Inside Out / The LEGO Movie

Pixar’s near classic 

and Lego’s identity crisis

     Inside Out takes a profound look at what a tween loses when she has to say goodbye to some elements of childhood in being able to move on in life.  Some of the imagery concerning Riley as a young child reminded me of Boo in Monsters, Inc. (2001), which Pete Docter also directed.  I doubt that there are any spoiler alerts possible since most of North America has seen it at least once and probably twice.  Most of the action takes place in Riley’s head briefly through her childhood and mostly during a challenging move across country because of her father’s work.   The emotions of Joy, Sadness, Anger, Fear, and Disgust pretty much control Riley’s worldview.

Disgust, Anger, Joy, Sadness and Fear

     The plot hinges on Joy and Sadness getting accidentally sucked into Riley’s long-term memory and having to make their way back to headquarters before her core memories are forgotten.  The visual representation of stored memories colored by their primary emotions looks like a phone game application so it’s extremely current.  The representation of the islands that make up personality and the Train of Thought are dynamically intelligent without drawing attention to themselves.  Bing Bong, the imaginary friend that sacrifices himself to allow Joy to succeed in saving Riley’s personality looked and felt a little like a character that didn’t make it into the Toy Story series.  He also disappears in a pit that looked like it cooled down from the incinerator pit that almost destroyed the major characters in Toy Story 3 (2010).

Joy and Sadness Pointing to the "Personality" Islands

     I can’t think of another animated family movie that makes visual gags about Picasso and takes on literary theory to explain a splintering personality.  It’s a spectacular looking movie, but I think it would be overwhelming in 3D.  There were times when I couldn’t keep up with everything going on in the labyrinth of long-term memories.  However, the focus on the 

Joy and Sadness

characters is what drives the movie forward, especially Joy (voiced to the nth degree by Amy Poehler) and Sadness (voiced by Phyllis Smith in a devastating performance).  In learning that sadness is necessary to cope with a new reality and allow others to help, Inside Out moves into territory that moves viewers because it is basic to human existence.  On the Pixar scale, it’s up there with The Incredibles, Monsters, Inc., and Toy Story 2.  

     I missed The Lego Movie (2014) when it first came out, but fortunately our neighbor Ella Jane lent us her copy.  Directed by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, who did wonderful work with 21 Jump Street (2012), it’s an upbeat, colorful computer animated movie that looks like it was achieved through stop motion animation.  The basic plot goes all the way back to Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1928) with a mad Big Business dictator deciding to destroy the world and the Everyman character trying to lead a revolt to stop him.

Destroying the Lego Set

     Neil thought it seemed like an advertisement for Lego and he’s pretty much on the mark.  It’s amazing the colors, characters, variety of brick shapes, and scenes that have been created by Lego (and are capable of being imagined and created).  Players follow the instructions for the pictured models; builders go ahead and do their own thing with the sets.  That’s also the point of the movie.  However, there’s a sense of hypocrisy or, rather, a sense that Lego is having its cake and eating it too with this movie.  Lego is a huge business, one of the best-known brands in the world, but the movie’s message is that big business wears blinders and wants to destroy anything that is individual and idiosyncratic.

Wyldstyle and Emmett

     The story turns out to be metaphysical with a boy and his father playing out an Oedipal conflict.  That was when the whole thing turned completely clunky.  A viewer can sense the mythic nature of the conflict in the animated part of the movie.  Bringing in human actors and turning over to live action kills what was imaginative and creative by making it ‘real.’  There’s even a moment of castration panic when the dad says he’ll let the little sister play as well and the boy is horrified.  Interestingly, Lego really increased its business when it began marketing specifically to girls.  However, the female characters in the movie suffer from the Hermione Complex, i.e. they have great ideas and are smarter than the male lead, but they’re only along for the ride, rather than vanquishing the antagonist (see The Harry Potter series).  After Katniss, I thought we’d left that behind, but not in the world of Lego, which has turned reactionary after being one of the most progressive brands of the past fifty years.

