon Prime.

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ASR Senior Contributor Woody Weingarten has decades of experience writing arts and entertainment reviews and features. A member of the San Francisco Bay Area Theatre Critics Circle,  he is the  author of three books, The Roving I; Grampy and His Fairyzona Playmates; and Rollercoaster: How a Man Can Survive His Partner’s Breast Cancer. Contact: voodee@sbcglobal.net or https://woodyweingarten.com or http://www.vitalitypress.com/

Other Voices…

"...these exceptional actors who, with heart and talent, ever so briefly turn a story about capitalism into a referendum on the soul of a nation..."The New York Times
"Air"...is effortlessly entertaining..."NPR
“Air”...it’s old-fashioned in the best sense: solid, confident, simple, straightforward and entirely entertaining. It’s the work of an intelligent classicist..."San Francisco Chronicle
"...Air is a light, well-paced film that makes two hours fly by. It will leave you thinking, ‘wow, I can’t believe I got so invested in a pair of shoes’..."The Film Magazine
"["Air" is]...an underdog story with the greatest basketball player of all time at its heart...."USA Today
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ASR Theater ~~ RVP’s Slapstick “Native Gardens” Tackles Class, Identity, Race, & Boundaries

By Woody Weingarten

Pride & Prejudice — the Musical, the Ross Valley Players’ last show, may have set too high a bar for Native Gardens, the theater’s current offering at The Barn in Ross, to equal.

Although this comedy of errors tackles class, identity, race, the American dream, and (both metaphorically and literally) boundaries, it’s funny and thereby compelling only sporadically — except for the final 20 of the 90-minute show when the slapstick becomes consistently hilarious.

…outstanding, and in effect becoming a character, is the marvelous, flower-filled set design…

Karen Zacarías’ play is all about a garden in an upscale Washington, DC neighborhood that’s blooming with colorful, non-native flora, and a property line argument that quickly blossoms between two next-door couples: an older, white, entitled Republic pair and an upwardly mobile millennial duo of color.

Steve Price is Frank Butley, who’s been meticulously cultivating his backyard garden forever and who desperately covets the Potomac Horticultural Society’s first prize (he’s previously had to settle for honorable mentions). His physical comedy consistently draws laughs, as do his squeaks, squeals, grunts, groans, and ultra-loud outbursts.

Steve Price as Frank Butley; Eric Esquivel-Gutierrez as Pablo Del Valle; Jannely Calmell as Tania Del Valle at RVP. Photos by Robin Jackson

Also outstanding, and in effect becoming a character, is the marvelous, flower-filled set design by Malcolm Rodgers, who just happens to be married to the play’s director, Mary Ann Rodgers. In the program’s notes, she explains that Zacarías stages “our defensive urge to categorize others” while ensuring that no one in the play “comes out smelling like a rose.”

Each of the other principals squeeze whatever they can from their roles — Jannely Calmell as Tania Del Valle, a pregnant, PhD-seeking Mexican-American who tries to keep her cool but works herself into a full-fledged rage cursing in Spanish; Ellen Brooks as Virginia Butley, an elitist engineer who ties herself to a chair with a chain as a desperation protest; and Eric Esquivel-Gutierrez as Pablo Del Valle, a rising attorney born in Chile with a proverbial silver spoon, who gets caught up in monetizing the disputed strip of land at $38,000. The actors’ joint problem is that the 2016 script, which often feels like a dozen sitcoms everyone’s seen recently, is light-hearted but heavy-handed.

As for the contrived storyline, the Del Valles are pressed into fixing up their yard because Pablo has impulsively invited his entire law firm to a barbecue while the inside of the house is unusable because the Georgetown students who’d rented it had let it go to seed, so to speak. Instant crisis! Instant squabble!

Eric Esquivel-Gutierrez as Pablo Del Valle; Jannely Calmell as Tania Del Valle in “Native Gardens”

Frank — who bemoans what he’s already lost (“Oh, God, I do miss smoking…and white rice…and Cat Stevens”) — is outraged about the entire situation, particularly because it means major changes the day before the horticultural judges are slated to be there to start judging.

