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Review: The Berlin File
The best moments suggest an actioner reimagining of Stephen Gaghan's politically ambitious but emotionally hollow Syriana.2.0
Ryoo Seung-wan's The Berlin File details an ominous political network in modern-day Germany in which agents from South Korea, North Korea, and the C.I.A. battle for the upper hand even as the true intentions of both their enemies and allies are cast into doubt, with nothing less than the departed Kim Jong-il's $4 billion bank account on the line. Though moderately more intelligent than the average action entry of this sort (one that purports gritty realism, but, as indicated by the aforementioned 10-digit number, is in fact rooted in hyperbolic obviousness), this film never strays far from the inoffensively generic, its technical competence as pleasing as its narrative is ultimately lethargic.
The best moments suggest an actioner reimagining of Stephen Gaghan's politically ambitious but emotionally hollow Syriana, albeit on a micro scale, and where Ryoo's film similarly falters is in failing to pay more than lip service to the schism between its characters' personal and professional lives before yielding the proceedings to entertaining but weightless spy-movie hijinks. Consider the fractious marriage between Pyo Jong-seong (Ha Jung-woo) and Ryun Jung-hee (Gianna Jun), he a ghost agent and she an interpreter and whose respective duties test their allegiance in ways that are acknowledged only to remain altogether unexamined, a failing highlighted sorely by the script's calculated attempt at a sucker-punch conclusion.
This mechanical, almost frigid approach to narrative development would be an ideal way to mirror these characters' voluntary lack of agency, but such parallels are infrequent at best and accidental at worst, the perfunctory efforts to humanize them beyond their call of duty amounting to little more than serviceable filler. Such banal exposition doesn't quite cripple the proceedings, but it's easy to imagine a superior, abbreviated version of the film in which characters and their motivations are examined more effectively, implicitly; as it is, it's a sporadically entertaining, modestly ambitious shoot 'em up that frequently succumbs to spelling out its subtext. At least the fisticuffs and gunfights are skillfully composed and edited, none better than an apartment brawl that ends with our protagonist functioning as an impromptu wrecking ball, but the high-water mark is an early, bloodless scuffle in a restroom that leaves a sobering impression of the personal toll of politics. By comparison, the rest of the film virtually evaporates on contact.
Cast: Ha Jung-woo, Han Suk-kyu, Ryoo Seung-bum, Gianna Jun, John Keogh Director: Ryoo Seung-wan Screenwriter: Ryoo Seung-wan Distributor: CJ Entertainment Running Time: 120 min Rating: NR Year: 2013 Buy: Video
Adam Nayman's Paul Thomas Anderson Masterworks Honors PTA's Ambiguities
Nayman's discussion of Anderson's ellipses implicitly cuts to the heart of why some critics and audiences resist Anderson's work.
The title of Adam Nayman's Paul Thomas Anderson Masterworks is misleading, evoking what the author refers to in the book's introduction as "…cheerleading—the stroking, in prose, of already tumescent reputations." While Nayman clearly reveres one of the most acclaimed and mythologized of contemporary American filmmakers, he's willing to take the piss out of his subject, sveltely moving between Anderson's strengths, limitations, and the obsessions that bind them, fashioning an ornate and suggestive system of checks and balances. Like Glenn Kenny's Made Men: The Story of Goodfellas, Masterworks pushes back against the simplistic, bro-ish language of adulation, and attending backlash, that often obscures a major artist's achievements. In the process, Nayman achieves one of a critic's loftiest goals: grappling with a body of work while honoring its mystery.
Masterworks is uncomfortable with the modern iteration of auteurism, which has been corrupted from its French New Wave origins by being utilized as often macho shorthand that denies the contributions of other craftspeople involved in a film's production. (At the end of the book are several essential interviews with key Anderson collaborators, such as producer JoAnne Sellar, cinematographer Robert Elswit, production designer Jack Fisk, and composter Johnny Greenwood.) Seeking to refute the Horatio Alger element of a particular auteur worship, in which a body of work is discussed chronologically, with a filmmaker's maturation noted with easy retrospection as a kind of manifest destiny, Nayman assembles Anderson's films in chronological order according to the time periods in which they're set. The book opens with 2007's There Will Be Blood (the director's fifth film) and penultimately concludes with 2002's contemporary-set Punch-Drunk Love, Anderson's final (to date) curdled valentine to San Fernando Valley, as well as his first psychodrama with a loner at its center. Nayman only deviates from this concept once, as 2017's Phantom Thread, Anderson's eighth and most recent film, is saved for last and presented as a culmination of a blossoming sensibility.
This structure creates a fascinating temporal zig-zag that mirrors the chaotic, uncertain highs and lows of creative work. Masterworks moves us forward in the timeline of Anderson's America while the filmmaker himself leaps all over the place in terms of artistic control. The wrenching ambiguity of 2014's Inherent Vice, in which Anderson fluidly dramatizes the psychosexual ecstasy, despair, and hilarity of corrosive commercialist annihilation, gives way in the book to Anderson's 1997 breakthrough, Boogie Nights, which Nayman astutely sees as a virtuoso primitive work, an epic that (too) neatly bifurcates pleasure and pain into two distinct acts while disguising its sentimentality with astonishing camera movements and a tonal instability that's probably equal parts intended and inadvertent.
Control is the theme of Masterworks. Nayman charts, again in a nearly reverse order, how Anderson reigned in his juvenilia—the self-consciousness, the overt debts to various filmmakers, the wild mood swings—to fashion a tonal fabric that still makes room for all of those qualities, only they're buried and satirized, existing on the periphery. The essential valorizing of Jack Horner, the paternal porn director of Boogie Nights, eventually gives way to the richer, more fraught examinations of obsessive pseudo-father figures like Daniel Plainview, Lancaster Dodd, and Reynolds Woodcock, of There Will Be Blood, 2012's The Master, and Phantom Thread, respectively. Anderson's films toggle between valorizing and criticizing men of industry who've, with a few exceptions, made America in their own neurotic image.
As these characters grow in complexity, their ingenues also evolve in nuance, becoming less fantasy projections of Anderson's own desire to prove himself than startlingly unique expressions of rootlessness and ambition. Boogie Nights, which Nayman calls a two-and-a-half-hour dick joke, even sets the stage for the ironic phallic references of the other films, with their plunging oil derricks, broken glass toilet plungers, and, well, Woodcocks.
No critic has written so perceptively about Anderson's mutating aesthetic as Nayman does in Masterworks. Most immediately, it's a pure, visceral pleasure simply to read Nayman's descriptions of imagery. On There Will Be Blood, he notably writes the following: "Emerging and descending at his own methodical pace, he's an infernal figure moving in a Sisyphean rhythm, and the trajectory of his movements—grueling ascents and sudden, punishing drops along a vertical axis, punctuating an otherwise steady horizontal forward progress—establishes the visual and narrative patterning of the film to come."
Such "patterning" is an obsession of Nayman's, as it should be given the films under consideration, and he shows how Anderson buried the overt psychosocial daddy and women issues of Boogie Nights and 1999's Magnolia into an intricate formalism that's complemented by a new kind of instability: unconventional, unexpected ellipses in the narratives that underscore a sense that we're missing something in the psychology of the protagonists, in the America that contains the characters, and perhaps even in Anderson's understanding of his own work. The obsessive nature of Anderson's bold often "lateral" imagery is also enriched by the endless twins and doppelgangers that populate his films, suggesting that he's chewing, with increasing sophistication, a set of preoccupations over and over, gradually triumphing over his fear of women as he sees his men with escalating clarity. Nayman uncovers many twins and cross-associations that have never personally occurred to this PTA obsessive, such as the resemblance that Vicky Krieps's Alma of Phantom Thread bears to the many dream women haunting Joaquin Phoenix's Freddie Quell in The Master, or how the mining of oil in There Will Be Blood is later echoed by the exploitive plumbing of minds in The Master.
Nayman's discussion of Anderson's ellipses—especially the bold leap 15 years in time near the end of There Will Be Blood as well as the two-year jump near the beginning of the filmmaker's 1996 feature directorial debut, Hard Eight—implicitly cuts to the heart of why some critics and audiences resist Anderson's work. Some people believe that Anderson uses such devices to write himself out of corners, excusing himself from the task of building relationships or establishing in more detail the contours of the history informing the films, while, for his admirers, such flourishes are suggestive and freeing—excusing not only the author, but the audience from thankless exposition so as to skip to the "good parts," the moments that cut to the heart of the protagonists' and Anderson's demons. Nayman understands Anderson to be fashioning a cumulative hall-of-mirror filmography that highlights an America in elusive, surreal, even daringly comic fragments. Or, per Nayman: "His later films are masterworks that don't quite fill their own canvases, drawing power from the negative space."
Paul Thomas Anderson Masterworks is now available from Abrams.
NewFest 2020: Dry Wind and Alice Júnior Take Aim at the Patriarchy in Brazil
It's a provocative juxtaposition for Dry Wind to stage its queer kinkfest at the epicenter of the land of Bolsonaro.
Daniel Nolasco's Dry Wind and Gil Baroni's Alice Júnior, both screening in the international section at this year's NewFest, are refreshing in no small part because they find two Brazilian filmmakers telling stories set in regions of their country that are cinematically underrepresented and largely unknown to international audiences. Dry Wind, for one, takes place in the rustic countryside of the state of Goiás, known for its cowboy iconography, livestock music festivals, and extremely conservative politics. It is, then, a provocative juxtaposition for Nolasco to stage his queer kinkfest at the epicenter of the land of Bolsonaro.
