There’s a scene in the movie Real Genius where Val Kilmer’s character tries to fly a remote-controlled helicopter around his dorm room. When it crashes, he asks his roommate, “Would you qualify that as a launch problem or a design problem?” When the all-too-well-named The Wreck of the Spanish Armada crashes, it’s clearly a failure of design, though in fact, like Chris Knight’s helicopter, it barely gets off the ground before failing.

When a hotel bellhop, wearing Errol Flynn’s pirate garb from the Sea Hawk, lingers after carrying a woman’s luggage (five perfectly matched Samsonite cases, just to deliver a conference keynote), and then pours her champagne, and then pours some for himself, he’s clearly not a hotel bellhop. Yet she fails to recognize him as her former lover of 30 years ago—even though he has the same unusual name, Drake (as in Sir Francis Drake, of defeating-the-Spanish-Armada fame. Much—way too much—is made of this.)

The coincidences don’t stop there. In the intervening years, her eventual husband became an oil trader on Wall Street, and Drake has become a Somali pirate whose specialty is stealing oil tankers—not for reasons of revenge, because, apparently, the one was a husband and oil trader before the other was a pirate. I say apparently, because it’s impossible to make sense of the story’s timeline, though it’s discussed endlessly. Nor of the character’s motivations, though they too are endlessly discussed.

In fact, the entire play, except its improbable opening minute, and its bookend, an utterly nonsensical final minute, consists of exposition and explanation, much of it of backstory known to both characters.

Except what they conveniently don’t know. Or conveniently mistake or misremember. “Remember when I picked you up at the airport last night?” Drake asks, as if he were an airport redcap, instead of a hotel bellhop, and as if she had arrived at night, instead of in the morning on a redeye flight with a breakfast over Dublin (part of the improbable opening minute). Would that I could misremember, or just plain forget, this entire play.

I saw ReLateAble at its first showing and it felt, inevitably, unrehearsed. The largely excellent dialogue calls for a particular pace, and two of the actors had already mastered it, while the other two had not—one by way of being too frantic, the other not frantic enough. These are good actors, so this a temporary issue.

The bigger problem with ReLateAble will not work itself out with more performances. While individual lines of dialogue sparkle and shine, doubly so in the reflection of laughter and the obvious enjoyment of the audience, the underlying beats repeat themselves endlessly, never increasing through further conflict, never getting an closer to solution.

Ann’s old college friend Fran is come for a visit; her roommate Jon is expecting the imminent arrival of Paul, a potential beau he met just last week. Meanwhile, the entire city’s Internet is inexplicably down. Jon is suffering withdrawal symptoms generally and a specific need to track Paul through every conceivable social networking platform.

Only one story thread resolves; fortunately, it is the most important one, and it does so satisfyingly with a dizzyingly perfect speech near the end. (The play could end there but for one final nice joke.) But the playwright needs to track all the story lines and give them beginnings, middles, and ends—and create one for Fran. Early on, she’s the strongest, most interesting character, but she becomes a plot-needed functionary as a loose cannon, before losing all relevance.

For better and for worse, we rarely walk into a show without expectations. (So much so that this reviewer has devised, mainly for movies, a four-S rating system: surprisingly not dreadful; surprisingly not bad; surprisingly watchable; surprisingly good.) Fringe shows might be thought to escape the tyranny of expectations—there are no previews, and its small venue and audience sizes generate little word-of-mouth. Still, two expectations mar an otherwise enjoyable Naked Hamilton.

First, the venue, DROM, is set up with a working bar along one wall, and a long stage at right angles to it, with four-tops nestled in the L thereby created. (Fringegoers who saw the hit play “Who Loves You Baby?” a few years ago at the similarly-laid-out Bowery Poetry Club know how ideal this arrangement can be; the conceit of that show was that Telly Savalas had come back from the dead to do a nightclub show.)

