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With Joe Meyers, entertainment writer

Archive for June, 2010

Down and out (with HBO) in Detroit

Friday, June 18, 2010 by:Joe Meyers

The HBO series “Hung” starts a second season later this month.

Earlier this week, I watched the season one DVD — which HBO Home Entertainment will release on Tuesday — and couldn’t figure out what made the cable network decide to renew the series for a second season.

Why cancel “Deadwood” and “Rome” and “Tell Me You Love Me” and renew this dud?

“Hung” is a draggy “dramedy” about folks suffering the current economic crisis in Detroit.

The suggestive title doesn’t really suit the show despite the fact that it is about a well-endowed Michigan high school coach (Thomas Jane) who turns to prostitution at the suggestion of a frustrated temp/poet (Jane Adams) who volunteers her services as the man’s “pimp.”

As much as I’ve enjoyed Jane and Adams in other roles, I didn’t believe the pairing of these two mismatched business partners for a minute.

The premise (and that slightly sleazy title) got the show lots of publicity when it debuted last year, but it’s an aimless and rather pretentious affair that tries to graft pseudo-political undertones on to storylines that aren’t very entertaining or enlightening.

The sex angle never quite meshes with creators Dmitry Lipkin and Colette Burson’s shallow social consciousness.

Athough “Hung” is set in the Detroit suburbs — and most of season one was filmed there — you get the strong feeling that Lipkin and Burson cooked up their desperate-man scenario first and then set it in sad, old, depressed Detroit to give their limp scripts a dose of “realism” and local color.

The prostitution angle seems to be mostly a hook for the writers to inject some sex appeal into their dull stories of middle-aged depression, parent-child alienation and financial anxiety.

How many women in a dying city would want — or need — to pay for sex?

And if those clients existed would they be likely to use a very eccentric female poet to line up their “dates”?

Lipkin and Burson seem to have hatched their notion without really thinking about the way the Internet has changed the sex industry.

With so many websites out there devoted to sexual connections — paid and otherwise — why would any 2010 woman with half a brain meet with and hand over a commission to a pimp?

‘Toy Story 3′: the geniuses at Pixar deliver a terrific sequel

Thursday, June 17, 2010 by:Joe Meyers

I’m not really crazy about animated movies — it’s hard for me not to think of them as kids’ stuff — but Pixar has never failed to make me overcome my prejudice.

The company’s movies are obviously aimed at the family market, but the way that the writers and directors and animators manage to delight solo adults as well as their target audience never ceases to amaze me.

“Wall-E” and “Up” aren’t just two of the best animated films of the last few years, they deserve to be on the list of outstanding recent movies of any kind. They are charming films that also manage to deliver first-rate storytelling as well as to explore real issues and anxieties shared by children and adults.

Pixar has avoided turning each of its hits into an ongoing cash cow — or a “franchise” as Hollywood likes to call it — but the first two “Toy Story” movies were so well-received that the company has delivered “Toy Story 3,” which opens Friday.

I went to a private screening last night and was knocked out by the emotional power and sheer moviemaking skill of this brilliant concoction which manages to sneak some rather profound ideas about aging and nostalgia into a marevlous entertainment.

The movie is really about the end of childhood and how we put away those things that were so important to us while we were young and carefree (if we were lucky enough to grow up as middle-class Americans, that is).

The witty and personable toys who delighted the young boy hero of the first two movies face the end of the line in “Toy Story 3” — the “boy” is 17 now and heading off to college. He hasn’t really played with the toys much recently but they are tucked away in a trunk in his room (except, of course, when no one is there and they can carry on with the fun and games they have on their own).

Mom wants her son to either recycle the toys at a local daycare center, pack them away in the attic or toss them with the other trash she is clearing out of his room.

It’s a premise that allows room for older people to look backwards, late teens to ponder their current transitions, and kids to simply enjoy as another story about the funny and resourceful secret lives of their own toys.

