First, my very quick Oscar wrap-up:
I was disappointed Eddie Murphy didn’t win. I heard Eddie Murphy and Harvey Weinstein left as soon as his category was announced and he didn’t get the Oscar. It’s just like that Will Ferrell/Jack Black/John C. Reilly song about how the comedian at the Oscars is the saddest man of all because he knows he won’t get any props. Next, that song, which you can watch at YouTube, was the best part of the Oscars aside from when Martin Scorsese won Best Director. I was glad for him. I was also happy that The Departed won Best Picture rather than Little Miss Sunshine. LMS had a good cast and a cute and funny dance sequence at the end, but the actual movie was on the forced side I thought. I admit I never saw Babel. I saw 21 Grams and think I’ll have the same reaction: great acting, interesting element of a story but sort of on the pretentious, drawn out side of things. And Ellen DeGeneres was a good host. I liked her jokes of dropping a script by Martin Scorsese and taking Clint Eastwood’s picture for her MySpace page.
Black Book
Series: Film Comment Selects [Feb 14-27 2007]
Director: Paul Verhoeven, Country: Netherlands, Release: 2006, Runtime: 135This year’s official entry for the Best Foriegn-Language Film Oscar® from the Netherlands, Verhoeven’s triumphant homecoming is a gripping and characteristically unsentimental revisionist take on the final year of the German occupation of Holland and the initial weeks after the liberation. Its heroine, played by rising star Carice van Houten, is a Jewish girl on the run, who joins the resistance movement and infiltrates Nazi headquarters by seducing a German officer (Sebastian Koch). All the familiar Verhoeven ingredients are here – sex, violence, intrigue, betrayal– but, above all Black Book demonstrates that he is a great classical storyteller.
Join us for a special screening of Dutch director Paul Verhoeven’s latest film, Black Book, followed by an onstage dialogue about the film and the director’s career between Verhoeven and Film Comment editor Gavin Smith.
Black Book was really good and I wasn’t quite expecting a straight drama from Paul “Basic Instinct” Verhoeven. It had a lot going on in it with a lot of surprises. Starship Troopers is also a movie influenced by Paul Verhoeven’s background growing up in Nazi-occupied Holland. But it is a sci-fi satire while Black Book is largely inspired by factual people and occurrences. PV said he thought the Dutch came off as angels in Anne Frank’s diary but really, it was a bunch of Dutch people who betrayed her to the Nazis in the end. So PV said he just wanted to make a movie that portrayed the morally grey area the Dutch came up against, including the Resistance, during WWII. He said he was about 6 or 7 years old during that time and his memories and experience were very skewed. He said he was very close to horrific incidents but he was unaware of the implications of everything. PV said he thought about making a movie about his experience as a child but then John Boorman’s Hope and Glory came out and he thought it was a perfect movie that captured that viewpoint exactly, i.e., how a child views war.
Someone asked PV if he had any plans to work with Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger again (they did Total Recall together). PV said AS had the rights to a project about the Crusades they had been working on but he didn’t think it would ever come to fruition as AS has other aspirations and Ridley Scott’s Kingdom of Heaven had recently been made. What else stood out from the Q&A? PV said he had to trim stuff to get an R-rating for RoboCop. He also said no matter what Sharon Stone says, he storyboards and choreographs scenes down to the tiniest detail so there are no surprises for anyone involved.
I saw John Mayer perform at Madison Square Garden, NYC on February 28, 2007. Mat Kearney opened for him. I had heard Mat Kearney here and there and thought he did a fine job.
This was my first time seeing John Mayer live and he didn’t disappoint. All of his musicians were top-notch. John Mayer as a performer was really consistent. We had our opera glasses which were helpful. I mean, it was good to mix up the close ups with just taking in the venue. It’s amazing that he can pack a stadium like MSG. He seemed energetic and into the show. He enjoyed singing and playing his guitar.
I was glad he didn’t sing Daughters because while I thought it was a perfectly decent song, I always interpreted that song as being a reaction to a relationship that didn’t work out because the girl had issues. And JM was singing, parents, don’t forget the kind of influence you wield over your children’s emotional make-up. But somehow it became a wedding song and I found it kind of weird as a daughter-father dance song. It was sending off a message that either this father didn’t emotionally damage his daughter so lucky groom or sorry, he did, but maybe there’s hope for her kids.
