Popularity: 2% [?]

Sex. You know you want it — and I know you’re not getting it from the movies. And I know you’re not because I’ve been looking myself, and coming up empty. Wanted teases with a proudly bare-bottomed shot of a tattooed Angelina Jolie (a digital effect made flesh) and she treats costar James McAvoy to a big lip-lock — but it’s all a part of his score-settling, and he’s more in love with his guns and knives than a deep-woods survivalist. A movie called Sex and the City might have offered more of the former than the latter. Here again, though, the heaviest lust is expressed for a genuine Vuitton bag, and female orgasm achieved over that scarcest of Manhattan commodities — closet space. (Then again, the men on the show, retained for the movie, are pretty unappealing. I’d want a bag, too, to place over their heads during the brief bump-and-grind scenes.)MTV killed sex in the movies. Videos spawned from edgy fashion photography sexualized the culture, but deprived it of genuine eroticism. The video-fueled Flashdance, a quarter-century ago, has a canned sexiness to it; it’s all about display, and peek-a-boo near-nudity, and a heavy-breathing “empowerment,” not human interaction. When it took off at the box office you could hear the studios breathe a collective sigh of relief; the freedoms let loose in the pesky Seventies were being chased back into the bottle. Audiences would settle for this. Aestheticized non-sex, robotic and passionless, became the norm.

In a sense, I was relieved. I will always remember squirming through Dressed to Kill with my mother and my aunt, thinking it would be a “regular” horror picture. We all loved it, but there are certain things, like, you know, Angie Dickinson self-helping herself in the shower in the very first scene, that you shouldn’t have to watch with Mom. (“A mother who takes her son to see Dressed to Kill; that’s the kind of mom I like,” said Brian De Palma when I relayed this anecdote years later.) (more…)

Popularity: 3% [?]

Okay, who hasn’t thought America’s favorite family has jumped the shark by now? Even with the success of last year’s movie (which I found quite funny) still fresh in the audience’s mind, the actual show has become something not so much unfunny as it is unfriendly.

Allow me to back up here. This assertion has been going on for a decade now, ever since a particularly harsh mean streak started to creep up on good old dullard Homer Simpson. His callous nature and general ignorance to all but his own personal needs cataloged deaths, a desire to get a friend back off the wagon ’cause he needed a drinking buddy, framing his wife for a DUI to save his own ass, and many a faux pas resulting in the viewing public crowning the character “Jerk-Ass Homer.” If there was an upside, it was that the rest of the characters seemed to be coping, uh, in character. The other saving grace was that, often, the show was still funny and still, dare I say it, human. As if to acknowledge that the audience’s statement was heard loud and clear, the term “Jerk-Ass Homer” started working itself into the scripts.

But now, in its millionth season on the air, all the characters are becoming jerk-ass. Homer dreams of suffocating his father, abandoning his kids, and shacking up with a rack of meat in a motel room. Marge also dreams of escape while attempting to live vicariously through her kids. Those kids, Bart and Lisa, are exhibiting less of a sibling rivalry and more of an ingrained hate for each other, and where the show once balanced the absurdities of real, mundane life with the occasional flashes of cartoonishness, now it is, inside and out, a cartoon.

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Popularity: 4% [?]

Chicago celebrated gay pride over the weekend with a parade, a “queer prom,” and enough inordinate self-esteem and alternative lifestyles to choke a Clydesdale. You go, gay people! I absolutely adore what you’ve done with the Bravo network, and your secret invasion of the Republican party these last few years has been faaaaaaabulous! Unfortunately, there was a party pooper in your midst on Saturday afternoon at the corner of Halsted and Addison, a man wearing a sandwich-board sign bearing the slogan PRIDE LEADS TO SHAME. But what does Evelyn “Champagne” King’s “Shame” lead to on my iPod if I press play and then use the shuffle option? “The Fool on the Hill,” by the Beatles.* (I love the shuffle option. It’s the Magic 8-Ball of the 21st century.)

Now, pride is one of the seven deadly sins, and if God would get off His duff and revise His original list, I’m sure He’d add a space for homosexuality at number eight, as fundamentalist Christians have requested via prayer and daytime talk shows for years now. (In a recent e-mail God told me, “Rob, I got paperwork that stretches back to the 1400s — and I’m talking B.C., my friend — so don’t expect any amendments or late additions anytime soon. Also, you should probably get that mole on your neck checked out.” I don’t like when He calls me Rob, but He’s God, so I let it slide. And it’s a skin tag, not a mole.) But until that day it’ll have to remain a nonfatal sin, and if something like a gay pride parade offends you, just call it a “double whammy” parade and see if that suits you better. We’re never going to be able to make everybody get along with everybody else, but as long as we can find nonviolent ways to help each other ignore the people we can’t tolerate, then that should be good enough.

