Movie Box Review

Despite ABC's attempts to claim otherwise, REVENGE is more "hittish" than true hit.  Although it premiered with strong ratings in the low 3s, it's since come down to numbers in the mid-2s, usually beaten by CSI in their shared Wednesday 10PM timeslot.  But these days, a 2.4-2.5 rating at 10PM is nothing to take lightly, especially compared to other ABC drama entries like The River, Pan Am and (based on its premiere) GCB, none of which could crawl much above a 2.  So while series creator/showrunner Mike Kelley said all the right things at today's PaleyFest session devoted to the show about how he hopes the series comes back for a 2d season, and that there are no guarantees in this business, Revenge has an excellent chance--barring an April/May collapse--to be back.  

The Revenge gathering was notably less boisterous than last night's Vampire Diaries craziness (amusingly, a new caution had been added to the pre-panel introductions today asking fans not to rush the stage when the session was over), as befits its more affluent, and dare I say somewhat older, audience.  Nevertheless, there was enormous enthusiasm for the show's antagonists, vengeful Emily Thorne (Emily Vancamp) and her nemesis Victoria Grayson (Madeleine Stowe), as well as the show's resident hunks Daniel Grayson (Josh Bowman) and Jack Porter (Nick Wechsler) and Emily's oddball partner in vengeance Nolan Ross (Gabriel Mann).  Apart from them and Kelley, participants in the panel included producer Marty Bowen, and performers Henry Czerny (Conrad Grayson), Ashley Madekwe (Ashley Davenport) and the series ingenues, Christa B. Allen (Charlotte Grayson) and Connor Paolo (Declan Porter).  

Only the first 15 minutes or so of the next unaired episode (which won't be seen till April) were screened, and there weren't a lot of full-scale spoilers, although Kelley allowed a cast member to confirm that a terrible thing happening to one character in that 15 minutes was the doing of another character (which had been set up in some dialogue in the portion that was screened). What Kelley did provide was a surprisingly detailed blueprint of how the rest of the season is going to play out structurally. So, STRUCTURAL SPOILER ALERT: 

The episode that was partly screened, Episode 17, will continue where the previous episode left off, with Daniel in jail for Tyler's murder (if you don't know who Tyler is, catch up) and the preparations for his trial.  Then the show will jump forward several months from September to December, and Episodes 18-19 will cover Daniel's trial, up to and including the verdict.  (The prosecution case will take up "2 minutes" of Episode 18, and from there on the focus will be on Daniel's defense.)  Episode 20 will be something different for the series:  an hour set entirely in the past, dealing with the period in 2002 when Emily was still trying to decide if her father's version of his arrest and conviction was true and when she was meeting her future targets for the first time.  Episode 20 will also include sequences flashing even farther back, to the beginning of the romance between Victoria and David Clarke (Emily's father--pay attention).  Then Episodes 21-22 will lead up to a season-ending cliffhanger, and also set things up for what would be the main storyline of Season 2.  Kelley provided little information about what this would be about, except to note that Daniel Grayson will no longer be the passive character he's mostly been so far, and that the enigmatic Takeda will figure into these episodes.  Kelley added that the plan for next season would be to follow the same structure as Season 1:  a central storyline occupying the first 13-15 episodes, aftermath episodes for the following 4-6 weeks, then an hour or 2 resolving some issues and setting things up for the future.

The panel was mostly breezy and light-hearted, although Stowe made it clear that while she's having a good time playing Victoria, she takes her character very seriously.  (She and Kelley have collaborated on an as-yet unseen backstory for Victoria.)  Most questions were about the storylines, for which Kelley's go-to answer was "If it's not impossible, it could happen."  (This included a query about whether Emily's father might actually be alive.)  The only complaint any of the actors seemed to have was that their respective stories didn't allow them to interact with some of the other characters as much as they'd like (Nolan with the Graysons, Ashley with Emily, etc).  The panel did clear up, though, that there's no way Nolan will turn out to be Emily's brother, however sibling-like their relationship may be.

Coming up at PaleyFest--deep breath, please--on Tuesday night:  the return of MAD MEN.

 

When the PaleyFest panels end, cast members often linger for a bit to sign autographs and otherwise make contact with the fans.  Therefore when the moderator says "Thank you" and the lights go up, there's usually a movement of audience members toward the stage.  But "movement" doesn't do justice to the full-scale rush that greeted tonight's salute to THE VAMPIRE DIARIES, a rock-concert level scramble that left onlookers ducking out of the aisles.

To some extent, that kind of response isn't a surprise:  Vampire Diaries is in its 3rd year as the unquestionably biggest--well, only--hit on CW, and the viewers who watch that network are younger and in better shape than those of the others.  Because of its genre and demographic, Diaries is also regularly underrated, almost never given full credit as one of the smartest, wittiest and most narratively satisfying serialized dramas on the air. 

The evening began with a screening of this coming Thursday's episode, the first back after a hiatus.  At the request of series co-creator/showrunner (with Kevin Williamson) Julie Plec, its climactic revelation won't be spoiled here, except to say that it's in keeping with the grand story twists that have marked this show from the beginning, and sets the stage for a new conflict to play out over the rest of the season.  

After a brief (inconclusive) discussion of said twist, the main part of the panel began.  Apart from Plec, most of the major cast members were in attendance:  Elena (Nina Dobrev), beloved of vampires and constantly stalked; brother vampires Stefan and Damon (Paul Wesley and Ian Somerhalder); Alaric (Matt Davis), who started as a vampire-hunter and is now Elena's guardian and a veritable vampire bud; witch Bonnie (Kat Graham); and relatively new vamp Caroline (Candice Accola).  

