Your Travalanche Daily Digest for October 1, 2026
17 hours ago
Sunday, September 03, 2006
the ghost of john casssavetes
Friday, August 18, 2006
Miklos' film goes international, and another film rec...
Mother of Invention alum Miklos Philips' short film The Enfolding has been accepted into two more festivals, one the NewFilmMakers NY festival in October, and a festival in Tricase, Italy. Congrats Miklos! Best of luck at both! This makes six festivals for this film!
Also, I saw a movie last weekend called Quinceañera that I wanted to pass the word about. "Quinceañera" is the Spanish word for a kind of religiously-tinted debut that a young girl makes on her fifteenth birthday. It's a a big family event, and, well, let's say that the girl in this movie gets some upsetting news just prior to hers. She leaves home to live with a benevolent great-grandfather, who is also sheltering a gay Latino hood cast out from his home. It's a simple story about the double-edged sword that is tradition, that is carefully and patiently developed. It takes place in Echo Park in L.A., and the camera work beautifully captures the life of that neighborhood. Some fine acting. Won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance, I believe I read somewhere. Worth catching.
Sunday, August 06, 2006
the movie everybody wants to have seen
And we saw what all the fuss was about.
The premise is that the 11-year old daughter in a (very) dysfunctional Arizona family has been named a finalist in a national pageant called Little Miss Sunshine. So the family : mom, pop, a heroin snorting grandad, a recently suicidal uncle, and the brother pile into the VW bus to drive from Arizona to Redondo Beach, where the pageant is to be held. The script is savagely funny, in a way that is a little reminiscent of Howard Korder's plays, which we sometimes work on in the class. There is some first-rate acting as well. The story is not without some flaws and misfires, but the piece as a whole has great heart and inventiveness, and an anarchic streak a mile wide. My vote: not to be missed!
Sunday, July 09, 2006
As You Like It A Lot!!!
Last night, I saw something I couldn't wait to come home and spread the word about. And how! It was a production of As You Like It produced by a new company called the ARClight Theater Company. The show is running at the Altarena Playhouse in Alameda. Where to begin! The piece was inventively staged, the acting was very good and some of it was stupendous, the company was extremely well-spoken, so the verse was a pleasure to listen to, and the cast had a real sense of ownership of the production. The strength of the direction is visible in the assurance and ease with which the whole thing comes off. And the theater itself is a gem: built in 1938, at the tail end of the Little Theater movement in this country, it stirringly evokes the idealism of that period. Hop on the BART and go there now!!!
More info at http://www.arclightrep.com/
PS I posted the audtions for this show in this blog in an entry entitled "Get Your Shakespeare On" a while back. This is a company to get involved with on the ground floor. They are doing work with a freshness and vitality that is the rarest of commodities. So stay tuned!
Monday, June 19, 2006
film actors take note, part two
Hi all,
I went to see a movie at Frameline, the Gay and Lesbian Film Festival here ins San Francisco, this weekend. The movie was called Boy Culture, and was directed by the same director who had made a film thst I saw last year, called Eating Out. Eating Out was uneven, but had some marvelously funny dialogue, not to mention some very strong acting. The leading woman in it, Emily Brook Hands, was particularly strong. She was also in this movie, Boy Culture, albeit in a much smaller role, but nevertheless probably the most memorable performance. But she was there in person, and appeared in a talkback afterwards. After the talkback, I approached her, eager to enthuse about her work and ask her where she had trained. She responded that she had grown up in Kansas, and had done musical theater all her life as a kid. Then she took some classes at the University of Kansas, and then after that, she had moved to L.A.. She mentioned the names of a couple of people she had studied with there, who weren't familiar to me, so I asked her what kind of stuff they taught in their classes. She said that they did a lot of clown work, very physical in approach. She said she also did a lot of "scene work" as well. I thought it was so interesting that she emphasized the importance of her clown work in her training, and that she had stood out so strongly. For those of you who read my earlier post, "film actors take note", you remember that the jist of it was that another actor had stood out to me in a movie, and when I looked into his background a little bit, I discovered that he had done a lot of very intensive physical training as well.
All of this to say: actors of all stripes, GET SOME PHYSICAL TRAINING! There are lots of ways to go: yoga, T'ai-Chi, capoeira (see the resources page of utteracting.com to read about this one), Pilates, Alexander, Feldenkrais, modern dance whatever. But it's so important to do something. I teach an approach that begins with from things like "internal" stuff, for lack of a better word, but the goal is to articulate a way of looking at our characters and scenes that activates us viscerally, at the cellular level, as a teacher of mine used to say. Everybody associates "emotion" with acting, and of course it is somehow important, but what is fundamental is that in the end acting is a mind-body trick. Think Black Mamba's mountaintop training regimen from Kill Bill. It is this kind of training in focus and responsiveness that really makes somebody stand out as an actor. We've all lived and suffered, we all have those emotional wellsprings to draw on but what we need is turn-on-a-dime kind of alertness, agility and strength. There is nothing like rigrous physical training to develop this.
Cheers,
Andrew--
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