Movie Trailers That Represent the Product with Perfect Accuracy: The Last Boy Scout

Being a 1991 Bruce Willis action vehicle, written by Shane Black, produced by Joel Silver and directed by Tony Scott. ​I’ll be re-watching this soon for the first time in about 20 years for a little thing I’ma write, but the trailer is pretty much EXACTLY WHAT I REMEMBER ABOUT IT.

It Takes Brass Balls to Direct This Play: Round House’s Glengarry Glen Ross, reviewed

This is why I never wanted to get a real job: Alec Baldwin in “Glengarry Glen Ross: The Motion Picture.”

No stage production of Glengarry Glen Ross feels complete to me without the speech David Mamet added for the movie version, eight years after his play won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1984.  But Round House Theatre’s Mitchell Hebert-directed version is solid if not revelatory. Reviewed in today’s City Paper.

Where There’s a Willis, There’s a Way, or They Still Call Me John McClane: Being a die-hard’s guide to the Die Hard-iverse

“I think I see my future…”

Hey, I didn’t ask to annotate the Die Hard films for NPR Monkey See.  I’m just a good man, caught in the wrong place at the wrong time.

No, I did ask. I was just delighted they were willing to run it at the obsessive, possibly excessive — but by no means exhaustive! — length at which I filed it.

I wrote it in a fit of anticipation for A Good Day to Die Hard, a film that, after reading a dozen or so reviews, I’ve decided I won’t be seeing — not in the cinema, anyway, where movies live. “This is a Die Hard movie where no one is trying and nobody cares, which is depressing,” wrote Deadspin’s Will Leitch. I haven’t been able to bring myself to watch Amour yet, so if I’m in a mood for depression-inducing viewing, I’m not gonna waste that on a movie that by all accounts debases a franchise and a character I’ve loved since I was a kid.

Toby, or Not to Be: STC’s Richard Schiff-starring Hughie, reviewed

Richard Schiff and Randall Newsome, neither of whom are “Hughie.”

So I saw Hughie — Eugene O’Neill’s odd, sad little two-hander of a one-act — the other night, hoofed the not-quite-three miles back uptown from the Landsburgh Theatre to headquarters, and was still in by 10 p.m. But I don’t think it was a flush of gratitude for a play that takes only an hour that led me to like it so much. Reviewed for the Washington City Paper.

The Grand Parade: It Takes a Lotta Chagall

I reviewed Double Edge’s Theatre’s The Grand Parade (Of the 20th Century) at Arena Stage.

Yippie kai yay, Motherfucker with the Hat: Studio’s trash-talking triumph. Plus, Kafka on the Shore

Drew Cortese and Quentin Maré talk hats.

Embarrassing admission: I didn’t realize until after I’d filed my review of Studio’s superb production of The Motherfucker with the Hat that its playwright, Stephen Adly Guirgis, is the selfsame motherfucker who wrote The Last Days of Judas Iscariot, the best thing I saw on a DC stage in 2008.

Also reviewed: Spooky Action’s Kafka on the Shore, DC’s second Frank Galati-scripted stage adaptation of a Haruki Murakami story or novel in four months.  This one is looser and more wobbly than the last one. Your mileage may vary.