Fresh Loaf

ELECTRIC SLIDE: Unlike animated features, live-action adaptations require intricate and expensive special effects, such as Jon Osterman's (Billy Crudup) transformation into Dr. Manhattan for 'Watchmen.' (Photo courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures)

After more than 20 years, DC Comics’ Watchmen will make the quantum leap from comic-book page to live-action film with its release this Friday. If hype and anticipation translate to even a fraction of box office success, Watchmen will affirm the popularity of superheroes — and even R-rated antiheroes — as Hollywood’s saviors. The blockbuster could join the ranks of such record breakers as the Spider-Man trilogy and the Oscar-winning The Dark Knight.

Superhero movies make the transition from ink and paper to celluloid the hard way, however. Saving the world and defeating flamboyant evildoers is the least of it. Simply making an exciting, convincing superhero movie that doesn’t insult an audience’s intelligence practically demands a miracle. Cinematic, super-powered derring-do requires massively expensive special effects, along with the challenge of casting flesh-and-blood actors to play literally two-dimensional, archetypal roles with impossible physiques and ridiculous costumes.

For every hit like The Dark Knight, there’s at least one costly flop: take the nipple-costumed Batman & Robin or Halle Berry’s embarrassing Catwoman. Even with the successes, audiences face flaws like the obvious CGI-rendered Spider-Man and Hulk in their first movies, or unfortunate choices such as Ian McKellen’s dumb-looking Magneto helmet in the X-Men films.

Animation holds out an easier approach; it goes with comic book stories as comfortably as a cape and cowl. The best cartoon features and TV series can do an end run around the real world’s limitations to offer an unlimited canvas that emulates iconic comic book art while putting exciting designs into motion. The right voice performances can even convey emotional heft without hanging a tights-wearing movie star from wires.

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NOM DE PLUMAGE: Flannery O'Connor with one of her trademark peacocks

Flannery O’Connor’s life never went to the extremes of her work. How could it?

In her unique, off-putting novels and short stories, O’Connor crossbred humor, horror and piety; her output had such hybrid vigor that she virtually established the genre of the Southern grotesque. Her first novel, Wise Blood, critiques Southern religion by way of homicide, self-mutilation, mummies and gorilla suits. Her famous, oft-anthologized short story “A Good Man is Hard to Find” begins with a mundane family road trip and ends with psycho killer, as if A Trip to Bountiful received a surprise visit from No Country for Old Men’s Anton Chigurh.

As Milledgeville, Ga.’s most famous resident for the majority of her brief life, O’Connor wrote unnerving tales that probably kept the town’s name synonymous with “mental instability” almost as much as the notorious Milledgeville Lunatic Asylum. Yet O’Connor lived the life of a genteel spinster, devout Catholic and famed bird-fancier, having contracted lupus, a disease that claimed her father, narrowed her personal horizons and took her life in 1964 at the age of 39. O’Connor told a friend in a letter, “There won’t be any biographies of me because, for only one reason, lives spent between the house and the chicken yard do not make exciting copy.”

Brad Gooch uses that quote as the epigram for Flannery: A Life of Flannery O’Connor, the first biography of one of the South’s most iconic literary figures. “After spending five years with Flannery O’Connor, I see it more as a coy challenge than a statement of fact,” Gooch says of the remark. “Certain editors and people, including [O’Connor’s friend] Elizabeth Hardwick, asked me ‘Do you think there’s a life there?’ She was perceived as the Emily Dickinson of Milledgeville.”

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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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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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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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THE MAN WITH THE PLAN: Sketch of garden at Henrietta Egleston Hospital for Children, designed by Edward L. Daugherty, FASLA. From the Cherokee Garden Library Collection, Kenan Research Center, Atlanta History Center

Next time you’re at the corner of North Avenue and West Peachtree Street, notice the sunlight shining on All Saints Episcopal Church. It’s the red stone edifice on the northwest corner across from the MARTA station. The light isn’t an accident. Landscape architect Edward L. Daugherty put it there in 1977.

