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Your faithful blogger is taking off a week to recharge.
Will be back with reports on “Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson” (above), “Post Modern Living,” “Babies” and lots of other cultural stuff that’s on my agenda for the next week. (You can follow my regular Twitter updates on this page.)
Take care and see you in May!
When the nice folks at the Trumbull Library asked me if I would host a “road movie” in conjunction with their “One Book-One Town” celebration of Reif Larsen’s “The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet” it didn’t take me long to zero in on the 1985 Albert Brooks film, “Lost in America.”
Larsen’s book includes a long section in which his teenage title character sets off from the Midwest to Washington, D.C. after he gets an unlikely job offer from the Smithsonian Institution.
Larsen’s book takes a rather whimsical view of life in modern America, so I didn’t want to bring everybody down with one of those grim, apocalyptic road pictures like “Easy Rider” or “My Own Private Idaho” or “Thelma & Louise.”
Indeed, the more I thought about “Lost in America” the more perfect it seemed as a neat reversal of Spivet’s journey from small-town to big-city America.
The sophisticated Los Angeles couple in the Brooks film give up their jobs to go in search of an America they’ve only read about in books or seen in movies — a bucolic place where people are nicer and where money will buy a lot more.
Albert Brooks pulled off a Woody Allen-style trifecta in his classic — writing it, directing it and co-starring with the brilliant comedienne Julie Hagerty (who gave him the same sort of comic spark that Diane Keaton and Mia Farrow have supplied in their Woody Allen pictures).
Of course, being consumerist young Americans of the 1980s the couple wants to be comfortable on their quest; the house-on-wheels is equipped with amazing gizmos like a microwave that can make perfect grilled cheese sandwiches.
The first stop out of L.A. is Las Vegas where the husband finds to his horror that his wife has been carrying an untapped addiction.
While he sleeps, she gambles away all of their cash.
This is when we get Brooks’ justly famous “nest egg principle” speech.
“Please do me a favor,” the man yells at his wife when she refers to their lost nest egg. “Don’t use the word. You may not use that word — it’s off-limits to you. Only those in this house who understand nest egg may use it. And don’t use any part of it either. Don’t use ‘nest,’ don’t use ‘egg.’ If you’re out in the forest you can point. The bird lives in a round stick. And you have things over easy with toast.”
Suddenly, the duo is dumped into lower middle class, middle America, where he ends up a crossing guard and she goes to work at a fast-food restaurant where her boss is half her age.
“Lost in America” is one of the funniest and most ironic explorations of that intangible American quest to hit the road.
(The free screening will be at 6:30 p.m. at the Trumbull Library, 33 Quality St.)
Another titan of the movie business died over the weekend — without ever winning an Oscar.
Dorothea Carothers “Dede” Allen had a long and productive life — she was 86 when she died — but the Academy Award eluded her in spite of the revolutionary impact she had on her own craft and the art of moviemaking.
Allen’s editing of “Bonnie & Clyde” was instrumental in elevating what could have been a B gangster flick into one of the most admired and most discussed pictures of the 1960s.
It was the cutting that kept the movie right on the edge between comedy and horror — most notably in the failed bank robbery scene early in the movie in which we laugh at Michael Pollard’s inept driving skills (and the bluegrass music on the soundtrack) until there is a shock cut to the bank employee who has just taken a bullet in the face.
At the end of the movie, Allen’s editing of the now legendary “ballet of death” in which Bonnie and Clyde are blasted with countless bullets — and the images alternate between slow motion footage and fast cuts — turned the moment into the second most famous violent sequence in movie history (after the shower murder in “Psycho”).
Allen was the first to admit that she was heavily influenced by the mix of emotional moods in the early 1960s French New Wave films of Jean-Luc Godard and Francois Truffaut, but she gave the slightly jagged approach to realism her own distinctive look.
The obit in The Los Angeles Times noted that with the landmark 1967 movie “Allen raised the level of her craft to an art form that was as seriously discussed as cinematography or even directing.”