These folks have been together on a hit for years, and they're a loose, talkative bunch (the moderator mostly just had to toss in a question every so often and let them go).  Any spoilers were more in the nature of hints:  before the season is over, Elena will have to make "a" choice (but not necessarily "the" choice) between the brothers, we haven't seen the last of Klaus and the Original Vampires, it's possible that we'll meet Elena's parents in a flashback.  Plec was noncommittal about whether the show would ever consider following the L.J. Smith novels and making Elena into a vampire, or when evil Katarina, Elena's vampire doppelganger (just go with it) would make a return appearance.  Dobrev got the evening's biggest laugh when she wondered aloud why Gossip Girl got to film episodes in Paris and they were stuck in Mystic Falls.  Somerholder was appropriately Damon-ish caustic much of the time, but like his character, he could become surprisingly heartfelt, notably when he talked about how he'd survived the brutal audition process for the show.   Audience squeals greeted any mention of the Elena/Stefan/Damon triangle (and for those more interested in the tabloid side of things, Somerholder placing his jacket around Dobrev's shoulders made their night.)  

The Vampire Diaries airs in the toughest hour on television, the 8PM slot that's home to the deadly battle between American Idol and The Big Bang Theory, and yet its ratings have barely budged.  Beyond that success, it's as smoothly and effectively run as any series in primetime.  Young audience tastes change--Buffy the Vampire Slayer is a legend now, but when it left the air, its ratings had preceded it--and Diaries' status won't last forever.  Nonetheless, it should have plenty of frenzied audience response still ahead of it.

We live in a pop culture where the recent Emmy Award nominees are so clearly superior to the films up for this past year's Oscar that it's not even worth arguing about. (Mad Men vs The Artist?  Game of Thrones vs The Help?  Modern Family vs War Horse?  Seriously?)  So the days when one could look down at a movie comedy by calling it "sitcom" are pretty much done--comparing a movie to Parks & Recreation, Louie or New Girl is, if anything, high praise.

Calling Jennifer Westfeldt's FRIENDS WITH KIDS akin to a sitcom, then, is more descriptive than critical.  The romantic-comedy-drama involves the inter-group relationships of 6 old friends who live in and around a major city (New York in this case), much as Happy Endings and How I Met Your Mother do.  The group includes 2 married couples:  Leslie and Alex (Maya Rudolph and Chris O'Dowd), and Ben and Missy (Jon Hamm and Kristen Wiig).  The story centers, though, on the 2 who are single:  best buddies Julie (Westfeldt) and Jason (Adam Scott), who have been inseparable since college, but never romantically involved.  (They love each other unreservedly, but aren't physically attracted.) 

The movie's title has double meanings, and the first is that as the story begins, Julie and Jason are feeling like the odd friends out, since both married couples are raising babies and/or toddlers, changing the dynamics of their marriages and the group in general.  Both Julie and Jason want children, but as they watch what parenthood is doing to their friends, and with each of them so far unable to find "the one" with whom they want to have it all, they eventually come to the title's second meaning:  they decide to have a baby together, just as friends (outside dating encouraged), with responsibility and custody split down the middle and no change, they vow, in their own relationship.

You don't need to have watched Ross and Rachel for all the years of Friends to figure out very quickly where all this is going to end up.  Nature may abhor a vacuum, but that's nothing compared to the way romantic-comedy feels about 2 good-looking unattached pals who've considered romances with everyone on earth except each other.  The issue with a movie like Friends With Kids is just how enjoyable and insightful the journey to that destination is.

This is where Westfeldt, making her directing debut (she previously wrote Kissing Jessica Stein and Ira & Abby) acquits herself well.  Her script may be glib and, in the end, predictable, but it's also marked by some sharp, bawdy humor, and later in the proceedings by more than a little surprisingly searing drama.  (A New Year's Eve gathering for the group prompts a particularly scorching monologue from Hamm, who in his day job is not unacquainted with characters who bare dark undersides.)

It's tempting but misleading to label Friends With Kids as trendily influenced by Bridesmaids, featuring as it does the same kind of 4-letter humor--much of it from the women characters--and half the same cast, but as it happens, Friends debuted at Toronto last fall, shortly after Bridesmaids hit theatres.  The similarities are superficial anyway, since Friends mostly eschews wacky slapstick for more of a concentration on relationships.  But the overlap in casts is all to the good, because these actors continue to be great together.  As for the newcomers:  Scott, who has been very dark indeed in indie movies like The Vicious Kind, brings a little of that edge to a less idealized romantic role than the one he plays in his own day job on Parks & Recreation.  Westfeldt makes a marvelous, funny pair with him, although one wishes that as a writer she'd resisted the cliche of having Julie be the sensitive one who's the first to become overwhelmed with true emotion.  In the smaller roles of Julie and Jason's significant romantic interests (think of them as the guest stars brought in for sweeps), Edward Burns effectively turns on the charm, and the much-maligned Megan Fox deserves some credit for completely holding her own with this high-powered ensemble.  

Friends With Kids isn't any kind of cinematic event--in terms of sheer quality, it's not better than 2 hours of TV's best comedies--but it provides the kind of self-contained 2-hour satisfaction that isn't TV's stock in trade (along with the kind of sex jokes confined to HBO and Showtime).  If you've been sitting on your couch long enough and want a smart, sophisticated and sometimes moving comedy on a bigger screen, this is the right movie to see.

