Your kid is struggling in school. You could get him a tutor. You could motivate him to work harder. You could provide all the love and support needed to make him want to be a better student.
Or you could just buy him a desk so nice he won’t be able to stay away from the books.
And just how do you come up with a desk like that? You gotta go built-in, and you gotta do it right. Here’s what you need to know to make your kid’s own personal study nook (or your own home office) come up aces.
Prepare your pocketbook
David Marshall of Albion Cabinets & Stairs doesn’t mince words about the cost of a custom desk. “Oh yeah,” he says. “Doing a built-in is more expensive than going to Lowe’s.”
But he insists it’s worth it—you’re paying for a designer to come to your home, examine your specific space and come up with the perfect piece. Plus, the costs can vary depending on the features you’re looking for.
Marshall says it’s tough to guess at the price of a built-in desk, but he asks his clients to give him as much info as they can about their style to ensure everyone feels they get what they paid for.
Matt Gruber of Peak Builders agrees the cost could range anywhere from a couple hundred dollars for a basic desk to several thousand dollars. He also says homeowners considering a built-in should think about what it might do to their resale value.
“Built-ins in a lot of ways are a really personalized thing,” he says. “People that are in their forever home tend to focus on maximizing their space, but it’s an expense. In the housing boom everybody was slapping things together, and no one really took the time to think about built-ins. People have calmed down and are chewing on it more.”
Pick the right spot
Thinking of putting your little bookworm’s desk in his bedroom? Think twice. “A lot of times we’ve done built-ins for kids in a hallway upstairs or a common room, out in an area where parents can keep tabs,” Gruber says.
According to Gruber, the shape of your house will also inform the ideal location for your built-in. The best spots are natural nooks and crannies where the desk won’t “encroach on the rest of the room.” Positioning a built-in desk under a dormer or windows can also work (although distractions can be a concern).
“I wouldn’t take a flat wall and jam a desk against it,” Gruber says. “It will feel obtuse sitting in the room like that.”
Craft your look
Marshall says most of the non-cabinet built-in work he does these days is composed of paint-grade wood, allowing his clients to go with just about any finishing color. He recommends checking out Pinterest and houzz.com to find inspiration and is accustomed to his clients sharing the pieces they’ve found online with him.
Gruber points out that aspiring designers can choose from a variety of desktop materials, just as they would for kitchen counters or bathroom vanities. He’s seen homeowners go with granite and soapstone in addition to the more traditional stained wood, painted wood or glass tops.
Choose the right accessories
The finishing touches on your desk can be what makes the grade. Gruber says he recommends at least one large file drawer. “Most people that have a home office or kids need a large drawer that gives you one central storage location,” he says.
On top of file drawers, you might add a knee-space drawer (the pullout just under the desktop that can hold a keyboard or pens), a cubbyhole for a computer tower or bookshelves just above the desk.
These are just the sort of additions that’ll drive up the price of your new desk, but really, can you put a price on your budding scholar’s success?
Each one bigger and better than before—that’s how interior designer Moyanne Harding describes each of her four retail shops, the first of which she opened in 1994, just three years after establishing her design business, Interiors by Moyanne. A fifth location, The Downtown Design Center in Lynchburg, opens this month.
Harding graduated from Randolph Macon Women’s College in 1987 with a degree in studio art and design before qualifying as a member of the Interior Design Society. For her, she says, “It’s all about adding the finishing touches to a master plan and specific layers of style to make it a fabulous project.”
“I like to do it all—from construction and remodeling to placing soap in the soap dishes.” We asked Harding what she’s been interested in lately and what she’s working on next.
Photo: Adam BarnesPhoto: Adam Barnes
What are you currently reading?
A Rudrani Devi book.
What are you listening to?
Vintage Marvin Gaye and Eric Clapton.
What are you watching on TV?
BBC Masterpiece Theater, “Ancient Aliens” and “Forensic Files.”
What are you eating/drinking lately?
Eating: Homegrown tomatoes and mozzarella! Drinking: Bouchaine Chardonnay.
What are you working on?
Commercially, furnishings and upgrades in the Randolph College Wright dorm and classroom. Residentially, many, many wonderful homes in McLean, Richmond, Lynchburg and Charlottesville. Plus, my new location—The Downtown Design Center—in Lynchburg.
