In the wide, wild world of contemporary fiction, there are few names higher on the list of literary superstars than our town’s very own T. Coraghessan Boyle. For the last 25 years, T.C. Boyle – the 57-year-old New York native who emerged with constant creativity and prolific grace from the prestigious Iowa Writers’ Workshop in the late 1970s – has bombarded readers around the world with characters as colorful as any in the history of literature.
Last February, on the Film Festival’s closing night, a dozen or so college students meandered onto the Arlington’s stage amidst an announcement about a cappella music. “Oh great, a cappella,” I grumbled, in chorus with my equally dismayed friends, figuring we’d be treated to an unbearably boring – if not plain embarrassing – set before the movie screened. To me, a cappella meant slow, beat-lacking love songs and show-offish vocal acrobatics, a style that hadn’t appealed to me since my Boyz II Men days back in junior high (which I admit sheepishly).
In this age of DVD players, hi-def cable TV, and multiplexes on every corner, the drive-in movie theater should be little more than a fading relic of our country’s past. But we Americans are a sentimental lot, which accounts for the surprising fact that drive-in theaters are actually a stable force and, in some
of our country’s corners, a growing trend.
At the Arlington Theatre, Tuesday, May 16.
The life of a musical legend goes through many acts, but the last act is the one by which people will remember him. So, when B.B. King rolled in on his 80th birthday celebration tour last week, there was some trepidation in the crowd at the Arlington. Devout fans wondered, had King passed his prime, or was he still the lyric-belting, guitar-picking bluesman they’d come to love over the decades?
At the Lobero Theatre, Monday, May 22.
Old-time storytelling tradition blended with biting pop culturalism-what could be better fodder for a Speaking of Stories evening? And who’s a more fitting author than our very own T.C. Boyle, the master of weaving modern life’s quirks and extravagances into otherwise timeless yarns? Monday night’s spoken story buffet spanned Boyle’s illustrious, short story-laced career, from 1977’s “The Champ” and 1988’s “Zapatos” to “Swept Away,” from 2005’s Tooth and Claw, “La Conchita,” his meditation on the mudslide that appeared last December in The New Yorker, and the unpublished “Hands On.”
There’s a slow wave of poor taste crashing over Europe and the East Coast as we speak, and it comes in the form of women’s pants tucked into gaudy boots. I first spotted the breaking trend in London in February-though its origin is probably more southeasterly, in such fashion hubs as Milan and Paris, where stylish hipstresses sported the tightest jeans whose lower reaches were hidden behind the ugliest, most obnoxious boots ever.
Tom Hanks, Audrey Tautou, Ian McKellen, Jean Reno, and Paul Bettany star in a film based on the novel by Dan Brown, written by Akiva Goldsman, and directed by Ron Howard.
Turning bestsellers into blockbusters is always risky, and usually pays off only when a filmmaker digests the written word and reinterprets it cinematically. But that makes book purists cringe, which is perhaps why, when tasked with making a movie out of one of the world’s most popular books ever, director Ron Howard didn’t reinterpret. To do so, presumably, would have made enemies out of the nearly 100 million people who read the book. But by keeping the film as fixed as possible to the book’s lofty, historically rich plot, Howard instead made enemies out of the film-watching public, millions of whom last weekend watched the film trip into the typical boring pitfalls of a book-cum-movie.
A man on the precipice of death due to a massive heart attack, his life flashing before his eyes, haggling with God about getting more time as a corporeal being, accepting a challenge to save his soul-these elements are nothing new to storytelling. But this time, in Santa Barbara author Bob Mitchell’s fast-selling novel Match Made in Heaven, the challenge is playing 18 holes of golf against 18 of our world’s most famous characters, from Leonardo da Vinci and Socrates, to Pablo Picasso and Marilyn Monroe.
Getting a bunch of drinkers to agree on anything-much less give their whole-hearted applause-is impossible, so it was with wondrous surprise this past weekend as two jam-packed bars raised their glasses and clapped their hands in unison for two very different occasions.
Jack Johnson, Michael Franti, Kelly Slater, Willie K., and Amy HÄnaiali’i Gilliom star in a documentary directed by Ira Hopper and written by Steve Barilotti. Screens on Saturday, May 13, at the Lobero Theatre in a benefit for Growing Solutions.
In the Hawaiian language, the word “kokua” means, roughly, “to help,” but it’s much more than that-it’s considered an ancient form of friendship that derived from the islands’ communal lifestyle, whereby neighbors help each other simply because it’s the natural thing to do.
