Podcast: An interview with Nathan Jerde

Here you'll find an interview with Nathan Jerde, drummer for the Ponys. Please excuse the terrible sound quality; Lacking proper wiring, I had to hold my voice recorder up to my cell phone. You'll see the transcript of this interview in Friday's Maroon, along with a review of the Ponys new album, Turn the Lights Out.

Jack White plays Elvis, ball and a biscuit to be had

I've come to the conclusion that anything Jack White touches turns to gold. Whether it be his fantastic music catalog (no matter what Pitchfork may say), his collaborations with Loretta Lynn and the Electric Six ("Danger! High Voltage!" may be a classic of this decade), and his acting roles. He's been excellent in Cold Mountain and Coffee and Cigarettes (One of my personal favorites), and now he's taking on a much bigger role: The King. In a biopic spoof Walk Hard directed by Jake Kasdan (of Freaks and Geeks fame), Jack White will play Elvis Presley, who is an acquaintance of the fictional musician protagonist played by John C. Reily (!). This movie wins even more awesome points than the John Travolta and Christopher Walken dragfest remake of Hairspray. I plan on seeing those two, along with the Simpsons movie, the day they're released (assuming I'm in this country).

Theater in New York Pt. II

Last night, I saw yet another exceptional play, Voyage, the first part of Tom Stoppard's epic trilogy The Coast of Utopia. I saw it with my father, a history professor at Columbia with a specialization in the topic of the play, 19th century Russian intellectual history. On the way to the theater, he was expressing his concern about knowing too much about the subject matter, and that inaccuracies would interfere with his enjoyment of the play. I reminded him that it was a play, and not a history book. After the first act, my father stormed out of the theater—and went straight to the box office, to buy tickets to the two other plays in the trilogy.

Stoppard has a long, illustrious history of making seemingly stuffy academic topics into fascinating drama. Most of the time, however, he sticks to a relatively simple environments, whether it be the determined world of Hamlet, a poet's journey to India, or an English cottage rich in intellectual history. In The Coast of Utopia, however, he's taken on an unprecedentedly large timeframe, and collection of individuals and ideas.

It calls to mind Travesties, which I would argue is his best play, which brings together figures as diverse as James Joyce, Lenin, Tristan Tzara (a founder of the Dada movement) into 1916 Zurich, framed it with the structure of The Importance of Being Earnest, and somehow managed to create incredible drama with some of the best dialogue of English language stage in the past 50 years.

Yet, not even Travesties tackles the amount of intellectual movements and personalities of The Coast of Utopia. Yet, once again, Stoppard manages to find an incredible, nonlinear plot, stunningly realized characters who are just as interesting dramatically as historically, and fit in Stoppard's trademark mastery of the English language. I heard one audience member at intermission complain it was like attending a lecture. For me and my father, obviously, this was not a problem.

It helps that the Lincoln Center production has exceptional talent to work with. The cast and production team has top-notch credentials, (you can verify that here), and this has the feeling of a scale of production of a different era (though with ticket prices going up to $100 per seat, I suppose it can only be the product of this era).

Sadly, I will not be able to attend parts II and III unless I miss a week of classes to fly home spring quarter. Don't think I haven't thought of doing so. Hopefully it will be filmed for the Performing Arts library.

Where's Commisioner Gordon in all this?

I'll blog about The Coast of Utopia in a bit, but before that, be on guard: Gotham is no longer safe from menaces and crime. Also, Gotham was really revealed to be Los Angeles. Defamer reported today that Batman was arrested outside Grauman's Chinese Theater. Apparently, local union workers were picketing and had rented a porter potty. Batman wanted to use it, and the workers, against their best judgment, wouldn't let them. An altercation broke out, and the LAPD put Batman in handcuffs at the back of a police car. This is like Ronald McDonald choking on a happy meal.

Theater in New York Pt. I

I have seen two fantastic plays over my Spring Break in New York, and if you get a chance to see a play in New York in the next few months, I'd highly recommend Talk Radio and The Coast of Utopia over pretty much all else (though it doesn't take much to convince me to tell you to avoid The Pirate Queen.)

