Aaron Tveit as Enjolras was a prince, he was poetry in motion, the rest of Les Amis were marvellous, especially George Blagden asGrantaire and Fra Fee as Courfeyrac, and you could tell they were truly feeling it in all their amazing group numbers, and there’s about 3000 words to follow of my Barricade Boys feelings, so strap yourself in.
I think someone already posted this, but I felt the need because E/R.
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20 May
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Silence the lambs. Bryan Fuller’s ‘Hannibal,’ which launched last night on NBC, might be gorgeously made and brilliantly acted, but Ken Tucker says that ultimately its calories are empty, and it is a ‘repulsive and tiresome’ show with a penchant for glorifying in violence against women.
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19 May
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Two books explore how multigenerational and one-person households are on the rise.
USA Network’s summer television show “Graceland” airs June 6, but viewers can watch the pilot episode on VOD (Video on Demand) from April 29 to May 12. The series follows a group of undercover FBI, DEA, and customs agents who live under one roof in Southern California. Their house, confiscated from a drug dealer and Elivs fan, is an expansive beachfront home dubbed Graceland.
It is puzzling that there should be no close equivalent in other European cultures for the English country house drama, as known through novel, film, television series, and the stage. English it is—not, for once, more correctly British. A Scottish country house would imply a very different kind of story, while a Welsh country house (on any great scale) is a rarity. The French and the Germans have their country houses in plenty, but they are too discreet to prompt such universal fiction. Steam trains do not draw up at local Spanish or Italian stations, bringing the weekend guests. There are few manservants laying out the clothes before dinner in Belgium. One wonders really how Europe managed at all.
I went to see Prometheus on Saturday. It was my first cinema trip in three years and the results were… not pretty. Prometheus is a film about space scientists and their space mission to a space planet to be killed by space aliens, except the scientists in question are pretty much the worst scientists in the history of science. Even by film scientist standards they’re absolutely terrible. The following laundry list of complaints is going to spoil the movie fairly comprehensively, so if you have any intention of watching this awful film at some point in the future I’d avoid reading the rest of this post if I were you. …
I only recently saw Quentin Tarantino’s first film Reservoir Dogs. More focused than most of his movies (but by no means a tight narrative, this being Tarantino), Dogs follows a group of criminals. The story slowly unfolds, using flashbacks to tell the audience important—or just diverting—information. All we know for sure is that a heist went terribly wrong.
The Master is an uncomfortable piece of cinema. Characters are irritating, pacing is slow, and the plot is pieced together through flashbacks and the occasional hallucination. The movie will frustrate some and absorb others, but the gorgeous cinematography, evocative music, and fantastic acting make it a film worth seeing. Though much of the movie may be baffling, it raises valid questions about the human condition.
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15 Apr
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“Too High to Fail” is a good rebuttal to those who say stoners never accomplish anything — Doug Fine did.
Two things up front. One: I loathe the theatre. The self-indulgence, the ungainly intensity, the often inescapable pathos and pretentiousness, all of it. As far as I am concerned, theatre plays should be quarantined and only released into the world when supervised by Mike Nichols and/or Emma Thompson.
I do not loathe theatre, but this is a funny rave about Slings & Arrows.
NBC’s new television series Hannibal opens with a stylistic reenactment of a double murder. Music pounds, time reverses and speeds forward, and deep red splatters white walls. The audience watches criminal profiler Will Graham (Hugh Dancy) put himself in the mind of a killer. We literally see him shoot two people. The scene hints at what is to come: intense visuals, Grand Guignol violence, and heavy-handed direction.
I’m sorry, this quote amused me
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08 Apr
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Once upon a time there was a radical president who tried to remake American society through government action. In his first term he created a vast network of federal grants to state and local governments for social programs that cost billions. He set up an imposing agency to regulate air and water emissions, and another to regulate workers’ health and safety. Had Congress not stood in his way he would have gone much further. He tried to establish a guaranteed minimum income for all working families and, to top it off, proposed a national health plan that would have provided government insurance for low-income families, required employers to cover all their workers and set standards for private insurance. Thankfully for the country, his second term was cut short and his collectivist dreams were never realized.
His name was Richard Nixon.
Arranged in a handful of clear, concise chapters, “Escape Fire: The Fight to Rescue American Healthcare” turns an unwieldy, Medusa-headed topic into a convincingly humane argument for change.
