Month: January 2011

Categories
Arts

The King’s Speech; R, 111 minutes; Regal Downtown Mall 6

Having grown up with a strict father (Michael Gambon) and a prominent older brother (Guy Pearce), an otherwise capable and courtly fellow (Colin Firth) finds himself with a problem. He stutters, severely.

Colin Firth plays Bertie, a stuttering Duke who finds himself crowned King George VI of England just as the country goes to war.

Unfortunately for him, he’s the Duke of York, at a time when the proliferation of radio has compounded the already unpleasant duty of public speaking. Fortunately for him, his enterprising wife (Helena Bonham Carter) seeks help from a talented, if unconventional, speech therapist (Geoffrey Rush).

With his dignity to protect (or perhaps only his battered pride) the duke at first resists treatment from this man, who happens also to be a commoner—and a proud one, at that. Then, to everyone’s surprise, the stammerer inherits the throne. Then his nation goes to war, and his public speaking only gets harder and more necessary. True story.
The movie’s title refers both to the difficult evolution of one man’s diction and to a momentous radio address he delivered to his people in 1939, dramatized climactically here as the greatest challenge of his career.

Call it a glossy inspirational inversion of Pygmalion, or a sports flick for those who prefer royals to athletes. But there’s no denying the universal appeal of this tastefully wrapped package. Director Tom Hooper, also of The Damned United and the “John Adams” series, obviously is at ease with recreating history and working with actors—and never mind that screenwriter David Seidler’s most recent credit before this was the David Carradine TV movie “Kung Fu Killer.” Here, Seidler’s solid script shows the consideration of humility and civility that we always say the movies lack. Also, the ennobling performances by Firth and Rush are as great and full as they’ve ever been.

The speech impediment isn’t Firth’s only technical challenge. The delicate combination of royal entitlement and abashed anguish can’t be as easy to humanize as he makes it seem. For Rush, the speech therapist is the perfect role. Warmth and compassion are built in, but the character has enough restraint to temper his innate theatricality.

The King’s Speech gets a little proud of itself for its carefully controlled emotional manipulation, and at times we can practically smell the pride on Bonham Carter’s breath. But of course she, like the rest of them, is simply doing her part for king and country and awards campaign. A well-bred crowd-pleaser and so obviously an Oscar magnet that it’s equally obvious to say so, The King’s Speech also happens to be a good movie. We’ll all feel better when the word gets out.

Categories
Arts

“Live to Dance,” “The Cape,” “Shameless”

“Live to Dance”
Tuesday-Wednesday 8pm, CBS
I’m all for the resurgence of dance in pop culture, but I wonder if we haven’t hit the saturation point with televised dance competitions. I guess we’ll find out. CBS tries its hand at the genre with this new show, headed up by Paula Abdul, who acts as both a mentor to the dancers and head judge. She’s joined by Michael Jackson’s former choreographer Travis Payne and ex-Pussycat Doll Kimberly Wyatt. The show is open to dancers from all styles, of any age, and even groups, making it a combination of “So You Think You Can Dance” and “America’s Best Dance Crew.” The question is, will people keep watching once “Idol” starts up against it in a few weeks?

“The Cape”
Saturday 9pm, NBC
Superhero shows have had a rough go of it recently. “Heroes” went to hell after Season 1, and “No Ordinary Family” is racking up less-than-extraordinary ratings. This new entry doesn’t even try to do the postmodern route, going straight for balls-out heroics, capes, super villains and secret identities. David Lyons (“E.R.”) stars as an honest cop on a corrupt police force who is framed for a bunch of murders, and then fakes his own death. Determined to clean up his city, he falls in with a group of circus freaks/bank robbers and trains to take on the mantle of his son’s favorite comic-book vigilante, The Cape. The show could go really wrong really fast, but in the plus column are James Frain, who was awesome as crazy vampire Franklin on “True Blood” last season (he plays the bad guy here), and nerd masturbation bait Summer Glau as a conspiracy-theorist blogger.

