Tynan's Anger

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

In a perfect world, Friday would be the day we stop worrying, shut off our brains, and seek the rest and relaxation we sorely need. Unfortunately, in today's world, we're using too busy getting drunk, trying to get laid, and worrying about if our jobs will be there on Monday. To help purge the bad thoughts,I will conclude every Friday on this blog with a story that will hopefully help to put things in perspective, and shut off the delta brain waves without the need for chemical enhancement, a moment Zen you won't get on The Daily Show.

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From Wikipedia:

Chairman of the Board is a 1998 movie starring Courtney Thorne-Smith and Carrot Top in which a surfer/inventor (Carrot Top) inherits and runs a billionaire's company. To some critics, it is considered Carrot Top's rendition of Billy Madison. It was poorly received by critics and moviegoers alike.

The movie cost an estimated $10,000,000 to produce, but made $306,710.^[1]

...The movie appears in IMDB's top 20 worst rated films of all time^[3]. Comedian and former Mystery Science Theater 3000 host Michael J. Nelson named the film the fifth worst comedy ever made.^[4]

So why does this merit Brain Detox Friday? Because Norm MacDonald, as usual, called it months beforehand, and broke all the showbiz rules in doing so:



I do hope Courtney Thorne-Smith has spoken to Norm since this night. I'd like to think she has a sense of humor about herself. Have a good weekend everybody

Labels: bad movies, Carrot Top, comedy, conan o'brien, courtney thorne-smith, marketing, movie stars, norm macdonald

Doing the unprecedented is not necessarily a good thing; in fact, there are an infinite number of bad things you can do that are certainly unprecedented. If I were to walk around Manhattan stabbing people while dressed as a rhinoceros and singing “Shoop” by Salt-N-Pepa, it would be unprecedented. We all understand that’s not good behavior. Yet, if I were to say that Dinner and Delusion was unlike anything I’ve ever seen on stage before, you’d probably think that was a good thing. (Never mind, for a moment, that doing something unprecedented is the whole point of live theater.)

But what if I were then to tell you that Dinner and Delusion was based on a weaker version of the same basic premise of Portnoy’s Complaint, with Freudianism so obvious that its creators seem to have forgotten Freud thought you repressed things, and that it featured cameos by the Good Doctor along with Timothy Leary, Osho, and the Prophet Elijah? And that it all centers around the Seder? Some people, those who confuse the unprecedented with the good, would assume that’s awesome, simply because they would have never thought of it. The others, those who can distinguish good and bad for themselves, might very well think that it’s the worst idea they’ve ever heard.

There’s a long, glowing, reverent tradition of the B-movie, or the “bad movie”; J Hoberman of the Village Voice popularized the idea in his 1980 Film Comment essay “Bad Movies.” In theater, however, where the medium's existence is much more fleeting and price more expensive, success in putting across camp, schlock, and so-bad-it's-good motifs has been much harder to achieve. The occasions where B-movie aesthetics did work were usually flash-in-the-pan successes, like The Producers, Xanadu, or Jerry Springer: The Opera. But those were all mainstream successes, and one of the key elements to a bad movie is its intentionally low production values.

With the cell theatre providing a cramped, horizontal space for Dinner and Delusion, the new opera has joined the ranks of Beowulf: A Thousand Years of Baggage and Toxic Avenger: The Musical as part of a new generation of B-theater, a result I’m sure the predominantly jacket-and-tie, Upper West Side Jewish audience didn’t anticipate.

As it stands, Dinner and Delusion was the closest theatrical experience I’ve had to a Paul Verhoeven movie. Paul Verhoeven, who made B-movie schlock mainstream without sacrificing its aesthetic in glorious travesties like Starship Troopers, Showgirls, and Black Book, is famous for taking the most preposterous premises with the worst scripts imaginable and somehow making them work, his utter conviction making everyone involved with the production, from designers to actors on down, commit to a project like it’s the greatest art work ever.

In Dinner and Delusion, we follow the travails of Sheldon (a decidedly creepy Demetrios Bonaros), a thirteen-year-old boy ignoring his family’s discussion of the role of Israel during a 1949 Passover while fantasizing about his Aunt Rosie. As soon as that fantasy becomes a reality, by my count roughly 20 minutes into the show, the Dinner portion of the evening ends and the Delusion sets in. For the rest of the opera experience we are left wondering: is what we are seeing a fantasy, or real? Is Sheldon really a drugged-out hippie who eventually settles down and becomes a shrink, without losing his lecherous side even in old age? Are we going to have one of those it-was-all-a-dream moments at the end?

I’m not 100% sure that composer Michael Sahl or lyricist Nancy Manocherian were aware of what kind of monster they were creating, but their resumes certainly imply that they are the perfect types to bring this kind of theater to New York. Sahl was a composer for '70s exploitation picks with names like Hot Circuit, Blood Bath, and The Incredible Torture Show as well as fancy-pants movies like the German film Waiting for the Moon about Gertrude Stein and an Oscar-nominated documentary on Adam Clayton Powell. Manocherian, meanwhile, has spent her entire career poking vortex-sized holes in the upper crust of New York City, and I find it remarkable that rich New Yorkers have grown up enough to be mocked so savagely, but fairly, on stage.

