Category Archives: For the Parents

Events for Thursday, August 23, 2012 through Wednesday, August 29, 2012

Posted on by
Reply

Thursday, August 23

  • Tonight through Saturday at 7:30 p.m. at the MuCCC is the 5th annual Sankofa Evening of Theatre & Jazz [source: MuCCC website, 2012-Aug-13]
  • Starting late after Garden Vibes at 8:30 p.m., the Dryden will be screening 48 Hrs. (Walter Hill, US 1982, 96 min.) Here's the calendar description:

    After making his film debut in this action comedy, Eddie Murphy became one of the biggest box-office draws of the '80s. He's hilarious as a convict recruited to help catch a killer, but this is a buddy comedy in the truest sense. The casting of Nick Nolte as his gruff partner brings out the very best in Murphy.

    [source: Dryden website, 2012-Aug-13]

  • Over at Abilene, also starting around 8:30 p.m. is My Plastic Sun, Coyote Campus, and Bad Sound. [source: Abilene website, 2012-Aug-13]

Friday, August 24

  • A friend of mine recommended I try and catch The Sugarland Express (Steven Spielberg, US 1974, 110 min.) at the Dryden, screening tonight at 8 p.m. and Sunday at 2 p.m. Again from the Dryden calendar:

    Goldie Hawn and William Atherton are petty larcenists in hot pursuit of the child they were forced to give up. But the stakes grow higher as they take a trooper hostage and become outlaw celebrities. Recipient of the Best Screenplay Award at Cannes, and shot just one year before Spielberg rose to international fame with Jaws.

    [source: Dryden website, 2012-Aug-13]

Saturday, August 25

  • Since the Bop Shop is no longer at the Village Gate, today and tomorrow is the In-Store Sidewalk Sale. [source: Bop Shop Events, 2012-Aug-13]
  • Today from 12 p.m. to 6 p.m. at the Genesee Center for the Arts is the Spokes & Ink Bike and Poster Fest. [source: Spokes & Ink website, 2012-Aug-13]
  • The Dryden will be screening the Rochester premiere of Miss Bala (Gerardo Naranjo, Mexico 2011, 113 min., Spanish w/ subtitles) tonight at 8 p.m. and tomorrow at 5 p.m. The calendar has this to say:

    Loosely inspired by a 2008 incident, Miss Bala offers an electrifying account of a beauty pageant contestant (Stephanie Sigman) ensnared in a war between a drug cartel and corrupt officials. With slinky long takes shot from volatile corners and crevices, Miss Bala is a tour-de-force that announces Naranjo as amajor talent.

    [source: Dryden website, 2012-Aug-13]

  • Awesome punk-rock The Blastoffs, The Tombstone Hands, and Philo Beddoe will perform at the Bug Jar starting around 10:30 p.m. [source: Bug Jar calendar, 2012-Aug-13]

Sunday, August 26

  • The MuCCC will be hosting a performance of Metal Quest: The First Emperor tonight at 7:30 p.m. [source: MuCCC website, 2012-Aug-13]
  • The Bug Jar is hosting West Fest with Anchorage Nebraska, very good hard-bar-rock band Inugami, Comedown, Pink Elephant, and good hard rock from The Cheetah Whores starting around 9 p.m. [source: Bug Jar calendar, 2012-Aug-13]

Monday, August 27

  • In Between the Lines Improv Troup and TOOP (The Opposite of People) Theater Company will perform at the Todd Theatre at the University of Rochester today from 1 p.m. to 2 p.m. [source: UofR website events calendar, 2012-Aug-13]
  • Tonight at 7 p.m. at the Flying Squirrel is the monthly Green Party Meeting. [source: Flying Squirrel website, 2012-Aug-13]

Tuesday, August 28

  • The Dryden will be screening Talk About a Stranger (David Bradley, US 1952, 65 min., 16mm) at 8 p.m. From the Eastman House calendar:

    Another neglected gem from the MGM B-unit, Talk about a Stranger follows young Bud as he tries to prove that the stranger who's moved in to the long-abandoned house down the road is an evil canine murderer. Set in an idyllic citrus town and photographed by noir specialist John Alton (Raw Deal), this junior version of Shadow of a Doubt carries palpable terror.

    [source: Dryden website, 2012-Aug-13]

Wednesday, August 29

  • The Devil is a Woman (Josef von Sternberg, US 1935, 75 min.) will be shown at the Dryden tonight at 8 p.m. From the calendar:

    Dietrich stars as a cold-hearted and mysterious woman who can belong to no one, but leads everyone to believe otherwise. Von Sternberg paints a vivid and stylized recreation of turn-of-the-20th-century Spain during Carnival.