Some of the toys wind up — temporarily, we hope — at a daycare center which looks wonderful on the surface, but turns out to be a nightmarish alternate toy universe ruled by a bitter teddy bear who has never gotten over being abandoned by his owner.

I know the paragraph I just wrote sounds absurd to those adults who haven’t seen “Toy Story 3” but, believe me, the scenes in the daycare center are as suspenseful (and scary) as anything I’ve watched in a live action movie lately.

The Pixar movie is, quite simply, too good to be left to the kids. In this rather dismal Hollywood summer of 2010, it’s the first and only (so far) must-see movie.

‘World Cup Soccer’: sports spending vs. morale boosting

Wednesday, June 16, 2010 by:Joe Meyers

The muckraking DVD distributor The Disinformation Company released a troubling but perfectly timed documentary Tuesday — “World Cup Soccer in Africa: Who Really Wins?”

The 75-minute film looks at the billions of dollars that have been spent in South Africa over the past few years to prepare for the 2010 World Cup Championship running through July 11.

The questions raised by the movie are the same ones that have been raised in municipalities all over the United States regarding the public value of public funds that are spent on new sports venues.

But in South Africa those questions have been magnified by the fact that the poverty-stricken country had to build several new facilities to get the World Cup because the existing sports stadiums were too small to meet the standards of the FIFA.

The FIFA runs the event and presents any country hosting it with a long list of non-negotiable demands. The host countries don’t get a penny of the global TV money or the commercial sponsorship dollars — worth many millions of dollars — all of which goes to FIFA.

What South Africa is getting is the attention of the world which politicians and business leaders hope will mean great PR for the country and increased tourist revenues.

Soccer fans around the world — or, rather, fans of “football,” as the sport is known everywhere except in the U.S. — believe no price is too high to pay for this international extravaganza.

As A.A. Gill wrote in Vanity Fair’s World Cup cover story last month, “(The event) is by a country mile, a long hop, an eagle, a furlong, and the whole nine yards, the greatest sporting event in the world, ever. It’s been estimated that more than 715 million people watched the cup final in 2006. By the way, that’s almost 10 times the number that watched the Super Bowl that year. Two hundred and four nations tried to qualify for this year’s World Cup (for 32 spots). To put that in perspective, there are only 192 in the United Nations.”

Gill sees the sport as a global morale booster for the poor people who most deeply love football: “Footballers rarely come from the middle classes. Their heartlands are the slums and shantytowns, the favelas and mean backstreets. To sit in the stadium on a Saturday afternoon in an industrial town anywhere in the world is to feel the great energy, humor, and anger of the engine room. The marketing and manufacturing of football and footballers grow increasingly cynical, but still there is a purity at the heart of the game, a direct link from the boys on the beach to the stars in the stadium, in a way that no other sport nor music nor the movies can claim.”

Filmmaker Craig Tanner spent much of 2008 interviewing people throughout South Africa, from hotel managers to construction workers to celebrated figures such as Desmond Tutu.

Many of them say that the national pride that will be instilled by this first African World Cup will be worth the money spent. Others express dismay that so much money has been spent on sports stadiums that will be too big for local teams to use after the FIFA has left the country.

As Tanner notes in a blog posting on the Disinformation site (www.disinfo.com), “Perhaps the most astonishing part of the film concerns the building of a stadium in Mbombela – a rural area near the Kruger National Park where tourists go to see wildlife. Near a town which does not have a top flight soccer or rugby team, and which does not have a population of the necessary magnitude to provide any enduring fan base, a 48,000-seat stadium (was) built to stage 4 World Cup matches over a 10 day period. No coherent explanation has been provided as to the stadium’s use after the World Cup is over.”

(“World Cup Soccer In Africa: Who Really Wins?” is available on DVD from The Disinformation Company and for download via iTunes, Amazon VOD, and select cable TV Video-on-Demand systems.)