Either way, Sahl and Manocherian have provided a vehicle for Kira Simling to show off her Verhoeven-like approach to theater in full force. No matter what you say about Dinner and Delusion, its production values cannot be questioned, as every actor knows exactly where to be and what to emote, and can pipe out a hell of a song, no matter how preposterous the actual content may be. You couldn't ask for more from the technical design; they even make the impossible space of the cell theatre seem like the only possible way to express the play. During intermission, I went to the bathroom, which was at the end of the horizontal living room space, and a sexually graphic sketch was framed on the wall. There was no way to tell whether the sketch was part of the set, nor did it seem to matter. If Simling did mean to add that level of detail to the show, however, she deserves some kind of award, though I don’t know if it should be a Drama Desk or a theatrical equivalent of a Razzie.

While Dinner and Delusion is heavily based on B-movie aesthetics, its presentation is inherently theatrical. Perhaps the greatest joke of all about the play is that it is an opera, which, by taking the highest form of elegance in culture and bringing it to the lowest, adds the same kind of touch as casting James Bond schlockmeister Timothy Dalton in the action movie spoof Hot Fuzz.

Yet, with B-movies, which are projected on a screen, the badness is easy to hide from. I’ve never been a fan of the beautiful train wreck theory of aesthetics—to me, the number of people killed by a horrific tragedy overwhelms the (normally false) sense of beauty the onlooker feels. Yet, I found myself rubbernecking constantly throughout Dinner and Delusion, mainly because I had never seen this kind of mindset applied to theater in such a manner. Maybe that’s why the Bad Movie aesthetic was once so appealing, before Showtime started to use Razzie award victories in ads promoting I Know Who Killed Me. Maybe it was the fact that I was in an altered state from two Seders I had attended in the nights before I saw Dinner and Delusion. But either way, through the power of theater, confusing the dream and reality in Dinner and Delusion clicked. I left the theater wondering which was the right choice: the dinner or the delusion? An awesome work of art, or the worst work of art I’ve ever seen? Or perhaps, Sheldon’s choice at the end of Act I: your mother’s kosher chicken, or massive quantities of LSD?

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Dinner and Delusion - Music by Michael Sahl; Libretto by Nancy Manocherian; directed by Kira Simring; musical direction by Djordje Stevan Nesic; costume, prop design by Hilary Krishnan; lighting/scenic design by John Hurley. Photo by the cell theatre.

Starring Demetrios Bonaros (Sheldon), Blythe Gaissert (Auntie Rose/Eden West/Rose), Philip Callen (Bernie/Baruch/Timothy Leary), Peter Clark (Morris/Mike/Freud), Jessica Medoff Bunchman (Millie/Mindy/Disciple), Vivian Krich-Brinton (Sarah/Sara/Disciple), and Christopher Herbert Director (Elijah/Osho).

Dinner and Delusion played at the cell theatre (338 W. 23rd Street) from Thursday, April 9-Saturday, April 11.

This review was originally published on Blogcritics.

Labels: 2008-2009, bad movies, camp, cell theatre, dinner and delusion, kira simring, michael sahl, nancy manocherian, new york, off-off-Broadway, opera, paul verhoeven

I thought we were done with Sex and the City. I had hoped that a television show that determined feminism to be professional women who can only talk about sex and shopping had outlived its welcome. Well, the movie that should never have been made has now had the best opening weekend ever for an R-rated comedy, and has even trumped Indiana Jones for box-office supremacy. And I'm here to bury it, not praise it. Why? Because I can (note the sarcasm).

Sex and the City is a microcosm with everything wrong with the treatment of professional women in this country. There's nothing wrong with successful women being able to screw around, but the show depicts women who have everything going right for them as still hopelessly dependent on men to make their lives somewhat meaningful. There's also the constant, never ending dependency on consumerism in their lives. When men aren't plentiful, material goods will have to do, usually clothing that's purpose is to attract men.

No one seems to remember that the show was created by a man, or that men wrote nearly half of the episodes and directed just about all of them. Darren Star, the creator, is an openly gay man who doesn't seem to know how to write women other than as a gay men. What's worse is that so many women who have no place identifying with the show somehow did (a fact spoofed on the Simpsons, when Patti and Selma Bouvier commented that the show "Nookie in New York" was so like their life"). And there have been a whole slew of imitators, such as Lipstick Jungle and Cashmere Mafia that, to borrow a phrase from Cinematical's Ryan Stewart, are possibly the two worst things to happen to New York since 9/11.

Apparently this depiction of women is only getting stronger, and has now trumped the depiction of say, a hard-assed Russian spy and a top notch archaeologist who can outdrink frickin' Indiana Jones. This is why I want to date a girl who has as much of a sense of fashion as I do, which mainly consists of having few pieces of clothing in their wardrobe that are not incorrectly sized and/or stained.

Labels: bad movies, feminism, here's what's wrong with the world today., sex and the city