Tales From the Dark Side: The Lust for Vinyl

The last time I wrote about buying vinyl, it was after a Record Store Day. I sent off early in the morning cruising a variety of shops to score some of the exclusive discs that are especially created one day in April for music hungry fanatics like myself. There’s another such day coming up in November. They call it Black Friday. Vinyl is black, you see. Although many of these special releases are pressed on coloured, even multi-coloured vinyl, to draw the rabid collector in even further. But somewhere back in the collector’s history there must be a beginning where this craving began. We all understand cravings these days. The proliferation of vampire and zombie stories, with their creatures’ cravings for blood and brains is just what makes people of a certain age, and bent, to wander the streets searching for a way to satisfy that vinyl-lust. I started to think about the first record stores I ever visited to see what it was that drew me into this dark world in the first place.

Insider Outsiders: Hulu's Difficult People

Julie Klausner and Billy Eichner star in Difficult People, on Hulu.

This past fall, IFC premiered a comedy called Garfunkel and Oates. The short-lived series starred Riki Lindhome ("Garfunkel") and Kate Micucci ("Oates") as a female musical comedy duo trying to make it in Hollywood, one NSFW folk song at a time. Admittedly I came a bit late to the party, only watching the show after IFC had already cancelled it, and only even becoming aware of it because of Lindhome's new Comedy Central series Another Period, which she co-stars and co-created with Chelsea Lately regular Natasha Leggero. (Another Period, a scatological "parody of manners" best described as Downton Abbey meets Keeping Up with Kardashians – and whose cast also includes Mad Men's Christina Hendricks – will finish its first season at the end of the month and is also among the most pleasurable of this summer's guilty pleasures.) Garfunkel and Oates is buoyed by the unassuming charm of its lead players and (unapologetically borrowing from HBO's Flight of the Conchords) provides ample opportunity for well-produced cutaway videos of the kinds of songs that have made the duo famous on YouTube over the years. It also offers a timely glimpse into the pandemic sexism of the internet and the comedy world in general. (Asked by a comedy club owner "Please, no material about your periods," the two acquiesce only to segue into a lengthy on-screen conversation about, of course, their periods.) Garfunkel and Oates – like the act which inspired it – was alternately biting and adorable, and was, for its brief time on our airwaves, always entertaining.

Shows about comedians, with the comics playing slightly tweaked versions of themselves, have long been a TV staple. From Jack Benny to Garry Shandling to Jerry Seinfeld to Larry David to the sublime Louis C.K., the list includes some of the funniest and often most innovative shows on television. (As last year's lamentable Mulaney demonstrates, however, the trope isn't always a guarantee of success: Mulaney felt a little like what I would have imagined the fictional series "NBC" commissioned from George and Jerry in the middle seasons of Seinfeld to have been like.) This past year, along with Garfunkel and Oates, television has added two new shows to that list, both notably about the travails of comedy duos: FX's (already cancelled) mockumentary-styled The Comedians (starring Billy Crystal and Josh Gad), and now Hulu's Difficult People. The latter premiered on Hulu on August 5, and will release one new episode a week until mid-September.

Blast from the Past: The Gift

Joel Edgerton (right) in The Gift, a film Edgerton also wrote and directed.

In movies, the Australian actor Joel Edgerton is best known for playing a wide assortment of muscle men and meatheads. Edgerton was the thuggish small-time crime lord in Animal Kingdom, one of the Navy SEALs on a mission to take out Osama bin Laden in Zero Dark Thirty, and the MMA fighter who reconnects with his estranged brother (Tom Hardy) by kicking his ass in the Octagon in Gavin O’Connor critically acclaimed, sweat-stained male weepie Warrior. (On stage, he has taken on the greatest meathead role in the pantheon of the American theater, Stanley Kowalski, in two separate productions of A Streetcar Named Desire.) When Edgerton finally got the chance to play a character who doesn’t come down to dinner in his undershirt, it was the oafish nouveau riche villain Tom Buchanan in the 2013 Baz Luhrmann travesty The Great Gatsby.

