Fresh Loaf

During the Christmases of my childhood, I always enjoyed advent calendars and the daily ritual of opening a little door to reveal a new surprise for each day of December until the 25th. Taking the advent calendar as inspiration, this month I’ll offer some tongue-in-cheek holiday blog entries, with the idea that clicking on, say, embedded video or “For the rest of this entry” lines are the online equivalent to opening a cardboard calendar window. First up is Invasion: Christmas Carol at Dad’s Garage, which is the only version of the Scrooge story where you may hear a word like “bacne.” Or “turduckephant.”

The Christmas Carol satire rejiggers the “invasion” concept the theater used in last year’s Invasion: Our Town. Both shows turn a theatrical classic upside down by the addition of a mid-show “invader” who’s not only new to the text, but hasn’t been seen by the rest of the cast, who have to incorporate the visitor on the fly. Dad’s likes to draft current or defunct roles from its long-running improvised soap opera Scandal! as the invader, and on Christmas Carol’s opening night Scott Warren played the Ghost of Christmas Past as a blustering barbarian in a loin clout. The nightly invader, isn’t the most surprising aspect of Invasion, however, but the casting of Ebenezer Scrooge himself. I’ll put the detail behind the cut to avoid spoilers, although the end of Dad’s trailer for the show gives it away:

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BATTLE ROYALE: "Alexander Nevsky" courtesy Corinth Films, Inc.

This year, Russia’s Alexander Nevsky (screening at Emory University on Wed., Dec. 3) celebrates the 70th anniversary of creating one of the most powerful battle scenes ever committed to film. When contending Russian and German armies clash on a frozen lake, director Sergei Eisenstein creates the template for seemingly all cinematic battles to come. You can find Alexander Nevksy’s bloodline in global epics from Ran to Braveheart to Mongol.

Eisenstein is best known for the still-thrilling “Odessa Steps” scene in his silent film Battleship Potemkin. If you’ve ever seen a baby carriage roll down steps into a movie, it’s an Eisenstein reference. In Alexander Nevsky, Eisenstein demonstrates his magic with screen composition, editing and crowd control when Prince Alexander (Nikolai Cherkasov) rallies the working Russian folk against rapacious German invaders. Stirring Prokofiev music accompanies the Teutonic charge across the ice, but Eisenstein switches to harrowing ambient noise when the battle is joined, proving his mastery with sound design as well as cinematic visuals.

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CAR TALK: Kate (Reese Witherspoon, left) and Brad (Vince Vaughn) head home for the holidays.

GENRE: Acerbic seasonal comedy

THE PITCH: Happily unmarried yuppie couple Brad and Kate (Vince Vaughn and Reese Witherspoon) get a crash course in family togetherness when forced to make four separate visits to their divorced parents (Robert Duvall, Mary Steenburgen, Sissy Spacek and Jon Voight, all Oscar winners) one foggy Christmas day.

MONEY SHOTS: Brad’s backyard-wrestling brothers (country singer Tim McGraw and Swingers’ Jon Favreau) pin him in undignified positions. Brad’s attempt to install his father’s satellite dish ends up with a wrecked living room and a TV in flames. Out of nowhere, Kate’s niece drenches her with projectile vomiting, setting off Brad’s gag reflex. Brad showboats as Joseph at a church nativity show.

BEST LINE: “My childhood was like The Shawshank Redemption,” laments Brad while explaining that he changed his name from Orlando. (more…)

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FOR THE BOYS: Sean Penn (center) stars as Harvey Milk in the eponymous drama.

On Nov. 4, same-sex marriage advocates suffered a setback when Californians narrowly passed the Proposition 8 ballot initiative ensuring that the state would only recognize marriages between men and women. The biopic Milk screened in Atlanta three days later, and its portrait of gay activism and California politics feels almost shockingly immediate, despite taking place three decades earlier.

Oscar winner Sean Penn plays Harvey Milk, a pioneering gay rights advocate who challenged hostile attitudes and institutional oppression, most notably Proposition 6, a California ballot initiative designed to fire schoolteachers suspected of being gay. In some ways Milk proves to be a tame, conventional film biography, but the post-Prop 8 climate gives it an urgency and relevance that may have been missing had it opened a month or two ago. (more…)

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WET ’N WILD: Hugh Jackman as the Drover (left) and Nicole Kidman as Sarah

If The African Queen and Indiana Jones had a baby with a chronic case of A.D.D. and raised it Down Under, it would grow up to be Australia, Baz Luhrmann’s overinflated romantic saga.