Dry Wind follows the routines of a community of factory workers in the rural city of Catalão, where sex between soccer-loving men who wouldn't hesitate to call themselves "discreet" always seems to be happening or about to happen. These torrid trysts mostly take place in the woods, on bare soil or parked motorcycles, and involve piss, ass-eating, and face-spitting. Throughout, Nolasco's frames are also filled with much hair—hairy faces, butts, and backs, suggesting a queer sexuality cobbled together with the coarseness of the men's local environment, despite the clearly foreign influence of Nolasco's hyper-stylized aesthetics. The film's drama lies in the decidedly Brazilian-ness of the arid landscape, the provincial accents, and the scruffy faces framed by a mishmash of international visual references whenever horny bodies escape to act out queer desire: from Tom of Finland to Tom de Pékin, from Kenneth Anger's Scorpio Rising to Rainer Werner Fassbinder's Querelle.
Nolasco alternates between explicitly sexual, neon-colored sequences that veer toward complete dreamscapes and the kind of European-film-festival-courting realism that Brazilian cinema is known for. The contrast can be quite bewildering, so much so that viewers may wish that Dry Wind would remain in the realm of reveries. Instead, Nolasco often tries to reassert Dry Wind as a film with an actual plot. In this case, it's one that has to do with jealousy, or the impossibility of intimacy in such queer configurations where sex is public only if it's clandestine but affection must be refused for the sake of social survival. Apart from a needless plotline involving a homophobic assault, it all makes perfect sense. But the film's most interesting moments emerge precisely when it surrenders to the presumably illogical strangeness of erotic fantasy.
For instance, when Sandro (Leandro Faria Lelo)—who regularly has sex in the woods with a co-worker, Ricardo (Allan Jacinto Santana), after their shift at the factory—happens upon what looks like a leather bar, the place turns out to be an empty construction site where queer archetypes—the harnessed master, the puppy slave, the drag-queen hostess—are there to perform for Sandro and Sandro alone, in a mix of silent performance art and interactive pornography. In another moment of poetic-pornographic license, an evident nod to Alain Guiraudie's Stranger by the Lake, a generically bearded hunk (Marcelo D'Avilla) with chained nipple clamps comes out of a man-made lake, ready to take Sandro into the water for an ecstatic drowning.
Significantly more comedic, Alice Júnior focuses on a trans wannabe influencer, Alice (Anne Celestino), and her perfumer of a father, Jean Genet (Emmanuel Rosset), who move from Recife to a small town in the south of Brazil. Subtlety isn't Baroni's aim, which is clear in the film's social media-like sense of pace and aesthetic bells and whistles, as well as in the obvious trans metaphor built into the narrative premise. Alice and her dad have to move down south because he wants to develop a new fragrance using pine cones local to the region, whose fruit only comes out if the person blowing through the cone has discovered the pine cone's real essence.
One becomes accustomed to the film's initially annoying incorporation of social media language into its aesthetic, such as the emojis that pop up on the screen whenever Alice does something or other, because it mirrors the interface through which contemporary teenagers animate everyday life. But Alice Júnior visibly struggles to differentiate itself from a soap opera. The over-the-top acting (the villains speak like Cruella de Vil) is technically in line with Baroni's animated Insta-grammar, but it becomes a problem when the film tries to tap into something other than its cute flamboyance. The film reaches for pathos only to find tinsel instead.
As fun as Alice Júnior can be, it's at its core a typical Brazilian kids' movie, in the vein of on-the-nose fare about enjoying life but not doing drugs that Brazilian megastar Xuxa put out in the 1980s and '90s, except queered by its trans protagonist and the visual language of the times. It wears its pedagogical message on its sleeve but is betrayed by a lack of substance. Alice is at once a naïve little girl yearning for her first kiss from a boy and a queer activist with an arsenal of didactic one-liners at the ready. This means some of the plot doesn't feel credible, as Alice masters LGBTQ resistance discourse perfectly in her interactions both on and offline, but prefers pissing her pants during a class exam, which naturally becomes a viral video, than demanding her right to use the women's restroom. At times she's a woke warrior, and at times she's a helpless little girl.
Alice Júnior only manages to transcend its sparkling surface in a few sequences where it pitches itself at grownups. In one, Jean Genet gets drunk with Marisa (Katia Horn), the kooky mother of one of Alice's gay classmates, and they start being a little too honest about what they think of their own children. The social media histrionics have nothing to offer in these incredibly entertaining scenes, which finally bring the film closer to Starrbooty than Clueless. These moments are fabulous precisely because they're unfiltered—queer in attitude, not in wardrobe. Jean Genet and Marisa don't toast to their kids because they're decent human beings fighting heterosexual patriarchy, but for being the "devilish bitch" and "dirty-mouthed trans" that they are.
NewFest runs from October 16—27.
Review: Synchronic Undermines Its Delightful Strangeness with Handholding
About a drug that sends its users back in time for seven minutes, the film holds your hand and walks you through its chronology mazes.2
Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead built alluringly mysterious worlds in films like Resolution and The Endless. These works of horror-tinged science fiction draw the viewer in through their ambiguous relationships to traditional space and time; they're complicated puzzles, and a good part of their fun is trying to fit the pieces together. But in their latest, Synchronic, the filmmakers do the fitting for you. About a drug that sends its users back in time for seven minutes, the film holds your hand and walks you through its chronology mazes, making what might otherwise be delightfully strange into something too pat and easy.
Steve (Anthony Mackie) is a hard-living EMT in New Orleans. It's not unusual for him and his partner, Dennis (Jamie Dornan), to respond to drug calls, and the film opens with heroin overdoses at a flop house, shot in a long take as the camera drifts from one room or character to another, building up a sense of dizzying dread. But the calls soon start to get weirder: someone who seems to have spontaneously combusted, someone bitten at a hotel by a nonnative species of snake, and someone in pieces at the bottom of an elevator shaft.
They're all victims of Synchronic, a designer drug that literally sends young people, with their soft pineal glands, into the past—and just how far depends randomly on where they are in the present. Soon, Dennis's 18-year-old daughter, Brianna (Ally Ioannides), pops the drug at a party and disappears, trapped in history, a damsel in distress held captive by time itself. Conveniently, Steve has brain cancer, which has made his pineal gland unusually soft for his age; nearing death, dragging his knuckles across rock bottom, he decides to unstick himself in time and rescue his friend's daughter. But first, though, he conducts a series of experiments to see how Synchronic actually works, explaining away the surreal with narrated video excerpts and white boards, suggesting a classroom lesson via Zoom.
Synchronic echoes Richard McGuire's 2014 graphic novel Here and David Lowery's 2017 film A Ghost Story, exploring a physical location by journeying across time but not space. And the Quibi-sized trips to the past are the high points of Benson and Moorhead's latest, evocative glimpses of a long and diffuse history, from the wooly mammoths and prehistoric men of the Ice Age, to the conquistadors and bayou alligators of colonization, to the racist rednecks of the early 20th century. But the filmmakers often play these seven-minute scenes as much for laughs as wonder. "The past fucking sucks!" Steve cries upon returning home from one trip. And he's not wrong—especially for a black man in Louisiana.
Benson and Moorhead, as they did in The Endless, eventually cast off the science that sets their story in motion for the melodrama at its core. There are some gaps in logic, and some cruel manipulations (including Steve losing his dog to the vagaries of pill-induced time travel), all concessions to an underlying drama about family reunion and self-sacrifice. The film isn't nostalgic, as it argues that the past is awful, and that the present a delicious miracle.
Cast: Anthony Mackie, Jamie Dornan, Ally Ioannides, Katie Aselton Director: Justin Benson, Aaron Moorhead Screenwriter: Justin Benson Distributor: Well Go USA Running Time: 96 min Rating: R Year: 2019
Review: Sound of Metal Is a Tender, Singular Portrait of Addiction
Darius Marder's film captures, with urgency and tenderness, just how enticing the residue of the past can be.3
"Fucked!" That's how Michael Gira described how his hearing is after a live show in a 2015 interview with the Guardian. Admitting to not even taking the simple precaution of wearing ear plugs while playing in one of the world's loudest bands, the Swans frontman went on to say, "It's a fix. It must unleash endorphins, because being inside the sound is to me the ultimate. When it's working and we're all psychically connected and the music's taking us over, I can't imagine anything more exquisite."
At the start of Darius Marder's Sound of Metal, Ruben (Riz Ahmed), the drummer for a Swans-esque noise rock band, Blackgammon, is shown in such a state of euphoria, furiously pounding away at his drums and enraptured by the wall of sound filled out by distorted guitars and the screaming vocals of his girlfriend and bandmate, Lou (Olivia Cooke). It's the sound of agony and ecstasy intertwined—a form of sonic transcendence that is, for Ruben, every bit as alluring as the heroin addiction that he kicked some four years earlier.
The aural assault of the band's live shows stands in sharp contrast to Ruben and Lou's personal life, which consists of quiet evenings dancing to soul music in their RV and waking up to health shakes and yoga. But it's seemingly only during their performances that Ruben feels both truly alive and at peace with himself, getting his fix of the rhythmic noise that's become his new drug of choice. So when the slight ringing in Ruben's ears the night before turns into a dull roar, leaving all surrounding noises muffled beyond recognition, it's not merely his professional livelihood that's at stake, but his mental and spiritual well-being as well.
This newfound state of near-deafness thrusts Ruben suddenly into a transitional phase, and Sound of Metal is in lockstep with him, using intricate sound design to approximate his nightmare state and amplify the confusion, anger, and disorientation that grips him. Ruben's life on the road, and thus his existence "inside the sound," becomes a thing of the past when, at Lou's request, he agrees to stay at a remote community for the deaf that specializes in helping recovering addicts. And it's here that Ruben is again forced to confront his addictive tendencies. Only now he's no longer chasing the dragon, but the chance to regain his hearing, whether through his impulsive desire to lose what remains of it by immediately returning to the stage or by holding out hope for a costly cochlear implant that, despite what he thinks, isn't quite the guaranteed quick fix that he believes it to be.
