Joe's View

I wish I didn’t already have plans for Sunday night because I would love see the New Hampshire band, Wild Light, that is opening for The Wallflowers at The Ridgefield Playhouse.

I’ve been hooked on the debut CD, “Adult Nights” (Star Time International/Columbia), for the past few weeks. These are songs of substance played with real spirit and some appealing subversive humor.

The harmonies and the hooks have earned the group comparisons with everyone from Death Cab for Cutie to The Shins and the Clash.

A critic in Rolling Stone made an amusing comparison: “U2 if they were fronted by Conor Oberst.”

I haven’t seen Wild Light live yet, but their summer tour has taken them to some of the best venues in the country, from the Highline Ballroom in Manhattan to the Troubador in L.A. As an opening act, they’ve been embraced by audiences who came to see The Killers, Arcade Fire and now The Wallflowers.

Guitarist Jordan Alexander teamed up with multi-instrumentalist Timothy Kyle in elementary school. They joined forces with drummer Seth Kasper and Seth Pitman (man of many instruments) in high school. Alexander went off to Philips Exeter Academy where his roommate was future Arcade Fire leader Win Butler.

Alexander spent a year working on the eventual formation of Butler’s band. After they split amicably four years ago, the real work on Wild Light began.

It’s hard to beat the combination of good musicianship and strong songwriting on “Adult Nights.” The group’s roots in New Hampshire are reflected in sad but pretty songs about the aftermath of an accidental death on a small-town family — “New Hampshire” — and youthful dreams of a more exciting place to live (“Future Towns”).

The reviewer for The Los Angeles Times put it well: “the band melds sunny folk-pop with a melancholic harmonic swirl and some brisk electronic atmospheres.”

Whichever way you slice it, “Adult Nights” is an auspicious debut album.

(For ticket info on the Sunday night show in Ridgefield, go to www.ridgefieldplayhouse.org)

Summer has been rushing by too quickly.

It wasn’t until last night that I was able to get to the Yale Summer Cabaret for the first time this season and I am very glad I had the chance to catch the world premiere musical, “Fly-By-Night.”

Sadly, this is the final production of the summer and the run ends Saturday night (sorry for the late report!)

The show is a collaborative effort by artistic director Kim Rosenstock with her fellow Yale School of Drama students Will Connolly and Michael Mitnick.

“Fly-By-Night” is a funny, sad and strange piece about a group of harried, struggling New Yorkers before, during and after the great blackout in the fall of 1965. The emotions are real, but the situations and the relationships are all slightly off-kilter — we never know where the characters might be going next and how their relationships will change.

The narrator — Slate Holmgren (left, on the phone) — plays multiple roles as he tells the story of two sisters, Daphne (Alexandra Henrikson, above) and Miriam (Sarah Sokolovic) who leave their sleepy little town in the Midwest for a new life in New York. Miriam doesn’t particularly want to make the trek but her ambitious older sister Daphne is determined to become a Broadway star and she needs the car (and the company).

Meanwhile, Harold McClam (Will Connolly, above) is bored out of his skull making sandwiches in his uncle’s New York deli when he falls for Daphne and then Miriam. Uncle “Crabbie” (Austin Durant) is a harsh taskmaster who hides his own secret dreams of getting the hell out of the deli business. Durant also plays the role of Harold’s widower father in the most touching scenes in the show — the man misses his wife terribly and holds on to her memory by repeatedly listening to the opera she once coerced him into seeing (“La Traviata”).

“Fly-By-Night” is performed arena-style with the audience sitting on two sides of the initmate space — a tight three piece band plays the very catchy new songs.

Throughout the show, you are able to watch the reactions of the audience members on the other side of the playing area. It was wonderful to see the happy, engaged faces responding to a truly fresh piece of material and an excellent company of singing actors.

(For more information on the final two performances of “Fly-By-Night” go to www.summercabaret.org)

Most media savvy people have seen many of Bruce Weber’s photos over the past 30 years — in editorial layouts for Vogue and Vanity Fair, and in ad campaigns for Abercrombie + Fitch and Ralph Lauren — but his long career as a filmmaker is not nearly as well known.

