Titles

If I recall correctly, I encountered this one when purchasing theatre tickets at a certain venue in Oxford.

On some website pop-up menus, there are so many possible titles that it's really hard to choose the most appropriate one to use.

(Click to see the full list. Some selections are cut off.) pic.twitter.com/mRgnGMMxkd

— Mason Porter (@masonporter) July 11, 2018

Massive Media Roundup

Time for the long-promised set of massive media reviews, which will mostly be short and sweet. I kept the tickets so that I could actually remember what I saw. The order below is simply the order in which I pick up the ticket.

Hellboy II: Great movie! I approve. The German phastasm was amusing. Was the elven princess in Stardust? (Apparently not, but for some reason she seemed similar to me.)

The Wind in the Willows (theatrical version): I saw this at a small theatre and I enjoyed it very much. Now I finally understand where Disneyland's Mr. Toad's Wild Ride attraction comes from... Highly recommended!

Bugsy Malone: In this play, British teenagers (and sometimes younger) attempt to do gangster noir. It was very good overall, but it definitely didn't work at times.

Get Smart: I had been waiting for this film to come out ever since I first heard about it something like 2.5 years ago, given that I really enjoyed watching reruns of the original series as a kid. The casting was excellent! Steve Carrell was the obvious choice to play Maxwell Smart (Agent 86), although nobody will ever duplicate Don Adams in that roll (not even Inspector Gadget, who was based on Agent 86 and was voiced by a Don Adams sound-alike). Anne Hathaway did well as Agent 99, though the dynamics between Agents 86 and 99 in the movie were a bit different than in the show (where 99 was madly in love with 86, who was completely oblivious to the whole thing---at least at first; by the time of the failed return of the series, I believe the characters were married). Duane Johnson and Alan Arkin were also excellent. The film included several catch phrases (which I appreciated) and in general was quite good, even though I prefer the original series (which was a Mel Brooks creation, by the way, so it shouldn't be a surprise that I like it so much). Also, the shoe phone played a prominent role in the film. That was extremely important.

Hello Dolly (musical): Unfortunately, I was not very impressed, though I admit that it did have its moments. However, once I saw Wall-E, I became happy that I saw the musical given that it played an important role in that film. (The clips being shown in the movie were from Hello Dolly.)

Wall-E: Another excellent Pixar film. I'm shocked. It's amazing how they conveyed such emotion in the characters with so little dialog.

Kung Fu Panda: I really liked it! I tried unsuccessfully to get people to see it with me, but se la vie. They thought it would be silly---their loss. (Or maybe it's more precise to say that they assume that "silly" means not worth watching?)

The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian: I enjoyed it, although I was a bit annoyed that they were hitting harder with the religious overtones in the film than they did in the prequel. The older daughter was a frosh (or "fresher", as it's called here) at Oxford last fall. I forgot which College.

The Pirates of Penzance: This was awesome! I recognized a very high percentage of the songs, which is not surprising given that many of the songs in there show up all over the place. I am the very model of a modern applied mathematician---or something like that. It could have been worse: I've been planning since I saw the musical (for the first time, amazingly enough) to write a parody of a certain song that I plan to call "Condensed Matter". Stay tuned...

The Forbidden Kingdom: I really liked this film as well. I could have done without the token white boy, but it didn't detract too much from what I actually paid to see (so I guess this is sort of like a milder version of AG's opinion on this point).

Oklahoma! (musical): This was a production by Oxford students that I saw at a small stage in Wadham College. I should have blogged about this earlier because then I could have mentioned that I ran into Lloyd alum Joe Jewell '04 (I think that's the right year), who was also in the audience. He will be starting as a grad turkey at Tech in the fall. I think he'll be in aeronautics. Oh, and the musical was really good! There was a recognizable vignette that I didn't realize came from this musical that I had seen parodied in a cartoon (I think in an episode of Bugs Bunny). There was also a very recognizable song ("Oh, what a beautiful morning") that I had no idea came from this musical.

Two Hobbit-Sized Parodies: Harry Potter and the Generic Adventure and Swords & Saucery: The second of these had a Lord of the Rings Theme. These plays were also performed by Oxford students and many audience members knew some or all of the people in the plays, so there was some audience participation at appropriate points. The Harry Potter parody was first. One of my friends played Snape, although I was already planning to go even before I found out about that. The guy who played Valdemort was booed lustily every time he came on "stage" (the performance was in the Wadham Gardens), including when he played a different character (a good guy) in the second parody. That was awesome! There were also lots of private jokes, and I even caught a couple of them. Think of these things as roughly like Lloyd movies, but as live performances. That was the basic ambience, which I liked very much.