As Ruben begins confronting his current predicament, Sound of Metal risks becoming a familiar, inspirational tale of overcoming one's disability. But the filmmakers fill out the familiar framework of Ruben's dilemma with an acutely detailed portrait of a deaf community headed by the serene and compassionate Joe (Paul Raci), a former addict who lost his hearing during Vietnam and firmly believes that deafness isn't a handicap.
As the film traces Ruben's integration into this community, and his increasing understanding of sign language, it becomes even more highly attuned to Ruben's emotional and sensorial experiences, both in terms of his newfound physical impairment and his struggle to accept the uncertain future ahead of him. It's a tumultuous time for Ruben, and Ahmed enlivens the character with a restless, bristling energy that constantly clashes with the sense of stillness and inner peace that Joe tries to instill in him every day. And this underlying tension between Joe's calm and patient acceptance of reality, and all its complications, and Ruben's undying need to return to "being inside the sound" colors the rest of the film.
Later on, Joe tells Ruben that "those moments of stillness, that place, that's the kingdom of God. And that place will never abandon you." Ruben's professed atheism deflates the religious aspect of Joe's statement, but as the final act takes an unexpected turn and the perpetual push-pull between stillness and chaos, silence and sound that grips Ruben at every turn are pushed to their breaking point, his advice takes on a newfound eloquence. For Ruben, the song may be over, but the feedback lingers on. Sound of Metal sees the value of stillness, particularly for addicts, but it also captures, with urgency and tenderness, just how enticing the residue of the past can be. In a way, it can be an addictive drug all its own.
Cast: Riz Ahmed, Olivia Cooke, Paul Raci, Mathieu Amalric, Lauren Ridloff, Chris Perfetti, William Xifaras, Hillary Baack, Michael Tow, Tom Kemp, Rena Maliszewski Director: Darius Marder Screenwriter: Darius Marder, Abraham Marder Distributor: Amazon Studios Running Time: 121 min Rating: R Year: 2019
Review: Ham on Rye Is an Elegant, Grand Chronicle of a Chaos Foretold
The film's purposeful archness challenges the sentimentality that marks many a film and real-life ceremony.3.5
Tyler Taormina's Ham on Rye, in which high school children come of age while moseying around the San Fernando Valley in anticipation of an undefined formal event, sets the audience up for a lark. Conflicting details give the impression that the film is divorced from time, with the children's clothes—long and flowing dresses, gaudily ill-fitting suits—suggesting holdovers from the 1970s. Even the immaculately put-together mothers and Hawaiian shirt-clad fathers seem like vestiges from a different era. No cellphones are initially glimpsed, and there are no overt pop-cultural references, though other textures place the story in the present day. In other words, there's a highly self-conscious, stylized, insulated innocence to the film that inspires distrust, as we're invited to enjoy the sort of idyll proffered by many teen movies, yet we know we're being played with. This archness, which isn't without sincerity, challenges the sentimentality that marks many a film and real-life ceremony.
Taormina and co-writer Eric Berger don't offer character development in a traditional sense, instead creating a free-floating and distinctly Altmanesque tapestry as they move among dozens of characters. The elegance and control of Ham on Rye's aesthetic is breathtaking, especially considering the film's shoestring production. Cinematographer Carson Lund bathes the story's neighborhood settings in a pastel light that again evokes the '70s—or, at least, modern pop culture's impression of the decade. And the camera lingers on details that indicate the ecstasies and miseries lingering underneath this suburban mirage, such as a shot of trash in a yard that suggests the aftermath of either indifference or violence, or of a postcard sent to a girl from her sister in college, which is written in an unnaturally, over-compensatingly proclamatory style that implies desperation while serving as a mockery of the girls' simplified visions of future adulthood. Such details point to the influence of many titans of the cinema, among them Brian De Palma, Peter Weir, and David Lynch.
The film comprises a string of melancholic dead ends. A group of boys talk of the importance of "porking," setting up a familiar "trying to get laid" scenario that never materializes. Later, they see another group of boys who resemble doppelgangers, and each gang puffs their bodies up, mocking the other, priming us for a fight that doesn't occur, as the second gang jumps a chain link fence, never to be seen again. Elsewhere, a group of men, visually coded as old-school stoner types, drive around ready to raise hell, which also doesn't come to pass. These half-formed anecdotes, and there are many more of them, come to resemble fissures in memory. We might be seeing the fuzzy, semi-sanitized, pop-mythos-addled recollections of the adult versions of these characters as they drink away their disappointments in a bar.
Once we're sufficiently acclimated to Ham on Rye's foreboding, wistful atmosphere, Taormina springs a poignant and satirical surprise. The children aren't making their way toward a formal event like the traditional prom, but a ceremonial dance at a deli, in which they eat sandwiches together before forming boys- and girls-only lines so as to evaluate one another and couple. The strangeness of this arrangement, like the general timelessness of the setting, underscores the arbitrary ornateness of real ceremonies—prom, homecoming, graduation—that insidiously serve the purpose of conditioning us to become well-behaved cogs in the social machine, like all the disappointed parents who lurk in the periphery of the film.
Underneath Ham on Rye's mystery and grandeur, then, is a theme that's traditional to teen movies: children's fear of selling out like their parents. Which isn't to say that Taormina indulges snideness, as he invests this dance with an intense visual splendor that embodies the naïve, untapped passion, laced with terror, that comes with inoculation into adult rituals. This sequence has the daring rhapsody of the prolonged prom sequence in De Palma's Carrie.
Ham on Rye's second half is informed with a kind of survivor's guilt that's also reminiscent of Carrie. Haley (Haley Bodell), the closest the film has to a protagonist, flees the deli ceremony, casting herself off as Amy Irving's character was cast off in Carrie. After her friends seem to vanish transcendently into thin air after the dance, Haley is left behind with her despondent family, perhaps stranded in childhood or simply this town, and the film abruptly shifts atmospheres. The pastels are traded in for industrial nighttime hues, and cellphones and other modern bric-a-brac are suddenly visible, while the posh suburban neighborhoods, with their kids who can afford to go to dances that whisk them off to neverland, are traded in for strip malls with disaffected teens and working-class parents who're pushed by their disadvantaged children to the brink of insanity. Ham on Rye first shows us a dream, with its intimations of chaos, before then showing us only chaos, with its lingering echoes of the vanished dream.
Cast: Haley Bodell, Audrey Boos, Gabriella Herrera, Adam Torres, Luke Darga, Sam Hernandez, Blake Borders, Cole Devine, Timothy Taylor, Gregory Falatek, Laura Wernette, Lori Beth Denberg, Danny Tamberelli, Clayton Snyder, Aaron Schwartz Director: Tyler Taormina Screenwriter: Tyler Taormina, Eric Berger Distributor: Factory 25 Running Time: 85 min Rating: NR Year: 2019
Review: Dating Amber Is a Touching Yarn About Defying Heteronormativity
David Freyne manages to indict the societal expectation of heterosexuality as a traumatizing force while also humanizing its straight victims.3.5
"This place will kill you." That's a recurrent refrain in Dating Amber, writer-director David Freyne's dramedy about two queer teens, Eddie (Fionn O'Shea) and Amber (Lola Petticrew), who pretend to be a couple so that they can make it through high school a little less scathed. It's one of those lines that sometimes captures a character's plight with such biting precision, and simplicity, that the viewer is caught off guard and the film is left feeling haunted. The place that "will kill you," as Amber warns Eddie as well as her herself multiple times in one way or another, is rural Ireland in the 1990s, where divorce is still illegal—an idyllic meadowland plagued by backward prudes and homophobic bullies.
The demands of heterosexuality are lethal to both straights and gays in County Kildare. Amber's father, for one, took his own life, and ever since then she's been charging her classmates to use her family's caravan as a place to have sex, so she can save enough money and move to London and work for a punk zine. By contrast, Eddie wallows in sorrow and denial, his gait the grotesque result of him trying to mimic butchness. He plans to do exactly what's expected of him—that is, to join the army and marry a nice girl who will probably just make him sleep on the living room couch like his mother (Sharon Horgan) does to his father (Barry Ward). Amber knows that living one's life according to the desires of others will kill you, so her offer to fake-date Eddie so their peers will stop harassing them seems more like an act of solidarity, an attempt to spare Eddie from the violence that she herself can take in stride.
The film is initially hyper-stylized, recalling Jamie Babbit's But I'm a Cheerleader. The colorfully coordinated precision of the mise-en-scène and campy over-acting all point toward satire. But there's a gravitas to Dating Amber that keeps pricking us little by little until it completely takes over in the film. Our first warning that humor may have been only the sheen of a much more serious cinematic proposition, a cheeky red herring of sorts, comes in a sequence in which Eddie and Amber take the train to Dublin and happen upon a gay bar. Instead of lusting over male bodies or dancing the night away on drugs (that comes later), Eddie is instantly transfixed by a drag queen singing Brenda Lee's "You Can Depend on Me." He approaches her on stage as if, at last, untethered from the world. In a kind of communion, Eddie embraces the drag queen like a lost child re-encountering his mother. She keeps on singing, rocking Eddie as if casting a queer spell, or baptizing the "baby gay," as she calls him.
