Kelson Reviews Stuff - Page 34

We went out to see Kooza last Thursday (January 21) during a lightning storm, (which was a bit of a story by itself).

The show was impressive. I think this is the sixth Cirque du Soleil show I’ve seen and they’ve all been good. A few acts did look kind of familiar, like the guy balancing on a 20-foot-tall tower of chairs (we’d seen a similar act at the OC Fair last summer), but even those acts maintained the “how the heck do they do that?!” factor. A contortionist act reminded me of someone’s idea back in the early 1990s, never realized as far as I know, to get contortionists to play non-humanoid aliens on science-fiction shows. (These days, you can just use CGI to portray any body structure you want.)

The centerpiece of the show was sort of a giant double human hamster wheel. Two mesh wheels, each with a diameter of perhaps 1½ times the height of the performers, are attached to either end of a scaffolding, which is then suspended from the ceiling so that the entire structure can rotate. Then two performers proceed to run and jump inside the wheels as the whole thing spins around in the air…and then they start running around the outside of the wheels! According to the Cirque website, it’s called the Wheel of Death.

The clowns seemed more prominent in this show than in the others I’ve seen, to the point where they basically had two MC characters: one serious, one comedic.

Oddly enough, the show features a rainstorm. There was enough fake thunder and lightning that we probably didn’t recognize the real thing a few times!

This should have been a great movie. Epic story, all-star cast…but it was intensely boring. 16 years later, I barely remember a thing about it other than being bored out of my skull, but the boredom itself left that much of an impression.

So bad that the group of friends I was with started heckling the movie, and the rest of the audience joined in. Of course, that means we found something fun about it, so it probably doesn’t count. (Similarly, I rather enjoyed Van Helsing as a comedy, even though it doesn’t seem to have been intended as one.)

A response to the LiveJournal “Writer’s Block” prompt:

What is the worst movie you’ve ever seen? Did you sit through it or walk out? What made it so dreadful?

Let’s see…worst movie I’ve ever seen in a theater. Top three candidates:

Dungeons And Dragons (2000)

So bad that the group of friends I was with started heckling the movie, and the rest of the audience joined in. Of course, that means we found something fun about it, so it probably doesn’t count. (Similarly, I rather enjoyed Van Helsing as a comedy, even though it doesn’t seem to have been intended as one.)

The House of the Spirits

This should have been a great movie. Epic story, all-star cast…but it was intensely boring. 16 years later, I barely remember a thing about it other than being bored out of my skull, but the boredom itself left that much of an impression.

Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen

On the plus side, it had giant robots blowing stuff up, and they put more thought into the story than I expected them to. And there were certainly good moments spread throughout the film. On the minus side, the visuals were so complex that they were hard to follow. That’s a problem I had with the Transformers’ designs in the first film, too — they look insanely cool in still shots, but start them moving and you end up with two clouds of shrapnel fighting each other. Plus Michael Bay has a very different sense of humor than I do, which didn’t help. And amazingly enough, the movie was tedious. I don’t know how you can possibly take a movie about giant robots and explosions and make it dull enough that I checked my watch at least five times during the film.

Yeah, that one probably deserves the title.

I don’t recall ever walking out of a movie before it was finished, unless the movie itself stopped due to technical problems (which has happened a couple of times). I’ve been seriously tempted to switch off some movies I’ve watched at home, though.

Ordinary Days is a slice-of-life musical about four people in New York City: a couple just moving in together, a grad student, and an artist. Their stories intersect, and each reaches an epiphany about his or her life over the course of the story. The music reminded me a bit of Stephen Sondheim and a bit of Stephen Schwartz. The cast was good, and the set design did a great job of suggesting various locations in an enormous city.

This was the first show I’d seen at South Coast Repertory’s Julianne Argyros Stage. Somehow I managed to go a whole decade without seeing anything at SCR at all, and the other shows I’ve seen over the last year were all in what used to be the main stage. In my head, I still had the image of the old second stage, a box-shaped studio, up until the point that we walked in the door to see a proscenium stage and a house with a balcony and box seats. I might actually have missed this one, except we ran into one of my music theater teachers from college on the way to Xanadu last month, and he was rehearsing this show as the musical director and accompanist.