In previous films such as Romeo + Juliet and Moulin Rouge, Luhrmann never let audience headaches get in the way of his pursuit of hyperbolic stylishness. Australia’s first third unfolds like a cartoon of romance novels. On the eve of World War II, Lady Sarah Ashley (Nicole Kidman) travels from England to Australia to save her late husband’s ranch, Faraway Downs, from a beef baron (Bryan Brown) and his vicious henchman (David Wenham). Sarah only finds allies among a rag-tag group of drunks, Aborigines and a rough-hewn cattle driver called “The Drover” (Hugh Jackman). (If this were an American film, he’d be a cowboy named “The Cowboy.”)

Australia’s shrill, spastic first act plays like this summer’s eyesore Speed Racer movie, pitched to middle-aged ladies. Once the massive cattle drive starts, however, Luhrmann catches a breath and lets the story calm down and expand to fill the gorgeous vistas of his native land. Australia features an adorable supporting turn from young Brandon Walters as Nullah, a “half-caste” boy born of Wenham’s character and an Aboriginal mother. Luhrmann uses Nullah’s travails to decry the racist aspects of Australian history in sharper terms than, say, Gone With the Wind ever did.

Eventually Kidman and Jackman’s charms emerge and the story intermittently clicks as an old-fashioned melodrama, culminating with star-crossed lovers and surrogate families trying to reunite during a Japanese attack. Even when Luhrmann’s epic successfully sweeps and sprawls, it still has to contend with heavy-handed Aboriginal mysticism and shameless tributes to The Wizard of Oz. As an Old School, Really Big Movie, Australia should fare well at the Oscars, even though it amounts to little more than a giant “Welcome to Australia!” postcard with super-saturated colors and historical footnotes written on the back.

Australia 2 stars Directed by Baz Luhrmann. Stars Nicole Kidman, Hugh Jackman. Rated PG-13. Opens Wed., Nov. 26. At area theaters.

(Photo by James Fisher)

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LIGHT SABER: The cinematography glows in Wong Kar Wai's 'Ashes of Time Redux.'

Director Wong Kar Wai’s Ashes of Time Redux showcases blind swordsmen, bounty hunters and courtesans in ancient China who display superhuman, gravity-defying martial arts feats. That said, it’s best not to think of it as one of those “wire-fu” action movies like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Hong Kong filmmaker Wong Kar Wai specializes in sensual mood pieces over conventional narrative films. Ashes of Time Redux has much more in common with the director’s lush but enigmatic present-day narratives such as In the Mood for Love or My Blueberry Nights than any Jet Li popcorn movie.

The “Redux” part of the title comes from Wong’s decision to re-edit his 1994 film Ashes of Time, which has a cult following despite never being released in the United States. The new version features a shorter running time and new digital color tinting, which gives the cinematography the quality of spun gold in some scenes. The late Leslie Cheung narrates the film as Ouyang, a broker of swords-for-hire who lives at the edge of a vast desert. Wong shows the precision of a painter in matching the inhospitable climate to the cynical character’s emotional desolation. Similarly, close-ups of a woman embracing a horse’s neck have the heady, tactile quality of Wong’s best work. (more…)

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The Plaza Theatre screens The Big Lebowski at 9:30 p.m. this evening as part of its monthly “Flicks & Giggles” series, which features a warm-up act of live comedy, followed by a big-screen laughfest. Directed by Oscar winners Joel and Ethan Coen, The Big Lebowski celebrates its 10th anniversary this year and has been enshrined as one of the most beloved cult comedies of the past 10 years.

The Big Lebowski works as a kind of gonzo combination of Raymond Chandler private eye story and Cheech-and-Chong pot comedy, and features famously profane dialogue. My favorite story about The Big Lebowski concerns Comedy Central’s attempt to clean up the film for broadcast. The language is not work safe, so I’ll put it after the jump, and the clip of the “Gutterballs” dream scene:

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Stocks jump on report of Geithner nomination

Fortune: How to love your trillion-dollar deficit

Market Movers: This is not a financial meltdown

Salon: How to think positively about a crashing stock market

Shoestring Branding: The bright side of tough economic times

The planet gets a “breather”

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Gwinnett Daily Post film critic Mike Clark and I frequently sit next to each other at screenings for movies like the Disney cartoon feature Bolt. Consequently, I know that Mike’s funniest line about the movie does not appear in his review. The film’s premise depicts a TV show about a super-powered canine (voiced by John Travolta) who protects spunky young Penny (Miley Cyrus) from high-tech evildoers. Bolt doesn’t realize the show is fiction, so when Penny is kidnapped on-screen, he ends up lost in the “real” world trying to find her. Penny, despite being an actress, genuinely misses Bolt, whose disappearance holds up the filming of the show.