    [source: Dryden website, 2012-Aug-13]

  • Over at Abilene, Euforquestra will perform with good, crowd-pleasing reggae from Thunder Body tonight starting around 9 p.m. [source: JamBase calendar, 2012-Aug-13]
  • Good, amiable hard rock from The Clockmen, Cavalcade, The DeVills, and The Red Lion will be at the Bug Jar starting around 9 p.m. [source: Bug Jar calendar, 2012-Aug-13]

Thoughts on Ruby Sparks …

Posted on by
Reply

With the Dryden closed on Mondays, I have been making a habit of going to the Little for their $5 Monday movies — often to see two films. Tonight I went to see Ruby Sparks. I had seen the trailer and had written it off, but I read an interview with writer-and-star Zoe Kazan which sold the movie on me (but be warned it's full of spoilers.) In short, consider what happens if a woman writes a role for herself as if she were a male writer creating a manic pixie dream girl (MPDG)? It all seems a little more self-aware to me, and I'm interested to see if all that works out. Alternatively, what if a movie centered on a MPDG were able to pass the Bechdel/Wallace test?

The introductory first act introduces us to Calvin, a young writer who met with massive success in his first novel. He lives alone in a fancy house and is trying to follow up with a second work. But it's not going so well. His only company is a scruffy dog who (as he reveals to his therapist) he got as a way to try and meet women, but it's not working. So his therapist suggests he try writing a few paragraphs about meeting a woman who adores his dog. And later while dreaming, he finds such a woman, albeit imaginary.

Enamored by his fantasy, he sets to frantically writing. He confides in his therapist that he's worried that he's falling in love with the character. And then all hell breaks loose when he thinks she's living in his house. She believes fully that the history defined by his writing is her actual life. And then worse: everyone else thinks she's there too, presumably because, well, she is.

But rather than turn into a rehash of Mannequin or Weird Science (yikes: dating myself seriously!) it steers more toward what it's like to be a being who has no idea she was just a fictional construct, centering on the differences with a real person.

And this is what the trailer completely misses: it's sort of a multi-layered writer's movie. I mean, all the characters are fictional constructs, but one is also a fiction-in-a-fiction. And then, while Calvin and Ruby are the most fully-realized characters, how can they coexist with others who are absurdly broad? For instance, when I saw Antonio Banderas as Calvin's stepdad Mort playing the stereotypically over-the-top artist, I thought, "oh my god, it's like he's made of ham." It's interesting to consider how all the characters exist and why they're there, and how fully formed the would believe they are.

The film gets me thinking, what if it were possible to buy, say, a robot girlfriend? What if I could make someone who is exactly what I think I want? Would I even come close to anything desirable? And then I also know it's necessarily a paradox to have free will (a.k.a. intelligence, artificial-or-not) and be manipulable or programmable.

Writing offers an outlet for those dreams of Pygmalion — a way to literally (and literarily) make friends. And Ruby Sparks touches on all the ramifications of that.

So I guess I'd recommend it if you're wanting for that kind of film. I find expectations to be extremely important when it comes to viewing a film, and the trailer does such a poor job of setting those expectations in the "right" direction that I don't recommend the trailer or any single-paragraph summary. And it certainly helps if you also like looking at Zoe Kazan.

About JayceLand's New Look

Posted on by
Reply

Well times change and so do I. In the last few years, I've transitioned further from going out to live music all the time to seeing mostly movies and only a handful of shows a month. So I decided to further pare down the number of events I list on the site.

My standing rule is that this site should be as easy for me as possible. I had toyed with a user-generated site and all kinds of fancy databases (which may still come) but that is most certainly not easy. And then there's the whole fragile way I generate the site each week — pretty much unchanged since 2001 — using FileMaker Pro 5 databases on a Macintosh Classic, exporting the data, and using some Unix scripts to make a HTML file. The workflow is quick (i.e. easy) although it's fairly convoluted.

So I decided the new site would be a weekly blog post with highlights of things-to-do — things I will very likely do (rather than "have a passing interest in doing" as it stands now). If you're only interested in the events lists, you can link straight to the events category and skip all my regular blog posts. The JayceLand home page will now redirect to the normal blog. To keep my sanity, I'm going to stop numbering them — the last numbered update was #705 on July 12, 2012. (And even then: 705 weeks of posting events … enough is enough!)

In addition, I'm dropping most of the internal links. You can Google a band just as well as I can. And I don't think I need to remind everyone the address of the Bug Jar (along with a link to Google Maps.) So it'll all look a lot more vanilla. And be much easier for me which, well, is the whole point.