The Muppets Transports Me to My 10-Year-Old Self

I was thrilled that my first movie with Jackson was one that he stayed awake and behaved for and that I absolutely loved. I might not have laughed so much since The Hangover.

The Muppets tapped both my funny bone and my sense of nostalgia. I actually choked up during some of the classic Muppets tunes reprised here. And lead actor Jason Segal is the secret weapon as one of the creators of the story, which is textbook Muppets but also really, really funny.

Amy Adams and Chris Cooper are also cast really well respectively as Segal's girlfriend and the oil-tycoon bad guy. The price of admission is worth it based on the cameos alone. What's interesting is that the cameos complement, rather than overtake, the performances of the stars and the muppets. Some of the biggest cameos, like George Clooney and Mila Kunis, are tellingly left on the cutting-room floor.

This is a classic, at the level of the original Muppet Movie and the best of The Muppet Shows.

***** out of ***** stars

What Would Happen If a Bunch of People Disappeared? "The Leftovers" Has Your Answers

With clearly great titles in his cannon (Election, The Abstinence Teacher, and Little Children), I had been meaning to read some of Harvard creative-writing professor Tom Perrotta's fiction for a while. And with the apocalyptic subject matter of his new book, The Leftovers, the time was finally right.

The story centers on various groups of loosely intertwined people in the nowhere town of Mapleton, which serves as a setting and microcosm of a world that has suddenly lost about half of its inhabitants. They all disappeared at the same moment in time - October 14 - and the book's title refers to the people who remain. Nearly all the characters have been devastatingly crushed and bewildered by the loss of loved ones.

Kevin Garvey is the town's mayor and his wife remains, but she has left him to join the Guilty Remnant, a secretive and creepy, all-white-wearing cult. His daughter remains but has become wayward and hangs around with a best friend who has a complicated relationship with Kevin. Meanwhile, Kevin has a new girlfriend whose entire family disappeared moments after an argument at the dinning-room table and his son has dropped out of college to follow a questionable guru named Holy Wayne around the country.

As weird as it sounds, the book is much, much less about science fiction or fantasy than it is about love, loss, family connections and lack thereof, and it is really a psychological study masked as a page-turner. Pretty phenomenal and impressive.

****1/2 out of ***** stars

Joseph Gordon-Levitt Fills Up My Time With a Mixed Bag of Movie Moments

Somehow the last two movies I've seen have been vehicles for former 3rd Rock From the Sun child star Joseph Gordon-Levitt -- 2010's Hesher and 2011's 50/50.

Everything about 50/50 should make it no better than a Lifetime movie about living with cancer. Gordon-Levitt plays a young worker at NPR who pals around with Seth Rogen and has a jerky girlfriend. When he discovers he has the disease, he is befriended by some fellow patients at the hospital. The performances  rise far above a TV melodrama, and make the movie at least worth watching.

Hesher is just weird. And slow. And pretty offensive. I guess the filmmakers were trying to show that loss can be a devastating thing. The ending (along with the middle and end) are just really ridiculous, meandering, heavy, and none of the sad-sack characters are too worthy of sympathy. Gordon-Levitt plays some sort of troubled but prophet-like Metallica-type longhair. We never really find out much about why he is the way he is. I can't think of a good reason that Natalie Portman (who co-produced it) and Rainn Wilson got involved.

It seems, at least with 50/50, that Gordon-Levitt has gotten back on track after the Hesher misstep. He was putting together a halfway decent little run before that, with Inception and (500) Days of Summer.

50/50
*** out of ***** stars

Hesher
* out of ***** stars

Classic Reads: Anna Karenina Feels Global Growing Pains

Find the other parts of this ongoing series of "Classic Reads" in the Books section.

Unlike the other great 19th-century Russian author, Dostoievsky and his peasants and scallywags, Leo Tolstoy examined the elite. Anna Karenina is the tale of a Russian aristocratic class being turned upside-down by the import of Western morals.

Anna and her brother, Stepan, are both having affairs outside their marriages. Soon enough, Anna becomes pregnant with her suitor Count Vronsky's child. She tells her husband, Alexey, who coldly worries more about his social and business reputation, determining that a divorce would only disgrace him.

Vronsky, meanwhile, is desperate to be with Anna. He attempts to kill himself. Finally, Anna decides to run away from St. Petersburg to Italy with him. They birth a healthy little boy. Soon, they return to Russia, but find themselves ostracized. This causes them to fight, she accuses him of being unfaithful, and she begins to take morphine as a way to cope with her increasingly troubled life.

