Fresh Loaf

WATERED DOWN: Annie (Bari Newport, top) tries to douse some common sense into her boyfriend Vincent (Chad Martin).

Horizon Theatre’s romantic comedy The 13th of Paris sets up a battle between the modern-day American and classic French conceptions of love, which promises to be a mismatch of David vs. Goliath proportions.

Sauve boulevardier Jacques (Mark Kincaid) extols the grand passions and gestures of Gallic romance, while his mixed-up American grandson Vincent (Chad Martin) helplessly counters with the casual, sexually utilitarian contemporary relationship. Jacques asks if Vincent ever writes love letters to his girlfriend Annie (Bari Newport), and the younger man replies, “We text each other a lot.”

The play finds Vincent in an emotional frazzle, having taken a spontaneous plane trip from his Chicago home to his grandparents’ flat in Paris’ 13th arrondissement. Despite his happiness with free-spirited Annie, Vincent worries they’re destined to devolve into the kind of uncommunicative middle-aged couple you see at restaurants. He hopes to find perspective on love through the trip to Paris, his grandparents’ love letters and Jacques’ advice, which comes from imaginary conversations — Jacques and his beloved Chloe (Carolyn Cook) died before Vincent was born.

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Karl Marx famously said that history repeats itself, once as tragedy, twice as farce. King Lear may not have been an actual English regent, but he looms larger than most historical royals as the title role in one of Shakespeare’s greatest plays. And if the Bard gave King Lear his tragedy, cult author Christopher Moore somersaults in for the farce with Fool.

The comedic novelist offers a bawdy, balls-out take on King Lear with a loose version of the plot from the point of view of Lear’s fool. The tragedy’s jester provides the perfect point of entry for a post-modern goof on King Lear, since the role’s rather ambiguous in the play, with an indeterminate age and a tendency to pop in and out of the action. Moore officially gives him a name — Pocket — and a sense of humor that elicits belly laughs from the kind of modern audiences unlikely to giggle at codpiece jokes.

Moore retains the play’s basic outline, including Lear’s vain, disastrous decision to divide his kingdom among his daughters and cast out good-hearted Cordelia while trusting her flattering elders, Goneril and Regan. In the play, Lear’s pride, cruelty and poor judgment bring doom upon his family and England, but Fool reveals that Pocket was the well-intentioned puppet master behind the vicious actions of Goneril, Regan and Edmund, the black-clad bastard.

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The sophomore season of “Flight of the Conchords,” HBO’s comedy series about “New Zealand’s fourth most popular folk-parody duo,” has been a little spotty but made an uproariously funny return to form last night. Directed by Michel Gondry, the episode riffed hilariously on the rivalry between New Zealand and Australia (does one even exist?), but the highlight was the introductory musical number at a dance club. It’s the like one of those unbelievably raunchy but undeniably catchy tracks laid down by Andy Samberg’s The Lonely Island, like “D*** in a Box” or “J*** in My Pants.” (I think they’re funnier with asterisks than spelled out.) The clip even features a cameo from one of the Village People — but watch it while you can, because it’s the kind of video that will probably get taken down and put back up elsewhere until an “official” viral version gets released.

Incidentally, Jemaine Clement and Bret Mckenzie will be bringing their Conchords musical-comedy act to Atlanta’s Fox Theatre on April 11.

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In honor of Presidents Day, here are two clips in celebration of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. The first, an animated (and I use the term loosely) video about the awesomeness of the Father of our Country. It’s hilarious and very unsafe for work:

Next, behind the cut, the best-ever TV appearance of 200th birthday boy Abraham Lincoln:

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GUIDING LIGHT: Andy Ditzler and one of his beloved projectors (Photo by Joeff Davis)

Film Love curator Andy Ditzler treats old short films, and even film projectors, with the care and attention most people reserve for their children.

