Fresh Loaf

I WILL REMEMBER YOU: Will you remember me?

Everyone else is leaving Dillon, so why not us? Street and Riggins headed for the Big Apple so Street can pursue his dreams. The trip came fully equipped with a fish-out-of-water sequence that had some surprising laughs. Of course, The City is not what MTV has trained the boys to expect (What did they expect? How old is Street now, 19?  And he doesn’t even have a college degree?). Plus, Jason’s sudden desire to become a sports agent was quickly snuffed out.

As the agent points out, this isn’t Dillon, where knowing the boosters is enough to get you a job. But it’s a small world after all, and Jason’s former Panthers teammate-gone-pro ends up being the wedge that opens the door for him after Jason pulls his sweet, terribly sincere, linguistic magic on him. Even though “the applicants for the entry level positions are all Harvard alum,” Jason Street is special. He does have a gift, and since the first episode of “Friday Night Lights” we’ve watched him struggle to find himself and his new identity beyond Jason-Street-high-school-star, and it looks like he’s finally succeeded.

Of course, the Riggins-Street bromance is tested as Tim contemplates the reality of Street’s east coast move. With Riggins’ pain comes much comedy gold, until the heartstring-tugging last scene. But as Riggins himself says, “OK … drop the violin.” There was plenty of other Dillon action this week, however, that actually took place in Dillon.

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THAT’LL TEACH ’EM: François Bégaudeau (center) as the Teacher

The Oscar-nominated French film The Class could qualify as a remedial course for audiences who believe that “inspirational teacher” films like Dangerous Minds or Stand and Deliver impart all the lessons you need about the educational system.

In The Class, teacher and award-winning novelist François Bégaudeau plays a fictionalized version of himself, a middle-school French instructor who tries to explain the imperfect subjunctive to rebellious 13- to 15-year-olds from an inner-city Parisian neighborhood. Rather than earn Hollywood-style standing ovations from his students, François faces insolent challenges and constant low-level chatter. At times he seems more like a comedian talking over hecklers on open-mic night.

Director Laurent Cantet, whose previous films include the mournful white-collar drama Time Out, restricts the action entirely to the classroom and various faculty offices, so we never glimpse the home lives of François or his students (played with impeccable realism by actual students). Instead, the classes prove to be scenes of near-constant conflict, including one outburst of violence. The audience easily sympathizes with François’ attempts to keep order and stay on message, giving The Class more real tension, in its soft-spoken way, than your average heist thriller.

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PEEP HOLE: Jaclyn Jose as Nayda in 'Serbis'

A Golden Palm nominee at the 2008 Cannes Film Festival, Serbis is like no multi-generational slice-of-life film you’ve ever seen. Philippine director Brillante Mendoza sets his bumptious drama at a failing adult movie house in the sprawling Philippine city of Angeles. The Pineda family not only manages the porn theater, but they also live under its roof, just a few flights of stairs away from films such as Bedmates and Young Screwpine.

Serbis’ first scene sets a tone of exhibitionism and voyeurism, as a teenage daughter vamps in the nude before a mirror while her schoolboy nephew peeps at her. The ironically named Family movie theater practically simmers with surging libidos. A young would-be painter lances a boil on his buttock in an early close-up, which interferes with his girlfriend’s subsequent visit. The Pinedas presumably turn a blind eye to the down-low prostitution that accompanies the screenings, as young rent boys and she-males ask “Serbis?” to prowling movie patrons. Serbis resembles the bawdiest work of novelist John Irving, or perhaps trash filmmaker John Waters most serious moments.

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GENRE: A debut novel about trying to write a debut novel. That’s a genre, right?

MEET SLATER BROWN, FICTIONAL NOVELIST: “He’d come to San Francisco expressly for the purpose of writing something that would last forever. Only he didn’t feel he could share this personal ambition with just anyone. They would think what? That he was a fruitcake! That he had lost contact with reality? It was a tricky situation, having a plan you couldn’t share. Nevertheless, for the first three days he exerted the plan flawlessly and with maximum concentration from the his perch in the back of TK’s. In the evenings he would reread what he’d written by the bar’s dim light. Nobody paid him a scintilla of attention.”

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BLOND AMBITION: Leonard (Joaquin Phoenix, right) eyes Michelle (Gwyneth Paltrow, center).

Most of the downbeat romantic drama Two Lovers transpires in the timeless corners of Brooklyn, at mom-and-pop dry cleaners or the kind of blocky apartments where neighbors call to each other from opposite windows while jazz music plays from an unseen source. When we first notice cell phones or DVDs in Two Lovers, they almost seem like contemporary anachronisms that snuck into a period piece set a half-century ago.