ABC's ONCE UPON A TIME is one of the few no-question-about-it hits of the current television season, and the gathering at today's PaleyFest session, while enormously enthusiastic, was less raucous and more comfortably pleased than last night's crowd for Community.  (If Community's fans sometimes had the air of an Occupy rally that had actually won something, the faithful for Once were more like the fans of a sports team that usually makes it to the playoffs.)  Even moderator Matt Webb Mitovich was hard-pressed to treat an upcoming Season 2 as anything other than a certainty, and creator/showrunners Edward Kitsis and Adam Horowitz made it clear with their responses that they're already looking forward to the continuing arc of a successful show.

All season long, Once Upon A Time has very cleverly--much more so than some of us expected--accomplished the trick of creating 2 overlapping and parallel universes for its story.  One is a fairy tale kingdom where Snow White (Ginnifer Goodwin), Rumpelstiltskin (Robert Carlyle), Beauty (guest star Emilie De Raven) & the Beast (who happens to be Rumpelstiltskin),Jiminy Cricket (Rafael Sbarge), Prince Charming (Josh Dallas), and of course an Evil Queen (Lana Parilla) are among the characters living their fantastic lives.  The other is Storybrooke, Maine, where it turns out that the Queen, now the Mayor (Parilla again) has cursed all the fairy tale inhabitants to a dreary, change-less everyday existence without any happy endings.  But all that begins to shift when the somewhat mysterious Emma (Jennifer Morrison) comes to town, having discovered she's the birth mother of the Mayor's adopted son (Jared Gilmore), who has a book of fairy tales that's convinced him of what's actually going on.  The ingenuity of the conceit is that each episode cuts back and forth between the worlds, and what happened in the fairy tale land informs the characters and storylines in Storybrooke.

The potential pitfalls on such a complicated, multilayered project are infinite, and while the show has been dramatically absorbing and lots of soapy/supernatural fun so far, eventually things will have to be explained and concluded--making it a little scary that Kitsis and Horowitz hail from Lost, since we all know how well that one worked out.  For now, though, it's a well written and performed weekly pleasure.  (And, incidentally, despite pre-season comparisons, in an entirely different league from NBC's far less ambitious Grimm.)

The PaleyFest panel began with a screening of tonight's episode, which mostly bypasses the main series mythology to tell the story of Leroy, a janitor in Storybrooke but better known as dwarf Grumpy in his other identity.  Although there are a few B story steps forward on the Queen/Mayor's plot against David, the town's Prince Charming, the episode is more charming than essential.  (It does, however, provide a nice overlap of Once Upon's land with the Whedonverse, as Grumpy's true love is played by Whedon vet Amy Acker.)  The first act of next week's episode was also screened, enough to let us know that it will center on waitress Ruby (Meghan Ory) and a Big Bad Wolf.

In the Q&A, Kitsis and Horowitz provided little in the way of meaningful spoilers.  (Remember, they're from Lost.)  The most specific tidbit was that both Charming and Rumpelstiltskin will find their way to Jiminy's Storybrooke psychologist's couch this season, and that Barbara Hershey will appear as the Queen's mother.  Apart from that, it was all fairly hint-y:  for example, before the season is over, we'll know why the Queen hates Snow White and what the mototcycling stranger is doing in Storybrooke.  We may also not have seen the last of the Sheriff, dead in Storybrooke but not in fairy tale land.

The cast, almost all of whom attended the panel (the only notable absence was young Jared Gilmore), and all of whom have steady paychecks to look forward to for quite a while, seemed to be having a good time, although from the sound of it, Vancouver (much rain, cold winds and snow) has its limitations as a shooting location.  There was also some discussion of the "green stage" used to accomplish the show's seemingly vast sets in the fantasy sequences:  the actors stand on an almost barren soundstage, only able to know what the room around them looks like by checking the director's video monitor that has the pre-vis artwork (that will later be added via CG) loaded on.  It's apparently all too easy to walk through invisible walls--which, as it happens, is a worthwhile metaphor for the risks of serialized and mythological TV writing, as well.  Only the future will tell if Once Upon A Time can satisfyingly stay within its boundaries..

Nest up at PaleyFest, the season's other unarguable hit:  New Girl.  

There's a scene in Paul Weitz's new film BEING FLYNN where Jonathan Flynn (Robert DeNiro), the alcoholic, narcissistic, pitiful, self-destructive father of Nick (Paul Dano), reads to his son from a publisher's rejection letter.  Jonathan sees himself as one of the greatest of all American writers--albeit unpublished--his only peers being Mark Twain and J.D.Salinger, and he considers it a great compliment that in rejecting his novel, the publisher termed it a "virtuoso display of personality."  The phrase comes awfully close to describing DeNiro's performance and Being Flynn itself.

Being Flynn is based on Nick Flynn's memoir "Another Bullshit Day In Suck City," and it tells a mostly pathetic and depressing story.  Jonathan was arrested for bad checks when Nick was just a child, and even when he was released from prison, he was never a meaningful part of Nick's life.  He did, however, send his son scores of letters, mostly desperately self-aggrandizing, and his presence overshadowed Nick's youth and the single mother (Julianne Moore) who diligently raised him but ultimately committed suicide.  Nick, passive and rootless, and also an aspiring writer, drifted into a job at a homeless shelter, and it was there that he and his father, who had been sleeping on the streets, truly met, and and the two began a painful, dysfunctional relationship. 

