Fresh Loaf

HOT SEAT: Veeps

The playful history bookVeeps: Profiles in Insignificance proves that the vice president typically holds far more importance as an election-year campaign symbol than any real authority once in office. Despite the recent fuss over Joe Biden and Sarah Palin, the vice president traditionally holds so little influence that the U.S. government scarcely notices if he’s gone. Throughout history, the veep office has been left vacant 16 times when vice presidents have either died in office or succeeded a president, for a total of 37 years with no occupant.

Published by Marietta’s Top Shelf Productions and featuring a hardback cover design that resembles a weathered high school text, Veeps offers puckish profiles of all the vice presidents, from John Adams through Dick Cheney. Writer Bill Kelter reveals a keen instinct for juicy anecdotes, while illustrator Wayne Shellabarger provides realistic but less-than-flattering portraits as well as amusing editorial cartoons of historical low points. (more…)

Bookmark It

GREAT BALLS OF FIRE: Klaatu's (Keanu Reeves) arrival on Earth in a giant sphere triggers a global upheaval.

GENRE: Sci-fi remake with high-tech hardware

THE PITCH: When an alien named Klaatu (Keanu Reeves) takes human form in advance of a possible invasion, single mom/scientist Helen Benson (Jennifer Connelly) tries to show him the best sides of humanity to forestall our extinction. (more…)

Bookmark It

SIGN OFF: Liberian women demonstrate at the American Embassy in Monrovia at the height of the civil war in July 2003.

The adage “Things could always be worse,” however true, can seem like a poor consolation during uncertain times. Things look considerably sunnier here in comparison to war-torn Liberia, the setting of the engrossing documentary Pray the Devil Back to Hell. Civil war has wracked the nation for much of the past 20 years. The film features harrowing video footage of women and children fleeing from war-time unrest, as well as wrenching tales of atrocities.

Despite offering glimpses of mankind at its worst, Pray the Devil Back to Hell presents the heartening message that dedicated people can force social improvement. Gini Reticker’s plain but powerful nonfiction film reveals how the women of Liberia, outraged at the country’s bloodshed, organized a peace movement that brought the nation back from chaos.

Social worker Leymah Gbowee leads a group of interviewees — at times haunted, at times feisty, but always compelling — who recall how the peace movement began with Christian churches. Asatu Bah Kenneth, the Muslim president of the Liberian Female Law Enforcement Association, joined the cause and, as Gbowee explains, served as a kind of “spy” for the peace movement. (Kenneth, along with producer Abigail Disney , will be present in Atlanta for Q&As at screenings on Dec. 12 and 13.) In a show of cross-denominational mobilization, Christian women urge their churches to put pressure on Liberia’s church-going president Charles Taylor (who could allegedly “pray the devil out of hell”), while their Muslim counterparts tried to influence LURD, the primarily Muslim warlords on the countryside.

(more…)

Bookmark It

FALLING UP: Mathieu Amalric as Henri

In Christmas movies, the spirit of the season inevitably trumps the personal conflicts that bedevil the characters. Arnaud Desplechin’s A Christmas Tale feels like a yuletide miracle in reverse: Christmas remains in the background, no match for the wrenching problems yet stubborn togetherness of the Vuillard family.

Matriarch Junon (Catherine Deneuve, the de facto first lady of French cinema) discovers that she has a terminal illness and a transplant may be the only means of saving her. Two possible donors may be her alcoholic, contentious middle son Henri (Mathieu Almaric) and her troubled teenaged grandson Paul (Emile Berling). Any transplant carries the risk of “graft vs. host” disease, in one of the film’s many medical metaphors for the paradoxes of family life. Can’t live with them, can’t live without their bone marrow. (more…)

Bookmark It

Beloved Atlanta performer Libby Whittemore brings her cabaret act — and loyal fan base — back to Actor’s Express for Ho Ho Home for the Holidays and A Connie Sue Day Christmas from Dec. 6-21. For years Whittemore honed the show with longtime music director Robert Strickland at the now closed club Libby’s, A Cabaret. A self-described “Christmas idiot,” Whittemore sings secular holiday standards in the first act, and in the second half takes the stage as her high-haired alter ego Connie Sue Day, “the 31st Lady of Country Music.” Here, she lists some of her essential Christmas songs from the show, in addition to “Have Yourself a Very Merry Christmas.”

1. “Christmas Time is Here:” “In the first part of show I talk about when I was little and my family traditions, so I sing this from the TV special ‘A Charlie Brown Christmas.’ Every time you bring up memories from childhood, it’s funny. Every year I try to watch ‘A Charlie Brown Christmas’ and ‘Rudolph, The Red-Nosed Reindeer,’ and I definitely watch White Christmas.”

2. “Santa Baby:” “I don’t like any of the Christmas novelty songs, like ‘Grandma Got Run Over By a Reindeer,’ except for ‘Santa Baby.’ Eartha Kitt definitely put her own stamp on it. I’m not trying to do a better version than her, I’m just trying to do it justice. It’s Eartha Kitt, for God’s sake.”

(more…)

Bookmark It

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.

(more…)

Bookmark It

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…)

Bookmark It

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…)

Bookmark It

One of the quirkiest traditions of this time of year is watching “The Simpsons” annual new “Treehouse of Horror” episode — after Halloween. Because Fox currently owns the broadcast rights to the World Series, and November is a ratings “sweeps” month, “The Simpsons” Halloween episode almost always airs after All Hallow’s Eve, when it’s horror-themed slapstick proves a little out of date. The show doesn’t even make self-deprecating jokes about it any more, it’s been this way for so long. This year the 19th installment airs on Sun., Nov. 2 at 8 p.m. and, as usual, features three segments: “How to Get Ahead in Dead-vertising,” “Untitled Robot Parody” and “It’s the Grand Pumpkin, Milhouse,” which satirize, respectively, AMC’s “Mad Men,” Transformers and “It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown” and other Peanuts specials. The amusing titles for the “Mad Men” spoof are already on-line:

“Treehouse of Horror XIX” seems unusually, uh, leaky this year. The episode’s election-themed prologue, involving a faulty voting machine, has been on-line for several weeks already. (In a sign of just how long “The Simpsons” has aired Halloween specials, one of its most amusing political-themed chapters dates to 1996. “Citizen Kang” featured slobbery aliens Kang and Kodus impersonating Bill Clinton and Bob Dole.) Anyway, here’s the new prologue, which at least airs ahead of Tuesday’s Election Day.

Bookmark It