“Shameless”
Sunday 10pm, Showtime
Showtime continues its streak of getting well respected, underserved actors and putting them in comedies with gonzo premises (see: Mary Louise Parker in “Weeds,” Laura Linney in “The Big C,” Edie Falco in “Nurse Jackie,” etc.). This time it’s William H. Macy’s turn, as he stars as Frank Gallagher, the self-destructive single father of a brood of working-class Irish Chicagoans. He spends what little money he has on booze and, well, booze. His six kids are similarly dysfunctional, from the insecure, directionless teen daughter (Emmy Rossum, Phantom of the Opera) to the science whiz who trades tutoring for sex, to the closeted gay son in Army ROTC.

 

Categories
News

Kluge lenders pour it on

If local land were local wine, then Vineyard Estates—a luxury real estate development envisioned by Patricia Kluge and Bill Moses—might be corked. Months after the Virginia winery owners bought back one foreclosed lot for a price of $3.67 million, five more lots in the project’s Meadows Estates subdivision on Blenheim Road in Albemarle County are scheduled for a January 11 auction.

Patricia Kluge

Every vintage has a history: In July 2002, the UVA Foundation sold the 123-acre Maxwell Farm—a piece of John Kluge’s 7,379-acre gift to the university—to a private partnership called House and Garden Company LLC. That partnership later became Kluge Estate Winery & Vineyard, which transferred the property to Patricia Kluge herself before the land reached its current owner, Vineyard Estates LLC. The acreage was subdivided into a handful of lots that Vineyard Estates LLC (Kluge and her husband Moses) planned to dot with million-dollar mansions.

Almost eight years later, the proverbial sparkling white bubbles seem ready to burst. In April, Vineyard Estates LLC settled out of court a $1.9 million breach-of-contract lawsuit brought by Frank Hardy, Inc. In December, locally based Farm Credit of the Virginias purchased the Kluge Estate Winery & Vineyard with a single bid of $19 million at another foreclosure auction; the bank holds a lien on the property to the tune of $34.8 million. Farm Credit also holds a secondary lien on Albemarle House, the former home of Kluge and Moses. Albemarle House is currently listed at $24 million, down from a hefty $100 million initial asking price.

Now, prompted by Vineyard Estates’ default on an $8.2 million loan from locally based lienholder Sonabank, five more Meadows Estates lots will be auctioned on the Albemarle County Circuit Court steps. The lots total more than 120 acres and are assessed at roughly $7 million.

In a prepared statement, Bill Moses said last week that Vineyard Estates “has suffered from a lack of sales as have many other real estate projects during the recent economic downturn,” and mentioned the 2009 bankruptcy of development partner First Colony Resorts.

“With the combination of these events, the financing bank for the project has found itself under severe pressure to take action,” said Moses. “We remain hopeful that given various on-going negotiations, the vision we have had for helping this  project benefit the county as well as the Virginia wine industry may still be able to be realized.” Moses did not respond to requests for additional comment.

There is also another plot of land that Farm Credit is eager to get its hands on. In a civil suit filed in Albemarle County Circuit Court, Farm Credit alleges that Kluge and Moses fraudulently transferred a seven-acre parcel into a trust for Kluge’s son—a charge that Kluge and Moses’ attorney, Edward B. MacMahon, Jr. called “ridiculous.” In the suit, Farm Credit asks that the transfer be voided and the land sold at auction.

MacMahon responded on his clients’ behalf, and denied that the property transfer was meant to conceal the land from Farm Credit. The response also says Farm Credit’s suit fails to make an adequate claim for the property, and states that the plaintiff has “unclean hands”—a statement on which neither MacMahon nor Moses would elaborate.

Categories
News

At UVA, growth vs. tuition

During the next four to five years, UVA President Teresa Sullivan hopes to increase the student body by 1,400 undergraduates and 100 graduate students, a move that would confer degrees on more than 1,000 Virginians while enrolling enough out-of-staters to keep tuition in check. It could also rearrange UVA’s academic priorities, make room for dozens of new faculty members, and improve the school’s current student-faculty ratio—so long as sufficient state funding comes through.

If UVA gets sufficient state support, then President Sullivan can add nearly 100 new faculty positions to accommodate a 1,500-student increase.

