I Swear I Was Just Going to Write This.

Almost exactly this article:

Back in the heyday of Dave Chappelle’s eponymous comedy show, the comic unveiled a skit in which he trumpeted the merits of slo-mo. From hanging out at the club to using the, er, facilities, Chappelle rightly proved that everything looked cooler when slowed down.

This past year had its very own version of the slow-motion effect, and its name was Paper Planes. Yeah, M. I. A.’s immigrant anthem is found on her 2007 album, Kala, but 2008 was the year the plane really took off.

NYU Keeps On Taking It.

Or buying it, to be more accurate:

New York University has won approval to purchase a long-sought-after church property owned by the Archdiocese of New York on the south side of Washington Square Park for $25 million.

The school had wanted to purchase the building, known as the Catholic Center at New York University, at 58 Washington Square South, at Thompson Street in Greenwich Village, for years.

Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Martin Schoenfeld gave his approval for the sale of the 21,639-square-foot building on a 12,622-square-foot parcel on December 24, according to court records published Monday.

I have a lot of love for NYU (my alma mater), and I don’t think that every real estate purchase they make is inherently problematic.  This is a sad one though.  The Catholic Center is kind of a beautiful building, and the fact that it’s going to be replaced by another big, semi-soulless NYU beast isn’t great to hear.

The Wrestler.

If you’ve never enjoyed some professional wrestling, I don’t trust you, and we’re probably not really friends.  Let’s start there.  I’m a lifelong wrestling fan.  In a big way.  That’s not what this post is about, but it’s certainly relevant.  I don’t spend much time watching it these days (although DVR has allowed me to rekindle my Monday Night Raw habit), but I follow just about everything that’s going on in the industry.  I wrote a play about professional wrestling (as a matter of fact, I ‘ll be workshopping that play in Chicago in three weeks).  I kind of think it’s the most underutilized, underrated dramatic art form in the United States.  So while I might not be the exact target audience for The Wrestler (I tend not to love obvious Oscar bait flicks), I’m pretty close.  I saw it last night.  I don’t do reviews, but…I guess this is kind of a review.  With bullet points.  And spoilers.  And I’m going to just talk about the movie as if you seen it, which probably means this won’t make sense to a lot of you.  Whatever.  It’s a blog.

• Mickey Rourke is as good as everyone says.  He looks like a broken-down wrestler, and that’s massively important in a film like this.  He looks a ton like Jerry Lynn actually, which lends credence to the rumors that Ring of Honor (probably the best wrestling company in the US — and a big part of The Wrestler) is going to run a film-based angle with Lynn.  I won’t go too deeply into why Rourke (or Marisa Tomei for that matter) is so right for this movie, but the casting is spot-on.
• There’s a lot of mediocre writing here, especially in the relationship stuff.  Yes, we get it: he’s old, he’s alone, he’s fallen from the top of his game down to a sad workmanlike existence.  He wants companionship.  We get all that, and we get it right away — but the dialogue beats the point home over and over.   There are chunks of this movie that are just subtextless and dreadful, although the sincerity of Rourke and Tomei elevates the dialogue.
• And here’s the important stuff: they get the wrestling right.  Really right.  Pro wrestling, like most professional sports (and while it’s theater now, not sports really, it’s still sports, you know?), is about male camaraderie.  This movie gets that.   The beauty of professional wrestling is that the guys who look like they’re kicking the crap out of each other are actually protecting each other, even when stapling dollar bills to each other’s foreheads.  Wrestling is about trust, compassion even, teamwork and community — the scenes where the indie guys are planning out the night’s matches drive this point home simply and beautifully.  Rourke’s character gets a round of applause from the boys in the back after every match — that’s the kind of love and respect that makes people do the horrific things to their body that these guys do.

Ultimately, there’s too much of bullet point two for my tastes and not nearly enough of bullet point three.  Every moment this film spends on something other than wrestling feels kind of generic, like we’ve seen it/heard it before, and even the solid, heartfelt performances don’t take things to any new ground.  But man, the wrestling — I’m biased, I know, but when the wrestling sequences are going on, I felt like I was watching something I had never seen on a big screen before.  I can only imagine what that must feel like if you’ve never been a fan.

In the Bill Simmons article I linked to above, he talks about the film’s final sequence: Rourke’s last match and the speech he gives before it.  It’s a great moment, but the moment directly before it was the one that really won me over.  Rourke’s just made his peace with returning to the ring.  He’s basically turned his back on Tomei, given up on his life outside of wrestling, and made up his mind to die on the mat (literally and/or figuratively).  His music starts: Sweet Child O’ Mine – and it turns out to be absolutely perfect entrance music: bittersweet, screeching, wistful, nostalgic, hard-rocking but still sad, a reminder of what Axl used to be, what Randy “The Ram” used to be, what Mickey Rourke used to be, what wrestling used to be.

And he makes his way down the aisle, and the fans give him love, and his opponent gives him love, and folks — that’s all anybody ever wants anyway.

West Side Story Pictures.

Playbill has them.

I  don’t exactly find them exciting.  What are the changes here?  Contemporary (kinda) dress and hair?  The staging feels a little like Laurents’ recent Gypsy, which makes sense, I guess — he’s going for the “keep the sets simple and let the show be the star” kind of aesthetic, I think — but man, I don’t know about this.

The good news, of course, is that I’m going to see it on February 27th.