The Lego Movie Cast

     Where Inside Out presents an ordinary girl’s experience and makes it fresh and remarkable, The Lego Movie celebrates Emmet, a regular guy who’s believed by a prophecy to be special, though it’s all a fake.  He has an original idea, but the energy, vitality, and extraordinary ideas of the others (Wyldstyle/Lucy, Batman, Benny the astronaut, Princess Unikitty) are shunted aside for his mediocrity.  I find that chilling even as it is presented as upbeat and heroic.  

Trainwreck

Amy Schumer Triumphs

     Trainwreck directed by Judd Apatow, but more significantly written by Amy Schumer, examines the life of a single professional woman in her thirties who hasn’t shed her party girl proclivities.  We first saw Schumer on the Comedy Central Roast of Charlie Sheen in 2011 and Neil reminded me that I thought she was foul, though hilarious.  She’s still crude, but working with other performers, rather than going it alone, provides her the opportunity to develop a much more complex character both culturally and politically. Even with the dirty language and the hilarious sex scenes in which it is the male body that is objectified, Trainwreck is sensational.

Amy's Escapade with John Cena

     In her standup, Schumer has relayed her sexual exploits and simultaneously been delighted and disgusted by her partners and herself.  In Trainwreck, Amy as Amy encounters real love both for herself and through the relationships of others.  It doesn’t always run smoothly and sex messes it up, but Schumer presents characters and relationships that deserve a second look (and, therefore, live up to the definition of respect).  Women can be professionals and they can be wives and mothers; they can be square, though they’re also less fun or they can be hip without being completely soulless.  Female cheerleaders can bring a community together as one character puts it and support other women.  Men can be competent professionally, kind, and romantic partners.  Athletes can be smart and funny.  

Amy Dealing with Mom Issues

     I don’t mean to make this sound like a cinematic ‘Kumbaya,’ but there’s a greater depth than can be displayed on a TV promo.  There’s a great joke about Woody Allen, for instance, and there’s a reversal of an older/younger physical relationship that turns dangerous.  How the older person could have avoided it without asking for I.D. is never underlined, though the slickest character cracks a dark joke about it.

The Romantic Leads—Schumer and Hader

     Gayle Keller (with Apatow’s and Schumer’s input, I’m certain) has cast the movie brilliantly.  I wouldn’t have thought of Bill Hader as a romantic lead, but he’s delightful as the grown up who’s looking for someone wild – the basis for screwball comedy since the ‘30s.  With this role after last year’s The Skeleton Twins, he proves he has a wide range.  Brie Larson plays the younger sister who’s both a loving (step)mother and a resentful daughter.  Colin Quinn has a wonderful scene at the very beginning explaining to his daughters the reasons for his divorce using a context they can understand that sets up all the family dynamics and then returns as a younger curmudgeon, who refuses to be 

Tilda Swinton

sentimental.  It took me a couple of minutes to realize that the hard-edged editor with the lower-middle class London accent and the Miami skin was Tilda Swinton.  She’s a satire (I hope) of Joanna Coles or Zanna Roberts Rassi.  Norman Lloyd plays Quinn’s table companion in the assisted living home and is lovely at 100, no less.  Vanessa Bayer’s dewy lipped naïveté contrasts beautifully with Schumer’s style and works 

LeBron James with Bill Hader

better here than on Saturday Night Live.  LeBron James is charming and intelligent as Schumer writes him; much more so than when he’s interviewed.  John Cena lampoons his image as Amy’s sensitive boyfriend, who unconsciously wrestles (pun intended) with complex, ambivalent attractions both dressed and nude.  There are cameos by a number of professional athletes and SNL veterans, both past and current, and all of them succeed.

     The only drawback for Schumer could be what she does next.  She leaps beyond her comic persona into a more profound place, but can she sustain it and will she be given the opportunity to fail?  Maybe it’s too early to consider Schumer’s magnitude, but Hollywood’s bean counters (or executives, though they’ve become the same thing) will start on Monday.  Going back a few years, Jane Curtin was allowed only limited film roles, but succeeded very well in sitcoms.  Janene Garafolo had a chance until she had a flop and that was it.  Bridesmaids placed Kristen Wiig front and center in Hollywood, but she hasn’t had another commercial success, mainly because she’s bravely taken on artistic challenges.  Instead, it was Melissa McCarthy who used that movie as a jumping off point for a major movie career.

