My Reviews- Arts Reporting And Reviewing
WILDCARD REVIEWS
HE & HER (TRAVIS HAYES-BUSSE & FRIENDS)
CRITIC
ROSSITER T. DRAKE
POETRY REVIEW
16TH & MISSION
MUSIC REVIEW
KOALACAUST
To hear some of Koalacaust’s muisc, visit their MySpace
PLAY REVIEW
LEARN TO BE LATINA
To me, a good theater experience makes you forget that you are watching a written play, acted out on a stage by a cast of characters. A good play sucks the viewer into its world and makes them feel connected to the experience. Learn To Be Latina, directed by Mary Guzman, was the type of theater experience that swallowed you whole and made you squirm, forcing you to question your progressiveness and revisit embarrassing pop music obsessions of the early 2000s before spitting you back out 90 minutes later.
I must admit I went into the play with high expectations. Knowing that the show was already sold out, I made the trek to La Val’s Subterranean in hopes of getting my hands on the ticket of a no-show patron. The joint was a pizza place, no wait, an underground theater, where you could conveniently purchase a slice and a brew right upstairs. There was a line for even the waiting list of hopefuls to snatch up unclaimed seats. Miraculously, I was let in. I took my seat and prepared myself for Impact Theater’s highly praised play. I will admit that no amount of preparation could have prepared me for the wildly unpredictability story that followed.
Hanan, who is played by Carlye Pollack, is an aspiring singer trying to get a deal with a pop music label. Representing the label, and the business of music signing are the robots in suits named Jill, Will, and Bill (Emily Rosenthal, Andrew Calabrese, and Jon Nagel). The business trio decides they want to sign Hanan, except for one little snag. When asked, “What are you?” Hanan replies she is Lebanese. Uh oh. This becomes the “ethnical difficulty” of the play. The story continues, as Hanan plays tug-of-war with the decision to trade her cultural identity in for a more crowd –pleasing persona. To help her, Will, Jill, and Bill call in the company’s “ethnic consultant” Mary O’Malley, a terrifying Scottish woman played by Melanie Salazar Case. Mary brings in the big guns to change Hanan into the ideal pop princess.
With lines such as, “Is the wrong kind of brown keeping you down?” and “keep the west, forget the rest,” and one sassy hand puppet, Learn To Be Latina proves to be a goofy way to examine social issues in the media. In other words, the deconstruction of identity into cookie cut out stereotypes that yield the most profit.
Scandal, heartbreak, and synchronized dancing ensue as the cast tries to untangle the difficult web of contrived identity, which, according to Mary O’ Malley, “is as negotiable as a back alley hooker.”
The plot thickens as a love interest sprouts between Blanca (the “office bitch,” and only true Latina on stage, played by Marilet Martinez), and Hanan, adding another layer to the identity crisis. With excellent dialogue between characters, choreographed and sporadic dances to such classics as N’SYNC’s “Bye Bye Bye,” and a montage time lapse of Hanan’s transformation, the cast keeps you engaged until the very last line of Learn To Be Latina.
Hanan’s Music Video:
The playwright Enrique Urueta lives in San Francisco. An earlier one-act version of this play was developed in the Bay Area Playwrights Fesival in 2005.
Written by Enrique Urueta
Directed by Mary Guzmán
Feb 18–Apr 2 | All performances 8pm | Directions
Tickets: $12 & $17 advance | $15 & $20 at the door
MOVIE REVIEW
ALICE IN WONDERLAND
3D real life
alice pale
costumes so awesome
painted roses red- parallel to queen m.i.l.
animation
so dimensional and textured
rich, simple
love dress
water fall artists
each character has a different color theme about them
rich, smoke
bandersnatch, jabberwocky
red queen castle looks like a Disney castle on acid
not really a kids movie
what is with depp’s accent back and forth to Scottish
muchness muchier
3D messes up focal points
One of us?
