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I’ve talked about filmmaker Shane Carruth here on NP1 at least once, maybe twice. Somewhere way back in the archives. It’s been a very long time since Shane made his first film, Primer. For the uninitiated, Primer is probably the most practical time travel film ever made, and quite certainly the most confusing. It follows two friends who unwittingly invent a time machine in their garage. An attempt to use the technology to get a leg up on the stock market almost immediately unravels thanks to unforeseen consequences. Going into detail would ruin the thrill of discovery your first go-round… and when I say the first go-round, I mean you’re probably going to watch this film three times in a row to start to understand it. That’s where Carruth’s skill as a filmmaker and storyteller really shine through. Not only does he make a confusing subject exciting to watch (think season five of LOST), he constructs an intriguing series of events that make it a thrill.  The film is only about 80 minutes long, which helps to make re-watching tempting. But best of all, Primer only cost about $7000 to make. This is in the pre-digital days in 2004 where people were still shooting features on film, mind you. If he’d had access to today’s DSLRs, it might’ve cost half as much.

I’m not really here to gush over this movie again, but I do think you should know that it’s FINALLY available to stream on Netflix, if you’ve got it. I highly suggest that if the above paragraph sounded intriguing to you that you add it to your queue now.

The real reason I’m here is to say that Carruth’s follow up, Upstream Color, is awaiting theatrical release. I had no idea that this film was in the making – in fact, I was under the impression that Carruth’s somewhat meandering but very cool A Topiary screenplay was going to be his next project. Having just finished reading it (but not understanding it for the most part), I figured we’d essentially seen the last of the Austin native. NOPE:

I DON’T KNOW WHAT THIS IS BUT I LIKE IT. I saw a couple of brief “synopses” of Upstream Color but decided not to read into them much. It looks like a romantic sci-fi vehicle of some sort. After reading A Topiary I got more of an idea of how Carruth’s mind works when he’s writing – he puts ideas and concepts out there for the audience but doesn’t quite like to fully explain them. This sort of thing worked in Darren Aronofsky’s The Fountain and I’m assuming Solaris, although I have yet to make it through that from start to finish.

We need more stuff like this, I think, and more of it from Shane Carruth. Here’s hoping that this gets him more notoriety. Who knows… maybe that batshit crazy stuff in A Topiary will make its way to the screen next?

Do you have a last.fm account? I’ve got one. I love it. It keeps track of all of the music I listen to on my computer and my iPod, and being a bit of a weird fan of statistics, it helps me keep track of where my musical taste has gone over the past couple of years. I often wish that it had existed back when I was in college or even high school, just to see if my favorite music has really stood the test of time or if I’m as open to new stuff as I like to think I am. Since I’ve been using it, I have started listening to the likes of Steely Dan, Why?, The Killers, and plenty of others, and they’ve all stacked up in intriguing ways against my usual staples.

But again, that’s just for what I listen to on the computer or the iPod. What if you could keep track of every single song you’ve ever heard in your life, either on the radio, TV, in movies, etc? I happen to believe that the song I’ve heard more times than any other in my nearly 30 years on this planet is “Respect” by Aretha Franklin. What if we could narrow that down, though, to the last decade and a half? Well, that’s easy. The answer is “Smooth” by Santana, featuring Matchbox 20′s Rob Thomas. And it’s never been on my iPod.

HAHAHAHAHA even in 1999 people were still buying singles in a physical format

“Smooth” was the inescapable Number One Jam of the Summer in 1999. It was on the radio constantly, was in super-heavy rotation on MTV, the whole deal. The thing is, it’s STILL played on the radio constantly. Any station that plays in 99% of offices in the United States is still playing this song, and doing so enough to make you think that it’s still new. I’ll admit, it’s not a terrible song. I love Carlos Santana and his hot guitar skills. This song is what relauched his career for a couple more albums and got people to rediscover his early stuff. I was considering saying something silly about Rob Thomas but then I remembered that he had a very funny cameo on It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia and that Matchbox 20′s first single, “Push,” is still one of my favorite 90′s radio hits.

So there’s 400 words justifying why I decided to make my first test of my home green-screen skills into a joke on this modern radio favorite.

Well, that was… interesting.