From that scene on, Dating Amber rather seamlessly strips itself of its hyperbolic affectations to reveal a heartbreaking story of emancipation through friendship. Freyne manages to indict the societal expectation of heterosexuality as a traumatizing force while also humanizing its straight victims. A brief scene when Eddie's doleful mother is, for once, alone at home and puts on a vinyl is particularly wonderful. She looks at her husband's framed photograph and smiles, reminding us that while the fantasy of heterosexual domesticity holds many promises, in practice, it can be an exhausting hell. "Anywhere!" Amber tells Eddie when he asks her where he could escape to. And as their own faux love affair begins to crumble, they can at last embrace the queerness and messy feelings for which there is no required language, no blueprints, and as such the opportunity to actually find a place that won't kill them.
Cast: Fionn O'Shea, Lola Petticrew, Sharon Horgan, Barry Ward, Simone Kirby, Evan O'Connor Director: David Freyne Screenwriter: David Freyne Distributor: Samuel Goldwyn Films Running Time: 92 min Rating: NR Year: 2020
Review: Bad Hair Is a Fiendish, If Tonally Uneven, Satire of Racist Beauty Norms
The film has an exciting, lived-in quality that elevates what are otherwise some markedly unsteady attempts at horror.2.5
The year is 1989, and while TV network Culture is considered dead weight by its parent company, its specialty in burgeoning, black-fronted music genres leaves it poised to successfully cover the sounds and styles that will dominate the next decade. Enter ex-model Zora (Vanessa Williams), the new boss with a new vision for the channel that includes rebranding it as Cult. Zora brought her own assistant, too, which puts pressure on Anna Bludso (Elle Lorraine), the assistant to Zora's predecessor and an up-and-comer with ideas of her own, rent to pay, and something to prove. Her own natural hair gets her dirty looks from white co-workers in the lobby and a miniature lecture from Zora herself, so despite what her family and her other black co-workers might think, she follows Zora's lead and gets a weave.
Justin Simien's 2014 feature-length directorial debut, Dear White People, translated so neatly to an extended TV format in large part due to its plethora of characters and plot threads, and Bad Hair similarly evinces his keen eye for humanity. As in his earlier film, the characters all have a diverse range of relationships: with each other, with their own race, with their aspirations, and with the eyes of the world at large. Though someone like Zora could easily have been a thin antagonist, you instead feel the context of age, beauty norms, and societal pressure that shaped who she is and what she wants to do. Bad Hair can feel overstuffed at times, as Anna shares scenes with an ever-increasing range of characters, including her family, friends, an ex, and her skeevy landlord, but the details give the film an exciting, lived-in quality that elevates what are otherwise some markedly unsteady attempts at horror.
And as it turns out, the weaves are also alive, and they're literally out for blood, at least those being offered at a mysterious salon where Anna, looking to make her mark on Cult as a VJ, is sent to by Zora. Their tendrils seek out oozing orifices, and their roots plant hunger in the brains of the afflicted while manifesting strange dreams. These scenes, with characters restrained and yanked off screen by hair-tuft tentacles, are initially promising, but their rhythm is all wrong. They're choppily and timidly edited in ways that direct the eye away from the action, as if to obscure any hokeyness that might become apparent from close scrutiny. As such, you may find yourself wanting for the sturdy, kinetic ingenuity of Sam Raimi.
The film is also uncertain of how seriously to take its horror. The extreme close-up of the weave process, as the needle snakes through the tender landscape of Anna's scalp while drawing blood, is brilliantly cringe-inducing. One memorable, repeated image of Anna's family sitting at the table while clumps of hair descend from the cracks in the ceiling is so effective because it's allowed to be eerie, rather than immediately undercut by a line about a support group for women with killer weaves. By the time the climax rolls into view, the film abandons any seriousness, even bringing in Lena Waithe, as the host of one of Culture's newly canceled shows, to make a Friday the 13th reference while snarking about the horror-movie proceedings. Bad Hair unintentionally mirrors its characters' own insecurities, teetering awkwardly between straight-faced camp and outright farce as it cuts the scare scenes to ribbons and makes jokes about itself, as if to preempt any disbelief from the audience.
Worse, the film is constantly overexplaining itself. Dear White People contained similarly blunt, into-the-camera messaging, but that felt appropriate for a setting where students are wrapped up in college politics and subjecting their ideas to class scrutiny. In Bad Hair, one character who confronts Zora utters a Freudian slip, accusing her of appealing to a "whiter" audience when she means to say "wider" audience, as though the film hasn't so clearly been making that point from the very start, when the central channel got knowingly rebranded as Cult. The interactions between Bad Hair's characters already convey the domination of white beauty standards and how the self dissipates when capitulating to them, so the extra steps taken to underline these themes only works to dilute them.
Cast: Elle Lorraine, Vanessa Williams, Jay Pharoah, Lena Waithe, Kelly Rowland, Laverne Cox, Chanté Adams, Ashley Blaine Featherson, Blair Underwood, Usher Raymond IV Director: Justin Simien Screenwriter: Justin Simien Distributor: Hulu Running Time: 102 min Rating: NR Year: 2020
Interview: Garrett Bradley on Exploring Human Dimensionality in Time
Bradley discusses how the forces of collaboration and intuition inform her filmmaking process.
Garrett Bradley's films assume grand proportions through their sweeping titles: America, Alone, Like, and, now, Time. Her work expands our notions of concepts and institutions central to contemporary life by interrogating the audiovisual imprints that define them in the public consciousness. These explorations expand the meaning of their thematic subjects by injecting Bradley's deeply intentional imagery into the conversation.
The filmmaker's latest, Time, is as much about the ineffable passage of its titular concept as it is about the cruel duration of a prison sentence. Through a delicately woven tapestry of decades-old home videos shot by self-proclaimed "abolitionist" Fox Rich over the years while her husband, Robert, was in prison and more recent footage shot by Bradley and her crew, the film captures time in all of its contradictions. When cut between commonplace scenes of Fox interfacing with the bureaucratic maze of the carceral state, the rushes of her past feel both tantalizingly close and also impossible to reclaim—all while her future with Robert appears indeterminate. Bradley's frequent deployment of stirring piano solos by Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou may give Time the aura of a fairy tale as Fox faces down a seemingly insurmountable system of oppression in the name of love, yet the film never loses grounding in the everyday realities and inhumanities made normal by mass incarceration.
I spoke to Bradley shortly before Time became available worldwide on Amazon Prime. Our conversation covered what the documentary might have looked like without Fox Rich's video archives, why she didn't feel the need to explain racism in the film, as well as how the forces of collaboration and intuition inform her filmmaking process.
I'm blown away that such a central component of the film, Fox Rich's personal video archives, weren't baked in from the beginning. When she gave you that archive on the last day of filming, was it a matter of her fully trusting you? Had she forgotten they existed? Did it just dawn on her that they might make a great addition to the film?
I had no idea. When you're working with someone so closely for a period of time, it presents all sorts of interesting emotions and challenges. At least from a filmmaker's perspective, you've got all sorts of reasons why, eventually, you have to walk away from production. What I can say is it was, to my knowledge, the last day of shooting. It was in the evening, and I just remember saying to her, "I'm going to come back and show you a cut." She was on the phone with Robert, and I remember her saying, "Hold on a second, let me get you something." She handed me this bag of all of these mini DV tapes that ended up being about 100 hours of footage. She had not seen or looked at that footage since she shot it. I remember getting in the car, shipping it out to get transcoded and being so incredibly nervous about the fact that there were no backups for it. It was a real testament to her to her trust. But why, at that moment, I can't say.
Without these tapes that so poetically give us a glimpse into Fox's own history, would your film really have been Time? I can imagine it's tough to speak to a project that was never realized, but what form and shape would your film have taken without them?
When I initially started shooting, my intention was twofold. One was to think about this film, which I was conceiving as another 13-minute Op-Docs short, as an extension of Alone, a sister film to this other film that had already come out. The intention behind that was to say, "How can I extend the conversation around incarceration, from a sort of black feminist point of view, from a familial point of view? From a point of view that that illuminates the effects of the facts." Fox is, actually, briefly in Alone. I met her in the process of making it. And she's a very different person than Aloné [Watts] and was navigating the system in a very different way. She was 18 years into the process of navigating the system, whereas Aloné was in the very beginning stages of that. I think, at that point, my head was really about, again, extending the conversation in a way that showed the diversification of experience within the same issue.
But then also, uniquely to Fox's own story, I really focused in on her daily life as a way of saying if there's anything that I'm able to illustrate in this film, if I have to stop shooting tomorrow, it's to show how deeply embedded the system puts itself in daily life. There's no separation between your work life, your personal life, your home life, your relationship with your children, your mother, yourself, your partner. There's no separation between that and the system. It really unequivocally embeds itself into every element of your day.
That was my initial intention, and a lot of the footage was there. Part of the challenge in the edit when looking at it was, wow, this actually feels really two-dimensional. It feels like we have no way of my proving as a filmmaker what I knew, which was the holistic nature of who we are as human beings. We are 360-degree beings. We have context, we have history, we have experience that informs how we maneuver the present moment. How do I show that? That's ultimately the challenge of making films, you can only tell stories and say things one frame at a time, from one dimension. I think that the film would have focused in on one element of life. It would have been very different, that's for sure.
The film talks about how Fox's story demonstrates the power of love as a tool of resistance. How do you convey such a radical notion without coming across naïve?
That's a great question. Basically, it's like, how do you make something good or bad, right? I have to say, I think in my experience, it's been making sure that vulnerability and intention are intrinsic parts of the process. Vulnerability on all ends, as a filmmaker, as a collaborator. That there's trust. I think the bottom line of that and respect are the ingredients of making something that I think can live outside of the opaqueness of what you're describing.
