Word: barrooms
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Moverman underscores the perpetual untimeliness of death in day-to-day life. The brief and rare use of music is entirely diegetic, stemming only from sources within the scenes, such as a barroom jukebox or a beaten-up car stereo. Montgomery’s first somber exchange with Stone, for example, is set to a cheery Beach Boys tune. The movie also resists the impulse to tailor the style of scenes to their emotional underpinnings; in one scene, a woman discovers that her husband has died on the sunniest, most peaceful of early fall days. With a careful hand...
...greatest innovation is a technique for framing the show—not for staging the show. This meta-theatricality is not enough to sustain a two-and-a-half hour production, and once the actors lose their scripts and take their roles on more fully, problems abound. The barroom décor no longer makes sense. Actor Ross Bennet Hurwitz is left in drag in the role of Bianca for the whole show, an odd move that seems to invite the audience to find gender commentaries in a production that claims to preference other themes. But beyond all else...
...design elements in the show do little to help the audience engage with the production. As mentioned, the scenery is mostly just barroom décor completed by a totally inexplicable jigsaw pattern painted on the floor. The lighting has a few select moments where it explicates the atmosphere of a scene, but otherwise it does little to aid the drama at hand. The sound is a dismal effort, relying largely on tacky, cartoonish underscoring that reduces the tone of any given scene to garish musical stereotypes...
...swaps? uh, sure, whatever - Americans can now revert to their ruthlessly pragmatic, commonsensical selves. Admitting that we aren't certain exactly how to proceed is liberating, and key. Hyperbolic rants and rigid talking points, in either Limbaughian or Olbermannian flavors, now seem worse than useless, artifacts of a bumptious barroom...
...merit a full pardon, it's fine to break out the bubbly. But if you drink too much champagne and start a barroom brawl? Indulgence revoked, and you're back to square one. How's that for an incentive to keep doing good works...