Never Be Opening———The 'Glengarry' Switcheroo

I really liked Charles Isherwood's story in the Times about the producers of Glengarry Glen Ross and their cynical decision to hold the show's opening, so I wrote a thing about it. 

Times theater critic Charles Isherwood caused a stir this week with an essay about the craven behavior of the producers of Glengarry Glen Ross, who used Hurricane Sandy as an excuse to postpone the official opening of their show by a month. While some imaginative conspiracy theorists have fantasized that this was simply a ploy to give marquee star Al Pacino a bit more time to learn his lines, Isherwood paints a more cynical picture, of producers selling high-priced tickets to something that is a preview-in-name-only, allowing them to rake in around $1 million weekly without having to face potential critical wrath.

When news came this week that Mamet’s other show on Broadway is closing—something his plays have done a lot of lately—hiding from critics suddenly seemed like a bright idea. Reviewers hated The Anarchist—a turgid think-piece about, sigh, the nature of evil and truth and stuff—and so The Anarchist died. But Glengarry might be a special case: a serious play that doesn’t need to be reviewed, because the critics can’t affect it at all.

Read it! Read it, you fools!

The Musical That Won't Die Continues Not To Die

Have you had a nasty taste in your mouth all day? Keep spitting, and it sticks around? Brush your teeth, rinse with Listerine, chug some whiskey—and it's still there? That's because Bono and the Edge are writing new songs for Spider-Man: Turn Off The Dark. And something tells me that Broadway's dumbest musical isn't about to get any smarter.

This could be the worst non-Romney-related idea of 2012. Having already paid out well over $100 to see the show, I can’t imagine anyone coming back for the sake of one or two new songs. That Spider-Man congealed into anything remotely watchable is something of a miracle, and tinkering with it could undermine the fragile foundation that supports this utterly nonsensical play. If Bono and the Edge break the play, it could be bye-bye Spidey, hello Kong. (I really want to see that Australian King Kong.)

So, just how bad could this be? Here are some ideas for Bono and the Edge as they sharpen their pencils and get down to making theater magic. Note: if any of these appear in the show, I look forward to the protracted, life-shattering legal battle that will ensue. It’ll make me Broadway famous!

What are the new spidey-songs going to sound like? Well you'll just have to click and find out.

Why It's Okay To Like The Zany Old Spice Game

In honor of the majestic accomplishment that is "Dikembe Mutombo’s 4 1/2 Weeks To Save The World,” I typed up a few hundred words on why it's okay to enjoy something like that, even though it's nothing more than very clever advertising.

The short answer? It's okay to like stuff that's clever.

The Old Spice commercials, going back to the Bruce Campbell campaign from five or so years ago, heralded an unprecedented weirdening (my word! Don’t use it!) of mainstream ad campaigns. Their ads are spare, strange and designed to be shared—a formula that lots of brands have tried to emulate and none have managed to get right. Imitations of this kind of zaniness usually fall short either because they aren’t weird enough, or lack a charismatic spokesman like Bruce/Fabio/Old Spice Guy.

(A rare exception—those creepy fucking Sprite commercials, which are way too goddamned weird.)

I love these Old Spice ads because they are the kind of thing I should fucking hate. I despise corporate pandering, because no matter how charming a company pretends to be, there’s simply nothing cool about corporations. If a marketing campaign manages to make me forget that for a moment, I tend to have an extreme backlash to it. How dare you amuse me?! How dare you make me forget the essential sinisterness of your business practices?!

You could keep reading that, or you could just go play this delightful game. Don't stop until you get to the Twinkie song. Seriously.

What ABC Crap-Pile Makes 'Liz & Dick' Look Like 'The Wire'?

Because no one has ever told me what planes are, I drove back to New York yesterday from a Thanksgiving retreat to Nashville. The entire ride up, my friends and I bounced with delight at the prospect of quaffing wine and cackling at the horrors of Lifetime's Liz & Dick. And then, when we settled in to eat and drink and snark after eight hours of the road, disaster struck.

For eight hours, we had dreamed of it, and I don’t need to tell you why. Every red-blooded Internet troll was sharpening its fangs in anticipation of the latest float in the Lindsay Lohan shit-parade, and we were to be first in line. But this Internet-free, bedbug-ridden, cockroach-ruled roadside inn had one drawback. No Lifetime! What the F?!

