I'm not saying ABBA writes better than Shakespeare... : Slings and Arrows

"Slings and Arrows" does kind of grow on you by the 3rd episode (first season), and though it's not great or raucous it continues to have its moments and to be very astute at its portrayal of the lives of theater people at the 2nd rung. One of the best elements is the developing relationship between the insipid Richard Smith-Jones (just like it's spelled), the business manager, and the corporate sponsor's representative, Holly Day, who's a driven, go-getter, middlebrow and who pushes him to take over the festival. In this episode, she carries him off for a weekend in Toronto where they'll, as she puts it, have a great dinner, see a show, and talk about our future. He's totally sick of going to shows, he tells her, but she's got first-row balcony for Mama Mia! That's different! They love the show, which leads to really some of the best dialog in the series, as they confess/agree that the problem is the New Burbage Shakespeare Theatre Festival puts on plays nobody wants to see, not shows like Chorus Line and Mama Mia! "I'm not saying ABBA writers better than Shakespeare or anything..." Richard remarks. Holly tells him she's working on a deal for a John Lennon musical. "I've already talked with Yoko." "Oh, no!" "Um, hm." Very good. Meanwhile, main story starting to gel around Jeffrey's struggle to overcome his fear of returning to the stage and his overall hatred of the festival. Idiotic director they bring in to take over Hamlet is hilarious - his idea is to emphasize the "rotten" in Denmark, and the state is littered with garbage. Though the series lacks the killer instinct, it does have its highlights.

Too many scenes in Slings and Arrows just fall flat

I want to like "Slings and Arrows" but it's just not as good, or funny, as it could be, or ought to be. Though they get the behavioral nuances of theater people dead right (or spot on, as theater people would say), and the skewering of the corporate-management sorts who want to run the Shakespeare festival as a profitable business is very funny and maybe even the highlight of the series, far too many scenes just include a few incidental comic lines or moments and then fall flat. For example, in episode 2 (season 1), there's the big funeral scene for Oliver, and the build-up is what will his rival director/former protege Jeffrey say? Everyone seems almost freaked out that he's been invited to speak, and there's a lot of build-up as he paces backstage and we hear snippets of the other speakers, all very ordinary, and at last Jeffrey speaks and, so what? He reads some "notes" that Oliver had given to the cast in some earlier production, and then he wanders off stage. This should have been a killer scene, it should have established Jeffrey's personality - we have to believe by this point in the series that he's a brilliant but troubled director who's going to take over the festival and change everything. His character has not emerged to the slightest degree. Similarly, Rachel McAdams plays an apprentice who's very sweet but also ambitious - and she tries out for a commercial and seemingly flubs the audition. Then gets the job. This is impossible. They should show her doing something crazy at the audition that shocks everyone and gets her the job. In short, this series has some nice moments but doesn't really know how to nail a scene that will really stand out in our minds.

Why Slings and Arrows could never be a U.S. TV show

It's perhaps surprising that nobody's done this before - a comic series about life in the theater - as you'd think actors and writers would know this milieu, but the fact is they don't know this milieu - probably 1 of a thousand American TV actors/writers/directors have any significant background in live theater. Of course it's different in England, and even in Canada, which as it turns out is where "Slings & Arrows" arises. It's about two theater troupes - not exactly rivals because they're so much on opposite ends of the spectrum - in a Canadian city obviously modeled on Stratford. The festival theater has corporate sponsorship - lots of jokes about, Hello! It's a business! - and lavish production values and a British director who's way burned out and a totally bored audience of worthies and swells. Across town, a another theater (they're both doing Shakespeare, and it doesn't seem as if the small theater is particularly avant garde) is being kicked out of its warehouse space for nonpayment of rent. The link is that the director at the small theater used to act for the British director at the festival until he had some kind of breakdown - it's an episode none of them talks about about, but it seems to be at the epicenter of the lives of several of the characters. Lots of Shakespeare references, which is fun (for me), and the crew gets so many of the types completely right, from the ingenue to the aging star to the earnest producer and the insidious corporate sponsor and the hangers-on - and the lives of actors after the show, centered on a lot of drinking.

Swinton speaks Italian! - and the world's weirdest sex montage: I am Love

Tilda Swinton speaks Italian (and a little Russian). That may be reason enough to watch "I am Love," which surprisingly places Swinton in an Italian-language, Italian-cast family melodrama. It's her movie, and she gives her expected totally powerful and controlled performance. It's also a really good movie, despite a few quirks. I'll be giving a lot away here, so if you plan to see the movie just stop now, but: I am Love is a story of a super-rich Milanese industrial family. The elderly grandfather announces his retirement at a b-d dinner and Lear-like, names son and grandson as his successors. Everyone's surprised he elevated the grandson. Swinton is married to the son, who's now the true power in the business, and plans to sell it. Grandson Eduardo sentimentally wants to hold onto the business - but his real attentions are to the high-end restaurant he want to set up with a friend, Antonio. Part of the fun of the movie is the ridiculously lavish house in which the Recchi family lives and the extraordinary food Antonio prepares, echoes of other great foodie movies like Eat Drink Man Woman. There are hints all along that Eduardo may have a homoerotic crush on Antonio but ultimately, to our surprise, Swinton begins an affair with the much-younger, "lower" class Antonio, culminating in one of the strangest, most graphic, least erotic movie sex scenes, including a montage of closeups of skin patches and insects on plants, set to the music of John Adams. Hard to even imagine, right? Ultimately, Eduardo dies in an accident and Swinton confesses she "loves" Antonio (it's more like a Lady Chatterly thing - pure sex, she hardly knows him). At the end, Swinton, now with short hair and dressed in track suit, takes off and leaves her grieving family. A liberated woman? Or a selfish bitch who ditches her faithful husband in time of need? I think the movies wants us the think the former, but it leaves enough room for us to wonder.