Dream Cars & Fashion in Indianapolis

One excellent show, another so-so 

L'Oeuf Électrique, 1942

     We found out about the Dream Cars exhibition at The Indianapolis Museum of Art (IMA) in January.  The time is limited since it ends in late August, but it’s worth seeing because these are one-of-a-kind automobiles that were designed and built as prototypes between 1934 and now.  

2010 Porsche 918 Spyder Concept Car

They weren’t put into production, though the final model, which is a Porsche doesn’t look that much different from some of their current models.  It seems more like a synthesis between a Porsche and the Batmobile.

1959 Cadillac and 1955 Buick

     The Big Three U.S. automakers are represented from the 1950s; the Buick and Chrysler models display elements that were utilized in later commercial models, which is 

1935 Bugatti

fascinating.  The European designers actually seemed more ahead of their time and pulled off some astonishing work, especially the spectacular Voisin and Bugatti cars.  There’s a Ferrari from 1966 that has a bench front seat that seats three with a centrally located steering wheel and a current BMW with a body made of fabric so that it can be adjusted continually, rather than having to build yet another prototype from scratch in metal.

1936 Scarab

     There are also examples of independent designers’ work such as the Scarab, which was the precursor to the van, the Airstream trailer, or an SUV, but was built in 1936.  It had a woven interior ceiling, sort of akin to a picnic basket, as well as seating that could be adjusted and turned around the way seating used to be on Southwestern Airlines.

It’s worth the drive to see this show.

2001 BMW Gina Light Visionary Model

The 20s Represented by Soeurs and Lanvin

     The Cutting-Edge Fashion: Recent Acquisitions exhibition pales in comparison to similarly themed or sized shows that we’ve seen at the Cincinnati Art Museum.  Covering the 1920s to the present, it includes pieces by major designers (Dior, Vivienne Westwood, Issey Miyake) as well as from the U.S., Europe, and Japan.  The Franco Moschino designs towards the end were wild, witty, and actually wearable.

Wedding Dress
in Need of an Iron 

     There were some problems with the exhibition, beginning with the fact that most of the pieces needed to be steamed since they were wrinkled.  The clothes needed to be fitted to the mannequins.  In a couple of cases, there wasn’t a foundation built on the mannequins properly so they looked as if a child were wearing her mother’s clothes.  One of the Westwood dresses featured cut outs, yet the curator put in backing cloth that looked wadded up and completely ruined the effect of the dichotomy between cloth and skin.  

Christian LaCroix

     The last time we visited the IMA, the guards and one of the docents could not have been friendlier and well informed.  This time, we encountered guards that corrected us every time Neil, Sue or I pointed at something because we might set off an alarm or touch a piece.  We’ve been to museums before.  We know not to touch anything; we were merely pointing out details.  One guard was so overly eager and officious that we felt like we were being followed from gallery to gallery on different floors.  When Neil expressed this opinion, he was told, “There’s a pattern where we change locations every fifteen minutes.”  Neil didn’t believe him.  I thought he was an asshole.

However, IMA is still a wonderful museum and many of the staff members are enthusiastic and friendly.

Dream Cars runs through August 23, 2015.
Cutting-Edge Fashion runs through january 3, 2016.

imamuseum.org

Shades of Neo-Noir

L.A. Confidential, Get Carter, 

and Mean Streets: Do they hold up?

     TCM has been playing examples of film noir, which are the ‘40s and ‘50s Hollywood crime movies that hold up better than the prestige product of that period and neo-noir, which are the self-conscious, artistic movies of the ‘70s and later that, in part, refer back to those earlier works.  Some that have played recently are L.A. Confidential (1997), Get Carter (1971), and Mean Streets (1973).