Much of the discussion revolves around plants native to the D.C. region and helpful to the ecosystem vs. those that aren’t “natural” but look pretty (as well as whether an oak is beneficial or a bother). Now and then, the neighbors’ fight substitutes flowers for something slightly more odious, such as whether Frank’s non-native flora are “immigrants” or “colonists.”

Meanwhile, all the protagonists are put off by the possibility of the verbal fight becoming a legal one involving the principal of “adverse possession” — more commonly known as “squatter’s rights.”

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ASR Senior Contributor Woody Weingarten has decades of experience writing arts and entertainment reviews and features. A member of the San Francisco Bay Area Theatre Critics Circle,  he is the  author of three books, The Roving I; Grampy and His Fairyzona Playmates; and Rollercoaster: How a Man Can Survive His Partner’s Breast Cancer. Contact: voodee@sbcglobal.net or https://woodyweingarten.com or http://www.vitalitypress.com/

ProductionNative Gardens
Written byKaren Zacarías
Directed byMary Ann Rodgers
Producing CompanyRoss Valley Players
Production DatesThru June 11th
Production AddressRoss Valley Players
"The Barn"
30 Sir Francis Drake Blvd, Greenbrae, CA 94904
Websitewww.rossvalleyplayers.com
Telephone415-456-9555 ext. 1
Tickets$15-$30
Reviewer ScoreMax in each category is 5/5
Overall3/5
Performance4/5
Script2/5
Stagecraft4.5.5
Aisle Seat Review PICK?----
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PICK! ASR Theater ~~ The Ni¿¿er Lovers Reclaims Black History. And What Blackness Is.

By Woody Weingarten

Lots of Black folks are trying to reclaim the N-word. Musician Marc Anthony Thompson intends to do much more in his first play — reclaim Black history.

He and co-director Sean San José, the Magic Theatre in San Francisco’s artistic director, use that stage to jumpstart the revolutionary notion by inverting some racial stereotypes while taking a hard look in the rear mirror at plantation slavery.

Together, in a world premiere of The Ni¿¿er Lovers (alternately dubbed “a new Ameriikkkan musical”), they in only 90 minutes cleverly strip away almost all the facades of taken-for-granted, anti-Black racism within the White population.

Their weapons? Sketch comedy, slapstick, and laugh-out-loud set pieces that allow the five Black actors to ham it up as adroitly as any vaudeville, minstrel, or silent film stars of yesteryear might have done.

Tanika Baptiste acts as emcee/narrator in “The Ni¿¿er Lovers” in The City. Photo: Jay Yamada.

They’re aided by amusing costumes that range from a ringmaster-like female emcee’s tailcoat and glitzy shorts to a loincloth for a rotund, bare-chested Neanderthal type with a bone in his nose. And by wonderful lighting effects and booming sound waves that attack you from all sides as if wild beasts are in the wings.

…sketch comedy, slapstick, and laugh-out-loud set pieces…

The storyline focuses on a real couple who flee from a Georgia plantation in 1848 to freedom in Boston, with the light-skinned Black wife masquerading as a White boy and her husband pretending to be her servant.

Along the way, the audience is treated to a variety of vocal and background melodies and, more importantly, insightful looks at hateful sexualizing of young females, apparent contradictions within the Christian church, and the mythologizing of Black male genitalia.

All are footlighted with sharp injections of humor (some of it totally cerebral, some as lowbrow as could possibly be imagined).

Familiar lines bring grins — or grimaces — when used in unfamiliar ways. Like when one Black character says with mock sincerity, “There were some fine people on both sides.” Or when another Black man proclaims with earnestness, “Some of my best friends are Jews.”