For more information on Moyanne Harding, visit moyanne.com.
You’d never know that Peter and Angela D.’s house, just off the Blue Ridge Parkway, isn’t brand new. Looking sharp in its ipe siding and modern lines, it appears to be a newly minted creation of Charlottesville design-build firm STOA, which just finished revamping it last December. What’s perhaps even more surprising is that it wasn’t a midcentury relic; it was originally built just 15 years ago.
Both the clients and the architects wanted the exterior of the home to be crisp and simple to allow the views—over the sprawling Shenandoah Valley and Allegheny Mountains—to dominate. That meant using an understated materials palette of ipe decking and hardiplank siding. Photo: Andrea HubbellPhoto: Andrea Hubbell
But the couple had two good reasons to radically remake their house after they bought it in 2012. For one thing, “It was very much not our style,” says Angela, comparing the place to the set of TV’s “Dynasty.” “There was vinyl siding and filigreed bits of metal everywhere.” (She and Peter preferred something more like Don Draper’s New York apartment on “Mad Men.”)
For another, there were major structural problems stemming from shoddy construction and the extreme weather that routinely visits this site on the very backbone of the Blue Ridge. A week after the couple moved in, Superstorm Sandy came calling. “We could see water penetrating through the windows and doors,” says Peter. “The fireplace and chimney were making tremendous noise and there was clear motion of air through the house.”
Nonetheless, most of the structural issues weren’t obvious until the couple hired STOA to remediate the existing chimney, a large stone affair unsuited to the site’s 60- to 80-mile-per-hour winds. Once the team began to inspect the house more closely, “We started realizing some of the building practices were not good,” says STOA’s Michael Savage. “There was no flashing around the windows; the bandboard was rotted.”
Special touches throughout the home emphasize STOA’s craftsmanship: large tiles on the bathroom walls, built-in shelving that extends from the living space to the bedroom. Photo: Andrea HubbellPhoto: Andrea HubbellPhoto: Andrea Hubbell
One thing led to another, and before long, STOA and its clients realized they had a major renovation on their hands. This suited STOA’s Justin Heiser, jokes Peter: “He had a vision right away. He says, ‘We’ve got to replace that front window,’ and I said, ‘Hi, my name’s Peter.’”
A total redo would provide the chance to do the necessary structural reinforcement, insulation and weatherproofing, and it would make the dwelling into something as beautiful as the site itself.
Clean and simple
The site is utterly spectacular: a westward view over the sprawling Shenandoah Valley and the Allegheny Mountains beyond. This is a place where the weather often becomes a panoramic display. When fog settles in the valley, says Peter, the foothills look like islands poking up through it.
With that sort of visual interest outside, says Savage, the design task for STOA was to stay out of the way. Both clients and architects wanted a crisp, simple look for the house that would allow the views to dominate.
One means to that end was a tightly limited materials palette. Whereas the original interior featured lots of beige walls, gold faucets and fussy trim, STOA pared it all down to a few key materials. Rich walnut wood plays against dark gray steel, stone and tile, and otherwise nearly everything is white: walls, trim, ceiling and counters.
The house is conceived as a whole, so the same materials that show up in the living space and kitchen—white oak, quartzite, walnut—can be found in the bedrooms and bathrooms, too. Everything is tied together. Photo: Andrea HubbellPhoto: Andrea HubbellPhoto: Andrea Hubbell
The house is conceived as a whole, so that the dark gray floor tile in the master bathroom, for example, echoes the hue of a steel fireplace surround and granite hearth a couple of rooms away. “We tried to tie absolutely everything together,” says Savage.
Most floors are white oak with a whitewash finish; countertops are made of the same white quartzite in kitchen and bathroom. Built-in shelves and paneling, made of walnut, cover the fireplace wall in the living space, then wrap around through the entrance to the bedroom and along the fireplace wall there—making a single edifice with multiple facets.
Another major change was to rethink the floor plan, which originally featured numerous angles. “Even the closets had 45-degree angles,” says Peter. “It was incredibly distracting.” With simpler, boxy rooms, things feel more open and serene. “It’s easy for your eye and your brain to take in what you’re seeing, and it looks much larger than it used to.”