Earlier today I effectively killed newpageone.com again while trying to fix it. Here’s a short rundown of what happened:

1. Noticed that comments had disappeared from the site and were no longer coming in.
2. Looked up documentation on WordPress sites and tried to solve the problem.
3. WordPress Codex made it apparent that I needed to repair my databases, but I did not have the tools to do such a thing installed on my server.
4. Accidentally installed PHP/database tools in the directory where I have my blog set up.
5. Panic.
6. Call Yahoo support straight away and talk with Jason for two hours.
7. Fix comment problem while creating a whole new one, essentially isolating the front page from the rest of the site.
8. Jason technically can’t give me WordPress support, so he leaves me with suggestions and I go to it on my own.
9. I ignore all of the new database information I’ve just learned and just export/import XML of all of my posts like I did the last time the site went down. I do this after deactivating my WordPress blog, starting a new one, and importing a nice big XML file with all of the site’s previous information.
10. Plugging the XML in and fixing plugins/widgets now. If I didn’t tell you, you wouldn’t know.

The reason the comments went down in the first place is because I get so much Spam that it crashes the comment database if I don’t clear it out every so often. Lesson learned!

Hey, kids, look who’s back!

They see me rollin...

Indeed, Watermelon Cat is here to herald some site issues. In an effort to fix the disappearance of all of the site’s comments, I managed to make a bigger mess of things. You can currently read the most recent posts on the front page, but anything else within the site is out of commission. Thanks to Jason at Yahoo Small Business Web Hosting tech support for helping me out with some issues and showing me a thing or two that I didn’t know about databases and PHP and whatnot.

Hopefully we’ll have this stuff back up and running soon.

“I am and will always be just simply a baseball player,my tomb stone will just say. Baseball.” – Jose Canseco, via Twitter

It was announced yesterday that the Worcester Tornadoes, my local Can-Am League baseball team, had just made the biggest signing in their history. In fact, this could have been the biggest signing in the league’s short history. Bigger than Brockton getting Bill “Spaceman” Lee to toss a couple of games to sell some tickets, bigger than Quebec signing former Cy Young-winning closer Eric Gagne to help him try to find his edge again. The Tornadoes signed one of the most polarizing figures in the modern game at the age of 47 – none other than Jose Canseco.

"@SHAQ we gonna fight or what"

If you’re unfamiliar, here’s a brief rundown of Canseco’s career as I remember it. Jose exploded onto the scene with the Oakland Athletics in the mid-eighties, where, along with Mark McGwire, he would become the first-ever player to hit 40 home runs and steal 4o bases in one season. The A’s went on to win the World Series in 1989 thanks to Canseco. It’s not that he was the one doing all the heavy lifting, though. Jose had become the first truly successful steroid-using ballplayer, a seemingly late-bloomer who went from being good to godlike. After leaving the A’s, he’d play for Texas, the Red Sox, Oakland again, and then sort of started to bounce around from team to team as he became lost in the shuffle of other players who had the same amount of success in transforming themselves into supermen on the field. As baseball finally started to take the whole thing seriously, Canseco was made an example of, especially after his book Juiced hit shelves and detailed the rise of performance enhancers in the game. Jose was effectively out of baseball at the age of 37, even after getting himself clean of steroids and still being able to at the very least hit the ball.

Canseco sort of faded into obscurity after that, the way guys like Dennis Rodman and Mickey Rourke do these days. Instead of disappearing, he ended up on a parade of reality TV shows and went into boxing. And then, the public rediscovers them, and an overwhelming wave of love shines down upon them – whether genuine or ironic. Or maybe a bit of both.

I had been falling into this trap with Canseco myself, thanks to joining Twitter last summer. I had heard that Canseco was a curious case on Twitter, and started following him a few months ago. Although he has a tendency to ramble about “liars” and express the desire to “slap a hater” every now and then, Canseco also comes across as a guy who can’t leave what he loves alone. Baseball is it for Canseco, his on-again-off-again girlfriend Leila being a close second. After that, “class is in session” when Jose wakes up in the morning and drops some serious science on all of us with nuggets like “If you haters don’t stop hating I am going to kill myself and haunt you.”