The sad story ends with more fighting between the two lovers, and Anna kills herself by jumping in front of a train.

Anna Karenina is almost farcically tragic, with new problems appearing for most of the characters around just about every turn. It is an early tale of the growing pains of globalization.

The Sea and Cake Plays the Perfect Show

I've been a long-time, die-hard fan of Chicago jazz-pop masters The Sea and Cake since their earliest records in 1994-1995. But, somehow, I had never caught them live. And last night at D.C.'s Black Cat, the band didn't disappoint.

McEntire, Claridge, Prekop, and Prewitt

The four musicians look like average middle-aged guys, but when they started playing, they were the coolest and one of the most mesmerizing bands I've seen in a long time. The short video above of one of their classic tunes does a pretty good job of capturing some of their magic.

Sam Prekop leads the band with unusual guitar picking and strumming styles, and vocals that are gorgeous yet at the same time don't really matter much in relation to the rest of the powerful music being played. Archer Prewitt masterfully blends his wildly inventive lead guitar playing with Prekop's stylings.

Meanwhile, Eric Claridge muscles his bass into sounds that reach the most pleasurable expanses of the listener's brain and drummer John McEntire freaks out with his precise smashes and joyously weird facial expressions.

I love this band. And although I really couldn't tell you what the set list was, it just didn't matter. All the songs were so good that when they finally got around to playing "Parasol" from 1995's perfect album Nassau as the set-closer, it was simply icing on the cake to a perfect show.

***** out of ***** stars

Late-Summer Travels in Memphis, Delaware, and (October!) Ocean Swimming

The family in Rehoboth

My wife Rachel impressively dashed through a 10K race around the Dogfish Head brewery in Delaware several weeks ago, and the family got to enjoy a rainy weekend at Bethany and Rehoboth beaches.

Luckily, the weather was much better (surprisingly, for late October) when we returned for another beach trip at Assateague Island in Maryland, where we biked, body surfed, camped out in the sand with our neighbors, and stood safely away from the wild horses.

Jackson at Assateague

Finally, the late summer/early fall traveling concluded with a week of work in Olive Branch, Mississippi at The Nature Conservancy's science conference, where I helped with a media training, presented on how to communicate with various audiences, sat on a panel about communicating science, and, most importantly, went out for a night on the town at B.B. King's club on Beale Street in nearby Memphis, Tennessee.

Mural in the gift shop at B.B. King's Beale Street nightclub

Me (on the left) with colleagues from Ohio

A Bright New Boise Begins An Apocalyptic Season at Woolly Mammoth

Photo by Stan Barouh

The Woolly Mammoth's new season is devoted to plays about the apocalypse. As readers of this blog know, I'm a big fan of "end days" stories, so I'm happy to be a season-ticket holder right about now.

The first offering is A Bright New Boise, which takes place mostly in a Wal-Mart-like break room at a retail store in Boise named Hobby Lobby. Will, a former member of an evangelical, cult-like church is escaping his dark past by taking a job there.

His real motive is to reconnect with his long-abandoned son, who also works at the store. But, hard as he tries to build a new life and fix his past mistakes, Will finds it hard to break out of his pattern of constantly waiting for that exact moment when the world will end.

Playwright Samuel D. Hunter's story reminds me a little of Wiener Sausage: The Musical!, my own play with writing partner Dan Sullivan. The big-box setting. The philosophical musings on corporations. The misguided characters. The end of the world. These topics are competing in a crowded field these days, so the fact that Hunter and the actors in the Woolly's production do such a great job is testament to the power of this play.

**** out of ***** stars

CARDINALS

I'm pretty lucky to have experienced three World Series championships so far in my lifetime. 1982. 2006. 2011.

Classic Reads: For Whom the Bell Tolls Previews World War II

Find the other parts of this ongoing series of "Classic Reads" in the Books section.


I don't like 1940's For Whom the Bell Tolls as much as Ernest Hemingway's other master war story, A Farewell to Arms, but that said, this is still better than 99 percent of all other novels.

Robert Jordan is a young American fighting the Fascists, led by Francisco Franco, in the Spanish Civil War, what was a prelude to the gory World War II. He and his elderly guide Anselmo are marching through the mountains of Spain, behind Fascist enemy lines, to meet another similar band of guerrillas, led by the drunken Pablo and his fierce and commandeering wife Pilar. Their plan is to blow up a bridge along with a good amount of Fascist soldiers, who frequently cross the bridge.