This is extremely difficult material, much of it no picnic to watch, and Weitz, whose work ranges from the lovely About A Boy to the execrable Little Fockers, doesn't find a tone to make it work.  The film's Jonathan is all mannerism with very little substance.  While it's great to see DeNiro stretching to give a real performance, something he's rarely done in the past 15 years (it's hard to avoid the feeling that Weitz and DeNiro felt so mutually disgusted with Little Fockers that they both needed to cleanse themselves afterward with something serious), he never finds Jonathan's center.  His work feels full of effort and yet superficial.  From the actor who gave us indelible portraits in Taxi Driver and Raging Bull, it's subpar.  

DeNiro isn't helped by Weitz's script, which while heartfelt never really draws a bead on who Jonathan is.  For all its gritty detail--no recent Hollywood product (even the indie part of Hollywood) has dealt so seriously with homelessness in quite a while--the film sidesteps complications and settles for bland emotion (and toward the end, sentimentality) too often.  

Dano has a more straightforward role:  he's the guy who hits bottom (getting to know his father leads him to some serious drug use) and manages to climb back up, turning out to be terrifically talented to boot.  Yet while his arc is the more simplistic and undeveloped part of the film, Dano's own odd qualities as an actor make Nick more interesting for a while.  Dano doesn't have a lot of gears, at least not that he's shown thus far--his killer app is a sort of intense distraction that can be played for humor or for surprisingly powerful repressed anger--but they serve him well here.  Olivia Thirlby, as the only sane person around, does so much with very little that one wishes she'd been given more of a part, and Moore, only briefly on screen, is her usual expert self.   

Being Flynn is a hard movie to recommend, because the hard truth is that filmmakers who deal with challenging, uncomfortable material have far less margin for error.  The work is transcendent or it's trite, and Weitz's film isn't transcendent.  It's intermittently powerful and worth watching for some strong scenes and interesting performances, without ever quite achieving a satisfying whole.

AWAKE -  Midseason on NBC:   If Nothing Else Is On...


NBC's AWAKE is sleepier than it sounds.  Its premise is certainly intriguing:  Detective Michael Britten (Jason Isaacs) is the driver in a terrible accident, with his wife Hannah (Laura Allen) and teenage son Rex (Dylan Minnette) in the car.  When he returns to consciousness, he finds himself straddling two separate existences, one where Hannah was killed and Rex is alive, and the other where the reverse occurred.  When he goes to sleep in one life, he instantly wakes in the other.  Both appear to be entirely real--he continues to carry out his job, solving separate (but with clues that are somehow linked) crimes with different partners (Steve Harris and Wilmer Valderrama); his partner in one world exists as a cop in the other.  Also, he attends psychiatric sessions in each world with a different shrink (Cherry Jones and B.D. Wong), each of whom tries to convince him that his or her reality is the true one.


So what's going on?  Well, Awake isn't saying, because that would be the end of the show.  In the pilot, written by Kyle Killen (unfortunately best known for writing two recently ambitious failures, Lone Star on TV and The Beaver in theatres), we simply watch Britten bounce from one plane of existence to the other, missing whomever's deceased in that reality, attending his therapy sessions and doggedly working at his job.  Where his wife is alive, she knows that he "dreams" of their son; in Rex's world, there's an attractive potential love interest in his son's tennis coach (Michaela McManus). In both worlds, Britten is a very sad man.

It must have all made for a great pitch meeting, but on screen Awake doesn't add up to much.  Unlike alternate reality movies like Sliding Doors or Groundhog Day, there's no overall story arc to the different realities, at least none that's revealed in the pilot.  (There's a hint that Michael might be more responsible for the accident than he can admit, but it doesn't go very far.)  Rather, Awake is reminiscent of ABC's shortlived 2006 Day Break, where Taye Diggs had to keep living the same day over and over until he could change what would happen, or what the movie Source Code would have been like if we never found out what was going on with Jake Gyllenhaal.  Technically, it's not that dramatically stagnant, since Britten will have new crimes to solve and his personal life will move forward in each reality, but those things alone aren't very satisfying.

Awake isn't helped by the muted style with which it's been made.  Director David Slade (he did the last Twilight movie, and before that the vampire-fest 30 Days of Night) keeps everything very low-key; there's an almost hushed tone to the therapy scenes.  Frankly, the material didn't need or deserve that level of respect.  Isaacs is an excellent actor (he's probably best known as Papa Malfoy in the Harry Potter movies, but he did superb work on Showtime's Brotherhood), and no supporting cast that features Cherry Jones lacks for firepower.  But rather than the two worlds seeming real in Awake, neither quite does; each of them feels somehow sketchy and undeveloped.

NBC hasn't yet announced where they'll place Awake on their schedule, and it's going to be a tough show to slot:  a serious, slow drama that isn't likely to skew young.  Perhaps in later episodes, Awake will find a way to introduce more compelling storylines and variations on its theme; for now, it's two parallel versions of "not that interesting."

Read more about TV's new shows at THE SKED PILOT REPORT.

PARENTHOOD is sort of the Bizarro version of a broadcast network drama:  it shines when addressing the kind of tiny moments of human interaction that just about every other show on TV can't be bothered to notice, but it sometimes falters when attempting the Big Event Episode that's bread and butter for most series.

Last night's season finale, unfortunately, was an example of the latter.  The episode, written by showrunner Jason Katims and directed by Executive Producer Lawrence Trilling, centered around the long-postponed and now very sudden wedding of Crosby (Dax Shepard) and Jasmine (Joy Bryant), but also tried to wind up, or at least advance/twist, almost all the other storylines of the season.  It was a lot to do in an hour (or what's left of an hour after commercials and promos), and much of it felt rushed and undeveloped.

