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Last Harbor SCREENED AT THE 2010 BOSTON FILM FESTIVAL: I suspect that "The Last Harbor" will eventually show up on a cable channel rather than in theaters, and might be cheap and successful enough to get a follow-up or two. Mystery series have been built on less than "former big-city cop solves crimes in picturesque harbor town", but it works best with a more interesting sleuth than Ian Martin. Ian (Wade Williams) is a drunk, and his latest outburst of behavior that gets stuff thrown out of court has him about to be drummed out of the Boston P.D. His captain offers him an alternative: The sheriff in his old hometown is looking for a promotion to a state job - why doesn't Ian transfer over there and while away the years until retirement in a two-person department in a town where nothing happens? It'll give him a chance to reconnect with his daughter Leanne (Austin Highsmith). One thing has crossed the desk, though - a girl who hasn't been seen in a couple of days. Ian starts digging and finds more than he bargained for. TTTTTTT
THIS LIME THREE BOWER (BACK STAGE WEST) Like Irish playwright Conor McPherson’ s the play The Weir and St. Nicholas, this is a modern version of Celtic storytelling. But it has the distinction of being perhaps the lightest and funniest of his plays. McPherson is fond of monologues, but here under Rand Marsh’s direction, the disparate speeches are handled so gracefully that the implied character interaction is made emotionally palpable. The story starts with Joe (Robert Andrus) who’s strongly drawn to a delinquent friend Joe’s brother Frank (Jeremy Stevens) helps their father run a local restaurant, and is resentful of a local bookie making his father’s life miserable. Local college teacher Ray (Seth Macari) is dating their sister, among many other impressionable students. When Frank decides to take action against the bookie, all three get involved in a crime that changes their lives in unexpected ways. Stevens centers the play with a strong dramatic performance, making Frank’s action entirely sympathetic Andrus is perfectly cast as the sensitive Joe, with an Irish accent so accurate it occasionally lapses in impenetrability. Macari, however, has the most entertaining role as the cheerfully debauched Ray, and he brings an admirable comic energy to the part. Playwright Conor McPherson’ s Irish drama meditates on the dramatic theme of “ getting away with it” and asks whether our concepts of ethical behavior are even relevant. The play also offers a portrait of the Irish personality that is decidedly grim, the three very different souls here united only in their impulsiveness, lack of emotional awareness, and the jarring ease with which they betray. Director Rand Marsh ‘ s organic production of a series of monologues voiced by a trio of very diverse figures, whose stories gradually s cohere at an unexpected point. Youthful student Joe (Robert Andrus) develops a crush on a school pal who betrays him unexpected and profoundly. Meanwhile, his rascally older brother Frank (Jeremy Stevens) gets it into his head to rob the local book is, who’ s leaning on his father to pay up an overdue bet. The two brothers’ anecdotes and intertwined with yet another story, that of charming but arrogant and hedonistic philosophy grad student Ray (Seth Macari), who plots to undermine a famous visiting philosopher so as to make a name for himself. Like McPherson’ s better-known play The Weir, the drama’ s action is never depicted visually but is instead described within the stories characters’ recount. And, as in his other plays, the show’ s real star is the lushly blarney-ful, lyrical Irish writing, here used to develop themes of moral corruption and decay set within the context of daily decisions. The admittedly minor story flows over us in a dreamlike, slightly eerie manner, and by the end of the evening, we have learned almost everything there is to know about these people and why they do the things they do. Marsh’ s staging is intimate and unobtrusive, the language allowed to speak for itself. And while moments are undermined by the actors’ occasional awkwardness at getting their mouth around the Irish brogue, the performances are vivid and believable. Macari’ s stunningly heartless Ray, who comes to the realization that he’ s more of a brute that an academic, is especially powerful, but so are Stevens’hot-tempered, instinctively reactive Frank and Andreus’ boyishly endearing Joe. LA WEEKLY PICK OF THE WEEK WW