Before screening “Movies of Local People: Kannapolis” in the basement studio of his Grant Park home, he uses a cotton swab to clean his 16-mm projector. “You should always do this. There’s a lot of motion of the film inside the gate, where the buildup of emulsion takes place. That’s how film starts to get scratches. I love film, but it’s stressful to work with it.”

After threading the film onto the reels, Ditzler dims the lights, switches on the projector and soaks up “Kannapolis’” vision of a segregated North Carolina town in 1941. Throughout the Great Depression, photographer H. Lee Waters traveled the South, filming people on the streets and then showing the images at the towns’ movie theaters so they could see themselves on the big screen. (It’s a far cry from the online exhibition of snapshots on, say, today’s Flickr photo sites.) Selected for the prestigious National Film Registry, “Kannapolis” first shows the blue-collar white neighborhoods, then the more impoverished African-American ones. The film serves as a kind of silent slide show of faces, the vivacious and the dignified, the camera-shy and the camera-hogs, and how one community lived in the Jim Crow South.

“What a beautiful print!” Ditzler says when he first sees the crisp, sepia hues of “Kannapolis.” In part he’s relieved because he programmed the film, sight unseen, as one of the introductory subjects of this month’s installment of his 6-year-old film series, Film Love. For February, Ditzler curates four evenings of Civil Rights on Film: Rare Films on African-American Life, 1941-1967, which offer richer and more complex glimpses of the civil rights era than we get from history books.

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ACTING SHMACTING: Tommy Wiseau shows how overrated talent can be in 'The Room.'

The Room arguably qualifies as one of the worst films ever made, but I’m not sorry I saw it. I’m only sorry I witnessed its shlocky attempt at eroticism on DVD instead of with a group, like the Plaza Theatre’s upcoming screening Tues., Feb. 17 at 9:30 p.m. Barely noticed upon its original release in 2003, The Room has inspired a fanatical cult following that includes Hollywood cool kids such as Paul Rudd and David Cross. The Room invites joyous ridicule at midnight screenings like The Rocky Horror Picture Show for a new generation.

Most cult films involve loopy subject matter, such as Rocky Horror’s alien transvestite musical or Plan 9 From Outer Space’s extraterrestrial grave robbers. The Room’s plot proves utterly mundane as it follows a San Francisco love triangle between a theoretically lovable banker named Johnny (auteur Tommy Wiseau), his bored, gold-digging fiancée Lisa (Juliette Danielle), and Johnny’s best friend Mark (Greg Sestero).

The Room’s fascination comes in large part from Wiseau’s bizarre screen presence. Overly pumped up, dressed in black, and with long black tresses framing his half-closed eyes, Wiseau looks like the kind of mob henchman Jean-Claude Van Damme would kick in the face in the first reel. His slurry European accent and challenges with emotional intonation make simple statements sound otherworldly. His would-be anguished exclamation “You are tearing me apart, Lisa!” has become the film’s de facto catchphrase. (Fittingly, Wiseau will appear on an upcoming episode of Adult Swim’s surreal “Tim & Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!”)

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Usually The Televangelist handles the weekly “Lost” recaps, but she disappeared in a flash of white light while paddling on the Zodiac boat, so I’ll be stepping in for last night’s episode, which has the charming title “This Place is Death.” To temper your disappointment, here’s a funny clip that proves that “Lost” almost aired in the 1960s, but was retooled as a comedy and titled “Gilligan’s Island.”

As luck would have it, “This Place is Death” put the spotlight on one of my favorite characters, someone who’s been MIA for months but made a strong return to form last night. I’m talking about, of course, the smoke monster.

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DON'T SPEAK: Andrea (Alessandro Calza, left) and Jeff (Adam Neal Smith) let their eyes do the talking.

An old commercial used to claim, “If you want to attract someone’s attention, whisper.” The indie drama Ciao seems to heed that advice in its quiet, compelling introduction. The audience reads a series of e-mail messages on a black screen interspersed between simple, enigmatic shots of one man leaving his apartment and another man going through his effects. We soon identify the two correspondents. Andrea (Alessandro Calza), an Italian graphic designer, plans to visit his chat room pal Mark in Dallas, Texas. Jeff (Adam Neal Smith), a financial planner, informs Andrea that Mark recently died in a car accident.