The problem was evident from the episode's start, when Crosby's and Jasmine's respective current romantic interests (Courtney Ford and D.B. Woodside), both made into real human beings over several previous episodes, were dismissed in an opening montage where almost all the dialogue was drowned out by a background song.  No time!  

What followed, though, was Parenthood at its best , a messy, believable all-hands-on-deck fight between brothers Crosby and Adam (Peter Krause) because Adam had gone behind Crosby's back to negotiate the sale of their jointly-owned recording studio.  The differing priorities of the brothers and their resulting tensions had been so well built-up over the course of the season that the explosion felt very real, and the fact that it was happening in front of the entire family managed not to seem at all gimmicky.

After that, the show had to settle down to the grim business of dealing quickly with all the season's accumulated storylines, which led to some unusually clumsy dramaturgy.  Julia (Erika Christensen) and Joel (Sam Jaeger), who had just suffered the heartbreaking failure of a failed adoption when the birth mother (Rosa Salazar) changed her mind after the birth, were informed, out of the blue, that children are sometimes available on a moment's notice when mother's give up their rights in emergency situations, so we knew that would happen before the episode was over--which it did.  (Although the show tried to throw a bit of a curveball by making the adoptee much older than the baby we were expecting.)  Kristina (Monica Potter) had a heart-to-heart with niece Amber (Mae Whitman) to tell her she couldn't be both employee and girlfriend of the city council candidate they both work for--and within minutes, Amber was delivering the same message and being assured that all was well, she could keep her job.  No sooner had Sarah (Lauren Graham) broken up with Mark (Jason Ritter) than he showed up at the wedding and proposed to her.  (Although if both Parenthood and the new Ritter/Katims pilot are picked up for fall, that marriage won't be happening.)  Most awkwardly of all, Adam suddenly changed his mind about selling the studio in a contrived (non) best man toast at his brother's wedding.   (As to which, by the way--if the studio is worth $2M+, as it clearly is, the brothers' financial issues should ease whether they sell the place right now or not.)

Even below-par Parenthood is far better than most network 1-hours.  The show juggles an enormous number of characters with--well, usually with remarkable grace.  The cast, which also includes Craig T. Nelson (whose character amazingly survived the episode without any heart palpitations), Bonnie Bedelia, Sarah Ramos and Max Burkholder, is as well-meshed an ensemble as any on television.  Katims and his writing staff are superb at showcasing the subtle connective tissues of family life.  

Parenthood is located squarely on NBC's bubble, with ratings that would surely get it canceled on any other network, but (especially in the last couple of weeks) in the not-so-bad range for the Peacock.  If network branding and identity still mean anything, the series, even with its occasionally flawed episodes, should be granted the opportunity to continue telling its first-rate tales of ordinary people.

VENUS IN FUR exists, at this point in its Broadway life, as two overlapping but not identical entities:  it's a deft new play by David Ives, but also, and more prominently, it's become the Star-Is-Born vehicle for its lead actress, Nina Arianda, who's currently giving about as dazzling a performance as you're likely to see on a Broadway stage.  

No one had ever heard of Arianda before she starred in the initial 2010 Off-Broadway production of Venus, and fittingly, in the play she's introduced as an unknown aspiring actress.  Her name is Vanda, and at the end of a long day, hopelessly late, she blows into an audition hall like a scatterbrained force of nature, desperate to try out for the lead in the play Venus In Fur--a character coincidentally also named Vanda.  The only one still in the audition room is writer/directorThomas (Hugh Dancy), who's packing up to leave, but Vanda talks herself, in her seemingly bubble-headed, flaky-funny way, into being allowed to read.  Once she begins, everything changes.

Thomas' play is based on the real late 19th century novel of the same name by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch.  His name became the root of the term "masochism," and that pretty much tells you the subject matter of the work.  It concerns a man named Severin and his obsession with Vanda, before whom he finds sexual satisfaction in abasement and humiliation.  Thomas claims to have written the adaptation out of purely academic fascination, with no personal feelings attached, but when Vanda convinces him to take the role of Severin opposite her, it's no surprise that before long, his real emotions begin to show.

The role of Vanda (the actress) is spectacularly mercurial, presented initially as a sort of savant who doesn't have a thought in her mind when she's being herself, but instantly takes on--embodies--all the necessary characteristics (accent, bearing) as well as the complexities and nuances of Vanda (the character) as soon as she's reading the role.  And there are increasing hints that she may not just be a gifted actress...

Venus In Fur (the play) is ultimately more of a game (and a satire on actor/director politics) than a serious commentary on male/female relationships, as Vanda the actress and Vanda the character constantly shift and begin to merge, and the balance of power between her and Thomas/Severin inevitably comes to resemble the story they're enacting.  But what a game!  The role of Vanda is a gift to a performer in the way that split-personality roles like Sybil and The 3 Faces of Eve have been gifts to actresses in the past:  Arianda gets to become less and more intelligent, submissive and powerful, American and European, seductive and revolted, 21st Century and 19th, all with split-second hairpin turns of body language and voice.  It's the very definition of a tour de force, and she pulls it off gloriously.

Dancy's work is less overwhelming than Arianda's, but shouldn't be underestimated.  He also has to transition between eras, characters-within-characters, and contrasting positions of power, and does so with seeming ease  Ultimately, though, his character's throughline is more clearly preordained, and Thomas is destined to be Vanda's foil.  

