A Week in The Arts

In the past week, I have taken in two movies, a musical play, and a streaming series.  Some quickie thoughts on each....

Oscar winning director Peter Jackson was commissioned by Britain's Imperial War Museum to take over 100 hours of film footage from the first world war, and "make something of it".  Jackson painstakingly restored film that was faded, blackened, and otherwise damaged from sitting in their canisters for over 100 years, colorized it, and turned it onto an astonishing documentary that tells of the horrors of war and its aftermath.  At the conclusion of the film itself, Jackson provides an additional film (think of it as an "extra" that comes on a movie's DVD release) that explains exactly how he and his team did what they did in creating this movie.  If you go to see the movie, please stay to see this additional feature.

Four Stars from The Grandstander.

Watching last week's Super Bowl prompted me to seek out and find this 1977 thriller from director John Frankenheimer.  In this one, the Palestinian terrorist group Black September decides to launch a terrorist attack on America by loading down the Goodyear blimp with explosives and attacking Miami's Orange Bowl during the Super Bowl.  Marthe Keller plays the Black September terrorist who is spearheading the plan, Bruce Dern plays a whacko American veteran who feels like he has been shit upon by "the system" who will pilot the blimp, and Robert Shaw is the Israeli intelligence officer who has to ferret out the plan and stop it.

One of the attractions of this movie was that parts of it were filmed on location in the Orange Bowl while the actual  Super Bowl, number X, between the Steelers and Cowboys, was being played.  So you get to see real plays from the actual game.  It also serves as a time capsule of sorts for a time before the Super Bowl became, for all intents and purposes, a national holiday.  At one point, Israeli agent Shaw looks at his FBI counterpart and says "What is this super bowl?"  Can you imagine such a thing?

Anyway, I had not seen this movie since it was new in theaters forty-three years ago, so I wasn't sure what to expect, but it holds up surprisingly well as a thriller, a football time capsule, and, sadly, a preview of just what exactly terrorism was to become in our world.

Three and one-half Stars from The Grandstander.

"Charlie and the Chocolate Factory" the musical adaption of the Roald Dahl children's book and the Willy Wonka movie, was the fifth show in this season's Broadway Pittsburgh Series.  Honestly, of the shows in the series, this was the one for which I had the lowest expectations, and through the first act, I wasn't thrilled.  However, the second act, when the characters actually went inside Willy's chocolate factory, was terrific, and it turned the show into a most pleasant evening at the theater.  The performance of the Oompa Loompas alone, during the show and at the curtain call, was almost worth the price of admission, as was the performance of eleven year old Rueby Wood in the role of Charlie.

Three Stars from The Grandstander.

I have always been a fan of Agatha Christie, and Amazon has shown some very good adaptations of Christie stories over the years, so I  was really looking forward to seeing this three part adaptation of "The A.B.C. Murders", a genuine Christie classic.

All I can say is that this proved to be three hours of my life that I will never get back.  The movie was so dark in tone and spirit as to be almost unwatchable.  John Malkovich, a very capable actor, played Hercule Poirot, and he would have been fine, i suppose, but whoever came up with this version - producers, writers, director? - gave him a version of the famous fictional detective that was nothing like you would expect.  They also gave Poirot a back story that was unconnected to anything that Agatha Christie devised to the point that the sound that you heard in the background was no doubt Dame Agatha spinning in her grave.

I have read that the Christie Estate is constantly commissioning these series and movies (the remake of "Murder on the Orient Express" of two years ago, for example) based upon her works in order to keep the name of Agatha Christie before the public, introduce younger generations to her works, and, not incidentally, keep her books moving off of bookshelves across the world.  I cannot imagine that the Estate was happy with this version of one of Christie's most famous works.

ZERO Stars from The Grandstander.