Jill surprised me on Friday night with a pair of tickets to see Ben Jonson's play, The Silent Woman, at the Shakespeare Theater. We've been meaning to check that venue out since we've lived in the District, but for some...
Continue reading "The Silent Woman, a play by Ben Jonson" »
Our friend Terri moved out to the hippy-dippy community of Greenbelt recently and invited us out there to partake of an amateur produciton of Ira Levin's Deathtrap. While Jill had seen the movie with Michael Caine and Christopher Reeve, she...
Continue reading "Deathtrap" »
Jill and I don't watch much television, which is why our friends are surprised that we are contemplating getting a 42-inch plasma television. I'm not quite sure why we want one either, except for the pure aesthetic quality that a...
Continue reading "Coupling" »
I have to admit that I was skeptical. While movies have been based on any number of things, I really thought it wasn't a smart idea to try and base one on a theme park ride. All you had to...
Continue reading "Pirates of the Caribbean
The Curse of the Black Pearl" »
Secret Ballot a film by Babak Payami This has to be the slowest movie I've seen since La Dolce Vita. The idea is great--an Iranian election agent trying to gather votes from a remote island whose residents are really...
Continue reading "A Vote Against" »
We spent the first night we were in England specifically so that we could attend a performance by the Royal Shakespeare Company. When reserving tickets months earlier, the best seats I could get were for a production of "As You...
Continue reading "Seeing the Forest for the Trees" »
As the announcer kept saying, we were at the Burghley Horse Trials when history was made. But to understand that, you have to know a little background. Most people are only familiar with the simplest of horse competitions, the quick...
Continue reading "2003 Burghley Horse Trials" »
Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron Most modern animation understands that the audience consists of a range, from the four-year-old to the forty. Unfortunately, Spirit doesn't. While the animation is professional, the plot and especially the music is excrutiatingly contrived and...
Continue reading "Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron" »
Here's a great Flash parody with some educational content, shorter than the three movies it is based on, plus you don't have to suffer what Keanu Reeves calls acting....
Continue reading "The Meatrix" »
There are two types of people in the world: the kind that like Andrew Lloyd Weber musicals and the kind that like Stephen Sondheim musicals. Well, actually, there's a third kind that don't like musicals at all, but these are...
Continue reading "Bounce" »
I was wary of this movie from the previews, as it seemed like it had focused on only one part of the wonderful Patrick O'Brian books--the character of "Lucky" Jack Aubrey--and used that as a vehicle for Russell Crowe. No...
Continue reading "Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World" »
We spent the last two nights watching the extended editions of Lord of the Rings in preparation of finally seeing Return of the King tonight. I can't recall anymore what the new parts to The Fellowship of the Ring were,...
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Walking back from the Uptown Cinema last night, we talked about what makes The Return of the King, and in extension, the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy, work. Jim Henley's been pondering the same question in a way, making...
Continue reading "The Retun of the King" »
Bend It Like Beckham is a thorougly entertaining movie about Jess, a girl who just wants to play football while her parents want her to be a traditional Indian girl and marry a nice Indian boy. While playing football...
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Living in Washington, D.C. has, of course, made me much more aware of politics, although there's something about getting older that has something to do with it as well. Browsing the video store racks the other day brought up...
Continue reading "The Manchurian Candidate" »
I can't remember exactly when we started listening to National Public Radio. It wasn't in Los Angeles (where I listed to KROQ and J listened to Mark and Brian), and it probably wasn't in Colorado (where we both listened to...
Continue reading "You're /watching/ National Public Radio" »
We spent this past weekend in New York catching a couple of the hottest shows on Broadway, as well as enjoying the town (no visit is complete unless you go to The Strand). Saturday night, we saw Wicked, based on...
Continue reading "An Oz Double-Feature" »
Many people mistake science fiction for spaceships and blasters, so when a science fiction movie comes around that doesn't contain either, like Gattaca or Brazil, critics describe the movie instead as surreal. While that adjective may justly describe those movies,...
Continue reading "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" »
Despite, in the view of Medley and Steve, the fact that Joss Whedon can't get anything going on TV, what with the cancellation of Angel, and the previous losses of both Buffy and Firefly, it seems that the chosen one...
Continue reading "The Third Coming of the Chosen One" »
We went and saw Fahrenheit 9/11 this past weekend, having to settle for a theater in Greenbelt as our first choice, the AFI, was sold out for the entire weekend. While Greenbelt wasn't sold out, the theater was over 3/4...
