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MOVIE REVIEW: Words and Pictures

As a teacher, The Wife appreciated the non-traditional ways both main characters in Words and Pictures attempted to engage their students.

At some point in July, the Wife and I saw Words and Pictures at the Spectrum 8 Theatre. I forgot to write a review straight on, partly because I was busy, but also because I don’t particularly enjoy scribing negative reviews. ESPECIALLY when I REALLY wanted to like the film.

The premise is that prep school English teacher Jack Marcus (Clive Owen), once an acclaimed writer himself, is a burned-out, functional alcoholic. He tries to motivate his students to value the written word.

He starts this contrived competition with the new teacher Dina Delsanto (Juliette Binoche), a well-regarded abstract painter now struggling with rheumatoid arthritis, about whether…well, read the title… are more important.

Some of it is mildly inspirational in the teacher-motivates-students plot in a number of better movies. Some of it is hokey, such as a scene in which she struggles to paint with nice classical music, while he drinks to excess while raucous David Bowie is the soundtrack. But the ending of this movie I didn’t believe AT ALL.

The Wife liked this quite a bit more than I. As a teacher, I think she appreciated the non-traditional ways both characters attempted to engage their students. And I did as well, but it wasn’t enough to ignore its failings.

I loved Binoche in Chocolat, and apparently, she does her own painting here, credibly. I think the failure of Words and Pictures is not with her. It’s not with Owen, either, though his character is never as charming as we’re supposed to believe. The real issue is the somewhat hackneyed script.

Anna and Brian’s wedding

Anna married Brian on August 1 of this year on a farm in Glen, NY.

I’d known Anna practically since she was born. The narrative that her father Broome told at the reception after her wedding to Brian suggested that perhaps she wouldn’t have been born at all, but for me.

The way he tells it, it was his first day working at FantaCo, the comic book et al store I was managing in late 1983. either he wanted to come in late or needed an extended lunch. Since he was a law student, I thought maybe he needed some extra study time. Or maybe he needed to work some more hours at the law firm he was also working at, but neither of these was the case.

Instead, he wanted to go see Bread and Puppet Theater with this young woman named Penny he had met. Broome SAYS that I extorted the promise that he would name his firstborn after me. Interestingly, after Broome spoke at the reception, some friend of his told me that the first time HE had heard the story, Broome said he OFFERED to name his first child after me for the time off, which is precisely how I remember it.

In any case, Broome and Penny DID get married; I was present at a ceremony that was a surprise to most of the guests who thought it was just a summer party. They had two children, Anna and Luke. And Anna’s middle name is Green.

I finally figured out why he persists with this version, which by now probably he even believes: it’s a better story! Or as Luke’s girlfriend said to me about another topic, “That’s just Broome!” A wise young woman. Broome and Penny are in the foreground in a photo by Anna’s godfather, Lynn Stone.

Anna married Brian on August 1 of this year on a farm in Glen, NY somewhere southwest of Amsterdam, Montgomery County. I really liked the vows, which I presume was based on these handfasting vows:

Brian, Will you cause her pain?
I May
Is that your intent?
No

Anna, Will you cause him pain?
I may
Is that your intent?
No

*To Both*
Will you share each other’s pain and seek to ease it?
Yes

Fortunately, it did not rain, which was in some forecasts, for we could have had a sea of mud. It was, in fact, rather warm, but dry. Good thing there was a large tent covering, to protect us from the sun after the brief ceremony.

I had not previously met Brian. They were living in New York City, but now they are residing upstate. During the early part of the reception, Brian sang John Legend’s All of Me to Anna. He has a VERY nice voice.

At some point, the bride tossed the bouquet, and the youngest single lady, one I’m related to, caught it. Fortunately, they didn’t do the part where the guy catching the garter puts it on the leg of the bouquet catcher, because that would have been weird.

There was mucho good food and a constructed floor. The Daughter and I shared a dance or two before The Wife, The Daughter, our friend Bill and I returned home.

Best wishes to my namesake and her new husband!

#1 songs on my birthday, 1964-1973

I’m passing on a great Sly song, and a Beatles anthem, to pick one of the greatest pop performances ever, in my mind.

My friend Dan Van Riper sent me this list of all the #1 songs since August 4, 1958.

I have links only to the middle tune, the song of my birthday. You can go to the website and hear the other contenders. If I’ve heard it before, I won’t play it again. If I’ve never heard of it, I’ll play it once. But I won’t listen to the adjacent tunes. My goal: am I happy with THAT choice to celebrate my birthday? Or (as will be the case in the latter stages of the game), I have no idea?