     L.A. Confidential, directed by Curtis Hanson and co-written with Brian Helgeland from James Ellroy’s classic novel possesses one of

The Superb Art Direction of LA in the early 50s

the strongest plots of any crime movie.  There are no dangling plotlines in either the book or the movie, unlike many of such works from the ‘40s and ‘50s.  Amazingly, Hanson and Helgeland were able to cut out about two or three major plotlines from the book, including a bizarre one about a Walt Disney-type entertainment tycoon, without sacrificing Ellroy’s tone and worldview.   The most significant difference is that the book ends with the young white knight sharing responsibilities for the future of the LAPD with the avuncular figure of evil that has significantly corrupted the force; the movie ends with the white knight on his own, but in charge.  It’s more idealistic, but less pragmatic.

Russell Crowe and Kim Basinger

     As a movie, it holds up most significantly in the acting and the art direction, both of which were peerless at that time.  Why didn’t anyone cast Russell Crowe and Kim Basinger in another movie?  They were one of the great screen couples of the ‘90s and generated a deep connection between their characters.  They’re actually more persuasive than the book’s characters because we can see them and they seem more complex, which is probably because there is a stronger focus on them in the movie. Guy Pearce, Kevin Spacey, and Danny DeVito are excellent, but it’s James Crowell, who embodies the dual-faced sense of the book and of the L.A. Quartet.

     Get Carter, which was directed by Mike Hodges and adapted by him from Ted Lewis’ Jack’s Return Home, is probably considered a minor classic here, though it’s a pretty

Newcastle's Coal Mines

major classic in Britain.  Wolfgang Suschitzky’s cinematography holds up beautifully, especially the cold, gray blue tones and the inky black.  Not only does it take place in Newcastle, famous for its coal; it’s also implacably grim.  A coal tip plays a significant part in the tough ending.  

     

     There’s no Hollywood hope since producer Michael Klinger and Hodges intended this to be a contemporary Revenge tragedy that would fit in with the embers of the Swinging Sixties and the crime underworld, made famous by the Kray twins.  Carter is a mob foot soldier, who returns to where he grew up in the north to investigate his brother’s death.  He suspects it wasn’t an accident and his journey to prove that is the plotline for the movie.

Michael Caine

    The matter of fact attitude surrounding the mob and its leaders’ determination to connect with legitimate business and political concerns is both cold and startling.  A number of scenes are still squirm worthy:  the black and white, amateurish porno movies that play at the edge of some shots; an attempted drowning in a bathtub; the final chase scene in which the viewer realizes there’s another unseen agent of destruction lurking outside the camera frame.  The violence succeeds in this because it’s meted out sparingly and is never intended to ‘entertain,’ unlike so much that takes place in current ‘action’ or comic book influenced movies that I find revolting.

Dorothy White with Michael Caine

     Michael Caine proves yet again his supremacy as a screen actor.  Except for Connery, was there a better British screen actor of that generation?  About halfway through, it registered that he never blinks and he never quite looks anyone in the eye.  He is implacable and, though he might seem like an avenging angel, he turns into a messenger of death.  The rest of the cast – some of whom I remember from TV series in England during the ‘70s – look like regular English people, though ones that can perform really well.  Playwright John Osborne (Look Back in Anger, The Entertainer) does some very elegant work as the northern mob king.  The only weak spots are Britt Ekland, who feels like she was dropped in to build international box office and a character thrown from a multi-story parking lot that obviously turns into a dummy.

     Mean Streets made Martin Scorsese and Robert DeNiro stars.  The title refers to Raymond Chandler’s essay “The Simple Art of Murder,” thereby placing its Neo-Noir ambitions squarely in the title.  Scorsese reveals New York’s Little Italy, where he was raised, in an intimate and self-aware way that hadn’t been seen before, resulting in critical hype at the time.  Looking at it

The Red-lit Bar Set

now, it’s amazing how much of it takes place in one set – a red-lit bar that one of the four friends owns.  Whenever the characters got into a car and drove away (only about three times), I sighed with relief that they were out of an area that seemed inbred by its transplanted Sicilian mores, obsession with though not a reflection of the values of the Catholic Church, and over-reliance on Hollywood gangster clichés.

