Month: March 2012

MOVIE REVIEW: The Lorax in 3D

The Lorax movie seemed to want to play to every audience.

I promised my daughter that we could see a movie last Saturday. What I had in mind was The Secret World of Arrietty, based on The Borrowers books. Unfortunately, it was in town for two weeks and then it was gone. Boo hiss. Since my wife had gone to see another film – Pina – the Daughter and I decided to see The Lorax at the Madison Theatre in Albany.

While I was/am a fan of Dr. Seuss, I was totally unfamiliar with the Lorax book, as was my daughter. In the movie, treeless Thneedville is where everyone seems to have the perfect suburban life. Well, almost.

Mr. O’Hare (Rob Riggle), who vaguely looks like the superhero boss lady in The Incredibles, gets to sell folks air. Young Ted (Zac Efron) is smitten with Audrey (Taylor Swift), and when she (somehow) starts drawing trees, real trees, and desiring to see them, Ted springs into action.

What follows is Ted talking to the Once-Ler (Ed Helms) about where the trees all went. He tells the story involving the Lorax (Danny DeVito), and I don’t want to reveal any more plot points, except that Ted’s grandma (Betty White) runs interference for Ted re: his mom (Jenny Slate).

The movie seemed to want to play to every audience. The Mission: Impossible theme for the adults – the animals were occasionally funny, though too cute; a sense of (not too much) danger for older kids; an environmental message as subtle as the Once-Ler family RV.

There were occasional good bits. The cameras everywhere remind me of the movie The Truman Show, or modern-day London or New York City. The budding romance had a couple of moments I could relate to. I laughed a few times. But ultimately, I thought it was a bit of a mess. The Lorax was a major player in such a small part of the movie. And paying extra for a 3D effect, which I could have done without, did not endear me either.

The Lorax movie website.

The Beatles vs. the Four Seasons

The label, with pretty much only the songs from the Beatles Please Please Me album, repackaged it several times.

 

The Wife and I have been to two programs at Proctors Theatre in Schenectady in the last month, both enjoyable, though in quite different ways.

On Friday, February 24, we went to the GE Theatre and attended “Looking Through A Glass Onion”, a deconstruction of the Beatles white album presented by Scott Freiman. Actually, we were the perfect audience. I remember hearing the album for the first time in the basement of the Unitarian church in Binghamton, NY late in the fall of 1968. By contrast, my wife had probably never heard of more than a half dozen of the 30 songs on the album. Yet we both walked away learning things.

That bit Can You Take Me Back Where I Came From between Cry Baby Cry and Revolution 9 came from a take of the song I Will. The song Revolution 9 came from an iteration of Revolution 1, is one of FOUR versions of Revolution, including the single and the version that shows up on the Anthology video, which is my very favorite, as it rocks like the single, but has the doowaps of Revolution1.

The difference is that Frieman was able to provide music snippets showing these things in context. He also somehow separated some tracks so you could hear Paul sing the bass line in I Will, e.g. Quite entertainingly told. The only problem is that he only got through about 2/3s of the songs on the album, though he did also touch on the single Hey Jude.

Tuesday, March 6, we saw Jersey Boys, the story of the Four Seasons, at the main Proctors stage. The reason the show worked, besides solid performances, is the Rashomon nature of the story, with Tommy, Bob, Nick, and Frankie having different recollections of what took place. I knew this quartet far less well than I did the Fab Four, but learned a lot more about them. Unlike some “musicals” that throw a bunch of songs together so that it’s more a musical revue than a stage production, this actually had a narrative flow. There were also effective visual effects that enhanced the narrative. I thought the Nippertown review was spot on.

The Beatles and the Four Seasons were, for a brief time, on the same record label in the US, VeeJay. The label, with pretty much only the songs from the Beatles’ Please Please Me album, repackaged it several times; likewise, the Four Seasons had moved onto another label. Thus was born the most peculiar The Beatles vs. the Four Seasons collection.

As Happy As Pi(e)

“When everyone is doing nice things for each other all the time there can be no war, and therefore pie can save the world.”

 

I suppose it’s been obvious, though I had been oblivious. The link between pi, that uncalculatable number starting with 3.14, and pie, the flexible food item that can be the main course (pot pies) or dessert (fruit pies), goes far beyond the homonym relationship.

Most pies are created in a mixing bowl, one that comes in a rounded shape, and then is placed in a pie pan, usually circular in design. Even the cutesy ones, such as those made in the shape of a heart, generally have rounded edges.