1/4/64 Bobby Vinton – There! I’ve Said It Again
2/1/64 The Beatles – I Want To Hold Your Hand
3/21/64 The Beatles – She Loves You

Maybe it’s because She Loves You was on a minor label (Swan) that finally became a hit in the US only after the Capitol Records marketing machine took IWTHYH to the top, but I always had the greater affection for it.

2/20/65 Gary Lewis and the Playboys – This Diamond Ring
3/6/65 The Temptations – My Girl
3/13/65 The Beatles – Eight Days A Week

All songs I own. I’ll pick that middle song, written by Smokey Robinson.

2/26/66 Nancy Sinatra – These Boots Are Made For Walkin’
3/5/66 Barry Sadler – The Ballad Of The Green Berets
4/9/66 The Righteous Brothers – (You’re My) Soul And Inspiration

The staff sergeant’s song was #1 for FIVE weeks, two weeks longer than any song that year. It wasn’t my type of record, let’s say, yet I knew all the words. Still, for my week, I’d take either of the other songs. Boots is iconic, though I never actually owned it, so I’ll pick Bill and Bobby.

2/18/67 The Buckinghams – Kind Of A Drag
3/4/67 The Rolling Stones -Ruby Tuesday
3/11/67 The Supremes – Love Is Here And Now You’re Gone

Own all of these, too. A tossup. All decent songs, none my favorite by the artist. Supremes, I suppose.

2/3/68 The Lemon Pipers – Green Tambourine
2/10/68 Paul Mauriat and His Orchestra – Love Is Blue (L’Amour Est Bleu)
3/16/68 Otis Redding (Sittin’ On) The Dock Of The Bay

Tough choice! I actually really liked Love Is Blue, the only performance by a French artist ever to top the Billboard Hot 100. “Its five-week run at the top was second-longest of any instrumental of the Hot 100 era next to 1960s Theme From A Summer Place,” which I was also fond of.
Then you have a song with GREEN in the title.
But I’ll opt for what I recall is the first posthumous #1 pop single, as Otis had died in a plane crash.

2/1/69 Tommy James and the Shondells – Crimson And Clover
2/15/69 Sly & the Family Stone – Everyday People
3/15/69 Tommy Roe – Dizzy

Did my sister own the Tommy Roe single? Heard it a lot. I’ll pick Sly, but I really also like how Crimson and Clover changes key near the end.

2/14/70 Sly & the Family Stone – Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin)
2/28/70 Simon and Garfunkel – Bridge Over Troubled Water
4/11/70 The Beatles – Let It Be

I’m passing on a great Sly song, and a Beatles anthem, to pick one of the greatest pop performances ever, in my mind.

1/23/71 Dawn – Knock Three Times
2/13/71 The Osmonds – One Bad Apple
3/20/71 Janis Joplin – Me And Bobby McGee

This is an easy pick. Donny trying to sound like Michael Jackson; nope. Tony Orlando; nope. Yet another posthumous #1, a great song written by Kris Kristofferson; yup.

2/12/72 Al Green – Let’s Stay Together
2/19/72 Nilsson – Without You
3/18/72 Neil Young – Heart Of Gold

Another tough choice. I love Neil, and this is perhaps cousin Al’s greatest song. But Without You, I felt viscerally.

2/3/73 Elton John – Crocodile Rock
2/24/73 Roberta Flack – Killing Me Softly With His Song
3/24/73 The O’Jays – Love Train

Mediocre Elton (given his other output from that period), decent Roberta, but anthemic (and geographically-based) O’Jays win out.

The Theater!

The Mac-Haydn Theatre is a 350-seat theater in the round, the stage is not huge, yet they use it and the various entrances and exits so well.

It’s peculiar that I hardly ever write about plays and musicals, given the fact that I go to them quite often, at various venues.

One great location is Proctors Theatre in Schenectady, pretty much the next city over from Albany, in the once a rundown vaudeville house that’s now a refurbished gem. Shows that had been on Broadway and are now touring show up here. It holds about 2700 patrons.

The Wife and I saw at least two shows in the 2010-11 season:
February 2011: Lion King. Astonishing, starting with the entrances from throughout the theater
May 2011: Hair. The story doesn’t age well, but it was still fun, with a lot of talented vocalists.