AeJay Marquis Mitchell, “White” sign dangling from his neck, is outstanding in “The Ni¿¿er Lovers” at the Magic Theatre in San Francisco. Photo: Jay Yamada.

Black wisdom occasionally is handed down unvarnished, succinctly illustrating the difference between races: “Do you think the White man thinks all day about being White?”

Violence is not overlooked, be it the rape of Black girls on the plantation or the vicious, unthinking slaying of White oppressors (though this voiced thought clearly cuts both ways: “You can’t kill them all.”)

Polemics and fire-and-brimstone speechifying are kept to a minimum while gags are injected to the max.

Gimmickry is also an ingredient — Blacks portraying Caucasians, for instance, carry “White” signs around their necks, not for actual identification but to heighten the satire.

To say the all-Black cast is outstanding is to both state the obvious and understate that reality.

Best of the best is AeJay Marquis Mitchell, who seems at many times to be channeling the masterful comic chops of the late Godfrey Cambridge. Right on his comic heels is Donald E. Lacy Jr., whose rubbery facial expressions can remind theatergoers of Woody Harrelson at the top of his game.

Donald E. Lacy Jr.’s rubbery facial expressions help make his comic points at The Magic Theatre. Photo: Jay Yamada.

The other three performers aren’t slouches, either — Rotimi Agbabiaka, Tanika Baptiste, and Aidaa Peerzada.

Thompson — who’s described by San José, co-founder of the new-performance group Campo Santo, as “the rare creative who knows no bounds artistically, stylistically, politically, and emotionally” — was quoted in a press release as saying that “the current climate of gender fluidity, fascination with antebellum times, stagnant civil rights progress, and my tendency to lean into farce made this the time for me to corral my thoughts and humor into an evening of musical/theatre/visual infotainment.”

He succeeded on all levels, of course.

Thompson, known for creating the musical collective Chocolate Genius Inc., has also said that he felt compelled “to look at the future, or at least the now. My kids live in a different world, and in a different way. What identity is, what sexuality is, and…what Blackness is.”

He does that — while asking the question “How can we still love through all this?”

(Additional content from the Magic Theatre, below.)

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ASR Senior Contributor Woody Weingarten has decades of experience writing arts and entertainment reviews and features. A member of the San Francisco Bay Area Theatre Critics Circle,  he is the  author of three books, The Roving I; Grampy and His Fairyzona Playmates; and Rollercoaster: How a Man Can Survive His Partner’s Breast Cancer. Contact: voodee@sbcglobal.net or https://woodyweingarten.com or http://www.vitalitypress.com/

From The Magic Theatre:

CONTENT WARNING
Check your (whyte) fragility at the door!

This show contains strong language (have you seen the title?) depictions of violence, rape, references to slavery, loud noises, singing, loud music, loud laughs, pregnancy, dildos, masturbation, gunshots, the use of every word you’re not supposed to say and more; all the things you see on TV everyday.

The Magic Theatre invites you to think before using the word in the title of the show, especially if you are of a whiter complexion. It’s a word that means different things to different people and can elicit feelings of trauma, anxiety, violence, and oppression, as well as camaraderie, identity and intimacy. Wait, which word are you thinking of?

By the way, no, the primarily non black staff at the Magic do not call the play by its full title.

Proof of full vaccination required for all in-person events.

ProductionThe Ni¿¿er Lovers
Written byMarc Anthony Thompson
Directed byMarc Anthony Thompson & Sean San José
Producing CompanyMagic Theatre
Production DatesThru May 21st, 2023
Production AddressMagic Theatre Ft. Mason Center, Bldg D 2 Marina Blvd. San Francisco, CA.
Websitemagictheatre.org
Telephone(415) 441-8822
Tickets$30 – $70
Reviewer ScoreMax in each category is 5/5
Overall4.5/5
Performance4.5/5
Script4.5/5
Stagecraft4.5/5
Aisle Seat Review PICK!YES!
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ASR Theater ~~ “Pretty Woman: The Musical”– LOL Funny

By Woody Weingarten

Tons of us have seen the 1990 movie: Julia Roberts, a hooker, charms plutocrat Richard Gere. Its feel-good offspring, Pretty Woman — The Musical, provides a fun experience, too, though not quite as charming.

