The BJMDDS General Discussion Thread......

[Kristatos]

I think AVTAK is at the bottom of a LOT of fans' lists. It hasn't aged well at all(to be fair, it was made 24 years ago!) Tanya Robers' screaming, and Sir Rog's advanced age are both marks against it.

It's near the bottom of mine, but Moonraker, Octopussy, TMWTGG and now QOS all come below it. Maybe DAF too, I can't quite decide.

[The Sweeney]

I think we ascertained last year that The Sweeney hates the Bond movies: he just likes a two minute scene from Dr No and the whole of Casino Royale.

Wrong Cap'n.

I LOVE - CR, OHMSS, FRWL, GF, LTK
I LIKE - Dr. No, TB, DAF, LALD, TWTGG, MR, TLD
I'm undecided about - QoS, FYEO

and I hate the rest......

[katied]

I forgot to tell you guys this..I got to see Body Worlds(as seen in CR!) on Sunday at the San Diego Natural History Museum.If any of you get the chance to see Body Worlds, go! It is well worth the price of admission.

[Kristatos]

I forgot to tell you guys this..I got to see Body Worlds(as seen in CR!) on Sunday at the San Diego Natural History Museum.If any of you get the chance to see Body Worlds, go! It is well worth the price of admission.

Yuk, no thanks.

[katied]

You know, I was worried about it being too gross(and I have been known to get grossed out easily)but to be honest, it isn't. That being said, I wouldn't reccomend seeing it on a full stomach!

[Kristatos]

You know, I was worried about it being too gross(and I have been known to get grossed out easily)but to be honest, it isn't. That being said, I wouldn't reccomend seeing it on a full stomach!

Well, quite. Plus, I don't like the idea of using real human cadavers as props. It seems disrespectful somehow.

[katied]

There's a lot of people that don't like the idea of using cadavers. I know that a few cities(mostly in more conservative parts of the U.S.)have tried to keep Body Worlds out of their cities for that very reason.

San Diego isn't like that, but I noticed that there was a exhibit on Charles Darwin coming to the same museum Body Worlds was at and that is the sort of thing people get upset/have an opinion about.

[bjmdds]

One hour to go for the official opening of A Steady Pain Broadway. The critics reviews will be out shortly after. I am SURE Broccoli buttered them all up.

[katied]

At the gym this morning one of the TV's was showing The View which was playing the clip of Hugh Jackman going off on a theater patron whose phone was ringing. Go Hugh!

[bjmdds]

It turns out the SAME thing happened last week. Talk is it was all an Eon plant for attention. The reviews are now coming out. The play received 3 out of 5 stars by 2 critics, one of which found Jackman's performance 'enthralling', and another who found Craig's mustached look close to a 1970s porn star of all things . Not great reviews, but adequate so far, with Jackman's role the heavier one(not surprising). At the prices they are charging we will see what legs it has after 2 weeks.

[katied]

It turns out the SAME thing happened last week. Talk is it was all an Eon plant for attention

I hate to be cynical but that doesn't surprise me.

And another who found Craig's moustached look close to a 1970s porn star of all things

So it's not just me

Not great reviews, but adequate so far, with Jackman's role the heavier one(not surprising). At the prices they are charging we will see what legs it has after 2 weeks.

I'm not surprised that Jackman is the one getting raves.

[Harvey Wallbanger]

At the gym this morning one of the TV's was showing The View which was playing the clip of Hugh Jackman going off on a theater patron whose phone was ringing. Go Hugh!

He was on the O'Reilly Factor as a Patriot! -Craig would of come off as a ass if he tried the same thing

[katied]

At the gym this morning one of the TV's was showing The View which was playing the clip of Hugh Jackman going off on a theater patron whose phone was ringing. Go Hugh!

He was on the O'Reilly Factor as a Patriot! -Craig would of come off as a ass if he tried the same thing

Well, he's trying to promote the play...not that I agree with him going on Fox News to do so.

[Harvey Wallbanger]

At the gym this morning one of the TV's was showing The View which was playing the clip of Hugh Jackman going off on a theater patron whose phone was ringing. Go Hugh!

He was on the O'Reilly Factor as a Patriot! -Craig would of come off as a ass if he tried the same thing

Well, he's trying to promote the play...not that I agree with him going on Fox News to do so.

He wasn't on fox as a guest - it was the cell phone video of the play

[bjmdds]

Sticking them on Oprah was Broccoli's doing. O'Reilly had him on as a still photo and internet video reference. It seems Jackman's name, outside of the marquee, is the one getting 75% of the attention. Coat-tails Craig they will call him. Jackman is several months younger than Craig yet Craig looks 10 years older than him, especially with that mustache.

[The Sweeney]

First review I came across - and (suprise suprise) Craig is the one getting the positive review, and Jackman isn't....

http://leisureblogs.chicagotribune.com/ ... reets.html

NEW YORK — In the Broadway production of Keith Huff’s “A Steady Rain,” Daniel Craig, the man known for playing 007, is required to transform himself into Joey, a Chicago cop with a craggy face, mousy spirit, a demeanor as gray as a Midwestern sky in February, and a youth spent letting his best friend and future partner beat him up three times a day. Peering out confessionally from the stage of the Gerald Schoenfeld Theatre, this guy tells us he didn’t complain because losing that friendship “would hurt more than anything.”