Read that tweet again. He sounds crazy – but it just comes across like that in print. He’s got a good sense of humor and his crazier statements on the state of the game and steroids just don’t come across well when he’s confined to 140 characters. I watched late one night as he was invited to come join Neal Brennan, Moshe Kasher, and Doug Lussenhop on The Champs Podcast (my favorite podcast, fyi), and waited with baited breath to hear it. Canseco is well-spoken and even humble enough to sound quite normal. I think that half of his sillier tweets are just there as a joke. I think.

JUST WHEN YOU THOUGHT IT WAS SAFE TO DRIVE TO AUBURN, JOSE CANSECO COMES TO THE PLATE

So how did I feel when I found out that Canseco had signed on with my local team? I am personally pretty pumped. Not just in the sense that we’ll have a big celebrity in our midst in Worcester, but that we’ll have someone capable of hitting a home run over Route 290 and onto the roof of Rotman’s. I’m excited that this little team, one that I love for being who they are, will sell tickets like nobody’s business for this season. This guy could be our next folk hero, and we really haven’t had one in ages.

So, to celebrate, I immediately whipped up a plan to create a t-shirt. This is not a 900-word post designed to sell t-shirts, mind you, I just thought it might be fun.

Click it to go to the NP1 Store. Wheeeeeeeee

There it is, in the Tornadoes’ orange and black, emblazoned with one of Jose’s catchphrases. On the back is his signature number 33, proudly displayed. Wear one to Fitton Field this summer and show Jose your support. Give him a hug and thank him for saving the game of baseball. If I get him to sign the one I’ve sent away for, I might be rich, at least in Bitcoins. Keep an eye out, I am going to have to make another t-shirt ad for this one.

So when the Tornadoes get started for the 2012 season, I hope to see a lot of you there in those bargain seats while Professor Canseco shows you all that he can still hit good pitches. Hugs for everybody. Jose Canseco will complete you.

Last night I basically talked about how angry I was over the fact that the only movie I saw in 2011 that had been nominated for Best Picture by the Academy happened to be terrible. Tonight, I’m going to tell you about the three films I expected to get nominated, and declare them the collective winners of the first ever Stevie awards. That’s right, they all win. Well, then, I’ve shot the suspense for you already, haven’t I? Then I guess this will be like Jeopardy and I’ll have to give you the questions in response to the answers.

I’m going to start with the only film I actively looked forward to this summer, and that is Drive. My excitement over Drive was mainly piqued by the premise: Ryan Gosling plays a Man With No Name who works as a stunt driver in Hollywood by day, but is a getaway driver at night. He becomes involved in the lives of a family living down the hall from him, and soon finds himself in big trouble with some nasty people. This all seems like a perfect recipe for a Fast and the Furious kind of romp with all sorts of car chases and one-liners. In fact, it was destined to be such a film, but after an $80 million project with Hugh Jackman attached fell through, Gosling would become involved and was asked to pick the director. After what will likely be remembered as a legendary Hollywood “first date” with Danish upstart Nicolas Winding Refn, Drive had a new direction as a tense, noir-inspired crime drama.

Distracted driving: driving while looking into Ryan Gosling's dreamy eyes

This new take on the tone of the story would produce one of the most refreshing Hollywood pictures in recent memory. Gosling evokes the cool of Steve McQueen throughout most of the picture. His character is able to find a real purpose in protecting the adorable Carey Mulligan and her little boy, and he doesn’t have to say much in order to get his point across. The cast is filled out by the likes of the great Brian Cranston, an hilarious Ron Perlman, the voluptuous Christina Hendricks, and a surprisingly intimidating Albert Brooks, who I felt was ROBBED when he wasn’t included among the nominees for Best Supporting Actor. I have always loved Brooks and wasn’t expecting his turn as a remorseless gangster.

One big element to Drive for me is its handling of its subject matter. Refn is a master of the blink-and-you’ll-miss-it school of showing violence and bloodshed onscreen. People in this film get stabbed, slashed, shot, and stomped, and while it’s never pretty, it is masterfully executed and only shown for a split-second. If you’ve seen his previous work, especially Valhalla Rising and to a lesser extent the outstanding Bronson, you know what I’m talking about. And oh yeah, there’s a couple of car chases. Very, very good car chases.

