Tag: Digital Media

One of Charlottesville’s most anticipated springtime events began today with the hanging of the LOOK3 TREES exhibit.  The installation has kicked off Charlottesville’s LOOK3 Festival of the Photograph since it began in 2007.

“It’s really our coming out party,” said LOOK3’s managing director, Andrew Owen.

LOOK3 attracts an estimated attendance of 25,000 artists and observers from around the globe, and the heart of the festival occurs June 12-15 with gallery shows, projections and workshops throughout the Downtown area.

This year’s featured TREES photographer is Tim Laman, a field biologist whose work with New Guinea’s birds of paradise is strung among the branches of the willow oaks lining the Downtown Mall.

Beyond the bird puns, it’s appropriate that these photos hang from treetops, as Laman spent eight years precariously climbing trees and hiding in the blinds to document the birds in their natural habitat. The striking birds are descended from crows, and are regionally specific to New Guinea. They have evolved an extraordinary, showy plumage used to attract mates and ward off predators, and Laman’s photography captures it vividly.

“When Laman’s work was featured in National Geographic in January, we knew this was the perfect exhibit for the Downtown Mall,” Owen said. The images were selected from 39,000 shots amassed by Laman over nearly a decade, and were narrowed down to 40 pictures by a team of curators chosen by Owen’s organization.

This year’s exhibit offers an enhanced experience through an audio tour provided by The Nature Conservancy, a festival sponsor. Caption cards posted at each image provide photo information, and a QR-code that will link smartphone users to audio clips about the images and interviews with Laman.

Bill Kittrell, The Nature Conservancy’s director of conservation in Virginia, views the collaboration as a fortuitous match. “In the sense of showing the beauty and the art and the behavior of the birds —and [the Conservancy] working in New Guinea to help protect and preserve the habitat for the birds—it’s a really good link between the science and the art.”

Kittrell hopes the opportunity will highlight local concerns. “It’s a great way to talk about conservancy in New Guinea, but also a great way to talk about conservation right here in Virginia, and all the birds we have here in Charlottesville.”

Charlottesville’s Downtown Mall visitors can enjoy this window into paradise through July 7.

 

Now that The Great Gatsby is out, there’s just one relevant question: To whom is this film targeted? It can’t be people who read F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel when it was first released. They’re dead. Is it for recent high school graduates? The millennials, who are plugged into everything all the time and don’t seem to have the attention span for Fitzgerald? Or is it for hip-hop lovers?

That’s really a reach—sure, Jay-Z is an executive producer. He, Beyoncé and André 3000 perform on the soundtrack, but their stamp on the movie itself is pretty tangential, even forgettable.

Whatever the variation on that question, one thing is certain. Director and co-writer Baz Luhrmann thinks his audience is made up of idiots.

How else to explain the changes Luhrmann and co-writer Craig Pearce have made to the text? Instead of telling the story from his family home, Nick Carraway is now an alcoholic recovering in a sanitarium, writing The Great Gatsby for his doctor. There’s even an intake sheet listing all of Nick’s symptoms. It’s mind-bogglingly dumb.

Changes happen when adapting a book for the screen. It’s inevitable. But Luhrmann’s changes and embellishments seem to come from a place of silliness, as if he were more interested in bombast than telling the story.

Most of the characters stick to dialogue right from Fitzgerald’s text, but it’s hard to concentrate on the spoken words when you’re distracted by the garish sets, bad 3D and stupid choice—yes, stupid—of having lines from the novel drift in and dance on the screen. Luhrmann, as usual, focuses on the spectacle. It’s almost as if he doesn’t understand the novel, which is critical of its era.

If Nick were narrating Luhrmann’s life, he might lump him together with Daisy Buchanan (Carey Mulligan) and her husband, Tom (an appropriately beady-eyed Joel Edgerton) as a careless person. But Luhrmann is a director who, when making Australia, apparently decided to use Michael Bay’s Pearl Harbor as inspiration, so no one should be surprised.

The actors are bogged down by their surroundings, too, with Leonardo DiCaprio’s Gatsby coming off as hapless, even needy. Tobey Maguire, as Nick, comes off best, which is not the kind of thing one expects to write in any review of a movie starring Tobey Maguire. And Mulligan is better than Mia Farrow could ever hope to be, but she, too, is swallowed by her surroundings. Daisy isn’t much of a full-
blooded person, even on the page, so maybe it’s not Mulligan’s fault.

