Review – Page 8 – Ted Mills

Modern Family – ‘Any Day Now’ features great performance, flawed script

December 21, 2012December 31, 2015 tedmills Leave a comment

From left. Garret Dillahunt, Isaac Leyva and Alan Cumming star in "Any Day Now." Music Box Films photos — From left. Garret Dillahunt, Isaac Leyva and Alan Cumming star in “Any Day Now.”
Music Box Films photos

Any Day Now” sounds like Lifetime movie-of-the-week melodramatic hokum: a couple fight to adopt a child after it is abandoned by its drug-addicted mother. But in Travis Fine’s decent and occasionally moving film, there’s more to this set-up. The couple is a drag queen and a closeted attorney; the child has Down syndrome, and the setting is West Hollywood of the late 1970s.

Veteran actor Alan Cumming plays Rudy, who we first see glammed up and lip sync’ing disco hits alongside two other drag queens on stage in a gay bar. Watching him from the bar is polyester-suited Paul (Garret Dillahunt), a district attorney just starting to find his identity. After a sexual dalliance, it’s love at first sight for Rudy and Paul. Meanwhile, Rudy winds up looking after his neighbor’s child after the cops take the mother away for drug use and fourteen-year-old Marco (Isaac Leyva) wanders away from Family Services custody and finds his way home.

Old School – Street photographer Ricky Powell’s work comes to Fuzion

November 30, 2012January 7, 2016 tedmills Leave a comment

A day after our walk-n-talk interview on the rainy streets of Santa Barbara, street photographer and rabble-rouser Ricky Powell sends me a thank-you note. His email signature is longer than the message, all separated with slashes like a telegram: Ricky P. / The Lazy Hustler / Funky Uncle / Horny Dog Walker / KooL Substitute Teacher / Bummy Sophisticate / Illy Funkster. All these titles he’s bestowed upon himself, but perhaps Lazy Hustler fits the best.

A very brief selection of Mr. Powell’s work now hangs at Akomplice/Fuzion on State Street through the rest of the year, documenting how Mr. Powell was at the right place at the right time when hip-hop exploded in the mid-’80s.

My Brother From Another Mother – Switched-at-birth tale has pretty locations, pretty decent actors

November 16, 2012January 13, 2016 tedmills Leave a comment

The two boys meet each other Cohen Media photo — The two boys meet each other
Cohen Media photo

As you may have guessed from the title, Lorraine Levy’s “The Other Son” follows a classic trope of “switched-at-birth” but with a cracking good, though portentous political update. Such narratives make us question nature versus nurture, and there’s plenty of that to go around in this drama. The story stumbles here and there, but there’s enough to recommend it.

We know something’s up when Joseph (Jules Sitruk) is turned down in his medical tests for the Israeli army when his blood type doesn’t match his parents, the army general Alon (Pascal Elbe) and his French wife Orith (Emmanuelle Devos). Turns out that being born during heavy shelling during the Gulf War has resulted in a mix up. Joseph is actually the son of a Palestinian family, Said (Khalifa Natour) and Leila (Areen Omari). This obviously comes as a shock to their son, Yacine (Mehdi Dehbi), who has just returned from medical school in Paris with his baccalaureate.

Precarious Balance – ‘Late Quartet’ has melodrama aplenty, but also a great Walken performance

November 9, 2012January 13, 2016 tedmills Leave a comment

Christopher Walken has become such a beloved figure in Western culture, with his wild eyes and imitate-able voice — I’m betting that at least one of your friends, or maybe you, dear reader, can do a great Walken impression — that one can forget how he got to this position. So “Late Quartet,” for all its faults, mostly in the script, serves as a good reminder of his acting skills.

Mr. Walken plays Peter Mitchell, cellist for the Fugue Quartet, a tight-knit (and highly strung) ensemble that is celebrating its 25th year. On second violin and viola respectively, we have the husband-wife team of Robert (Phillip Seymour Hoffman) and Juliette (Catherine Keener), and on first violin, and determining the sound of the quartet, there is Daniel (Mark Ivanir), who also instructs Robert and Juliette’s daughter, Alexandra (Imogen Poots).

Cool, Calm, Collected – Wonderful Warm Documentary on Tony Bennett Thrills

November 2, 2012January 15, 2016 tedmills Leave a comment

These days, “zen” is often used as shorthand for any guide to a discipline that advocates focus and not sweating the small stuff. But after watching “The Zen of Bennett” (as in famous singer Tony Bennett), the title is by far the most appropriate. Although we see a Buddha statue in the background only once, and although Mr. Bennett never speaks of spirituality in any overt way, he comes across as coolly invested in wisdom and Buddha nature. If only we could be this serene and talented when we hit 86 years old.

In this documentary, produced by Mr. Bennett’s son Danny and directed by Unjoo Moon with a series of dreamy, prismatic images, we follow Mr. Bennett as he travels across the States and over to Italy to record a series of duets with contemporary artists both young and established, from Carrie Underwood to Willie Nelson.

