Hold onto your seats and save your laughter because a storm is coming. From the Daily Show to the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, Hasan Minhaj is now making an appearance at the Michigan Theater, bringing his North American Tour “Before the Storm” to Ann Arbor. With his insightful political and cultural commentary, Minhaj is standing up to analyze America. After the release of his first comedy stand-up special and before he is set to host his own Netflix show, this rising comedian is touring the country to tell everyone exactly what is happening in this fragmented country. See his striking comedic talent in person at the Michigan Theater on September 8 at 7pm and 10pm. Yondr is used for his performances, creating a phone-free environment so everyone can fully immerse themselves in Hasan Minhaj’s brilliant new show.
REVIEW: Isle of Dogs.
Momotarō is a peach boy in Japanese folk lore – a hero who had been born from fruit. In the story, he travels to Onigashima, the isle of demons, and defeats monsters with his newly acquired animal friends, obtaining treasure for his family. These parallels are seen in Inugashima, or Isle of Dogs, where Wes Anderson crafts his newest endeavor around a Japanese setting. When a dog flu sweeps through Megasaki City, the mayor Kobayashi exiles all dogs to Trash Island, exercising his authoritarian political precision with sinister intent. But Atari, his nephew, is determined on finding his bodyguard dog Spots.
For many reasons, Isle of Dogs is spectacular and clever. It bangs into its self-assured display like a firework – having the same amount of subtlety and persuasion as a firecracker, but similarly lacking as it dissolves too quickly and leaves a measurably less remarkable post-impression. It is undeniably fantastic, but there is something missing from all the razzle-dazzle.
The production is beautiful, one-of-a-kind. And even without the slick graphics of computer CGI, there’s a exactness in the stop-motion animation, detailed in scenes where a sushi chef prepares a lunch, or when Tracy recites the facts on the actors of her conspiracy theory, shining a flashlight on an elaborate tangle of clippings and string. At a technical standpoint, the film is incredible, made with 240 sets and hundreds of models, scenes constructed with a visionary lens to turn plastic sheets and cotton wool into interesting landscapes. From untranslated easter eggs printed on the overhead trolley to numerous references to Kurosawa, the visuals are refined. The colour schemes are beautiful. Not a strand of fur is out of place.
On the other hand, the film sometimes borders on using Japan like a mood board, as purely an aesthetic, swinging back and forth between succeeding and failing its original intention of being a cultural homage. It’s an interesting choice to have no subtitles for any of the dialogue given in Japanese, dialogue that is given by well-known stars such as Ken Watanabe and Yojiro Noda. It gives us the dogs’ perspectives and uses mistranslations as a plot device, but this can be hairy in certain aspects, especially when a character like Tracy emerges from this kind of language choice.
Nevertheless it’s an idiosyncratic plot, emerging from the surfeit of adaptions and remakes to tell us a story centered on man’s best friend with a weird but irresistible kind of charm in the folds of the writing. Isle of Dogs is ambitious in many ways, and in others, it’s all bark but no bite. It’s crafty in its humour, often deadpan and sometimes near ridiculous. The dialogue is well-timed and funny. And for a film about cute dogs, there’s a grittiness to it, never shying away from graphic themes or its political undertones.
But while there’s certainly a lot of good bois in Isle of Dogs, it’s difficult to form a relationship between the viewer and the number of characters the film introduces. We learn a lot about Atari, Spots, and Chief, but it doesn’t leave much room for the growth of all the other characters, including our main band of dogs. With such a hefty, vibrant plot, the screen time of under two hours ends up becoming a limiting reagent, not allowing the story to glow to its full potential.
In the end, Isle of Dogs is fantastic and it is fun to watch, but it lacks a certain depth – a certain howl – to its puppy snap.
Currently playing at State Theatre and elsewhere! Student tickets are $8.
REVIEW: Big Fish
It is a story of love. It is a story of dreams. It is a story of being misunderstood and one of wanting to understand. Big Fish is a story filled with stories, and it’s one definitely worth watching.
The 12 chairs version of this musical performed at the black box theatre of The Encore created an intimate setting for this musical exploring the truths and exaggerations behind a faltering relationship between father and son, between a dreamer and a realist. As Will questions everything he knows about his father, he dives deep into the stories he’s grown to doubt.