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Popularity: 4% [?]

Nobody, and I mean nobody, has demonstrated an ability to manipulate popular culture better than Quentin Tarantino. The pop-culture reference is a staple of modern entertainment. Television shows like The Simpsons take delight in finding ways to work a dozen clever references into each episode, and lesser shows like Family Guy owe their existence to pop culture cutaways. Two of the writers of Scary Movie (2000) have even managed to build an entire franchise of execrable films that consist of nothing but references to other films and stories. Tarantino is no stranger to this technique; his films are full of references and homages, even though they are often too obscure to be recognized by the average viewer. What truly sets Tarantino apart from the hordes of hacks who appropriate images and stories from other sources in order to stimulate an audience’s collective memory is that he has an unparalleled ability to weave these references (quotes, songs, even biblical verses) together in unique ways so that they instantly emerge as new memes in popular culture.

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Popularity: 6% [?]

BOTTOM LINE: It’s wordy and long and the subject matter seems less than current, but the production is great, the direction is interesting, and the cast is one of the best ensembles on Broadway. If you want to see it, do it now — Top Girls closes on Sunday!

In 1982 Caryl Churchill wrote a play about what it takes for a woman to achieve great professional success. Although it was performed professionally in London and off-Broadway in the States, it never made it to the Great White Way. But this year Manhattan Theatre Club included Top Girls in its season, the play’s first-ever Broadway production. In ‘82 Top Girls was cutting edge in its poignancy and honest rhetoric on the issue of equality in the workplace; in 2008 it comes off as somewhat historic and outdated. How far we’ve come in 26 years.

It’s not that Top Girls is unrelatable. The play centers on Marlene, a British woman who has just been made managing director at the employment agency where she works. Told in three separate scenes with intermissions in between, the audience learns who Marlene is, how she achieved her success, and what she lost along the way. It seems that women can’t be professionally successful and have families or loving relationships. We learn that Marlene has sacrificed everything to get where she is, and maybe doesn’t regret her personal sacrifices anyway.

Don’t get me wrong, there are still issues with gender equality in the workplace. Women still don’t make as much money as men, and they often have to work harder to prove themselves. But the issues presented in Top Girls seem almost antiquated to what women encounter today. In 2008 it is possible for a woman to have both a family and a career; resources are available and society doesn’t shun women who desire both. Also, there are many women CEOs and even heads of state. Hell, for a few months there it looked like we might even have a woman president!

Top Girls is an interesting look at the history of this issue, and Manhattan Theatre Club’s production, directed by James Macdonald, keeps the story line firmly set in 1982 intead of updating it to modern times. The play has a feminist air about it — strong women achieving great things and all — and my boyfriend, who saw it with me, requested that I only recommend it for “people with vaginas.” I think that’s somewhat accurate, though anyone with an interest in the subject matter would be intrigued.

Although Top Girls is well executed and incredibly well acted — Martha Plimpton is friggin’ amazing — it doesn’t resonate as completely as it should. Maybe it’s that the specific subject matter doesn’t hold up 26 years down the road, or maybe it’s because Churchill’s script is wordy and somewhat tedious. You should know that Top Girls is not a passive or light experience; the audience has to work a little to stay with the story. But it does have its funny moments, and the acting is top-notch.

Top Girls plays at Manhattan Theatre Club at the Biltmore Theatre, 261 W. 47th St., but only for one more day — Sunday, June 29, at 8 PM. Visit mtc-nyc.org for ticket information, and check out more New York theatre reviews at theatreiseasy.com.

Popularity: 6% [?]

Popularity: 8% [?]