Sullivan’s proposal answers pressure from the Governor’s Commission on Higher Education Reform, Innovation, and Investment. That program, founded in June, seeks to put more Virginians through college and bolster many of the left-brain disciplines that Governor McDonnell has said will “equip Virginians to succeed at the highest levels of global economic competition.” Chief among these are STEM programs—a tidy acronym of Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math.

If STEM prioritization has some at the university nervous, then a perceived lack of resources to support growth is even more pressing. Sullivan’s proposal aims to keep tuition steady following an increase earlier this year. In June, the UVA Board of Visitors approved tuition increases of $956 for in-state students and $1,902 for out-of-state students. As long as the Commonwealth follows through on funding, Sullivan contends, UVA should have no trouble expanding.

“What we don’t have are the faculty,” says University Vice President and Chief Operating Officer Leonard Sandridge. “We have a plan to use the tuition and the state money…to accommodate those needs.” This plan would improve student-faculty ratios, currently at 18 to 1, by bringing on more than 90 new faculty members.

University officials were not prepared to get specific about how faculty spots would be divided among departments. However, Meredith Woo, Dean of the College and Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, says that the programs UVA intends to develop “range from areas of traditional strength such as the humanities to frontier areas in the sciences in which we are poised for distinction, such as global environmental challenges, human life span development, and cosmic origins.”

Those lofty-sounding goals are part of an ongoing commitment to improving research departments. Among these is one that certainly could fill many of the potential new faculty positions: a cross-disciplinary focus on the universe itself. This has already led to the on-grounds establishment of the North American ALMA Science Center—the American headquarters for studying data that the world’s most advanced radio telescope generates in Chile.

The University is also adding its Center for the Chemistry of the Universe, a collaboration between the Chemistry, Astronomy and Physics departments along with the School of Engeering. The Center is scheduled to enter its 10-year, $40 million Phase Two in 2011.

Though the plan is for now merely hypothetical, some worry that the emphasis on STEM programs and generating degrees could result in cuts to arts and sciences and graduate programs. Associate Vice President for Public Affairs Carol Wood insists that these concerns are unfounded. “The goal is to increase quality in the STEM disciplines, [while] at the same time preserving the extraordinary quality that the University has long been known for in the liberal arts,” she says. “There is no intention to sacrifice one for the other.” 

Categories
Living

Hole'd up?

When life hands you lemons, you make lemonade. When life hands you a restaurant, you make good, old-fashioned comfort food. That is, not until you overhaul the whole place.

Lex Gibson (right) and Naomi Annable have been in full-on renovation mode for six months now, doing nearly all the construction work (and even some electrical) on their own. "We just want to create a nice home for everyone—and for ourselves," Gibson says.

That’s how it went for Lex Gibson, who about six months ago was handed the keys to L7, Jim Baldi’s former Elliewood Avenue Asian fusion spot, and given the reins to do as she pleased. When Restaurantarama first spoke to her in August, she was hopeful The Pigeon Hole, as she named it, would be up and running by the middle of that month. As it turned out, the building she inherited was itself somewhat of a, excuse the pun, lemon.

“We’ve been learning a lot about construction,” says her business partner, Naomi Annable. The women, who met while working at Dr. Ho’s Humble Pie, have put blood, sweat and tears into the space’s renovation, refinishing floors, retiling the bathroom, patching holes—and those are just structural improvements. The duo has big plans for the decor, too. They’ve handstained table tops and gathered a slew of mismatched white plates and silverware. Annable has amassed quite the collection of salt and pepper shakers, anything from a radish and cucumber-shaped set to a pair of roosters.

“If this fails,” Gibson says, “we could probably start a salt and pepper shaker museum.”
But let’s talk food. Restaurantarama got a peek at the menu: The all-day breakfast spot has plans to offer a $5 bag lunch (complete with a sweet note, just like Mom used to include), different kinds of sammiches (their word, not ours) and, for Sunday brunch, The Crabby Florentine, among other things. They’ll also serve fresh squeezed juices (carrot, apple and, coincidentally, lemonade) and authentic mint juleps. In other words, they’ve thought of every last detail.

“When you run a restaurant,” Annable says, “you have so many opportunities to touch people throughout the day.”

Adds Gibson, “You have the opportunity to turn someone’s day around. I just want [coming to eat here] to be an experience.”