Daugherty may not have physically moved photons through space, but his efforts that year kept the church’s neighboring skyscrapers far enough back on their lots to ensure that All Saints would always get sufficient natural light. Both the church and its enclosed gardens reaped the benefits: an island of humanity in a concrete wilderness.

Daugherty occupies a revered position in Atlanta’s architectural ecology. His resume reads like a who’s who, or rather a where’s where of Atlanta institutions: Agnes Scott College, the Governor’s mansion, Clark Atlanta University, the Botanical Gardens, Georgia Tech. An intimate retrospective of his work at the Atlanta History Center details the breadth of Daugherty’s more than 50-year career here. On view through Oct. 10, Edward L. Daugherty, a Southern Landscape Architect: Exploring New Forms provides glimpses of the man and his work through 50 sketches, plans and photographs. (more…)

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COUNTRY ROAD: "América," from 'Walking to Guantanamo'

Richard Fleming, a world traveler thanks to his career as a documentary sound recordist, had his “Eureka!” moment while walking in the hills of Haiti.

Given the weekend off from his latest film, he went backpacking on Haiti’s remote mountain trails and found them to be anything but isolated. “I was walking along what amounted to a pedestrian superhighway. There were hundreds of merchants and farmers on this footpath, carrying stuff to market,” he says. “This is a great way to get to know a culture,” he thought.

Fleming hit on the notion to trek the length of Cuba on foot as a way shake off a mid-life rut and better learn a country that had fascinated him for years. He envisioned that Cuba would offer an even more illuminating walking experience than Haiti, since the collapse of the Soviet bloc had created a transportation crisis on the island, with severe shortages in fuel, vehicles and replacement parts. Fleming’s four-month Cuban adventure in 2000 led to his new travel book, Walking to Guantanamo, published in November by Commons, and now an exhibit, Walking to Guantanamo: The Photographs, on display at Whitespace Gallery through Feb. 18.

Whether through his descriptive writing laced with self-deprecating humor or through snapshots rich with illuminating details, Fleming shares his experience of Cuba as a nation of lush beauty seemingly forgotten by history. Typewriter repair shops enjoy brisk business, revolutionary slogans cover pitted walls and Afro-Caribbean religions such as Santeria have gradually come out of the closet. Although the book concludes at Guantanamo Bay, Fleming focuses more on its history as a thorn in the side of U.S./Cuban relations than the current prisoner abuse scandals at “Gitmo.” (more…)

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CRITIC'S CHOICE: Viggo Mortensen as John Halder in 'Good'

Every year since 2000, the Atlanta Jewish Film Festival has reliably presented the diversity of movies by Jewish artists or otherwise reflecting the Jewish experience. This year, films relevant to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict range from Alan Dershowitz’s legalistic documentary The Case for Israel to the family friendly drama The Little Traitor, starring Alfred Molina.

The 2009 festival runs Jan. 14-25 and includes 48 narrative and documentary features and shorts representing 20 nations. This year’s program particularly conveys the breadth of other art forms involving Jewish themes, as viewed through the prism of cinema. It’s like the filmmakers’ cameras stand on the foundation of Jewish culture.

One of festival’s highest-profile screenings is the Atlanta debut of Good (3 stars), an adaptation of a 1981 play by late English playwright C.P. Taylor. Viggo Mortensen plays John Halder, a German novelist and literary professor who understandably worries when his work draws the attention of Hitler’s government in the mid-1930s. A smooth-talking member of the Reich (RocknRolla’s Mark Strong) expresses interest in Halder’s treatment of euthanasia in a novel and asks the writer to draft a paper on the subject. (more…)

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SEAT'S TAKEN: Kooza's unicycle duo

Some of the best parts of Cirque du Soleil are the things that go wrong.