Forces of Nature – The team behind ‘Ruckus’ returns for a free show at CAF

November 26, 2010July 1, 2015 tedmills Leave a comment

Back again so soon? Some readers may remember Anaya Cullen and Marko Pinter from September’s issue, when they caused a “Ruckus” over at Center Stage Theater, where they were one-third of that evening’s show of multimedia performance. For this Thursday’s forum Lounge at Contemporary Arts Forum, the two return with their still-unnamed company for “Gravitational Forces,” a longer, more ambitious piece.

Returning to mix sound, video and dance are Kaita Lepore and Steven Jasso, who Cullen considers as much a part of the company as the two creators. For “Dichotomous” and “Ruckus,” Cullen remained behind the scenes. But for “Gravitational Forces,” she returns to the stage as a performer. Santa Barbara audiences will know Cullen from her previous performance work for SonneBlauma Danscz Theatre, though currently she is the costume designer for State Street Ballet.

Sankai Juku bring the esoteric dance of butoh to The Granada

October 30, 2010June 25, 2015 tedmills Leave a comment

Butoh, the post-war Japanese dance style that celebrates slow, methodical movement, rarely comes to Santa Barbara, and so the crowds that turned out for Sankai Juku’s appearance at The Granada Thursday night seemed larger than usual for such an esoteric experience. For those who stuck with it, the all-male company’s work, “Tobari — As if in an Inexhaustible Flux” paid off in surprising ways.

A life cycle in a way, the seven acts of the work took us through nothingness, creation, life, death and back into nothingness. As the program explained, “Tobari” is a Japanese word meaning veil, physically and metaphorically, a veil between day and night, or life and death. But it also described the backdrop, a simple but absolutely mesmerizing wall of stars in an inky blackness. Stared at long enough — and butoh encourages and requires lots of staring — the stars did seem to twinkle and move.

A Howling Success – Resuscitating America’s greatest 20th Century poem in film

October 29, 2010June 25, 2015 tedmills Leave a comment

What a spectacular creation is Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman’s docu-drama “Howl,” and what a gorgeous mess. That’s quite befitting for the classic Whitman-esque sprawl of a poem, delivered first to a group of eager beatniks in a smoky coffeehouse one night in 1955. This electric evening is brought to life by an amazing performance by James Franco, who portrays author Allen Ginsberg.

Franco has played interesting characters in “Milk,” “Spider-Man 3” and “Pineapple Express,” but his Ginsberg is something else entirely, a creation from the inside out. He portrays the poet at several stages of his artistic genesis, most notably in conversation with an unseen interviewer during the obscenity trial at which the poem “Howl” and City Lights owner Lawrence Ferlinghetti were the center.

POINTS of VIEW – SBCAF’s new two-painter exhibition finds an experiment in alienation

October 22, 2010July 7, 2021 tedmills Leave a comment

AT TOP, 'POD 3,' PAUL WINSTANLEY; ABOVE, 'EPIPHANY MODEL: THE PHOTOGRAPHER 2,' PETER ROSTOVSKY — AT TOP, ‘POD 3,’ PAUL WINSTANLEY; ABOVE, ‘EPIPHANY MODEL: THE PHOTOGRAPHER 2,’ PETER ROSTOVSKY

The “Parallax” view is a fixed point that seems to move when seen from two slightly different viewpoints. The perspectives from a left eye and a right eye are one example. The works of Paul Winstanley and Peter Rostovsky represent it as well, as the two artists who make up Contemporary Arts Forum’s new show — opening Saturday — look at similar things in very different ways.

Wistanley focuses on lonely, alienating interiors, from corporate offices to university common rooms. Rostovsky’s work ranges over many subjects and mediums, but this show will focus mostly on his “mediated landscapes.” Both artists provide new ways of looking at the world around us, and CAF’s publicity provides a tasty hint of the artists’ overlap: Rostovsky’s “Curtains” and Winstanley’s “Veil 15.” Both feature curtains, the former deep, red and mysterious with hints of the theater, while the latter is white, translucent and divided into sections by the window panes behind.

A New Wives’ Tale : The Housewives of Mannheim explores changing roles in 1944 Brooklyn

October 12, 2010June 30, 2015 tedmills Leave a comment

From left, Pheonix Vaughn as May Black, Wendy Peace as Alice Cohen, Corey Tazmania as Billie Friedhoff, and Natalie Mosco as Sophie Birnbaum). DAVID BAZEMORE PHOTOS — From left, Pheonix Vaughn as May Black, Wendy Peace as Alice Cohen, Corey Tazmania as Billie Friedhoff, and Natalie Mosco as Sophie Birnbaum).
DAVID BAZEMORE PHOTOS

WARNING: REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS

The setting of Alan Brody’s play is 1944 Brooklyn, where modest apartments were small, the denizens were mostly women waiting for their men to return from the war, and America was in flux between the scrimping and saving of the wartime effort and the flowering of post-war prosperity and consumerism. As Mr. Brody shows it, some women were decorating bars of what would soon become a cage, and some were realizing that there was more out there in the wide world.

In this new play enjoying its West Coast premiere at the opening of Ensemble Theater’s 2010-11 season, we meet three housewives whose lives are all about to be upturned with the arrival of a new neighbor.