The restaurant’s opening date (they hope for real this time) is January 18.

 

Light on its feet

One thing’s for sure: Folks in Orange County aren’t going hungry. Restaurantarama previously reported the opening of Vintage at the Inn at Willow Grove and, as of this month, Orange just gained another eatery: The Light Well, located in the old Rickett’s Drugstore Building at 110 E. Main St. It touts itself as “coffee, kitchen, tavern” and offers healthy, local and organic ingredients in original homemade recipes—including many veggie options.  

Categories
Living

What difference does a year make?

The start of a new year is a natural time to reflect upon your past year’s accomplishments. Perhaps you got a new job, lost weight, or quit smoking, but for wineries whose wines are biding time in the cellar before release, there is little concrete to reflect upon. The success of a vintage is projected as early as harvest, but there’s no way of knowing how good it will be before tasting the finished wine.

A wine’s vintage describes the year its grapes were harvested. Exact percentages vary by country, but for the most part, for a label to list the vintage year, 85 percent of the wine must come from grapes harvested that year. If a blend of grapes from two years or more is used, the wine is called non-vintage (NV) or multi-vintage (MV). Most Champagne and sparkling wine producers blend wines from different years to achieve a consistent house style called a cuvée.

Still wines almost always indicate vintages, but their importance is widely disputed. Regions in the colder limits of wine production are more affected because a short or cool growing season can lead to under-ripe grapes, which make underdeveloped wine. We know this all too well in Virginia. Vintage: The Winemaker’s Year, a documentary released last fall, focuses on our area’s unpredictable weather as the tipping point between a losing and a winning vintage. But even when Mother Nature rebels, our schooled winemakers have an arsenal of skills to mitigate uncooperative weather. In the warmer, drier climates of other New World regions, the systematic use of irrigation makes for more uniform growing conditions and, in turn, more product uniformity year after year.

It’s a whole different story for wines from the highly prestigious region of Bordeaux. Bordeaux primeurs or “futures” are sold two years in advance in a custom that dates back to the 18th century. Needing at least 10 years of age to pacify their ruthless tannins, the wines of Bordeaux have always been for the investor. Beginning in April, barrel tastes of the most recent vintage are offered to the trade, media and critics (including one well-known score master), and the months to follow are a frenzy of price-setting and hype-making until you learn that 2009 is the vintage of the decade! Chateaux get cash flow and collectors get a deal, because who knows how much the “best vintage ever!” will fetch on the retail market two years from now. But, when a famous Bordelais saying goes, “The best vintage is the one we have to sell,” how certain can we be that we aren’t being hoodwinked into spending megabucks on juice that’s no better than last year’s or the year before that?

We can never be certain. But, since wine from a great region is even better in a good year, and since today’s winemakers can make good wine even in a bad year, buying wine without consulting a vintage chart isn’t much of a gamble. It may even be one of your finest accomplishments of the year—after you taste it, of course.

Charlottesville’s Locavore Hunter talks about the invasivore diet

If beef is what’s for dinner, then Canada goose may be the invasivore’s alternative. So says Jackson Landers, the "Locavore Hunter" who first caught C-VILLE’s attention with his "Deer Hunting for Locavores" course and is currently at work on Eating Aliens, in which he writes about making meals from different ecological menaces.

Landers appeared in Sunday’s New York Times to discuss how a diet of invasive species can sustain a person as well as his immediate ecosystem. James Gorman writes that Landers "has branched out from the locavore life to invasives, and lionfish are one target. But as he has pushed the envelope of the invasivore approach, he has hunted and eaten feral pigs, two species of iguana, armadillos, starlings, pigeons and resident Canada geese."

"Thus far I seem to be the only person around who is dead serious about actually making a point of killing and eating invasive species," Landers wrote on his blog after the Sunday issue was published. "But it’s nice to see I’ve got some company out there who is at least thinking in that direction."

UPDATE: Local woman, 27, dies in Preston Avenue parking lot

UPDATE: 3:18pm

Charlottesville police have identified the woman as Courtney Chambers, a Management Services Corporation employee. Chambers was found in her own vehicle after she failed to return to work following a lunch break. For a full report, read below.