On Tuesday, I saw a revival of Eric Bogosian's Talk Radio starring Liev Schreiber. I can't recommend this play highly enough. Ben Brantley at The New York Times said Schreiber's performance "confirms his status as the finest American theater actor of his generation," and after spellbinding performances as everything from Iago and Richard Roma, I tend to agree with that statement. It's an incredible and rare experience to see an elite performer working at the top of his game, and Talk Radio provides that opportunity.

What bothers me about the press for it, though, is that it's being regarded as a vehicle for Schreiber. The play is brilliantly structured, with monologues from supporting characters creating a perception of Schreiber's character that is ultimately altered in Schreiber's absolutely heartbreaking closing monologue. The play also makes an incredible use of the radio station headquarters as a stage, and Bogosian's dialogue is typically sharp and biting as ever. Yet, the only praise Hilton Als at The New Yorker has for the play as a revival is a weak comment on its relevance to reality TV, and Terry Teachout at The Wall Street Journal
even lambasts the play, and irresponsibly dismisses the closing monologue with a quote from a Donald Fagen song.

The main issue is that Eric Bogosian has fallen out of favor. Teachout summarizes Bogosian's status in theater circles in the opening lines of his review: "Twenty years ago, Eric Bogosian was one of the hottest young guns in American theater, a performance artist whose blisteringly intense one-man shows were must-see events. Now he's a regular on 'Law & Order: Criminal Intent.'"

I'll update on my opinions of another excellent show, Tom Stoppard's The Coast of Utopia, tomorrow. I must sleep, as I may see a film at the top of my priority list, The Lives of Others, tomorrow afternoon.

Biggest non-performance SXSW event

Of all the excessive media coverage of SXSW (and I mean excessive, don't even bother trying to weed through last week's Pitchfork or A.V. Club news), perhaps the most telling revelation was by music industry vet Peter Jenner, who revealed that $50/year for free music would be feasible to the consumer as well as immensely profitable to the RIAA. Jenner said the $50/year charge would "meet or exceed the current over the counter sales of the music industry at a far lower cost," and the only thing holding the RIAA back is a far outdated business model that depends on album sales.

So basically, Jenner's putting a number of what has been obvious to every music fan since the rise of Napster. People will download free music whether or not the RIAA wants them to. A $50/year price would give people an incentive to buy legal, higher quality music, and with the RIAA's cooperation, conceivably the availability of hard-to-find music would be made easier. Unfortunately, the RIAA still believes that people are willing to shell out $13 for an album despite plummeting sales and unrelenting piracy. Usually major entertainment industries don't wait 7 years to change an outdated business structure, but I guess old habits die hard.

The Rise and Fall of Web 2.0

On March 2, an article I wrote was published in the Viewpoints section of the Maroon discussing the shady legal precedent allowing for the existence of YouTube. I made the point that all it takes is a big enough lawsuit, and YouTube and Google may fall.

Although this was perhaps the least angry column I've written for Viewpoints, it produced the most heated response. The Maroon received a letter in response to my column that was so infuriated by my column, that the letter was published as a column of its own.

What a difference a week makes. I don't want to make an I-told-you-so post, but the last week has strengthened my case dramatically. There have been no fewer than 3 major blows to the very foundation of Web 2.0, and YouTube in particular.

Last Tuesday, federal courts struck a major blow to webcasting music, upping the royalties required to pay for music and requiring a flat $500/month fee for webcasts with a certain listener frequency. For many stations, the fees would be so high that there's no feasible way to maintain a webcast.

The next day, Mark Cuban, the semi-notorious owner of the Dallas Mavericks subpoenad YouTube to see the full extent of copyright infringement for his film company, Magnolia Pictures. I read Cuban's blog, blogmaverick.com, quite religiously, and for the past 8 months he has almost entirely devoted his blog to criticizing YouTube. A lot of my article was influenced by Cuban's blog.

Before Google bought out YouTube, Cuban said anyone who bought YouTube was a moron. He took a lot of slack for that, but yesterday, he was proven right. The big lawsuit we've all been waiting for finally came, as Viacom sued Google for $1 billion over massive copyright infringement on YouTube.

