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Time travel is hardly a stylistic innovation in theater these days. One pretty good new off-Broadway play, Clybourne Park, dramatizes the racial changes in an inner-city Chicago neighborhood by twinning two scenes 50 years apart: the arrival of the neighborhood's first black family in 1959 and the invasion of the first gentrifying white couple in the now all-black neighborhood in 2009. But When the Rain Stops Falling goes far beyond such schematic parallelism. Bovell's time-hopping structure is intricate but surprisingly natural - never strained or purposely obfuscating. Rather, as in the works of Faulkner...
David Cromer - the Chicago-based director who won acclaim for his recent off-Broadway revival of Our Town - handles all this with sensitivity and solemnity. (This is a real rara avis in New York theater: a play without laughs.) A cast of mostly Americans (among them Mary Beth Hurt and Victoria Clark) conveys the British and Australian milieus with as much authenticity as you're likely to find on these shores. The play is unrelievedly bleak but with a denouement of unexpected hope: a moving, almost revelatory evening of theater, and easily the best new play of the year...
Everyone knows a baffling couple like the one that takes shape in Greenberg, Noah Baumbach's defiantly unsettling new film. One half of the couple is a genuinely lovely person. The other seems to have no redeeming qualities whatsoever. You come home from being at a dinner party with them stumped as to why the lovely person hasn't noticed that their spouse or partner is a total stinker. You ponder, maybe for the first time, the term co-dependency. Mostly you wonder how this pair ended up together. (See the top 10 actor-director pairings...
...stinker in Greenberg is the title character, Roger Greenberg (Ben Stiller), a misanthropic, depressed carpenter who returns to his native Los Angeles after many years in New York. He's just gotten out of a mental institution and his intention is to spend at least six weeks dogsitting for his wealthy brother but otherwise doing exactly "nothing" - on purpose. "That's brave, at our age," observes his ex-girlfriend Beth (Jennifer Jason-Leigh, Baumbach's wife and story collaborator, here looking justifiably distracted). (See Ben Stiller as a Na'vi and other memorable Oscar moments...
...that is obvious. Jan. 12 was, in effect, the starting point for the next phase of competition in China's search market - the battle for Google's share, which is about one-third in terms of search revenue. The most obvious potential foreign beneficiary is Bing, Microsoft's new search entry. And while Bing may not exactly have been handed the keys to a very rich kingdom, the executives there understand their good fortune - and have not been shy about subtly sticking the knife into Google. On March 17, Craig Mundie, chief research and strategy officer, told the China Daily...