The ultimate independent director, Weber has self-financed documentaries and shorts for the past 20 years, but they have never been widely distributed in theaters and their video lives have been spotty as well (the great Chet Baker documentary, “Let’s Get Lost,” seemed to go out of print almost as soon as it was released on video by a record company subsidiary in 1990).

The range of Weber’s interests is very wide and somewhat eccentric, so the films often feel like the private visual journals of an obsessive fan and collector.

Weber clearly has a “thing” for men who look like the late jazz trumpet player and singer Chet Baker — two of his documentaries, “Broken Noses” and “Chop Suey,” focus respectively on a boxer and a model who bear striking resemblances to Baker before his good looks were destroyed by drugs and booze and brushes with violent criminals.

Neither of these young men — Andy Minsker and Peter Johnson (below) — have personalities interesting enough to support feature-length study, so Weber uses them as jumping off points for moody, slightly surreal films about masculinity, old time Hollywood, people and their pets, and cult music figures such as Frances Faye.

You name it and Weber has tossed it into his filmmaking pot, combined it with terrific music, and whipped up movies that are strikingly beautiful, emotionally elusive and unlike the work of any other American director.

Last week, the Sundance Channel launched a month-long festival devoted to Weber that includes the American television premieres of “Let’s Get Lost” and “Chop Suey” and a bunch of short films that have never been seen outside a handful of museums and non-profit venues such as Film Forum in Manhattan.

Weber has been fortunate in finding cinematographers who have been able to capture the style of his pictures on film. In some cases, movie scenes were shot as Weber worked on ad campaigns and personal photographic projects (he devoted a whole book to pictures of Johnson in and out of his clothes and garbed in some odd transgender costuming).

The photographer narrates most of his films, adding bits of sometimes embarassing personal history to the montages (we find out about his psychoanalysis, his lifelong interest in Elizabeth Taylor, and the obscure records and pictures he has been collecting since he was very young).

The movies in the Sundance festival are highly variable in quality — “Chop Suey” wanders around aimlessly for more than an hour, only coming to life in a tantalizing sequence from a decade ago showing the late Robert Mitchum (above) working on a recording project with Dr. John (this is, apparently, part of the Mitchum documentary Weber has been talking about for many years).

“Let’s Get Lost” is a jazz biography masterpiece, however, and is getting its first Sundance showing tonight at 10 p.m.

Two of the Weber shorts are terrific. “Wine and Cupcakes” is a celebration of Central Park, shot in the aftermath of 9/11, which follows a middle-aged artist couple on a long autumn afternoon spent doing nothing special, but nevertheless storing up wonderful memories of a perfect New York day.

And “Liberty City is Like Paris to Me” is a beautiful celebration of a black neighborhood in Miami on Inauguration Day last January — Weber brings in a couple of professional dancers for a street ballet that is a real knock-out.

The Bruce Weber festival runs through the month. Sundance has also set up a special web page, with an exhibit of Weber photography and some of his short films available for downloading:

http://www.sundancechannel.com/bruce-weber/

“A Perfect Getaway” barely registered in terms of box-office gross last weekend, but it’s a very entertaining and very unpretentious little horror movie with a neat twist at the end.

The movie’s reliance on solid acting and clever plotting seems positively old-fashioned in this era of torture porn like the “Saw” series and the recent “The Collector.”

The art of good storytelling has been lost in the suspense genre in recent years — horror these days is mostly about shocks and explosions of gore strung together with little rhyme or reason.

The slasher flick craze that was so big in the late 1970s and early 1980s was more or less played out by the mid-1990s, but then the clever horror comedy “Scream” revived the genre.

Ironically, the slasher cliches that “Scream” parodied have come back in straight form for a whole new generation of teens (Do you believe that a remake of “Halloween 2″ is opening at end of the month?)

“A Perfect Getaway” has a teasing plot in which three couples converge in an isolated part of Hawaii — just after the brutal murder of a couple in Honolulu — and through the use of good character actors like Steve Zahn (above, with Milla Jovovich)  and Timothy Olyphant we can never be quite sure who will survive the movie (and who the actual killer or killers might be).