When Steve & Eydie Ruled the Earth

Tuesday, June 15, 2010 by:Joe Meyers

Over the weekend, I caught the last performance of “Pete ‘n’ Keely” at the Music Theatre of Connecticut in Westport and felt nostalgia I didn’t even know I had in me.

The 2000 off-Broadway show is a gently satirical send-up of a form of show business that came crashing to the ground in the late 1960s when rock music and sexually explicit movies started to dominate the culture.

The fictional Pete Bartel (Terry Lawson) and Keely Stevens (Kristin Huffman) — whose heyday was in the 1950s and early 1960s — are obviously meant to be stand-ins for Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gorme and lots of other pop singers who were favorites on TV variety shows of the period such as “The Ed Sullivan Show” and the talk/variety shows hosted by Jack Paar and Steve Allen.

The premise of the musical is that Pete and Keely’s marriage collapsed under the strain of their singing act, but they have come together for a 1968 NBC reunion special (perhaps the last year during which such a special would have been deemed commercially viable).

Pete and Keely sing at least two songs that Steve & Eydie recorded — “Besame Mucho” and “This Could Be the Start of Something Big” — and Act Two gives us a taste of their one disastrous book show on Broadway (something that Steve & Eydie tried once, too, with the 1968 flop “Golden Rainbow”).

In the 1970s and ’80s, it became fashionable to look down on Steve & Eydie and their peers — as relics of a bygone age of show biz.

But “Pete ‘n’ Keely” is a reminder of the talent and energy that were necessary for musical performers before studio technology and the rise of the singer-songwriter made nightclub vocalists seem less “creative” than artists like James Taylor and Joni Mitchell.

Singers like Lawrence and Gorme and Frank Sinatra and Tony Bennett had to develop interpretive gifts as well as vocal chops so that they could put across the music and words of a wide variety of composers and lyricists. What they did was more akin to acting than the self-analysis we have come to expect from people who only sing material that they write.

They also tended to perform in smaller venues than the rock acts, where they couldn’t hide behind massive sound systems and electronic instruments.

Like most baby boomers I had to listen to the “old-fashioned” singers my parents loved when I was a kid in the early 1960s, but I quickly shed that music as soon as I was on my own in college in the late 1960s and early ’70s.

Now I am astounded by the fact that someone like Ella Fitzgerald could have gone into a studio and recorded “The Gershwin Songbook” in a few days’ time. And she sang “live” to a full orchestra on every take. I feel the same way when I listen to the Broadway cast recordings that were made in those days — with the whole score being recorded on one day.

It would be an interesting experiment to take away the studio magic of today’s recording artists to see exactly how much “voice” they have before the technicians go to work on their tracks.

“Pete ‘n’ Keely” managed to click on two different levels — reminding us of a vanished era, but also demonstrating that there are still singer-actors like Huffman and Lawson who have the vocal chops to sing the material that made Steve & Eydie et al so popular in their day.

‘Thrillers’: from Theseus to ‘The Da Vinci Code’

Monday, June 14, 2010 by:Joe Meyers

Next month, the International Thriller Writers will hold their annual four-day gathering at the Grand Hyatt in Manhattan, where fans of the genre will be able to attend panels with everyone from Lee Child to Lisa Scottoline and Ken Follett to Sandra Brown.

The event which runs July 7 to 10 is designed both for readers and aspiring writers, with the first few days of the conference devoted to nuts-and-bolts panels where some of the top writers in the field will share their stories of how they became successfully published.

The group has been in existence less than a decade but already puts on a conference that gives such long established crime fiction conventions as Bouchercon and Malice Domestic a run for their money.

It was at the 2004 Bouchercon in Toronto that a group of thriller writers decided the time had come for their own organization and annual get-together — the growth of the group and the conference in five years’ time is quite amazing.

ITW co-founder David Morrell and Hank Wagner are the editors of a wonderful new book in which members of their group write about favorite works in the genre — “Thrillers: 100 Must Reads” (Oceanview).

