Reverend's Reviews: Feeling Idiotic

The punk band Green Day's 2004, Grammy Award-winning album American Idiot provided something of a narrative in its critique of the Bush-era, post-9/11 USA. The CD's credits even refer to bisexual front man/lyricist Billie Joe Armstrong as "starring" in the piece, so it wasn't much of a surprise when plans were announced to adapt it as a Broadway musical. Billed as Green Day's American Idiot, the theatrical result -- which is just now making it's Los Angeles debut at the Ahmanson Theatre through April 22nd -- is pretty stunning.

Co-adapted (with Armstrong) and directed by Michael Mayer (who has become the premiere stage chronicler of this generation's angst between this and his Tony Award-winning work on Spring Awakening), the musical spins an abstract, largely sung-through tale of three brash young American friends who end up taking different paths to maturity. Johnny, played by the occasionally over-the-top but generally riveting Van Hughes, falls into drug abuse faster than you can say/sing the score's potent "Boulevard of Broken Dreams." Then there's sweet-voiced Jake Epstein as Will, who discovers on the eve of his move with Johnny and fellow best friend Tunny to the big city that he's gotten his girlfriend pregnant. Tunny (the Channing Tatum-esque Scott J. Campbell) is subsequently co-opted into the "War on Terror" and joins the military, where he receives his own rude induction into adulthood.

The trio encounter such album-inspired characters as "St. Jimmy," a devilish drug dealer, and love interest "Whatsername" along their various journeys, and they do so accompanied by chart-topping hits "Wake Me Up When September Ends," "Are We the Waiting" and the title track. As compelling as these lead performers and songs are, American Idiot on stage would not succeed as well as it does if it weren't for its multi-talented supporting cast members, Darrel Maloney's riveting video/production design, and the choreography of Great Britain's Steven Hoggett.

While Hoggett's stage-pounding dance moves are occasionally predictable and repetitive, they certainly express the show's rebellious, down right confrontational spirit. Hoggett also creates a spectacular, drug-induced airborne duet between Campbell's Tunny and "Extraordinary Girl" Nicci Claspell. I was initially concerned that the handful of female performers/characters in the show were objectified, but there are enough men in boxer briefs on display to balance things out.

It was interesting to watch the reaction of the opening night crowd (which included Oscar nominee Tom Hulce (who also co-produced), Oscar winner Marcia Gay Harden, and gay blogger extraordinaire Perez Hilton along with various blue-hairs) to American Idiot in LA. Essentially the first decade of the 21st century's answer to such prior revolutionary musicals as Hair or Rent (and, in my opinion, more effective than Spring Awakening), Armstrong & Mayer's opus may not have cross-generational appeal. American Idiot, however, does offer energy to spare as well as a critical yet balanced take on enduring geo-political concerns. You'd be an idiot to miss it.

Reverend's Rating: B+

Review by Rev. Chris Carpenter, resident film critic of Movie Dearest and the Blade California.

Reel Thoughts Interview: Frances Fisher's Sedona Adventure

It’s been six years since director Tommy Stovall released the gripping thriller Hate Crime, and he has been working on his follow-up film, Sedona: The Motion Picture ever since. The comic drama is a love letter to the town he and his partner Marc Sterling call home, and it shows. Their son Trevor even stars in the film as a young boy who wanders away from his two fathers (Hate Crime’s Seth Peterson and Matthew Williamson) in the Sedona woods. Frances Fisher anchors the film as Tammy, a high powered ad executive who has a run-in with a small plane on Sedona’s 89A highway, and ends up stranded in the New Age paradise. Fisher’s friend, Sordid Lives’ Beth Grant, suggested her for the role after scoring the part of the aura-reading salon owner Deb.

Fisher’s Tammy is oblivious to her beautiful surroundings and just wants to get out of town (like Bill Murray in Quick Change and Griffin Dunne in After Hours). Deb tells her that there is some reason that she’s stuck in Sedona, and Tammy finds herself flashing back to a traumatic incident that occurred on her birthday many years earlier. Coincidentally, it is Tammy’s birthday that day, and the town crazy, Claire de Loon (Lin Shaye) is running around demanding people sing “Happy Birthday” with her.

