The Blue Man Group’s eloquent little 9/11 video memorial, “Exhibit 13,” can be viewed online here. (Thanks to Charly Z for the link.)
Strange doings in Obscuristan
One of the greatest pleasures of my years as the theater critic for the SF Examiner was the opportunity to cover the work of the San Francisco Mime Troupe each year. This theater collective with a distracting name (they don’t do what’s conventionally understood as mime at all) has been carting its free outdoor shows to Bay Area parks in the summer for over 40 years now. It has managed to invent its own tradition, mixing sharp political satire and musical comedy in the vein of 19th-century melodrama — think Gilbert & Sullivan meets “Dr. Strangelove” meets Brecht, with doses of vaudeville and Mad magazine thrown in for fun. The motivation is progressive politics, but the method is pure comedy.
This year’s show, “Mr. Smith Goes to Obscuristan,” borrows its plot structure from Capra’s “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,” transplanting the action to a mythical Central Asian country and transforming the hero into Jefferson Smith, a firefighter-hero of 9/11 who gets drafted by the Bush administration to observe the first “free” elections in Obscuristan. There are jabs about the U.S.’s last “fixed” election; merciless mockery of President Bush, Dick Cheney and even Barbara Bush; gags about Internet-connected mullahs and a shadowy opposition candidate named “Ralif Nadir”; and, beyond the jokes, a thoughtful tracing of the distinction between honest post-9/11 patriotism and good old American jingoism, self-interest and hypocrisy. The script is co-written by my old friend Josh Kornbluth, so I cannot offer an impartial review, but I can offer a highly biased recommendation: See it if you’re in the area.
A Dowd-y view of indie film
New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd has her fans, but I am not one of them. Her pieces usually read to me like a series of drafts of alternate leads: She keeps trying out one-liners and fine-tuning her jokes, but seems uninterested in actually building an argument. Often she has her finger on the pulse of a narrow spectrum of Beltway (and, lately, Hollwood) insiders; she aggressively distances herself from her subjects via a barricade of wisecracks, but they seem to be the only stratum of society she is actually interested in.
Her piece
today on Soderbergh’s new “Full Frontal” (which I have not seen, but Stephanie Zacharek reviews here) is actually somewhat more linear than the norm for her; this time, the problem is that her argument — that “indie” does not necessarily equal “good,” or, as she says, “just because something is grainy doesn’t mean it’s cooler” — is about 30 years old. There is nothing novel or innovative in pointing out that being low-budget crude, or art-house obscure, does not in itself render a movie worthy of one’s attention or ticket dollar.
Pauline Kael established this essential critical stance early on in her career, and several generations of critics — myself very much included — grew up accepting it as a given. Cheap movies succeed or fail artistically in much the same ratio as expensive ones. There is no correlation between budget size and quality (or virtue). About the only indictment of big Hollywood movies that does not apply equally to small indie movies is that they squander huge sums of money and cultural attention. When an indie flops, the waste is less egregious.
Obits
RIP: Chaim Potok (“The Chosen”); Leo McKern (who played Rumpole of the Bailey). Also passed away, though I cannot imagine he is resting in peace, nor can I wish him such: William Pierce, the neo-Nazi and white supremacist who wrote “The Turner Diaries.”