Pi, of course, is the defining term for the circumference (2πr) or area (πrr) of a circle.

And everyone knows that the circle is perfect; it has no beginning and no end.

Here’s a link to TeachPi.org, “the first and best place on the Web for teachers who want to find or share ideas for Pi Day activities, learning, and entertainment.”

And here is Buffalo blogger and raconteur Jaquandor, a leading advocate of the efficacy of pie, even willing to take one in the face on occasion. You should go to his website and just search for pie.

His blog led me to The World Needs More Pie by Beth Howard, with the tag, “Give a piece a chance.” To that end, she writes:

Why We Should All Bake Pies

“Pie makes people happy. Happy people want to do nice things for others. When everyone is doing nice things for each other all the time there can be no war, and therefore pie can save the world.”

And maybe it can.

I is for India

Many people falsely believe that Mahatma Gandhi was the first prime minister of India.

I’ve had a long fascination with India. You can read what the CIA World Factbook says about the country.

Maybe I’m drawn in because of the idea of an independence movement that was won, NOT primarily by military means, but rather through a civil disobedience movement practiced by Mohandas K. Gandhi, which he first utilized in South Africa and then in India. I read a Gandhi autobiography in college – I may reread it this year – and I recognize his liberation struggle techniques that were eventually used by Martin Luther King, Jr. and others.

Gandhi was disheartened, though, by the partition of India and Pakistan into two separate countries, upon independence in 1947, especially since the severing was based largely on religious beliefs. I always found it really strange that Pakistan was established in two geographic parts, East and West, divided by 1,600 km (994 mi) of India. In 1971, East Pakistan became Bangladesh.

It’s an odd thing: many people falsely believe that Mahatma Gandhi was the first prime minister of India; even JEOPARDY!! contestants have made this mistake. The Mahatma was NEVER a political leader, in that sense. It was Jawaharlal Nehru who led the nation from 1947 until his death in 1964. Here’s a list of all the prime ministers of India. The country is often cited as the largest democracy in the world.

I am intrigued by the so-called Indian renaming controversy. I still have to think, when I hear Mumbai, that it is the former Bombay. I’ll figure it out eventually; I’ve been saying Beijing instead of Peking, China for a good while now.

It’d be impossible to do justice to India here. My interests include everything from the long-standing dispute with Pakistan over Kashmir to the many fascinating structures, to sitar music, undoubtedly a function of George Harrison helping introduce Ravi Shankar to America.

I do wish a friend of mine who visited several places around India at Christmastime 2005 would put out a blog. She sent out e-mails to her friends about her findings at the time, and they are quite entertaining. Only a brief snippet I’ll share here: “Delhi is flat, mostly low scale and teaming with traffic of every vehicle imaginable including those with 4 legs. The road rules make Boston driving look polite.”

ABC Wednesday – Round 10

The teller of secrets

I muse how my life would have been if, instead of being the eldest child, I had had an older brother.

 

Today would have been my parents’ 62nd anniversary. But my dad died a few months after their 50th, in 2000. I always remember the date, though, because my mom always referred to me as an early anniversary present. I was born five days shy of their third wedding anniversary. Coincidentally, my eldest niece was born five days short of HER parents’ anniversary. Also, since my parents were married in 1950, it was always easy to calculate how long they had been hitched.

The odd thing about my parents. My father revealed almost nothing about his past. My mother, though, starting when I was nine or ten, would drop tidbits about her past, my parents’ joint history, and, more peculiarly, events from my father’s past at which she was not present, to my sisters and to me. So she told us stuff about him that he never told us about himself. Some were so spotty that it engendered more questions than answers. A few things fell into the category of “We REALLY did not need to know that.” Other bits were useful; WHY my father didn’t particularly like Christmas made a certain amount of sense.

One item she mentioned was that she had experienced a miscarriage in April 1951, in the second trimester of the pregnancy; it was a male. She was rather matter-of-fact about it in the telling, but she noted that my father was rather devastated by the situation. So when my mother got pregnant again, in 1952, she reported that he was a bit at arm’s length emotionally about it. It wasn’t until the baby arrived safely that he could even think about coming up with names.

This explains the frantic calculation of names he did on scraps of paper at his cousin Ruth’s house before he came up with Roger Owen Green, with the initials ROG. From time to time, I muse how my life would have been if, instead of being the eldest child, I had had an older brother.

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