It all starts with a witch who tells Edward Bloom how he dies. The aura around this scene gave me chills. With Anna Birmingham killing it as the witch surrounded by four dancing creatures and green lighting and music to set the mood, I would’ve freaked out just like Zacky Price. The town of Ashton is too small for a man like Edward Bloom, creating a big fish in a small pond. Edward sets out to see the world and befriends a giant named Karl and a circus ringmaster who is secretly a werewolf, only to come across love at first sight when he sees Sandra, winning her over at Auburn University with daffodils. His adventures are wondrous and empowering — just enough so for Will to become skeptical of the tales he once loved.
The entire cast rocked every song and dance move, from the Alabama Stop to the “Little Lamb from Alabama” routine. In the number “Stranger,” Billy Eric Robinson as Will nailed the longing of a son that just wants to know who his father really is before it’s too late and as he prepares for fatherhood himself. Emmi Bills and David Moan’s beautiful love duet “Daffodils” captured the chemistry that lets the audience see how Edward’s dream finally came true as he finds his soulmate, and Bills’s touching rendition of the ballad “I Don’t Need a Roof” perfectly reinforced that love. Ridiculous laughter was provided by Connor Giles and James Fischer as the hilarious brother duo Don and Zacky Price. Moan pulled off the often rapid transition between acting as a sick, dying man and as an exuberant young man with his entire life ahead of him and his sights set to the skies. Together, all 12 members of the cast created a beautiful story that stretches your imagination.
Stories are a source of inspiration, and as Will reconciles this with the father he never knew, he realizes that the man who’s like a stranger to him is a man who is just finding a way to leave a memorable legacy for the family he loves.
If you’re in the area for the next month, be the hero of your own story and go out to The Encore in Dexter to watch this talented cast tell this story you don’t want to miss.
REVIEW: Truth or Dare
Everyone is familiar with the old trope of going out with your friends on a Friday night, settling into theater seats with some popcorn or soda, and watching a scary movie. Like Michael Jackson in the “Thriller” music video. Even if you’re not that much into horror yourself, you’ve likely seen this image before. The movie might not necessarily be good, but for many people, it’s still an idea of a fun night.
Truth or Dare is a great type of movie for this. It’s surprising and scary, shallow enough to make fun of but still deep enough to be genuinely clever. The film tells the story of Olivia (Lucy Hale, Pretty Little Liars), a kind and charitable girl who is enticed into joining a spring break trip to Mexico by her best friend, Markie (Violett Beane, The Flash). While they’re there, they end up getting roped by a stranger into a game of Truth or Dare. When they return to school, they find that the game is possessed with a demon that has followed them back, and now they must take turns being forced to play with the demon. If they answer untruthfully, fail to complete a dare, or refuse altogether, they will be killed.
In a lot of ways, this movie follows a typical, formulaic scary-movie structure. Without naming names, many of the friends are picked off one by one in a series of violent deaths that each manage to be shocking, despite the often-predictable nature of the movie. Olivia and Markie, the main characters—each a “Final Girl” in her own way—eventually end up returning to the Mexican mission where they initially played the game in an effort to set everything straight. When people are possessed temporarily by the demon, their faces take on smiles with a freakish Uncanny Valley quality, which is genuinely disturbing to see.
Additionally, many of the characters fall into convenient and general archetypes, particularly when it comes to the side character friends. Ronnie (Sam Lerner) is an insensitive jerk nobody really wants around. Penelope (Sophia Ali) is an alcoholic. Brad (Hayden Szeto) is the perfect son who’s hiding the fact that he’s gay from his police officer father—who, incidentally, manages to crop up out of nowhere at even the most random and improbable places and times. Each character has one defining feature about them. Only with Olivia, Markie, and Lucas (Markie’s boyfriend and Olivia’s crush, played by Tyler Posey), do these features begin to expand into truly fascinating character arcs.
At the center of the movie is the friendship between Olivia and Markie, established at the very beginning. The repeated line, “Between you and the world, I choose you,” is crucial, as over the course of the movie this friendship is tested in ways that range from trivial to terminal. The audience is coaxed into caring about each of them. Markie is grieving the death of her father, who took his own life, and even at the times when the story seems to flirt with turning her into an antagonist, it is always easy to sympathize with her point of view. Hale and Beane have tangible, believable chemistry, and one finds oneself rooting just as much for them to stay friends as for them to make it out of everything alive.
