Movies and a Play

Failing to catch THE BIG SLEEP (1946) at a local art-museum showing, I pulled out my DVD (TYG has never seen it) to watch Humphrey Bogart’s Philip Marlowe attempt to clear up a blackmail case involving decadently rich Lauren Bacall’s slightly nutty and equally dissipated sister only to discover a tangled web involving gamblers, bookstore owner Dorothy Malone, dirty photographs and Elisha Cook Jr. in one of his few good guy roles (“He was a funny little guy—but I liked him.”). This is notorious for a plot that ultimately makes no sense (they switched the killer from the Raymond Chandler source novel) but it doesn’t matter in the face of great performances, colorful noir characters, snappy dialog (“You want me to count to three like they do in the movies?”) and dramatic scenes; TYG was quite entertained. “I hope you’ve had experience dodging trouble, because I have a feeling you’re about to face a lot of it.”
SUPERMAN VS. THE ELITE (2012) adapts a 1990s Superman story in which a new super-team (patterned on The Authority) with its take-no-prisoners approach to crimefighting has people asking whether Superman’s no-kill approach isn’t out-of-date. This suffers from mediocre voice casting (Lois in particular sounds rather harsh) but the story by Joe Kelly (who wrote the original issue) is solid, proving Kelly’s point that what makes Superman interesting isn’t the things he can do but the things he chooses not to do (which I’ve discussed before). “You were the first and the best—but now you’re a cliché and you don’t fit in any more.”

THE IMAGINARY INVALID was a local adaptation of Moliere’s French comedy about a wealthy hypochondriac so desperate he’s willing to marry off his daughter to a quack to guarantee a doctor on call. A really oddball production with a mix of wit, satire, shtick and slapstick—I’ve no idea how much is original to this version or innate in the “comedie ballete” genre to which this belongs. Working in references to Moliere’s death during the original production of this didn’t work for me, but a good job by the local Playmakers group nonetheless. “We only die once—but then we stay dead such a long time!”