Walter Bobbie's direction brings a welcome clarity to what could have been a mess of confusion:  even when we don't know exactly what's going on, or who a character 'is," we always feel comfortable that we know as much as the play wants us to at that given moment, and where we are in Ives' process.  John Lee Beatty's set design and Peter Kaczorowki's lighting design are also notable for squeezing a remarkable variety of changes out of a single fixed set.

Venus In Fur is constantly enjoyable, even if not particularly profound, a satisfying, sexy, funny exercise in theatrical gamesmanship (gameswomanship?).  It's destined to remembered, though, mostly for unleashing Nina Arianda and her powerhouse set of skills onto an audience that finds itself more than willing to yield.

There's an inescapable irony in Theresa Rebeck's play SEMINAR when the bilious novelist (Alan Rickman) who's reluctantly teaching a group of aspiring young writers launches an attack on one of them by predicting that his "whorishness" will make him more suited for a life in Hollywood than one in the finer precincts of the arts.  Rebeck herself has recently acquired a corner of the pop zeitgeist all her own:  she's the creator and head writer (sole writer of the initial 3 episodes) of Smash, a little TV effort of which you may have heard.

Seminar, a small-scale play performed (except for one scene) on a single set and without intermission, is far from the big-budget glitz of Smash.  Both works, though, share a way of looking at the arts that parades world-weariness and cynicism while barely hiding an idealism verging on sentimentality.   In Seminar, the artistic effort of choice is the writing of fiction:  Preppy Kate (Lily Rabe), who may not be rich but has a fabulous rent-controlled apartment in the family, has organized the seminar and is one of the 4 participants paying thousands of dollars each to have Leonard (Rickman) read their work and provide individualized critiques.  Other students include Douglas (Jerry O'Connell), who Has Connections and has already had short pieces published, and Izzy (Hettienne Park), a young woman far more comfortable with her sexuality than Kate is.  Most crucial is Martin (Hamish Linklater), on whom Kate has a crush obvious to everyone except Martin.

Each student submits more-or-less meekly to the eloquent assassinations of talent and character that seem to be Leonard's only mode of communication--except Martin, who refuses to submit his writing to the teacher.  This being a play, that can mean only one of two possibilities:  Martin is a fraud, or he's a genius.  (Warning:  Spoilers Ahead)  As it turns out, the latter is the case--although, as so often happens with narratives depicting fictional genius, the bits and pieces of Martin's work that we hear about certainly don't sound as remarkable as we keep being told they are.  Martin's writing prompts, finally, a show of legitimate emotion from Leonard, who reveals himself underneath it all to be as devoted and self-sacrificing for his art as any of his young charges.

All through Seminar, the soap opera aspects of who ends up sleeping with whom have been fairly glib (when Kate is miserable, she gorges on ice cream), but Rebeck gets away with that, because these callow characters' choices about whom to sleep with are meant to be fairly glib too.  When things turn serious at the end, though, and reverence for Literature is being invoked, the play becomes problematic:  the notion that Leonard, with his decades of anger and profound bitterness, merely has to read a promising manuscript to be transformed into a self-effacing champion of art is one that's more romantic than believable (writing talent is treated almost like a super-power), and Martin for his part becomes a character increasingly unable to bear the narrative burden placed on him. 

Much of Seminar works, though, because Rebeck supplies plenty of snappy dialogue before things get too self-important, and the play. fluidly directed by Sam Gold, has a great cast.  It's not exactly a stretch for Alan Rickman to play an ill-tempered professor who resents his students (he must have to restrain himself from deducting nightly points from Gryffindor), but there are few actors more enjoyable to watch in that part.  Rabe is so strong as Kate that one wishes Rebeck had provided a less dismissive ending for her character.  Linklater almost manages to pull off Martin, although he can't quite make the final scene work.  O'Connell and Park, despite having much less substance to work with, are consistently engaging.

The flaws of Seminar--plot turns for the sake of diversion alone, a point of view less challenging than it initially appears--are associated not so much with serious artistic statement as they are wth popular entertainment... like television.  Perhaps the real happy ending to this story happened off-stage.  (Although given last night's ratings--perhaps not.)

This year has brought us a far-fetched, but ultimately moving and deeply romantic story about a couple who have finally gotten together and married after a great deal of turmoil and who then face their greatest challenge of all:  a fluke accident deprives the wife of any memory of her beloved, and when, despite all his desperate efforts, he's unable to make her remember their past, he sets out, with equal parts tenderness and determination, to make her fall in love with him all over again.

I speak, of course, of the final season of Chuck.

As it happens, the new movie THE VOW tells much the same story, only without the chase scenes and machine gun battles.  Unfortunately the filmmakers also left out the emotional depth and snappy dialogue that Chuck provided.  In their stead, we get much sappiness and almost nothing that's convincing.  

In The Vow's version, Paige (Rachel McAdams) and Leo (Channing Tatum) are 4 years married, and share a marital bliss that only movie couples about to suffer tragedy are permitted.  She's a sculptor and he owns a struggling recording studio; their combined incomes allow them to own a house and studio roughly the size of a city block.  One night a truck rear-ends their car, and Paige is propelled through the windshield in slow-motion (miraculously without shedding a drop of blood).  When she comes out of her coma, she's fine... except that she's entirely forgotten the events of the last 5 years, which includes her entire relationship with Leo.  As much as he lovingly leads her through their things and prompts her with memories, he remains a complete stranger to her.