The audience at Naked Hamilton, naturally, set itself up to optimally look at the stage. But since the story of is of two alcoholic former lovers rowdily hanging out at their favorite bar, the actors, naturally, played the entire first half of the show, and some of the remainder, at the bar. Many in the audience were facing the wrong way, and a pillar impeded the view for those sitting along the long back wall. An announcement by the venue manager before the show starts, and a minute given over to people reseating themselves, would help immensely.

The second expectation involves the show’s length. Listed in the Fringe guide for one hour, it barely went forty minutes. This subtly changes how one sees the action—for one thing, when watching the final conflict, one expects there to be at least one more to come. (If it seems unreasonable to build subliminal expectations along these lines, think of the experience of the diminishing thickness of the right-hand side of a book as you read it—which is important enough that e-book readers tell you how many e-pages remain.) Again, an addendum to the venue manager’s opening announcements would help.

The show itself embodies a noble idea—that the improvements of gentrification are (to use a word my cousin once invented) deprovements for pre-existing populace, attracted as they are to low rents or down-and-out environs. Tom and Tee’s beloved bar is closing early one night for a photoshoot. Already drunk, they protest, are locked inside, and the cops are called. Besides the imminent threat of arrest, they fear their home-away-from-home will close; almost as bad, or maybe worse, its clientele and character are already changing.

To do this as a two-person play is an interesting, not entirely successful, idea. It relies on an unseen and improbable bar owner, and magnifies the perennial dramatic problem of revealing backstory with two and only two characters, who know each other intimately. That problem is partly overcome by one character revealing a secret that may or may not be true. The veracity question is never answered, though, contributing to the abruptness of the ending.

Finally, while both performances were excellent, they were unevenly so. Sky Gilbert’sScott McCord’s Tom fills the room; he’s brilliantly inebriated and fully formed; it helps he has the stage (/bar) to himself for the first ten minutes. Suzanne Bennett as Tee cannot make herself as large with Tee, an effort not helped by an awkward signature gesture of a double-fisted double-armed rock-star arm raising.

Despite or because it is imperfectly realized, Naked Hamilton is well worth its 40 minutes—and would be even at 60.

Is the Mona Lisa just a copy of the woman it is a painting of?

Is a memory a copy? What if it’s not really a memory? And what if we simply don’t know? How does our knowledge—or lack of knowledge—change something?

In Certified Copy, an author, James (William Shimmel), has recently published a book in which he asserts that copies have their own integrity. As proof, if someone doesn’t know it is a copy, he is filled with all the same feelings of beauty and artfulness as is the person who looks at the original. In the opening scene, he gives a reading, eagerly (though only briefly) attended by a woman, Elle (Juliette Binoche). What is her interest in him? We wonder.

The thesis seems wrong, maybe even a bit absurd. At one point James looks at a newlywed couple and says they ought to know what lies ahead for them, that their happiness is an illusion they should be disabused of. What is the harm, Ellie asks him. And hasn’t he just repudiated the thesis of his book?

Partway through the movie, the two, having traveled to another town to look at a work of art—a copy, naturally—are mistaken for being married to one another by an old woman who runs a café. Elle, does not correct the error. For the rest of the movie, the couple—on their own, far from the café, continue the charade. But what if it isn’t a charade? Our understanding of the couple, our feelings for and about them, change depending on whether we think they have just met, or have been married for 15 years.

As far as reality is concerned, it makes all the difference in the world whether they are married or strangers. But this is a movie, a work of art. How we regard (look at) it determines how we regard it (assess it as a work of art). Is a perfect copy of as good as the original, if you regard it that way?

IMDb / Box Office Mojo / Rotten Tomatoes (88%/69%)

Look inside, and you’ll see a lots of gears that need oil—David Edelstein’s review for New York Magazine, for example, is counted as favorable, but to read it is to find more green splattered on the page than red. He concludes it by noting that Hugo tells his young friend Isabelle that

machines have no extra, unneeded parts, and if he were a piece of a machine he’d have a reason for being. We know, of course, that he is a piece of a machine: Scorsese’s Colossal Stupendous 3-D Thrill Generator. It’s not clear if the irony is intentional.