There, he made the fatal mistake of trying to scale his performance to match the bombastic style of his director. Neither Luhrmann nor Edgerton seemed to understand that Tom’s lines about the scientific basis for racism and looking out for number one are enough on their own to mark him as an obnoxious fellow; it isn’t really necessary for the actor to underline things by bellowing every syllable. Edgerton makes his directing debut with The Gift, which he also wrote and acts in, and it’s a bit of a shock: a deft, perfectly controlled little thriller, a commercial entertainment but one that’s smart and detailed and rewards close attention to the nuances of what’s being said and how. It is that rarest of oases in the late summer movie release schedule, an actor’s movie.

Shakespeare For The Masses: Commonwealth Shakespeare Company's King Lear

Commonwealth Shakespeare Company's King Lear. (Photo by Andrew Brilliant)

We are pleased to welcome a new critic, Michael Lueger, to our group.

Reviewing a free production of Shakespeare in the park might seem to miss the point. It seems that every day brings fresh hand-wringing about the future of the theatre, and whether the trends of rising ticket prices and aging audiences have sent it into a terminal decline. In light of such concerns, it’s encouraging that organizations such as the Commonwealth Shakespeare Company (CSC), which has been mounting Shakespeare on the Boston Common for 20 years now, and which staged King Lear from July 22 to August 9, are bringing free productions of classical works to a wide audience. However, the relative decline in the importance of theatre in popular culture means that, for many of those attending events such as Shakespeare on the Common, this may be the only production that they see in the course of the year. Many of the 75,000 attendees (by the CSC’s estimate) who saw Lear this summer will have their impressions of the theatre in general shaped by what they experience at this production, and may base future decisions on whether to attend other shows on its quality. Given those circumstances, it’s worth critiquing the CSC Lear for what it gets right and wrong about presenting Shakespeare to a wider audience.

Jackpot – Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation

Rebecca Ferguson and Tom Cruise in Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation.

Tom Cruise’s Ethan Hunt is a gambler, according to terrorist Solomon Lane (Sean Harris), a loose cannon whose reckless success relies more on luck than solid field work – which is one of the reasons the CIA has chosen to shut down his Impossible Mission Force. Luck does certainly play a large role in getting Ethan out of many of the harrowing situations he puts himself in, but it has nothing to do with the success of the Mission Impossible series, which – through experience, dedication, and craft – might have hit the jackpot on a perfect blockbuster spy thriller with Rogue Nation.

1984 in the 21st Century

Simon Coates, Christopher Patrick Nolan, Hara Yannas, Sam Crane, Tim Dutton, Stephen Fewell, Mandi Symonds & Matthew Spencer in 1984, at London's Almeida Theatre. (Photo by Manuel Harlan)

Robert Icke and Duncan Macmillan’s exciting production of George Orwell’s 1984 (they did the adaptation as well as directing it) began two years ago at the Nottingham Playhouse and toured around the U.K. before opening at the Almeida in London and subsequently the West End earlier this year. (It will tour the U.S. this fall, including a stop at the American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge.) Orwell’s 1949 classic is inherently dramatic, though both movie versions – one in 1956 and a second, naturally, in 1984 – were disappointments. (A 1953 television production for  CBS's Studio One attracted some notice, but I’ve never seen it.) Icke and Macmillan’s 1984 is relatively modest, though the stagecraft in the climactic scene where the Thought Police arrest Winston (Matthew Spencer) and his lover Julia (Janine Harouni) is quite sophisticated. The show has a cast of nine and Chloe Lamford’s set, which looks like a slightly moldy English library from the Depression era, also does service as an office, an apartment and a canteen; it manages to both look anonymous and suggest a nostalgic glimpse of an earlier England.

Off-key: Ricki and the Flash

The following contains spoilers.