With no spoken dialogue, Ciao’s early moments draw us in. As we watch Jeff go about his routine, we reflect on how unexpected tragedy can lend gravity to the seemingly mundane activities of the survivors. Then, at about the nine-minute mark, the characters finally start talking out loud to each other, and Ciao becomes a lot less interesting.

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SUIT CASE: 'Mojo's' Skinny (Ed Morgan, left), Silver Johnny (Clint Sowell), Mickey (Doyle Reynolds), Sweets (Matthew Myers), Potts (Scott Warren) and Baby (Brent Rose)

Dad’s Garage Theatre’s darkly comic play Mojo suggests that pub-crawlers and bobby-soxers should steer clear of Ezra’s Atlantic, a London nightclub in the midst of 1958’s rising rock scene. After a potentially big deal goes horribly wrong, Ezra’s employees and spongers hole up in the club to sort out their predicament and figure out who’s on whose side. One cockney hustler declares, “One of us just got sawed in two, so I don’t want to be on our side.”

Mojo’s blend of seedy underworld characters and Jacobean rivalries, not to mention the play’s wicked use of violence, rock music and hyper-verbal comedy, put it clearly in the company of 1990s bloody hipster films. Playwright Jez Butterworth wrote Mojo in the mid ’90s, roughly between the release of Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs and Guy Ritchie’s Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels. The chain of influence is hard to miss. (Dad’s online trailer emphasizes the connection.) Given the 50-year-old slang and thick (if not always convincing) accents, audiences might want to rent Julien Temple’s brassy musical Absolute Beginners for a refresher course on swinging London of the late 1950s.

At Dad’s Garage Theatre’s Top Shelf, the playhouse’s ensemble feasts on the florid dialogue and high-tension confrontations. It makes for an entertaining production that still feels like a half-success — like a cover version of a song that never escapes the shadow of the original.

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MAKIN' BANK: Clive Owen as Louis Salinger

Apart from America’s repo men, probably the only people popping champagne corks over last fall’s financial meltdown were the producers of The International. Doubtless the filmmakers wondered whether Clive Owen and Naomi Watts were big enough names to open their fair-to-middlin’ espionage-type thriller about a nefarious global bank.

Then the markets crashed and megabanks hit up the U.S. tax payers for bailout money, without curtailing their corporate fat-cat ways. With financial institutions emerging as the zeitgeist’s villains of the moment, The International’s follow-the-money suspense plot seems almost psychic. It’s like the way the Three Mile Island nuclear accident happened 12 days after the release of The China Syndrome: You can’t buy that kind of publicity.

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Author Barbara Brown Taylor

I could probably fill a cathedral with people I know who claim to have a spiritual side, but immediately make the disclaimer that they’re not “churchy” or “very religious.” Barbara Brown Taylor’s book An Altar in the World is a kind of how-to guide for squishily spiritual souls; the type who glance askance at religious fundamentalism, but don’t want to cut God loose and become atheists, either.

Taylor was ordained as an Episcopal priest and served for years at Atlanta’s All Saints’ Episcopal Church, but has wrestled with ambivalence over organized religion. In her 2006 memoir, Leaving Church, she describes how, despite the depth of her faith, she became burned out with the ministry. She currently works as a professor at Georgia’s Piedmont College. While she’s not opposed to church-based worship, An Altar in the World, as the name implies, seeks out sacred meanings in seemingly mundane activities. (Local readers will enjoy her anecdotes set at local venues such as the Atlanta Masjid of Al Islam.)

The book, subtitled A Geography of Faith, walks the reader through different strategies for finding the eternal in the everyday. (more…)

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KNEADY WOMAN: Courtenay Collins (front) as Cookie

If the Kendeda Graduate Playwriting Competition serves as the Alliance Theatre’s Research and Development Department, then its latest world premiere production, Julia Brownell’s Smart Cookie, may represent an alteration in the secret formula.

