Stage Door: Tom Sturridge Oscar's it Up in "Orphans"

Jose here. From its start, the new production of Lyle Kessler's famous Orphans, has been plagued with controversy and an aura of pure chaos. First, Shia LaBeouf infamously quit the play during the first week of rehearsals leading members of the press to wonder exactly what had gone wrong. While some blamed Alec Baldwin for his notorious bad temper, others wondered if there was indeed more than met the eye. LaBeouf was handily replaced by Ben Foster in the midst of a Broadway scandal that combined leaked emails, unexpected theater appearances and juicier drama than anyone in Smash could ever come up with.

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April Showers: "Singin' In The Rain"

Dancin’ Dan (or, as you might know me from the comment section, denny) here, with a special Dance on Film edition of April Showers for your weekend.

 You all know the feeling, right? The project you’re working on is sunk because one of your partners is an idiot (a beautiful, blonde idiot with a nasally squawk of a voice). After a late night brainstorming session with two of your other partners, you come up with a brilliant solution to your problem. How do you celebrate?

If your immediate answer to that question was not “take the partner that I have a crush on home, then wave the cab away so I can walk home in the rain, giving away my umbrella to some random stranger on the street,” don’t worry. It just means that you’re not a Hollywood star of the silent screen played by Gene Kelly in a 1950s musical. 

And in real life, such a response would be crazy, most likely getting you nothing but a nasty case of pneumonia. But on the silver screen, it feels perfectly natural, an explosion of joy… a glorious feeling!

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"VIRGIN ALERT! VIRGIN ALERT!"

All male periscopes down!"

Great Moments in Screen Bitchery #2,029

"Mean girls" have been around forever in High School Movies and then they weren't always the villains -- take Grease 2 for an example. The Pink Ladies are such bitches!

April Showers: “The English Patient”

 Andrew here with an April Shower to pass the evening.

I’ve always gravitated towards film scenes incorporating water. Often it does not transcend the aesthetic (water on screen just looks pretty), but even as downpours – natural or man-made –are often utilised as read-made ways of attuning the audience to moments of sadness, it’s great when filmmakers utilise it other ways. I say utilise with slight hesitation because in a film where Minghella seems to be telegraphing nodes and nodes of information, the rain scene in The English Patient comes off as especially slight.

The titular patient (formerly known as Count Laszlo de Almásy) has been severely burned across the body and confined to a bed, remembering ghosts of his past. He is dying, and convivial Nurse Hana – running from ghosts of her own – is keeping him comfortable in his last days in an abandoned Italian monastery as World War II draws to a close. They are joined by mysterious thief Caravaggio and sapper Kip and his Sergeant Hardy. A few moments before the rain is released, an agitated Hana bicycles out to find Kip, her new lover. He is busy defusing a bomb which has his name written on it. Literally.

 

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Review: Oblivion

David here, with a review of this week's biggest super-massive release, Oblivion, while Nathaniel's off in Nashville.

"Seconds left on the clock. So Hubie throws a Hail Mary. Touchdown!" He may be seventy years in the future, and one of only two humans currently living on planet Earth (maybe), but Tom Cruise is still Just Like You. Cruise’s Jack just a regular Joe who likes baseball, Conway Twitty and younger women. Not only has he got one back at base – Victoria (Andrea Riseborough) is his partner on their mission monitoring the planet and repairing the drones roving the barren planet – but he’s got one in his head. Images of the world that was haunt him, as he dreams constantly about Julia (Olga Kurylenko) atop the Empire State Building. When the woman herself crash lands on the planet, impossibly replicated from his dreams, Jack’s uncomplicated life starts to disintegrate.

Oblivion’s title promises the vast grandeur of the most epic blockbusters – the mononymic title booms out of the dark to a blast of noise that’s somewhere between the Inception meme and the THX blast on the aggressive-noise scale. More...

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