Meryl Steep’s terrible performance as Ricki Rendazzo, a ‘rock chick’ who left her family years ago to try for music stardom, only to end up fronting a minor bar band in Tarzana, California, is only one of the many drawbacks of Ricki and the Flash, a movie whose truthfulness is as elusive as Ricki’s dreams of success. As the ‘aging’ Rendazzo, Streep is all pouty lips and pained expressions, outrageous outfits and excessive makeup; what she isn’t is a flesh and blood character. But Diablo Cody’s screenplay doesn’t allow for anyone to create anything memorable on screen and Jonathan Demme’s lazy direction – he’s never been worse – only underlines the emptiness and hackneyed nature of the movie.

To Be or...: AMC's Humans

The AMC/Channel Four summer SF series, Humans, which just finished its first season last Sunday, focuses on the familiar theme of what it means to be human in a world being run largely by synthetic life. Loosely based on the 2012 Scandinavian show, Äkta människor (Real Humans), Humans (which is set in a future Britain that doesn't look dramatically different from the present) is a densely plotted, yet engaging, serial drama that sets itself up as a thriller, but resists the kind of melodramatic mechanics that give most popular television programs their push. Although that approach is certainly laudable, and it never becomes languid (especially given that other successful thrillers like True Detective manufacture suspense by mainlining dread), there is a pronounced lack of suspense despite the very nature of the story. Since Humans wants to be on the human side of every issue there seems to be little of consequence despite the consequences that unfold. Even so, the cast – whether they are playing real people or synths – have dimensions built into their roles which gives the plot some pep and purpose.

While We’re Young: Do Not Go Gentle into Middle Age

Ben Stiller and Naomi Watts in While We're Young

Noah Baumbach’s early comedies, Kicking and Screaming and Mr. Jealousy, were so fresh in the writing that the deficiencies in the filmmaking didn’t seem important (Baumbach both wrote and directed); they were like minimalist movie versions of terrific little plays, performed with brio by casts of talented young actors. Kicking and Screaming reworked territory – the reluctance of young men to grow up and enter the world – that had been famously inhabited by earlier directors, notably Fellini in I Vitelloni and Barry Levinson in Diner (which was his own version of I Vitelloni), but Baumbach’s loose, gabby approach made it feel like a series of explosively funny bull sessions. And I’d never seen anything precisely like Mr. Jealousy, where Eric Stoltz becomes so obsessed with his girl friend’s past relationship with a hip novelist that he joins the novelist’s therapy group. Almost two decades after seeing Mr. Jealousy, I can still run scenes through my mind and chuckle over them.

Incoherent Film: Woody Allen’s Irrational Man

Emma Stone and Jaoquin Phoenix in Woody Allen's Irrational Man.

What to make of Woody Allen’s latest movie Irrational Man? Not much, actually. The drama about jaded, lacklustre university professor Abe Lucas (Joaquin Phoenix) who only comes to emotional life when he plots to kill a stranger mines much of the same territory, concerning morality and the meaning of justice versus injustice, that Allen’s Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989) did. It also delves into the same mystery tropes, such as how to best commit the perfect murder that was the subject of Manhattan Murder Mystery (1993) and Match Point (2005). Not much new here, then, other than the film’s Newport, Rhode Island setting and, believe it or not, a somewhat more modern soundtrack. (The Ramsey Lewis Trio’s 60s tracks used in the movie, "Wade in the Water" and "The In Crowd” are poppier than Allen’s usual classical/jazz standards, but also overused here.) There’s also the welcome presence of Emma Stone, who also starred in Allen’s last movie, Magic in the Moonlight (2014). As Jill Pollard, Lucas’s student who falls hard for him and becomes reluctantly involved in his immoral machinations, she pretty much steals the movie, except there’s so little to Irrational Man that hers is really not much of an accomplishment.

CD Projekt Red and The DLC Renaissance

Internet users put their Photoshop skills to use in expressing their frustration with the way DLC has changed over the years.