It’s not that I have a sadistic impulse to see injuries or mishaps under the blue-and-yellow stripes of the Grand Chapiteau. The performers’ reactions to accidents or slip-ups simply add an additional charge to the show. I caught two apparent mistakes on the opening night of Cirque du Soleil’s latest show, Kooza.

First, during the tightrope performance near the end of Act One, one man came up behind another and jumped over him, leap-frog style. His feet landed on the wire but he lost his balance and had to grab hold to keep from falling. Then, during the gravity-defying teeterboard stunts near the finale, one acrobat perched on a single metal stilt, hopped onto the low end of the board and was launched into the air. He did multiple flips in the air with the stilt deliberately still attached. He landed upright on the stilt, but stumbled.

Such moments can make a greater impression than the same circus acts performed without a hitch. In its nearly 25-year history, the Montreal-based Cirque du Soleil has made the wildest feats look easy, but sometimes you appreciate the routines’ demands when they look more difficult. Plus, you can’t help but share in the performers’ espirit de corps after an error. They always do the same routine again, immediately, to get it right, in an almost macho show of bravado and professionalism.

It’s possible that such mistakes are actually deliberate and intended to build suspense. If so, they succeed brilliantly. That may not be likely, but I love the idea. (more…)

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Hey, there. We know you’re feeling down, maybe a little out. (We’re right there with ya some days.) So, we thought it’d help to point out that 2008 hasn’t been a complete loss. As a matter of fact, Atlanta achieved a lot this year in the way of the arts. Here, CL theater critic Curt Holman and visual arts critic Cinqué Hicks take a look back to recall some of their favorite moments. (more…)

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FELLOWSHIP OF THE SING: Shay Latte as an angel (left), Galen Williams as Joseph, Kelly Young as Mary, Sam Collier as an angel

Audiences could be forgiven for worrying that True Colors Theatre Company’s Black Nativity might evoke a high school’s annual birth of Jesus holiday pageant. The perennial musical’s first half takes place “When Christ was born” and hits all the requisite beats of the first Christmas: angels, shepherds, Magi, etc. Plus, True Colors follows a similar approach as its recent holiday productions of The Wiz by casting primarily high school and college students as well as some recent graduates.

Fortunately, Langston Hughes’ Black Nativity resembles a revue more than a plot-and-character-driven musical. The material turns out to be an ideal vehicle for the young ensemble, since director/choreographer Patdro Harris and music director J. Michael can cast to the performers’ individual strengths, while acting never really becomes an issue. (more…)

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DEEP THOUGHTS: Will Smith as Ben Thomas

Seven Pounds could have been made for anyone who ever said, “Oh, that Will Smith is so good, I could watch him in anything.” That anonymous fan should have been more specific, because Seven Pounds presents one of the world’s biggest movie stars acting his heart out in practically nothing in particular.

Smith reunites with his Pursuit of Happyness director Gabriele Muccino for an ambitious but maddeningly enigmatic drama that withholds key information from the audience for nearly its entire running time. Since we never know exactly what’s going on until the end, we spend Seven Pounds in a state of mild frustration. The film offers a fine showcase for Smith’s maturity as a screen actor, but feels more like a series of effective acting exercises. (more…)

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Self-portrait, San Francisco, 1970

What was it like to work side-by-side with Hunter S. Thompson and Tom Wolfe? What did it take to earn Mick Jagger’s trust? What was John Lennon doing in the hours leading up to his murder in 1980? Photographer Annie Leibovitz answers such questions and more in her new book, Annie Leibovitz: At Work, which chronicles her singular experiences capturing some of contemporary culture’s most mythic personalities and moments. Leibovitz comes to the MJCCA’s Zaban Park location for a sold-out appearance Wednesday, Dec. 10, as an extension of the center’s book festival.

Would you talk about the writing process and how you developed the narrative to accompany your photos?
It’s been a process over the years to learn how to talk and to mean what [I] say. With Susan Sonntag, you know … she was the one who helped me have a voice. After Susan died, I sat down with Sharon [Delano] to work on the introduction for A Photographer’s Life and there were about five sessions where she literally put it together. She says I said everything on some level, but you know she put it together in a way where for the first time you could really hear my voice. You’re hearing me and it has emotional context to it.

