A & E

Friday’s Flicks: Mario Bava and Moon Memories

Yeah, Friday's Flicks is late again. Maybe I should retitle it Flicks from a Flake. My time the last several days has been monopolized by the MidPoint Music Festival and my immersion in Tim Lucas’ magnum opus, Mario Bava: All the Colors of the Dark.

The local writer’s long-awaited biography on the cult Italian horror director (Black Sunday, Black Sabbath, Danger Diabolik, among many others) has finally seen the light of day. Lucas began writing the original manuscript in 1976; it’s now become a 12-pound, 1,126-page, full-color glossy love letter to a director whose influential career has been neglected far too long.

Lucas’ name should be familiar to horror/fantasy film buffs — he and his wife, Donna, have self-published the respected magazine Video Watchdog out of their Price Hill home for 15 years.

Stage Door: Old Story, Same Relevance

Sometimes the same old story needs to be told. That's pretty much what's going on with Performance Gallery's production of GILGAMESH IN URUK: G.I. IN IRAQ, which opened on Sept. 27 and runs through Oct. 7.

This is actually THE old story — first told almost 5,000 years ago in the ancient land of Sumeria, which we know today as Iraq. It's about a power-mad king who suffers from his ambitions and begins to question whether he's made the right decisions in promulgating a war that's caused him to lose friends and supporters. Sound familiar? It did to Cincinnati playwright Blake Bowden, who has partnered with one of our city's most innovative theater companies to give this brand new version of a very old tale some contemporary relevance.

It's directed by Regina Pugh, who always digs deep for meaning in scripts she stages, and it includes the creative contributions of Aretta Baumgardner, a performer who brings puppets and other unusual creatures to life. (This is not a kids' story, however — Performance Gallery recommends it for audiences who are at least 15 years old.)

Arts Mean Business

Since 1995, The Cincinnati Business Courier has selected 40 people under the age of 40 who are making a difference in Cincinnati's business community. It's always an interesting list of movers and shakers, but this year seems especially noteworthy from an arts perspective because it contains three individuals from three of Cincinnati's excellent arts organizations, two theaters and a dance company.

Barbara Hauser, Marketing Director, Cincinnati Ballet

Jay Kalagayan, Executive Director, Know Theatre of Cincinnati

Clara Rice, Associate Executive Director, Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park

Looking over the list of names in the 2007 class — who are recognized in a luncheon today at Paul Brown Stadium — I also see people who are making a difference as volunteers for arts organizations. I hope that Barbara, Jay and Clara work hard to represent the arts to their classmates. Our fine arts scene is a defining factor that makes Cincinnati a great place to live — and do business.

– Rick Pender

Die Hard in Jail?

Hollywood director John McTiernan was sentenced to four months in prison today.

Payback for the lameness of Rollerball, the 2002 flop populated by such thespians as Chris Klein, Rebecca Romijn and LL Cool J? Nah. It seems the guy behind action hits Die Hard, The Hunt for Red October and Predator — a guilty pleasure if there ever was one (that big, completely over-the-top, helicopter-sounding gun was the bomb when I was a kid) — was sentenced for his association with notorious Hollywood private eye Anthony Pellicano.

McTiernan apparently had Pellicano wiretap Rollerball producer Charles Roven’s phone, then lied about it when questioned by police after the private eye was busted a few years back.

(Photo courtesy of imdb.com)

— Jason Gargano

Friday's Flicks: Cronenberg vs. Haggis

The fall movie season unofficially kicks off this week (at least locally) with the release of a pair of dramas from high-profile directors: David Cronenberg’s Eastern Promises and Paul Haggis’ In the Valley of Elah.

The rest of the many offerings range from modest indie films like Luke Wilson’s The Wendell Baker Story and Henry Jaglom’s (yes, he’s still making movies) Hollywood Dreams to studio fare like Dane Cook and Jessica Alba’s lame comedy, Good Luck Chuck, and the IMAX re-release of Michael Bay’s latest exercise in bombast, Transformers.

(Photo courtesy of Universal Pictures)
(In the Valley of Elah photo courtesy of Warner Independent)

Oh, and don’t forget yet another frothy looking thing from Amanda Bynes, a perpetually fresh-faced teen actress who seems to have carved her own niche as a semi-bankable, trouble-free alternative to peers like Lindsey Lohan and that Disney girl whose naked pictures somehow popped up on the Internet.

Stage Door: Bed Musings

Looking for something interesting onstage this weekend? There's a good show that you might have missed last February (in the midst of a blizzard, I was in an audience with about five people watching it one evening). It's back for a brief, two-weekend run.

It's called SONGS FROM AN UNMADE BED, and it was a joint production of New Stage Collective and Know Theatre, featuring New Stage's talented Artistic Director Alan Patrick Kenny at the piano and singing. Unmade Bed features 18 songs that explore the mind of a gay man living in New York City who’s dealing with love and loneliness — and who makes some bad decisions along the way.