There are bits of several old thrillers knocking around in “A Perfect Getaway” — everything from “Deliverance” to “The Talented Mr. Ripley” — but writer-director David Twohy mixes the pieces up with wit and genuine creepiness.

The response to the new Nora Ephron movie ‘Julie & Julia’ has been largely positive — at the multiplex where I saw it Sunday the audience applauded at the end — but reviewers have been beating up on the ‘Julie’ half of the story.

As you probably know, the movie is split down the middle, with only half of the scenes telling the story of how Julia Child became a foodie legend in the 1950s and 1960s.

The other half of the movie is about a contemporary New York woman named Julie Powell who made a name for herself seven years ago with a blog devoted to the year she spent working on every recipe in ‘Mastering the Art of French Cooking.’ (Powell was depressed from her job in the 9/11 recovery effort and decided she needed a project to raise her spirits.)

Many reviewers have written that the Julie scenes featuring Amy Adams are not nearly as entertaining as the sequences with Meryl Streep as Julia.

I agree that Streep has never been more delightful on screen than she is here, but I wonder if the Child scenes would score so strongly without the set-up they get from the modern-day material.

For younger moviegoers, in particular, the scenes in Powell’s Queens, New York, kitchen in 2002 serve as an artful way of showing the enormous influence Child has had on cooks and cooking in the United States.

The Julie scenes are about the legacy of a great food writer and TV host; they dramatize the way that Julia reached out to millions of Americans (those who cooked from Child’s landmark book and those who became fans of the TV shows).

I like the parallels writer-director Ephron draws between Julie’s attempt to find herself through cooking and writing and Julia’s long struggle to get ‘Mastering the Art of French Cooking’ published.

Adams doesn’t get the chance to enchant us as Streep does — especially in the scenes showing Julia and her equally eccentric sister Dorothy (played by the brilliant Jane Lynch) — but Adams plays a role something like the straight man in a wonderful comedy team.

We’ve been celebrating a lot of 40th anniversaries this summer — from the first moon landing to Woodstock to the Manson massacre.

1969 was a wild, fervent year on many levels, but it was an especially exciting time for movies. During the summer of that year, I saw “Easy Rider,” Midnight Cowboy” and “The Wild Bunch” within a few weeks of each other.

The films from overseas were exciting in 1969, too, including “If…” and Godard’s “Pierrot le Fou” (which opened here four years after its French debut).

A rather pretentious skin flick from Sweden — “I Am Curious (Yellow)” — caused a sensation with its unprecedented nudity and sex scenes. The movie packed huge theaters in all of the major urban centers around the country, paving the way for the mainstream release of hard core porn pictures such as “Deep Throat” a few years later.

Those were the days when a foreign language film could have almost as much impact on the culture as a Hollywood release. Case in point: “Z,” the exciting and thoughtful political thriller by Costa-Gavras which was embraced by critics and audiences in a big way. The power of the movie was demonstrated by “Z” being nominated in both the best foreign language and best picture Oscar categories (the film won in the former category).

“Z” is about a political assassination in Greece in 1963 and the way the crime exposed the deep political corruption in that country. Two years before “Z” was released, a group of right-wing generals seized control of the country. giving the movie great topicality. But Costa-Gavras told the story in such a vivid, gripping manner that the politics became a secondary factor for the large international audience that loved the movie as a thriller.

The style of the film had an immediate impact on U.S. directors. Within a few years, you could see the influence of “Z” on such gritty homegrown urban thrillers as “The French Connection” (1971), “Serpico” (1973) and “The Taking of Pelham One Two Three” (1974).

For many years, it has been impossible to see “Z” in a good print in this country (the U.S. rights to the movie bounced around after the original distributor went out of business in the 1980s). Fortunately, the folks at the Criterion Collection straightened the mess out so that a DVD could be released later this year. As a result, restored 35 mm prints were made for U.S. art houses and on Wednesday night it will be my pleasure to introduce a screening of the new and improved “Z” at the Avon Theatre Film Center in Stamford.

(“Z” will be shown Wednesday at 7:30 at the Avon, 272 Bedford St., Stamford. For more information, go to www.avontheatre.org)

Baby boomers often joke that the only place they feel really young these days is at a play.