This case could drag on for years, and the $1 billion figure could skyrocket dramatically, and if successful, could bring down Google completely. While past cases against YouTube have been thrown out, this case is the largest-scale yet, and is the first time a company with deeper pockets than Google has launched a campaign against the site. This could be the definitve trial of the decade, and for once, the madness to my method actually works.

More 300 fallout

300 absolutely killed the box office this week, raking in $70.9 million. It broke multiple box office records, according to boxofficemojo.com, including best opening weekend for an ancient battle epic (beating out Troy and Gladiator), the best March opening weekend, the third highest grossing opening weekend for an R-rated film, and the fifth highest ever for a comic book movie.

So much for the critics. Despite decidedly mixed reviews, where the negative reviews were about as negative as reviews get, the film immensely surpassed expectations, as Warner Brothers experts thought it wouldn't go higher than $40 million.

I have defended 300 a lot over the past week, but I have lacked a critic who defended it in quite the same way I did. I found it today in Richard Roeper's review in the Chicago Sun-Times. He's the only one I've seen who seems to understand the goals of the movie, and dismisses critics looking for history in 300:

Snyder directs "300" as the tallest of tall tales -- a vivid dream. You want realism and devotion to the hard facts, watch the History Channel. You want to experience the Battle of Thermopylae as a nonstop thrill ride, here's your ticket.

He also addresses quite clearly what the film triest to do--and succeeds in doing:

In this sweeping and epic adaptation of the classic graphic novel from master-of-the-genre Frank Miller ("Sin City," "The Dark Knight Returns"), director Zack Snyder has created a jaw-dropping, surrealistic dreamscape filled with stunning images, simmering and seriocomic homoeroticism, a topless oracle-babe, a sexy queen, larger-than-life warriors, hot love scenes, cutting-edge special effects and battle sequences so ambitious, you sometimes have to laugh at the sheer audacity of the whole thing.

Other critics have criticized the film for being driven to a stupid, video game, fast food culture. Roeper is the first I have read to accept that premise, and then focuses on how it successfully executed that goal. Bravo.

A letter I just submitted to the Times

A.O Scott’s review of 300 both completely misses the main goal of the film and is inconsistent with his own standards. He criticizes the film for being “twice as stupid” as Apocalypto and says you could find more “nuance and irony in a Pokémon cartoon.” Does he really believe the film wants to be nuanced, as opposed to simply an action-packed, fast-paced, fun comic book movie?

I would also like to point out that in an equally negative review of Ang Lee’s The Hulk, Scott commented that the film was “incredibly long, incredibly tedious, [and] incredibly turgid.” Hence, Scott criticized one comic book movie for being too stupid and another for not being stupid enough. It’s incredible that, nearly a decade into the comic book blockbuster phenomenon, the standards for what makes a good comic book movie are still just as confused and contradictory as when the trend began.

Sincerely
Ethan Stanislawski
Voices Editor
Chicago Maroon

300 divisive among critics, but not among fans

Like I expected, 300 has been an extremely polarizing movie among critics. Although it has a 61% overall on rottentomatoes, and a 53% from the "cream of the crop" the negative reviews have been some of the most negative I've read in a while. A.O. Scott of The New York Times said "300 is about as violent as Apocalypto and twice as stupid," and Kyle Smith of The New York Post violated the Hitler rule--never compare anything to Hitler, by saying "it isn't a stretch to imagine Adolf's boys at a 300 screening, heil-fiving each other throughout and then lining up to see it again."

I tend to think these reviews miss the point. The film wasn't suppose to make political symbolism--as Snyder said in my interview--and it wasn't supposed to be subtle. It was supposed to be an action-packed, pompous, humourous comic book movie, and in that it suceeded tremendously.

What this shows me more than anything else is that the critical standards for comic book movies still remain confused after nearly a decade of their prominence. Scott, for instance, criticized The Hulk for being "Incredibly long, incredibly tedious, incredibly turgid." 300 is none of those, and is exciting the whole way through, yet he criticizes it for being stupid. Hence, he has criticized one comic book movie for being too stupid and another for being not stupid enough. Can we establish some actual standards for evaluating a movie?