Director and co-writer James Gray places Two Lovers very much in the present, but gives the film the black-and-white shadings of an old fashioned social realist script, pitched somewhere between the 1950s plays of Arthur Miller and Ernest Borgnine’s love-among-the-losers film Marty. Gray deserves credit for trying to give his class-conscious romantic triangle a grounding in character and real-world texture, and the cast clearly takes its work seriously. But Two Lovers ultimately seems stuck in a bygone decade.

In Brighton Beach, unmarried Leonard Kraditor (Joaquin Phoenix) lives in the clutch of his Jewish immigrant parents (Isabella Rossellini and Moni Moshonov). He works at his father’s dry cleaners while vacillating between his dream of being a photographer and his suicidal tendencies following his canceled wedding engagement. (more…)

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NEUROMANCY: Beth Lilly can photograph your future.

Last week Atlanta Celebrates Photography announced the selection of “Gifted,” a proposal by local artist and photographer Beth Lilly, for its next ACP public art project. More details will solidify as “Gifted” marches toward completion, but for the moment, this much is clear: The project will involve the literal gift of 1,200 limited-edition prints, distributed to the public for free during ACP’s citywide festival in October.

Beth Lilly (aka the Oracle @ Wifi) specializes in collaboration — that is, she creates art by embracing and reworking the social networking trends of our digital media-saturated society in surprisingly novel ways. Lilly’s Oracle @ Wifi series, for instance, is an ongoing, improvisational performance-meets-photography project. On the seventh day of each month, Lilly invites the public to call her with a “question for the Oracle.” Basically, you can ask her anything, so long as the wording is tasteful and involves a future event. Over the past three years, the Oracle has fielded queries as specific as “Will I get into law school and become a successful lawyer?” to such fantastic head-scratchers as “What do I really really really want?” and “Are my family and me moving to the United States?” The Oracle’s response comes in the form of three photos, taken at whatever location Lilly may be, which are then randomly assigned to each caller’s question. As in other forms of divination, the meaning of these “image-fortunes” is a matter of free association.

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DRESSED TO KILL: Linus (Chris Marquette, left) and Zoe (Kristen Bell) hydrate after a long day of role playing.

For a certain breed of dedicated, Jedi-robe-wearing, Boba Fett-imitating aficionados of George Lucas’s sci-fi franchise, Kyle Newman’s Fanboys is the most eagerly awaited film since Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace. And we know how well that turned out.

Fanboys takes the 1999 release of Menace, the first new Star Wars film in 16 years, as a generational tipping point, particularly for four Lando-quoting friends in their early 20s during late 1998. When Linus (Chris Marquette) reveals he’s dying from terminal, unspecific cancer, the foursome road trip from Ohio to California, intent on breaking into Skywalker Ranch to see a rough cut of the film.

First scheduled for release in August 2007, Fanboys became an online cause celebre when the Weinstein Company reshot the film to cut out the downbeat cancer subplot. The fans struck back (in part by threatening to boycott last summer’s Superhero Movie) and the sickness storyline was restored. The cancer subplot unfortunately proves mawkish and contrived, but at least it helps justify behavior that would otherwise be illegal and stalkerish.

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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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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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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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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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Futureproof, N. Frank Daniels’ novel set mostly in and around Atlanta, is a thinly veiled retelling of the author’s own descent into teenage drug abuse and general delinquency. It’s about a white boy with dreads trying to figure himself out in the televised glow of Kurt Cobain. It’s also about half as good as it could be — full of writing that should have been reworked, trimmed, or simply cut before ever appearing in print. Daniels goes about his work with an attitude much like Luke, the story’s headstrong, willfully ignorant narrator. As a result, Futureproof comes across as a defiant but ultimately flawed debut.

Daniels, like most writers, didn’t like the idea of his manuscript gathering dust in the neglected slush piles of literary agents or book publishers. “In this age of so much media and information and distraction … Shakespeare himself would have had his work turned down” without the right connections, Daniels claims in a postscript to Futureproof. Instead of waiting around for someone to hand him a contract, Daniels published the book himself.

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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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OUT OF CONTEXT: Meg Aubrey's "Trash Day," 2008

Meg Aubrey’s MFA thesis show, I Just Live Here, at Gallery Stokes is like a debutante ball: Both serve up white, southern womanhood with a saccharine aftertaste to feed mythologies of place and time.