James Bond would throw a martini in the face of such a hinterland loser, but Craig shows up for his Broadway debut in a shapeless suit, sporting a tasteless mustache, a crude comb-over, a flawless Chicago accent, a psychologically battered visage and a remarkable weariness to his soul.

He looks exactly like a veteran, going-nowhere functionary at 35th and Michigan, or 26th and California, or wherever mostly decent people learn to subsume themselves to fit in and get by.

It is a most arresting transformation by this formidably skilled British actor. And for those of us who feared that the Broadway machine and high-wattage celebrities would torpedo the original, startling authenticity of Huff’s gritty, pulpy crime drama, which first ignited at Chicago Dramatists in 2007 with Chicago actors Peter DeFaria and Randy Steinmeyer in the cast, it is also a significant relief.

If only Hugh Jackman, the co-star of this two-man play about cops whose personal relationships become entangled with the crime on Chicago’s streets, could have managed a similar transformation. He does not. Denny, Joey’s racy partner and one of those angry men addicted to life on the edge, is a tough nut for the preternaturally handsome, articulate and charismatic Jackman to crack. Sure, he finds the energy and charm of the guy (the kind of early-peaker we all knew at high school), and the drive of Jackman’s personality certainly helps this simple Chicago play land with a mainstream New York audience. And land it does. Over the course of 90 minutes of dueling monologues, Denny goes to seed, like all guys of his type eventually go to seed, before our very eyes. Steinmeyer had that down cold.

But you do not stare up at Jackman’s well-toned body and Hollywood style and picture a desperate man on morphine, flailing between a wife and hooker, watching his cocksure routine turn to dust.

You could. Jackman, a formidable talent, has it in him. But he has to be more willing to mess himself up, to deconstruct his own celebrity persona and stare his own inevitable decay in the face. On the rough Chicago streets, as Huff’s unstinting play suggests, time is truncated, and a cop can grow old and tired on a single night. That’s what this script demands.

Without that element, it just comes off as a well-written police procedural, which I suspect is how it will be viewed by some tastemakers in New York, although in Chicago I thought this script also offered a great deal more.

Still, the new Broadway director John Crowley wisely resisted the temptation to mess with the show’s sparse, ambiguous soul. This is an after-the-fact story of a two-cop encounter with an angry pimp, a needy hooker and an agonizingly poor on-the-street decision that fuels the cannibalistic antics of a Jeffrey Dahmer-like killer.

Not only does Crowley not mess with the ambivalence of the setting — we’re not sure if we’re hearing this story alongside a journalist, an internal-affairs investigator or a priest — he actually sharpens and personalizes the storytelling by jettisoning the desks used onstage in Chicago and leaving these two men standing in their own pools of heavy overhead lights.

In what comes off as something of a sop to the three-digit prices of most seats, the designer Scott Pask adds some mercifully abstracted digital landscapes, most of Uptown. Given the ominous size of the buildings, as distinct from the three-flats that dot the actual Uptown landscape, it looks as if Pask was confusing the Far North Side of Chicago with Harlem, but that’s Broadway for you. It’s never fully clear why we see some places and not others, but Pask’s creations are certainly richly textured affairs that contribute the right mood, if not veracity.

The racial tensions in Huff’s play have been sharpened by recent political events. Even the Olympic bid has contributed to the piece’s newly palpable timeliness. This is not a multivalent dramatic masterwork, but it’s also not the peak of this fine Chicago writer’s career. “A Steady Rain” is an accessible, star-studded snapshot of the consequences of a Midwestern malaise — commercially packaged, for sure, but still recognizable to any Chicagoan with their eyes open.

[The Sweeney]

And another poisitive review....nothing negative about DC though, BJ. Not sure where you've read these bad reports on him and Jackman getting the glowing reviews....

http://www.usatoday.com/life/theater/re ... raig_N.htm

[The Sweeney]

Well well...another review...and again Craig is getting all the praise. NY Times eh? Bah!! What do they know.....Poor old BJ and Katied. Their world has just fallen apart....

http://theater2.nytimes.com/2009/09/30/ ... y.html?hpw


I particularly liked these parts of the review...

For the record, both are just fine in their parts, and in the case of Mr. Craig, almost unrecognizable with a milquetoast mustache and cowed mien, more than fine.

In a role that gives off an acrid whiff of the rogue cop played by Harvey Keitel in Abel Ferrara’s 1992 movie, “Bad Lieutenant,” Mr. Jackman often seems to be presenting his character more than inhabiting it. He is an incorrigibly likable entertainer, naturally at home M.C.-ing the Oscars or starring in musicals like “Oklahoma!” (in London) or “The Boy From Oz” (on Broadway). Here his polished charm and clean, expansive gestures keep us from ever recoiling from Denny, no matter how destructively he behaves.

Mr. Craig, a highly reputable stage actor in London (“Angels in America,” “A Number”) before he became the screen’s sixth James Bond, creates a more complete portrait as Joey, who emerges as a constant worrier, born with a sense of guilt and a fear of offending. Playing small, drawing in on himself as if hoping to become invisible, Mr. Craig’s Joey still registers large and lucid. And it’s amusing to watch him and Mr. Jackman as carefully contrasted, yin-and-yang studies in body language.

[katied]

Pretty good review from USA today...but then they're a trusted newspaper.

Something has to be REALLY bad for them to give it a bad review!

[The Sweeney]

Pretty good review from USA today...but then they're a trusted newspaper.

Something has to be REALLY bad for them to give it a bad review!

Hmmmm....and NY Times?