Word: richard
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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...
...Based on Robert Kaplow's young adult novel of the same name, the story blends fictional characters with real ones. Efron plays a fictional one: 17-year-old Richard Samuels, a high school student who worships Noel Coward and who acts as our main conduit into Welles' world. Welles plucks Richard off the street and gives him a small but crucial part in his version of Julius Caesar, which truly was performed, to great success - in modern dress with a fascist theme - at New York's Mercury Theater that fall...
...Spending a week in Welles's orbit, Richard learns how to light a match in the coolest possible way, how to impress a girl and, like Icarus, he discovers what happens when you get too close to a star. He rubs elbows with plenty of real people who were fast becoming Welles' loyalists, like Houseman, Joseph Cotton (James Tupper), George Coulouris (Ben Chaplin) and radio star Les Tremayne (Michael Brandon) as well as one fictional dream girl, Sonja (Claire Danes), a Vassar grad who functions as the production's girl Friday and occasionally, as Welles requires it, geisha...
...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 of him is as a man in his mid-30s, based on McKay's appearance, it hardly seems like a legitimate context. Sonja is not as worldly as she'd like...
...believe, is a downgrading of their own concerns. Singh will be in the U.S. on the anniversary of last year's Mumbai terror attacks, which were orchestrated by Pakistan-based groups with traditional ties to Pakistan's military intelligence organization, the ISI. But while Obama and his Afghanistan envoy, Richard Holbrooke, have urged India to make concessions on the decades-old Kashmir dispute in order to help Washington's efforts to persuade the Pakistanis to focus more resources on fighting the Taliban, little has been done to coerce Pakistan to crack down on extremist groups using its territory...