The story, not that it matters (because it doesn’t to Luhrmann): Nick moves into a house on West Egg, Long Island, hoping to make it in the bond market on Wall Street. His neighbor in the palace next door is Gatsby, who is attempting to win Daisy back after a brief romance with her five years earlier. Gatsby and Tom have one great blowout, and DiCaprio really wears that pink suit. But in the end, everything and everyone is suffocated by Luhrmann’s vision. Green lights, valleys of ashes and a dying American dream have nothing on the crushing weight of his thumb.

 

The Great Gatsby PG-13, 143 minutes, Regal Stonefield 14 and IMAX

 

Playing this week:

42
Regal Stonefield 14 and IMAX

Admission
Regal Downtown Mall Cinema 6

The Big Wedding
Regal Stonefield 14 and IMAX

The Company You Keep
Regal Downtown Mall Cinema 6

The Croods 3D
Regal Stonefield 14 and IMAX

Disconnect
Regal Downtown Mall Cinema 6

The Hobbit:
An Unexpected Journey
Carmike Cinema 6

The Host
Carmike Cinema 6

Iron Man 3
Regal Stonefield 14 and IMAX

Jack the Giant Slayer
Carmike Cinema 6

Mud
Regal Downtown Mall Cinema 6

Oblivion
Regal Stonefield 14 and IMAX

Pain & Gain
Regal Stonefield 14 and IMAX

Peeples
Regal Stonefield 14 and IMAX

The Place Beyond the Pines
Regal Downtown Mall Cinema 6

The Sapphires
Regal Downtown Mall Cinema 6

Side Effects
Carmike Cinema 6

Silver Linings Playbook
Carmike Cinema 6

Snitch
Carmike Cinema 6

To The Wonder
Vinegar Hill Theatre

Upstream Color
Vinegar Hill Theatre

Wreck-It Ralph 3D
Carmike Cinema 6

Movie houses:

Carmike Cinema 6
973-4294

Regal Downtown Mall
Cinema 6
979-7669

Regal Stonefield 14 and IMAX
244-3213

Vinegar Hill Theatre
977-4911

Before there was Netflix or On Demand, or even Sneak Reviews, the only way to see an older movie was to catch a second screening at a movie house. Vinegar Hill, the local theater with a penchant for art house classics and independent film releases, is reviving the tradition for a one night only screening of Jean-Luc Godard’s harbinger of cinematic revolution, Breathless (À bout de soufflé, 1960) on May 16.

“It’s the best way to see a movie anyway, with a crowd” said C-VILLE Weekly’s own James Ford, who is also one of Vinegar Hill Theatre’s four staffers, a group of self-admitted “movie nerds” responsible for the pick.

Breathless may be a fixture on film school syllabi, but Ford says he’s been surprised at how many people he has met in promoting the event that have never heard of it. He hopes the classic film series will bring together film buffs and casual popcorn eaters, and that it will expose a new generation of moviegoers to the classics. The film is Godard’s first feature, and is credited for launching La Nouvelle Vague (the French New Wave), filmmakers of the late ’50s and ’60s dedicated to experimental film form, editing, and sound, and engagement with social and political commentary.

“I love everything I’ve seen by Godard, Vivre Sa Vie [To Live One’s Life, 1962], Masculin féminin [Masculine Feminine: 15 Precise Facts, 1966].” said Ford. “[Breathless] changed cinema forever; people around the world are still making movies today that are influenced by it. It feels like seeing a movie for the first time.”

It’s a crime story, it’s a love story, and it’s a great date movie, if you don’t mind your date falling in love with Jean-Paul Belmondo’s pouty-lipped attitude, or Jean Seberg’s pixie bohemian charm (or both). Depending on how the seats are filled on Thursday, these one-off screenings may become a regular monthly occurrence.

Buying a ticket to the series is also an opportunity to support Vinegar Hill, now part of the Visulite Cinemas family of theaters, through a perilous time—the zoned historic building which houses the theater is up for sale, leaving Vinegar Hill renting month to month and unsure if their lease will be renewed past August.

Vinegar Hill just launched online ticketing (finally), making advance tickets available at http://www.visulitecinemas.com/specialevents.asp.

Thursday 5/16 $7.50-10.50, 7pm. Vinegar Hill Theatre, 220 W Market St., 977-4911.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bJFFy3soy9Y

Hollywood is content to blow shit up in the months before May and after August in a way it never used to be, but the dog days are still the time* to find the most literal bang for your dinero. Here’s what the studios are pushing, and what we think.