The two leads (Jessie Davidson as Vivian Ward and Tony Award nominee Adam Pascal as Edward Lewis) have such terrific pipes that their singing might move you either to wild applause or tears. Or both.

…a fun experience…

And Travis Ward-Osborne as the show’s comic linchpin — playing both the cuddly manager of the Beverly-Wilshire hotel and the singing narrator — is a slapstick marvel who can move you to laughing out loud. Ditto Trent Soyster, who playfully plays his bellhop sidekick, Giulio. Both are particularly smile-inducing via exaggerated clown-like schtick. Their over-the-top tango during a dance lesson alone is worth the price of admission.

Jessie Davidson as Vivian Ward. Photo: Matthew Murphy.

Another major positive is the show’s book, penned by the late Garry Marshall, who directed the original movie version and seventeen other films, and J.F. Lawton, who’s written screenplays for every major Hollywood studio. The musical, now at the Orpheum Theatre in San Francisco through April 30, provides gags galore , with some lines repeated verbatim from the film.

Praiseworthy, too, is Jessica Crouch as Kit. She’s a singer with an extraordinary ability to hold a high note forever and a day.

A poignant, ultra-romantic scene that many are likely to label the musical’s best involves Verdi’s La Traviata, with our focus couple sitting in a box-seat ringed by plush curtains while decked-out devotees spin around them as operatic tones ripple all the way to the last rows.

The storyline, of course, has Vivian agreeing to stay with Edward for a week at the Beverly-Wilshire hotel in 1960s Hollywood and do whatever he wants, sexually and otherwise — for $3,000. She then evolves from a foul-mouthed, blonde-wigged sex worker into a Rodeo Drive clothing-clad, ladylike, brunette beauty. Shades of both Pygmalion, which itself was turned into a delightful musical, My Fair Lady, and Cinderella.

She also tries to dissuade him from leading a hostile takeover and firing scores of employees.

And yes, the whole thing’s a shallow dive into the unspeakable lives of most streetwalkers. Without becoming Chicago.

Choreography by the film’s Tony Award-winning director, Jerry Mitchell, never reaches the passion that could push this show beyond three-and-a-half stars, however. The audience is treated mostly to a chorus of dancers that frequently thrust their arms into the air, with whatever hoofing skills they may have kept in check.

The two-hour musical (plus intermission) features twenty-one numbers by Grammy winner Bryan Adams and Jim Valiance. Most are —forgettable.

Memorable, in contrast, is the show’s upbeat attitude — and, in fact, colorful costumes designed by Gregg Barnes.

The company of “Pretty Woman: The Musical”. Photo by Matthew Murphy for Murphymade.

Toward the end, there’s a moment where Edward gives Vivian a glitzy necklace as an accessory to a striking strapless red gown after saying, “Something is missing.” Taking nothing away from Jessie Davidson’s stellar performance as Vivian, what may be missing in Pretty Woman — The Musical is…Julia Roberts.

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ASR Senior Contributor Woody Weingarten has decades of experience writing arts and entertainment reviews and features. A member of the San Francisco Bay Area Theatre Critics Circle,  he is the  author of three books, The Roving I; Grampy and His Fairyzona Playmates; and Rollercoaster: How a Man Can Survive His Partner’s Breast Cancer. Contact: voodee@sbcglobal.net or https://woodyweingarten.com or http://www.vitalitypress.com/

ProductionPretty Woman: The Musical
Music byBryan Adams and Jim Valiance
Directed & Choreography byJerry Mitchell
Book byGarry Marshall and J.F. Lawton
Production DatesThru April 30th
Production AddressOrpheum Theater 1192 Market St. at Hyde. San Francisco.
Websitewww.broadwaysf.com
Telephone(888) 746-1799
TicketsFrom $77
Reviewer ScoreMax in each category is 5/5
Overall3.5/5
Performance4.5/5
Script4.5/5
Stagecraft2.5/5
Aisle Seat Review Pick?-----
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Pick! ASR Theater ~~ Ailey Dancers Bookend New Show with 2 Perfect, Decades-Old Pieces

By Woody Weingarten

It could have been difficult to keep Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s sonnet phrases, “How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.” from echoing in your brain while exiting Zellerbach Hall in Berkeley.