“She was just an extraordinary collaborator, and in the course of editing that film, I came to develop confidence in Dede,” director Arthur Penn told The Times on Saturday. “Indeed, she wasn’t an editor, she was a constructionist.”
In 1967, Allen lost the Oscar to another master editor Hal Ashby for his work on “In the Heat of the Night” (which was also named best picture over “Bonnie & Clyde”).
Allen’s brilliant editing of Sidney Lumet’s “Serpico” in 1973 wasn’t nominated. The duo worked together again on “Dog Day Afternoon” — check out the editing in that film during the accidental gunshot scene — but Allen again lost to a superb competitor (Verna Fields for “Jaws”).
Allen’s first major film was “The Hustler” in 1961. Perhaps due to the extraordinary editing on that movie, star Paul Newman hired the cutter for his directorial debut film, “Rachel, Rachel,” in 1968.
The editor was choosy about her collaborators and tended to work with the same directors over and over again. So you will see her credit on fairly obscure films like James Bridges’ woefully underrated 1984 film noir, “Mike’s Murder.” Some say Allen’s early preference for offbeat New York-based films hurt her in the Oscar races because that category was then dominated by old-line Hollywood cutters.
A few years ago, Allen gave a terrific interview to fellow editor Mia Goldman (at www.editorsguild.com) where she talked about her good fortune in starting out in New York City, far from Tinsel Town:
“I came out of the so-called ‘Golden Age’ in New York, when people had much more control of their pictures. I miss that process immensely – the freedom to get a picture, to make it a labor of love that everybody’s involved with and excited about. It’s much harder to do today, even if you’re on an independent, I would imagine. I miss the fact that the process has become so interfered with. I miss that intimacy. It’s become…a victim of Corporate America. But that’s the world we live in.”
The Green Day album-derived musical “American Idiot” opens tomorrow night at Broadway’s St. James Theatre.
I haven’t seen it yet, but have been fascinated by the advance buzz on the Broadway chat rooms.
Older show people have been dismissing it as another loud, “jukebox” musical in the vein of “Mamma Mia!” (but without that hit’s conventional storytelling).
Younger theatergoers are coming away from the show lauding it as an advance into contemporary pop and rock music rather than another recycling of yesteryear’s hits and themes (i.e. the just opened “La Cage Aux Folles,” the second revival of the Jerry Herman hit in the past five years).
Today, Playbill.com had a good story about the way that the producers of “American Idiot” are using the web and social network sites for tomorrow’s opening:
“The producers announced that starting at 5 p.m. April 20, visitors to www.AmericanIdiotonBroadway.com will see exclusive coverage of the opening night.
Visitors can expect:
Exclusive videos and photos from the red carpet, opening night show and the after party.
Twitter updates from the cast and creative team.
Accounts by the two American Idiot fan contest winners, broadcasting their experiences live from the red carpet and after party.”
The keepers of American mainstream movie standards are probably breathing a sigh of relief today over this weekend’s disappointing box-office performance of “Kick-Ass.”
The film came in number one in the box-office sweepstakes, but it grossed $11 million less than the pre-weekend $30 million projected take.
Based on a popular comic book, the R-rated movie is graphically violent and profane, but it’s the spectacle of a pre-teen superhero girl killing people that pushes the movie into new territory.
Killing a child in a Hollywood film is still a taboo. Even in the most vile slasher flicks, if there’s a kid involved in the action, you can be pretty certain he or she will survive until the final reel.
Kids have been killers in the movies for some time now, but up until “Kick-Ass” the carnage has been kept off-screen.
Back in 1956, a very popular Broadway play about a child murderess, “The Bad Seed,” was made into a movie, but had to be changed significantly. On 
Broadway, the little girl got away with murder — and drove her mother to suicide — but in the Hollywood version the kid was struck by lightning while trying to retrieve a piece of evidence on a pier. And we never saw her kill anyone.