The simplicity of style here makes it hard to overlook the fine craftsmanship that animates each surface. A few special touches provide luxury, like the large tile on the master bathroom walls, with its wavelike relief pattern. In the living room fireplace, ceramic aspen logs stand vertically as though still part of a forest, while the granite hearth runs the length of the wall and turns a corner to become an understated seating option.
Keeping out the cold
Design aside, there was plenty of nitty-gritty construction to be done in order to make the house safe and livable. During storms, rain and snow travel upward along the slope of the Blue Ridge from the valley floor—so the precipitation appears to be flying up instead of falling down. Snow would pile up along the north side of the house as high as the rafters.
Inadequate weatherproofing, says Peter, meant that “with the heating on full blast, we were unable to maintain any sense of heat.” He and Angela used to wear hats indoors on winter evenings. It was noisy, too, with the wind whistling through openings in the building envelope and shooting down the chimneys. “It was like living on a sailing ship,” says Angela.
The STOA crew added insulation, new sheathing and a rain screen, and worked hard to properly reinforce structural elements. Even the new deck—extra-wide, resplendent in ipe and stainless steel—has a weatherproofing function: It buffers the wind that comes up from below, keeping it away from the main living level.
The clients have been impressed not only with the boost in style to their dwelling, but its increased comfort and efficiency. “We wanted this to last a lifetime,” says Peter. “We wanted a sense that this was home and it was safe.”
The more dramatic the house, the more challenging it is to create an appropriate landscape surrounding it. When Jim and Cynthia Stultz built their Western Albemarle house in 2000, architects Daggett & Grigg drew them a plan for an imposing Palladian-style home, including an ambitious hardscape that featured a high semicircular stone wall along the rear terrace.
The right stonemason to make this plan a reality, the Stultzes thought, would be Shelton Sprouse, whose credentials, in local terms, could not be bested. Sprouse is the builder of the stone wall that surrounds the vegetable garden at Monticello—and he’s worked at Poplar Forest and Ash Lawn-Highland too, receiving an award from the American Institute of Architects for these presidential projects. He’s been a stonemason since the early 1970s, and spent the better part of a year working at the Stultzes’.
Photo: Virginia Hamrick
“I didn’t have any idea of the magnitude of the job,” says Jim Stultz. Sprouse sourced the stone himself from a local creek valley, and along with partner John Apperson, painstakingly selected each stone as the wall slowly rose.
“It’s intuitive,” says Sprouse, also a musician, of his approach to stonework. “It’s like playing drums in a samba band; if you don’t have that samba beat…”
The Stultzes’ terrace emerges from a covered section just off the back door and opens onto a western view, feeling both expansive and, because of a stand of tall trees nearby, sheltered. A linear stretch gives way to a rounded peninsula that holds planting beds as well as seating.
Photo: Virginia Hamrick
It’s this area that’s defined by the semicircular wall. From a set of easy steps down from the terrace, one is drawn along a path that follows the outside of the curve, and as the ground slopes away the wall becomes taller and taller, until—at the bottom of a second set of steps—it looms high overhead. Large, roundish stones punctuate its surface, otherwise composed mostly of narrow, angular pieces.
The scale and precision of the work more than match the house itself. The Stultzes were happy enough with Sprouse’s craftsmanship to bring him back for more. He built a hot tub surround just off the house, and contributed to what his clients call “the temple”: a circular, open structure with classical columns, inspired, says Stultz, by something Jefferson drew. The third president called this feature a “folly.”
Photo: Virginia Hamrick
“Montpelier has one,” says Stultz. “Jefferson’s never got built. I thought I’d give it my shot.”
Situated downhill from the house, along the treeline, the temple is part of a larger landscape scheme that includes two pools and several sets of steps, bisected by water running through a channel. Sprouse constructed walls to enclose the steps and—in an echo of the larger project up the hill—define the upper, circular pool.
Sprouse says that while he did consult with his clients about their preferences, he works from basic principles that have stood him well through four decades of practicing his craft. “My instinct has always been the horizontal lay,” he says. “I like the feeling of foundational stuff; I don’t like seeing stones up on end.”