Your love would been aimed not at one human being but the entire Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, which had just bookended its new Cal Performances show with two old pieces that perfectly merged modern dance with classical movements, “Night Creature” (the opener) and “Revelations” (the closer).

…impossible to leave the hall without a smile on your face…

The former was a tour de force initially choreographed by Ailey in 1974 to a complex but marvelous big-band jazz composition by Duke Ellington. Its music ranged from the brassiest of brass to violins as sweet as Godiva chocolate, with dancers’ skills shining via high-steppin’ moves that might have been lifted from a hot Harlem nightspot and spirited twirling across the stage from here to perpetuity.

Sarah Daley-Perdomo, a substitute soloist, was flawless in all three movements of Masazumi Chaya’s restaging, coupled with Michael Jackson Jr. in two of them.

“Revelations” is, of course, Ailey’s signature work. It appears as the finale of many of the troupe’s programs and remains as striking today as when first presented in 1960.

Loud applause and shrieks of approval greeted the dancers as the curtain rose for its 10-tune, Gospel-loaded production, before the company’s first barefooted movements, revealing that much of the audience had seen the piece multiple times before. Each recognizable segment then drew additional hand clapping.

Especially outstanding were the grace inherent in “Fix Me Jesus”, a duet, and the coupled-off joy of the entire company in “Rocka My Soul in the Bosom of Abraham.”

Sandwiched between the first and last dance-concert segments were “Cry,” a masterful solo performance by Jacquelin Harris, and “For Four,” the only piece on the program not choreographed by Ailey.

“Cry,” a 1971 creation dedicated to “Black women everywhere — especially our mothers,” had originally been a birthday present to the choreographer’s mother. The three-parter includes jarring music by Alice Coltrane as well as Laura Nyro’s “Been on a Train,” which details, mournfully, the anguish of drug addiction. “Cry,” too, was restaged by Chaya.

“For Four,” named because it showcases two couples, was the weakest of all the entries — and it wasn’t weak at all. Still, its choreography by Robert Battle and staging by Elisa Clark paled compared to Ailey’s work, despite it providing pleasure through music by Wynton Marsalis and eye-catching costuming of removable tux jackets, black suspenders and white shirts.

Overall, dance enthusiasts were treated to sequences that evoked bliss and sadness, sensuality and sexuality, nonchalance and eloquence, passion and coolness, simplicity and razzle-dazzle — plus fantastic lighting effects, useful projections onto a rear screen, and a dancer’s ponytail hair extensions playfully bouncing with every twist of her head and body.

Everything, of course, came with splashes of virtuosity, which made it almost impossible to leave the hall without a smile on your face.

Earlier Zellerbach Hall performances of the troupe this month introduced two new dances, “Are You in Your Feelings?” — choreographed by Kyle Abraham to a soul, hip-hop, and rhythm ‘n’ blues mixtape, and “In a Sentimental Mood,” an intimate duet by Jamar Roberts (and revisited Twyla Tharp’s “Roy’s Joys,” Paul Taylor’s “Duet,” and a 1986 Ailey tribute to Nelson Mandela, “Survivors”).