In many ways, Truth or Dare can be said to be another drop in the bucket of predictable, college-student-focused, slasher horror movies. But the characters are real enough (and the performances strong enough) that it’s still engaging, and it is truly clever in a lot of ways, featuring some major plot twists—again, some of them easily foreseeable, but some still totally out of the blue. It’s not the type of movie you’d root for at the Oscars, but it is the type of movie that will show you a good time if you’re just in the mood to buckle down with some friends and enjoy some good, old-fashioned scares. Truth or Dare is currently showing at multiple local theaters, including the Quality 16 and Rave Cinemas.
REVIEW: A Quiet Place
A Quiet Place is built off of a premise that makes itself known even in the title: The world is quiet. Anyone who makes a sound places themselves in immediate peril of being violently destroyed by any one of a group of sound-hypersensitive monsters that have taken over the country, and possibly the world as well. The idea of a movie in which the characters cannot speak is an interesting concept, and a particularly inviting one for the horror genre, in which so much can be drawn from jump scares and loud noises.
Indeed, A Quiet Place makes plenty of use of these. In this way, the movie benefits from the rules it sets for itself, because in a world of so much silence, each jump scare is that much more arresting. There are other common horror elements at play in this movie, from the horrifying images of the monsters themselves to some of the concepts on the screen, like when the children (Millicent Simmonds and Noah Jupe) nearly drown in a silo and are unable to scream out for help.
But what ultimately makes this story so frightening is the devotion that everyone in the family feels toward everyone else. John Krasinski, who directed, co-wrote and co-starred in the movie, has said in interviews that he wanted the primary focus of A Quiet Place to be the family’s love and dedication, and he absolutely succeeded. He and Emily Blunt, his wife in real life, star as a husband and wife, Lee and Evelyn respectfully, who will do anything to keep their children safe in this dystopian world. Their love for the children is palpable, and small gestures and acts throughout the movie, like Evelyn’s attempts to teach her children reading and math, bring the audience closer into their minds and make it easier to sympathize with them. Which is, after all, the primary objective of so many horror movies, and for good reason: If the audience can come to sympathize with the main characters, then the concern for their safety will be that much more impactful and close, because it will feel similar to a concern for the safety of the self.
Beyond its success within the horror genre, though, the film is fascinating in and of itself, in large part because it isn’t afraid to break its own rules. Or rather, it follows its own rules, but it explores them in so much depth that the viewers are allowed to view them both from within and from without.
The main one, of course, is the principle of silence. The characters are unable to speak out loud, so they communicate through pantomiming, mouthing, and sign language. However, early on in the movie, Lee takes his son Marcus to a river, where the two of them are able to speak out loud for the first time in the film. The way Lee explains it, talking is loud, but the river is louder, which means it drowns out any sound of them being there, and they are safe for the time being. While this does seem to invite some more questions—namely, if talking by the river is safe, why doesn’t the family just move to the river?—it is also a crafty early indication that the film is ready to get creative.
“Creative” is probably the best overall way to describe this movie. Bolstered by strong performances by all four of its lead actors, A Quiet Place, while unconcerned with background information (How did things come to be this way? What was this family like before all of this?), is a skillful look into the strained, meticulous process of preserving love in the face of the apocalypse. A Quiet Place is currently showing at local theaters around Ann Arbor, including the Quality 16 and Rave Cinemas.
PREVIEW: Big Fish
Alternating between two timelines of the present-day real world and the storybook past, Big Fish is the story of Edward Bloom, a traveling salesman, and his son Will as they grapple with mortality and their faltering father-son relationship that has been riddled with tall tales. Based on Daniel Wallace’s 1998 novel Big Fish: A Novel of Mythic Proportions and the 2003 film Big Fish written by John August and directed by Tim Burton, Andrew Lippa has merged the two with music and lyrics to create a musical as mystical as its plot.
Celebrate the end of finals week, the 2017-2018 school year, and the coming of summer with a musical that will stretch your imagination and warm your heart. From April 26 to May 20, The Encore Musical Theatre Company will be performing Big Fish from April 26 to May 20, so there are many chances to see the amazing talent The Encore has to bring! Tickets can be bought at https://www.theencoretheatre.org/tickets/.