About halfway through the movie, Penny’s unctuous Hollywood agent shows up with an American White Shepherd and tells her “We found your dog!” Penny embraces the dog with delight, then pauses and says “This isn’t Bolt,” rightly identifying the new dog as an imposter. When that happened, Mike leaned over and said to me “Just like Changeling!” — i.e., the Clint Eastwood film in which the LAPD return a kidnapped boy to his mother (Angelina Jolie), even though they know he’s not the right kid.

Once, our across-the-armrest quipping nearly got us into trouble, which I’ll describe after the jump, because it spoils the ending of Nights in Rodanthe.

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Fake right-wing pundit Stephen Colbert repackages himself as a singing, dancing, all-purpose fatuous celebrity on A Colbert Christmas: The Greatest Gift of All, which debuts on Comedy Central on Sunday night, Nov. 23. In a flawless parody of 1970s-style variety shows, A Colbert Christmas finds Colbert trapped in his mountain cabin by his greatest nemesis — a hungry bear. He still manages to play host to such unexpected guests as Toby Keith, Jon Stewart, John Legend and Elvis Costello (whose seasonal costumes alone make it worth watching).

A Colbert Christmas rises above the usual Christmas spoof thanks to the strength of the holiday parodies by David Javerbaum (”The Daily Show” executive producer) and Adam Schlesinger (songwriter and Fountains of Wayne co-founder). Javerbaum and Schlesinger provide some of the best Christmas (and Channukah) parodies this side of “South Park.” Here’s Colbert introducing the show and launching into the first half of “Another Christmas Song” (which also available in its entirety as an audio file):

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The vampire romance Twilight opens today and is poised to be a teen sensation. Tuesday night’s screening at Parkway Pointe featured the single loudest preview audience I’ve ever heard, approaching Beatles concert levels (probably because teenage girls just like an excuse to yell). If you’re put off by potential crowds, or have heard that Twilight is pretty lame if you’re not already a fan in the books, consider a terrific Swedish import with vampire themes called Let the Right One In, which features some pointed similarities.

UNSUSPECTING HUMAN
Twilight: Bella Swan (Kristen Stewart), a thoughtful, awkward 17 year-old girl who dreams of romance
Right One: Oskar (Kåre Hedebrant), a thoughtful, alienated 12-year-old boy who dreams of revenge

ANGST-RIDDEN VAMPIRE
Twilight: Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson), the mysterious hunk with ever-changing eyes in the adjacent desk in biology class
Right One: Eli (Lina Leandersson), the mysterious waif with huge eyes in the adjacent apartment in the housing project

HIGH SCHOOL DEFINING TRAIT
Twilight: Walking in slow motion
Right One: Bullying comparable to Lord of the Flies

SMALL-TOWN WEATHER CONDITIONS
Twilight: The Pacific Northwest at its most overcast, allowing vampires to pass for human in public.
Right One: Sweden at its most wintry, allowing red bloodstains appear more starkly against the white snow. (more…)

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THREE WISE MEN: Hugh Adams (left), Barry Stoltze and Brik Berkes in Theatrical Outfit's 'It's a Wonderful Life: A Live Radio Play.'

Something about radio seems particularly suited to the holidays, perhaps because we grow up with the tradition of radio stations switching to all-Christmas formats after Thanksgiving. Several theaters, including Theatrical Outfit and the Atlanta Radio Theatre Company, are staging holiday plays that tap into the live radio format. Even if a performance isn’t going out over the airwaves, the audience still feels a charge when that “ON THE AIR” sign lights up.

The 1940s Radio Hour, for years a perennial holiday show at Marietta’s Theatre in the Square and playing this year at Dahlonega’s Holly Theater, evokes the spirit, songs and commercials of the WW II era. From Dec. 3-21, Theatrical Outfit harks back to roughly the same period with a remount of last year’s Christmas show, It’s a Wonderful Life: A Live Radio Play, which imagines Frank Capra’s classic film performed for an audience by five actors. (more…)

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Bestselling author and National Public Radio commentator Bailey White speaks in a throaty but quavering drawl that’s so distinctive, you can imagine her spinning leisurely yarns for hours on a front porch in her hometown of Thomasville, Ga. Her voice can be a little misleading, however. White sounds so grandmotherly that a listener may underestimate her as merely quaint, when her writing can reveal unexpected precision and perceptiveness. (more…)

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