n a traditionally grim winter season for both house-buying & theater-going, my new next door neighbor moved here from Spain & I’ve been anxious to let her in on the secret treasures of the Bay Area. It’s not easy to make choices with too much out there & while I frown on using the ‘little man’ in the SF Chronicle, a literal icon whose position in his chair (‘sitting up’, ‘snoozing’, ‘jumping out of the chair’, etc.) is a lazy way of instantly dooming a movie or play should the critic be particularly venomous,  I recognize that some guidance is welcome. I just don’t know where it should come from.

Case in point: I’m not a Jim Carrey fan, nor did I appreciate the humor in Something About Mary which got raves, but I did wander out to a suburban mall & catch a showing of Saving Silverman , which the Chron gave ‘empty chair’,  because I love Steve Zahn.  My reaction begs the question—when you experience a positive charge from a movie that is billed as a comedy, can you trust that it will continue to hold up on repeated viewings?  In other words, how sure can a jaded critic be that the horrible opinion of the flick he thinks he saw is not in fact the result of a sub-standard burrito consumed in haste while making his way through a traffic jam?  I will admit that I was in a devastated mood coming from a pointless & somewhat humiliating callback, however I truly have begun to trust (knock on wood) that whatever Zahn does, it will be grounded in a fundamentally sound comic sense. And even though I had seen the trailer a dozen times & knew that he and Jack Black were going at some point to be upside down on the grass outside the fiancee-from-hell’s window, I still laughed out loud when it came. This is where the phrase ‘word of mouth’ comes from. My mouth to your ear:  ignore the critic. 

Everything else this month is ‘serious’,   although certainly not without merit—no walkouts this time—with the requisite number of Oscar performances.  Pollack intrigued me.  I know Ed Harris can access whatever it takes to bring emotion to the screen.  I love the bit in The Abyss when Mary Elizabeth Mastroantonio is being resuscitated after she volunteers to drown & Harris has to watch her come back to life by looking down into the camera,  POV the woman’s.  The editing is doing its magic convincing us that the actress was lying there when actually she wasn’t even in the room. So I figured Ed Harris was going to deliver big time on this occasion especially since it’s his baby.  My conclusion is that if I can separate my uncomfortable reactions from knowledge of filmmaking or acting in general and just know that the painter was having a semi-permanent Bad Day, then I can accept Harris’ take on the guy.  It felt like a glimpse into the artist’s personal hell. I also want to see some Art now, where before I was like, yeah, whatever. The Pledge was another noble effort.  Jack Nicholson looking all grody at the beginning & so you say ‘oooh, what’s up with that’, and then you find out at the end. Extra points for Robin Wright Penn for also being somewhat grody.    Mega-points to Willem Dafoe for Shadow of the Vampire especially the nails which he plays like castanets. An admirable job of playing a lunatic without resorting to bottom of the barrel tricks.  Actually harder than it might seem since the ‘actors’ making the ‘film’ in the film have to have cheesy acting styles. And how did they ever get anything done back then with those hand-crank cameras?!

With the writers’ strike looming, the confusion over what will be available for our viewing pleasure has caused us to consider movies we wouldn’t ordinarily be interested in, such as Save the Last Dance, which was OK, but not as exciting as Flashdance. What I’m really looking forward to is another Gerard Depardieu epic, this time about the French guy who cooks for the King, but in the meanwhile, a small Depardieu-directed family drama, The Bridge,  is a welcome treat. (Why didn’t they put him in charge of Chocolat?  I bet he wouldn’t have eviscerated it. I can see him as the nasty husband, too.)  He gets back to his Jean de Florette roots here,  though not as a city guy, just a poor schlub who’s trying too hard & gently failing.  It was so great to see a man react internally to his wife’s infidelity; no violence, no big slugfest with the other man, no vengeful attempts to sour the son’s relationship with his mother.  Just a really engrossing & sexy film.

We ventured out to catch a new play, Snakebit, David Marshall Grant’s effort to combine women’s & men’s & gay issues.  Nice that the female member of the cast happens to be a woman of color irrespective of anything in the actual script.  Even with the usual sputtering start, I had this warm feeling from the top when I saw one of the characters lying there with his mess of  moving boxes around him, lost in the vain attempt to find the edge of the clear packing tape.  And since we had such a fun time at a production of The Complete Works of William Shakespeare Abridged, we thought The Complete History of America would be fun, too.  Nope, too dark these days, it actually needs British actors to make it work since American actors are part of what’s going on in this country which is distinctly not funny.  The small cast of Athol Fugard’s The Road to Mecca almost put us to sleep with this extremely talky & static play;  the first act was so long I was ready to scream, but I will concede that it is possible, in the same way Lettice & Lovage with the right cast can pull it off, for the playwright’s vision to really move us.   Community theater is probably not the place.

This month I had the privilege of attending the opening night of a new cast of The Vagina Monologues, of course with gal pals—the best way to go—and just wish that it was longer.  Pretty good for a no frills production.  Just the words up there, slicing the air. Jill Eikenberry, Kathleen Chalfant & Lorri Holt pass the spotlight back and forth, going from the heights to the depths & the probably 98% female audience is right there, like our own revival meeting.  The two guys who happened to be in front of us got up one after the other to step out (too much pre-show liquid?) but they were the only ones in a 500 seat house, my point being that I can see where this would be an uncomfortable show for a guy to sit through.  Especially the ‘I am an Angry Vagina’ monologue which got the applause/reaction meter into the red zone about 15 times.  For those with a hunger for more there’s always Margaret Cho’s I’m the One that I Want , hopefully out on video, an incredibly brave & feisty Statement by the Performer, which coincidentally uses ‘vagina’ more times than Mamet uses ‘fuck’.

 © 2001 Claudine Jones ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

An Editor’s Note

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