Two decades later, little Regan in “The Exorcist” killed a Hollywood filmmaker — while possessed by a demon — but the act was kept offscreen. A few years later, a spin-off demonic horror movie, “The Omen,” implied that the little anti-Christ boy was behind a series of very graphic killings, but again we never saw the child doing the deed.
“Kick-Ass” breaks new ground with its foul-mouthed little girl superhero who — in the final reel — kills so many people so graphically that I lost count of the number of victims.
The premise and the execution were clearly too much for “Kick-Ass” to be a blockbuster hit, but judging by the continuous laughter at the screening I attended yesterday, the movie will have a very long life as a cult picture.
To be fair, the creators of the movie (and presumably the comic book as well) make it clear the story is set in an alternate New York City — and is intended to be a very black comedy — but they have opened a door that a lot of untalented exploitation filmmakers will no doubt start walking through.
(P.S. At 2 p.m. Monday, The Hollywood Reporter sent out the following bulletin: “For the second consecutive session, Sunday boxoffice estimates failed to crown the right film as weekend boxoffice champion.
This time, it was Lionsgate’s action comedy “Kick-Ass” overtaking “How to Train Your Dragon” from DreamWorks Animation and Paramount. Final official data released by Rentrak on Monday showed that “Kick-Ass” rung up $19.8 million, compared with a $19.6 million weekend haul for “Dragon.”
That reversed the pic atop domestic rankings. On Sunday, Par had estimated “Dragon” would ring up $20 million through Sunday, while Lionsgate penciled in $19.8 million.
As things turned out, Par had been overly optimistic about the Sunday haul for “Dragon,” while Lionsgate sold “Kick-Ass” a bit short.”)
Noel Coward’s “Blithe Spirit” and “Private Lives” get revived frequently, but you don’t hear about too many productions of “Fallen Angels.”
The 1925 comedy is about two married London women — best friends for many years — who are excited and horrified by a possible visit from a Frenchman with whom they both had affairs before they were married.
According to the Internet Broadway Database, there hasn’t been a Broadway revival of the play since 1956 when Nancy Walker and William Windom co-starred in an Americanized version of the script (with Efrem Zimbalist Jr. as the visiting lothario).
On a visit to Philadelphia last weekend, I saw the well-received production at the Walnut Street Theatre. While Coward’s 1925 euphemisms are still in place, the piece feels surprisingly modern as a story of juicy women heading into middle age who are tired of the 
sexual routine of marriage and the dense men who can’t believe their wives had much sexual interest — or experience — before they got married.
Coward wrote two terrific roles for women — Julia Sterroll and Jane Banbury — and funny supporting parts for the dense husbands who take off on a golfing trip in the first act and return to be left reeling by news of their wives’ premarital adventures in Act Three.
The real centerpiece of the play is the long second act dinner (above) shared by the two women as they get increasingly drunk while talking about the mysterious Maurice Duclos. Their supposed anxiety about what their husbands will think is not very convincing — we can see that they are both hot to trot with Maurice again.
It must have been quite shocking in 1925 for two women alone on stage to let their hair down about sex before marriage, sex during marriage, and the possibility of cheating on their husbands. The women keep saying they don’t want to see Maurice again, but it is easy to see that they are each trying to get the other one out of the way before the man arrives.
During this long scene, I couldn’t help but think of “Sex and the City” and the way that HBO series blew people’s minds a decade ago with its depiction of how women talk about men when there are no men around.
Susan Riley Stevens (above, right) and Karen Peakes are terrific as Julia and Jane and Greg Wood and Bill Van Horn are very funny as the clueless husbands.
Coward also wrote one of his best comic maid parts in “Fallen Angels,” the newly arrived Saunders (Jennie Eisenhower) whose seemingly limitless skills and experiences keep shocking the two women she is serving.
If you’re anywhere near Philly between now and May 2, director Malcolm Black’s crisp revival is well worth a visit.
Why do the people who write about crime tend to be so nice?
That’s a question I’ve asked myself more than a few times after interviewing everyone from Sandra Brown to Harlan Coben and attending many conferences such as the Bouchercon — the annual international gathering of crime writers and the readers who love them — and the New England Crime Bake.