Media products have interesting lifespans. Like us, they are born, they live, and they fade away – but unlike us, their lives can be artificially extended. An artist will expand upon an existing work, investing it with new perspective, or maybe the benefit of sales revenue will prompt a re-release of a much-loved classic. We see it across all media: albums get reissues and special editions, movies get bonus features and director’s cuts, and games get something called downloadable content.

Evidence and Memory: Harper Lee's Go Set a Watchman

Harper Lee in 1961. (Photo: Donald Uhrbrock/Time & Life Pictures)

The New York Times announced on February 3 the imminent publication of Harper Lee’s Go Set a Watchman (HarperCollins; 278 pp.)—an early manuscript, the rejected draft of which inspired a rewrite resulting in To Kill a Mockingbird, winner of a 1960 Pulitzer Prize and still among the most beloved of American novels. The manuscript, thought to be lost or destroyed, had lately been discovered by Tonja Carter, Lee’s lawyer, but doubts were immediately raised about the legitimacy of its publication. The 88-year-old Lee, it was pointed out, had suffered a stroke in 2007, and might be insufficiently compos mentis to authorize (or even understand) the release of a moldering, long since rejected work—one which, in any case, she herself had not seen fit to publish in all the intervening years, despite every opportunity and incentive to do so. Added to this was the fact that Lee’s sister and protector, Alice, had died in the fall of 2014: some claimed that Alice, at Harper’s behest, had purposely blocked publication of Watchman, and that its appearance so soon after her death smelled of exploitative cause and effect. Yet statements endorsing the publication and attributed to Lee were released through her publisher and lawyer, and her agent—while noting his client’s puzzlement about why people were interested in the book now—indicated no veto action on her part. That the same publisher, lawyer, and agent all stand to benefit nicely from the publication is duly noted, but others visiting Lee at her assisted-living facility in Alabama have likewise claimed that she is well aware of, and quite happy about, the book’s appearance.

War as Hell: What Price Glory? and The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel

Americans haven’t written many war plays, but I would say there are two great ones: What Price Glory? by Maxwell Anderson and Laurence Stallings, from 1924, set in France during the First World War, and David Rabe’s The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel, about Vietnam, which was first produced while the war was still going on, in 1971. Both take an anti-war stance, but in almost every other way they are strikingly different; even as anti-war plays they’re distinct from each other. Still I don’t think it’s possible to think about what Rabe accomplishes in the angry, poetic Expressionist fable Pavlo Hummel without considering the groundwork Anderson and Stallings laid for the war play in What Price Glory?, which was tremendously successful on Broadway and spawned two movie versions as well as three sequels to the first (silent) one.

The fact that there were sequels to a film adaptation of a war play points to the unusual quality of What Price Glory?, which belongs to another genre as well, the hard-boiled comedy. Hard-boiled comedies were almost entirely creations of the theatre of the 1920s: The Front Page, Once in a Lifetime and the original (non-musical) Chicago are the best-known ones, though Robert Altman’s 1970 movie M*A*S*H is an example from a much later era. In fact, What Price Glory? clearly paved the way for M*A*S*H, which has a wartime setting (Korea). Hard-boiled comedies are cynical, satirical and anti-authoritarian, and their heroes are shrewd, quick-witted professionals who excel at their jobs and have a highly developed nose for bullshit, not to mention an instinctual intolerance for it. The heroes of Anderson and Stallings’s play are Captain Flagg and First Sergeant Quirt, career soldiers with a checkered history: they’re buddies and rivals who have fought over one woman or another in a series of military outposts, and in more than one war. Their present military ranks are as temporary as everything else about them: Quirt was once a captain, but Flagg reduced his pal's rank at some point over a woman.

The New Cold War in Jason Matthews' Palace of Treason

Novelist Jason Matthews. (Photo: Nicole Bengiveno / The New York Times)

“[Putin] was a natural conspirator who was concerned about one thing – sila – power, strength, force. It was having and keeping sila that everything else derived: personal wealth, Russian resurgence, territory, oil, global respect, fear, women.”