On top of all of that, Drive is also a film that takes place in its own little world – a Los Angeles that isn’t quite the cleaner, friendlier city it is today, but not the street-gang warzone you might expect, either. To me, it’s the kind of world the Grand Theft Auto video game franchise has been creating for years. It’s a world you know doesn’t exist, but it damn well could if it only wanted to. Not to mention one of the best soundtracks I’ve heard in a long time, which only adds further personality to an already stellar picture. Definitely not to be missed.

I couldn't find a single production still that could say what I wanted, so have this instead

Now, here’s something that I hate to admit as a movie enthusiast: I don’t like Swedish films. I enjoyed Let the Right One In immensely, but from there, it’s like trying to watch Russian films. No matter how beautiful they might be, I just can’t stay awake. Ingmar Bergman puts me to sleep better than episodes of Modern Marvels on the History Channel. I couldn’t even make it through the original version of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, which I tried watching over a year ago and fell asleep a half-hour in. I intended on revisiting, but kept putting it off until the inevitable American version surfaced. But this was more than just a Hollywood adaptation as far as I was concerned.

David Fincher is one of my favorite filmmakers. I have seen almost every one of his movies and I was very encouraged by The Social Network last year. He managed to step his game up considerably with that picture and ended up bringing his downer style to what so many people just assumed would just be “Facebook: The Movie.” After the considerable acclaim for the movies based on Stieg Larsson’s hugely popular mystery series, it was obvious that Sony Pictures had to do the right thing and get Fincher on board. What we got was “the feel-bad movie of the year.”

Fincher went back to Social Network‘s well and cast Rooney Mara (who played a brief but pivotal role in TSN) as the titular Lisbeth Salander and asked Trent “Nine Inch Nails” Reznor to score the film. Both decisions were good ones. Mara is convincing as the detached and disturbed Lisbeth Salander, hacker and private investigator. The big debate over whether her portrayal of the character is better than the original by Noomi Rapace, but from what I’ve seen of Mara and Rapace’s other work, Mara showed more range. Daniel Craig plays Mikael Blomkvist, the disgraced magazine editor whom Salander assists in solving a decades-old disappearance of a young girl in northern Sweden.

The plot is almost by-the-numbers mystery with a mostly British supporting cast (including Christopher Plummer, not Max von Sydow as I had originally expected) speaking English with British accents in Sweden, but none of that really matters. It’s also scary, shocking, and ugly, but still so damn good that I can’t give you details if you don’t know the story. After seeing this, you will know without a doubt why the original novel’s title literally translates to Men Who Hate Women. But it’s Fincher’s show. He made a huge splash with Se7en all those years ago and Dragon Tattoo is a return to that same territory. I certainly hope that if and when Sony asks for The Girl Who Played with Fire and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nestthat they pay Fincher however much he wants to stay attached.

Gary Oldman. That is all.

The third and final film I fully expected to get a best picture nod was Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, which does win the exclusive Stevie award for Most British Film. Gary Oldman heads a cast that also includes Colin Firth, John Hurt, Mark Strong, Toby Jones, Tom Hardy, and the new Sherlock Holmes, Benedict Cumberbatch. Wow, that’s a lot of British people. But what’s this, Let the Right One In‘s Tomas Alfredson is the director… well, even with this Swede in the driver’s seat, I think it remains pretty damn British. In fact, that’s one reason I was very excited about this espionage thriller.

Well, “thriller” isn’t the right word. As intriguing as every character is, as mysterious as every clue might be, your heart never gets racing. Probably that Swedish director’s fault, but that’s fine. The slow pace lets you fully appreciate Gary Oldman’s incredibly understated performance as George Smiley, a retired member of British Intelligence. Smiley is a man who has devoted his whole life to two things: his estranged wife and his job. Upon retirement he can’t help but want to get back at it when a roguish young agent, played by a wonderfully hammy Hardy, shows up at his home asking for help tying up some loose ends to the very case that led to his dismissal. And so begins a complex Cold War mystery that demands your attention and your respect.

I wasn’t sure how I felt about Tinker Tailor until it was over. It’s a movie that holds the cards close to its chest until the very end, but when it laid them down, I had to smile and say that I was thoroughly satisfied. I can say that I figured out who the spy was before he was revealed, although mostly through the process of elimination. I will admit that I found myself lost at a couple of points in the “who’s that guy, why is he doing that” way, but not nearly as lost as some people I’ve spoken with, who can’t seem to tell what a flashback is, among other things.