 

The Great Gatsby

Does anyone really want to see The Great Gatsby on the screen? Maybe Baz Luhrmann can make Jay Gatsby (Leonardo DiCaprio) into someone we can identify with while not wanting to strangle Nick (Tobey Maguire) and Daisy (Carey Mulligan). Luhrmann (Moulin Rouge) certainly knows flash, which is just what the jazz age needs. (May 10)

 

Star Trek Into Darkness

It’s become fashionable to wait a million years between sequels, but even non-Star Trek fans like J.J. Abrams’ 2009 reboot. And we had to suffer through Super 8 in the interim? Weak. Here’s to Chris Pine and Zachary Quinto busting some ass. (May 17)

 

The Hangover III and Fast & Furious 6

There comes a time in every franchise’s life when its producers and studio must make a decision: Kill it or get the defibrillator. The Hangover II—which was the same movie as The Hangover, but not funny—deserved kill status. The Fast and the Furious should have died in the script phase. In 2000. (May 24)

 

After Earth

Will Smith and son Jaden Smith star in this sci-fi tale of who gives a shit? Sorry. But seriously, this movie has an original story by Will Smith and direction by M. Night Shyamalan which gives it the appeal of pissing up a flagpole. (June 7)

 

This is the End

This is the story of six friends (James Franco, Jonah Hill, Seth Rogen, Jay Baruchel, Danny McBride, and Craig Robinson) living in a house and having their lives taped…as the world ends. Find out what happens when people stop being polite and start getting real. Note: It involves me vomiting. And is MTV getting residuals? (June 12)

 

Man of Steel

In the most recent trailer, Clark Kent’s father (Kevin Costner) suggests a bus load of kids should have died so that Clark (Henry Cavill)’s powers would remain a secret. With a story by Christopher Nolan and David S. Goyer (The Dark Knight), consider me on board until further notice. (June 14)

 

World War Z

Zombies. Fast zombies. Expensive zombies. Brad Pitt and zombies. Big, big changes from the zombie novel. Lackluster trailer. Bored with zombies. (June 21)

 

White House Down

Whoa, whoa. I thought Gerard Butler saved the White House already this year (Olympus Has Fallen). Do I have to sit through this crap again? At least this movie has Channing Tatum and Jamie Foxx. (June 28)

 

The Lone Ranger

I would have loved to sit in on this pitch meeting. Producer: “Guys, let’s update a dead genre with a notoriously difficult history in the way it portrays Native Americans and cast Johnny Depp as Tonto.” Exec: “Green light. Can’t lose.” (July 3)

 

Grown Ups 2

How do guys who look like Adam Sandler and Kevin James have wives that look like Salma Hayek and Maria Bello? And why isn’t Rob Schneider in this sequel to Grown Ups? Scheduling conflict my ass. (July 12)

 

Red 2

Hey, whippersnapper. Shootin’ guns ain’t just for the young’uns. Bruce Willis and Helen Mirren proved that with Red, and they’ll prove it again with Red 2. Do me a favor and load my Glock while I power nap, O.K.? (July 19)

 

Girl Most Likely

Kristen Wiig stars as a loser trying to put her life back together. If that sounds like Bridesmaids, you’re not crazy! But in this movie, her mother is Annette Bening, probably because Jill Clayburgh died before Bridesmaids was released. And Girl Most Likely story sounds totally different on paper (sarcasm implied). But Bridesmaids was fun, so whatever. (July 19)

 

The Wolverine

They should have called him “The Dork.” Hugh Jackman and his Adamantium claws return. (July 26)

 

2 Guns

In this corner, we have Denzel Washington. In the other corner, we have Mark Wahlberg, former underwear model and bad actor. Gentlmen, shake hands and let the dick measuring begin. (We even called it 2 Guns, Get it?) (August 2)

 

*I’ve done no research to determine whether that’s true.

 

Playing this week:

42
Regal Stonefield 14 and IMAX

21 and Over
Carmike Cinema 6

Admission
Regal Downtown Mall Cinema 6

The Big Wedding
Regal Stonefield 14 and IMAX

The Company You Keep
Regal Downtown Mall Cinema 6

The Croods 3D
Regal Stonefield 14 and IMAX

Evil Dead
Regal Stonefield 14 and IMAX

From Up On Poppy Hill
Regal Downtown Mall Cinema 6

G.I. Joe Retaliation 3D
Regal Stonefield 14 and IMAX

The Hobbit:
An Unexpected Journey
Carmike Cinema 6

The Host
Regal Stonefield 14 and IMAX

The Incredible Burt Wonderstone
Carmike Cinema 6

Iron Man
Regal Stonefield 14 and IMAX

Jack the Giant Slayer
Carmike Cinema 6

Jurassic Park 3D
Regal Stonefield 14 and IMAX

Mud
Regal Stonefield 14 and IMAX

Oblivion
Regal Stonefield 14 and IMAX

Olympus Has Fallen
Regal Stonefield 14 and IMAX

Oz the Great and Powerful
Regal Stonefield 14 and IMAX

Pain & Gain
Regal Stonefield 14 and IMAX

The Place Beyond the Pines
Regal Downtown Mall Cinema 6

Room 237
Vinegar Hill Theatre

Safe Haven
Carmike Cinema 6

Snitch
Carmike Cinema 6

Scary Movie V
Regal Stonefield 14 and IMAX

Silver Linings Playbook
Regal Downtown Mall Cinema 6

Trance
Carmike Cinema 6

Wreck-It Ralph 3D
Carmike Cinema 6

Movie houses

Carmike Cinema 6
973-4294

Regal Downtown Mall
Cinema 6
979-7669

Regal Stonefield 14 and IMAX
244-3213

Vinegar Hill Theatre
977-4911

On Thursday, Dr. Steven Greer will appear at the Paramount to introduce the biographical documentary SIRIUS, which follows Greer, an emergency room physician better known for his work with extraterrestrials and government secrets. Extraterrestrials, he says, have been visiting this planet for some time, and our government has been shooting their vehicles down and studying their technology.

This technology can free us from our dependence on fossil fuels and change our lives for the better, but fossil fuels make too much money for certain powerful people, and those people are bent on keeping this technology a secret.

Dr. Greer has been battling them for some time via two organizations he founded: the Center for the Study of Extraterrestrial Intelligence (CSETI), which makes contact with E.T.s and welcomes them to our planet, and The Disclosure Project, which is dedicated to securing the release of everything the government knows. SIRIUS is part documentary about that work, and part fundraiser for the third step, actually bringing that alien technology to the people. C-VILLE spoke with Dr. Greer recently at his farm in western Albemarle County.

C-VILLE: How did you get into this line of work? Do you call it ufology?

Dr. Steven Greer: No, never.

What do you call it?

The UFO term is a misnomer. It was invented by the intelligence community after they knew that they weren’t unidentified. When I was about 8 I had a sighting of a disc-shaped craft outside Charlotte, North Carolina, and I knew what I had seen, because it was completely non-aerodynamic.

These objects that people see fall into two categories: extraterrestrial vehicles, which are ones that are quite unusual, and things that are man-made that look like a flying saucer that we began developing in the ’40s and ’50s.

So, the big story here is probably less of the E.T. story, than it is a technology story and the national security state run amok.

Basically, there are areas that are called Unacknowledged Special Access Projects. A USAP is a coded or numbered program that is run completely without any real paper trail, and without the review of Congress or the President. It’s the subject no one wants to talk [about]. It’s the giggle factor. It’s the kook factor. No one wants to be associated with it because, to be honest with you, the media…have been lackeys in my opinion.

C-VILLE isn’t important enough to be made a lackey.

I know that. You’re not the New York Times, which is why you can do this story. The New York Times wouldn’t be allowed to. In fact I have a family member who worked for The Boston Globe and she said, “Absolutely, we would not be allowed to do a story on this.”

What led you to start actually studying them with CSETI?

In 1990 I had another contact event, and I thought ‘what I ought to do is see if we could put teams together to go out and make contact.’ I discovered that there was no department anywhere dealing with the fact that we’re being visited, and that there ought to be some sort of diplomatic outreach. CSETI is our global attempt, and now we have several thousand teams who are learning these protocols that are very controversial because they involve remote viewing consciousness, things that are into the weird area. But I tell people, if it’s not pretty strange, it’s not going to be E.T.

You say that people working with you have been killed.

Back in the day, before I authorized the level of security and protection we have now, there were some folks who really wanted to help us, and they, three or four of them, died in quick succession.

One was my right hand assistant, Shari Adamiak—[she] and a member of Congress and I all got metastatic cancer—we were all supposed to die. Very mysteriously, you wonder how it happened, virtually the same month. So they all died, and I survived. Barely.

Then, there’s a former CIA director named Bill Colby who had been part of these classified programs and knew about these technologies, and he was going to bring one of these technologies out to us, and the week that he was going to meet with a member of my board they found him floating down the Potomac River.

His son just came out with a book saying that his father must have committed suicide, but he didn’t.

At this point I don’t take anything for granted in terms of my security, but what I tell people is, there’s safety in numbers, and there’s safety in having a lot of people know what you’re doing. Everything I have (and about 85 percent of the material I have is not in the public yet) is in places that if something happens to me, boom. And it would be devastating.