Stuff at the Montreal film festival: I'm now wishing I could have gotten tickets for the new Woody Allen film (they sold out, so my debate whether I should go to that one versus having dinner at a normal time ended rather quickly) because I really want to see it and the UK is not presently listed in its IMDB entry as somewhere it's being released. Damnit! Satellites & Meteorites was an excellent Gondrey-esque film was an Irish director, who was there to answer our questions after the film ended. (A short film called The Ranger was shown before the main film. This was meh.) It was a bit rough around the edges and in a couple of situations could have been more subtle, but it is definitely on the short list of my favorite films of the year.) The Japanese film One Million Yen Girl was enjoyable, but it was merely good. Lissi and the Wild Emperor was a very funny German cartoon (with very high animation quality) which would probably get a PG-13 rating in the US. It made fun of Emperor Ferdinand. (For what it's worth, I picked the order randomly except for the ones at this film festival. I did these last on purpose.)

Alright, now I've finally caught up on one of the entries I had been meaning to write for a while.

Several movies (plus a musical and a concert)

Here are some belated comments about several movies that I've seen over the last couple of months:


Lars and the Real Girl: This was quite a charming film, and deals with certain types of social awkwardness quite well. (The lead actor did a good job in this one.)

The Spiderwick Chronicles: This film is decent, but there's been much better stuff in this genre the past several years.

The Other Boleyn Girl: This film was a nice piece of historical fiction. It was good but not great. The character that Natalie Portman played was quite a bitch.

Horton Hears a Who!: I really liked this cartoon! (Highly recommended!) It captures the spirit of Dr. Seuss quite well, and Steve Carrell and Jim Carrey were both extremely well cast. I also got to see a teaser for the third Ice Age film during the trailers. I approve!

Son of Rambow: This film has been advertised as a "British comedy," which is a bit misleading. It does have some comedic moments, but it is better described as a dramedy. It is a great film. I recommend it highly.

Persepolis: This film was excellent and incredibly well done! The animation style was awesome. The thing I like best is that even in the most serious scenes, one can see something ridiculous in a small part in the background. (For example, in one such scene--which I believe focused on the tattered remnants of a city after lots of violence--one can briefly see a dog peeing in the background.) I was consistently laughing at that stuff (sometimes the only person in the theatre doing so). After seeing this film, I'll never be able to think of "Eye of the Tiger" in quite the same way again. The main quibble I have with this flick is that characters from culturally similar (or, really, the same) backgrounds are voiced by people with completely different accents, and that hurt my suspension of disbelief a bit. On a similar note, the casting of Iggy Pop as a voice actor was odd (to put it mildly). What the Hell? That notwithstanding, this is one of my favorite films of the year so far.

Iron Man: I saw this film on Tuesday, and it is also one of my favorite films so far this year. This flick is outstanding. In fact, in my mind this is one of the best comic book films ever! (Note: I am not classifying these films according to how faithful they are to the original sources, but merely according to how much I enjoyed the movie versions.) After seeing the film, I was thinking it might be my favorite comic book film ever, but this morning I remembered V for Vendetta (which is from a comic book, right?) and I'm probably forgetting others. Robert Downey Jr. is awesome, as usual, and I love the witty repartee he has with his character's inventions. (Downey Jr. is one of my favorite actors.)


I also saw a musical and a concert during the past couple of months (with two more musicals coming up in the next couple of weeks):

Buena Vista Social Club: This show was basically a linear combination of Jazz and various types of Latin music. The highlight for me was their souped-up rendition of "Perhaps, Perhaps, Perhaps." Of the Caltech crowd, I think Lemming in particular would have enjoyed this.

Fiddler on the Roof: I've wanted to see this for several years, so I'm glad I finally had the chance to do so. The performance was very good (especially that of the lead actor), but everybody except for the lead had a considerable amount of trouble maintaining their accent (and even the lead slipped once or twice). Somehow, hearing a bunch of different British Isles accents hurts the suspension of disbelief quite a bit for this particular musical, which is usually done by a bunch of people who are supposed to speak English like Woody Allen, Jackie Mason, Fyvush Finkel, etc. (Finkel has actually played several different roles in this musical in the past.)

Mort

This evening, I saw a play called Mort, which was adapted from the eponymous Terry Pratchett book. I have (obviously) heard of Discworld, but I have never actually read any of it. Nevertheless, the idea of a play based on stuff like that sounded appealing [and, interestingly, Tolkien's (great? great great?) granddaughter, an Oxford freshman, was in the play so there are other fantasy connections as well] and I was not disappointed. (It turns out that one of my perturbation methods students from last term was also in the play.)

I hadn't know about the play until I read a review of it in one of Oxford's student newspapers, and I was thankfully able to make it today (the last day). The author of the review seemed to find it mediocre, but I was intrigued by both the theme and his/her comments that the character of Death had a very dry sense of humor. That was more than enough to make me want to see it because I like that sort of thing. Sure enough, Death was awesome!

