Word: orsones
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...Unless, that is, you're more curious about Orson Welles than about the charming but still callow Zac Efron. In the new Richard Linklater film, Me and Orson Welles, a youthful Welles is brilliantly embodied by Christian McKay in one of those, hey-who's-that? performances that tends to draw Oscar talk, even if the film itself isn't much more than an extremely pleasant lark. It is set in 1937, when Welles was just 22 and his ego was better established than his career. His broadcast of H.G. Wells' The War of the Worlds was a year away...
...McKay's performance, which marries physical resemblance to internal channeling - he's practiced in this, having written and performed a one-man show called Rosebud: The Lives of Orson Welles - is exceptional. But there's one insurmountable problem: his age. He's 36, and passing for Welles at 22 is more than a stretch, especially when you're up against the world's biggest teenybopper. When Orson and Richard are briefly positioned as romantic rivals for Sonja, it's ludicrous, no matter how much charisma Efron exudes - since our perception...
...Linklater (Dazed and Confused, School of Rock) usually sticks to contemporary stories, or ones set in the recent past. (An exception, The Newton Boys, a 1920s-set western, was his least memorable film.) Nothing about Me and Orson Welles suggests a directorial affinity for period pieces. When a vintage ambulance pulls up to transport Welles around Manhattan, you half expect the prop master to pop out and buff the hood with pride. But Linklater's great strength lies in showing how "families" form in unexpected places, especially when it's a question of putting on a show. Here...
...transparencies, and text documents—span all the way back into silent films and include international movies. Notably, the collection includes shots from films whose footage has been partially or wholly destroyed—such as Josef von Sternberg’s The Case of Lena Smith and Orson Welles’ The Magnificent Ambersons. The film collection is immense; “it took over [the Justs’] whole townhouse—except for the kitchen and bathroom,” said HFA Director Haden Guest. “That kind of collection is only put together...
...young Beck deeply traumatized. "He loves radio," says his longtime producer and on-air sidekick Stu Burguiere. "The way the mind becomes its own theater and the listener engages in the medium with you, drawing their own pictures in their heads." Beck once lovingly re-created the 1938 Orson Welles classic War of the Worlds for XM Satellite Radio, and he named his production company Mercury Radio Arts in homage to Welles' Mercury Theatre on the Air. (See "Heeeere's Glenn! When the Lunatic Fringe Tries Comedy...