Podcast Wednesday: Gerard Butler

Today I will be podcasting all of the interviews I conducted that were published in Tuesday's issue of the Chicago Maroon.

Here is the interview with Gerard Butler, who starred as Leonidas in the much-hyped 300, which will come out this Friday. The interview was published in the Maroon on Tuesday, and here's the full interview:



This one's the most entertaining. Enjoy.

Podcast Wednesday: Rodrigo Santoro

Today I will be podcasting all of the interviews I conducted that were published in Tuesday's issue of the Chicago Maroon.

Here is the interview with Rodrigo Santoro, who plays Xerxes in the much-hyped 300, which will come out this Friday. The interview was published in the Maroon on Tuesday, and here's the full interview:



I'll be back with the final interview, with Gerard Butler of 300.

Podcast Wednesday: Zack Snyder

Today I will be podcasting all of the interviews I conducted that were published in Tuesday's issue of the Chicago Maroon.

Here is the interview with Zack Snyder, director of the much-hyped 300, which will come out this Friday. The interview was published in the Maroon on Tuesday, and here's the full interview

.

I'll be back with the interviews of Rodrigo Santoro and Gerard Butler.

Podcast Wednesday: Kal Penn

Today I will be podcasting all of the interviews I conducted that were published in Tuesday's issue of the Chicago Maroon.

Here is the interview with Kal Penn, who starred in Mira Nair's The Namesake, which will come out this Friday. The interview was published in the Maroon on Tuesday, and here's the full interview:



I'll upload the 300 interviews in the upcoming hour.

Rockists rejoice, your savior is here

Unreleased Jimmy Page Guitar Riff To Be Retrieved From Secret Vault To Save Rock And Roll

This is up there with one of my favorite Onion articles ever, along with the Equus article, the Hammurderer article, and Donald Rumsfeld's no-holds-barred martial arts tournament, recently featured in an ad insert in the Maroon.

Revenge of the studios? Hardly.

David Carr (no, not the Texans quarterback) wrote a very annoying article in Monday's New York Times which argued that "Old-line Hollywood studios, confronted over the last few years by indifferent audiences and an insurgent collection of independent film makers, declared dominion over the industry’s crowning event."

This seems rather misguided. One Hollywood movie wins a Best Picture Oscar, and all of a sudden studios are back. First of all, studios have always dominated the Oscars, so the fact that Carr treats the victory of a studio movie as a bold new direction is pretty foolish. Foreign and independent films dominated this year's nominations more than any other Oscars ever. The Departed's victory may be less due to the fact that it was from Hollywood and more to the fact that it was the most viable winner of the Best Picture nominees.

Furthermore, if the studios suddenly dominated the Oscars, how come no film in the past 3 years has won more than 5 Oscars? Wasn't the Academy notorious for not spreading the wealth in the 20 previous years, hence having bad movies like Titanic and The English Patient winning upwards of 10 awards in the face of much better competition? Filmmaking, like every other outlet in the media, is getting spread out and more competitive. Just because the old guard hasn't broken down completely doesn't mean it's not falling apart.

Best in-house ever

Theater nerd that I am, when I first heard that Daniel Radcliffe was appearing as Alan Strang in Equus, my first thought was not that he's appearing naked on stage. That was a given, considering the role he's playing. I focused more on hearing the young man who plays Harry Potter will also play a deranged youth who spikes the eyes out of 6 horses, delivers nothing but TV ad slogans for the first half hour and delivers lines like "I stuck it in her!" in a deranged manner.

Still I take any chance to stick it to Harry Potter, which is why I was happy to include this in Friday's Maroon



This is what we in the media biz call an in-house, where, when there's excess space in a print publication, you fill it with something random. The New York Times usually uses slogans like, "Think of the children" for this purpose. This however, ruins childhood dreams, something the Maroon prides itself upon.

Harry Potter fans may object, on a factual level, that there is no 8th book in the franchise. I think the more egregious error is that Alan Strang is a horse-worshipper, not a horse-fucker. Still, the point was made.