In everything from the title of your works to the images contained within them, you maintain such a focus on redefining the way we think about giant structures and institutions in our lives. Is this a goal that you consciously set out to achieve when embarking on a new project, or are you discovering the way in which your work interacts with these notions and ideas?
I think it goes back to this idea of the sort of cinematic challenge of trying to allow things to feel as they do in the real world. Context, history, and multiple dimensions are so intrinsic to that. I think the same can be said for the macro and micro experience. That's what we live in. We have our individual lives, but we're a part of a larger system. And depending on who we are and how we're moving through space, that can become oppressively clear or something that one has the privilege to forget. I think I always enter a project first from the personal. I don't think that's a rule though. There are other projects that I'm working on or thinking about where I'm coming at it actually from a larger scale first. I think it changes from one project to the next. But you're right, ultimately, there's always going to be for me a conversation between the two. The great meaning comes out of the conversation between the two.
Did you feel a need to rescue or shelter Time from the tropes of social realism or the journalistic point of view that normally pervades stories about mass incarceration or the prison-industrial complex?
There were certainly questions in the edit around how literal we wanted it to be, how much we felt the film needed to explain the minutiae of the crime, the trial, the legal system, the sentencing. Myself and Gabe Rhodes, who edited the film, as we were talking through a lot of that, I found myself feeling that to really explain it was also then to try to explain racism in America. And I'm not really sure that the film is particularly obligated to do that. Because it's for people, and made with people, who inherently understand that and live it every day. And so when we think about obligations around certain forms of explanation, or sort of a literal proof of an explanation of the why, it can also be coded language. This idea of universality becomes coded language for who we're actually speaking to if a majority of the people in the country are, in one way or another, affected by this issue. So, I didn't feel that we had to do that.
How did you conceive the film's coda? There's something both comforting and tragic in the notion that cinema—and only cinema—can both preserve and reverse time.
I wish I had a profound answer. I struggled with this question a little bit. Because it was really at a point in the editorial process where we were just working off of instinct and emotion. And there was, riffing off of your last question before, just not even needing to have a literal reason for why we ended it the way we did. It just felt right. It felt like we were able to work with the images in a way that directly responded to what the entire film was about without having to say it in any other way. I think for some people, it works. For some people, it doesn't. I wish I could say something more profound than that, but it was just pure instinct.
So much about this film feels like it was almost fated to come together: discovering Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbro's music through YouTube algorithms, Fox Rich giving you her archive and transforming the project, the cosmic parallels revealed in the edit between the footage you shot and her videos. Has this transformed the way you think about artistic ownership and authorship at all?
I think my work has always inherently been collaborative. My work always starts with a series of questions, and the answers come out of conversations that are happening with people in my community are what inform a lot of the aesthetic choices. There was another project, for instance, that I was commissioned for the Whitney Biennial 2019, called A.K.A. That was me really having questions about classic American cinema and race relations between women. My instinct was to go to women that I knew and to ask them questions that I myself had, and a lot of their answers literally shaped the scenes, the camerawork, the lenses. I think Time is an extension of that same love I have for working with people.
Review: Rebecca Unimaginatively Runs a Classic Through a Netflix Filter
The film is a pretty bauble of a thing that ticks off the story's shock revelations in an efficient, if not particularly surprising, fashion.2
Ben Wheatley's Rebecca is effective at channeling elemental fears into a glossy package, but less so at crafting characters that are more than the sum of their archetypal parts. The story is little changed from Daphne du Maurier's 1938 Gothic novel or Alfred Hitchcock's 1940 Oscar-winning adaptation. While staying in a posh resort on the French Riviera, an unnamed young woman (Lily James) working as traveling companion for acid-tongued, man-hunting dowager Mrs. Van Hopper (Ann Dowd), is romanced by dashing and recently widowed aristocrat Max de Winter (Armie Hammer). In quick order, the somewhat lost-seeming woman marries Max and refashioned as Mrs. de Winter, the new lady of Manderley, Max's sprawling coastal estate that becomes her gilded cage.
Following the sunny, happy-go-lucky Riviera opening, the film pivots into psychodrama mode once it relocates north to the gloomier English seaside. Given Mrs. de Winter's humble origins, she commits one faux pas after another. She's riddled with class anxiety, not knowing when she will next offend Manderly's icy housekeeper, Mrs. Danvers (Kristin Scott Thomas), the platoon of servants and other staff needed to run the massive complex, or her new husband. The unspoken rules that she keeps breaking—asking the wrong questions, venturing into the wrong rooms, studying a menu incorrectly—all seem to lead back to the same source: Manderley is still in the ghostly grip of Max's recently deceased wife, Rebecca.
At every turn, people remind Mrs. de Winter of how little she measures up to her predecessor, some more intentionally than others, from Max's kindly sister, Beatrice (Keely Hawes), remarking about Rebecca being one of those "annoying people everyone loves," to Danvers rhapsodizing in openly romantic terms about her late lady being "the most beautiful creature I ever saw in my life," to Rebecca's rascally cousin, Jack (Sam Riley), making snide innuendos about Rebecca's horse-taming skills. While Max doesn't say such things openly to his young bride, his simmering rages and habit of sleepwalking at night to stare wistfully at Rebecca's now closed-off quarters suggest his still being in the grip of an undying passion.
Much of the film's middle section details what's either a waking nightmare for Mrs. de Winter (the most effective parts of the story plug into relatable anxieties over being found out or not measuring up) or extensive gaslighting campaign. In either case, the primary instigator is Danvers, who despite being theoretically in charge of the estate appears to spend most of her time lurking in corners waiting for Mrs. de Winter to make another mistake. Thomas's serenely imperious performance is one of the film's highlights, stopping just shy of Ryan Murphy-esque grande-dame camp. Riley's rakish gleam is similarly energizing, particularly when the story turns into a late-developing courtroom drama about how or even if Rebecca died.
As for the leads playing the mere mortals wriggling under Danvers's unflinching glare, neither James nor Hammer measure up. James has the more difficult job of the two, needing to seem sympathetic even as Mrs. de Winter lurches from one clueless encounter to the next; the actress spends much of Rebecca blushing in joy or biting her lip while on the verge of tears, neither delivering much in the way of depth. And as Max, Hammer communicates a kind of stolid and unintelligent glumness that makes it difficult to comprehend how Mrs. de Winter could ignore so many warning signs of deep depression and anger.
One crucial problem with this new version of Rebecca, in fact, is that Max is reduced to little more than a repository of warning signs, from refusing to answer his bride's questions to growling "Put that back!" when she dares to pick up a volume of love poetry that Rebecca had inscribed to him. Since Max has precious few plus-column characteristics that don't fall under the categories of "handsome," "wealthy," and "smart dresser," Mrs. de Winter's travails after being trapped by her love for him are difficult to identify with.
At least the film doesn't default to assuming that gothic necessitates a glum visual palette. The design of Manderley is spectacular, its classic English aristocratic grandeur seeming to stretch on for miles, lensed by cinematographer Laurie Rose with gorgeous chiaroscuro layering. Avoiding both the grotesquerie of some of his other work and the tight tensions of Hitchcock's adaptation, Wheatley's Rebecca operates instead as a less psychologically knotted and more straightforward costume drama. It's an attractive and fairly shallow bauble of a thing that ticks off the story's shock revelations in an efficient, if not particularly surprising, fashion.
Cast: Lily James, Armie Hammer, Keeley Hawes, Kristin Scott Thomas, Sam Riley, Ann Dowd, Bill Patterson, Tom Goodman-Hill Director: Ben Wheatley Screenwriter: Jane Goldman, Joe Shrapnel, Anna Waterhouse Distributor: Netflix Running Time: 122 min Rating: R Year: 2020
Review: This Is Not a Movie Is a Smart, Clear-Eyed Tribute to Robert Fisk
The documentary adroitly demonstrates that Fisk is still motivated by the boyish curiosity that drew him to journalism.3
As a boy in the London suburbs, Robert Fisk's career aspirations were shaped by seeing Foreign Correspondent. In 1972, Fisk got the seemingly glamorous job that Joel McCrea had in the Alfred Hitchcock classic, and has been at it ever since. But reporting from overseas is messier in real life than in scripted drama, which is why Yung Chang's engrossing portrait of the 74-year-old journalist is titled This Is Not a Movie.
Fisk began no further from home than Belfast, but in 1976 he arrived in Beirut, which became his permanent home base. He's covered invasions, insurrections, and all kinds of catastrophes, always taking what he calls "the side of those who suffer." This stance has engendered many conflicts with supporters of the region's dominant powers, as well as with editors at several British newspapers. Fisk currently writes for the now online-only Independent.
The documentary's title, which echoes that of Jafar Panahi's This Is Not a Film, suggests an attempt to deconstruct cinematic storytelling. But it's Fisk who's the iconoclast here, as Chang has crafted a conventional blend of new and archival footage, without any experimental narrative strategies. Unlike his earlier Up the Yangtze, which benefited from a narrower focus and compressed timeline, This Is Not a Movie isn't especially shapely or propulsive.
The two things that give this documentary its power and provocativeness are intellectual rather than dramatic: Fisk's work, and his ideas. Using digital minicams, Chang and his crew follow the journalist through Syria, Beirut, and the West Bank. There's also a foray to Serbia and Bosnia, where Fisk tries to determine how European weapons were routed to the Syrian bloodbath, which he calls "the worst reported war in the Middle East."