With hyper-saturated aerial shots of the gorgeous Sedona scenery and recognizable settings like the Red Planet Diner, Sedona: The Motion Picture captures the vibe of the funky and affluent town, and the cast is filled with actors you’ll recognize such as the sublime Grant, Barry Corbin from Northern Exposure, Christopher Atkins from The Blue Lagoon and Robert Shields of the mime duo Shields and Yarnell. The film’s low budget gives it a homegrown charm and Fisher is amazing, playing comedy as well as serious drama as her past catches up with her. Stovall’s son is engaging and adorably non-actorly, making you feel terrible when Peterson treats him so coldly.

The Sedona Chamber of Commerce could not have produced a better travelogue, and don’t be surprised if a certain statue prominently featured in the film gets a whole lot more people looking up its loincloth.

Frances Fisher is one of those striking red-haired actresses like Tilda Swinton who immediately imbue their characters with gravitas and integrity, be it as Deborah Saxon in the soap opera Edge of Night, Lucille Ball in Lucy and Desi: Before the Laughter or as Kate Winslet’s mother in Titanic. Despite feeling very sick, the star was gracious enough to talk to me about her role in Sedona and other work she’s done.

She was attracted to the role in Sedona when her pal Beth Grant suggested it for a few reasons. “Beth was in as Debbie and I like Sedona and I like playing someone who’s going through a transformation, because that’s what we’re all here to do on this planet, is to learn and grow.”

Fisher, who has a daughter Francesca with her conservative ex Clint Eastwood, isn’t shy about stating her support for same-sex marriage, and happiness with the recent Prop 8 ruling. “I believe that any two people who love each other should be allowed all the rights and privileges of any other two people who love each other legally and emotionally and spiritually.” Her Sedona director and his partner Marc Sterling are good examples of how conventional a same-sex marriage with children can be.

She had to hit the ground running, arriving late the night before filming commenced and wrapping up filming twenty-three days later. There were a lot of locations where they had to shoot, only allowing for one or two takes of any scene, but that contributed to her fish-out-of-water disorientation. “It was pretty intense,” she remarked.

Fisher received good notices for her performance as Lucille Ball, but she was sad that there was so little preparation time allowed. At one point when she was supposed to do Ball’s iconic comedy bit with a bass, the prop people handed her a fiddle.

She’s pleased to see Jessica Chastain, her costar from the 2008 Arizona-set film Jolene, receive such acclaim this year in The Help, The Tree of Life and The Debt. “(Jolene) was her first movie ever and I’m thrilled. She’s a great actress and she’s a good friend and I’m very, very happy for her success.”

Fisher will also soon be swept up in another Oscar-winning media frenzy when Titanic gets its star-studded 3D London premiere, which she will attend. It turns out that surviving the Titanic’s sinking onscreen was not the only disaster Fisher would escape. On Christmas day 2001, Fisher and her daughter narrowly escaped a fire that engulfed their home, with Francesca reportedly jumping from her upstairs window into her mother’s arms.

Fisher definitely brings that maternal fighting instinct to her role in Sedona, and you will love her passionate and comedic work in the film.

Interview by Neil Cohen, resident film critic of Movie Dearest and Phoenix's Echo Magazine.

Reel Thoughts: Friends in Low Places

One time… at Band Camp... actually, it was in a Creative Writing class... I was tasked with writing a story in which I used as much profanity as I could, since it was something I never did in my writing. The resulting story could have turned out like Jennifer Westfeldt’s Friends with Kids, but I succeeded much better than the Kissing Jessica Stein actress.