–  Jason Matthews, Palace of Treason (Scribner, 2015)

In his debut thriller Red Sparrow, Jason Matthews introduced Dominika Egorova of the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR), one of the most intriguing heroines to grace the espionage genre. Courageous, a stunningly attractive former ballerina and capable of unleashing lethal force on anyone who presents a threat, Dominika is a synesthete endowed with the gift of seeing emotions as colours above the heads of those around her. (When I reviewed Sparrow two years ago, I mistakenly suggested that her synesthesia was a metaphor for heightened intuition. I have since learned that synesthesia is a neurological condition that may affect four percent of the population. Those who experience this phenomenon usually see colours in letters and numbers or associate sounds with colours, but in some rarer cases a synesthete can associate particular colours with specific people. The latter application is the most relevant to Dominika.) She is also a graduate of the Sparrow School, where male and female agents are taught advanced sexual techniques as an aid to seduction and recruitment. Dominika is recruited by Nate Nash, an internal-ops officers, also tasked with handling CIA assets. His aura is deep purple, one that is “warm, honest and safe.” But the increasingly reckless Nate breaks every rule of security by becoming involved with Dominika. In the sequel, Palace of Treason, Mathews provides sufficient back story so that anyone can enjoy this novel without having read its predecessor.

The Landscapes of Film: Interview with Peter Greenaway (1986)

Today would have been Critics at Large co-founder David Churchill's 56th birthday. Earlier this week, I was trying to think of a way to commemorate it in our post today. While his wife, Rose, supplied me with a box of published and unpublished work to consider, I felt the need for something else. But what? So without a solution in mind, I put it to the back of my mind and took to my storage closet the other night to find some book I needed for some other matter. While hunting for this lost hardcover, however, I came across a file in a box which contained a transcribed and unpublished interview with film director Peter Greenaway that David had done back in 1986 when the director was in Toronto for a presentation of his work. Seeing the typewritten series of sheets, where corrections consisted of pencil slashes across words and scribbled insertions, it took me back to a whole other era of writing and editing. But it also brought me back to the moment when David gave it to me to read which was shortly after he did his transcription. 

We had been friends for about two years at that point and already feeling each other out on our favourite films, directors we liked and didn't, and gleefully and teasingly putting each other's views to the test. We were still a year away from doing reviews together on the radio. But he already knew that I was no fan of Peter Greenaway's pictures (which to that point included The Draughtsman's Contract and A Zed and Two Noughts) because I found them to be obsessively formal and the abstract exercises of a patrician; or perhaps, to put it more succinctly, Greenaway was the art historian as beach bully who (to paraphrase critic Terrence Rafferty) kicked art in our faces. So I think David wanted to prove otherwise when he gave me this interview to read. Perhaps he also wished to justify a sensibility that spoke deeply to him at the time. (David was also a huge fan of Alain Renais who had an enormous impact on Greenaway's work.) We had already had our arguments over Stanley Kubrick's later films like The Shining which David would attend whenever it was being revived. "Whenever I feel depressed, I go to see The Shining," he would often say about a film that could send me into fits of depression. I never got an answer out of him as to why it cheered him so (but had he lived, as he intended, to review Rm 237, a documentary about viewers' obsessions with The Shining, I might have gotten my answer). Anyway, I never did get around to reading his interview with Peter Greenaway which I'm sure he saw as a shortcoming of mine. Maybe he wanted me to find it the other night if you believe in interventions from the other side. But as I was reading and editing it today, I could hear his voice threading through this conversation as I could imagine him also grinning somewhere in satisfaction that he finally found a way to get my attention. I can say that after devouring the discussion, I still haven't changed my mind about Peter Greenaway and his films. But neither have I about David's value as a dear friend and great critic. And we all miss him in the pages of Critics at Large.