One thing this makes me want to do is read the book, but in looking at Mort's wikipedia entry, there appear to be three books that come before it. My question to the audience is first whether this is necessary for this particular book and second (independent of the answer to the first query) what you think of those three preceding books (as well as this one).

Three Plays

I recently had a three-week period in which I saw one play each weekend (in addition to other performances, which I'll discuss later).

The first was The Rivals, a play by Richard Sheridan. I previously read it in my 10th grade English class. (By the way, this play is where words like "malaprop" originated.) I saw some humor in reading it, but seeing it performed was unsurprisingly greatly superior. The Oxford student newspapers complained that the performance was "traditional," but I was quite pleased with that. I liked it a lot.

I then saw a very non-traditional theatrical version of Alice - Through the Looking Glass. It was enjoyable (and it worked, in spite of its unusual way of presenting things) and some of the ideas were very clever, but I think I would have preferred a traditional version. Also, I was disappointed by a absence of the Cheshire Cat, the absence of the caterpillar + bong, and the minimized role of the Mad Hatter.

Finally, I saw a version of Sheridan's A Trip to Scarbarough that seemed to be based pretty much on the 1982 revival version. It had a couple of very clever ideas, but unlike Alice this one pretty much failed to work. I was a bit disappointed overall.


During the third of those three weekends plus the following Monday, I also saw Alison Moyet in concert (more on that in another blog entry) and a stand-up comedian named Mark Watson (who was ok but nothing special).

2007: The Year in Theatre

I think I've figured out the way to get me to finish blog entries that I have been meaning to do for a while---I'm supposed to be grading right now and I've finished checking e-mail, so I need to do something else that doesn't involve marking papers. (In principle, I could work on my next book instead, but I find it hard to do much of that when I am working this hard on real work. Somehow if the number of actual work hours gets above a certain threshold, then working on my book fades into the background for another week. I have several e-mails from a few months ago with people who are supposed to give us information for stories...)

Anyway, let me talk about some of the plays, musicals, and operas (well, there was only one opera) that I saw in 2007.

The opera in question was Carmen, which I saw in December at the New Theatre in Oxford. It's actually quite a nice venue and I enjoyed the show quite a bit (and couldn't get "The Torreador Song" out of my head for several days after I attended).

The big disappointment of the year (in terms of musicals... "Leave my personal life out of this!") was Chess, which played for one night only in Hollywood and which I had been looking forward to seeing for over a decade. The problem is the acoustics were lousy and they screwed up the song "One Night in Bangkok" completely, so I need to see this musical properly at some point.

Avenue Q was extremely fun! I'm glad I finally had a chance to see that!

Along with Caltech's CPA theatre group---hey, does anyone here want to go to theatre together? I'm still trying to figure out who is into what.---I saw two Shakespeare plays (Richard III and MacBeth) in a park in Hollywood. (The plays were produced by a small indie Shakespeare company and were quite well-done. Plus, it was a relaxed atmosphere, so I dug it.) The latter was a good reminder that a particular line of Tom Lehrer's that I like ('full of words and phrases, and signifying nothing!') actually comes from Shakespeare. Then again, so do a lot of lines that I take for granted. (Did you know, for example, that Shakespeare actually invented the term "metric fuck ton"?)

With the CPA group (and Lemming), I saw All About Waalken at a small theatre in Hollywood. It gave me quite a fever, which I couldn't find even close to enough cowbell to cure. I also saw some other stuff with the CPI theatre group, such as a small play whose name escapes me. There might have been something else of note, but I can't think of it at the moment, so this will have to be it tomorrow.

I'll be seeing my first play of 2008 on Saturday: Sheridan's The Rivals, which I read back in the day in 10th grade English.

By the way, I just noticed that I have a slight redundancy problem in parts of this entry. (I think that's the story of my life...) CPA stands for "Caltech postdoc association," so "Caltech's CPA" is a bit awkward. (And I can no longer ask, "Who's the CPA now?" Do any of the Lloydies reading this remember that one? It was classy.)

On a completely different note, does anybody have any bright ideas for ancient Somerville (or Oxford) traditions that I should introduce in the near future? I was going to get my math minions to do something on pi day but then I was reminded that we list the day and then the month around here, which foiled my plans entirely. (I would have gotten away with it if it weren't for those kids! And their stupid dog, too!)

Alright, I better go do some more marking. Oh what fun we have!

Upcoming Musical

I saw an advertisement in the LA Weekly today for a musical called Alice in One-Hit Wonderland. I am so going to see this! (I'm currently trying to convince the CPA theatre crowd to go with me. We'll see how well that works.)

Dude, this is going to be so awesome!