"If you don't go to the scene," Fisk says, "you can't get near the truth of it." And that's the essence of his mission, which is as moral as it is historical: "So no one can say, 'This didn't happen.' So no one can say, 'We didn't know. No one told us.'" Although he's lived in Beirut most of his life, Fisk is no modern-day Lawrence of Arabia. In his unironed shirts and rumpled pants, he looks as if he's dressed to putter in the garden at the Irish cottage he says he might have chosen as his retirement home. He admits to speaking only "a bit" of Arabic. (The film shows Fisk's reliance on translators and guides but doesn't explain where he gets them, as Chang is more interested in Fisk's life and ideas than the practicalities of his work.)
Fisk's focus on the victims of Middle Eastern power plays has made him some enemies. A defining moment in his career was the massacre of Palestinian refugees at the Sabra and Shatilas camps, carried out by Lebanese Christians but facilitated by Israeli forces. (It's the only event that ever gave him nightmares, he says.) He travels with Amira Haas, an Israeli journalist he admires, to survey the West Bank areas sundered by Israel's separation wall and to visit what Fink terms Israeli "colonies." Inevitably, the reporter has been denounced as an anti-Semite, notably by Alan Dershowitz in a 2001 audio debate excerpted in the film.
That moment aside, Chang devotes little time to Fisk's detractors. Notably, it doesn't challenge his claim that there was no chemical attack on Douma, Syria, in 2018. Early reports may have been overstated, but few observers support Fisk's account of the incident. Even a reporter who prides himself on getting as close to the story as possible can make a mistake. But Chang makes a strong case that Fisk's approach is more reliable than that of journalists whose method privileges deflection and distortion. Indeed, what Fisk has to say about that should interest newspaper readers who never turn—or click—to the foreign coverage.
Noting that war is "not a football match," Fisk rejects mainstream journalism's standard operating procedure, which he describes as, "First you tell the truth. Then you get someone to deny it." In the fourth year of Donald Trump's presidency, Fisk's rebuff of journalistic "balance" could hardly be more pertinent. Fisk may be out of sync with his profession, but Chang's documentary adroitly demonstrates that the septuagenarian is still motivated as much by the boyish curiosity that drew him to journalism. Dismissing the idea of that cottage in Ireland, Fisk says, "I still want to know what happens next."
Director: Yung Chang Screenwriter: Yung Chang, Nelofer Pazira Distributor: KimStim Running Time: 106 min Rating: NR Year: 2019


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You may want to get Publication 509, Tax Calendars. It has tax calendars that tell you when to file returns and make tax payments.
You may want to see:
Identification Numbers(p5)
Social security number (SSN).(p5)
Individual taxpayer identification number (ITIN).(p5)
An ITIN is for tax use only. It does not entitle the holder to social security benefits or change the holder's employment or immigration status.
Employer identification number (EIN).(p5)
|New EIN.(p6)
When you need identification numbers of other persons.(p6)
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The Kardashians have just closed a new three-year deal with E! for their signature series "Keeping Up With The Kardashians," which covers seasons seven, eight and nine of the hit reality show and also extends E!'s first-look deal with the family for unscripted ideas, concepts and projects.
This deal covers Kim Kardashian, Kourtney Kardashian, Khloé Kardashian Odom, Rob Kardashian, and Bruce, Kris, Kendall and Kylie Jenner, according to Deadline.com.
"Keeping Up With The Kardashians" is E!'s highest-rated and most-watched series of all time, with its episodes claiming five of E!'s top 10 most watched telecasts ever. The most recent Season 6 averaged more than 3 million total viewers. Season 7 premieres May 20.
In addition to breaking ratings records itself, "Keeping Up With The Kardashians" also has spawned a slew of spinoff series, including "Kourtney And Khloé Take Miami," "Kourtney And Kim Take New York," and "Khloé & Lamar." The new deal does not cover the offshoots, only the mothership show.


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'Digital Badges' Would Represent Students' Skill Acquisition
Initiatives seek to give students permanent online records for developing specific skills
For many adults, the thought of earning badges evokes childhood memories of sewing Boy Scout or Girl Scout patches onto sashes and vests.
But some educators are hoping that the current generation of children will associate the word with something new: digital badges.
In this vision, electronic images could be earned for a wide variety of reasons in multiple learning spaces, including after-school programs, summer workshops, K-12 classrooms, and universities. And once earned, the badges could follow students throughout their lifetimes, being displayed on websites or blogs and included in college applications and résumés.
The concept originated at the end of 2010 at a conference held by the Mozilla Foundation in Barcelona, Spain. The idea is getting a toehold in higher education and is being tried with some youths at the precollegiate level.
Advocates of this vision for K-12 contend that such badges could help bridge educational experiences that happen in and out of school, as well as provide a way to recognize "soft skills" such as leadership and collaboration. Badges could paint a more granular and meaningful picture of what a student actually knows than a standardized-test score or a letter grade, they say.
But not all educators are convinced of the merits of the idea. Because badges are still being developed and have not yet been introduced into classrooms, how they would fit into the structure of K-12 education and whether they could actually fulfill the goals that proponents have described are still up for debate.
Other skeptics argue that introducing digital badges into informal education settings—where most agree they would have the greatest impact initially—could bring too much structure and hierarchy to the very places students go to seek refuge from formal achievement tracking. And many point to research that suggests rewarding students, with a badge for instance, for activities they would have otherwise completed out of personal interest or intellectual curiosity actually decreases their motivation to do those tasks.
Advocates see it differently.
Among the strongest proponents of the idea is the Chicago-based John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, which has spearheaded the digital-badges movement for lifelong learning by launching a competition for badge proposals in partnership with Mozilla, a nonprofit Web organization best known for its open-source browser Firefox, and HASTAC, or Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Advanced Collaboratory, a network of individuals promoting new technologies for learning.
"Kids are learning in their peer group. They're learning online. They're learning in interest groups and after-school programs," says Constance M. Yowell, the director of education for U.S. programs at the MacArthur Foundation. "One of the things that is abundantly clear to us is that learning is incredibly fragmented, and there's nobody that's helping the learning that's happening across those connections."
Helping to string together learning achievements across informal and formal education, as well as at transitional education points, such as from precollegiate to higher education and from formal education into the workplace, is one of the main goals of badge advocates.
For example, K-12 students could earn badges for mastering certain content, such as physics or trigonometry, or for soft skills acquired in afterschool settings, such as leadership or environmental stewardship, that could paint a clearer picture of themselves for college admissions officers.
"How do you make visible what kids are learning, and how do you help them get credit for it?" says Yowell. "How do you build bridges across the multiple places that kids are learning so they can see the connections between what they're learning inside of school and outside of school?"
Another advantage of digital badges, their boosters say, is the ability to create learning pathways where none previously existed. For example, students who have earned an introduction to HTML badge, which refers to a type of computer programming language, could then be encouraged to pursue an intermediate level HTML badge to continue building their skills, a website creation badge where they could apply that skill, or a badge for a new programming language, such as Java or CSS.
"With badges, you can actually scaffold out a pathway of what is next," Yowell says. "We want as much as possible to create multiple entry points for learning and multiple pathways for career and academic success."
Yowell envisions a recommendation tool that could point students to a variety of opportunities based on the competencies they've demonstrated through earning their badges.
"It becomes an integrated process as opposed to one where the assessments are separate," Yowell says.
This was one of the reasons why MOUSE, a New York City-based youth-development program that teaches students to provide technical support and leadership in their schools, began using badges. One of the main programs MOUSE offers is MOUSE Corps, a career-readiness program for high schoolers that gives those students experience providing information technology support for their schools, as well as professional internships, mentoring, and skills-building workshops.
"What it's really about is giving [students] that authentic role in their schools, and giving them all kinds of venues to apply their skills in real ways," says Marc Lesser, the education director of MOUSE. "The major outcome of [MOUSE Corps] is all about applying skills, but we also want to help them to envision a pathway that goes beyond 12th grade."
MOUSE, which operates in 400 sites across the nation, has been experimenting with awarding digital badges for the past two years, says Lesser. So far, the organization has awarded more than 19,000 digital badges for a range of activities, including interacting with other students in MOUSE on its social-networking website; taking care of schools' IT tickets, or requests for technical help; completing workshops; and mastering technical skills such as networking or programming languages like HTML.
The group's move to digital badges was partly spurred by a desire to encourage students to think about the program as more than just a semester-long commitment, Lesser says.
"We needed to start helping young people see a trajectory for themselves [in the program]. There's far more impact when young people stay with us for longer periods of time," he says. "Badges may help learners see steppingstones that don't lay out in a linear way."
For example, once one badge is earned, a host of other badge-earning opportunities open up to students.
MOUSE also had to devise a way to track where students were in the program and provide them feedback about their progress.
"We needed a way to be able to give credit where credit was due in all different scenarios—when learners were experiencing or building skills in all kinds of different ways and around all different kinds of skills," Lesser says.
'Gamification' of Education
But skeptics point to research that shows that giving out rewards (extrinsic motivation) for tasks that students are already doing for their own personal enjoyment (intrinsic motivation) actually reduces the overall motivation students feel for those tasks and undermines student engagement.
Henry Jenkins, the provost's professor of communication, journalism, and cinematic arts at the University of Southern California, in Los Angeles, says badges run the risk of contributing to the "gamification" of education.
"[Gamification] is a system which does not trust the power of intrinsic motivation and feels the need to add a layer of extrinsic motivation," says Jenkins, who was interviewed by email. "Some forms of gamification rely so heavily on points schemes that there is far less effort to make the activities meaningful in and of themselves."
Already, many students are caught up in such a conception of education, he says, with high-achieving students focusing more on receiving high grades—or a multitude of badges—than the learning itself.
"I worry that badges can become just another points system … [that] undercuts the motivational structures," he says.
And when it comes to informal learning, part of what makes such learning unique, he says, is precisely the lack of hierarchical structure and formalization that badges threaten to impose.
