Sunday, June 29, 2008

The Plex to be demolished

Posted by John Stoehr on Sun, Jun 29, 2008 at 9:54 AM

It's funny what boxing teaches you.

The former location for Friday Night Fights, the lowcountry's monthly display of the sweet science presented by Jim Kelley Promotions, was The Plex in North Charleston. Kelley has since April moved the fights to Mt. Pleasant and its Omar Shrine Convention Center near Patriot's Point.

The move, along with a gaggle of rumors, signaled something was amiss at The Plex. Turns out that if the venue couldn't work out a deal with SCE&G which ended up buying out its lease with sights set on constructing a new office building next to the airport, then its future would be dim. During its squabble with the power company, which spanned much of fall and spring concert season, The Plex avoided booking national and regional acts. Was Bright Eyes the last big show? I don't know.

Anyway, in the program notes for Friday's event, Kelley noted what's going to happen to The Plex.

"The old venue will soon be razed for an SCE&G office building."

There you go. The latest installment of venue news in Charleston.

Topics: Performance Venues

Flip-flopping at Spoleto, Italy

Posted by John Stoehr on Sun, Jun 29, 2008 at 9:31 AM

First there was talk of sharing an opera, now there's none.

Dan Wakin, the classical music reporter for The New York Times, is in Italy covering the Festival of Two Worlds, the counterpart to Charleston's Spoleto Festival USA. He writes that the two festivals are considering sharing an orchestra next year, at a cost that was smaller than first thought. As for an opera, which was the big news during this year's American festival, that's off the table.

Mr. [Giorgio] Ferrara [director of the Festival of Two Worlds] estimated that the total cost would be roughly $300,000 to maintain the orchestra. “The numbers aren’t so stratospheric,” he said. That is something of a turnabout from the festivals’ initial announcement of plans to cooperate, in April, when he suggested that bringing the American orchestra here would be too expensive. At the time, talk was of sharing an opera production, but that is off the table for the immediate future [italics mine]. Perhaps a Charleston production from next summer could be brought here, Mr. Ferrara said, or vice versa.

In Charleston this year, news of the so-called "reunification" of the two festivals had many in a tizzy, including The Post and Courier's Dottie Ashley. Problem is, Ashley took language couched in ambiguity to be the language of certainty. When Nigel Redden, director of the American festival, discussed "exploring" options, he was hedging his bets, as he ought to when talking to the media.

If an opera is off the table, what then is the significance of "reunification" beyond the symbolic? Sharing an opera was the cornerstone of the festivals' partnership before Gian Carlo Menotti left in a huff in 1993. It was what gave the American festival a certain swagger, a glamorous sense of international cosmopolitanism. But now, with this latest news from Italy — that an opera is off the table for the time being — calls into question the whole notion of "reunification."

It also underscores the absence of a kind of journalistic skepticism when it comes to reporting about the arts. As I note in this post prior to the start of this year's festival, the press release announcing the alleged reunification does not say they will share operas.

It says that they “agreed to explore” the idea. It doesn’t say that the American festival will reunite with its Italian sister. The press release says that they “announced plans for the structure of a partnership [italics mine] between the two festivals.”

There’s a difference between a partnership and the structure of a partnership.

Nigel Redden, director of Spoleto Festival USA, was equally cagey in an interview yesterday with City Paper: “We are going to announce some kind of plan, if that’s the word, some kind of framework, for collaboration in the 2009 festival.”

So it seems a bit of caution is to be used until we know for sure what this news means. Bottomline: They will not share money, organizational structure, and many other resources. The “reunification” still appears to be largely symbolic, something, to be sure, that has value unto itself, but something that shouldn’t be over- or understated.

Topics: Spoleto

Saturday, June 28, 2008

Movie Review: Mongol

Posted by John Stoehr on Sat, Jun 28, 2008 at 9:44 AM

click to enlarge unknown.jpg

Mongol opened last night at the Terrace Theatre. Our critic Jonathan Kiefer had this to say.

King of the World

Sergei Bodrov reveals the good side of the Mongol mystique

By Jonathan Kiefer

Mongol

Starring Tadanobu Asano, Sun Hong-Lei, Khulan Chuluun, Odnyam Odsuren

Directed by Sergei Bodrov

Rated R

Forget Zohan. What about Genghis Khan? Now there’s somebody you don’t want to be messing with. Which might explain his cultural staying power, and why a movie about him made seven centuries after the man’s death could actually find an audience.

It’s from Russian director Sergei Bodrov (fondly if barely known to American audiences for 1996’s Prisoner of the Mountains), co-writing with Arif Aliyev, and it’s a beauty. As world-conqueror biopics go, Mongol is sort of the anti-Alexander. It’s consistently dignified in the way that Oliver Stone’s picture was consistently risible, and it’s justified by its enthusiasm alone in a way the latter certainly wasn’t.