Aubrey’s 10 medium-size oil paintings pursue a cast of female characters through prosperity-era, suburban America. In “New Tree,” two women sit facing each other in spindly patio chairs at a stiff little cafe table. The painting is keyed-up so that the light has an overexposed, sun-drenched quality. We might imagine a shopping center parking lot or mini-mall courtyard behind them, but such context has been removed. Instead, a flat wash of solid sky blue fills the background and middle distance. Just off to the right in the midst of this arid environment, an impossible little tree grows, artificially tied down in an artificial circle of artificially manicured grass.

All the women in Aubrey’s paintings inhabit similar deserts of suburban precision. (more…)

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HAND OUTS: Followers beg Jesus (Darius de Haas, center) for healing.

Devout apostles of musical theater should flock to the Alliance Theatre for Jesus Christ Superstar GOSPEL as soon as possible. Watching Darius de Haas’ performance as Jesus, particularly his solo of “Gethsemane,” offers such breathtaking thrills, it’s like being present at the creation.

“Gethsemane” finds Jesus on the eve of his execution, confronting God with fear and rage: “Take this cup away from me.” Anxiety, indignation and other emotions seem to ripple across his features, while he raises a voice that seems capable of shaking heaven’s foundations. It may be a miracle if de Haas can sustain the song’s power throughout the show’s entire run, providing justification to make haste to the Alliance. (more…)

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In 2006, Theatrical Outfit staged one of Atlanta’s most impressive world premiere Southern plays of the decade, Keeping Watch by Thomas Ward. For Going with Jenny, opening Wed., Jan. 28 at Theatrical Outfit, the playwright shares writing duties with his wife, Sherry Jo. The play’s a semi-autobiographical, he said/she said account of dating and marriage starring Mandy Schmeider and Travis Smith. Married for 11 years, the Wards currently teach at Baylor University in Texas and discuss the perils of writing about their relationship while still being in their relationship.

How did you meet?
Thomas: We met in college doing theater together. It’s almost so romantic it makes me puke, but we played Tevye and Golda opposite each other in Fiddler on the Roof and started dating.
Sherry Jo: We had to fight not to have “Sunrise, Sunset” at our wedding.

Thomas, you were more experienced as a playwright before Going with Jenny. How did you decide to collaborate with Sherry Jo?
Thomas: Right when Keeping Watch opened, I guess I wanted to strike when the iron was hot. I told Tom Key (Theatrical Outfit’s artistic director) I had a one-man play in my drawer, and I wanted his feedback on it, for his expertise in the one-man show form. He came back and said he wanted to produce it. After Sherry and I left Atlanta and went to Baylor, I talked to Tom who said he was still interested but that it was too short for his 2008-2009 season. During that conversation, I said “What if Sherry wrote Act Two?” Tom jumped at that, and I told Sherry. She was familiar with what I’d written, and I said “Write a response to it.”
Sherry Jo: It’s been an interesting process because it felt like a commission for me. I felt close to the play because Thomas had always shown me his writing. Plus, it was about marriage and ex-girlfriends, so I was happy to get my two cents in and make him the punch line of some of the jokes. (more…)

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FULL FRONTAL: A streaker rocks a small town's world in 'Just Like Home.'

Reports of a late-night streaker throw a small town into a tizzy in the doggedly quirky comedy Just Like Home, the final film of the High Museum’s Danish Film Festival. The scandalized gossips repeat the words “You could see everything,” which proves particularly funny given that practically no one did see the unclad pedestrian. Plus, the refrain hints at the villagers’ reflexive panic that their secret selves will be revealed.

Just Like Home relies on the kind of wryly comic contrivances that defined the cult TV series “Northern Exposure.” Laborers go on strike when wrongfully suspected of streaking, leaving the town square as a raw, unfinished construction site. A handful of neighbors, each with their own eccentricities, band together to run “The Silent Ear,” an advice hotline that they hope will flush out identity of the unknown nudist. By the end of the film, everyone gets exposed in one way or another.

Director Lone Scherfig belongs to a generation of Dutch filmmakers who gained international attention through the Dogme 95 film movement and its “vow of chastity:” a series of aesthetic restrictions (hand-held cameras, no artificial lighting, etc.) meant to focus the filmmakers’ attention on story and acting over special effects and other gimmicks. Much of the Dogme 95 output had a scrappy energy. Scherfig stood out with her 2000 film Italian for Beginners, a charming ensemble romance with a similar vibe (and several of the same actors) as Just Like Home. The Dogme films shared a grungy look, and Scherfig seems to revel in the chance to present the town in a loving photographic sheen.