Definitely hoping to ride the wedding dress train of Bridesmaids, Friends with Kids is an adult-themed relationship film with raunchy bits grafted on like a bad science experiment. With Bridesmaids alums like Kristin Wiig, Maya Rudolf and Jon Hamm, it is tempting to compare the films, but they really aren’t even in the same genre. Westfeldt is going for a Woody Allen-type ensemble comedy, but unfortunately, she is done in by two fatal flaws: her own blandly wooden performance, and the aforementioned badly done raunchiness.

Westfeldt comes off like Lisa Kudrow with all charm, quirkiness and charisma removed. She creates a void at the center of her own film, no matter how hard costar Adam Scott works to make up for her shortcomings. The misfired nastiness includes extended improbable discussions about vaginal tightness and yet another explosive baby diarrhea scene straight out of last year’s horrible comedy The Change-Up.

The premise of Friends with Kids really doesn’t hold water. After seeing how miserable all of their coupled friends are after having children, platonic best buddies Julie (Westfeldt) and Jason (Scott) decide that they should have a no-strings attached baby; that way they can share custody half the time and enjoy their single life the other half... what could go wrong? Of course, these pals are deluding themselves, because they both get jealous when the other finds a hot person to date, Ed Burns as a perfect gentleman in her case and Megan Fox as a Broadway actress starring in Chicago in his case.

The conflicts are as unconvincing as Westfeldt’s dirty talk, and because the main wedge in their friendship/baby timeshare arrangement is unbelievable, so is the resolution. Fox is made to be a child-hater, for instance, and Westfeldt makes Julie totally unsympathetic by having her throw herself at Jason when he is clearly in a relationship with Fox. How did she think it would turn out? All of the issues raised in Friends with Kids could have worked (and almost do at times), but Westfeldt is too involved with the material to realize when it goes off the rails. Also, what does it say when the two most unsympathetic characters are played by Westfeldt and her real-life honey Hamm?

Friends with Kids should be commended for putting New York actors to work, but I am surprised that Rush Limbaugh and Rick Santorum aren’t vilifying the movie for being a contraceptive device. The film made me never want to have kids, so it is more successful at birth control than condoms.

Reel Thoughts Rating: C

Review by Neil Cohen, resident film critic of Movie Dearest and Phoenix's Echo Magazine.

Reverend's Reviews: You've Got to Have Friends

As often as naive high school seniors pledge to "stay friends forever" and tell their besties "don't ever change" in their yearbooks, the harsh reality is that friendships do change over time. This is especially true once spouses/partners and children enter the picture.

Writer-director Jennifer Westfeldt captures the evolution of longtime friendships well in her new dramedy, Friends with Kids, which opens tomorrow. Westfeldt is best known in LGBT circles as the star of 2002's lesbian romance Kissing Jessica Stein. She also stars in her current film as Julie, a successful, single Manhattanite happy with her intimate but non-sexual relationship with similarly successful, single best friend, Jason (Adam Scott of TV's Parks and Recreation). Horrified as they are by the deteriorating marriages of their longtime friends Ben and Missy (Jon Hamm and Kristen Wiig) and Alex and Leslie (Chris O'Dowd and Maya Rudolph) following the births of their respective children, Julie and Jason decide to have a child together the natural way without making an exclusive commitment to each other.

Though their friends are publicly supportive but privately offended initially by Julie and Jason's decision, they are impressed and eventually jealous of the non-traditional family once Jason and Julie's baby is born. The new parents' bliss proves short lived, however, once Jason falls for a hot Broadway dancer (the ever-hot Megan Fox) and Julie is drawn to a recently divorced man played by a surprisingly hunky Edward Burns, director-star of such popular indies as The Brothers McMullen and She's the One.

Friends with Kids is honest and frequently very funny even if the humor sometimes feels forced. Unspooling like a younger, raunchier Woody Allen film, especially in light of its lovingly-shot NYC setting, it is also representative of the growing genre of crude big-screen comedies like last year's hit Bridesmaids that focus on women. Speaking of Bridesmaids, Friends with Kids serves as a mini-reunion of its cast, notably Wiig, Rudolph, Hamm (who is also Westfeldt's real-life, longtime partner) and O'Dowd, who winningly played Bridesmaids' bewildered Irish cop. Their latest effort is better, smarter and less gross-out (despite a scene involving Jason and his infant's explosive diarrhea) than the somewhat overrated Bridesmaids.