That hints at what Joe Morgenstern says directly, over at The Wall Street Journal:

thematic potency and cinematic virtuosity—the production was designed by Dante Ferretti and photographed by Robert Richardson—can’t conceal a deadly inertness at the film’s core.

That’s it exactly. The movie’s dialogue is so entirely on the nose, from beginning to end—as if it isn’t enough have Hugo explicitly say that people are machines and need to have a function, and he says it several times—with Isabelle finally replying, gee, maybe that’s what’s wrong with my dad. Doh! Marty, we got the point an hour ago when you made an automaton a central character in the movie.

Even the 3-D didn’t work for me. As it was supposed to, the effect heightened the distance between them when one person was closer to the audience than another, but the people themselves, especially the front person, looked like a cardboard cutout—two dimensional, in other words. And throughout, the 3-D was just plain distracting.

Then there’s the matter of the movie’s tutorials on the history of cinema. I can think of no one I would rather hear lecture on the subject than Martin Scorsese—and if he would deign to teach us, a thousand at a time in a big lecture hall at NYU for twelve bucks a night, sign me up for all of them. But I didn’t take the subway in the other direction to a theatre in the middle of Queens to watch Marty at his most didactic, channeled through the character of Rene Tabard (Michael Stuhlbarg). You know that public service commercial that Scorsese does for film preservation? That’s most of the third-act plot in Hugo.

Finally, speaking of film school—Screenwriting 101 isn’t too early to learn a handy little rule of thumb: The protagonist has to resolve the biggest conflict—the crisis—by his own actions. James Bond can’t just sit there enchained by Blofield until Felix Leiter comes to rescue him, he has to escape by his own devices. But Hugo’s final salvation—I’m not really giving anything away, because it’s inconceivable that this movie not have a happy ending—comes as he stands hopelessly in the middle of the train station until Georges Méliès (Ben Kingsley) saves him.

I have no doubt that Hugo will enter the pantheon of great films, as The Departed did. If only the Academy had given Gangs of New York the Best Director title it arguably deserved, we wouldn’t have to keep rewarding Scorsese for the disappointing movies that have followed.

IMDb / Box Office Mojo / Rotten Tomatoes (94%/83%)

Shortlink: https://wp.me/p2947-eH

When the scene finally ends, it gives way to not one, but a series of flashes of very different scenes, none long enough to make any real sense. Eventually, like a child being disciplined, it becomes clear that you need to sit still and take it. You’re not going to get any quick or clear explanations. You settle in for the long haul. You hope the payoff will be worth it. It is.

Tilda Swinton is just extraordinary, in a role that can’t have seemed even possible to play when reading the script. She’s the mother of a teenage boy who has done about the worst thing a teenage boy can do.

The other performers, notably Jasper Newell and Ezra Miller as the child and teenage Kevin, are exceptional as well. John C. Reilly is also excellent, but we don’t see as much of him, though it’s hard to know whether, or how much, that contributes to what finally happens.

The movie has no easy answers, no answers at all in fact, for questions that almost surely have no answer. How much discipline? How much love? How much is nature, and how much nurture? Can a boy be born bad? Can people living in the same household live in different realities?

Instead, it spends its time exploring these people, giving substance to things that can ordinarily only be talked about and never embodied—this particular boy, this particular mother, these other family members, and those other mothers, whose children were the victims of this particularly horrific event.

There is nothing wasted, nothing extraneous, in We Need to Talk About Kevin. Events unfold in three chronologies, shuffled like decks of cards (once the three stories sort themselves out, you’re never confused about which you’re watching): Kevin and his mom, from his birth onward; mom, and eventually Kevin, on the horrific day; and mom, and eventually Kevin, in the frozen, undead days and months that followed.

Tilda Swinton’s portrayal of a woman dragging herself through one day after another, in the shell of her former self, has to be seen to be believed. This story needs to be seen, not to be believed—nothing can make the unbelievable believable—but because it at least makes it it seeable. Few movies try something this hard. A very rare fewer still, succeed.