Told what to be my dream/my life
“I make the path”
as tall as a blade of grass
white queen- veins
very Joan of Arc
girl power
“choice must be yours”
battlefield looks like a chessboard
CGI looks like 300
Harry potter dragons
Dark vs. light
Mad hatter
Funny as a redhead
Johnny twiggy eyelashes
Tribute to mj dance
Inappropriate romantic looks
Should’ve taken fencing lessons Eng
Get to the sword moment
Chain mail like spandex
White queen-vows? Dress
Be back again soon…setting up for a sequal
TV SHOW
THE OFFICE
‘Manager and Salesman’
Has “The Office” finally lost its charm? The most recent episode, entitled ‘Manager and Salesman,’ suggests that the show may be toeing the line between “comedy with a point” and jokes thrown together and filmed. In this episode, Jo Bennet (played by Kathy Bates), the new CEO of Sabre, which has taken over Dunder-Mifflin, pays the office a visit. Upon discovering that two people are “managing” the office, she cuts the position of one co-manager back down to a plain salesman. Leaving the decision up to Michael and Jim ensured there would be a tug-of-war of titles and a struggle of power and wit, but the plot of this episode is undeniably predictable and weak. Of course, Michael ends up as sole manager and Jim ”wins” by getting a chance to make unlimited commission. It fell short of expectations, especially since there could have been more potential material in Michael remaining a salesman (even if just for the day)- which might have produced some fresh gags. Instead, the script had Michael shouting out short and poorly constructed jokes, as if he suddenly sprouted Tourettes Syndrome. Maybe the predictability of Michael’s unpredictability can only be taken so far. Also, while Jo’s character may be a good edition to the cast she’s not on screen that much, and it is a static Kathy Bates role merely spiced up with a few snappy lines (such as: “you can’t give me gravy and tell me its jelly, cause gravy ain’t sweet” and “just choosing seats, not getting’ married- chop chop little onion”). Jo Bennet seems to prove that the writers are slacking and mostly relied on Bates’ typecast image to quickly build up the CEO character that was so recently added to the show.
It seems like this episode was merely a vehicle to correct the Jim-as-manager-plot that seemingly failed. Even though lamely executed, it was a step back in the right direction. The promotion of Jim in season three took away from the deliciously humorous battle of the minds between Dwight and Jim: Jim was no longer physically next to Dwight and, in fact, had won the battle; this episode brought things back to normal pecking order. (Jim can resume antics like dipping Dwight’s tie into his coffee.) Missing from this episode, and the sixth season, are the story-lines that used to be so irresistibly humorous. The romantic appeal of “The Office” is being stretched very thin now that the Pam and Jim are nested with a bun in the oven. The love interest shift to Andy and Erin, both characters about as deep as a kiddies’ pool, is just moving too slowly, and not in a funny when-are-Jim-and-Pam-going–to-get-together kind of a way. Since Jim and Pam were “real” crushes the audience was enthused to care about them. The substance of Ryan “the temp” has been stripped away. Before, when Ryan clawed his way up to the top of the corporate ladder, his character was so annoyingly bad (in an entertainingly good way) that the viewer might desire to squish BJ Novak’s face between thumb and finger on the actual TV set. Now his character seems irrelevant, his comic potential lost, even with a new alliance with Dwight. The only thing that distinguished him from being a humdrum worker was the pastel scarf carelessly thrown around his neck.
“The Office” used to be so good at representing those little moments in life where you just cringe because of the awkwardness of the situation. Maybe there are only so many of life’s awkward little moments that can be represented in TV, or maybe the writers are just losing steam, whatever the case, it seems desperate. When Michael tries to undercut Jim, it just seems wrong. Hopefully, next week, The Office will regain a storyline (and sense of purpose) before fans of the show lose their patience and give it up like a lollipop that has been dropped on the ground. Maybe redemption could be reached in the form of a new character.
Documentary Review
The Reckoning: The Battle for the International Criminal Court 2009
The documentary The Reckoning captures the efforts of the International Criminal Court, led by main prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo, to bring the worst offenders of war crimes and crimes against humanity to justice. The film and its subject were both huge undertakings. Both
selection from the human rights watch traveling film festival and official selection of Sundance Film Festival 2009
follows ICC prosecutor Luis Moerno-Ocampo across four continents during three years of investigation.
Directors Pamela Yates, Paco de Onis, & Peter Kinoy
Qoutes:
“One day, there will be justice…”
Countries like the U.S. never want to get involved, world won’t do anything
“John Bolton is the death nail to international justice”
scathing criticism of the U.S. foreign policies toward the ICC
Observations:
Hard undertaking
Footage must have been hard to recover, especially the homemade footage from defected soldiers
Must have been filmed over a long period of time
U.S. portrayed among the few international villains not willing to join as a member state
Feelings:
Anger enough to rally
Frustration by no resolution and several dead ends
Hopelessness
Discontent
Tasks seen as so daunting
Informed of things I did not previously know about the ICC or the process of prosecuting war crimes internationally
Sudan not a member state of the ICC
Moved in direction of filmmaker to end impunity internationally
Engaging techniques including comparison of important players in the Nuremburg trials
Problem:
Long, could have been divided into multiple films
Spanned many countries, which all had to have their own backstories, history and context.
Didn’t delve as deeply into the ongoing investigations in Sudan as some of the other countries
Veered into a very specific direction when talking about child soldiers, then branched back out to war crimes