Robert DeNiro in His Star-Making Role

     I know I’m being hard on what is considered a classic.  I admired it more when I saw it in college, though even then I thought half of it looked like it was lit as a photography dark room.  The casual racism, sexism, and hypocritical homophobia just grate after a while.  These guys haven’t the patience for dealing with a gay couple they give a ride to, but their bromance and emotional hijinks aren’t much different.  Of course, I also realize they aren’t supposed to be self-aware enough, unlike their creator, to understand this about themselves, but why is stupidity considered admirable?

The Pool Hall Scene

     Yes, it was a blast in 1973 because it looks grimy New York right in its face.  It also doesn’t pull many punches, though I don’t know how the three characters survive the final car/gun chase (Scorsese plays the gunman).  Although the cinematography is by Kent Wakeford, Scorsese planned the camera movement and it’s spectacular.  One sequence in a pool hall in which the major characters get into a fight with other patrons after unsuccessfully collecting protection money feels like something Max Ophuls or Luchino Visconti would have done if they’d directed this material.

DeNiro had his choice of playing one of the four friends and he shrewdly chose the star-making part, rather than the leading role.  Just try taking your eyes off him as Johnny Boy, the dopey/volcanic best friend that also seems like a modern day trickster or devil doll.  Harvey Keitel, a really good actor

Harvey Keitel

in the lead, gets stuck playing a lot of Catholic guilt as his character tries to fit into his forebears’ expectations for him.  He seems very relieved to play with Amy Robinson as the woman he loves, but his family doesn’t approve of because she’s epileptic (Robinson became a successful film producer later).  David Proval and Richard Romanus play the adult and the incompetent friends, respectively.  (Proval is probably familiar from The Sopranos).

Jane Smiley: Good Faith

Back to some forgotten 

elements of the 1980s

     I’ve read four of Jane Smiley’s novels:  A Thousand Acres (1991), Duplicate Keys (1984), Moo (1995), and, most recently, Good Faith (2003).  Over a thirty-five year career, she’s written fiction, non-fiction, critical studies (Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel from 2005 is an excellent primer for anyone interested in how writers create fiction), and young adult novels.  She has set books in New York’s Lower East Side in the 1970s, Greenland in the Middle Ages, a Midwestern flagship research university, an Iowa farm, Beverly Hills, and other far-flung places.  She’s moved among many genres:  the psychological thriller, the campus novel, the family saga, the comedy of manners, and short story collections.  She’s wrestled with both Shakespeare and Boccaccio in specific works patterned on theirs.

Lower Manhattan's Financial Center

     What I’m trying to say is that she’s one of the most versatile of writers.  Good Faith takes on the simmering economic mania of the 1980s when real estate began booming, Treasury bills – good ol’ T-Bills that were previously ignored in the popular consciousness – became a commodity, portfolios turned into bargaining chips for borrowing ever greater amounts of money that eventually would not be paid back, and savings & loans morphed from milk and cookies institutions into something resembling economic cocaine.  At the dawn of the ‘80s, cocaine was just a party drug; its full destructiveness wasn’t understood until the late ‘80s, which was when the ‘trickle down’ economy first crashed because borrowers had kicked the can until it boomeranged as a crushing boulder.  I remember the gold and silver markets being tended daily by the media in the late ‘70s, rather than the early ‘80s, but I’m sure Smiley’s research backs up her story.

     Good Faith begins in 1982 and ends in 1984 just as Americans looked towards ‘a new day’ after the final hangover of the Carter administration.  Smiley’s novel could be a cautionary tale for middle-class, small city/exurbia America of the mid-1980s, but it’s actually a look back from the vantage point of the 2001 post-9/11 economic ‘correction.’  Smiley 

The Reagon Era

captures the sensibility of the early Reagan era without ever dressing up the narrative with period pop culture details, which is a mightily disciplined feat.  Good Faith percolates along as the reader wonders whether Marcus Burns, the second main character, is a rainmaker or a charlatan or an out-and-out con artist.  Shaw would have loved this guy, especially as he explains how the federal government’s policy changes in taxes, savings & loans, and various other industries would free up money to grow and grow (though only for those with yachts in the harbor, not the rowboat owners that found themselves metaphorically stuck in the mud when the economic tide rolled out).