Photo: Virginia Hamrick
THE BREAKDOWN
1,000 square feet
Primary materials or finishes: Hand-gathered stones from a creek in White Hall
Dan Zimmerman's past projects include a modern kitchen reimagined for more efficient storage and work spaces. Photo: Andrea Hubbell
“I didn’t know what my future would hold, but I wanted to spend my time in college drawing and making things.” That’s Dan Zimmerman on his visit to Virginia Tech, the school from where he’d later graduate with a degree in architecture. A constant sketcher growing up, Zimmerman was interested in art but wasn’t sure how that interest could lead to a career. Once he settled on Tech, he was hooked. “Many nights I’d end up sleeping under my desk after pulling an all-nighter in the studio,” he says.
After college, he moved to Winchester, where he worked for a small residential architecture firm before moving to New York City to be with his then-girlfriend (now his wife and colleague), Serena Gruia. A few years later, they set up shop in Charlottesville and, in 2007, partnered with Zach Snider’s Irons Construction to form Alloy Workshop, a design-build firm that specializes in modern structures for everything from aging in place to LEED-conscious homeowners. We asked him to tell us a little about his path to architecture, what he’s working on now and the state of the industry in our region.
Why architecture?
Architecture is an extremely broad profession which has allowed me to find and develop a career tailored to my natural and learned skills and strengths. For me, it is creative problem solving, design, entrepreneurship and community development. Other architects out there have a true love for building codes and zoning. It is said that architects are generalists. I have also heard it said that architects are a mile wide and a foot deep, while other professions can be a foot wide and a mile deep. I love that architecture allows me to explore so many varied paths within the profession.
The conversion of a law office to a hip space for a web-based development company. Photo Andrea Hubbell
Why did you choose to practice in Virginia?
I grew up in Winchester, so I am a Valley boy. I went to Virginia Tech and after college worked in Winchester, where I became licensed. Shortly after that I met my wife, Serena, who was living in New York City, so I moved there to be with her. After a few years, we decided to move out of the city so I could start my own practice. We chose Charlottesville because it was in Virginia; like Winchester, it is a small community where you can see a friend almost anywhere you go; like New York, there is something going on every night.
Photo: Andrea Hubbell
What was your life like as a child and how did it lead you to design?
Unlike my extroverted father, I was sort of shy as a child, so I would often hang back and observe. At age 4, I wasn’t drawing building sections or creating LEGO towers to the moon, but as I grew up, I drew and sketched daily. I was definitely interested in art, but I didn’t know how it could lead to a career. My father led me to architecture. We visited Virginia Tech when I was a sophomore in high school. I didn’t know the difference between engineering and architecture, so he thought it would be a good idea to find out. I don’t remember the answer they gave at the engineering school, but when I walked into the architecture building, I saw a cool, modern, light-filled building. It was also filled with desks surrounded by drawings and stacked high with models. At that moment I decided that architecture was what I wanted to do.
Tell us about your college studio experience. Was there a stand-out teacher who had a lasting impact on you?
It took me a semester to get my bearings, but after that I jumped into architecture and the studio experience with both feet. I was there all the time. I worked in the architecture school library and many nights I’d end up sleeping under my desk after pulling an all-nighter in the studio. I had several great professors who influenced me, but Jay Stoeckel stands out. Importantly, he was a practicing architect. He was constantly challenging me to think through the work. His critiques were brutally honest, sometimes insisting that we go back to the drawing board. Everyone should have a harsh critic (just ask my wife); it is ingrained in me the importance of making deliberate choices and being able to share the rationale behind them.
A spacious bathroom for a homeowner with compromised mobility. Photo: Andrea Hubbell
On process: How does it begin?
For me, it begins with talking to our clients, learning as much as we can about their daily lives; how they live and work or how their business is run. It also begins by establishing the parameters of the project: Are there zoning, regulatory, budgetary or schedule restrictions? The idea is to cast a very wide net of wants, desires and needs in the beginning, so as the project develops, design solutions and concepts can address more than one need. The hope is to improve, as much as we can, the daily lives of our clients.
What inspires you?
The challenge. I love to creatively problem solve. I love to help people. Architecture allows me to do both every day. It allows me to help others create.
A kitchen renovation to improve functionality and layout. Photo: Andrea Hubbell
How does the site or sense of place inform architecture for you?
That really depends a lot on the client and the project. It is always a major factor in the design, but I don’t have a single formula for my approach. My personal preference is to find a balance between the existing site and the new project. But there are times when it is appropriate to find beauty in creating opposition to the existing conditions.