Lifetime is the premier movie channel for idiots, and you would have to be an idiot to stay in such an awful motel. Why the two have not been introduced is beyond me. But we had several hours to kill there before the red wine robbed us of consciousness, and the time had to be passed somehow. In case you’ve fallen into a timewarp and today is yesterday, you’re in Roanoke, and Twitter is blowing up with quips ranging from asinine and cruel to dead on balls accurate, you may pass the time thusly.

What happened next? Read on, fair reader. Read on.

This Holiday, Put A Connery On Your Table

Thanksgiving is tomorrow, and the best thing about it—really the only good thing, frankly—is that it affords an opportunity to stuff your face with gravy and stuff your eyes with James Bond.

Christmas comes with all sorts of cultural prescriptions. Watch It’s A Wonderful Life. Drink egg nog. Read something adorable that’s features bountiful rolls of bouncing Santafat. From the start of the advent, your free time will be accounted for. But nog aside, Christmas demands much less in the way of menu planning. It’s Christmas—eat a turkey, maybe? A goose? Each year, my mom makes a big salty country ham. It’s goddamned beautiful.

Compare that to Thanksgiving, which has an endless list of culinary commands, but not much culturally to suggest. Watch football, maybe? Play Monopoly with your weird cousin? Sit?

It’s that laxness that makes what passes for Thanksgiving culture much more interesting, the same way that a Christmas menu is almost certainly going to be more palatable than its gravy-doused cousin. The fact is that there are Thanksgiving movies—they just might not have anything to do with Thanksgiving.

Because James Bond movies are typically released around this time of year, I associate the November holiday with a protracted gorging on the finer works of Sean Connery, Timothy Dalton and—yes god damn it, George Lazenby. (Seriously—best Bond theme, best Bond chase scene—On Her Majesty’s Secret Service.) Bond movies are a near-perfect analogue for Thanksgiving. Even the best of them are overrated, overblown and incoherent. Those of us who have already finished our cooking for the week could probably, if we were bored enough, track which Bond is which component of a classic Thanksgiving spread. Let’s go there now!

You want to read more? Oh yes. Oh yes you do.

Alice Cooper, John Carpenter & The Dark Days of Disco

This may not be the best thing I've ever written. In fact, it's definitely not the best thing I've ever written. But if you want a lot of links to kickass John Carpenter music—and one link to this ewok song that is actually the worst song I've ever heard—then today's Bullett post is for you.

I should hardly have been surprised to find that in 1982, Italian disco magnate Mario Boncaldo—who also gave us the Ewok Celebration 12″—worked his magic on some of the best tracks from the Escape From New York soundtrack. It’s, uh, much better than the Ewok song. In fact, I’ve been listening to the Ewok song while writing this, and it might be the worst thing I’ve ever heard. It might be melting my brain. Ah, yes, at 4:10 there’s an Ewok rap, so consider my brain melted and accept my apologies if the rest of this post is more gibberishy than usual.

(Mr. Mario’s website, by the way, is a terrifying delight. His slogan is “the House Music before the House Music.” I want that on a t-shirt now, please.)

The next year, he did the same thing with Assault on Precinct 13. The Halloween soundtracks, we can assume, were too good on their own to fool with. The songs are driving, repetitive, spooky, brutal—everything we love about John Carpenter music, but three times as long.

That wonderful repetition got me thinking about one of my favorite traits of John Carpenter movies: indifference in the face of danger. It’s a normal thing in horror pictures for the audience to realize the danger well before the characters do, but Carpenter takes it to extremes.

Shit. I gave away the ewok link. Still, hay mucho más. 

Of course, as badass synth soundtracks go, nothing Carpenter ever did could touch the opening theme for The Long Good Friday. Did anyone ever make a disco remix of that? Because I would love for it to be eight minutes long.

Main Theme - Francis Monkman - The Long Good Friday Soundtrack

Let's Stop Making Jokes About Porno Titles, Please

When The Performers was first announced for the fall season, I thought—"Gee. A porno comedy with Cheyenne Jackson, Henry Winkler and Alicia Silverstone. That's either a very good idea or a very bad idea."

Guess which one it was!

I was just wondering, “Should I go see The Performers?” when the show’s producers made my decision for me. After seven performances, the show has closed, making it the first casualty of the fall season and one of the finest flops in recent memory. It also gave headline writers around the country an opportunity to trot out sorely-underused impotence gags. Good job, fellas!

The producers tried to cast some blame on Hurricane Sandy, but the apparent ease with which the rest of Broadway bounced back from the storm suggests that the real fault might have been the hailstorm of nasty reviews. Think there’s a connection? Oh, I don’t know.

Read on if you'd like to know which of the play's jokes—as quoted in the reviews—were the lamest. Hint: They're all tied.