I’ve interviewed many crime writers over the years and have found them to be huge fans of other writers’ work. When you talk to a mystery novelist, he or she will inevitably mention something they have just read and enjoyed, or mention the crime writers who inspired them to give the genre a shot.

The real fun in the new book derives from the unexpected pairings.

Lee Child kicks off the volume with his appreciation of the Greek myth of Theseus and his battle with the beast known as the Minotaur (above). Child writes about how much he loved this story as a schoolboy and how he immediately saw parallels between the myth and the Ian Fleming James Bond adventures.

Child writes that contemporary readers need such larger-than-life stories — with clearly defined heroes and villains — just as much as those who listened raptly to the Theseus story in 1500 B.C.

The book goes on to trace the entire history of thrillers, as Douglas Preston writes on “The Woman in White” (1860), David Morrell extols the virtues of what is perhaps Agatha Christie’s most brilliant construction, “And Then There Were None” (1939), and other writers bring us up to date with appreciations of such modern classics as “The Firm” (1991) and the 2003 Dan Brown blockbuster, “The Da Vinci Code.”

“Thrillers” will be a great resource for book clubs and individuals who would like to get an appreciation of earlier eras in the history of the genre — it is a perfect browsing book.

The trouble with Tony, or: grading on the curve

Sunday, June 13, 2010 by:Joe Meyers

Tonight’s telecast of the Tony Awards on CBS at 8 should be fun.

Sean Hayes of “Promises, Promises” is doing the hosting chores and the producers have rounded up a starry bunch of presenters that is supposed to include Cate Blanchett, Angela Lansbury, and Daniel Radcliffe.

The show is almost always a good infomercial for Broadway, but a distorted view of the New York theater scene.

Because the awards are restricted to fare that has been produced on Broadway during the 2009-2010 season, terrific off-Broadway musicals like “Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson” (below) and great plays like Horton Foote’s “The Orphans’ Home Cycle” won’t be mentioned tonight because they were presented in the wrong part of New York City.

“Andrew Jackson” and another well-received off-Broadway musical “Yank!” could have made the best musical Tony categories a lot more interesting this year.

Out of the four shows in tn the running for best musical are three shows with scores made up of pre-existing pop music — “American Idiot” (above), “Fela!,” and “Million Dollar Quartet.”

The only “original” musical — and the front-runner if you can believe the prognosticators — is “Memphis” (below), a show that opened to mixed reviews and is supposedly going to win primarily because Broadway producers believe it has the best touring potential.

The three pop music shows didn’t qualify in the best original music and lyrics category, so the Tony nominators had to change the whole nature of that slot by adding the background music from two plays, the fast flop “Enron” and the hit revival of “Fences,” to the “Memphis” songs and the poorly received Andrew Lippa song score for “The Addams Family.”

It seems that the “Memphis” team of David Bryan and Joe DiPietro are assured a Tony win — that will put them on the same historic list as Stephen Sondheim and Rodgers & Hammerstein — but isn’t that a hell of a way to win a musical theater prize?

Because the producers are so hungry for exposure on the CBS telecast — and the right to put the words “Tony winner” on their marquees — they see no shame in continuing to fill categories that should be dropped in a season this weak.

‘Insatiable’: fed up with vampires

Friday, June 11, 2010 by:Joe Meyers

Meg Cabot stakes out fresh territory in the overcrowded vampire field with her delightful — and scary — new novel, “Insatiable,” which was published by William Morrow on Tuesday.

Cabot is best known for her hugely popular young adult books — including the “Princess Diaries” series — but she has made regular forays into adult fiction with charming contemporary love stories, including a cyber romance series that began with “The Boy Next Door.”

“Insatiable” is a big book — 454 pages — but it is so funny and so suspenseful that most readers should polish it off in a few sittings.