A really good movie that demands a lot of attention: Ajami

It was probably a mistake to watch the Israeli film "Ajami" on a Friday night when I was dead tired because this film was really quite good and demands a lot of attention, which couldn't really give it. Don't worry, I won't give the plot away because I can hardly remember it - I'll need some help. But I would say it's another one of the recent spate of movies that takes seemingly unrelated characters and events and over the course of the narrative pulls them together, as they intersect in violence and tragedy. Making this narrative structure even more difficult than usual, however, Ajami (which I gather is the name of a Palestinian West Bank neighborhood?), the film does not use straightforward chronology; rather, we see certain scenes that are hard to comprehend (even if you're awake!) and later see the scenes the build up to them or put them in context. Further difficulty for Americans will be the general unfamiliarity of the name and the locales - hard to understand which neighborhoods are in Israel, West Bank, Arab, Jewish, etc. Still - a very strong film that is taut and exciting and gives us a sense of what life is like among the many racial-ethnic communities living alongside one another in Israel/West Bank today. Story begins with a drive-by shooting of a Palestinian teen, in revenge for an attack against another Palestinian gang. Over the course of the movie we meet another Palestian man who is trying to negotiate peace for his family in this gang war and falls in love with the daughter of the neighborhood strongman (they're Christian Arabs, but this is not clear to us or at least to me till much later), a Palestinian living without papers in Israel and working in a restaurant, an Israeli police officer whose brother has been killed in the service, a Palestinian restaurant owner dating an Isreali Jew - almost all of these people come to a bad end, and the movie is about how and why this happens. It's in some ways about life in one particular time and place, but it strikes me that Ajami could easily be transported to any American city and the same story could take root and thrive.

An homage to Huck Finn and to Bob Dylan : Kisses

By no means is it a great movie, but the Irish indie "Kisses" has a lot going for it and may foretell more good works from Irish cinema and from this writer-director. Story about two abused kids, boy and girl (about 12 years old maybe?), next-door neighbors in an industrial suburb of Dublin, who run away to the city to escape horrible families. Like most child runaway stories, it's improbable for the most part and meant to be so, but more than most it includes some really rough elements and some very exciting moments. Many times when I was sure the kids would not make it - though I knew in movie terms they would have to (though the ending is ambiguous and intentionally disturbing). Part of the time, as the kids romp through a shopping mall wasting $ on a buzz cut and new sneakers, thought no kids would behave that way, they'd be really worried about how they were going to get through the night. At other times, I accepted that they were just kids, impulsive and naive, and that they'd manage. There are homages here to the greatest runaway story, Huck Finn (they take a canal barge to Dublin), and echoes of other runaway movies such as the great Little Fugitive and, in a funny way, with two young people building a romantic bond as they course through the night, I was reminded of Before Sunrise. The main homage in the movie is to Bob Dylan - the boy is named Dylan, and he learns that his antecedent is a "musical god," and who would disagree? Great Dylan songs on the soundtrack and one amusing "appearance" of Dylan in the film itself.

Should you watch Season 1 after you've seen Season 3? : Breaking Bad

Watched the first season pilot for "Breaking Bad" last night for some reason; had already seen most of Season 3 (but none of seasons 1 or 2). M. is always curious about how these shows (which we sometimes pick up later in their runs) began, but I'm not, once I see where it's going have little interest in looking back. Someone once asked me: If you only had read the last act of Romeo and Juliet, wouldn't you want to see the beginning? Yes, but Breaking Bad is not Shakespeare. In fact, we enjoy reading/seeing great dramas multiple times, but even the best of television, for me, serves for only one round. Nevertheless, the pilot for Breaking Bad is quite well done and I can certainly see why the show was picked up and renewed. Amazing how most of the characters that I'd seen in Season 3 are introduced here; also surprising how little they change - even really good TV is mostly about types and characteristics, not about subtle character development. Pilot starts off with a very exciting and for first-time viewers bewildering scene of van careening through the desert, driver wearing mask, half-naked, bodies rolling around in the back - then we flash back 3 weeks and by end of pilot understand the scene: a meth lab on wheels. Personality and dilemma of main character established well. Friend Andy has noted to me that he could never buy into the premise of Breaking Bad, and I agree - idea that he would keep his cancer diagnosis secret from family and that he would embark on this crime path is not made credible in the pilot - and in that way I think it's almost better to begin watching Breaking Bad at a later point, when the crime history is a given, rather than a choice.