Saturday, May 26, 2007

Greetings from NYC... "Blackbird" and a Black market "Pirates"



Hey everyone. Moved into the NYU dorms Wednesday afternoon to be closer to my internship and been keeping vedy vedy busy. I'll try to give you any interesting tidbits I happen to come across. Anyway. Today I caught the matinee of "Blackbird," a fucking stunning two-person play starring Jeff Daniels and Allison Pill as a man and a woman who had a three-month-long affair when he was 40 and she was 12 who know meet again for the first time 15 or so years later.

It was just an incredibly tense, ferocious 90-minute work with unbelievable performances by both Daniels and Pill. Not a show that will leave you smiling, but you'll be glad you spent the time. "Blackbird" isn't eligible for the Tonys since it's off-Broadway, but it's certainly better than any of the Tony nominees for Best Play that I've seen (all except "Radio Golf"), though "Frost/Nixon" comes close.

The play is playing in an incredibly small house (I'd estimate 150 seats) which worked for and against it. For, because it only makes it all the more intimate and causes an unbelievable sense of discomfort and unease, and against it, because my audience was filled with fucking idiots who thought they were at home with their TV talking to one another while this live performance was going on. Perhaps in a huge Broadway house, a rude asshole can get away with this, but at NYCity Center, their voices permeated throughout the room.

I'd recommend you check out "Blackbird" but it's sold out for the rest of it's run. However, you can do what I did and wait on the cancellation line on the off-chance a ticket pops up. It's a bit of a pain in the ass, standing in line for well over an hour and a half, but it's certainly worth it. Here's a snapshot I took of "Blackbird's" incredibly impressive set prior to the performance:



A major perk of living in Chinatown is the bootleg movies available at every street corner. Out of curiosity, I picked up a copy of "Pirates 3" and "Spider-Man 3" at 5 dollars a pop.



The "Spider" one crashed my computer, but the "Pirates" one... well, I'm seriously dumbfounded (and disturbed) that a bootleg of this quality is already available on the second day of a movie's release. Simply astonishing. I wish I liked the movie, because otherwise I would definitely give this one a second watch; the closest to screener quality I've ever seen on a filmed-in-a-theater bootleg (sorry for the pic quality-- I took them off my laptop):







Anyway, that's all for now. Be back soon hopefully with a quick take on "Bug" and FINALLY a review for "Knocked Up," which I've now seen three times.

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