Kevin Courrier,
Editor-in-Chief.


dc: As much as you are a filmmaker, you've also been called an enumerator, a cataloger and a classification theorist. How do all these things comprise what you do in films like A Zed and Two Noughts and The Draughtsman's Contract?

pg: All forms of art and human activity are desperate attempts of man to comprehend chaos by cataloging it in some way. Perhaps the supreme image is the map, that extraordinary artifact that's told you where you've been, tells you where you are, and tells you where you're going – all in one plane. Language, of course, is a supreme cataloging device which organizes our thoughts and ideas and puts them into some coherent form. So you could say that all human activity falls along this pattern. It's all a process of cataloging, collating and organizing random data that is forever falling on our ears in order that we can utilize and reuse it. So to actually do that in terms of art is no particularly original thing, but I just find it fascinating. Look at the concepts of the invisible line that runs around the world that indicates the equator. By dividing up the planet into convenient sections in order to comprehend the chaos of time is all part of the same desperate attempt to organize the material.

A Zed and Two Noughts (1985)

dc: How did your early years influence your tendency in your pictures to enumerate and catalog things?

pg: My father has considerable interest in ornithology, so that is why I use that influence as a focus in my films. Though I don't know that much about ornithology, my own particular interest in natural history focused in on the collection of British insects. I have a large collection that I recently gave up on because I feel today like it's big game hunting on a smaller scale. As the beetles I collected got rarer and rarer I began to feel like I was plundering. But it was still an area that fascinated me. That is, the careful cataloging where, for instance, I could discern 98 different species of the lady bug which each one is very minutely different from the next.

Women, Interrupted: Hindsight and Younger

Brian Kerwin and Laura Ramsay in Hindsight, on VH1.

Apparently I'm due for a midlife crisis, or at least that's what television is telling me – loudly. Sure. I know how old I am (and if I forget, Facebook is always there to eagerly remind me) but aside from a rapidly greying beard and a still growing list of chronic aches and pains, I have only rarely found myself dwelling morbidly on that fact. But 2015 seems to be the season of the midlife reversal. It began (for me) with Showtime's Happyish, which established quickly, with a bittersweet birthday party around his kitchen table, that its depressive protagonist Thom Payne was celebrating 44 exhausting years. Sure, Thom is played is played by the 49-year-old Steve Coogan, but it was enough to give this Gen-Xer pause. Today, I'm writing about two midlife shows from across the gender divide, VH1's Hindsight and TV Land's Younger. Both series tells stories of 40-something women facing up to the choices they've made, and who – through varying circumstances – suddenly find themselves living lives of women in their mid-20s. The first is essentially an escapist prime time soap with a fantasy flourish, and the second a comedy/drama that delivers laughs and poignant moments of self-discovery, through the lens of some moments of surprisingly pointed social commentary. Both shows have already finished their short first seasons and both were renewed for next year, but if you haven't watched them yet, Younger is the one to catch up on before its new season begins early in 2016.

Neglected Gem #80: Six Ways to Sunday (1997)

Norman Reedus in Six Ways to Sunday (1997).

Norman Reedus’ face hadn’t yet turned into a slit-eyed tribal death mask when he starred in Six Ways to Sunday (1997), a low-budget black comedy that barely made it into a few theaters when it was new and hasn’t established the cult that would give it an afterlife, but that still has a spark and a bent but potent vein of mordant wit. (I first saw it on a DVD that I was able to pick up for six bucks; the now out-of-print DVDs available at Amazon go for more than that now, but in recent months, the movie has also turned up at YouTube. Reedus, best known for his hard-to-resist star turn as the principled white trash zombie killer Darryl on TV’s The Walking Dead, was in his late twenties when he played Sunday’s main character, Harry, an 18-year-old virgin who lives with his mother (Debbie Harry) in a particularly uninviting apartment in a particularly bleak, wintry part of Youngstown, Ohio. Here, he has the sly, baby-fox look of the young Christopher Jones in Wild in the Streets and Three in the Attic. But though Harry is far from defenseless, he’s ill-equipped to outfox anyone, except unwittingly. He’s even invented an imaginary friend, a smiling, finger-popping daddy named Madden (Holter Graham), to protect himself from admitting that he knows more—about things like sex, and violent anger—than he wants to.