I’ve heard many stories of one mystery writer helping another in a variety of ways — from reading and critiquing a manuscript to supplying a positive blurb for the first printing of a new book.
If I was ever to write a novel — a highly unlikely event — I would give serious consideration to making it a thriller or a mystery simply because the folks who work in those fields have formed a real community through organizations such as the Mystery Writers of America and the International Thriller Writers.
Because these people are so much fun to be around, I volunteered to moderate a couple of panels at Murder 203 this weekend in Easton and Westport.
The libraries in the two towns launched the two-day event last year with great success, pleasing the many writers who came to talk about their work and the readers who wanted to meet them.
When I’ve asked a few crime writers to explain the congeniality of people who make a living writing about the darkest aspects of human behavior, more than one writer has speculated that perhaps they get rid of all their nastier impulses in their work, and then love to get out and meet people.
Whatever the reasons, crime writers are great to listen to and to party with, and you can do both this weekend at Murder 203.
(For more information on the Saturday and Sunday gathering in Easton and Westport, visit www.murder203.com.)
Issue Nine of n + 1 is another terrific collection of reviews, fiction and social commentary.
Produced in Brooklyn twice a year, the journal is always sane and always funny, but you never know what the crew of writers overseen by Keith Gessen (above, left) and Mark Greif (center, with editor-at-large Marco Roth, right) might zero in on in each issue.
The new issue has an excerpt from frequent contributor Sam Lipsyte’s hilarious new novel, “The Ask”; Greif’s brilliant piece on the way “Octomom” took the media fall for the financial collapse of 2008; an overview of the Jane Austen + zombies publishing genre; and two excellent pieces on “Narcoterror in Mexico.”
n + 1 always starts with a section called “The Intellectual Situation” in which anonymous writers tackle some of the biggest issues and themes of the day.
“Addled” is one of the best analyses of the impact of the Internet on advertising and print that I’ve ever read. Whole books and conferences on the subject — which scares people in my business to death (with good reason) — have not addressed the subject so pointedly.
The anonymous writer notes that advertising has now escaped from the confines of newspapers and magazines and TV to confront us everywhere we look on the Internet (and in new public places thanks to digital TV technology):
“With so many new surfaces available to ads, newspapers will never make close to what they formerly earned, no matter how often we reload the Times website. As the space open to advertising continually expands, the value of each individual ad must correspondingly decline.”
“Of course, ad revenue could go up if companies started increasing ad budgets, but over the past ninety years, through the rise of TV, radio and the Internet, total advertising spending has remained almost constant at between 2 and 3 percent of GDP.”
“Ads themselves are premised on the infiniteness and malleability of human desire; ad budgets, on the other hand, recognize the relatively fixed and inelastic nature of disposable incomes.”
The anonymous n + 1 writer believes the rise of social networks like Facebook and Twitter could spell the doom of traditional, salaried media:
“The extension of advertising to the domain of private chatter undermines the competitiveness of anything that costs more than private chatter to produce. Marx blamed the below-subsistence wages of the proletariat on the reserve army of labor; the below-subsistence revenues of the Times can be blamed on the reserve army of the social network.”
In another part of “The Intellectual Situation” the writer takes exception to the idea that the Kindle and the Nook will promote more reading of what we now call a “book.”
In response to publishing world hype that stated “The Internet is the largest group of people who care about reading and writing ever assembled in history,” the n + 1 critic agrees that there is a lot of reading and writing going on in cyberspace, “But what kind of reading, what kind of writing?”
“The Internet is the largest group of people ever assembled, period. Some join ‘Infinite Jest’ discussion groups. Others can’t read to the end of a wire story. Book-length literature is the product of certain historical conditions, of a certain relationship to written language. Assimilate book-ism to webism and the book looks like nothing so much as an unreadably long, out of date, and non-interactive blog post.”
(You can find more info on n + 1 via the bookmark on this page.)
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