What’s in the studio at the moment?
Right now, we have a really nice balance of commercial and residential projects. We are working on exterior renovations for two different local restaurants, an office renovation for a growing national company that is based in Charlottesville, a two-story addition to a house downtown and an addition and renovation of a house on Pantops for some returning clients. Our office has been really blessed to work with some great clients since we started. There is a lot of trust needed and we work really hard to earn the trust of our clients.
A richly textured, feminine bathroom in Charlottesville. Photo: Andrea Hubbell
How would you assess the state of architecture in our region?
Overall, I would say that it is positive. I work primarily in the Charlottesville community, but as president of our local chapter of the American Institute of Architects (AIA), I can say that the architects that live and work in our region are extremely talented and are making great contributions to their communities. Charlottesville is a progressive community that is rooted in the past; it supports and appreciates a broad range of architectural styles. We have some of the best examples of architecture, both old and new, right here in our community. That being said, there are always going to be buildings that get realized which make you wonder, why did they do that? Or, how did they miss that opportunity?
Birds Say is one of the rare instances where a band completely avoids the sophomore slump, taking its prodigious talent and somehow magnifying it by 10. The string rock quintet-turned folk is at its best here, whether it’s the dizzying bluegrass—taken up a notch by the clever mandolin licks from Auyon Mukharji—with wry, whimsical lyrics (“Harrison Ford”), laying down some beautiful Americana (“White Horses”) or making the hair on your neck stand up with the exquisite melodies and four-part harmonies (“Do You Ever Live”). With little more than subtle hand claps and languid strings, the group gives the title track subdued beauty, especially when paired with lyrics such as, “Don’t know what the birds say / Don’t know what the birds / Listen to them all day / Nothing sounds like words.” Vivid imagery and forthright examinations of love are among the album’s key themes, all of which make Birds Say an unquestionable knockout of a record.
JR JR
JR JR/Warner Bros.
If you like the cut of the jib on JR JR’s (formerly Dale Earnhardt Jr. Jr.) last album, The Speed of Things, you’ll be inclined to like JR JR as well. It’s an extension of the musical and lyrical territories that Speed explored—meaning that much of this album feels sedated and introspective. “Break My Fall” is a contemplative number about the people who make or break our lives, while “Caroline” is a confident ode to not giving a damn what others think. Much of the album follows theses types of thought-provoking themes, and the music that accompanies the journey is pretty eclectic. “Philip the Engineer” has a lumbering pop sound, while “Gone” features shades of Paul Simon in its funky bass and overall melody. “James Dean” plays like an R&B slow jam that got tossed into a blender with an ’80s-era synth ballad, and it represents a new era for this band. It’s a nice restart.
Barrence Whitfield & The Savages
Under the Savage Sky/Bloodshot Records
So this is what punk sounds like if you mash it with rockabilly, R&B and the musical energy that made Chubby Checker a legend. From Whitfield’s unhinged vocals on the raucous “Rock and Roll Baby” to the lively, dance-inducing “The Claw,” which harkens back to the days of bands coining dance crazes like the twist, this record is an almost non-stop rock party. Rumblers like “Bad News Perfume” and “Katy Didn’t” highlight the roller coaster ride of love with lines such as “She makes me want to claw my eyes out” and “Katy tried to kill me with a clip-on tie/Katy didn’t care so why should I?” Under the Savage Sky is a high-octane, gritty album that will leave you sore in places you didn’t know you could be sore by the time you’re through dancing. Party on.
The truth about cats and dogs is that they couldn’t be more different when it comes to thyroid malfunction. Photo: File photo
“Are you a cat person or a dog person?” I’m asked on a regular basis, as if my answer mightreveal some medical truth concerning the objective superiority of one species over the other. As it happens, I share my home with one of each, offering sound excuse to shrug my shoulders and dodge the question entirely. Although the two are frequently painted as polar opposites, I’m not sure that medical science supports that conclusion. But then I remember the curious nature of their thyroid glands, and I wonder if, perhaps, I’m mistaken.
At the risk of oversimplifying, you can think of the thyroid gland as the body’s metabolic gas pedal. It normally produces hormones that help set the overall rate at which energy is burned by other organ systems. As you might expect, it can malfunction in one of two ways, producing either too much or too little. Human thyroids can find themselves afflicted in either direction. But dogs and cats, for whatever reason, have decided to go their separate ways on this one.