Robin Phillips: The Stratford Years

Robin Phillips, in 1977. (Photo via Torstar News Service)

Robin Phillips, who died on July 25 at the age of seventy-three, trained at the Bristol Old Vic and spent a decade as a young actor (he played the title role in the 1969 film of David Copperfield) before turning to directing. I own a copy of a TV movie of Strindberg’s Miss Julie that he directed in 1972 with a stunningly beautiful, sexually daring Helen Mirren playing opposite Donal McCann (a decade and a half before he played Gabriel in John Huston’s The Dead). After two years at the helm of the Greenwich Theatre in England, Phillips took the post of artistic director at Canada’s Stratford Festival and held it for six seasons, 1975 through 1980. I was in my twenties then, living in Montreal, and except for 1976, when I was traveling in Europe, I made sure to visit Stratford once or twice every summer, so I saw roughly a dozen and a half of the shows Phillips directed (or co-directed). I thought at the time that he was the most brilliant stage director I’d encountered in my young, fervent theatergoing life. It was an exciting time to be at Stratford: Phillips brought Maggie Smith, Brian Bedford, Peter Ustinov, Jessica Tandy and Margaret Tyzack to act alongside such Stratford stalwarts as Martha Henry, William Hutt, Douglas Rain, Alan Scarfe, Jack Wetherall and Domini Blythe. (Bedford ended up becoming one of those stalwarts.) Phillips claimed exhaustion when he left Stratford, and no wonder: during two or three of those seasons he staged five plays. His subsequent directing career was halting, though he worked in London and New York and around Canada; nothing evidently nothing he did after 1980 matched up to his achievements at Stratford. But those were glorious years, and I count myself fortunate to have attended so many of his dazzling shows.

Based On A True Story: Kumiko, The Treasure Hunter

Rinko Kikuchi in Kumiko, The Treasure Hunter.

Kumiko (Rinko Kikuchi, of Babel and Pacific Rim) searches for things. The oppressively rigid structure of her Tokyo life – represented in her mind-numbing job, her condescending boss, her overbearing mother, and her tiny, stifling apartment – makes her restless, and so she goes out searching for things, perhaps in an attempt to find a purpose for herself as much as any actual buried treasure. Kumiko, The Treasure Hunter, written and directed by David and Nathan Zellner, opens with Kumiko’s search leading her to a shaded cove, where she uncovers a soggy VHS copy of the Coen Brothers’ Fargo (1996). It’s unclear who left the tape there for her to find, and whose directions she’s followed to get there, but none of that matters: this first, context-free quest establishes the film’s tone of dreamy unreality, and gives Kumiko the first thing she’s had to strive for in years.

All That Jazz: Paradise Blue and The Wild Party

Kristolyn Lloyd and Blair Underwood in Paradise Blue. (Photo: T. Charles Erickson)

Paradise Blue, a new play by Dominique Morisseau at the Williamstown Theatre Festival, is set in the African-American community of Blackbottom in Detroit in 1949, during the heyday of bop. Its protagonist, Blue (Blair Underwood), is a jazz trumpeter who owns a club, the Paradise, and headlines the combo that plays there. He’s struggling to attain the zenith of his creative powers while battling the ghosts of his childhood: he saw his father murder his mother. Morisseau intends Blue to embody the musicians in the bop movement, gifted and intellectually self-challenging, restless and haunted. It’s a great subject, but she’s also working with black archetypes that limit the play imaginatively. The quintet of hard-working actors in Ruben Santiago-Hudson’s production strive to bring a vibrancy to the play but they’re stuck playing caricatures.