Short Takes
CINEMA
On the Back Lot With Fellini
LONG BEFORE THE LITERATI INVENTED Magic Realism, the people who worked in movie studios were living it. On back lots all over the world, the harshly practical has always confronted the giddily romantic. In his faux documentary INTERVISTA (Interview), Federico Fellini imagines a fictional Japanese television crew interviewing him as he shoots an equally fictive movie version of Kafka's Amerika. The result is not so much a self-portrait as a sentimental-satirical vision of back-lot life, a jazzy juxtaposition of past and present, star egos and bit-player frustrations, epic pretensions and commercial hackery. It's a movie for movie lovers, especially those who romanticize the moviemaking process -- and Fellini's undimmed capacity for surreal gestures and devil-may-care imagery.
VIDEO
Jesus in Jeans
PROVOCATIVE IMAGES FILL THE TV screen. Over a driving, syncopated rock beat, a woman's voice -- urgent, seductive -- tells a story of possession and salvation. No, it's not Madonna's Justify My Love. It's the American Bible Society's music video OUT OF THE TOMBS, a 9-min. contemporary version of Mark 5: 1-20, in which Jesus exorcises from a man the demons called Legion. The admirable goal of this first offering of the society's Multimedia Translations Program (coming: the Nativity, the Prodigal Son) is to carry the Bible's ^ message to a young generation not much inclined to read. Alas, this particular message is overwhelmed by the medium: the narrative style is distracting, and the imagery too often fascinates without illuminating.
THEATER
Muddled Madness
NO ACTOR CAN EXPECT TO CONQUER THE title role in HAMLET -- only to provide fresh insight into a few scenes. Tom Hulce, whose varied work has been overshadowed by his gigglesome Mozart in the film Amadeus, specializes in ironic, self-deprecating intelligence that ought to meet that modest goal. But in a hokey production all too typical of Washington's Shakespeare Theater, Hulce fails to make the words sound sincere and obscures the political and revenge narratives with muddling about real-or-feigned madness. Francesca Buller comes as close as anyone can to bringing off Ophelia's breakdown, and Franchelle Stewart Dorn provocatively sketches a Gertrude who senses her new husband's perfidy -- yet succumbs anyway.
The Half-Naked And the Dead
YOU MIGHT NOT IMAGINE A LOT OF laughs in being held hostage in Lebanon, stripped to your sweat-soaked shorts and sour T shirt, chained to the wall of a cell shared with other victims, not knowing who has taken you or for how long or, above all, why. But Irish writer Frank McGuinness finds a trove of snarky pub wit and schoolboy antics in SOMEONE WHO'LL WATCH OVER ME, which last week moved from London to Broadway with its deft West End cast -- Alec McCowen as a prissy English teacher, Stephen Rea as a dissolute Irish journalist and James McDaniel as a tightly wound American doctor. The roles recall the contrived ethnic jumble of old war movies. McDaniel, the most touchingly real, most underscores this falsity.
BOOKS
Falling Short
THE SIX-NOVEL SERIES TALES OF THE City, with its interweaving cast of gay and straight characters, proved that Armistead Maupin was a master of the big canvas. Working on a smaller scale in MAYBE THE MOON (HarperCollins; $22), Maupin seems to have lost his sense of perspective. The story, about Cady Roth, a dwarf actress who can't find work, canters along in Maupin's usually breezy fashion, but it doesn't go anywhere. Cady's friends -- her naive roommate who has bad taste in men, a gay best friend who challenges Hollywood's treatment of homosexuals, the black single father who becomes her lover -- are more intriguing characters than she is. Telling their tales might have made for a better book.