You guys… I love my job. Why? Because I get paid to dream up concepts for short films.
I am very excited to present “The TDF Costume Collection (A Silent Movie.)” As the title suggests, it is a silent film about Theatre Development Fund’s super-awesome costume collection, which provides low-cost costume rentals to nonprofit productions across the country.
I wrote, directed, and produced this picture, and my talented friend Chris Bryan filmed, edited, and devised the cool visual flourishes.
The actors are all members of the TDF staff. Ginger Bartkoski plays “Ginger” and Stephen Cabral plays “Stephen Cabral.” The merry band of lunatics is played by Thomas Adkins, Sarah Aziz, Patrick Berger and Denyse Owens.
p.s. — Because a section of this video includes a voiceover, we also created a closed caption version. If you’d like to see it, go here.
Welcome to another edition of my column “In Praise Of…,†in which I call attention to actors whose work is so good is rarely calls attention to itself.
I dedicate this column to a favorite of mine, Tim DeKay. He might look more familiar nowadays, since his show White Collar is a bona fide hit and has just begun the second half of its debut season on USA. DeKay is FBI agent Peter Burke, who nabbed mastermind grafter Neal Caffrey (Matthew Bomer) and put him behind bars. Eventually, Burke agrees to a work-release program if Caffrey helps Burke solve crimes in exchange for getting out of jail so he can track down his own missing girlfriend. It’s an intriguing bromance: The two both resent and respect one another. Essentially, it’s Silence of the Lambs-lite meets I Love You, Man.
Oh, Pop Music, you are a fickle mistress indeed! Sometimes you send a great song all the way to number one, but sometimes, just to remind us you’ve got the power, you let Britney Spears top the charts with the world’s most boring ode the threesomes. Even worse, you sometimes take a great song and let it fail. Flop. Crasharooski.
But today I stand up to you, Pop Music! Today, I declare that the following seven singles didn’t deserve to fail. Today, I resurrect them with a barbaric yawp!
Welcome to Wife Watch!, the only blog post that ranks the most powerful wives on this week’s episode of Big Love.
The latest installment, “The Greater Good,” hinges on characters defending their personal lives, so this week’s First Wife will be the one who takes the most decisive action on behalf of her convictions.
Sure, some of the speeches were interesting and a few upsets kept things spicy, but the real story of the 67th Golden Globe Awards was the shocking ineptitude of the direction and production.
Think about it: Every five seconds, a camera lurched awkwardly around a table, cut to the wrong person, or gave us an unflattering shot of someone’s back or elbow. Every time a winner tried to collect a prize, he or she had to navigate an impenetrable sea of tables and chairs. And then there were the slapstick bits, like a production guy stepping on Chloe Sveigny’s gown and Matthew Morrison tripping up the stairs when he went on stage for Glee’s big award. (Morrison’s fall wasn’t the show’s fault, of course, but it was a good metaphor for the entire night.)
I’ve decided, however, that the glass is half full. If we tilt our heads the right way, then we can see five upsides to last night’s amateurish Golden Globes telecast…
Back when I reviewed Up in the Air, it was only playing in, like, two theatres and a producer’s mind. Now that the movie has gone a little wider, I wanted to re-pimp what I wrote about it.
I wanted to share with you a letter I have written after the recent turn of events in the late-night battles:
Dear Jay,
By the time you read these lines, I’ll be gone. It’s with a hard heart that I sever ties to our relationship, as I’ve been a fan and ardent supporter of yours through good times and bad. But this time, you’ve gone too far.
R&B group Sade may be the musical equivalent of Halley’s Comet, in that their rare appearances are met with a remarkable amount of fanfare and excitement.
Consider this: Sade hasn’t released a studio album since 2000, and the studio album before that came out in 1992. (They did release a greatest hits collection in 1994 and a live record in 2002.) Yet despite these enormous gaps, all of their albums have been crazy popular, each selling millions of copies.
It seems the group’s newest album, Solider Of Love, which arrives on February 9, will be equally successful. As of this writing, pre-orders have made it the third best-selling album on both iTunes and Amazon, and residual excitement has pushed The Best of Sade to number seven on the iTunes chart.
This surprises me because iTunes is generally the province of younger consumers. For instance, teen starlet Ke$ha’s album sold over 100,000 digital copies last week, while adult-skewing Susan Boyle, whose blockbuster album has sold over three million copies in seven weeks, has moved a mere 89,000 online units. (Those numbers are broken down here.)
So does that mean that the young people of America are embracing Sade, whose last single came out when many of them were in Huggies? Or does Sade somehow convince older people to turn on their computers?
And also… why is Sade immune to the cultural amnesia that undoes so many other artists? The conventional wisdom is that acts need to drop new material at regular intervals or they’ll be forgotten, and the disappointing sales for much-delayed projects by Fiona Apple, Guns ‘N Roses, and Whitney Houston certainly bear that out. What is it about Sade’s music that keeps people devoted?
And why is radio equally attached to them? The single “Soldier of Love” is currently number fifteen with a bullet on Billboard’s Hip-Hop/R&B songs chart. And yeah, it’s a good song that puts a slight contemporary twist on Sade’s classic smooth-n-sexy sound, but Aretha Franklin, Donna Summer, and countless others have released good-to-great contemporary pop songs in the last ten years without getting a nibble at R&B radio. What makes Sade different? It’s not like they achieved the kind of Beatles-level popularity that would make them obvious candidates for perpetual success.
I’m not knocking their good fortune, you understand. I think it’s great that music this good is getting heard and that the band behind it apparently will never fade. I’m just trying to figure out how Sade can buck the traditional music business model and still be on top.
Maybe it’s because their sound is so unique and interesting. Maybe it’s because the Masons declared that whoever won the Best New Artist Grammy in 1986 would be blessed with immortality.
Ot maybe it’s because Sade has remained mysterious. After all, other than a reckless driving problem in 1998, lead singer Sade Adu has avoided the type of legacy-staining scandal that can make people lose interest in a star. She just makes a record every now and then, rolls up to get inducted into the OBE, and then disappears.
And as for the rest of the band? Hell, most people don’t even realize that Sade is a band. (But it is. It just happens to be named after its lead singer.)
Maybe some people buy this music because its the only glimpse we get into Sade’s world. Maybe if VH-1 ran a reality series called Sades and Nights, no one would care.
What are you thoughts? Are you interested in Sade? What do you think keeps them living in the public’s heart?
Hey everyone… I double-dog encourage you to watch the Spike Lee-filmed movie of the Broadway musical Passing Strange, which airs tonight and throughout the week on PBS’ Great Performances.(Go here for a schedule of showtimes.)
For me, this rock-soul opus by Stew and Heidi Rodewald is the best musical of the 00s, and when I call it a masterpiece, please know that I don’t use that word often.
I don’t want to tell you too much about the show, really. Let me just say that it’s an honest-to-god rock musical that attacks intellectual questions about race, culture, and American identity while making startling, moving insights about why people love each other. Funny, touching, and honest, it is proof that the musical still has exciting places to go.
And here’s a clip. In this song, “Church Blues Revelation / Freight Train,” a young man sitting in church has a revelation that music brings people closer to God than religion. (You don’t see their reaction here, but let me assure you that his community isn’t as inspired by this idea as he is.)