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Every so often, an advertisement comes along that's actually funny. This one's insidious, winnowing its way into your brain so you find yourself, er, 'glenning,' at odd times of the day, although I remember the song much more than the...
Continue reading "My Theme Song" »
We bought a high definition television at the beginning of the year, and had cable installed for local and national HDTV broadcasts. The picture difference is remarkable: George W. Bush has hair in his ears (discovered during the State of...
Continue reading "Olympic High Disappointment" »
Tom Shales covers a part of the story on NBC's atrocious coverage of the Olympics in a story this morning about a snafu with the commercials running on the high definition channel. Frankly, it's not the commercials that have been...
Continue reading "A Higher Definition" »
Although this got nice notices when it was out in the theaters, I still wasn't sure I wanted to see it. Produced by Saturday Night Live's Lorne Michaels, and written and starring several SNL alumni, it had a stigma of...
Continue reading "Mean Girls" »
I was hesitant about this movie at first, somewhat based on the previews, which implied more of a focus on the alleged improprieties of J.M. Barrie and the "lost boys," but I've yet to see a movie with Johnny Depp...
Continue reading "Finding Neverland" »
The Ghost of Gordon Sumner hits Dustin Hoffman between the celluloid with his own words: "Hoffman said he quit because 'studios weren't interested in the kind of films that people of my generation wanted to see.' He added: 'I just...
Continue reading "Dust-up" »
The theme of Lorenzaccio, the currently running play at the Shakespeare Theater, makes it a perfect choice for that venue, encorporating so much of the bard's own favorite tropes that it seems to be a long-lost play of his own....
Continue reading "Lorenzaccio at the Shakespeare Theater" »
Our good friend Terri called us up on Thursday and asked if we were interested in going to a concert in a garage on Saturday. "What?" It seems that she met this fellow while contra-dancing who played bluegrass guitar and...
Continue reading "Garage Band" »
The last (and first time) we were at the IOTA Club & Cafe was in November, to see James McMurtry touring in support of his new live album with the Heartless Bastards. As we had also just been to a...
Continue reading "John Doe at the Iota" »
I had to make a deal with J to see John Doe on a Monday night at the Iota, and that was to go with her on a Thursday night to see Jonatha Brooke at the Birchmere. It really wasn't...
Continue reading "Jonatha Brooke at the Birchmere" »
J's parents have been visiting us (and helping out loads with projects at the "new" house) since last Thursday. This is the first time they've been here for the 4th, so we decided to go downtown and enjoy the fireworks...
Continue reading "Hey, Baby, It's the Fourth of July" »
We've been trying to see this film for a while now, after having missed it in the theater. I was interested because it had a score by Peter Gabriel, who has great taste for movies with which to lend...
Continue reading "Rabbit-Proof Fence" »
The final ticket in our season pass for The Shakespeare Theater was a play by Oscar Wilde, Lady Windemere's Fan. I hadn't seen this one or read it, so it was a real treat and probably one of the better...
Continue reading "Lady Windemere's Fan at the Shakespeare Theater" »
The first third of this movie, where you meet poor little Charlie Bucket and his family in their dilipidated home, where they are so poor that his grandparents sleep in one bed by the fire, head to toe, is so...
Continue reading "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory" »
Due to an entirely surprising coincidence, we enjoyed a bit of Morocco fest this past Friday. Friday nights are normally our nights out, which recently have been only to investigate Silver Spring downtown as we are still getting settled into...
Continue reading "A Night of Morocco" »
I was out with some buddies this past Tuesday and, for some reason, the talk turned to what was the worst and the best comic book movie. I maintain that the best is Unbreakable, but the others wanted to limit...
Continue reading "Bringing Manga Alive" »
Unlike normal, a few months ago I actually was preparing for an upcoming trip: my parents were coming to visit and wanted to go to New York and see a Broadway show. From previous visits, I knew that I needed...
Continue reading "Dirty Rotten Scoundrels" »
I didn't think I wanted to see this movie, a combination of being wary of DiCaprio following the execrable Titanic and a disdain for the bio-pic, that always seems to be more hagiocentric than revealing. I had forgotten that the...