HOLLYWOOD POP NOVEL: A TRUTH STRANGER THAN FICTION (Scorpio Men on Prozac & Their Oil Changes) LA WEEKLY - REVIEWED BY JOEY ALKES On first picking up a novel called 'SCORPIO MEN ON PROZAC,' an XLIBRIS paperback, this very Cancer male and skeptic is presented with a reasonable 'Why should I read a novel about Scorpio men or Prozac, for that matter. Especially since, I reserve talk of the anti-depressant Prozac to 12-step dumps and astrology to pick -up lines. Being married it has been years since I've entertained a study of the science to any useful purpose. So, Why is it that I put down my thoroughly unreadable ancient copy of Albert Schweitzer's prose in his "Out of My Life and Thought" to read Scorpio Men you ask? Curiosity my friends, a sometimes very dangerous curiosity. As fate would have it, the author of Scorpio Men, Rand Marsh, was one of this columnist's editorial charges in the early days of Venice Magazine, and in those last days of the quirky Hollywood Gazette. Fortunately for me, and definitely for him, writer and critic Marsh's debut novel (or novelette) has enough moments in it that are hilarious and inspired to ignore those parts of the book that one wouldn't insert into a typical Hollywood Oscar contending movie, no less a literary work. Trust me folks, as his old editor, Marsh's publisher couldn't have unearthed a tougher critic to review this work. Marsh, who is a regular contributor to such pulp fiction culture rags as Spin Magazine and URB, who has had a number of plays produced, and presently has full-length feature film in development, has a knack (And yes just like that bubble-gum pop band of the Eighties) for good hooks. In 'Scorpio Men On Prozac' he has chanced upon the double barrels of both; the popularity of astrology as a distraction from personal responsibility, and the obvious dependence on pharmacology in place of any evidence of a comprehensible higher-power in the universe. Structuring the book through a series of short tales, divided by tips for Scorpions based on their moon sign conjunctions; basic Scorpion life-advice ("Scorpio remember, to fear love is to fear life, and those who fear life are already dead."); visits to the "shrink" who writes the "zac" prescriptions entitled, "Doctor Please Some More of These" (creating a form of insider shorthand like "being zacked"); and various facts and anecdotes about Prozac itself, he and his dysfunctional "crew" of Scorpio men sometimes on Prozac, and sometimes trying to kick it as if it were some form of dope, manage to mismanage their lives into a painful degree of comedy and pathos. The publisher describes the novel as "a darkly comic adventure into the psyches of a group of Scorpio men and boys who are taking or should be taking Prozac AND the people they love or who have been twice stung" and makes the claim that, "Scorpio men may make you laugh or cry, they may piss you off but they will never bore you." For the most part this is true. Often the characters piss me off more than they make me laugh, but laughter is definitely a part of the experience of reading Scorpio Men... Josh, or Rand Marsh himself, suggests that added to the trials and tribulations of being a "man" on this planet at this time, being a Scorpio, creates an almost impossible mission in life. Various characters choose different responses, and in one case a highly unlikely suicide in my opinion, with the information the reader has available (The author himself tells me that this is a true story. Go figure??). All the men (or boys)in the novel 'act out' with some form of self-destructive behavior in response to the dual pressures of testosterone and a Scorpio Sun (Oct. 22 - Nov. 21). Overeating or deprivation, drugs, obsessive career rituals and for a couple of these young men just being musicians, qualifies as some of the manifestations of dealing with such an overwhelming burden. The only escape hatch outside of insanity (jails, institutions and death), even at the supposed price of losing one's soul, is the pharmacology of Prozac; yet needing to make some sort of macho sense out of it all, Marsh feels compelled to escape the "zac" in the book's conclusion. "Shy? Forgetful? Anxious? Fearful? Obsessed? Overweight?" asks the author. "Now science will let you change your personality with a pill," ridicules Marsh. Debut novelist Rand Marsh displays a sense of humor, and engaging sense of self-deprecation, a dreamy narrative language of originality and a feel for the ultimate absurdity that being human suggests. In the context of his own identity (Writers writing about what they know best, themselves), Marsh succeeds in exposing his own confusion and angst at what being a man alive in today's gender-confused society, a West Hollywood crowd full of vacuous pre-occupation, his view of what he, and many men for that matter, interpret as an evolving feminine insensitivity (His LAPD wife's. His suicidal best friend’s wife's. His mother and sister's) to this male dilemma; and the hypocrisy of modern medical solution in the form of pharmacology. Whether one agrees or not with what Marsh suggests about the issues, Scorpio Men on Prozac makes thought- provoking reading. More importantly, it is a downright enjoyable read. |
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