For Bieber, The Barc May As Well Be Shea

I live near the Barclays Center, whose opening was maligned by residents who feared that each Brooklyn Nets game would end with a tsunami of boozed-up shouting morons. As it turns out, Nets fans have been incredibly subdued. Not so Beliebers.

Speaking of vomiting in public, Justin Bieber played the Barclays earlier this week. (Can we start calling the Barclays “the Barc”? Is that appropriately lame, or unforgivably lame? Other suggestions, from Internet friends, include The Black House and The Rust Bucket.) The performance was reportedly tepid, but that did not stop the Beliebers from screaming. I assume nothing can.

After the performance, a pack of wild fans waited outside the stage door, hoping to catch a glimpse of the star’s tour bus. (Which had just spun around, we assume, on the Rust Bucket’s famous rotating trucks turntable.) Though the bus’s windows were fully blacked out, the kids lost their shit, screaming like our parents’ generation might have while being simultaneously diddled by all four Beatles. As the bus lumbered away—as their dreams lumbered away—the kids broke past the barricades and chased after the bus. It would have gotten away, too, if it hadn’t been for that street light.

Read the rest on Bullett.

And for those of you who want to get the image of Beatles-y group sex out of your head, or just feel like thinking about Shea Stadium for nine minutes:

Uploaded by McCKLENN on 2009-10-18.

Hedy Lamarr ——— Nakedest Inventor of Them All!

I've always found that most classic film beauties—your Crawfords, your Hayworths, your etceteras—were at best interchangeable and, at worst, bland. While the men of old Hollywood never have trouble making an impression, their romantic leads were usually so underwritten, so overly made up, that they never had a chance. There are a few exceptions, however—Barbara Stanwyck, Judy Holliday, Veronica Lake—but most of them were so beautiful, so lively, that they were kept out of the really famous pictures, and aren't as famous today as they perhaps ought to be.

To that list, let's add Hedy Lamarr—the woman best remembered for being a punchline in Blazing Saddles. I wrote a post for Bullett today about Ms. Lamarr, an inventor who didn't mind getting naked on camera. On the sex scene from 1933's Ecstasy, which follows a nude romp through the forest in pursuit of a horse:

Though less thoroughly benippled, the ensuing sex scene is crackerjack. Lamarr and her stud kiss a bit, lie down, kiss some more, and then he drifts downward out of frame—what may be the earliest use of what would become an incredibly tired way of signifying oral funtimes. But while the camera would normally pan up and away, here it lingers on Lamarr, and we get to watch her go through the range of facial expressions induced by this rather intense blue collar orgasm. For her performance, Wikipedia tells us adorably, “The authenticity of passion was attained by the film director’s off-screen manipulation of a safety pin strategically poking her bottom.”

Click through for a link to what may be the oldest NSFW video you will ever see—excepting, perhaps, the really racist bits of Birth of a Nation, which I bet you wouldn't want your boss to catch you watching.

Shut Up Annie, Shut Up Oliver, Shut Up Everybody!

Perhaps writing about the hurricane has gotten to me, because I just lit in to Little Orphan Annie and a few other famous musical characters who are, depending on your taste, either beloved icons or easy targets. The title of the post is probably the best thing I've written all week—"Little Orphan Annie, And Five Other Musical Heroes I Want to Punch In The Face."

The new revival of 1977′s toothache-inducing Broadway classic Annie premiered last night at the Palace Theater. Reviews have been just on the happy side of lukewarm, with most of the praise going towards the undeniably adorable dog that was profiled last week in Business Insider, beneath the barely-comprehensible headline, “Annie’s Sandy Hopes Sun’ll Come Out Day After Tomorrow.”

But no matter how much love is heaped on the red-headed twerp, her shrill squeal, bubbly optimism and unforgivable curls have always made us want to belt her. Now now, I’m not threatening to make my way up to 47th Street and start slugging. I’m not getting paid enough to go to Times Square, and with my freelancer’s build—a unique combination of flabby and scrawny—it’s really not a good idea to pick fights, even with tweens. But boy, something about those bouncing red locks makes me want to hurt somebody, and she’s not the only one. Here are five other musical legends who fill me with an overwhelming urge to bust their lip.

Am I an utter jerk, or do I have a point? You be the judge.

One other note about the Little Orphan which I forgot to mention—she's pretty sure the sun'll come out tomorrow. It doesn't always. Sometimes it stays cloudy, y'know? I'm just saying it's not the thing to bet your bottom dollar on.