If you’re a fan of any of the fine gentlemen I listed in the first paragraph (even the Swede), an Anglophile in general, love 1970′s style, or want a clever Cold War spy chase, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy will deliver. And if the film’s final shot doesn’t make you grin ear to ear, then you are probably a pretty crummy person who wasn’t paying attention.

2011 was a terrible year for film. And I’m not just saying so because there weren’t that many typical “Oscar movies” released this year, I mean it on all fronts. Sequels, prequels, adaptations, and reboots dominated the box office, and in most cases they weren’t very good ones, either. So creativity was almost non-existent. I saw only a couple of summer blockbuster-type flicks and was underwhelmed.  Even the final push for Oscar season was lacking. Still, I thought I had at least covered a good deal of the best the year had to offer. Then the nominations came out last week. (Yes, I realize that I’m just getting around to this NOW.  I tweeted about it then.  Everything is going far too quickly on the internet for a blogger like myself, the lazy kind.)

Let’s roll out the ten films the Academy chose for Best Picture:

The Artist
The Descendants
Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
The Help
Hugo
Midnight In Paris 
Moneyball
The Tree of Life
War Horse

Oh boy.

I only saw ONE of these movies, and I hated it with all of my heart and soul. That picture was The Tree of Life. This was Terrence Malick’s return, a “deeply personal film,” or as I like to call it, “offensively pretentious bullshit.” I would have hated this flick as it was, but after having been working myself up about it for the previous six months, the disappointment made it even more hard to watch. The trailer was mysterious and enticing. It was a series of beautifully composed shots, interspersed with shots of planets colliding and stuff like that. “Cool,” I thought, “some sort of over-arching story about the origins of life, perhaps?”

WRONG. VERY VERY WRONG, STEPHEN. The movie was a two hour version of the trailer. There was hardly any narrative or actual plot to speak of. It consisted of Sean Penn going to work, looking out a window, and having a flashback of his whole childhood. His entire childhood consists of his father, Brad Pitt, yelling at him to mow the lawn. The kid playing Sean Penn acts like an annoying little shit and mumbles all of his lines.

"Oh no, I'm in a terrible movie, aren't I?"

Also, there is an interlude WHERE HE THINKS ABOUT DINOSAURS FOR A HALF HOUR. And not cool dinosaurs, either, boring ones.

Then Sean Penn imagines seeing his whole family on a beach like they’re in heaven or something, and he leaves work at the end of the day with a look on his face that says, “DUDE I GET IT NOW.” So it’s a sequel to Fast Times that shows that Spicoli grew up and got a job, even though it seems that all he does at this job is just stare off into space and think about what a shitty kid he was. I waited through the whole movie hoping for a good payoff, but I should have known better. The only good thing I can say about Tree of Life is that it actually came across as if you were watching a stream of memories, and a lot of that has to be attributed to Emmanuel Lubezki’s cinematography and the half-dozen people who edited it.  Amazingly enough, this was the intent of the film.

Nine other films and I didn’t see a single one.  The Artist looks cute, because it is a modern silent film that’s gotten plenty of buzz. The Descendants is not only a George Clooney vehicle, but also the latest from Alexander Payne, who has had a fantastic pedigree to this point. Extremely Loud is exploitative of 9/11 victims, their families, and of autism in general. It only got nominated because Tom Hanks is in it. Don’t take it from me, take it from all the critics who have panned it. Especially my beloved New York Post. The Help will hopefully get Viola Davis the Oscar she should have won for Doubt a couple of  years ago and will ensure that the lovely Emma Stone is at the ceremony. Hugo has gotten spectacular reviews from my friends, and is apparently the best use of 3D since it was brought in as simply a gimmick. Apparently, Martin Scorcese has managed to harness it to create a beautiful film. Midnight in Paris is my boy Woody Allen’s latest joint, so I don’t see why I wouldn’t want to see this in the first place. Moneyball is apparently the good Brad Pitt movie that came out this year, even if it did somehow cause Jonah Hill to get nominated for Best Supporting Actor. Maybe he and the furiously obnoxious Melissa McCarthy can both win Oscars and make me swear off of the film industry forever. Still, it’s about sabermetrics, a part of baseball that I have yet to learn about, so I still want to see it. And then there’s War Horse, which was nominated because of Steven Spielberg. I love Steven, but it seems like a lazy nomination to me.