2011-2012:
Mar 2012: Jersey Boys. The story of The Four Seasons gave me a lot more respect for the singing group. Well done.
April 2012: Memphis. Apr 12 This is why I watch the Tonys; I wouldn’t have known what this award-winning show about music and race was about had I not seen it on the awards show. Good stuff.

As a result of these, we decided to get 2012-2013 season tickets:
October 2012: Mary Poppins. The one show we took The Daughter to, it was colourful and charming. We saw this only a few months after we saw the movie, the Daughter and I for the first time.
November 2012: Wicked. As good as was promised, and much more interesting than the book. The one musical I did review.
January 2013: Million Dollar Quartet. The heavily fictionalized story of a recording session with Presley, Cash, Lewis and Perkins. It was pretty good, but the performances at the end were great. There’s a chat with some of the actors after some Thursday afternoon performances, and these guys were particularly charming.
February 2013: Priscilla. Very entertaining, occasionally provocative show I enjoyed. No, I never saw the movie.
May 2013: Les Miserables. I had never seen a theatrical production. The movie I found to be tiresome. This production, though, I found wonderfully compeling, with some great singing, and touching acting performances.
An extra show we saw that season-
June 2013: Billy Elliot. While it took some wide swings between comedy and pathos, I did enjoy it quite a bit, and it was ultimately effective storytelling.

After watching the previews of the 2013-2014 season back in March, which included a singer from Sister Act, we signed up again. I was sold not just by the fact that Book of Mormon was on the roster, but by seeing the War Horse horse, live on stage. You can see the three people controlling the large puppet, yet you buy into the horse’s actions. The neighing comes from them making three different pitches.
September 2013: Ghost. This was the first Proctors show that I thought was an outright disappointment. It was as though they still needed to work out the pacing bugs. Worse, I never really believed the romance of the two main characters. But the woman playing the Whoopi Goldberg role was great. I liked, didn’t love the movie. Here’s the Broadway World website.
October 2013: Matthew Bourne’s Sleeping Beauty. Was it dance? Was it theater? Good chunks of the story made no sense to me. It LOOKED great, but left me cold. The Wife liked it more than I. Here’s the Nippertown review.
January 2014: War Horse. This is an extraordinary event, this horse who is thrown into war, and his owner who fights to find him. Quite intense sat times. There may have been something in my eye at the end.
February 2014: Sister Act. I had very low expectations of this, another Whoopi Goldberg movie made into a musical. But it was GOOD! Entertaining, funny. Arguably better than the movie.
March 2014: Book of Mormon. I did not see. I was in the hospital with The Daughter. The Wife went – I told her if she had to stay all night at the hospital, I’d stay all day. She thought BOM was too raunchy for her taste.
May 2014: Phantom of the Opera. This was a new production, but since it was a totally unknown commodity, it didn’t matter. While we liked it quite a bit, we were both confused by a few things that maybe would have made more sense to a veteran of the musical.

Thus, for the 2014-2015 season, we opted out of getting season tickets again. It’s not that some of the shows were disappointing. It is that too many of the shows are familiar.
Newsies • Oct 11-17, 2014 – The Daughter and I saw this on Broadway in February 2014, only her second trip to NYC. It was really good, especially the second act, but I don’t need to see it again. Maybe The Wife will go with a friend.
Jersey Boys • Jan 13-18, 2015 – Saw this a couple years ago, and don’t need to see it again so soon.
The Illusionists Witness the Impossible • Feb 17-22, 2015 – Have no feel for this, whether it’d be interesting to me.
Annie • Mar 3-8, 2015 – I’ve seen no fewer than three iterations of Annie in the past four years, including my niece in a high school production. Even though this will be “new”, I’ll pass.
Pippin • May 26-31, 2015- Now THIS I’ve wanted to see since seeing the TV ads for the original production 40 YEARS AGO.
Kinky Boots • Jun 16-21, 2015 – And I’d see the recent Best Musical.

Another great venue is the Mac-Haydn Theatre, about 45 minutes away from Albany in Chatham, NY. It’s a 350-seat theater in the round, the stage is not huge, yet they use it and the various entrances and exits so well.

In June 2011, we saw The King and I, and the aforementioned Annie, and they were quite fine. This year, in June, we saw The Music Man, and Fiddler on the Roof. The former was quite good, but the latter, incredible. I can’t believe the number of people traveling on the stage without bumping into each other or falling off. This is my second-favorite musical, and it was a very worthy production. BTW, lyricist Sheldon Harnick, who just turned 90, tells his story.

