1 man. 2 days. 3 theatres.
It has been a busy weekend!
I wasn't quite sure what I expected from Edward Albee's Seascape (at The American Century Theatre, yesterday), but I did expect giant anthropomorphic lizards discussing philosophy, and giant anthropomorphic lizards discussing philosophy there were. What really impressed me about it was that the lizards weren't just the easy gimmick they could have been; almost the entire first act is just a conversation between the two human characters, a husband and a wife who have just reached retirement age, and yet it's every bit as engrossing and powerful as the second act. At the end of the first act, the couple meet a pair of lizards who have just evolved sapience and left the ocean, and the second act is all about the first contact, the reactions of the humans, and the culture shock the lizards go through, and the realization—by both lizards and humans—that the consequence of intelligence is the knowledge of mortality. (God damn it's hard to talk about plays without sounding like a pretentious goit.) But despite the sometimes heavy subject matter, there were a lot of very funny moments. The production was a very good one, though they clearly gave their set designer a bigger budget than he or she was used to. ("And here, at the entranceway, we will build... HALF OF A BOAT HULL FOR NO REASON." I was really hoping the lizards would break out tiny bicycles and start doing tricks using the hull as a ramp, but that may be because I just reread "Let Us Now Praise Awesome Dinosaurs" the other day.) The actor who played Charlie, the male human, was particularly impressive.
Julie & Julia (at the AFI Silver, yesterday) could almost have been retitled Meryl Streep Can Kick All of Your Asses, but that wouldn't be quite fair to Stanley Tucci, who kicks some ass of his own in this one. Every other actor in this movie should seriously just have stayed at home. The frame story, about a bored government employee cooking every recipe from Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking over the course of a year and blogging about it, wasn't without its charms (after all, who wouldn't like a story about a blogger getting a book deal, meaningful cough?) but couldn't possibly stand up to the flashbacks to Julia Child's life and marriage. Frequently hilarious; if you are capable of not laughing aloud when Meryl Streep shouts, in Julia's unique warble, "gung'f ubggre guna n fgvss pbpx!", then you may well be an anthropomorphic lizard. The movie is also notable for having not one but several scenes that pass the Bechdel/Wallace test (though you'd be surprised how few of them there are).
District 9 (at the Charles, today—turns out it was still running this weekend) was not the Second Coming of Science Fiction, but it was an excellent and intelligent action movie. I liked the structure, with the pseudo-documentary to build the universe and develop the deeper themes of the movie and then transitioning into the full-blown action part to make the bad guys' heads blow up. (If you're offended by South Africans either a) cursing or b) exploding, you might want to skip this one.) But despite the 'splosions, it is at its heart a very dark and scathing look at racism and xenophobia—not just in South Africa's past, but in South Africa's present, and mired in the human soul across all nations, races, and eras. Yeah. Kind of heavy. Every single human character who has any impact on the plot is complicit in unconscionable crimes, including the unwitting hero. Most of the "prawns" aren't very likeable either; lost, leaderless, hated, ghettoized, and addicted to Nigerian cat food, most of the ones we see have become the violent, mindless brutes the humans consider them to be. There are only two genuinely likeable characters in the movie, one of each species, and only one a major character—and by the end, bar vf va wnvy sbe oybjvat gur juvfgyr ba uvf rivy rzcyblref, naq gur bgure vf urnqrq onpx gb uvf ubzr cynarg gb nffrzoyr na neznqn gb yvorengr uvf sryybj cenjaf ol sbepr. The ending is ambiguous and very much anticipates a sequel, which might not be a bad thing, since there's clearly a lot of room to flesh out the universe further. Side note: hell of props to Image Engine for creating CG characters and effects I barely even noticed.