At once sweeping and intimately confidential, with durably magnetic performances by Japan’s Asano Tadanobu as the adored warlord and China’s Honglei Sun as Jamukha, his blood brother and eventual enemy, Mongol, a 2007 Best Foreign Film Oscar nominee, has to be by far the best action epic of 12th- and 13th-century Asian nomads you’ll see this month.

And besides, really, how else will you get to know the founder of the Mongol Empire? It’s no use holding out hope for the definitive written record of his early life, so an honorably dramatized, handsomely photographed motion picture record will have to do.

So, OK, you’ve heard about the rape and the pillage. But what about the honor and the justice? As a youngster, Temudgin (Kahn’s boyhood name, well-played by Odnyam Odsuren) brazenly chose a bride from the wrong clan (or, more accurately, let her choose him), saw his father poisoned and his own clan betrayed from within, suffered long and grueling periods of slavery, watched helplessly as his wife got stolen, earned a break or two from the god Tengri, Bringer of Thunder, and, well, yes, made himself into a willful, fearless warrior.

None of this should be at all easy to watch, but thanks to Bodrov’s clarity of purpose, it compels. The first installment in a proposed Genghis Khan trilogy, Mongol is the movie that’s supposed to leave you thinking, “Oh, so that’s why he was so aggressive.” Those who would accuse the filmmaker of being his subject’s unwitting apologist should perhaps reserve judgment until the full report is in.

“Mongols need laws,” Temudgin says, about midway through the movie. “I will make them obey, even if I have to kill half of them.”

That’s right; to many a hawkish pundit’s dismay, they’re just not teaching this stuff in the MBA programs and legislative chambers nowadays.

But back in the day, or at least in the Year of the Earth Tiger (1218), well, guess who got some serious results with that particular strategy of governance? Doing so meant negotiating variously shifty and potentially deadly alliances, maintaining an unflappable determination to rescue his kidnapped wife (Khulan Chuluun), and enduring no shortage of blood-spraying combat on her behalf. It also helped that he wasn’t afraid of thunder.

True, just having presided over the biggest contiguous empire in history doesn’t make him automatically interesting to everybody. To get the most out of Mongol, you’ll probably have to give a damn about the Greatest of all Rulers to begin with. But the richness of the movie’s detail and its overall temperament — demonstrably more at home in the arthouse than in the multiplex — tend to seduce.

Shot on location in the snowy steppes of Kazakhstan and Mongolia, Bodrov’s tale can’t help but seem both ancient and authentic. The pace is commendably unhurried and the scope swells up in a way that feels organic to a character-driven story, instead of simply anxious to get to the next CGI-enhanced scenes of battle. If it feels longer than its two-hour running time, it’s only in the best possible way.

And if some of Bodrov’s sequences occasionally seem to drift and hiccup, the net effect remains an arresting piece of portraiture — not to mention an invitation to partake of his trilogy’s next two installments. The movies may not last another seven centuries, but thanks to their contribution, the Genghis Khan mythology certainly will.

Topics: Film

Friday, June 27, 2008

Extreme Akim goes to Hollywood

Posted by John Stoehr on Fri, Jun 27, 2008 at 2:13 PM

Charleston native Akim Anastopoulo is the star of Eye for an Eye, a People's Court spin-off in which the popular local lawyer is nicknamed "Extreme Akim" and wields a baseball bat on which is emblazoned the word "justice." It's among the worst of the judge-oriented shows, I'm told. Don't take our word for it. See for yourself.

At any rate, Anastopoulo is also the head of a television and movie company called Atlas Worldwide Syndication and Distribution. The company announced yesterday that it has completed work of what it claims is the largest movie studio in South Carolina in Hollywood, S.C.

Located in downtown Hollywood, the studio is a four-stage, three-acre facility that will open on Aug. 1. It's already being used for pre-production work and has a high-definition "camera package." Future renovations will include an additional 20,000 square feet to the sound stage.

Anastopoulo says he plans to move filming of Eye for an Eye to his South Carolina site. We're certain Extreme Akim is dedicated to bringing filmmaking to the lowcountry that's as high a quality as his television show (which, by the way, is hosted by none other than Kato Kaelin, a surfer dude famed for his role in the O.J. Simpson trial).

The Cannon Street Boys

Posted by John Stoehr on Fri, Jun 27, 2008 at 1:42 PM

In 1955, the Cannon Street YMCA Little League baseball team was the only one of its kind in the nation that consisted of African-American boys. White Little League teams in South Carolina refused to play them, and because they did not want to forfeit, the white teams formed their own program, Dixie Baseball for Boys.

The mass exodus left only one legal team in the state, The Cannon Street Boys, who were able to advance to the World Series, but did not play a single game because the team never technically played a game; they made their way based on forfeits.

The original team members were commemorated at the 2002 Little League World Series with a banner. Presently, a film titled The Cannon Street Boys is in the making to tell their story. The film will consist of actors from the Charleston area. The movie is currently being cast. Filming is expected to end in October. —Caitlin Baker

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