Final 2022-23 Cal Performances events at Zellerbach Hall include George Hinchliffe’s Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain on April 26; Octavia E. Butler’s “Parable of the Sower,” a “congregational opera” May 5 and 6; and a recital by soprano Nina Stemme on May 7. Information: 510-642-9988 or https://calperformances.org

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ASR Senior Contributor Woody Weingarten has decades of experience writing arts and entertainment reviews and features. A member of the San Francisco Bay Area Theatre Critics Circle,  he is the  author of three books, The Roving I; Grampy and His Fairyzona Playmates; and Rollercoaster: How a Man Can Survive His Partner’s Breast Cancer. Contact: voodee@sbcglobal.net or https://woodyweingarten.com or http://www.vitalitypress.com/

ProductionAlvin Ailey American Dance Theater
Producing CompanyAlvin Ailey American Dance Theater
Production DatesThrough Apr 16th
Production Address101 Zellerbach Hall Spc 4800, at UC Berkeley, Berkeley, CA 94720-4800
Websitehttp://www.calperformances.org/
Telephone(510) 642 9988
Tickets$42 – $116
Reviewer ScoreMax in each category is 5/5
Overall4.5/5
Performance4.5/5
Aisle Seat Review PICK?YES!
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ASR Film ~~ “Carmen” Showcases Fears, Perils of Fleeing Immigrants

By Woody Weingarten

Myth-like choreography — including a sharp-elbow crowd sequence at a bare-knuckle boxing match — embellishes Carmen, a new movie.

Carmen is a singular, non-linear, dramatic film that exquisitely blends disparate elements: classical and flamenco dance, mournful and wistful singing, suspense and southern border violence, mother-daughter love and a couple’s intimacy while employing an undocumented workers’ underground railway of sorts, and more than a little religious symbolism.

Highlighted are striking close-ups that etch the joys and pains of life into individual faces, and far-distant camera shots that in both silhouette and color display the beauties of the natural world (including mountains, meadows, foliage, and birds on wires). Plus Ferris wheels, highways, and taut action in near-total blackness. Featured, too, are recurring images of fire and gunfire, feet and hands, all augmented by pounding music with notes of edgy, ominous violins.

…Carmen is a singular, non-linear, dramatic film that exquisitely blends disparate elements…

It’s a flick delivered in English and Spanish that will be enjoyed by artsy movie house regulars but will undoubtedly be skipped by those who’d prefer to see the latest Avengers fly-athon.

The title role of Carmen is played by 32-year-old Mexican actress Melissa Barrera.

The title role is poignantly filled by 32-year-old Mexican actress Melissa Barrera, a breakout star of In the Heights who here, after her mom is shot to death, survives an illegal crossing with the help of Aiden, a Border Patrol deserter who grapples with more than a touch of disassociation or PTSD or God-knows-what — something that makes it difficult for him to relate to anybody but Carmen.

Barrera portrays the “tough but fragile” Carmen by alternately exuding fear, sadness, joy, glam and sexiness, and by dancing and singing up proverbial storms.

Aidan, an ex-Marine with stripes tattooed on his arm, is effectively played by 27-year-old Paul Mescal, an Irish actor who earned a 2023 Best Actor Oscar nomination for Aftersun, a coming-of-age tale.

Paul Mescal and Melissa Barrera star in “Carmen”.

Not incidentally, the fight-to-the-death boxing scene in which “people like to bet against a white boy,” is unique because it showcases krumpers, dancers who’ve used the form of krumping to escape gang life and non-violently show emotions while stressing energetic, sharp movements of their arms and chests.

Carmen’s goal is to reach her godmother Masilda (Rossy de Palma, who’s been in more than a couple Almodóvar films) and, thereby, sanctuary of sorts in the La Sombra Pederosa nightclub in Los Angeles.

When all’s said, it’s probably best to let loose of the 1 hour, 56-minute film’s storyline and dialogue and just lie back, relax, and enjoy the direction of French-born Benjamin Millepied, who choreographed Black Swan. Otherwise, you could be bothered by the likes of a cutaway to a dance sequence in the middle of a love-making scene — or hard-to-digest lines that indicate it’s important to know who you are, the things you’re running from often turn out to be the things you’re running toward, or “I will live inside you forever.”