     What’s most compelling about Smiley’s novels is how she raises big questions as her subtext, rather than as the actual plot.  A Thousand Acres re-examines the story of King Lear, but touches upon progressive farming practices, while the main characters act from, but rarely articulate, the effects of child sexual abuse.  Moo presents a large university that could be located in a town like Ames, IA, or Bloomington, IN, or Falcon Heights, MN, but the underlying dichotomy concerns the attitudes of the Silent Generation administration, the ‘don’t trust anyone over thirty’ Baby Boomer faculty and staff in middle age contrasted with the pragmatism and lowered expectations of the Generation X students.   When Good Faith 

Baby Boomer Faculty

concentrates on an extended entrepreneurial family in a smaller city somewhere within a couple hours drive from New York City, though we’re never quite sure where, it really bubbles. 

     I haven’t read The Greenlanders (1988), which Jonathan Franzen thinks is one of the most under-appreciated contemporary American novels, but those I’ve read usually feel like they’re in the Midwest or the Plains states.  Even Duplicate Keys, which hinges on a harrowing sequence where the main character believes a suspected killer is quietly burglarizing her in the middle of the night, doesn’t exactly capture NYC in the late ‘70s.  It could be any big American city and since the plot revolves around the music industry, it might as well be L.A. or Nashville except for the fact that the main characters walk everywhere and that’s very significant in the book.  

Jane Smiley

      Locale is not a strong element of Smiley’s writing, though research is omnipresent.  Actually, there’s so much information about how money works in Good Faith that I felt I was trapped in an Arthur Hailey novel like The Moneychangers (1975) or Airport (1968), where it was always publicized how many interviews he’d conducted, though he still ended up with cliché-driven plots and stick figure characters.  Only Maureen Stapleton and Lee Remick were able to breathe any kind of life into the screen adaptations of his books.  Smiley is in a different class of writer from Hailey in quality, but perhaps not in terms of intention.  However, she doesn’t sell anywhere near like he did..  Even though A Thousand Acres was celebrated in its day, Lorrie Moore chose it as a current unjustly overlooked book in the May 2015 O magazine.  

     When Carole and I were chatting about writers a couple of weeks ago and I mentioned Smiley, she said, “Oh I got through ten acres of her big one and gave up.”  I posited that it was because of Smiley’s writing style.  It’s understated to the point of bland.  She strips some of Strunk & White’s The Elements of Style to their basic points and dissipates – actually, she pretty much erases – a strong individual voice.  Here’s the opening:

This would be ’82.  I was out at the Viceroy with Bobby Baldwin.  Bobby Baldwin was my one employee, which made us not quite friends, but we went out to the Viceroy almost every night.  My marriage was finished and his hadn’t started, so we spent a lot of time together that most everyone else we knew was spending with their families.  I didn’t mind.  My business card had the Viceroy’s number in the corner under “may also be reached at.”

    This could be the start of an updated private eye thriller or a literary equivalent to Cheers, which also premiered in 1982.  Instead, the Baldwin family members give it a sense of the wild, idiosyncratic hilarities of a Preston Sturges movie.  That’s the greatest attraction, rather than the gentle Mephistophelian comedy Smiley is more intent upon engineering through a narrator who isn’t very dramatic.

U.S. independence & LEGO @ Kenwood

Tiny plastic bricks + 

American iconic buildings = Wow!

U.S. Capitol Building

     We’d planned to go walking at Kenwood Towne Centre and, just as we were parking, Neil said, “Be prepared for a surprise.”  We walked through to the upper level and there was the Lincoln Memorial in LEGO!  There were over a dozen scale monuments on the upper level and three on the lower 

Liberty Bell

level.  The toughest to create would have been the Liberty Bell, which uses no curved bricks at all and depicts the entire description and the spectacular Capitol Building.  Upon seeing this model, we overheard one gentleman say, “Oh wow, there’s the White House.”  It’s great that it was a teachable moment for him.  

The Fantasy Good Earth Mall

     Look closely and you can see the statues of Jefferson and Lincoln in their respective memorials.  There were also a number of fantasy scenes incorporating American landscapes (urban, rural, a variation of Mt. Rushmore) as well on the upper level.  These were created using the full range of bricks and pieces available either through the LEGO store at Kenwood or through clubs.  