Tell me about Sirius.

We’ve started a company called Sirius Technology Advanced Research, STAR, which would be the parent company to raise the funds to build a research [facility] here in the Charlottesville area. I have a disc with several thousand pages of designs and unknown patents that has been provided to us. But you need a laboratory.

You can’t walk into UVA and do this at a lab. Why? Because their equipment isn’t dealing with 10 million volts at a fraction of a watt. You have to custom build the systems.

This is the part that people don’t understand, that this is actually really serious science. This is about a $10 million R&D effort, $6 to 10 million, conservatively. But it’s got to be done. You’re dealing with such complex physics and materials. You need nanocrystalline materials, you need specialized Kawasaki analyzers that can deal with thousands or millions of volts as opposed to 110 or 120 which is what we run our appliances on.

Who, exactly, is keeping this information secret?

It changes. For example, in the past, we have some documents that listed Dr. Oppenheimer and Dr. Vannevar Bush, who worked on the Manhattan Project, the so-called Majestic Committee.

There have been various people, I mean, George Shultz has been involved in this committee. Dick Cheney has been involved with the committee, there was a Democrat from California who’s passed away, named Congressman Brown who was on this committee, CIA director Helms…

Not all of them are intelligence and military, some of them are corporate titans. Their consensus has been, until fairly recently, that this stuff is secret and should stay secret. Now, I found out a few years ago that now there’s a majority of them that think it should come out, but they’re still a little afraid to do it.

This work subjects you to a lot of ridicule.

Oh, and hatred.

Has that been difficult?

I think it’s been more difficult for my family than it has been for me. For me, I persevere. Some of it’s been painful, and frightening, and sad, but ultimately what keeps me going is the vision. Once you know this is true, and you know that there are, not only intelligent life out there in the universe that’s here, but that we may have come from some of these civilizations, life on Earth may have been seeded from them, and then on top of that, there are sciences and technologies that are already existing that would give us a whole new civilization without poverty or pollution, that’s worth doing something about.

Tickets for the screening of SIRIUS are $15 and available at www.theparamount.net. CSETI also offers three day Contact Trainings and Expeditions for $495 (there’s one in Charlottesville May 10-12). For budget minded DIYers, there’s an E.T. Contact Tool app, $6.99 for iPhone, $9.99 for iPad. 

Aliens. Are you in? Tell us what you think below.

More links:

Tickets 

SIRIUS The Movie 

Center for the Study of Extraterrestrial Intelligence  

The Disclosure Project 

Contact Trainings and Expeditions 

ET Contact Tool app  

For the past 14 years, Light House Studio has offered filmmaking workshops for local students, providing a hands-on education that rivals many college-level programs.

I was a student at Light House in its first class during the summer of 1999, and was crowded into a studio space in the basement of The Jefferson Theater with seven other students and four or five instructors during the very loose, informal beginnings of the program. Our topics were not assigned, rather we were paired into buddy groups, assigned a mentor, and told to go out and shoot whatever we wanted.

A lot has changed in the world of video since then. Digital cameras are everywhere
and A/V editing software is easier to find and use than ever. Teenagers making their own media is a commonplace trend, rather than an infrequent occurrence.

Light House has grown as well, and now offers a wide variety of classes year-round, each on a different aspect or genre of filmmaking. When I returned last year to teach a film history class, I was astonished at how knowledgeable and accomplished the students were. The Internet has given them access to decades of cult classics, and their projects were more ambitious than anything a young person could have made in the ’90s.

“We run into kids now that make their own movies by themselves and don’t even know about us,” said program director Jason Robinson. “The main thing that we offer—more so than the equipment—is the opportunity to be around people who are making stuff. Your work is stronger if you’re with people doing similar stuff.”

Light House runs programs year-round, and is busiest in summer when students have more time for immersive classes. The upcoming 2013 summer schedule includes a total of 13 day camps and advance workshops, many of which are already filling up. “This is our most packed summer ever, in terms of the things we’re offering,” Robinson said. “We’ll have something going on every day from 9am-3pm, sometimes two things in the classroom at once, in addition to groups going out into the community.”

“When you take a class here, it’s a three to one ratio of students to teachers,” explained development coordinator Lucy Edwards. “You’re working in small groups with adults who are professional filmmakers and who are dedicated to your group.”

The classes during the school year include Keep it Reel, Light House’s longest-running program which focuses on outreach in the community. Currently, students from the Westhaven Community Center are working on a documentary about the controversial topic of nearby restaurants that refuse to deliver to the Westhaven neighborhood.

