Movies, Plays and TV

MOTHER NIGHT (1996) is a watchable but unsuccessful adaptation of the Vonnegut novel I read this summer with Nick Nolte as the German playwright recruited by the Allies to combine espionage with rabble-rousing propaganda broadcasts (“There are no Jews in foxholes.”), enabling him to glide through the war without really choosing a side. This lacks the wryly absurdist tone of the book (which I admit would have been tricky), instead taking the farrago of the protagonist’s experiences far too seriously. Nolte is good in the lead, though Alan Arkin as a Soviet spy and John Goodman as Nolte’s US handler steal the show; Arye Gross plays an Auschwitz survivor and Kirsten Dunst is Nolte’s young sister-in-law. “I lost my wife four years ago——my choices were to move to Greenwich Village and become a painter or blow my brains out.”
(500) DAYS OF SUMMER (2009) has Joseph Gordon-Levitt entering his flashback booth to try to figure out why Zooey Deschanel refused to fall in love with him when they worked so well as friends. I give the film points for not having this Great Obsession result from sheer hotness, but Deschanel is too bland to believe she’d inspire this much passion. Pointless. “Nobody falls in love with Ringo.”
Liam Neeson becomes DARKMAN (1990) when brutal ganglord Larry Drake blows up his lab, leaving him disfigured. Using his synthetic skin invention, however, he sets out to infiltrate and destroy the syndicate. Despite its big flaws (how exactly does his lab equipment survive the explosion still functional?) Sam Raimi’s energetic direction makes for great entertainment (the finish on a skyscraper has an ingenious way to give the villain the upper heand) and the first-rate cast (including Frances McDermond as Neeson’s lover) raises the acting over a lot of super-hero movies (the scenes where Neeson’s sobbing out his despair are gut-wrenching).. “If realizing that dream requires a few unpleasant decisions, I’m not going to run away.”

AFTER THE REVOLUTION is an autobiographical drama by Amy Hertzog in which an activist lawyer discovers that not only was the blacklisted grandfather who inspired her to fight for the innocent a Soviet spy, but that her father knew for years and never told her——which as the program for this production notes, makes the issue more family dynamics than left-wing politics. Very well done. “You lost your right to participate in this conversation when you lied to me my entire life.”
I caught a DVD of an excellent production of OTHELLO (2007), with Eamon Walker as the Moor who makes the mistake of listening to Tim McInnerny’s conniving, resentful Iago, leading, of course, to dishonor, death, betrayal and suicide. Powerfully done, with Iago stealing the show as he often does. “Thus I turn her virtue into pitch, and out of her own goodness, fashion the net that ensnares them all.”

The first season of LAND OF THE LOST reminds me that despite the weak acting and F/X it really was a first-rate SF series. A family gets sucked into a pocket universe occupied by dinosaurs, the reptilian Sleestak (and their never-seen God), time travelers and advanced science. With scripts by David Gerrold, Larry Niven, D.C. Fontana and Walter Koenig (which convinces me the Totally Rational Enok is intended as a Vulcan riff), it’s definitely worth seeing.