Leonard On Leonard: Pierce Interviews Nimoy

Leonard Nimoy announced his retirement from acting in April 2010, wrapping up a career that spanned more than 60 years and took him from playing lead roles in Clifford Odets plays to guest-starring on Fringe. Nimoy was 34 when he won the role of Mr. Spock in the original series of Star Trek—a role that defined his career for many people. But Nimoy has always been a Renaissance man. Over the last 50 years, he’s been a playwright, poet, memoirist, spoken-word performer (the famed Thalia in New York was renamed in his honor, thanks to his work with public radio’s “Selected Shorts” series), director, producer, and singer. His retirement from acting coincides with a decision to focus his attention on another lifelong passion: photography.

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(And click here for more Nimoy action via Exile friend John Mitchell’s interview in the North Adams Transcript!)

Top One Movie of the Week (7/29)

by Andrew Osborne & Scott Von Doviak

ANDREW: Back in March, during the SXSW Film Festival in Austin, I remember you and I wound up kicking ourselves when we discovered we’d not only missed a sneak-preview screening of this comic drama about a dying man (Robert Duvall) who throws his own funeral party, but we’d also missed Duvall’s castmate Bill Murray tending bar at a local watering hole shortly thereafter. And while I’m sure director Aaron Schneider‘s film won’t be quite as much fun as ordering a Shiner Bock from a genuine Ghostbuster, Get Low‘s enthusiastic early reviews (and Oscar buzz) could make this a Top One Movie we’re both willing to see during the second leg of your visit to my neck of the woods. (Or will our inability to reach consensus derail our moviegoing plans and force us once again into another long night of bar golf?)

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Leonard Pierce Reviews Avenged Sevenfold: Nightmare

Avenged Sevenfold has built a hugely successful career on a willingness to change its sound to suit whoever might be listening. Over the course of five studio albums, it’s tossed death-metal howling, metalcore vamping, emo/glam posturing, and whatever else moved units at Hot Topic into its sonic mix. The end result is a band that’s gone from one plateau to another without ever developing a coherent sound. Still, the group’s fans are an enthusiastic lot, and they had every reason to worry whether Nightmare would ever happen. The band’s drummer, Jimmy “The Rev” Sullivan, died late last year from a pill overdose, and there was legitimate concern that the band would call it quits after such a devastating blow.

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Lauren Wissot Reviews The Extra Man

It’s hard to see what Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini, co-directors of American Splendor and The Nanny Diaries, saw in taking on The Extra Man, the story of a socially awkward teacher named Louis Ives (played by the always understated Paul Dano) who leaves behind his sheltered prep-school gig for the wilds of Manhattan. Once there he lands a phone sales job at an environmental magazine and moves into the Upper East Side apartment of an eccentric dandy (played by the predictably cast Kevin Kline).

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Nick Schager Reviews Life During Wartime

Todd Solondz’s Palindromes employed eight different actresses for the same role as a means of proving a point that the director then felt inclined to bluntly state at film’s conclusion: nothing, and nobody, changes. It’s a pessimistic worldview that had become a crutch, an easy way of justifying not only his tableaus of suffering and misery but also his creative stasis. Unfortunately, his latest—a sequel of sorts to Happiness, his final work which effectively balanced compassion and condescension—finds Solondz still stuck in a rut.

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Top One Movie of the Week 7/22/10

Life During Wartime

SCOTT:  This week is a little different than most, in that I will actually be in your town this weekend (you are picking me up at the airport, right?), so we could conceivably see a movie together. I just hope it’s not this one. Don’t get me wrong, I am sort of curious about the latest from auteur-of-ickiness Todd Solondz, which is being billed as a quasi-sequel to Happiness, although it features an entirely different cast playing some of the same roles (most hilariously, The Wire’s fearsome Omar, Michael K. Williams, as “Allen,” the part originated by the decidedly non-fearsome Philip Seymour Hoffman). That’s an intriguing concept, to be sure, but let’s not sugarcoat this: I can’t stand Todd Solondz.

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Unwatchable #27: Bottoms Up

If Uwe Boll is the king of Unwatchable, it’s quickly (or, more accurately given my recent pace at this project, very, very slowly) becoming apparent that Paris Hilton is the queen. I think this is not so much due to her acting (which is bad) or her choice of projects (which is worse). It’s just that people hate her. People who probably haven’t seen her work in the likes of Nine Lives and House of Wax nevertheless feel the need to pull up her IMDb page and cast negative votes against these films, because that’s the only way these otherwise powerless individuals can make it clear to the world that, whatever it is Paris Hilton stands for, they’re agin it. I suppose that’s admirable in a way, but what of the collateral damage? And by collateral damage, I of course mean – what about me?

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The Arab Street

by Leonard Pierce

The Jersey Shore changed the rules not only for reality shows, but for racism. No longer would the task of putting forth negative, degrading caricatures of ethnic groups fall to outsiders; instead, it would be people from the group itself who would perform the vital function of making their entire ethnos look like shit. No more would WASPs be charged with making Italians look like shifty, loud, obnoxious, entitled, crass, piggish, vain jackasses; instead, it would be a new wave of proud young Italians, or in the case of three members of the cast, non-Italians pretending to be Italians, who would set the standards for shiftiness, loudness, obnoxiousness, entitlement, crassness, piggishness, vanity, and jackassery that future generations would follow.

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Thoughts on Love and Arthur Lee

by Hayden Childs

When I was young and firebellied with my head bursting with education and the sheer thrill of being alive, it might have come to pass that you and I could have spent time discussing Kant’s Critique of Judgment, and it’s within the realm of possibility that you might have even found my take interesting.  But my memory and understanding of Kant’s system of aesthetics have gone the way of my rudimentary understanding of the Russian language, so Прости меня.  I do recall that Kant lays out his taxonomy of art at one point, and he places music in the highest, least touchable, most ineffable category, because – and I am almost definitely getting this wrong – he argues that music is the artform least affected by reason.

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Nick Schager Reviews Inception

Inception is Instruction Manual Cinema, a film that spends so much time explaining—and explaining, and explaining—the rules of its narrative conceit that it fails to either emotionally engage or, except in a few notable spots, viscerally thrill. Working from a canvas at once larger than The Dark Knight and yet markedly reminiscent of it (not to mention countless other celluloid sagas), Christopher Nolan’s would-be epic is a work of sometimes stunning imagery but only affected heart, a pseudo-heist film that borrows liberally from all corners of the cinematic world (The Matrix, eXistenZ, Last Year at Marienbad, the canons of David Lynch and Michael Mann) in service of a tale that’s as hollow as its reality-bending Rubik’s Cube ruses are intricate.

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