I had always wanted to do a book on the making of the photographs, you know the making of a photograph. (more…)

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REALITY CHECK: "Human Giant's" Aziz Ansari

In a recurring sketch called “Shutterbugs” on the MTV show “Human Giant,” Aziz Ansari plays a film agent putting together a movie about 9-11 starring kid actors. “Jason, this is what we call a career-defining role,” he tells a pint-sized player dressed up as George W. Bush. “Did you take a shit before we started shooting?”

The fake film, in which Bush’s character wrestles a mini Osama Bin Laden wearing a turban and a fake beard, is as cringe-worthy as it is hilarious. “Lil’ 9/11 is the best movie idea we’ve ever had,” Ansari insists, as tiny Bush flies a fighter plane and pledges to “find these evil doodles.” Ansari later hires a thuggish pre-teen armed with a baseball bat to break the Osama actor’s kneecaps, as he’s represented by a rival agency.

The sketch typifies Ansari’s politically incorrect humor, which is as thoughtful as it is outrageous and often sprinkled with current event and pop culture references. He brings his informed commentary cloaked in off-color gags to the Punchline’s stage Wednesday, Dec. 10 as part of his “Glow In The Dark” stand-up comedy tour. (more…)

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DEATH BECOMES THEM: A skeletal death works in the world of pathogenic microbes in “Memento Mori” (translation: “Remember that you are mortal”).

Did the bubonic plague extinguish Europe’s feudal caste system and trigger the rise of the middle-class bourgeoisie? Did yellow fever end the trafficking of African slaves to the New World? Did the Spanish flu halt World War I? According to Outbreak: Plagues that Changed History currently on view at the CDC’s Global Health Odyssey Museum, the answers are maybe, maybe and maybe. And although it’s assuredly an oversimplification to attribute some of history’s biggest events to any single cause, Outbreak puts forth the intriguing notion that many of the defining currents of human social and cultural history around the globe have at least been influenced by some of the planet’s smallest inhabitants.

Outbreak is the artistic brainchild of painter and illustrator Bryn Barnard. Barnard’s 2005 book of the same name targets middle school children with lush gouache and oil paintings that bring to life key moments in world history. It shows how a slew of unimaginably destructive epidemiological disasters gave us the world we live in now. The current CDC exhibit comprises Barnard’s original paintings along with maps and text borrowed from the book. It’s the first collected public showing of the work, and as is typical for CDC exhibitions, Outbreak aims to make explicit connections between broad health issues and daily life. (more…)

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The Alliance Children’s Theatre and Berke Breathed’s now-retired comic strip “Opus” share a common, current fascination with one of America’s favorite bedtime stories. The soothing picture book Goodnight, Moon by Clement Hurd and Margaret Wise Brown has helped children drift off since the 1940s. Through Nov. 16, the Alliance Theatre is staging Chad Henry’s musical adaptation, and The Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s Pierre Ruhe says his preschool son loves both the book and the production. Ruhe adds,

Rosemary Newcott’s direction, in fact, has the opposite effect of the book. In striped pajamas, his cotton tail peeping out the back, Little Bunny (Derek Manson) and his pink-pajama’d pal Mouse (Sharon Litzky) apparently downed a couple of Red Bulls after dinner. They’re clearly on a sugar and caffeine high…

Meanwhile, Goodnight Moon literally provides the final resting place for Opus, a sad-sack everyman who happens to be a penguin in Breathed’s comic strip of the same name. “Opus” ran from 2003 through 2008, and in its final arc, Breathed (as “the creator”) and Elvis appeared to Opus and told him to find the place where he wanted to be forever. After various adventures, the final strip appeared in late October on the website of The Humane Society of America and sent Opus off to final reward: asleep in the last page of Goodnight Moon.

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