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UPDATE: 11:45am

Charlottesville police say the 27-year-old woman who died yesterday afternoon in a parking lot near Preston Avenue appears to have experienced a "medical issue." Lieutenant Ronnie Roberts tells C-VILLE that local police are still waiting on the results of an autopsy for an official cause of death.

The woman, confirmed as a local resident, was found in a car located in a parking lot at the Oxford Hill Apartments, near the intersection of Preston and Madison avenues. Roberts could not immediately confirm whether the car belonged to the deceased woman.

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Charlottesville police are awaiting autopsy results for a 27-year-old woman who died yesterday afternoon in a parking lot in the 1200 block of Preston Avenue.

According to a media release from Lieutenant Ronnie Roberts, a passerby noticed "a female in a car who appeared to be in need of medical assistance." The woman died on the scene. As of yesterday evening, Charlottesville police reported no signs of foul play, and continued to investigate the incident. At present, no information has been released about the woman’s identity.

Below, an approximate map of 1200 Preston Avenue

 


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Hypocrite Press’ latest is a guide for Charlottesvillle’s “unresidenced”

Plenty of treats inside this week’s paper, folks. In the Feedback column is an interview with Wes Swing about his new record, Through a Fogged Glass; on the Screens page, a review of the acclaimed new Colin Firth vehicle The King’s Speech; and in this week’s Open Studio an interview with Hypocrite Press founder Matthew Farrell.

The self-publishing fad, made available by low-cost options through the Internet, has mostly been confined to hobbyists, scrapbookers looking to go a step further, or rich writers willing to pick up the tab for a book no publisher is willing to put out. But Farrell’s 19-year-old old Hypocrite Press predates fads, and skirts convention with a brave new book, street to forest: a scattered guide for the charlottesville unresidenced, that caters to a contingent largely unable to buy books: the homeless.

In a town where, like many other towns, communication between the haves and the have-nots is often limited to solicitations by the latter, street to forest is a great local-specific resource. The section "Lawmakers and the Law," includes word-for-word reprints of city laws for panhandling, public urination and defecation and solicitation, among other laws that affect those between (or without) homes. The second section, "Getting By," covers DIY gynecology, local fishing holes and "plants for smoking." For those with homes, a handy guidebook goes a long way to clarify why a homeless person is doing something that seems quite strange. (For example, stockings are a great insulator.)

Matthew Farrell says in this week’s Open Studio, "I do things that are like art because it amuses me and because I think it torments people, who are actually artists, into doing better work."


Farrell writes of the book’s arrangement, "I have tried to make it discontinuous and chaotic, to match the lives of its readers, and their time," and suggests that readers not go from cover to cover but to "flip through it in an idle diversionary moment." The book’s rough edges are readily apparent on its list of contributors, which includes concerned citizen Stratton Salidis, sometime music critic and B.C. member Stephen Barling, as well as Eric Lott and Lydia Moyer (both UVA professors) and the filmmaker Johnny St. Ours.

If you’re between homes, need to leave yours, or simply into urban adventure, find a copy of this book. Read more about Charlottesville’s homeless here. Check out Hypocrite Press here.

street to forest is the latest from Matthew Farrell’s Hypocrite Press.

Howard University and Virginia Tuesday JPJ 7 p.m.

Virginia plays the seventh-game of their current eight-game home-stand Tuesday night at the JPJ.

Howard University is Virginia’s opponent, and the game is scheduled to begin at seven o’clock.

Virginia is 9-5 so far in the 2010-11 season, and Howard is 2-10. Virginia’s leading scorer Mike Scott will not dress, and just night be done for the season because of problems with his surgically-repaired ankle. If that is the case, Virginia will appeal to the NCAA in order for Scott to gain a fifth-year of eligibility.

Also, Virginia football player and current Junior defensive end Zane Parr announced today that he will forego his senior season and will enter the NFL Draft. Parr made 48 tackles in 2010, and I’m almost certain that another year at Virginia would have been in his best interest athletically, but if he can be drafted in the first three-rounds then it might just prove me wrong.

I follow the NFL Draft religiously, and having watched every minute of the Draft for the past 8 years, I just don’t see Parr going till the sixth or seventh round at best. Good luck Zane! Go Hoos!