The people she does remember are those from earlier in her life, and conveniently for the movie's sake, it turns out that this was just about the time she completely changed everything in her lifestyle, leaving law school, the suburbs, her parents (Sam Neill and Jessica Lange) and her then-fiancee Jeremy (Scott Speedman) for reasons that aren't revealed until the end of the story.  Since she doesn't remember the reason she left them, those are the people she now feels comfortable with, and she goes back to her former pre-marriage life.

This is where The Vow almost threatens to become interesting, because the old Paige was very nearly a Mean Girl, a rich, closed-off law student whose friends might as well be named Muffy and Heather.  A movie about a free spirit who retreats to the world of snobbery and creature comforts might have something on its mind, but this isn't that movie.  The script, credited to the team of Abby Kohn & Marc Silverstein (responsible for He's Just Not That Into You and Valentine's Day) and shockingly to the great Jason Katims, of Friday Night Lights and Parenthood (one would like to think his contribution was limited to Leo's recording studio, since it echoes a plotline on Parenthood), makes Paige's parents cartoons of well-off arrogance, and the ex-fiancee is of course an insensitive villain who ultimately has to be punched by Leo.  So Paige's desire to re-enter their clearly inferior world just makes her seem like an idiot, and the explanation of why she moved away in the first place is a silly plot revelation.

Tatum and McAdams are both likable, charismatic performers, and they're all The Vow has going for it (aside from one decent scene for Jessica Lange in the last reel), but they don't have the tools to create characters that aren't on the page.  Tatum mostly looks doggedly puppydogish (taking off his shirt at every opportunity), while McAdams alternates between "puzzled" and "troubled".

The direction of Michael Sucsy, who made the HBO Grey Gardens, is slick and completely lacking in personality, as are the technical credits.  You know a romantic movie is in trouble when the central couple temporarily break up and you find yourself thinking that maybe they really are better off apart; The Vow accomplishes the truly difficult feat of making Nicholas Sparks adaptations look nuanced and convincing.

As we know from the final ratings, last night went as well for NBC as it possibly could have, with the Giants/Patriot Super Bowl (yay, Giants!) becoming the most watched broadcast in television history, boasting an audience of over 111 million people, while the post-game season premiere of THE VOICE was watched by more than 37 million people itself.  

All of this merely served to set the stage for 10PM tonight, when NBC will air a little show called SMASH, of which you may have heard.  It's the one about some New Yorkers trying to put on a new Broadway musical about the life of Marilyn Monroe.  Produced by (among many others) Steven Spielberg.  Starring Emmy-winner Debra Messing and Oscar-winner Anjelica Huston.  (And "introducing" Katherine McPhee, for those who hadn't been introduced to her on American Idol.)  With original songs from the composer/lyricisst of Hairspray.  And so on.

Even in a best case scenario, here is what Smash won't do.   It won't cure cancer.  It won't end world hunger, or solve the knotty problems of the Middle East.  It won't turn around the American economy.  In fact, on its own Smash won't even turn around NBC's economy.  Nevertheless, the network's outside spend on promoting the premiere of Smash has been estimated at $25M, and that doesn't count the additional tens of millions worth of promotion the show has received on NBCs (and its affiliated networks') own air. 

So what is Smash likely and unlikely to accomplish?  Well, as of now, Smash is a damn good pilot, with plenty of promise to become a first-rate series.  But much more importantly for NBC, Smash is intended to represent the first big step on the network's road to rehabilitation, a step back toward the squandered pre-Zucker days when NBC stood for both quality and success.  With virtually every show of the network's 2011/12 season either dead, on life support, or completely unimpressive (yes, that's you, Grimm), Smash is the one show that could make this year look like a success for NBC.  On a more personal basis for the head of NBC's entertainment division, Bob Greenblatt, Smash is also a statement about his taste and his vision--this is a project that Greenblatt had previously developed when he was at Showtime, and it was hand-chosen to make the journey with him to the land of broadcast networks.

Now, the bad news  for NBC is that despite its distinctive high quality (in the pilot, at least), Smash isn't going to be for everyone.  It's unapologetically a very New York, very Broadway drama, with lots of of snappy, smart dialogue that assumes you know and care about its subject matter.  Some will call it "insular," and they won't be wrong.  Some people will fall in love with the show, and many will have no interest.  (Mitch Metcalf's prediction is that the latter group will be by far the larger.)

But there's good news for NBC too.  For one thing, it doesn't take much to be a hit on NBC these days.  Right now, the highest rated series on the network (all these numbers exclude football) is The Office, which did a 2.8 last week.  And the highest-rated drama is Law & Order: SVU, which hasn't done better than a 2.4 all season, and recently has been more like a 2.  As much as NBC may want a phenomenal hit, if Smash is anywhere in the 2s, they can mutter "West Wing wasn't a blockbuster either," and claim high-quality success.  

Even better, the Monday 10PM timeslot can be had.  It's dominated now by Hawaii 5-0, with ratings mostly in the high 2s, while Castle is usually around half a ratings point lower.  Smash should have a strong lead-in from The Voice, and if it can pull some viewers from the competition, it can be right in the thick of things.

Here, perhaps, is the most important thing to remember.  Although tonight is hugely important for NBC--if Smash doesn't get off to a fast start, it's done for--its rating will only tell us a limited amount.  The numbers over the next 3-4 weeks will be crucial, and will, for all intents and purposes, determine whether NBC can claim (moral, at least) victory when it announces its new schedule in May.  

As another backstage musical once said:  Curtain Up; Light the Lights...