The novel grows out of the “Twilight” and “True Blood” overkill in pop culture right now — vampires as sexy bohemian loverboys rather than the mass murderers of the past.

Cabot’s heroine has the same first name as the heroine of Bram Stoker’s “Dracula” but it is spelled differently — Meena rather than Mina — and she has zero interest in vampires.

In fact, Meena loathes the genre and she hates the fact that the New York City-based daytime drama that she writes for — “Insatiable” — is about to introduce a handsome young bloodsucker in an attempt to boost their anemic ratings (like all other daytime soaps, the show is on life support).

Cabot is terrific at setting the contemporary New York scene, with Meena love/hating her glamorous job and the fact that her chronically unemployed brother Jon has moved in with her.

What starts as a vampire send-up cleverly morphs into a superior example of the genre when Meena’s neighbor invites her to a dinner party where she meets a Romanian historian/prince named Lucien Antonescu, who quickly sweeps her off her feet.

Meena is already hopelessly in love with the guy when she finds out he is a real vampire — indeed, the son of the notorious Vlad the Impaler — who is in Manhattan as part of an upheaval within the community of the undead.

Lucien has made his followers swear off human murder, but some vampire has been murdering girls in the city.

The way that Cabot re-invents vampire lore within the context of a sexy, funny Manhattan adventure is quite amazing.

Like her smart, psychically gifted heroine, readers who begin the book thinking they’ve had it with vampires will quickly find themselves racing through this impossible-to-put-down comic thriller.

It’s a perfect beach book for the summer of 2010.

‘Word is Out’: the return of a classic documentary

Wednesday, June 9, 2010 by:Joe Meyers

On Tuesday, Milliarium ZERO released the classic 1977 documentary, “Word is Out,” on DVD.

The film was an art house hit and was shown on PBS outlets a few years later, but the documentary went out of circulation for many years and the existing prints and source materials deteriorated to the point that screenings became impossible.

The UCLA Film & Television Archive — which has restored countless classics over the past few decades — and the Outfest Legacy Project received a grant from the David Bohnett Foundation that produced a high definition version of the movie that was screened at film festivals earlier this year.

Now we have the DVD, packed with great extras.

“Word is Out” was a landmark on several levels.

It demonstrated the power of a simple “talking heads” documentary, if those “heads” were astutely interviewed and then carefully edited.

“Word is Out” was also one of the first movies to present a cross-section of gay men and lesbians talking about their lives and struggles a few years after the gay liberation movement started. The filmmakers were careful to make it clear that this was not a definitive view of gays in America — they subtitled the film “stories of some of our lives” — but the wide variety of the people and personalities on view destroyed long-standing stereotypes.

The documentary was the work of a San Francisco filmmaking collective — The Mariposa Film Group (below) — made up of Peter Adair, Nancy Adair, Andrew Brown, Rob Epstein, Lucy Massie Phenix and Veronica Selver.

The movie is in the same vein as the oral history projects of the late great Chicago journalist Studs Terkel.

Just a few years before “Word is Out” was released, Terkel had a galvanizing impact on readers (and fellow reporters) with his book “Working,” in which he gathered together the comments of dozens of different people about their relationship to the work they did.

Terkel proved that the words and stories of “ordinary people” could be educational, entertaining and deeply moving if they were edited and assembled with great care.

“Word is Out” has a simple, low-key feeling that was arrived at through incredibly deft editing that makes the words of one interview subject flow naturally into an anecdote delivered by the next person. The fact that the Mariposa Film Group could achieve this unforced flow of interviews from such a disaparate group of subjects is a testament to the careful work that went into the filming and assembling of this still-powerful non-fiction movie.

“Word is Out” definitely has a late 1970s feel in the post-hippie, laid-back manner of some of the interview subjects — there is a lingering 1960s revolutionary fervor in a few of the people we meet, as well — but the struggles, the humor and the dreams on view in the film are timeless.

(For more information, go to www.wordisoutmovie.com.)

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