“…Barrera and Mescal’s performances arouse the desperation of strangers turned lovers on the run…” — The Hollywood Reporter

Though this beautiful, sometimes poetic tragedy was very loosely inspired by Bizet’s opera about a Roma (gypsy) woman, it contains no hint of bullfights or matadors or multiple seductions. Like the opera, which in turn was based on an 1845 novella, it does spotlight power struggles involving social class, race, and gender.

Carmen will open April 28 at the Landmark’s Opera Plaza Cinema, 601 Van Ness Ave., San Francisco; at the Rialto Cinemas Elmwood, 2966 College Ave, Berkeley; and at the Century Regency, 280 Smith Ranch Road, San Rafael.

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ASR Senior Contributor Woody Weingarten has decades of experience writing arts and entertainment reviews and features. A member of the San Francisco Bay Area Theatre Critics Circle,  he is the  author of three books, The Roving I; Grampy and His Fairyzona Playmates; and Rollercoaster: How a Man Can Survive His Partner’s Breast Cancer. Contact: voodee@sbcglobal.net or https://woodyweingarten.com or http://www.vitalitypress.com/

TitleCarmen
Directed byBenjamin Millepied
Screenplay byAlexander Dinelaris Jr.
Cinematography byJörg Widmer
Distributing CompanyMagnolia
Release DateApril 28, 2023
Runtime1 hr 56 min
ShowingLandmark’s Opera Plaza Cinema, 601 Van Ness Ave., San Francisco;
Rialto Cinemas Elmwood, 2966 College Ave, Berkeley;
Century Regency, 280 Smith Ranch Road, San Rafael.
Reviewer ScoreMax in each category is 5/5
Overall4/5
Performance4/5
Script4/5
Cinematography4/5
Direction4/5
Aisle Seat Review PICK?YES!

 

Other Voices…

"...undeniably exhilarating to watch one of the world’s most accomplished choreographers team up with one of its most virtuosic composers for the kind of aggressively unclassifiable movie that would never exist if not for these two artists reaching beyond their disciplines to create it themselves."
Indie Wire
"...“Carmen” was the best movie this critic saw at the Toronto International Film Festival."
Sarah Manvel, Critics Notebook
"...Luck was on the side of Carmen director Benjamin Millepied. His two leads, Paul Mescal and Melissa Barrera, are both riding hot streaks at the same time. Mescal for his roles in "God’s Creatures" and "Aftersun"; Barrera for "In the Heights" and a pair of "Scream" movies. They...make for a scorching pair in Millepied’s gritty, contemporary take on Georges Bizet‘s opera..."Punch Drunk Critics
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PICK! ASR Film & Video ~~ Documentary About Primo Writer & Editor Toiling in Tandem is Powerful

By Woody Weingarten

Robert Caro is a powerful Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer. He’s 87.

Robert Gottlieb is a powerful book editor. He’s 91.

Put ‘em together and they’ll fight with fervor over semi-colons (and, of course, much larger issues.)

Put ‘em together and they’ll work in tandem for half a century and produce Caro’s multi-book bio about Lyndon B. Johnson’s power (and desperation.)

Biographer Robert Caro (left) and editor Robert Gottlieb have become friends after squabbling over Caro’s books for 50 years. Photo by Claudia Raschke, courtesy Wild Surmise Productions, LLC, and Sony Pictures

Now the two bespectacled Bobs are featured in a new Sony Pictures documentary, Turn Every Page, directed by Gottlieb’s daughter, Lizzie. It, too, is powerful. The film starts with a close-up of the dual titans of literature poring over a manuscript; it ends with them walking down hallways in search of “real” pencils, the yellow kind with erasers at their ends.