“We just got a grant to do a doc on a local food hub,” Robinson said. “Rather than put it on our site and make it a class, we did it as a project with the Renaissance School during the school day. The kids who were interested went out and shot on a farm, and at the distribution center. They interviewed people, it was a crash course in filmmaking. But it’s also educational—the farmers there are all from the International Rescue Center, from Bhutan. They’re really neat guys.”

“That’s how we run a lot of our programs,” Edwards said. “We’re able to offer classes at a discount, or sometimes for free, because of those grants.”

Light House has also been active in sending out the students’ completed films for entries in festivals around the country. “One of the music videos we made last year has just won a ton of awards,” said Robinson. “We were really flabbergasted. The students were 13- to14-year-old girls and they made a video for an unreleased Sarah White song called ‘Last Day of May.’ Billy Hunt was their mentor on that, and it’s gotten into the L.A. Film Festival, NFFTY in Seattle, the Pendragwn Youth Film Festival in Seattle, and the Virginia Student Film Festival.”

“We have a lot more that we’re pushing,” Edwards said. “It ebbs and flows. Traditionally we have at least one or two films that will win a whole bunch of awards, and this year we have five or so films that have been honored as finalists or award-winners at film festivals. There are even a couple of festivals that have a whole Light House block.”

“A lot of our students stay in touch, and a lot of the really active ones go to film school, all over the country,” Robinson said. “We have students who are graduating now from VCU, SUNY-Purchase, Columbia, and Chicago. They go to cool places. A bunch of them just got accepted to Emerson. We do keep in touch, and a lot of the students end up coming back later to mentor.”

“The workshops at Lighthouse are taught by knowledgeable professionals in film, making it easy to get past a lot of the early rookie mistakes beginners can make. It’s all around an incredibly effective learning environment,” said Greg Nachmanovitch, a sophomore at Charlottesville High School, who first got involved in Light House through a summer animation workshop. “The flexibility and possibilities of the medium fascinated me,” he said. “And after that I knew I wanted to pursue film for the rest of my life.”

 

Watch the award-winning video for Sarah White’s Last Day of May here.

 

 

Powerful happiness

Josh Rouse The Happiness Waltz/Yep Roc Records

The Happiness Waltz is filled with singer- songwriter Josh Rouse’s patented folk-pop charm that hearkens back to the warm, ’70s- era recordings. It finds Rouse singing with an ease and subtle richness reminiscent of Paul Simon. The album plumbs the depths of love and life with surprising insight and delicacy. The languid “It’s Good to Have You” features Rouse crooning about how good it is to have someone special in his life, the down-tempo shuffler “Our Love” examines a love that has aged well, and the idealism in the acoustic ditty “Start a Family” is undeniable. Even the wistful closing title track is beautiful because it centers on happy memories, rather than times of regret.

Anais Mitchell & Jefferson Hamer Child Ballads/Wilderland Records

This seven song collection of traditional ballads from England and Scotland is a fantastic experience. Anais Mitchell’s clear, spritely voice is the perfect complement to Jefferson Hamer’s thick, rich vocals, and the overall effect on these folk songs is mesmerizing. Whether singing about a man who begs his queen to lift her curse on his barren wife (“Willie’s Lady”) or waxing philosophically about life’s mysteries (“Riddles Wisely Expounded”), Mitchell and Hamer infuse these centuries-old tunes with vitality. The duo performs the songs as though they are original storytellers, and their abilty to connect with the content makes it all the more stunning. Child Ballads takes you on a medieval journey filled with knights, bards and castles on the wings of deeply satisfying, gorgeous duets.

The Milk Carton Kids The Ash & Clay/ANTI Records

The Ash & Clay is wondrous folk music. Joey Ryan and Kenneth Pattengale use only acoustic guitars and complementary vocals to sing about emotionally deep subjects in a surprisingly subtle way. The album is marked by disappointments and suffering, yet it’s oddly beautiful. “Snake Eyes” makes an abbreviated, mournful nod to the lyrics of “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” and despite the lively sound of “Heaven,” when the duo sings “They promised me heaven / I was hoping for something more,” it’s hard not to feel their disappointment too. The closer, “Memphis,” talks about the emptiness of Graceland despite the joy it was intended to bring. The album uses serious material to inspire contemplation, and makes simple powerful music.

 Institutional knowledge

Stealing fiction from fact, The Institute is a bold, mind-warping documentary film for the brave new world where “actors” weave the story of the Jejune Institute, which hosted a complex, thrilling game, designed by Jeffrey Hull, and played by thousands of people using San Francisco’s urban landscape as its venue. Director Spencer McCall blends topics like socio-reengineering, force fields, algorithms, and false prophets into an artful, visually rich collision with reality.