Inaugurated in 2003 and endowed by the Kendeda Foundation the following year, the program invites students of 30 graduate playwriting programs across country to submit their work. The winning play receives a full production on the Hertz Stage, finalists get high-profile staged readings, and the Alliance helps discover and cultivate some of the country’s most impressive new writers. This commitment to new work probably helped the Alliance secure its Regional Theater Tony Award in 2007.

Previous winners of the Kendeda competition have not lacked for ambition, touching on such heavyweight historical subjects as the French-Algerian War and the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921. Plays don’t even have to win to make a splash: In 2006, Actor’s Express produced Megan Gogerty’s controversial Love Jerry, a musical with themes of pedophilia, after the play became a Kendeda finalist. To date, the reach of the plays has exceeded the grasp of several of the winners, as if the judges prefer to honor ambition and thematic breadth while excusing some clunky construction.

Smart Cookie, the fifth Kendeda winner, feels like a 180-degree turn from the others, and not just because it’s a comedy set in contemporary America. Compared to the avant-garde flourishes of last year’s In the Red and Brown Water, Smart Cookie proves almost aggressively conventional — the kind of script that could make the transition to film or television with only cosmetic re-writes. But who ever said that a sturdy narrative structure and funny one-liners were bad things? (more…)

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THE MAN IN BLACK: Atlanta Ballet's 'Dracula'

The Atlanta Ballet’s current show begins with a skin-crawling prologue. Wolfish, costumed dancers surround a sleeping man’s bed; a happy wedding repeatedly turns into a mournful funeral; and booming, insistent knocks resound throughout. The rapping sounds suggest Poe’s raven tapping at the chamber door. The images evoke Goya’s nightmarish paintings, and the whole disturbing tableau dispels any preconceived notions you have of ballet as a genteel performing art.

The surreal, sideways introduction to the Dracula ballet provides a fresh interpretation of one of our culture’s most familiar stories, like putting new blood in an old bottle. The Atlanta Ballet’s production proves ideal for audiences who don’t like dance — or don’t realize that they actually enjoy ballet. (more…)

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Steven Soderbergh’s four-and-a-half-hour film Che, starring Benicio del Toro as famed revolutionary Che Guevara, opens today. Much of the two-part film involves Guevara and his fellow rebels marching, fighting and training in the jungles of Cuba and Bolivia. It proves oddly reminiscent of this clip, which probably isn’t what Soderbergh and del Toro had in mind:

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Kate Warner, artistic director of Dad’s Garage Theatre, is leaving the theater to become artistic director of the 25 year-old New Repertory Theatre in Boston. In a quick phone call last night, marketing director Linnea Frye told me that Warner will leave in April, giving her time to direct the plays Mojo (opening tonight at the Top Shelf) and The B-Team (March 13-April 4). She’ll have to be replaced for this summer’s musical boy-band mockumentary Boy Groove.

Warner was an Artistic Associate with Dad’s Garage from 2002–2004 before taking over as artistic director in 2005. At Dad’s she’s directed such plays as Debbie Does Dallas, The Rocky Horror Show, Reefer Madness, Skin, Indulgences and The Jammer. When Warner took over from Dad’s founding artistic director Sean Daniels, I wrote:

Warner is a steady, reassuring choice rather than a flashy one. She’s been an artistic associate at Dad’s since 2003 and as a director has often proved simpatico with the company’s lighthearted aesthetic. Plus, after spending almost 10 years as managing director of Theatrical Outfit, she has firsthand experience with the challenges of making theater in an often indifferent city.

Frye says that the Inman Park playhouse is putting together a search committee to identify Warner’s replacement.

Updated: After the cut, some quotes from the Dad’s Garage official press release.