IMDb / Box Office Mojo / Rotten Tomatoes (82%/86%)

Short link: https://wp.me/p2947-er

The Big Heat, 1953

Police sergeant Glenn Ford is tough as nails, but has a heart of gold. Gloria Grahame is a kept woman, but has a heart of gold. Everyone else is a crook and a louse, except for the woman who works at the auto repair shop, and you can tell she’s a good egg because she walks with a cane.

The plot of The Big Heat is a straight line from the first scene to the end, with a single I-can’t-believe-they-did-that moment in the middle that’s telegraphed so thoroughly the they should save their money and put a first class stamp on it.

Still, even on an off day Fritz Lang can create eye candy out of nothing but lighting and camera angles. If you want to see Gloria Grahame when she has some real material to work with, go straight to In a Lonely Place. As for the other principal, he’s quite good here, but has there ever been a truly great Glenn Ford movie?

“Trust” is a hard movie to watch; it isn’t so much enjoyed as experienced.

A 14-year-old girl, Annie, falls into a relationship on a teen website with a boy, Charlie, who’s 16, then 20, then 25, then, when they finally meet and end up in a motel room, 35. The police get called in fairly quickly, but it takes much longer for Annie to see him for what he is, a sexual predator of adolescent girls.

Roger Ebert’s one-liner in his top 20 films of the year, on which it occupies number 17, is “The bravest thing about David Schwimmer’s ‘Trust’ is that it doesn’t try to simplify.” That’s a fair statement. It doesn’t try to simplify Annie, nor her father Will (Clive Owen, brilliantly playing a role that has almost no place to go), nor even Charlie, who is all the more creepy for how normal he appears, and is never demonized even as the audience, like Will, wants to kill him for what he’s done to Annie and her entire family.

Nor does “Trust” take a simple path even in its structure. It has a plot point number 1, of sorts, but not a plot point number 2, not least because it doesn’t really have a protagonist (nor an antagonist, beyond the demons in Will’s mind and, eventually, Annie’s).

“Trust” strikes something like false notes only occasionally, as the characters all too often are able to articulate exactly what’s going on with them in a preternatural way, but when it happens in the climactic scene, the words fit the characters like gloves and they give the entire film a prefect resonance.

“Trust” is eminently worth enduring. I don’t see nearly as many movies as Ebert, but for me, too, it’s one of the best of the year.

Rating: 10
(using the BroadwayWorld rating system of 10=effusive praise; 9=excellent; 7/8=positive with some reservations; 5/6=respectfully unenthused; 3/4=mostly negative; 2=little to recommend; 1=offended, insulted, angered)

I don’t know how Dawson Nichols came up with the show “I Might Be Edgar Allan Poe” but it’s fun—and might even be integral to its experience—to wonder that he did.

“I Might Be Edgar Allan Poe” apparently started life as a fully-cast radio drama, but as a one-man show it opens with a man writhing on the floor while reciting a poem by Edgar Allan Poe. He stops to chat a bit with the audience, leading to the moment when he utters the title phrase. “Oh,” he continues, “I know I’m not Edgar Allan Poe. Edgar Allan Poe is dead. I’m not Edgar Allan Poe.” And yet. It’s not the hesitation of an irrational person unsure he’s not Edgar Allan Poe. It’s that of a rational person presented by a strange set of circumstances that are best explained by a hypothesis he knows must be false. Plato asks in “The Republic” how a just man can live in an unjust polis. So too, how can a man be rational when he has the bad fortune to inhabit an irrational corner of the universe.

“I Might Be Edgar Allan Poe” inspires just such philosophical thoughts—on madness, reality, and the power of art to get under the skin of an entire culture and stay there for 150 years. It’s impossible to listen to “The Tell-Tale Heart”—and yes, in the most forceful moments of a tour de force performance, Craig Mathers recites all of “The Tell-Tale Heart”—without remembering having read it, even if it were years and years ago.