The White House

     This free exhibition runs through July 19 and it’s only being seen in select cities.  About a decade ago, Kenwood Mall billed itself as the place “to expect the unexpected.”  It coincided with a beautiful display of gargantuan sand castles.  The LEGO independence exhibit exceeds even that one.

lego-americana-roadshow

The Audience

Is Helen Mirren the Queen, 

or is the Queen Helen Mirren?

     How is it possible for one to catch an evening performance in London's West End and still be home to sleep in one's own bed that night? There's only one affordable way, and that is to view it at the movie theatre during a Fathom Event.  It was my pleasure to see The Audience starring Helen Mirren for which she recently won the Tony Award for Best Actress in a Play for the current Broadway run.

The Young Queen with PM Anthony Eden

     Mirren is best known for her Oscar-winning role in the 2006 film The Queen.  For this stage creation, based on the Queen's weekly meetings with her Prime Ministers, the same writer (Peter Morgan) has broadened our glimpse into Her Majesty's private life.  It's a premise that many like to imagine and the play only solidifies our trust in what those in the know can tell us.  It's all based on speculation, but one still feels a sense of truth after seeing it.  For me, that feeling comes from the convincing performance by Mirren.  

PM John Major,
The Secretary and The Queen

     The play starts with a little history about the Queen and her palace through the eyes (and ears) of her secretary who helps carry the plot from PM to PM.  The other significant device that helps pull one into their world is that it is not presented in chronological order.  That allowed for some rather magical onstage moments with Mirren being transformed from the 1990s back to her first meeting with Churchill.  Costumes, wigs and makeup all assist in transforming Mirren to her teens, but it is her changed voice and movements that are so remarkable.  In the second act, it happens again with her going from the 1950s up to present time right before one's eyes.

At Balmoral with Harold Wilson

     The scenes were sprinkled with several comedic situations, mostly provided by Harold Wilson and Maggie Thatcher.  The inner thoughts of the Queen are handled through conversations with her onstage teenage self offering some of the most poignant scenes of the performance.  The set design subtly changed for the periodic palace remodels and a surrealistic indoor/outdoor scene at Balmoral Castle in Scotland.  The lighting was exquisite, taking a large set and crafting it into a more intimate space.

     It's most likely that this was a one time onscreen performance.  However, look for it in a possible dvd release.  It'll be worth the wait.

http://www.fathomevents.co

There Are Two Sides to Cheapside Cafe

The one that I liked, and the questionable one

Chorizo Egg Sandwich

     Let's get the likable thing out there first…the food.  We met Katy and Denny there for Sunday Brunch and between the four of us, three chose the Chorizo Egg Sandwich served on a Ciabatta bun with green chile and cheddar cheese.  They all really enjoyed the spicy edge it had.  I'm always attracted 

Muffaletta

to a Muffaletta, the classic New Orleans concoction that is rarely prepared correctly away from the Big Easy.  I can't say this was dead on, but it was a respectable northern version with a flavorful olive tapenade.  

The Interior After the Morning Rush

     Its location is at Eighth Street and Cheapside Alley, hence the name.  Please don't be fooled into thinking this might be an affordable cafe.  Instead, it appears to be a place to be (or be seen) as our downtown continues to unfold into a full-fledged livable neighborhood.  The questionable part hit me as soon as we entered.  It's a simple space that has had much thought put into the design of white walls and weathered wood, but the set up was what I would term "silenced chaos".  Was there a host–something I would expect from a "cafe"? No, it's actually a walkup, order, sit down and hope that you end up with your order dining establishment.  The menu board, although simple, does take some studying and it was inconveniently located on the side wall where people were lined up against it to place their orders.  I only wish there had been more thought put into the space layout.  

Teepee Dining Room and Outdoor Picnic Tables

     Given the crowd, we chose a seat outside at one of the picnic tables made from the same wood used throughout.  Now the question was whether our food and drinks would arrive.  They did, very simply presented as the rest of the experience…everything on oversized plates with no garnish.  

      It's all a very simple place.

 

cheapsidecafe.com