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IN A PINCH: Michelle Williams in 'Wendy and Lucy'

In his new comedy DVD Kill the Messenger, Chris Rock remarks that people always feel sorry for dogs that belong to homeless guys. It never occurs to them to feel sorry for the homeless men. Director Kelly Reichardt’s spare drama Wendy and Lucy uses a canine companion to magnify the audience’s empathy for its drifting heroine.

Michelle Williams plays Wendy, a young woman from Indiana driving across America with a dog named Lucy and a vague plan to find work in Alaska. She keeps some cash in a money belt, but strictly rations the reserves to bankroll her trip. When her car breaks down in a former mill town in Oregon, Wendy suffers a series of misfortunes — some avoidable, some not — that emphasize the tenuousness of life on razor-thin financial margins. Even audiences with money will feel familiar pangs of nervousness while wondering whether an auto mechanic (Will Patton) will make a bank-breaking diagnosis.

Lucy’s disappearance exacerbates Wendy’s desperation, as she struggles to track down the dog while having no car, phone or place to live. Wendy’s attachment to Lucy, and her guilt over the pet’s disappearance, help cultivate our sympathies for a character who otherwise keeps an emotional remove. The script doesn’t explain how she entered such dire straits. Reichardt and Williams embrace a kind of working class American minimalism — clearly inspired by the Italian neo-realists — that keeps us from getting inside Wendy’s head in a conventional, Hollywood way. (more…)

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WAITING FOR THE MAN: Benicio Del Toro as Che (right) and Catalina Sandino Moreno as Aleida Guevara

Che, Steven Soderbergh’s epic-length consideration of Latin American revolutionary Ernesto “Che” Guevara, feels almost like the director’s bid to atone for his Ocean’s 11 movies. The star-driven caper comedies celebrate Las Vegas, superficial glitz and the joys of money for nothing. What better way to compensate than an austere cinematic portrait of an iconic figure who gave his life in opposition to materialism and poverty?

Watching Che certainly feels like an act of penance. Soderbergh and producer/leading man Benicio del Toro present what could be called an anti-biopic, studiously avoiding the kind of big gestures and historical oversimplifications that define more crowd-pleasing films about real personalities. Guevara’s background as a doctor, his formative experiences, even his wife and children barely get passing mentions in the film’s four-and-a-half hour running time.

Instead, the film splits into two parts to take a clinical look at Guevara during two of the most significant periods of his life. The first half (unofficially called “The Argentine” in reference to Guevara’s Argentinian origins) focuses on Guevara’s crucial, decidedly unglamorous work as a guerilla fighter in the Cuban revolution in late 1950s. Part one switches from the lush greens and yellows of the Cuban jungles to black-and-white recreations of Guevara’s New York visit in early 1960s, granting interviews and addressing the United Nations. The second half, “Guerilla,” follows Guevara’s doomed bid to bring the revolution to Bolivia in the mid-1960s. (more…)

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Having played Batman, the title character in American Psycho and humanity’s savior John Connor in the upcoming Terminator: Salvation, Christian Bale has an intense screen presence. But it’s being upstaged by his off-screen behavior, including an arrest last summer as well as a recent tantrum on the set of Terminator: Salvation. People with anger-management issues should beware: not only can these tirades get recorded and leaked to the internet, some even get made into NSFW dance remixes:

“Tantrum-tampering” is turning into a unique new medium. Just now I saw Bale’s tirade edited to provide the male dialogue in this mash-up trailer for He’s Just Not That Into You. The Bill O’Reilly remix probably sets the bar for the form.

In this particular case, I have a little sympathy for Bale, since he lost his cool during the middle of shooting a big scene. It seems like a lot to ask an actor to get all emotional and raw one minute, then switch it off once the camera’s off. On Ain’t It Cool News, Harry Knowles posted a defense of Bale, and remarks that he knows truth behind outburst because,

“I know this because I happen to be somewhere where someone that was there that day and for the shoot is.”