"We don't know those people," Jason confesses to Julie at one point after witnessing their friends' at their worst. We can all be tempted at times to say the same of our longtime friends as all our lives lengthen and develop. Challenging and touching in equal measure, perhaps most especially during its potentially polarizing final scene, Friends with Kids makes for worthwhile adult viewing... especially for those with children.

Reverend's Rating: B

Review by Rev. Chris Carpenter, resident film critic of Movie Dearest and the Blade California.

Reverend's Reviews: Two Men and a Camera

Award-winning cinematographers Laszlo Kovacs and Vilmos Zsigmond spent most of their adult lives joined at the hip. From their native, war-torn Hungary to Hollywood during its renaissance period in the 1960's and 70's, the men "left one revolution behind only to create another." Kovacs lensed the radical Easy Rider, Targets and Five Easy Pieces, while Zsigmond brought a stunning naturalism to such blockbusters as McCabe & Mrs. Miller, Deliverance, The Deer Hunter and Close Encounters of the Third Kind as well as the underrated box-office bomb Heaven's Gate.

An Emmy Award-nominated documentary about the pair, No Subtitles Necessary: Laszlo & Vilmos, has just been made available on DVDand Digital Download by Cinema Libre Studio. James Chressanthis' excellent expose features a diverse assortment of commentators who have worked with one or both of the men, including Sandra Bullock, Sharon Stone, the late Dennis Hopper, Peter Fonda, Karen Black, directors Peter Bogdanovich and Bob Rafelson, composer John Williams and critics Leonard Maltin and Todd McCarthy.

As Stone says of Vilmos and Laszlo (the former shot her 1993 thriller Sliver): "They learned how to light in a war zone." The men fled Budapest while film students when the Russian army suppressed an uprising against Hungary's Communist regime. Along their way to the Austrian border, they shot dramatic first-hand footage of the brutal crackdown against their fellow citizens so the rest of the world would be able to see what was going on. The eventual master cinematographers succeeded so well because they came, according to Stone, "from the training of life and truth."


First, though, Zsigmond and Kovacs had to work their way up the film industry ladder over a ten-year period following their arrival in California. They started out shooting baby pictures, then porn and cheap horror films, including 1964's notoriously bad The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies. Fearful that they wouldn't be hired because their names sounded too European, the men billed themselves as "William Zsigmond" and "Leslie Kovacs" on their early US films.

It was Kovacs' acclaimed, breakthrough work on Easy Rider that catapulted both him and Zsigmond into the big time. When the newly in-demand Kovacs was unable to take on Peter Fonda's follow-up, The Hired Hand, he recommended his best friend to Fonda as well as to director Robert Altman. Soon after, Zsigmond found himself in demand as well.

No Subtitles Necessary boasts generous helpings of personal anecdotes and clips from the men's films. Kovacs passed away in 2007 (he is seen on oxygen during an interview shot toward the end of his life), but his wife and daughters are on hand to provide more intimate insights. What ultimately, touchingly emerges in the documentary is the mutual admiration and affection Kovacs and Zsigmond held for each other. Director Mark Rydell states, "Like brothers... they matter to one another" and Kovacs' widow, Audrey, shares "They were as close as two men could ever be."

The documentary is itself well-shot by Anka Malatynska and edited to a brisk pace by Elisa Bonora. A fascinating tribute to two courageous visionaries, No Subtitles Necessary: Laszlo & Vilmos also serves as a great companion piece to the wide variety of American movie classics for which they were largely responsible.

Reverend's Review: A

Review by Rev. Chris Carpenter, resident film critic of Movie Dearest and the Blade California.