If a cat’s thyroid is going to cause problems, it is almost certain to speed up—a condition called hyperthyroidism—and nearly everything else speeds up with it. Affected cats burn calories too fast and try to compensate with ravenous appetites. But they can’t eat enough. Fat supplies melt away, and muscle is broken down to help feed this new demand for more energy. Apart from simply wasting away, hyperthyroid cats also have to contend with heart disease resulting from an increased heart rate and blood pressure. It’s life-threatening if untreated.
Dogs, on the other hand, will often find that their thyroid glands have grown lazy—a state called hypothyroidism—and the symptoms run opposite to what you’d expect in a hyperthyroid cat. Reduced calorie consumption causes them to pack on pounds, even though they’re eating far less than before they were sick. Families begin to notice a general lethargy, with maybe a few mood swings tossed in for good measure. And the altered metabolism tends to cause skin problems ranging from hair loss to infection. It’s not usually dangerous, but it does quite a job on the dog’s quality of life.
The good news is that these things aren’t terribly difficult to handle. Hypothyroid dogs have it particularly easy. Because they’vefound themselves short on thyroid hormone, we just give it back to them in the form of a supplement. There may be a bit of fiddling to get the dose where we want it, but, once we do, they’re right as rain.
Cats are a bit trickier because their overzealous thyroid glands need to be put back in check. Luckily, the thyroid is the only part of the body that uses iodine to function—it is a key ingredient in the production of thyroid hormone—and we can take advantage of that fact to bring it under control. Most commonly we use long-term medication to prevent it from using available iodine. In other cases, we might choose a brief course of radioactive iodine. It sounds alarming, but it’s finished in a couple of weeks and potentially curative. In other cases still, we make use of special iodine-restricted diets to limit thyroid function. The right choice depends on numerous factors that you’d want to discuss with your vet.
For reasons nobody knows, that’s the way it is. Cats become hyperthyroid, dogs become hypothyroid, and never the twain shall meet. Or almost never, at any rate. You’ll find rare exceptions here and there, but they only serve to prove the rule. I’m not sure if any of this is reason enough to declare a victor in the rivalry between dog people and cat people, but on the odd chance you have a preference for which endocrine disorder you’d rather find yourself treating, I suppose it could be useful in deciding your own affiliation.
Dr. Mike Fietz is a small-animal veterinarian at Georgetown Veterinary Hospital. He received his veterinary degree from Cornell University in 2003 and has lived in Charlottesville since.
Black Mass boasts an all-star cast with Johnny Depp playing the lead of notorious Boston mobster Whitey Bulger. Photo: Warner Bros.
Director Ridley Scott disappointed more than just his own fans when Prometheus was released in 2012. As it happened, Guillermo del Toro (Hellboy, Pan’s Labyrinth) had been crafting an adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft’s groundbreaking horror novella, At the Mountains of Madness, that apparently bore more than a passing similarity to Prometheus’ tale of humanity’s ancient alien creators and their unknowable, sometimes horrific motives.
On the one hand, there is certainly room in the world for both films, especially when considering del Toro’s still-unbroken hot streak and how limp and incomprehensible Prometheus turned out. On the other, imagine how frustrated we’d all be if del Toro followed through with his film as initially conceived, only to have audiences reject it for being too similar to a movie they didn’t like.
One has to wonder, then, why The Departed—Martin Scorsese’s Oscar-winning tale inspired by the evolution and exploitation of a deal struck between notorious Boston criminal Whitey Bulger and the FBI—didn’t lead to the scrapping of the not-altogether- bad-but-certainly-redundant Black Mass. Scorsese’s film left a mark on the film world and spearheaded the current boom in Boston movies by depicting not only the scary swagger and frightening charisma of a Bulger-esque figure, but for painting a clear picture of the city’s systemic problems and how this criminal was in fact cut from the same cloth as the so-called good guys. Meanwhile, though Black Mass boasts some impressive, immersive performances and occasionally inspired dialogue, director Scott Cooper’s cinematic detachment makes the proceedings feel like a re-enacted Wikipedia article in comparison.