Saturday 4/27 $8.50, 7:30pm, Bantam Theater, 609 E. Market St. 566-2987.

It may seem strange to suggest that a movie about the survival of the human race doesn’t have high stakes, but Oblivion, a movie about the survival of the human race, doesn’t feel as if it has high stakes.

What Oblivion does have is a unified vision, excellent production design, camera work and computer graphics, and solid performances from the entire cast. Tom Cruise, in particular, avoids some of the least attractive aspects of his superstar persona—the clapping and shouting and near-crying—and the rest of the cast is game, too.

Chalk it up to the handiwork of director Joseph Kosinski, who last disgraced movie screens with the beautiful but dazzlingly boring TRON: Legacy (Garrett Hedlund still hasn’t recovered). He’s learned a thing or two since then: Keep audiences guessing, and keep the suspense building.

Cruise is Jack Harper (for those counting, this is at least the third movie in which Cruise plays a guy named Jack). He and his teammate, Victoria (Andrea Riseborough, looking markedly different from her appearances in W.E. and Disconnect), are the last two humans on Earth. They communicate with the Tet, a giant space station in Earth’s orbit.

The Tet houses other humans who are awaiting transport to Saturn’s moon, Titan, after a nuclear war on Earth against so-called Scavengers, alien invaders that succeeded in blowing up our moon. Our nuclear weapons did the rest.

Jack is in charge of securing giant vacuums in the remaining oceans that change seawater into energy for use on Titan. The few Scavengers left on Earth want to destroy them.

In all sci-fi, nothing is as it seems, and Jack is soon confronted with a horrible reality (even more horrible than being one of the last two people alive on Earth). The Tet may be lying to him, and to Victoria. And the Scavengers may not be what he thinks they are, and an old NASA spacecraft has crash-landed nearby—with survivors.

Sounds promising, and it probably should be, but it all happens so efficiently that it seems by-the-numbers. There’s more, of course, but there are genuine spoilers in Oblivion, though attentive viewers will figure everything out long before Jack and Victoria.

In fact, sometimes everything has such a decided lack of urgency, the mind begins drifting toward other non-important (but somewhat important) details. If Jack and Victoria are so afraid of radiation, why does Jack skip about without protection on the planet’s surface? Why does Victoria wear high heels on a dead planet where she’s the only woman?

Why haven’t the aliens, who supposedly traveled millions of light years, been able to figure simple communications tools? They can travel from the far reaches of the galaxy but haven’t mastered something as basic as Wi-Fi? Why do the filmmakers pretend “Ramble On” by Led Zeppelin is the first track on any Zeppelin album? Do aliens really only travel through space to conquer other worlds?

Quibbles. But one doesn’t quibble when one’s interest is held. Good luck, Earth!

Oblivion, PG-13, 125 minutes, Regal Stonefield 14 and IMAX

 

Playing this week:

42
Regal Stonefield 14 and IMAX

Admission
Regal Downtown Mall Cinema 6

Barbara
Vinegar Hill Theatre

Blancanieves
Regal Downtown Mall Cinema 6

The Croods 3D
Regal Stonefield 14 and IMAX

Dark Skies
Carmike Cinema 6

Evil Dead
Regal Stonefield 14 and IMAX

G.I. Joe Retaliation 3D
Regal Stonefield 14 and IMAX

Ginger & Rosa
Regal Downtown Mall Cinema 6

The Hobbit:
An Unexpected Journey
Carmike Cinema 6

The Host
Regal Stonefield 14 and IMAX

The Incredible Burt Wonderstone
Carmike Cinema 6

Jurassic Park 3D
Regal Stonefield 14 and IMAX

Olympus Has Fallen
Regal Stonefield 14 and IMAX

Oz the Great and Powerful
Regal Stonefield 14 and IMAX

The Place Beyond the Pines
Regal Downtown Mall Cinema 6

Safe Haven
Carmike Cinema 6

Scary Movie V
Regal Stonefield 14 and IMAX

Side Effects
Regal Stonefield 14 and IMAX

Silver Linings Playbook
Regal Downtown Mall Cinema 6

Trance
Regal Downtown Mall Cinema 6

Tyler Perry’s Temptation
Regal Stonefield 14 and IMAX

Warm Bodies
Carmike Cinema 6

Wreck-It Ralph 3D
Carmike Cinema 6

Movie houses

Carmike Cinema 6
973-4294

Regal Downtown Mall
Cinema 6
979-7669

Regal Stonefield 14 and IMAX
244-3213

Vinegar Hill Theatre
977-4911

Swing and a miss: Jackie Robinson biopic fails to tell the whole story

I wish it were possible to report that 42 is a homerun. It ain’t. It’s pretty standard bio fare. Back in 1975, Paul Simon wrote that there are 50 ways to leave your lover. In 2013, are there 42 ways to avoid seeing 42?