Monthly Wallpaper - March 2012 - Joan Crawford

107 years ago this March 23rd, little Lucille Fay LeSueur was born. But it was several years before she achieved her destiny as Joan Crawford, one of Hollywood's most enduring stars and the patron saint of this very website.

To celebrate her birth month, Movie Dearest dedicates this month's Calendar Wallpaper to our very own "mommie dearest" in a collage of her iconic roles throughout her career, from the Oscar-winning high of Mildred Pierce to the swan song low of Trog. Also included are some of her most memorable characters, such as Sadie Thompson, Crystal Allen and Blanche Hudson.

Just click on the picture above to enlarge it to its 1024 x 768 size, then right click your mouse and select "Set as Background", and you're all set. If you want, you can also save it to your computer and set it up from there, or modify the size in your own photo-editing program if needed.

Reverend's Reviews: Virgin Herring

The artistocratic, purity-loving Lady Billows in LA Opera's new production of Albert Herring hasn't got anything on arch-conservative presidential candidate Rick Santorum. One of the few comedic works by gay composer Benjamin Britten, the 1947 opera humorously skewers the politics and social mores of a small town in the British countryside. The Los Angeles revival, which runs through March 17th and is the company's first performance of the piece in 20 years, couldn't be better timed in light of our current US political debates.

As the month of May approaches each year, the pious Lady Billows (amusingly played and impressively sung in the opening night performance by corrals her town's leadership into naming a virtuous local girl as "the May Queen." The questionably-lucky young lady selected is traditionally feted for a day and will for the first time, as an enticement to other girls to protect their maidenhood, receive a generous cash gift. But when a worthy virgin can't be found, Lady Billows and her cronies decide to instead honor a "May King," and their choice is the opera's title character. Albert (a fine, nuanced turn by fast-rising young tenor Alek Shrader) is the hapless, insecure son of the local grocer, who keeps her son virtually locked up in her store. Albert's only friend is his co-worker Sid, played here by handsome baritone Liam Bonner. Sid is bound and determined to help Albert come out, so to speak, and Sid seizes on Albert's May Day coronation as the perfect opportunity to do so with the assistance of his girlfriend Nancy (the lovely Daniela Mack) and a flask of rum.

Britten's score for Albert Herring is fairly subdued, and some occasional low-volume levels opening night on the part of the James Conlon-conducted orchestra as well as a couple of singers made it sound even more so. It features a number of excellent quartets and quintets that were performed with gusto, however. Act 3 goes on a bit long with its intentionally-excessive lamentations over Albert's disappearance and presumed death, but it is largely redeemed by the triumphal finale in which Albert's new, decidedly less-virtuous lease on life is revealed.

Britten based Albert Herring on Le Rosier de Madame Husson, a short story by French satirist Guy de Maupassant (with the text translated by Eric Crozier). The resultant opera illustrates well how easily the self-serving intentions of the sanctimonious can backfire on them, a lesson those presently vying for the Republican presidential nomination could stand to learn. While watching and listening to Albert's plight as the untarnished, unwilling puppet of socially-conservative forces, I couldn't help but think of how Santorum, Gingrich and Romney is each striving to position himself as the "perfect" candidate by denouncing ad nauseam what they consider immoral. Naturally, homosexuality is one of their frequent targets. There are, appropriately, some subtle nods to gay viewers/listeners in Albert Herring; it is a Britten work, after all. These are evident in the concern Sid has for Albert and a bit of a love triangle that develops between Albert, Nancy and Sid by the end.

LA Opera's production is well-directed by Scotsman Paul Curran (who was wearing a flattering kilt opening night) and entertainingly designed by Kevin Knight. Between the infrequency with which Albert Herring is mounted and the helpful commentary I believe it provides on our nation's current political spectacle, it shouldn't be missed.

For more information or to purchase tickets, please LA Opera's website.

Reverend's Rating: B+

Review by Rev. Chris Carpenter, resident film critic of Movie Dearest and the Blade California.