I have violated the covenant between reader and critic. You, the reader, expect me, the critic, to leave his home in Brooklyn, get on the subway, and attend screenings 25 or so minutes away in Manhattan. This I understand. And I do it without complaint. Without public complaint, that is. I mean, I could complain. About the disruption to my other daily tasks: tending the cat litter, say, or rearranging my Netflix queue. (Only two weeks till the unrated version of The Ruins hits the streets. Awesome!) The crowded trains, which have me longing to purchase the biggest, baddest SUV I can find and expand my carbon footprint to Godzilla size. The frisking I endure at “all-media” screenings, where full body cavity searches conducted by ex-cons with “Mother” tattooed on their biceps are the norm lest we in the media sneak in video cameras to record Prince Caspian for Estonian bootleggers. The deprivation at smaller-group indie screenings, where food and drink are strictly prohibited, and a little man taps me on the shoulder when I reach past my concealed video camera for my concealed Poland Spring and says “No water” as I slowly die of thirst between subtitles.

But that is only part of our unspoken agreement. The other part is getting to the point when I tap out my usually sort-of weekly report card. This time, I am duty-bound to say that I wrote part of this piece while actually watching the movies—not on one of those horrid blue-glow devices that pop on and off and make it look like a search party is intermittently erupting in the theater but on my MacBook, which I took with me to bed as I curled up with my beloved Vera Farmiga in Quid Pro Quo and Matthew Broderick in Finding Amanda, which has just opened for real. And for this I can thank my new best friend, Mark Cuban. (more…)

Popularity: 8% [?]

The seven words you can’t say on TV. There. The thing that every blobit (blog + obit = blobit) is going to focus on is out of the way and we can get to what George Carlin really was on about. It wasn’t curse words. It wasn’t drugs. It was freedom.

From his early exposure as the hippy-dippy mailman on Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In to his most recent and venomous HBO comedy specials, from his ill-fated sitcom and recurring role on Thomas the Tank Engine to Bill & Ted and a handful of sardonic, sarcastic, and sometimes sacrilegious best-selling books, Carlin was a guy who wanted to say whatever he damn well felt like saying, regardless of whose fragile sensibilities would be crushed in the blowback. The essence of the man was his love of the language, both the sacred and the profane. His classic skit about hair, for instance:

I’m aware some stare at my hair.
In fact, to be fair,
Some really despair of my hair.
But I don’t care,
Cause they’re not aware,
Nor are they debonair.
In fact, they’re just square.

They see hair down to there,
Say, “Beware” and go off on a tear!
I say, “No fair!”
A head that’s bare is really nowhere.
So be like a bear, be fair with your hair!
Show it you care.
Wear it to there.
Or to there.
Or to there, if you dare!

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Popularity: 7% [?]

Can you feel it? I feel it. You know what I’m talking about – that sudden jolt, that shock that has surged through the American consciousness over the past three weeks? It’s not the Democrats nominating a black guy for president…who didn’t see that one coming? It’s not gays getting married in California…though I do distinctly sense my own marriage being undermined.

No, I’m talking about the recent revelation that, back in the ’70s, there were people with loose morals! Don’t take my word for it; the (vaguely titillating) evidence is right there on CBS (CBS?!?) every Thursday night at 10 on Swingtown, a show that’s a veritable smorgasbord of bell bottoms, Playboy Club parties, soft rock, and archetypal placeholders that so far occupy the space where real characters should be.

There’s Grant Show, who already made the ’90s safe for promiscuity on Melrose Place, as an airline pilot intent on bringing the Mile High Club down to earth. There’s Jack Davenport, the onetime backbone of the awesome British sex-romp Coupling who wasn’t much of a swordsman (ahem) in the Pirates of the Caribbean flicks, as a family man struggling with the sexual revolution and his American accent.

There’s Molly Parker, who first gained notice playing a necrophile (necrophiliac?) in the Candian indie film Kissed, as a homemaker straddling ’50s suburban mores and the swingin’ ’70s. (It seems clear she’ll be straddling other things in the coming weeks, but that’s another story.) And then there’s the gorgeous Lana Parrilla, late of 24 and the short-lived Windfall, as Show’s absurdly hot-to-trot wife who takes a practically evangelical approach to the recruitment and seduction of swinger wannabes.

It’s the bicentennial summer of ’76, and Davenport and Parker, thanks to some financial good fortune, have moved “only five minutes away” from their conservative Chicago neighborhood and their dowdy friends into a den of iniquity filled with wife-swappers, slutty divorcees, and perhaps even some nascent teen homosexuality. (Only on TV could changing neighborhoods seem like time travel – but then, Swingtown producers Mike Kelley and Alan Poul told the New York Times that they envisioned the show as the bastard child of Boogie Nights and The Wonder Years, and if that’s possible then I guess anything is.) Here’s a humorous sneak peek: (more…)

Popularity: 7% [?]