FOX's new series TOUCH got off to a very good start in the ratings with a "preview" episode last week (having American Idol as a lead-in didn't hurt), and certainly indications are that it could be a solid hit when it makes its series debut on Mondays next month after Alcatraz is done for the season.  To these eyes, though, it looked to be as boneheaded a TV series as any in recent memory.

Touch was created by Tim Kring, who gave us Heroes, which became a very odd network TV phenomenon:  the hit that never really was.  Heroes started off like gangbusters, and visions of spin-offs, merchandising bonanzas and feature films danced in NBC's desperate head.  Then the show came back for a disastrous second season (remember the medieval Japanese storyline?  the multiple versions of just about every major character who kept turning up?), and it never recovered; Heroes limped along for another couple of seasons, but its downward trend was irreversible.  Touch doesn't feature super-powers per see, but it already shows clear signs of the kind of confusion and soft-minded preference for mysticism over plot logic that doomed Heroes.  

Touch brings Kiefer Sutherland back to TV, this time playing Martin Bohm, a baggage handler at JFK who manages to be as ineffably grim and determined as Jack Bauer used to be.  Martin's wife died on 9/11, and he's raising son Jake (David Mazouz) on his own.  (One of the pilot's weirder conceits is that although Martin can barely make ends meet, he and Jake live in a multi-million dollar 3-bedroom Manhattan loft because his stockbroker wife left it in trust for Jake--hopefully that included funds for yearly maintenance and property taxes.)  Jake is really the show's focal point, a magical autistic who sees the hidden, mysterious patterns in the universe but who can't or won't speak or otherwise directly communicate with other human beings--including, generally, by touch.  (He does, however, narrate the series, although mercifully not with the voice of Helen Mirren a la Glee.)   As Martin is told several times in the course of the pilot, it's his job to protect Jake and decipher the meanings of the patterns Jake finds, so as to save whoever is due for rescue that week.

To call the plot of Touch convoluted and contrived is less an insult than a factual description.  In the pilot, Jake fixates on numbers that reveal a trail to 9/11 and the fireman who discovered his mother in the World Trade Center, a winning lottery ticket, a phone booth in Grand Central Station, a missed train, a school bus crash, and the miraculous saving of its passengers.  A B/C story that doesn't seem directly related to Jake similarly unites the British parents of a dead child, a Baghdad boy who aspires to be Chris Rock but whose search to find a pizza oven for his father forces him to become an unwilling suicide bomber, an Irish amateur singer who's also a helpful cell phone carrier employee, and Japanese prostitutes.  Note:  I didn't make any of that up.

Touch is sort of an Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu movie (Babel, 21 Grams) for dummies--intercontinental strands of story forced into unconvincing connections.  All Touch has is plot, because with Jake not communicating and Martin mostly spitting out intense pronouncements through gritted teeth, there's nothing in the way of characterization.  The only other substantial regular character is Gugu Mbatha-Raw as Jake's social worker, who's briefly officious but who, by the time the pilot is over, has already acknowledged and embraced Jake's strange powers.  (Since Danny Glover is listed as a regular, one assume that in future episodes, his single scene as a sort-of scientist who appreciates Jake's abilities will be expanded.) 

The Touch pilot was directed by Francis Lawrence, whose feature films include I Am Legend and Water For Elephants, so it's certainly slick enough, but it has no substance beyond its glib New Agey everything-is-connected message.  Perhaps the Highway to Heaven-plus-autism formula will connect to audiences for years to come; for some of us, though, the overblown daffiness of the enterprise severs the connection from the start.

MIDDLE OF NOWHERE, which won the Sundance US Dramatic Directing award for Ava DuVernay last night, is in no rush.  The films moves with deliberation as it establishes its leading character and her difficult situation:  Ruby (Emayatzy E. Corinealdi) isn't a single mom, but she might as well be, with husband Derek (Omari Hardwick) doing a 8-year stretch in prison.  Ruby sacrificed her own dreams of being a doctor so that she could raise their son and make the weekly trek to visit Derek in jail; she struggles with her nursing career, her difficult relationships with her disappointed mother (Lorraine Toussaint) and sister (Edwina Findley), and her own loneliness.

The main body of the story takes place 4 years into Derek's sentence, when he has his first chance to be released on parole for good behavior.  Ruby's life becomes more complicated when, even as she's in the midst of raising the funds for her husband's appeal, she meets a charming bus driver (David Oyelowo), and then learns increasingly shocking facts about her husband's time in prison. 

The melodramatic bones of this story could have resulted in a Lifetime movie (although it's not exactly Lifetime's demo), but the restraint and precision of DuVernay's script bring it to a different level.  Middle of Nowhere is also aided immeasurably by Corinealdi's powerful performance as Ruby--she's a woman constantly aware that her every action has consequences for everyone in her life, and her attempts to crawl out from under that weight are quietly moving.  Hardwick and Oyelowo are also excellent as the men who orbit her life, although Toussaint, despite a bravura dinner table monologue, is hindered by DuVernay's decision to keep Ruby's family life somewhat vague.  Sharon Lawrence, as Derek's attorney, has a small but very nimbly written role that she plays to the hilt.

DuVernay makes smart use of what must have been limited production resources, and the cinematography by Bradford Young (who also shot Pariah) belies the film's low budget with handsome visuals that mercifully mostly eschew the urban-movie cliche of shaky hand-held camerawork. 

Middle of Nowhere sometimes bears the burden of its own cinematic dignity, and it can feel stolid, especially in the mid-section (a little re-editing before theatrical release might help).  But Corinealdi is never less than compelling, and Nowhere feels like it's taken Ruby--and the audience--on a genuine journey by the time it ends.