Word: half
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...stage of the Agassiz Theatre is lined with cardboard columns. Strewn across the boards are big, half-painted set pieces--platforms akimbo, colliding, stairs aimed into nothing. I feel like I've walked into the closing scene of a tectonic morality play. Overhead, lights are just swinging into place over the balcony's edge. A crowd of performers is milling in the wings, brocaded and beribboned. In the pit a harpsichordist is bent over his instrument like a hermit at his orisons, wielding the tiny crucifix of a tuning key. A Cupid darts across the unclothed scene, her bow unstrung...
...real time, the band celebrated the "New Millennium" complete with falling balloons and a "power outage" courtesy of Y2K. But it would take far more than that to stop Guster. In a daring move, they played "Mona Lisa" completely unplugged in the hushed theater and even got half the audience to sing along with them. Guster ended the performance appropriately with the sad, uplifting "Rocket Ship" as they blasted off to their home planet in their rocket-chairs...
...little antsy after the movie, so we made a quick detour into Uno's to grab a midnight snack. I half expected to see John Malkovich in the bathroom mirror. "Hey, remember me?" said a kid standing in front of the bathroom door as soon as I exited. "Yeah, we went to camp together in seventh grade," I said, shocked that I could recall this guy's face on the spot. "Yeah. It's so funny how we keep running into each other. Camp, then Harvard Summer School, and now..." "I didn't go to Harvard Summer School," I answered...
...Pace is the film's largest failing; though a deliberate pace helped the first half succeed very admirably, it fails when the tensions are rising by not building to a climax. Mann's film slackens and almost sputters...
...form as an actor's director. Mann's cameras work in intimate closeness with his actors. And the cast works well with Mann's studied technique, which forces them into ultra-realism under the camera's close scrutiny. But the astonishing character study that dominates the first half begins to unravel when the film, inexplicably, changes its focus from Wigand to Bergman. Just as Wigand is entering his darkest period, becoming psychologically unhinged, the film cuts away to Bergman and his struggles with the brass at CBS. The heroic, moral air that builds up around Bergman in the last third...