Sunday, June 15, 2008

This Month's Free Movie

Every month, the folks at Turner Classic Movies, slap some old film up on their website which you can watch online if you're of a mind to. This month, it's One Man's Journey, a 1933 melodrama starring Lionel Barrymore, Joel McCrea, May Robson and Dorothy Jordan. Barrymore plays a small town country doctor who is so devoted to his practice and to healing the sick in his town that he neglects his own needs. It's a nice little film with a good score by Max Steiner. You can watch it by clicking...oh, how about clicking right here? It runs about seventy minutes.

• Posted at 11:42 PM · LINK

P.S.

And the eleven o'clock news led with the headline that same-sex marriage is only hours from commencing in California. They're going to start issuing licenses tomorrow at 5:01 PM. That's quite a follow-up to the Tony Awards...which, by the way, struck me as the least-gay Tony telecast in many years.

• Posted at 11:08 PM · LINK

Tony Time!

The Tony Awards actually went two or three minutes over this evening. That's interesting because a couple years ago, CBS was telling the producers that overage would not be tolerated; that even if it meant cutting off the final award before the winner was announced, the 11:00 local news would not start even five seconds late.

That was back when the show was crammed into a two-hour time slot, sometimes with an extra hour preceding it on PBS. The telecasts have gotten so much better since someone at CBS had the good sense to say, "Hey, if we're going to broadcast the Tony Awards, let's really broadcast the Tony Awards." So it went to three hours and now, they seem to have also given them a few minutes of a grace period at the end, which this year was necessary. (Wish I'd known that. My TiVo recording ended before the show did.)

I thought it was a pretty good show. I know for some, half the fun is bitching about the clothes and the speeches and the ghastly production numbers, and I suppose some people are now having a wonderful time, complaining about the little segments with Whoopi Goldberg performing in scenes from long-running musicals. But the show kept moving and apart from the necessity of giving out a lot of awards to people America doesn't care about, I thought it was about as good as the Tonys are likely to be. I was actually disappointed that things moved at such a rapid clip that Whoopi didn't get to say much.

Some of the shows looked pretty inviting. I have a feeling Xanadu and Little Mermaid sold a lot of tickets tonight while Young Frankenstein and Grease didn't. The number from Grease looked like the new stage version was adapted from the movie by someone who didn't know there'd ever been an old stage version.

Oh, excuse me. I made a mistake in the above paragraph. The show is not called Young Frankenstein. It's actually The New Mel Brooks Musical, Young Frankenstein. If you want to know one of the reasons it didn't get much in the way of Tony nominations (it won none of the few it got), there's a big hint in that official title. True, reviews weren't wonderful but the show was also known within the Broadway community for a certain air of arrogance in its advance publicity, ticket prices, refusal to report grosses and other little ways. I suspect someone will also be peeved at that commercial they ran during the East Coast feed and which I caught via my satellite dish. It touted the show as "Winner! Best Musical 2008!" — which would make many think it had won the Tony in that category. Actually, in type that could not possibly be read on any TV screen, it presumably admitted that this was the Outer Critics Circle Award.

Best acceptance speech? Mark Rylance, winner of Best Actor in a Play for Boeing-Boeing. He did a rambling monologue that had nothing to do with the event or the show or the award. From press coverage, I gather that it was an excerpt from The Back Country, an essay by the poet, Lewis Jenkins. It sure got the crowd's attention and in a good way.

Nice tribute to Rent. I'm sorry Mr. Sondheim was a no-show but his acceptance note, read by Mandy Patinkin, was classy. The medley from South Pacific looked especially good...almost enough to make me want to see this production of a show I've never much liked.

That's all I have. Good job, whoever did the show this year. I'm sorry my TiVo cut off the credits so I don't know who you are.

Oh, wait. I just realized the West Coast telecast is concluding as I'm typing this so I just turned the set on. Executive Producers Ricky Kirshner and Glenn Weiss...Weiss directed...Dave Boone was the writer. Fine job. And the late news started at 11:01:30 so they only went a minute and a half over.

• Posted at 11:04 PM · LINK

Vote About the Vote

I haven't done one of these in a while. This poll has nothing to do with who you'd like to see win the White House. We're merely asking for your prediction...and I'll ask again a few times before Election Day. You have one week to vote this time.

• Posted at 1:11 AM · LINK

Today's Video Link

Here's Lewis Black on an NPR show, getting a call from someone who doesn't like his work. The caller makes a number of mistakes, the most obvious being that if you want to criticize something in public, you need to be prepared to make your case with an example or two.

The caller believes that Black does some kind of damage by mocking religion, Judaism in particular. That alone makes you think the guy on the phone hasn't heard (or understood) much of what Mr. Black says. But even if he's right — even if Lewis Black is out there saying the worst kind of things about Judaism — they'd probably be less disrespectful of the religion than the suggestion that it's so frail it can be harmed by one guy yelling on a stage somewhere. It's like people who think America is so fragile, it could crumble if someone occasionally burns a flag.

• Posted at 12:55 AM · LINK

June 16, 2008 • Current • June 14, 2008