See, I’ve been looking forward to 42 for months. It’s not often that biopics do that to me, but 42 combines two seemingly can’t-miss elements: baseball and Jackie Robinson, a symbol of American heroism.

But, almost as a rule, biopics are difficult. When squashing a historically significant person’s life into two hours—in this case, two hours and eight minutes—filmmakers run the risk of making that person sanctimonious, or boring, or sage-like, or lots of other adjectives.

Thankfully, 42 isn’t sanctimonious and Jackie isn’t sage-like. From the movie’s perspective, he’s just a boring guy who wants to play baseball. Jackie also knows that he has to be the coolest head on the field; Brooklyn Dodgers general manager Branch Rickey (Harrison Ford) tells him as much.

So how long can we watch a guy get called every horrible racist name and not react before we start to feel icky—and then even worse—apathetic? That depends on whether you feel the biopics wheel’s turning or get caught up in the story.

Fortunately, the story—which has no surprises or a-ha! moments—has good actors to disguise its total lack of surprise, engagement or ingenuity. As Robinson, Chadwick Boseman is fine, but he’s not given much to do other than look noble or angry. Nicole Beharie, as Rachel Robinson, is charming.

Christopher Meloni, who’s had quite a career since leaving “Law & Order: SVU,” burns up the screen as Brooklyn Dodgers manager Leo Durocher, but is gone too soon. After telling his players that Robinson is the future of baseball and defending his right to play, Durocher is suspended by baseball commissioner Happy Chandler for incidents that are “detrimental to baseball,” including an affair with a married actress. Historically accurate? Sure. Good storytelling decision? Not really.

Finally there’s Alan Tudyk as Philadelphia Phillies manager Ben Chapman. Tudyk deserves special recognition for being willing to hurl 8 million racial epithets at Boseman in a major American motion picture. Those scenes contain the movie’s few genuinely uncomfortable moments, and they hit home.

And in a revelation that will surprise no one, Ford is terrible. Rickey is supposed to be a character, not a caricature, and Ford is no character actor.

But story-wise, there’s nothing to recommend 42 because it sticks so close to biopic formula. And moments that could be powerful—such as the first time Rachel discovers a “Whites Only” restroom and ignores its implications—don’t have much impact because they come and go in an instant. It’s almost as if 42 is more interested in Robinson on the field than off the field, but we know what he did on the field. We grow up knowing it. And part of the point in a biopic is to give us a feel for a person’s whole life, right?

42/PG-13, 128 minutes/Regal Stonefield 14 and IMAX

Playing this week

Admission
Regal Downtown Mall Cinema 6

Argo
Carmike Cinema 6

Blancanieves
Regal Downtown Mall Cinema 6

The Call
Regal Stonefield 14 and IMAX

The Croods 3D
Regal Stonefield 14 and IMAX

Dead Man Down
Carmike Cinema 6

Evil Dead
Regal Stonefield 14 and IMAX

G.I. Joe Retaliation 3D
Regal Stonefield 14 and IMAX

Ginger & Rosa
Regal Downtown Mall Cinema 6

The Hobbit:
An Unexpected Journey
Carmike Cinema 6

The Host
Regal Stonefield 14 and IMAX

The Impossible
Carmike Cinema 6

Jurassic Park 3D
Regal Stonefield 14 and IMAX

The Last Exorcism Part II
Carmike Cinema 6

No
Vinegar Hill Theatre

Olympus Has Fallen
Regal Stonefield 14 and IMAX

Oz the Great and Powerful
Regal Stonefield 14 and IMAX

The Place Beyond the Pines
Regal Downtown Mall Cinema 6

Scary Movie V
Regal Stonefield 14 and IMAX

Silver Linings Playbook
Regal Downtown Mall Cinema 6

Trance
Regal Downtown Mall Cinema 6

Tyler Perry’s Temptation
Regal Stonefield 14 and IMAX

Warm Bodies
Carmike Cinema 6

Wreck-It Ralph
Carmike Cinema 6

Movie houses

Carmike Cinema 6
973-4294

Regal Downtown Mall
Cinema 6
979-7669

Regal Stonefield 14 and IMAX
244-3213

Vinegar Hill Theatre
977-4911