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GLUE GUN: "Evereman Wheatpaste" by Evereman

On Tues., Jan. 20, the nation will swear in the president with the catchiest catch phrase since Eisenhower’s “I like Ike.” If ever there was a time for art to explore political language, it’s now.

Beep Beep Gallery’s Popaganda attempts to tackle the visual language of politics without all the messiness of actual politics. Organizers Mark Basehore and James McConnell have brought together work designed to promote itself, promote nothing, or promote promotion with no ties to real campaigns or parties. Unfortunately, this group show is long on promise and short on delivery.

Popaganda squeezes 15 artists’ works into Beep Beep’s intimate, studiously lo-fi space off Ponce. The exhibit consists mostly of small paintings, drawings and mixed-media works by a young stable of gallery regulars including Ben Goldman and Sat Kirpal Khalsa. Themes depicted range from Goldman’s hyperpatriotic portrait of the gallery’s founders to Evereman’s early Soviet-style print of a worker mounting a poster by, who else?, Evereman. The spirit of Shepard Fairey hangs low over all.

What should have been a provocative look at how art shades into marketing shades into manipulation, instead too often degenerates into a series of easy jokes. But irony eats its young. And the down-at-the-heels, hipster aesthetic of snarky irony evinced by most of the show’s works is already starting to feel dated.

A missed opportunity is forgivable, but Popaganda takes a step down from there. (more…)

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SIZE MATTERS: Kevin Phillips (left) and Jamal Woolard as Biggie Smalls

GENRE: Rags-to-riches rap biopic

THE PITCH: Christopher Wallace, a.k.a. Biggie Smalls, a.k.a. the Notorious B.I.G. (played by newcomer Jamal “Gravy” Woolard, who only has two names) rises from the violence of Brooklyn drug dealing to the violence of the 1990s hip-hop scene.

MONEY SHOTS: Young Biggie triumphs in a street corner rap battle. A fight breaks out — or does it? — during one of Biggie’s first concerts. At his wedding to singer Faith Evans (Antonique Smith), Biggie shoots the preacher an amusing look during the part about “forsaking all others.” Faith gives a beat-down to a hotel room ho when Biggie fails to forsake all others. Biggie’s ex, Lil’ Kim (Naturi Naughton), raps in full woman-scorned mode before an audience.

BEST LINE: “What kind of man, a grown-ass man, calls himself ‘Puffy?’” wonders Biggie’s perpetually worried mother (Angela Bassett) about her son’s Svengali. (more…)

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TWO TIMERS: Jill Jane Clements (left) and Steve Coulter

Jill Jane Clements and Steve Coulter may be the best possible couple of Atlanta actors to cast in an “opposites attract” romance like Georgia Ensemble Theatre’s Southern Comforts. Clements can turn even a staid role into a firecracker, infusing her dialogue and body language with funny interpretations and curlicues. Her women always seem to be vividly “present,” while Coulter often excels at playing men who are somehow absent. Underneath the Lintel and Side Man are two terrific prior examples of Coulter playing absent-minded or easily distracted characters.

Georgia Ensemble Theatre artistic director Robert J. Farley paired up Clements and Coulter so well when he directed Southern Comforts last year at Theatrical Outfit that he’s remounting the show for his Roswell playhouse. Georgia Ensemble Theatre’s Southern Comforts initially avoid clichés before turning all too predictable.

Superficially, Clements’ Amanda Cross and Coulter’s Gus Klingman embody regional differences. She’s a spunky widow from Tennessee visiting her daughter in New Jersey, while he’s a taciturn retired stonemason and widower who hates to travel. Amanda stops by Gus’ house to pick up a church donation, but a thunderstorm and a mutual fondness for baseball lead them to hang out for a while. To the credit of Kathleen Clark’s script, Southern Comforts explores their early, mutual attraction in a mature, respectful way. A more formulaic rom-com would have launched into rote bickering and name-calling before the couple fell into each other’s arms.

Southern Comforts broaches a more complex problem in the notion as to whether individuals can truly change, particularly older people too set in their ways to compromise. (In fact, Clements and Coulter may be a little young for their roles as written.) Unfortunately, the play emphasizes simplistic situations, such as Gus’ embarrassment at Amanda’s frank discussion of sex, and a funny but seemingly endless sequence with Gus trying to install storm windows. A plot point involving cemeteries creates an intriguing crisis in the relationship, but Southern Comforts chooses such a simple resolution that the play’s final scene feels like an evasion. Fortunately, the audience can enjoy Clements and Coulter’s pleasing interplay as Southern Comforts takes the easy way out.