All the lyrics are by Mark Campbell, but each tune has a different composer, so it's a fascinating musical ride — through the genres of Broadway tunes, Alternative Rock, Modern Art songs, Cabaret numbers, Folk songs and more. Kenny is a great performer (and a hell of a piano player), and his show was nominated for a Cincinnati Entertainment Award as an outstanding alternative production. It's running at New Stage's new home at 1140 Main St. in Over-the-Rhine at 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday. For tickets, 513-621-3700 or go to newstagecollective.com.

— Rick Pender

The Dumbest Wine Web Site ... Period

Today I discovered a Web site (www.justwinepoints.com) that perfectly represents everything that’s wrong with the wine market’s reliance on the “point system” to move product.

This site (which I at first wrongly took to be satirical) claims it “cuts to the chase and offers exactly what wine savvy consumers are truly looking for — a numerical score without all of the flowery descriptive baggage.” They go on to assert that, “wine descriptors and any other verbiage lashed onto rating points is wasted time and effort by both reviewer and reader.”

Why, they don’t even bother to list wines on their site that they scored under 90 points, because who would be interested in sampling such crap?

This whole line of thought would be laughably absurd … if it wasn’t so pervasive in wine marketing. In fact, last year I wrote a Fermentations column (“Happy Birthday, Mr. Parker,” issue of July 19, 2006) explaining why rating points are generally irrelevant and that the description appended to them can be a far more valuable tool in helping “savvy consumers” find wines that they’ll enjoy.

Last Chance for Kong

After just one week, King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters is set to close tonight at the Esquire Theatre, which is too bad.

Seth Gordon’s lovingly nostalgic documentary takes one back to a time when video arcades were all the rage, communal hang-outs that all but vanished when home consoles took over the video game universe in the late 1980s and early ’90s. Gordon sets up King of Kong as essentially a showdown between two polar-opposite, fortysomething Donkey Kong freaks: world record holder Billy Mitchell, an unintentionally hilarious egomaniac with a mullet who considers himself the “Gamer of the Century,” and Steve Wiebe (pictured above with family), a soft-spoken family man who threatens to surpass Mitchell’s 25-year-old mark.

The film wrings unexpected tension from their rivalry, as the small but passionate old-school gaming universe looks to verify who really is the “King of Kong.” Word since the film’s release is that Gordon played fast and loose with chronology, as well as conveniently leaving out facts in an effort to beef up the drama between the two. Maybe, but that doesn’t detract from the fact that King of Kong is an entertaining look at an odd but fervent group of classic gaming geeks that will have many conjuring memories of their beloved Atari 2600s. Catch it if you can.

(Photo courtesy of Picturehouse)

— Jason Gargano

Come on Down to the River

OK, here's a great question for a bar-stumper? What's Cincinnati's oldest continuously operating theater venue? People will probably try to come up with something like the Playhouse (it started in 1960), but it's a youngster compared to the Showboat Majectic, which celebrates its 85th year of offering floating entertainment come next spring. The Showboat was enrolled in the Cincinnati Entertainment Awards Hall of Fame in 1998, by the way, in recognition of its many years of entertainment to Cincinnatians.

Cincinnati Landmark Productions (which also manages the Covedale Center for the Performing Arts) recently announced the Showboat's 2008 season, and it follows in the vein of popular, mainstream entertainment that audiences have come to expect. No one goes to the 'boat for cutting-edge material, but it's always a pleasant jaunt on a summer evening for some comedy or an old-fashioned musical. Here's the line-up that will be available:

ALWAYS PATSY CLINE (May 7-25, 2008)
GO-GO BEACH (June 4-22, 2008)
CHEAPER BY THE DOZEN (July 9-27, 2008)
PETE 'N' KEELY (Aug. 6-24, 2008)
SHOW BOAT! (Sept. 10-28, 2008)

The latter is the legendary Jerome Kern-Oscar Hammerstein II musical that is generally identified as one of the most influential musical theater productions of all time (it premiered in 1927, including such classic tunes as "Only Make Believe" and "Old Man River"). How appropriate will it be to mark the Showboat Majestic's 85th season with this classic of the American stage. I only hope they can do it justice, given the cramped stage on board the smallish craft that is permanently moored at Cincinnati's Public Landing. It will be a challenge, but it should be fun.

For more information, you can call 513-241-6550 or go to www.cincinnatilandmarkproductions.com

— Rick Pender

Love Me Not

So far I don’t love Tell Me That You Love Me.

HBO’s latest series, which attempts to tackle the sticky, complex topic of modern relationships, offers seriousness and scenes of graphic sex galore. Too bad nearly all of its characters are uninteresting, clothed or not.

Reeling from the loss of its signature series, The Sopranos (which won best drama series at the Emmys last night), the puzzling cancellation of Deadwood and a spotty season of Entourage, HBO seems to be grasping for relevance with Tell Me That You Love Me, a carnally daring (word is that the sex is not simulated) but dramatically inert series that, after two episodes, is destined to go the way of its intriguing but similarly laconic John from Cincinnati: cancellation.

That said, I’m still holding out hope: I need something besides Bill Maher to keep my interest in a post-Sopranos HBO, a movie channel whose television series are almost always more interesting than its repetitive, staid film programming.

(Photo courtesy of HBO.com)

— Jason Gargano