"Too quick a move towards badges runs the risk of destroying the complex but fragile ecosystem within which participatory learning thrives," Jenkins says. Providing adult validation for student achievements through digital badges in places where that validation did not previously play a role could turn some students off, he says.
"There is a value in helping these youths find ways to value what they are doing as intellectual pursuits, and there is a value in seeking to validate these experiences and help them learn how to mobilize that knowledge as they learn to work through the formal structures that exert power over their lives," says Jenkins. "But making badges too central to the process may alienate them before they have a chance to exert ownership over the knowledge they are acquiring."
That is part of the reason why digital badges should be viewed as feedback, rather than a reward, says Yowell, of the MacArthur Foundation.
"What we think matters most for learning is, how do you give the learner and the folks supporting that learner ongoing feedback about how they're doing?" she says. "We're not having a conversation about replacing standardized tests or grades."
The badges competition hosted by the MacArthur Foundation, Mozilla, and HASTAC concluded on March 1 at the Digital Media and Learning Conference in San Francisco, where 30 winners—chosen from 91 proposals—were awarded grants ranging from $25,000 to $175,000 to develop their ideas. The winners—including heavy hitters such as Intel, NASA, and Disney-Pixar—have one year to develop their digital badges, working with other winners to form a badge "ecosystem" that educators hope will transform the way achievement is acknowledged for learners of all ages.
"Part of our goal for the competition was to build a community of thoughtful collaborators," says Yowell. "We are welcoming of all those who want to join us in this endeavor and be thoughtful skeptics."
Two key factors in selecting the grant winners were the transportability and the granularity of the proposed badges, says David Theo Goldberg, the director of the MacArthur Digital Media and Learning Research Hub at the University of California, Irvine.
Transportability refers to the ability of the badge to follow the badge earner through his or her lifetime and be recognized in a variety of environments. Granularity emphasizes the need for specific data and details about why and how the badge was earned, so that anyone viewing it will have a clear understanding of the competencies of the badge owner.
Some of the winners will clearly target K-12 students. One such proposal, the "American Graduate: Let's Make It Happen" badges, is funded by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting in an effort to target potential dropouts by engaging them in digital educational resources. Another winner, BuzzMath, will focus on helping students set goals to master the Common Core State Standards in mathematics.
Others, such as BadgesWork for Vets and the Design for America: A Badge Community for Innovation, are being developed for different population groups as well as the general public.
Building a 'Badge Economy'
On its surface, a digital badge is nothing more than an image file encoded with metadata, or information, that includes all the data needed to understand the badge, such as which organization awarded it, what skill or achievement it represents, if and when it expires, and links to evidence for why it was awarded.
With support from the MacArthur Foundation, Mozilla has developed an Open Badge Infrastructure, or OBI, designed to become the underlying technical scaffolding for badges.
"The Open Badge Infrastructure creates some standardization around a common language of badges that we can all communicate with," says Erin Knight, a senior director of learning for the Mountain View, Calif.-based Mozilla Foundation. "The idea is that each badge carries with it all the information you need to understand the badge."
The OBI details exactly what should be included in the metadata of the badge; supports the issuance, collection, and display of badges; allows badge earners to tie their badges to their own identities; and provides badge earners with a way to sort and manage their badges.
Part of the infrastructure includes a "digital backpack" in which badges can be stored,managed, and displayed. Keeping the badge earner in control of which badges are seen by whom was a big consideration in the development of the OBI, Knight says.
Sunny Lee is an open-badges product manager and partner manager for the Mozilla Foundation. "[The digital backpack] enables the learner to be able to curate and manage the image that they want to represent to the rest of the world," she says. "The idea is that we're kind of laying down the plumbing for this badge economy to flourish. Now, we need some badges circulating around the economy to jumpstart it."
Some observers wonder how meaningful badges can become if any organization is allowed to give them out for any reason; the fear is of an influx of superficial badges that have little to do with learning. But Knight says that is precisely why the badge earner must be responsible for managing his or her own badges.
"Yes, there will be badges that mean nothing—that will happen—but the key is that the learner is in control, and they can decide what is important and how they share those badges," she says. "One of the problems we're trying to solve is that a lot of the way learning is defined right now is incredibly prescribed, and the learning that counts is top-down decided. … We want to open up and legitimize learning that's happening everywhere."
While much remains to be seen about how digital badges could affect K-12 learners, many involved in the movement say they appreciate the conversation it has sparked about assessment, the tracking of achievement, and lifelong learning.
"We're definitely not saying that [digital badges] are a silver bullet, and we're not even saying that badges are going to end up being one of the pieces of the solution, but there's clearly a lot of potential here, and at the end of the day, if we decide that badges aren't the right way to do it, it would be hard for us not to consider that it's somewhat of a success," says Knight, of the Mozilla Foundation. "Everybody has elevated these issues and come together to think about it and been willing to turn assumptions on their head."
Digital badges are a way of forcing educators to recognize that learning is no longer confined to a classroom and is taking place anytime, anywhere, adds Goldberg, of the Irvine, Calif. and Durham, N.C.-based HASTAC.
"What this speaks to, and what the interest in badging as a creative form of motivation assessment and reward for learning is, is a sense that learning is transforming before our very eyes and has been certainly since the advent of the Internet," he says.
"It's the case that learning is taking place around the clock," he says. "It's taking place interactively and collaboratively in all sorts of ways both inside and especially outside of institutional framing."
Vol. 05, Issue 03, Pages 24-25, 28, 30Published in Print: June 13, 2012, as Digital Badges
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It's been years since I've eaten any sort of Asian cuisine in Oxford. The first and only time was some odd strip mall buffet with a friend, and I wasn't too impressed. Apparently things have changed quite a bit since that time, as evident by the existence of Big Bowl Asian Bistro. An outpost for Asian cuisine is usually the first thing I seek out in a new town, but it took the guidance of Alvin & Kate along with Molly and Nick to introduce me to what this Asian bistro had to offer.
Thumbing through the menu, there are your standard Chinese dishes, e.g. General Tso's, Sesame Chicken, Beef and Broccoli, and a number of familiar Japanese offerings but there's also a fair amount of Thai dishes as well. I'll admit they aren't much more than a smattering of meat and vegetables with Thai curry paste, but there is that selection. Truth be told, I've never been too interested in restaurants that try to mix different Asian cuisines, but I was willing to give Big Bowl Asian Bistro a chance.
Refreshingly the meal started with a complimentary plate of fried dumpling and wontons.
There wasn't much to either one of these. The wontons were doughy, but with crispy edges and a simple, decent flavor. The pan fried dumpling was much the same, just all right, but you could tell these were greasy and likely frozen, not fresh.
It's hard to resist a good spring roll, but I was curious what would be inside the Shanghai Crispy Spring Roll.
Pretty well fried, at first I thought these were all veggie and rice sticks
but I was wrong. Kate pointed out the shrimp in these spring rolls, but I still thought they were pretty bland.
Wanting to try some of their Japanese offerings, I ordered a few pieces of nigiri and sushi rolls. The first to arrive was the unagi nigiri.
I love the taste and texture of barbecued eel, but I've never seen it served on a half of cored cucumber.
The eel was great but it was an odd combination of creamy eel and cool cucumber, one I quickly learned to enjoy.
As much as I enjoyed the nigiri, I was equally disappointed by the Lobster Tempura roll.
Maybe I made a mistake in ordering it, but it's hard to resist the idea of a fried lobster roll.
The roll was soggy as the sauce had completely saturated the rice. With no crispiness to the tempura lobster, it only furthered the muddled flavors. This wasn't a terrible roll, but it certainly wasn't a standout or one I'd order again.
I did order a third roll, but the waiter soon came to tell me that it was unavailable. Asking if I'd like to choose another roll instead, the first thing that popped in my mind was Hamachi Kama.
Like the Lobster Tempura Roll, ordering this might not have been a prudent decision. This too falls into the "meh" category. It was a decent version of the Yellowtail Collar, but it wasn't grilled very well. There was no deep, rich crust and no real flavor.
Hoping to take another look at their Chinese offerings, I figured the Big Bowl Spicy Beef would be a winner. After all, it's partially named after the restaurant; that makes sense, right?
Beef with peppers, onions, and mushrooms in a spicy black bean sauce sounds like an excellent idea, but there were not very many forward flavors in their sauce.
The beef was tender and there were plenty of equal sized chunks of pepper, onions and mushrooms, but there was nothing there to make it work together. I know there were black beans in the dish because they're plain as day, but they were lacking any potency just like this dish was lacking any spice. As for the rice, it's just plain buffet fried rice. It's all veggies and too much soy sauce.
One thing that really did surprise me was that Big Bowl Asian Bistro offered a wide selection of bubble tea flavors. With flavors ranging from the usual fruit offerings of Mango, Honey Dew, and strawberry to the more unique Red Bean and Lychee, it was a fairly impressive selection.
I went for a Lychee Bubble Tea and was surprised. I've never seen so much ice, at least ice that hasn't been crushed. Not surprisingly, the bubble tea was much like the food at this Asian Bistro, passable, but nothing to get excited about. I'm not sure how many other Asian offerings there are in the town of Oxford, but I'd wager that Big Bowl Asian Bistro is not the only one. That being said, it seems like Big Bowl has fallen into the trap of trying to be all things to all people. Like most multifaceted approaches, Big Bowl Asian Bistro does do everything but not very well.


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Dear Rebbetzin
I appreciate your column with its practical suggestions and helpful advice.