As he does, the barriers between artist and art begin to dissolve. Remember back to the story. Madness is expressed with such power and intimacy that it’s impossible not to wonder how the author could be other than mad himself. We have been wondering for half the play whether its central character is other than mad, and as he recites it— even though, within the context of the play, it isn’t mad to be doing so—the equivalent question about him becomes insistent, and then finally answered.

The miracle of the play is that for a moment we even wonder this about the playwright. For a moment—just for a moment, but for that one long moment—madness is expressed with such power and intimacy by “I Might Be Edgar Allan Poe” that we wonder, how the author could be other than mad himself? This is powerful theatre.

We never wonder that about Mathers himself; indeed, it’s a tribute to his acting abilities that we never question his sanity. He is, instead, a perfect vessel for 80 minutes of fine madness.

[more fringe 2011 reviews here]

2h 0m (but see below)
VENUE #7: Connelly Theater
Performance seen: Thu 25 @ 8:45

Rating: 7
(using the BroadwayWorld rating system of 10=effusive praise; 9=excellent; 7/8=positive with some reservations; 5/6=respectfully unenthused; 3/4=mostly negative; 2=little to recommend; 1=offended, insulted, angered)

I liked “Noir.” I wanted to like it more. I wanted there to be more of it to like.

McQue (no first name), a big lug of a 1950s New York cop, is stymied in his ambition to advance beyond the level of detective, mainly held back by his jerk of a lieutenant, Norbert Grimes. McQue is also a little bit jealous of the department’s golden child, newly-made detective Clay Holden. Holden is in charge of an investigation of a sweet little murder, and McQue wants in on the case. Holden is also, though, involved in the very crime he’s investigating, thanks to a doll who’s not as innocent as she looks.

Here’s what I liked about “Noir.” (1) The central character of McQue, as likeable a private dick since Philip Marlowe in “The Big Sleep.” (2) The simplicity of the story—four characters: three cops and a dame. It’s all so efficient—a complete noir in an hour. Sweet.

Here’s what I didn’t like about about “Noir.” (1) McQue is far too likeable. The problem with “The Big Sleep”—and what makes it properly not a noir movie at all—is the lack of moral ambiguity in its central character. (2) The tight simplicity of the story. Part of the charm of noir is the convoluted plots. It’s possible to go too far—“Red Harvest” comes to mind, as does that all-McGuffin-all-the-time classic, “The Maltese Falcon”—but all things being equal, too much complexity is better than too little.

The two problems compound one another. McQue is not very believable as a big lug. For one thing, it’s made instantly and painfully clear in the first scene that he isn’t, and so it’s not believable that his lieutenant or anyone else thinks he is. Nor is it necessary for the story—it’s apparently his motivation for pushing himself into the case, which in turn explains how he’s on it, but is all this machinery needed? Couldn’t it have simply been his turn?

Given these limitations, Michael McCoy as McQue is perfect, from his voice to his physique. His character addresses the audience with knowing charm even as he addresses Grimes with contempt. I thought Andrew Dawson had some problems as Grimes, though they may be endemic to the part as written. The character spins long stories to make his points, rendering impossible the quick repartee we both expect from noir and get elsewhere (for example, when Grimes tells Clay, “You’re holding onto false hope,” Clay responds, “Is there another kind?”).

Author Stan Werse, an attorney in his 50s who started writing plays and screenplays less than a decade ago, does a generally wonderful job recreating the conventions of the genre, but he may need to make some tough choices between adhering to them or giving us characters with more complexity than an affectionate send-up can handle. Or maybe Werse just needs to go out a little bit further on the limb he has constructed.

If you were to plot the story’s complexity over time, it would slowly rise to about the 55 minute mark and then fall off a cliff. Five minutes later, it has wrapped up it’s entire plot in a single neat bow. The Fringe catalogue lists the show as running 120 minutes, not 60. Sometime between acceptance and performance, did Werse simplify the noir out of “Noir”?

[more fringe 2011 reviews here]