Southern Comforts Through Jan. 25. $17-$33. Wed., 7:30 p.m.; Thurs.-Fri., 8 p.m.; Sat., 4 and 8 p.m.; Sun., 2:30 p.m.  Georgia Ensemble Theatre, 950 Forrest St., Roswell. 770-641-1260. www.get.org.

(Photo by Bill DeLoach)

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ROAD RAGE: Leonardo DiCaprio (left) and Kate Winslet as Frank and April Wheeler

Seldom has such an intelligent, impeccably mounted film seemed so far removed from the contemporary cultural mood as Revolutionary Road. Director Sam Mendes crafts a respectful adaptation of Richard Yates’ acclaimed 1961 novel. Mendes casts his wife, Kate Winslet, and Leonardo DiCaprio as April and Frank Wheeler, a young married couple chafing at the constraints of suburbia and the corporate rat race.

Revolutionary Road mercilessly exposes the doomed aspirations and inevitable conformity that accompanied America’s prosperity in the mid-1950s. The film arrives at theaters, however, in the midst of an economic recession and a different national mood than even six months ago. At a time of mass layoffs and foreclosures, Revolutionary Road misses the zeitgeist by a mile. Perhaps Mendes shot the film too beautifully for its own good, because it’s hard to share much sympathy over Frank’s grey flannel office job, or the imprisonment April feels at their roomy Connecticut house on hilly, tree-lined Revolutionary Road. The bad timing only exacerbates the nagging sensation that the Wheelers’ self-pitying predicament lacks universality or the scope of tragedy. (more…)

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Atlanta-based novelist Jack Riggs follows up his award-winning 2004 debut When the Finch Rises with The Fireman’s Wife, an introspective tale involving a firefighter’s strained marriage in small-town South Carolina in 1970. Writer-in-Residence at Georgia Perimeter College’s Writer’s Institute, Riggs will discuss the book Thurs., Jan. 15 at the Decatur Library’s Georgia Center for the Book.

Did you do much research on firefighting for the book?
I would like to say that I rode on a fire truck for a month, but I didn’t. I starting out reading Larry Brown’s On Fire. Larry’s a friend of mine, and the book started out as a tribute to him and the type of firefighting he did in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when the equipment was very different than it is now. I talked to some firemen and read some true-account stories to get a sense of the language, but did most of my research online. Some of the scenes came from reconstructing my memories as a child, driving by terrible wrecks or things like that. (more…)

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A side effect of the popularity of viral videos is a renaissance in the novelty song. The increased professionalism of Youtube-able film clips has meant that musical parodies and other comedy songs have increased in both quality and variety while finding bigger audiences thanks to blogs and social networking sites. Here are five of 2008’s definitive musical videos that didn’t involve a cat flushing a toilet.

1. “I’m F***ing Matt Damon”

The “Digital Shorts” of “Saturday Night Live” specialize in NSFW music video parodies like the recent “J*** in my Pants.” (I use asterisks because the clips are probably funnier when the swears are bleeped out.) None has bettered shock comic Sarah Silverman and her musical prank on her boyfriend, talk show host Jimmy Kimmel. “I’m F***ing Matt Damon” has catchy hooks that make it fun listening, despite being the most inappropriate break-up song imaginable. Kimmel’s response, “I’m F***ing Ben Affleck” built to a “We Are The World”-style chorus and proved nearly as funny, but the joke was officially exhausted when Elizabeth Banks sang yet another version, “I’m F***ing Seth Rogen,” to promote Kevin Smith’s Zack and Miri Make a Porno. (more…)

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SHEET STORM: Kate Winslet (left) and David Kross star in Stephen Daldry's 'The Reader.'

In a typical act of award-season positioning, the Weinstein Company is pushing Kate Winslet’s performance in The Reader as a Best Supporting Actress contender, presumably so she won’t compete with herself for Best Actress for her work in Revolutionary Road (which opens in Atlanta on Jan. 9). Even if Winslet signed off on the plan, the tactic does a disservice to her career-best performance in The Reader, one of the year’s most challenging and intellectually rich dramas. (more…)

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Ken Wright is literally putting his money where his mouth is, both as the first mayor of Dunwoody and as a supporter of the arts. President of health care software company eHealthcareIT, Wright has pledged to donate his first year mayoral salary of $16,000 to Stage Door Players, a small, 24-year-old professional playhouse. Artistic director Robert Egizio says “It will go into a general operating fund to be used as needed. His backing has jump-started a new and profound interest in Stage Door.” (more…)

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