(Parse that sentence.) Nevertheless, tantrum-tampering strikes me as an appropriate response, whether the bad-behaving person involved is an A-list movie sar or just a temperamental co-worker. Let’s say, for instance, that Wyatt Williams recorded me having a 10-minute hissyfit after bringing me Orange Lacroix Water instead of my preferred Pamplemousse Lacroix Water, like I’ve told him a million times. Having my words laid down over a track of, say, “I Like To Move It, Move It” and spread all over cyberspace seems like a punishment that fits the crime.

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WONDER WOMAN: Coraline (right)

The fantastical opening credits sequence of Coraline superbly sets the stage for the eerie wonders to come. An unseen, scissor-handed figure sews and dresses a rag doll in an otherworldly environment. At one point a needle pops through the coarse fabric and JUTS RIGHT OUT AT THE AUDIENCE, in one of those amusing show-offy moments we expect from 3-D movies, but still takes us by surprise.

Coraline employs most of its 3-D effects more subtly but with seamless effectiveness. Henry Selick, who also directed Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas, presents an ingenious fusion of delicate stop-motion animation and splashy 3-D gimmickry. Each style enhances the other. Coraline’s toys-in-the-attic designs seem even more tactile and solid rendered in three dimensions. The combination insistently beckons the audience into the film’s creepy yet magical places and things better than the 2-D version would. (more…)

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To coincide with this week’s world premiere of Smart Cookie by Julia Brownell, the Alliance Theatre will present stage readings of the finalists of the 2008 Kendeda Graduate Playwriting Competition on Feb. 2 and 3. This marks the fifth year in the Alliance’s competition to find and showcase promising new writers, and even the readings can be a big deal: the reading of Megan Gogerty’s Love Jerry lead to Jasson Minadakis’ decision to program the controversial musical at Actor’s Express in 2006. The readings are free and feature some of Atlanta’s best actors and directors, so they’re a great deal. Here’s the line-up:

The Near East by Alex Lewin
Directed by Rachel May (Feb. 2 at 2 p.m.)
An American archaeologist teams up with an Arab activist to unearth the “Mother of Books,” the oldest scripture, from its resting place in the desert between Mecca and Medina. But their controversial mission affects a number of other characters, including a secretly gay Arab radical, a British spy and the ghost of a precocious 13-year-old boy.

Fair Use by Sarah Gubbins
Directed by Freddie Ashley (Feb. 2 at 7:30 p.m.)
Sy and her law partner Chris have worked on some tough cases but have always worked out their competition over drinks and commiserating about dating – since his perfect woman is nothing like her perfect woman. All that changes when a client accused of plagiarism causes them to call on a hot-to-trot legal eagle. They discover that claims of intellectual property and claims of the heart are difficult to defend.

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A friend of mine recently suggested that “Battlestar Galactica” be nicknamed “As the Basestar Turns.” Although it takes place on spaceships, at times the acclaimed Sci Fi channel series seems more soap opera than space opera, given that plot points have involved terminal illness, adultery, alcoholism, unexpected pregnancy, surprise resurrections and evil twins. Some of the android Cylon characters have, in effect, hundreds of evil twins. Take that, “Days of Our Lives!”

So it’s a relief that the show’s Jan. 30 episode, “The Oath,” proved such a compelling, almost unbearably suspenseful return to form. The third of the show’s final 10 episodes (nicknamed “Season 4.5,” to distinguish it from the 12 episodes of Season 4 that aired in 2008 — got that?), “The Oath” offered a prime example of the show’s ability to embed knotty moral dilemmas into thrilling action tropes. It’s like the Jan. 16 season premiere, with its game-changing revelation about Earth, were just build up to “The Oath.”

Before getting into “The Oath,” however, you may have heard about what happened with the “Battlestar Galactica” season premiere broadcast in Canada: A pivotal moment on the episode was followed immediately by a breathtakingly inappropriate commercial break. A clip capturing the unfortunate juxtaposition has already taken on viral life of its own, known as “Worst Commercial Placement Ever” (both in terms of song choice and dominant image). You don’t have to know “Battlestar Galactica” to appreciate it, but if you’re interested in the show and haven’t seen the episode yet, DO NOT WATCH THIS, because it hinges on a huge spoiler.