…if you’re…interested in literature, books, writing, or editing, this doc must be on your “must see” list…

In between, Gottlieb says he knew after reading merely 15 pages of The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York, the first Caro book he edited, that the bio was “going to be a masterpiece.” He notes, too, that Caro “is now working on Volume 5 of the three-volume biography” of Johnson. Caro, who takes about seven years to research and write a book, says he doesn’t “think anything was harder” than his first LBJ volume, and recalls the original million words of the Moses bio and the 350,000-word cuts necessary for the spine to carry the book’s weight.

Both admit to long-standing difficulty with the other. Says Gottlieb, “It’s not that I was trying to tear his bleeding heart out of his chest.”

The years have softened them, though. And although they don’t hang like buddies, the documentary tells of multiple Caro and Gottlieb intersections: Both are New York City Jews. Both had troubled childhoods. Both are workaholics.

And both clearly want to get everything right (and complete.)

Both are also quirky.

Caro, who was an investigative reporter for Newsweek before he turned to writing books, takes the carbon copies from his Smith Corona electric typewriter and squeezes them into a small space over his refrigerator; Gottlieb, who was editor-in-chief of Simon & Schuster, Alfred A. Knopf, and The New Yorker, collects what he calls “love objects,” hundreds of plastic women’s pocketbooks.

Caro (left) and Gottlieb promote Caro’s first book. Photo by Martha Kaplan, courtesy Wild Surmise Productions, LLC, and Sony Pictures

Turn Every Page: The Adventures of Robert Caro and Robert Gottlieb isn’t, however, just talking heads of the two. It features, in addition to several clips of LBJ (emphasizing civil rights and “equal opportunity”), a slightly bedraggled Colin Farrell reading from a Caro book; an interview with Bill Clinton; and lots of flashing covers of books Gottlieb edited (Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 as well as volumes by Clinton, Toni Morrison, Salman Rushdie, Nora Ephron, and John le Carré.)

Though she emphasizes the literary collaboration, Lizzie also focuses on the personal. Her father, for example, talks about his mom making him “stand outside for an hour every day” just to get some air, because he preferred staying inside buried in books; Caro opens up about walking along the street, finding every other person holding some sort of device, and feeling “out of touch” with modern life.

Caro’s series portrays LBJ’s duality — the visionary reformer and the conniving opportunist (who was elected to the U.S. Senate by fewer than 90 votes “cast a week after the election”.) Using the technique of a novelist, he humanized him. And showed how power affects the powerless.

Absent from the documentary are the pair’s working conversations; Caro insisted the sound be turned off because “it’s kind of a private thing.”

Lizzie Gottlieb and Robert Caro enjoy the outdoors together. Photo by Mott Hupfel, courtesy Wild Surmise Productions, LLC, and Sony Pictures

Lizzie says the two are “in a tortoise-like race against time to finish their life’s work.” Gottlieb says he feels bad about being old because it means you’re heading “faster and faster toward not being at all.”

Before the doc ends, Gottlieb praises his friend for being “a word painter — he paints with words.”

There are numerous take-aways from Turn Every Page, many more than Caro likes semi-colons, Gottlieb doesn’t. So, if you’re the least bit interested in literature, books, writing, or editing, this doc must be on your “must see” list.

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ASR Senior Contributor Woody Weingarten has decades of experience writing arts and entertainment reviews and features. A member of the San Francisco Bay Area Theatre Critics Circle,  he is the  author of three books, The Roving I; Grampy and His Fairyzona Playmates; and Rollercoaster: How a Man Can Survive His Partner’s Breast Cancer. Contact: voodee@sbcglobal.net or https://woodyweingarten.com or http://www.vitalitypress.com/

 

TitleTurn Every Page: The Adventures of Robert Caro and Robert Gottlieb
Directed byLizzie Gottlieb
Producing CompanySony Pictures Classics
Release DateDec 2022
Runtime1 hr 50 min
ShowingLark Theater in Larkspur
Reviewer ScoreMax in each category is 5/5
Overall4.5/5
Production Vakues4.5/5
Aisle Seat Review PICK?YES!