There have been plays in Washington Park in Albany for over a quarter-century, with the Park Playhouse, and I’ve seen 80% of them. The last two productions I recall seeing were West Side Story, my favorite musical, which I pretty much hated, especially the intermission huckstering; and Cabaret, which was considerably better.

Steamer 10 is a little community theater within walking distance of our house. It has a mixed fare of serious plays and things such as Robin Hood and the Good (& Bad) Fairies of Nottingham, which we took in back in March. But they’ve branched out; their production of Romeo & Juliet, outside near Lincoln Park, was quite fine, despite the incredible wind the day we saw it. Fortunately, my man Dan reviewed it.

For several different periods, but not in the past five years, I went to Capital Rep, an Equity theater. I know I saw these, and I may have forgotten one or three:
Dreaming Emmet by Toni Morrison (premiere)
The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe by Jane Wagner
Glengarry Glen Ross by David Mamet
Fences by August Wilson
Halley’s Comet by John Amos
A Tuna Christmas by Williams, Sears & Howard
The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck, adapted by Frank Galati – a particularly clever staging
Dancing at Lughnasa by Brian Friel
The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee (adapted by Christopher Sergel) – still powerful
Always…Patsy Cline by Ted Swindley
Over the Tavern by Tom Dudzick
Our Town by Thornton Wilder
Pretty Fire by Charlayne Woodard
Forever Plaid by Stuart Ross
Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol adapted by Maggie Mancinelli-Cahill
Picasso at the Lapin Agile by Steve Martin
I Love You, You’re Perfect, Now Change by Joe DiPietro and Jimmy Roberts
Menopause The Musical! by Jeanie Linders
Jacques Brel is Alive & Well & Living in Paris Words & Music by Jacques Brel, Conception, English Lyrics and Additional material by Eric Blau & Mort Shuman

I Go To Sleep

The Pretenders released I Go To Sleep as the fifth single from their second studio album Pretenders II

I’d written this really LONG blog post, so long that it ended up in two parts, and it was emotionally exhausting. So I took a nap. Napping is not something I do well. Often, waking up, I feel more tired, or disoriented.

This time, though, I was feeling reflective when I awoke. I got to think about this song by the Pretenders called I Go to Sleep. So when I woke up fully, I started to find various versions of the song.

The Kinks (1965): Ray Davies wrote the song, as any obsessive/compulsive liner note/LP label reader would know. But I didn’t even realize this version existed. It’s a demo, and it sounds like it, but it’s sweet, though too fast, with choppy vocals, compared with the version I knew best. It was included, I learned, as “a bonus track on the reissue of their second studio album Kinda Kinks.”

The Applejacks (1965 single). Has this metal clanging throughout, which I found really annoying.

Cher (1965, on her debut album All I Really Want to Do.) She sings it OK, but the arrangement messes with the major/minor chordal structure in the bridge, not to its benefit.

Peggy Lee (1965, from the album, Then Was Then, Now Is Now.) I love Peggy Lee, but not this, which seemed oddly parochial.

Marion (1967, released as a single in Germany and the U.K.) Marion Maerz was a German singer of the ’60s. This was apparently a significant version, as it got a special section in Wikipedia. It is string-heavy on the bridge, and thereafter. The background vocals do not particularly enhance.

The Pretenders (1981, released as the fifth single from their second studio album Pretenders II) The gold standard, three minutes of perfection.

Sia (2008: Sia Furler, on her album Some People Have Real Problems. Sia’s cover charted at number thirty-two on the Australian Singles Chart.) This is about the same length as the Pretenders’ version, yet feels rushed, somehow. However, this Sia version, at 3:30, and with a harmony vocal, is very nice.

Works Progress Administration (2009, on their self-titled debut album WPA). I rather like this one, with the harmony on the bridge.

Anika (2010, on her debut album Anika.) I was reading the YouTube comments. Some people don’t understand why everyone wouldn’t like this. But I’m in the other camp that found the beat very annoying, with the voice somewhat of a monotone. I did like the idea of what’s being attempted here more than the execution.

Rasputina (2011: on their collector’s album “Great American Gingerbread: Rasputina Rarities & Neglected Items”), This is live, with two cellos, and despite a clunky note or two, I rather enjoyed it.

Other versions:
2011: Camilla Kerslake on her second album Moments
2011: Kraus
2013: Rachael Leahcar on her second album Romantique

Here are the lyrics to I Go To Sleep.
***
Going to Sleep [New Timelapse Video].

Arthur is sleepy.