He did perform Waiting on the World to Change which I don’t mind but it sounds so much like the Impressions song that I was feeling like hearing John Mayer perform People Get Ready instead. However, I did enjoy him playing his over-played single No Such Thing. I liked the John Mayer Trio stuff. I liked everything else from Continuum and his other albums. All in all, it was a very solid show and concert-going experience.
Incidentally, John Mayer spoke about his stand up comedian aspirations and experimentations in EW recently. This stand up project is where the stories about him being racist arose. I guess he had a routine about why white comedians just can’t use the n-word but he used the n-word in this routine and it just didn’t pan out. John Mayer said he learned fast not to make that mistake again. I took from that that John Mayer is not racist. He just misjudged a situation and quickly rectified it. But he said he has received a lot of constructive criticism and support from stand ups in NY. So that’s cool for him. It doesn’t seem to be interfering with his joy of music. Here, I found it online:
These days, Mayer is taking his comedic inclinations a little more, well, seriously. In the past nine months, he’s made a string of low-key stand-up appearances at comedy clubs in L.A. and New York. ”I brought this plague into the world!” says kids’ comedian Sherrod Small, a regular on VH1’s Best Week Ever. ”John came down to the Comedy Cellar in New York, and he wanted to get on stage. So we worked on a couple of jokes he had in his head, and the next week, he went on. He was nervous, but he did great.”
”I have the bug,” Mayer admits. ”The last set I did was decent, and decent, for me, was a new high. But it does make people around me a little nervous.” Such anxiety probably seemed justified when a brouhaha erupted after Mayer allegedly used the N-word in the course of his stand-up set last June. ”It wasn’t some Michael Richards-style freak-out,” says book editor and novelist Jason Pinter, who was at the show in question. ”It was within the context of a joke about how black people can use [the word], whereas, for white people, it’s taboo. Had the joke been funnier, it probably would have made more sense. I definitely want to be clear that I don’t think he’s a racist. It was a poorly timed joke. I just don’t think his material was as good as it should have been.”
Last but not least, the long awaited Wooster Group production of Hamlet has been in previews at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn. It will eventually be playing in the Performing Garage in Soho but not until the fall of 2007. For now, you have to make the trip to DUMBO (District Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass). The area itself is odd but has stunning views of the city and surrounding bridges not to mention the river. There is great ice cream there at the Brooklyn Ice Cream Factory (I think it’s called this). The original Jacques Torres chocolate factory is there (you can go to the bigger store in the West Village too). The over-rated but still good brick oven pizza place Grimaldi’s is also there.
Now, I adore the Wooster Group and everything they aspire towards. I have also seen a fair number of Hamlet productions. So I’ve been looking forward to this particular performance for a long time. The actual production is cool. The actors are serious about their craft but they are also interested in bringing a new experience to the audience. They are known for how they integrate multi-media with new interpretations of staples in the theater world. But I only lasted through the first half. Last time I was at St. Ann’s Warehouse, it was a performance in the round or semi-round so the seats were spread out a bit more. They always use folding chairs so it is not the most comfortable but it is a way they keep prices down. Also, they alternate between general seating and assigned seats.
This time, it was a conventional stage in front, seats in a row set up. The folding chairs were assigned and also lined up flush to one another. So everyone’s elbows and knees were knocking with their neighbor’s elbows and knees the whole time. Plus, for whatever reason, I’m sure there was a good reason, the heat was blasting right before the show. So it was very stuffy. In addition, I was just plain sleepy from staying up for various other outings. So it was just poor planning on my part in that respect. So, the combination of sleepiness, being squeezed in and feeling the mild stuffiness of the venue made me decide I’d rather make the trek out of Brooklyn earlier than later. Also, this is only the workshop version (the 2 hours and 40 minute long workshop version) so I know they will fine tune it and have more performances at a later date. So my plan is to return when it is at the Performing Garage and hope that it is less crammed. I know they try to keep ticket prices affordable but I think people would’ve paid more to have breathing room. Then again, maybe I’m the only one with the issues here although my two fellow PCA’s did accompany me out of there. They said they could’ve stayed but felt it was stuffy in there.
Still, I hope I can keep enjoying the Wooster Group performances in the future. I am just of the same ilk as Attia and Mark Anthony as depicted in ROME where they are frequently reclined as they interact with others. If only I could have been in a barcalounger during Hamlet, I would’ve been extremely content!
![[Post to Twitter]](http://www.thesis.mekerr.com/blog/wp-content/plugins/tweet-this/icons/tt-twitter.png){kind=icon}