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FINGER LICKIN' GOOD: Tim Heidecker (left) and Eric Wareheim

Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim are human beings. We can all agree on that. But does that disqualify them from being honorary cartoons?

True, they’re not particularly exaggerated in appearance. Tim looks like the towheaded, pie-faced boy next door all grown up, while Eric’s a bespectacled, sideburned galoot with plenty of height and a crooked smile. They were both born in Pennsylvania in 1976 and would draw little attention as white-collar employees alongside the water coolers of Middle America.

The late-night TV audience first glimpsed the duo’s animated alter egos when they played the title characters in “Tom Goes to the Mayor” on Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim programming block. Since 2007, they’ve appeared in the flesh as the stars of Adult Swim’s “Tim & Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!” a surreal but emphatically not-animated sketch comedy series. Using green-screen technology to plop themselves into seemingly any environment, Tim and Eric play a host of weirdos, including tone-deaf singers whose faces drip with eczema, half-deranged corporate pitchmen, and would-be swingers obsessed with shrimp and white wine. (more…)

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On Sat., Jan. 31 at 1 and 10 p.m., The Plaza Theater’s monthly Silver Scream Spook Show presents a movie with one of the all-time great titles, Godzilla, Mothra and King Ghidorah: Giant Monsters All-Out Attack. From 2001, it’s the 25th film about Godzilla, the famed fire-breathing dinosaur mutant. Godzilla’s behavior has fluctuated over the decades from evil to good to insipid “friend of children” and back again, and Giant Monsters All-Out Attack finds the radioactive reptile back to being evil, like a classic recidivist. His former adversaries like Mothra and King Ghidorah rise to protect Japan from Godzilla’s rampage. It’s great fun, but frankly, not quite as impressive as director Shusuke Kaneko’s previous giant monster film, Gamera III: The Awakening of Iris, which is one of the best (if least-appreciated) Japanese “man-in-suit” monster flicks ever made. Here’s a couple of mini-trailers for Giant Monsters All-Out Attack: enjoy the weird toy commercials that come with them:

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SKETCHY TERRITORY: Ari remembers the war.

Waltz With Bashir, Ari Folman’s surreal remembrance of Israel’s 1982 war with Lebanon, ends on the most wrenching note imaginable, yet leaving the theater offers no relief to the audience. The real world only amplifies the movie’s disheartening themes.

Folman, a filmmaker and Lebanon War veteran, uses splashy animation for his fascinating nonfiction account of the damage war inflicts on innocent civilians and victorious soldiers alike. Viewers steep in the horrors of the Lebanon War and the psychological trauma of its aftermath. But after the closing credits, current events come rushing in and we recall the fresh wounds of Israel’s recent conflict with Gaza. Waltz With Bashir offers depressing confirmation of the adage that history repeats itself, and suggests that a similar film — Waltz With Gaza, maybe — will be made a generation from now. (more…)

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I know the Coen Brothers have won Oscars for Fargo and No Country For Old Men, while The Big Lebowski has emerged as one of the definitive cult movies of our time, but my heart will probably always belong to their second film, the Southwestern screwball comedy Raising Arizona from 1987. Two future Oscar-winners, Nicolas Cage and Holly Hunter, play a desperate childless couple who resort to kidnapping one of the infant “Arizona Quints,” reasoning that the parents “have more than they can handle.” When The Plaza Theatre screens Raising Arizona at 9:30 p.m. Fri., Jan. 30, look out for some of the Coens’ favorite actors as well as references to other movies. For bonus points, consider the similarities between No Country for Old Men’s implacable hit man, Anton Chiguhr, and Raising Arizona’s Lone Biker of the Apocalypse:

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