I am a Baalat Teshuva, someone who became religious later in life, with young children of my own. I feel at times immense resentment of my non-religious parents who, although they have largely compromised on personal religious issues with both myself and my husband, still comment on matters which govern our lives. For example, they resent the fact that we have a large family. They informed us that they and my husband's parents don't want us to have any more children! To keep "shalom" we listen, but afterwards the resentment and hurt builds up inside me and I can't seem to release them.
How is it possible to keep one's perspective on this issue of resentment when parents/in-laws are not observant?
Dear Reader,
The scenario you describe is not an uncommon one among Baalei Teshuva (those returnees to an observant lifestyle) and their families of origin. Unfortunately, when both protagonists dig their heels in, much unnecessary heartache and pain ensues. Instead of becoming increasingly invested in their positions and widening the gap between them, I think both sides would do well to consider the following points.
You inform me that your parents have made compromises on your behalf and that only the issue of a large family remains a source of conflict and tremendous hurt. I hope that I am assuming correctly that you understand and fully appreciate the major adjustments a lifestyle change such as yours imposes on your family. The accommodations they have made for you must be seen and interpreted as generous expressions as love and caring. You must not take them for granted and moreover you must be sure to express your gratitude every step along the way.
For some parents your decision to becomes observant may feel as a condemnation, a negative assessment of the quality of life they had heretofore provided in the upbringing of their children.
Aside from the practical adjustments and compromises, parents find themselves at a loss to intellectually grasp and comprehend the necessity for this change in course and the major upheaval that it brings in its wake. At a deeper emotional level, it may feel to them as a condemnation, a negative judgment and assessment of the quality of life they had heretofore provided in the upbringing of their children. It threatens the core of their being because it computes in their mind as a rejection of what they deemed as their best efforts.
The only antidote to their feelings of being left out in the cold as you march off to the beat of your own drummer and to what appears to them as your newly discovered nirvana, is to be inclusive rather than exclusive.
You need to rewind back to your formative years in your parents' home and identify what it was that gave you the spirit of inquiry, the seeds of your metaphysical quest for search and meaning. What gave you the courage to strike out and the ability to search for truth? Invariably you will find that parents, while not committed to the specific behaviors of the lifestyle you have embraced, nonetheless gave you the potential, the wherewithal to return to your roots. Undoubtedly, they created an environment of love, affection, common decency and openness etc, and other components of a positive nature that encouraged you along the way.
It is important that you recognize that in large measure you stand on their shoulders. What you are doing does not emerge out of a vacuum. Hence, you are beholden to them and must give credit where credit is due. Let your parents know that your journey was made possible by them and the many years they invested in you and that you are eternally grateful. Inclusive not exclusive.
Sit down with your parents and have an open, heart-to-heart talk with them.
Having said that, I would advise you to sit down with your parents and have an open, heart-to-heart talk with them. Don't be defensive. Don't try to explain the many reasons for a large family; they have heard them before. Just allow yourself to be vulnerable. Let them know that you understand their concern for you. Every parent wants to see their child "happy" and comfortable. In their minds and to their way of thinking, increasing the pressures of life by assuming more and more responsibility with each additional child, does not configure or fit in with the picture of a good and easy life.
The following incident may prove instructive. Emily, a young attorney with a brilliant future, made the decision to embrace an observant Torah life. Initially, her parents dismissed it as a fad, a passing phase, reminiscent of her "hippie" days given to unconventional and antiestablishment behavior. But the test of time proved otherwise, and they watched in horror as their accomplished daughter began to produce baby after baby.
On one occasion, her mother blurted out in exasperation, "When is it going to be your turn? You will never be able to afford the good things in life -- vacations, Las Vegas, cruises etc, and all other earthly delights and pleasures. You will be paying tuitions for the rest of your life!"
Emily realized that at the core of her parents' outrage and disapproval was a genuine concern for her. They wanted their beloved 'baby' to have a 'good life'. Emily assured them that her chosen path, though inscrutable to them, was best for her and having children was her greatest source of joy. She had 'been there and done that.' She had as a youngster already experienced affluence and had known the 'good life'. She found that though her current life was not easy and raising many children did exact a tremendous toll, ultimately the opportunity to bring decent human beings into the world was the most meaningful and rewarding calling.
At the conclusion, with a gleam in her eye, Emily pointed to her delightful crew and asked, "By the way, which one of these precious gems would you like me to send back?"
I think it is important for you, my dear reader, to openly enlist your parents' assistance. You need to share with them the pain that their disapproval causes you. You should also share the fact that under the best of circumstances, even as committed as you are to the way of life you have chosen, it is not an easy road to navigate. Even the most healthy and delightful children demand enormous physical, emotional and psychic energy, and that you find it hard to do it alone, without their support and involvement.
Let them know that while your way of life is not negotiable, you desperately need their support and approval.
Let them know that while your way of life is not negotiable, you desperately need their support and approval. You need to see them take delight in their grandchildren. Tell them it will warm your heart and give you the necessary strength to go on. Additionally, assure them that you are acting responsibly -- that there are Torah criteria and authorities to consult if mitigating issues concerning having more children should arise, and that you will avail yourselves of these resources when necessary.
In Emily's case it took a number of years. She bided her time. She continued to interact lovingly and respectfully with her parents. They exchanged visits a number of times a year. Fear and trepidation seized Emily every time she had to inform her parents of yet another pregnancy.
Finally, at the Bar Mitzvah of her first child, when her father beheld the beautiful and accomplished young man, he conceded with tears in his eyes. He admitted that he had been misguided in his intransigence and that she had in fact been on the right track. Nothing in the world, he admitted, could give him more 'nachas' and joy than his wonderful grandchildren -- every one of them.
Admittedly, not every situation is so happily resolved. But you must put forth your best effort to celebrate every expression of progress and every move in the right direction. I would advise you to do the following:
- Surround yourself and network with people of like values and if possible similar challenges.
- Try to maintain the high moral road of respect and love to parents even when the situation is tough and you would desperately want to see a more accepting and approving stance from them.
- Remind them that you are their child, who bears the imprint of the values they have impressed upon you even if they do manifest themselves differently in the life of your choosing. Inform them that though your horizons may now encompass "a road less traveled," you are and will always be their beloved offspring who needs their love, approval and support.
- Pray and beseech the "Ultimate Parent" to give you strength and wisdom and to bless your wonderful endeavors with success as only He can.


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For someone known for serious, soulful crooning, Michael Bolton is surprisingly funny.
The singer has sold more than 53 million albums and has dominated the airwaves with such hits as "That's What Love is All About," "How Am I Supposed to Live Without You" and "When a Man Loves a Woman." In addition he's not afraid to flex his vocal muscles for a comedic cause.
In 2011 he joined forces with the comedy group Lonely Island (Akiva Schaffer, Jorma Taccone and Andy Samberg) to create a music video for "Saturday Night Live." In the video Bolton sings an overly dramatic ballad about the fictional Captain Jack Sparrow, the hero from the "Pirates of the Caribbean" movies.
The short was well received and has since garnered more than 99 million views on YouTube. Bolton followed that up with a tongue-in-cheek video add for Tidy Cat's new brand of natural cat litter Pure Nature.
But Bolton has not let his funny bone distract from his music career and on Tuesday, Feb. 26, he'll release a new album, "Ain't No Mountain High Enough -- A Tribute to Hitsville U.S.A." In January, he also released his autobiography, "The Soul Of It All: My Music My Life."
On Thursday, Feb. 14, Bolton will take the stage at the Ridgefield Playhouse for the theater's Valentine's Day Champagne Gala Fundraiser. The festivities, which include dinner and a raffle, kick off at 6:30 p.m. and Bolton is scheduled to perform at 8:30.
In anticipation of the show, we caught up with Bolton, who was born in New Haven and lives in Westport.
Q: What is your song-writing process like?
A: That can be hard to describe. It's an evolutionary process. It can start with a melody, a lyric or even a conversation. I love writing with young artists and up-and-coming producers. They bring so much excitement and energy to the process, and I've been lucky enough to be in the studio with Ne-Yo and Lady Gaga recently.
Q: You were born in Connecticut and still live in the state, what keeps you here?
A: I wanted to raise my family away from all the scrutiny of Hollywood and New York. Connecticut is such a beautiful state. It's very peaceful here.
Q: Early in your career you played in the heavy metal band Blackjack, but obviously your solo career has taken a different turn. How did this transition in style come about?
A: I wasn't making money with some of that early rock and metal music. But I started to have my songs recorded by other artists. It wasn't until a label exec told me to stop giving my songs to other people to make famous that I transitioned to the sound that people came to know me by. I've always loved R&B music. With this new album "Ain't No Mountain High Enough -- A Tribute To Hitsville USA," I'm paying tribute to the kind of music that I grew up listening to.
Q: What first led to your interest in music?
A: Well, let's see ... I was really bad at everything else. All kidding aside, I was drawn to music and what it could do for your soul. It all just felt natural to me. And I am so grateful that I have had a long career in the business. It's been very rewarding.
Q: How were you approached to do the "SNL" pirate skit?
A: I had been introduced to the Lonely Island guys a few years back and we always talked about doing something together. They had sent ideas, but the timing never felt right. So when they brought this idea of Jack Sparrow, I couldn't resist it. It was brilliant, and those are some of the hardest working young men in show business. They're hilarious and brilliant. I was really nervous about it because we really didn't know how it would fly. It wasn't until Sunday morning after the show aired that we realized something had really connected with people. It was a blast and one of the most memorable experiences in my career. I'd do it again.
The Ridgefield Playhouse, 80 E. Ridge, Ridgefield. Thursday, Feb. 14, 8:30 p.m. $130 or $185 for the meet and greet. 203-438-5795, www.ridgefieldplayhouse.org.
Erik Ofgang is a freelance writer in Connecticut; firstname.lastname@example.com
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