The One That Saves Me.

The Internet is a wonderful place.  I had this song stuck in my head:

Which led me to remember this (another reason why I love Jay-Z and find his swagger unimpeachable — I might have posted the story behind this before):

And then I stumbled on this:

Worst Movie Idea Ever.

From the generally awesome but often misguided Bill Simmons:

Q: You can go back in time and recast one sports movie with actors and actresses from that era. Which movie do you tackle, and what are your casting changes?
– Corey, Salt Lake City

SG: I would tweak “White Men Can’t Jump” with the following moves: Denzel Washington for Wesley Snipes and Sharon Stone for Rosie Perez. Here’s why: Snipes killed that movie (at least for me) because he was such an obviously lousy basketball player in real life. Every hoops scene physically pained me; really, nobody could stop this 5-foot-6 guy who dribbles over his ear, shoots line-drive jumpers and does the same crossover move every time? He’s so bad that every time it’s showing on Encore or TNT, I keep waiting for Mike Dunleavy to sign him during the closing credits. I just can’t handle it. As for Rosie Perez, remember when the Son of Sam claimed his neighbor’s dog talked him into murdering people? If I listened to Rosie’s voice long enough, I really feel like I could commit a homicide. And you know what else? I don’t think I’d go to hell for it. Maybe 20 years in purgatory, but ultimately, God would understand. I’m amazed this hasn’t been used as a defense in a murder trial yet: Overexposure to Rosie Perez’s voice. Anyway, you put a legitimate hoopster like Denzel in there (better actor, too) as well as Sharon Stone at her sexapex (I just created that word), and that’s one of the top 15 sports movies ever made. Alas.

White Men Can’t Jump is a perfectly cast movie.  Rosie’s performance is one of the absolute keys — if you made that movie with Sharon Stone (Sharon Stone?), it would fall completely apart.  Simmons has said some stupid shit, but good lord this one is bad.

Happy Holidays, Folks.

Have a great one.

Teixeira Too?

I love The Yankees, but I admit, this is getting ridiculous:

Teixeira’s deal raises the Yankees’ offseason spending spree to $423.5 million. Just last Thursday, they gave Sabathia a $161 million, seven-year contract and Burnett an $82.5 million, five-year deal.

The Yankees, preparing to move into their pricey new ballpark, will hold the four largest contracts in the sport. Third baseman Alex Rodriguez has baseball’s highest deal at $275 million over 10 years, and shortstop Derek Jeter is second at $189 million over 10 years.

Thing is, I think they’re all good signings.  AND…I wouldn’t be against them signing Ben Sheets either.

But god damn it — I’m a liberal.  I’m kind of sometimes communist.  And this is the only professional sports team I love?

You Grandiose Motherfuckers Don’t Play The Shit That They Like.

There is a lot of talk right now about the desperate state of the non-musical play in the United States:

“In a sense, the dilemma of nonprofit theater can be simply summarized — supply has outstripped current demand,” Dana Gioia, the chairman of the national endowment, wrote in a preface to the report. “The remarkable growth and professional management of theatrical organizations across the nation has not yet been matched by equally robust growth in audiences.”

Some smart folks are offering up ideas as to how to overcome this issue. First, Alexis Soloski, one of my favorite critics, suggests that the NEA needs to get involved with a big push towards ticket subsidies and/or salary underwriting. Pretty good ideas, but still not getting at the heart of the matter, I believe. George Hunka hits a little bit closer to what I’m thinking, although I don’t necessarily think that it’s all about tragedy. Basically, his argument is summed up in this sentence:

Perhaps the spectators are finding that theatrical experiences as created by most theatre artists do not speak truly to their condition or their lives.

The hip-hop version of that comes from the opening of The Roots Things Fall Apart, which actually takes its cue from Spike Lee’s Mo’ Better Blues (cut and paste job from imdb.com):

Bleek: But the jazz, you know if we had to dep… if we had to depend upon black people to eat, we would starve to death. I mean, you’ve been out there, you’re on the bandstand, you look out into the audience, what do you see? You see Japanese, you see, you see West Germans, you see, you know, Slavolic, anything except our people – it makes no sense. It incenses me that our own people don’t realize our own heritage, our own culture, this is our music, man.
Shadow Henderson: That’s bullshit.
Bleek: Why?
Shadow Henderson: [slurred] It’s all bullsh… Everything, everything you just said is bullshit. Out of all the people in the world, you never gave anybody else, and look, I love you like a step-brother, but you never gave nobody else a chance t- to play their own music, you complain about… That’s right, the people don’t come because you grandiose motherfuckers don’t play shit that they like. If you played the shit that they like, then people would come, simple as that.

I humbly submit the idea that the non-profit theater, in its great drive to promote art for arts sake (or even to pander to what they think is their core audience with the same old chestnuts and/or plays about the same old people doing the same old things), is continuously failing to play the shit that they like.

Grandiose motherfuckers indeed.

More Reasons Why Sports Matter.

I’m not religious, but this article from Rick Reilly speaks to a whole lot of goodness:

After the game, both teams gathered in the middle of the field to pray and that’s when Isaiah surprised everybody by asking to lead. “We had no idea what the kid was going to say,” remembers Coach Hogan. But Isaiah said this: “Lord, I don’t know how this happened, so I don’t know how to say thank You, but I never would’ve known there was so many people in the world that cared about us.”