Meanwhile, a young girl named Maria has been rescued from starvation, torture, rape, and the execution of her parents at the hands of a band of Fascists. She is convinced nobody will ever be able to love her again, but Jordan convinces her this isn't true and they fall in love.

Along the way, Jordan encounters the remains of another guerrilla leader, El Sordo, and his band that has been slaughtered and beheaded by the Fascists. El Sordo's team was also supposed to help with the bridge scheme, so their defeat makes the plot look even more grim and hopeless. Making matters all the more impossible, Pablo steals the detonator and blasting caps one night while Jordan sleeps, meaning they will have to try and explode the bridge with the more-dangerous method of grenades.

Pablo returns right before the mission is to begin. Jordan uses his original tools and, sure enough, the bridge blows up. But the elderly Anselmo is killed by a flying steel fragment. Jordan, Pablo, Pilar, and Maria are soon trapped by Fascist troops, who fire at them. Jordan insists on being the last of the group to cross a dangerous road, and enemy fire drops his horse right on top of him. The others are able to drag him out of the line of fire, but he knows his leg is crushed. He voices his love to Maria and the others drag her away.

As Jordan contemplates his life in its waning moments, he decides he is not dying in vain. He fought for the common people and he knows he has helped lead them on a long road to eventual victory.

For Whom the Bell Tolls features the classic battle between the hopeful and good Jordan and Anselmo and the despaired, drunken, and bad Pablo. That gives the novel its heft and global meaning, and it is certainly the best story ever told about the Spanish Civil War.

Yuck Rocks. Black Cat Sound Guys Don't Rock.

Good friend Fran Chung wrote up the following review for the entertaining Yuck show the other night at the Black Cat in D.C. I'm just republishing his excellent take (which I completely agree with, and which appeared with this photo and others in DCist) rather than wallow through my own mixed emotions of seeing the show on the same night I got in my first car accident in decades (I'm fine, it wasn't my fault, and our Honda Fit didn't fare too badly). Despite that unfortunate distraction, I still give the show **** out of ***** stars. It was not as good as their recorded work, but I'm chalking that up mostly to the fact that the Black Cat sound engineers seem to be getting worse and worse every show I see there.

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The label "1990s revivalists" follows Yuck around inexorably, sometimes an epithet, often a term of endearment, always an apt descriptor for their retro-leaning indie-rock sound. At the Black Cat on Wednesday night, the London-based four-piece wore it as a badge of honor, putting their own youthful spin on familiar tropes from the 20th-century's musically fecund final decade.

On the set-opening "The Base of a Dream is Empty", the guitars of Daniel Blumberg and Max Bloom trailed feedback before the band built up a creamy wall of sound that instantly called My Bloody Valentine to mind. A few songs later, Blumberg affected a J Mascis-like drawl during "The Wall", while "Suicide Policeman" came off as a strummy, mid-tempo ballad reminiscent of early Belle & Sebastian, complete with tender boy-girl harmonies. Bassist Mariko Doi took a lead-vocal turn on the appropriately-titled "Georgia", which sounded like it could have been a lost outtake from one of Yo La Tengo's classic early-'90s albums.

At the heart of the set came "Get Away", Yuck's finest song, and the one that best crystallizes their highly referential, yet distinctly appealing musical aesthetic. Bloom's bright lead guitar melodies sliced through the fuzzed-out mix on top of a throbbing, Pixies-esque bassline that propelled the song forward until Blumberg launched it into the stratosphere with his soaringly anthemic Sparklehorse-meets-Weezer hook. "Summer sun says get out more," Blumberg sang, "I need you, I want you, but I can't get this feeling off my mind." These were trite, jejune sentiments that have been expressed in a thousand tunes, but rarely with as much infectious verve.

By the end of their brisk, hour-long performance, Yuck had run through much of their self-titled debut LP, adding the bonus cut "Soothe Me" and the B-side "Milkshake". As the band capped their set with another Kevin Shields homage, "Rubber", it seemed fair to wonder what the quartet could do for a second act. As fertile a trove of musical resources as the '90s are, surely they are not inexhaustible, and one hopes the band's next record will explore some different territories. For now, though, it's probably best to just go along and enjoy the nostalgic ride.