At some regional and non-profit venues, the theater audience appears to be rapidly aging out of existence.

I don’t even see my 50something peers most nights at off-Broadway mainstays such as Manhattan Theatre Club or the Signature Theatre — my contemporaries don’t seem to have as much of a theater habit as the folks in their 70s who still subscribe to regionals and non-profits.

Therefore, it was a kick to see the new play “Slipping” by Daniel Talbott at the Rattlestick Playwrights Theater in Greenwich Village Friday night.

The packed house was made up mostly of young people in their 20s and 30s and it was clear they were riveted to Talbott’s contemporary coming-of-age story about a gay high school boy named Eli (Seth Numrich, above left) from San Francisco who finds himself stranded in Des Moines, Iowa, after his father’s death.

In a plot strangely reminiscent of the 1980s teen hit “Footloose,” Eli’s suddenly single mother, Jan (Meg Gibson), rather inexplicably takes a teaching job in the Midwest rather than find something closer to home.

The fish-out-of-water situation might not be fresh, but Talbott’s characterizations are strong and director Kirsten Kelly has rounded up an excellent quartet of actors.

In addition to fine work by Numrich and Gibson, there are strong performances by Macleod Andrews (above right) and Adam Driver as two of the apparently straight peers Eli is drawn to with semi-disastrous results. Andrews plays Jake, a high school jock who is confused by his attraction to Eli. Driver plays the scary Chris back in California whose deeply closeted homosexuality is expressed in frighteningly violent outbursts.

Director Kelly does an impressive job of smoothly shifting the time period from 2006 Iowa to California a few years earlier — and then back again — on the tiny Rattlestick stage.

“Slipping” plays like an amalgam of “Rebel Without a Cause” and the lonely outsider films that made the late John Hughes so popular with teens in the 1980s.

“Slipping” proves that with the right material and the right prices (all seats $20) it is possible for a play to attract a young audience. The show closes next Sunday and all performances are sold out, but I have a hunch the run will be extended.

I saw the independent hit, “(500) Days of Summer,” last night and was impressed by the picture’s offbeat take on romantic comedy — it’s a movie about a young man (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) who falls in love with a woman (Zooey Deschanel) who never really feels the same way about him.

The picture is an old-fashioned charmer in its writing and direction — consistently witty and easy on the eyes — but takes a huge chance right at the start by letting us know that we will be following a relationship that ends without “happily ever after.”

We have all gotten so tired of formula romantic comedies lately — mismatches-who-warm-up-to-each-other films in the vein of “The Ugly Truth” and “The Proposal” — that “(500) Days” runs the risk of being over-praised simply because it is different.

What no one is disputing, however, is the star power of the 28-year-old Joseph Gordon-Levitt who plays Tom Hansen, a Los Angeles greeting card writer who goes bonkers over an elusive new co-worker named Summer (the delightful Deschanel, fully recovered from her flat-footed performance in “The Happening” last summer).

Gordon-Levitt takes a guy who could have been viewed as a self-centered mope and turns him into a nice decent guy audiences are taking to heart.

The movie marks a change of direction for Gordon-Levitt after a series of intense dramatic performances in pictures such as “Stop-Loss” (2008), “The Lookout” (2007) and his breakthrough role in the Gus Araki indie hit, “Mysterious Skin” (2004).

Gordon-Levitt has been acting professionally since he was six and did a long stint on the TV sitcom “3rd Rock from the Sun” after doing guest shots on everything from “Murder, She Wrote” to “Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman.”

All those years in mainstream TV no doubt spurred Gordon-Levitt to play risky, angry characters in his first few film roles, but “(500) Days of Summer” proves he can carry movies in traditional leading man roles whenever he’d like.

The actor’s willingness to ditch any “image” concerns for a good part seems to be more in the tradition of Sean Penn than Tom Hanks, however, so I have a hunch he won’t be doing a lot of roles like Tom Hansen. Next up is another gritty drama, “Hesher” (above), which judging by the promotional stills, will be taking Gordon-Levitt back out on the edge.