Told through a series of interrogations once the Winter Hill-FBI alliance goes south and Bulger has fled Boston, Black Mass shines when it remains focused on the allure of a life in organized crime while not shying away from its brutality. Bulger, as depicted by Johnny Depp, is not just a monster, though he certainly is that. He attempts to instill parental wisdom in his child, even if that wisdom is warped and ultimately damaging. His manner is both charming and terrifying; even if he likes you, he might still kill you thanks to his Stalin- esque paranoia.
Bulger’s brother Billy (Benedict Cumberbatch), who is at the beginning of a long, fruitful and trailblazing political career in Massachusetts politics, is approached by a fellow Southie kid-cum-FBI agent John Connolly, who’s out to strike a deal with Whitey’s Irish gang to take down the Italian mob. Though the supporting cast—including Rory Cochrane, Dakota Johnson, Peter Sarsgaard and Kevin Bacon—is excellent, at the emotional core of Black Mass is the way in which South Boston was able to produce a psychopath, an honorable public servant and a crooked man of the law, all of whom have the same sense of loyalty.
But that’s only when the movie works. Most of the time, Cooper is content to recycle the same type of scenario over and over again, with no apparent goal for the movie beyond placing the camera in front of actors who have clearly done their homework. Depp’s performance works despite—not because of—the mountains of makeup. Edgerton puts the most energy into his role; Connolly may be a caricature of young Southie men, but spend enough time in Boston and you will come to know at least one person exactly like him. But the episodic structure (including musical swells into fade outs, à la TV dramas) and lack of cohesion make Black Mass a repetitive, forgettable exercise, despite its best qualities.
A large-screen television flickers, the pale light providing the sole illumination as a thin arm reaches out and flicks ash from a dying cigarette into an empty highball glass. Camera pans back, revealing the worn back of a La-Z-Boy recliner, along with its inhabitant’s other hand, thumb working furiously at the cracked screen of an off-brand Android phone.
Phone buzzes. The chorus of Gary Numan’s “Cars” fills the air. Jim Gilmore, former governor and current presidential aspirant, stabs at his phone until the voice of Jim Webb, former senator and current presidential aspirant, echoes on speaker.
Jim Webb: Jim.
Jim Gilmore: Talk to me.
JW: Jim! It’s Jim.
JG: Jim who?
JW: Ha ha. Mr. 2 Percent, that’s who.
JG: Screw you.
JW: Dude, are you watching this shitshow?
JG (feigning indignation): What, the debate? Of course I am. Haven’t you been following my tweets?
JW: Uh, course. Hold on.
JG: What.
JW: Hillary just texted.
JG: What?
JW: It’s nothing. She wants to know what shampoo I use. Anyway, holy cow, those tweets!
JG: I know, right?
JW: I mean, “Trump doesn’t understand the Constitution.” “Dr. Carson waffles.” “Fiorina ducked the question.” It’s like you’re calling the most boring MMA fight in history.
JG: Oh, you think you’re gonna do better? That crazy-haired Vermont commie is eating your lunch.
JW: He’s just a fad. College kids like him.
JG: Like Obama.
JW: Yeah, but white.
JG: What?
JW: No, I mean…
JG: Are you watching this?
JW: Man, Carly is killing it.
JG: Totally.
JW: I can’t wait ’til I can get up there and yell my damn fool head off. That’s gonna be so sweet.
JG: Don’t count your chickens.
JW: I’ve only got four chickens. You have like 16 chickens.
JG: You have five chickens.
JW: Do not.
JG: Lincoln Chafee. Ring a bell?
JW: He is not running. Is he?
JG: Wait, hold on, this is epic. I’m going to tweet right now. You’re going to retweet this, right?
JW: Sure. Wait, hold on, I think my Twitter’s broken, it’s all like … (Static, then silence. Gilmore sighs and pours himself another drink).
Odd Dominion is an unabashedly liberal, twice-monthly op-ed column covering Virginia politics.
Top of the Hops Beer Festival will feature more than 150 craft beers from around the world.
Top of the Hops Beer Festival
Saturday, September 26
Enjoy two-ounce samples of more than 150 craft beers from around the world combined with great food, education seminars, music, food and games. $50-80. 21-plus. 3pm. nTelos Wireless Pavilion, 700E. Main St. betsy@redmountainentertainment.com.