Continue reading "The Aviator" »
by Kate Bush Twelve years after her last studio release, Kate Bush returns with a two-disc set that should have been pared down to one. But Bush has long been in the group of popular artists who are allowed...
Continue reading "Aerial" »
I was always a bigger fan of C.S. Lewis and the Narnia books than I was of Tolkien and The Lord of the Rings. It probably was due to always wanting to escape this world, as the Pevensy children get...
Continue reading "Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe" »
The inevitable comparison for this movie is to Shakespeare in Love if only because it is about seventeenth century actors performing Shakespeare from moviemakers whom are more interested in the dramatic potentials of this than historical accuracy. And they're both...
Continue reading "Stage Beauty" »
Although I had already seen Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, a friend invited us to go with her to the Smithsonian Air & Space Museum where they were showing the movie on the IMAX screen. We got there...
Continue reading "Harry Potter at the IMAX" »
Many years ago, someone recommended this film to me, and I can understand why. It's a clever film, full of surprises as the protagonist psychiatrist is drawn into the world of confidence men, finding herself fascinated by their very...
Continue reading "House of Games" »
I think I expected a French version of Alias, and perhaps Nikita the TV series is such, but this movie from 1990 was much darker and, in actuality, more interesting than I expected. It was still a little bit...
Continue reading "La Femme Nikita" »
No, we didn't get to go to this year's Kentucky Derby. We missed it by a week, as we were in Kentucky last weekend for the 2006 Rolex Kentucky Three-Day Event (photos on Flickr soon). We did, however, go by...
Continue reading "2006 Kentucky Derby" »
Al Gore won't win an Academy Award, but this documentary based on his slideshow about global warming will. For what this documentary does is what film does best: it takes a difficult topic--that has years of accumulated misunderstandings both real...
Continue reading "An Inconvenient Truth" »
starring Peter Dinklage We've had this movie for the last month, always putting off watching it for one reason or another. It is a very understated movie, with much of the action never commented on directly in the movie, but...
Continue reading "The Station Agent" »
It's the time of the year when we attend concerts it seems. J noticed that Aimee Mann is coming back to the Birchmere for a Christmas concert, which boggles the mind somewhat, given how most of her music is somewhat...
Continue reading "'Tis the Season" »
Over the last couple of years, J's become a Ben Folds-atic. I debated last year whether or not to get her a fan club membership, and I probably should have. J's always loved piano playing, especially in rock music, and...
Continue reading "Ben Folds at Washington College, Chestertown, MD" »
We'd been meaning to try out the new pub in downtown Silver Spring, so we accepted when our friend Terri invited us to join her and her friend Sara there for a 10pm show of a band that she liked,...
Continue reading "Scythian at McGinty's" »
starring Joaquin Phoenix and Reese Witherspoon We missed this movie in the theater, and it finally popped up to the top in our netflix queue, a bit like cream rising to the top of the milk churn. This is an...
Continue reading "Walk the Line" »
Missed this one in the theater and it finally came up in the Netflix queue. As seems to be the case with movies made from graphic novels these days, the filmmakers did a great job of capturing the visual...
Continue reading "V for Vendetta" »
It's hard to describe exactly what this performance piece is about, but that's never stopped me before. You start with a male cross-dresser named John Epperson who performs in drag as Lypsinka. Next, you take audio clips of Joan Crawford...
Continue reading "Lypsinka: The Passion of the Crawford" »
We went to see Al Gore speak last night at UMBC's Maryland Forum. His lecture was basically the same information that is contained in An Inconvenient Truth, although there were some nods to Baltimore and Maryland as well as some...
Continue reading "Preaching to the Environmental Choir" »
Your music video of the day (since I'm now a YouTube user and producer) comes courtesy of The Society for the Activation of Social Space through Art and Sound (SASSAS) who sponsored a concert by Petra Haden wherein she took...
Continue reading "Petra Haden and the Sell-Outs" »
The recipe is simple: Take a classic song, in this case, Elton John's "Funeral for a Friend/Love Lies Bleeding" Go to http://images.google.com and find as many pictures of the artist possible; download these to your hard drive Open up a...
Continue reading "So You Want to Be a Music Video Director" »
I've written previously about my love for Kate Bush's mid-80s album, Hounds of Love. I came upon the album after my time spent watching music videos, which for most of Kate Bush's video work was probably a good thing (I...
Continue reading "Kate Bush, "Cloudbusting"" »
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