Also, they nominated the latest Transformers movie for Best Visual Effects. This makes Optimus Prime a three-time Oscar nominee.

Guess what, kids? This is only PART ONE of a TWO PART blog post. Part Two will be up tomorrow, when I tell you about the award-worthy movies that I actually saw in 2011 (okay, so I saw two of them a couple of weeks ago), and finally launch my own movie awards, THE STEVIES. See you then.

Wondering what’s coming your way in the first few weeks of the new year?  Peer upon these words, dear readers, and behold!  All of these predictions have been made while I drank copious amounts of coffee while listening to Talking Heads albums.  I think it’s also how David Lynch wrote Eraserhead.

Aries
Your uncle will send you an email asking for his limited edition box set of Rocky VHS tapes back, he “needs them.”

Taurus
A dream about an upright talking dog wearing parachute pants with suspenders will haunt you throughout the day, but it turns out not to mean anything.

Gemini
While waiting in line for coffee you overhear a conversation in which someone inaccurately attributes an acting credit to “Corey Feldman with a beard,” when it was in fact Jeremy Davies in the role.  DO NOT CORRECT HIM, as this will cause you to become unstuck in time.

LOST BOY or just LOST? Be careful either way!

Cancer
You and three others in the office will pitch in for Chinese on Friday; you will like the fortune you get better than this horoscope.

Leo
You’re going to hear a song you liked in high school on a classic rock station for the first time and briefly consider steering into oncoming traffic.

Virgo
You encounter a wizard as you leave Walgreens.  The wizard is in possession of a magical amulet that gives him +3 immunity to fire.  He strikes quickly, hitting your dog with a Confuse spell.  It’s your turn, what do you do?

Libra
The same unlisted number you keep missing calls from turns out to be Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia, asking for money.  By the time you are actually able to pick up, he tells you that the fund drive is over so he’ll call back in a year.

Scorpio
While at a monster truck rally with your cousins, an argument begins over “who is better,” Bigfoot or Grave Digger.  You suddenly realize that you are discussing the merits of two diesel-powered vehicles, not sentient beings, and wonder what circumstances have led you to being at a monster truck rally in the first place.  Welcome to the first day of the rest of your life.

Y'ALL DON'T KNOW SHIT ABOUT MONSTER TRUCKS

Sagittarius
A friend’s allergy turns out to be a blessing in disguise.  Now would be a good time to take up beekeeping.

Capricorn
You will discover that something very similar to a sport you invented in your driveway when you were twelve is now wildly popular in Scandinavia.  The scrawny Army brat you never heard from after junior high is the Swedish league’s highest-paid player.

Aquarius
Instead of buying scratch tickets this month, just go to the park on a windy day, throw a handful of money in the air, spin around five times, and count to twenty.  Whatever money you can recover is what you would have gotten back on two of the tickets in the first place.

Pisces
Avoid the new pottery course taking place at the community center this month – the “instructor” insists on having nude models present at all classes.

As time goes on, the more I realize that Batman might be my favorite superhero.

That said, the trailer for The Dark Knight Rises has arrived and it’s got me very excited to see the conclusion to this interpretation of the story, one that hasn’t quite followed convention and has created its own unique world for its characters.

Like any good limited run of a comic series, you get the sense that anything can happen – there are no guarantees in Christopher Nolan’s vision of Gotham City.  Major characters can die in these films, as opposed to decades-long survival in comics.  Look no further than Harvey Dent, who bit it almost immediately after becoming Two-Face.  It keeps you guessing.  Even though TDKR looks to potentially follow the “Knightfall” storyline with Bane, we’ll also see Selina Kyle for the first time in this series, along with what I think will be a very intriguing tie-in to the Occupy movement.

Meanwhile, Sony Pictures thinks they need to reboot Spider-Man already with a guy who made a hipster rom-com at the helm and Warner Bros. is trying again with another Superman flick.  Superman I’m still on the fence about, but you’ll learn of my heartbreak/nerd rage over a new Spidey soon enough.

That's it, Bruce. Enjoy yourself once in a while.

July 20th can’t come soon enough.

Hey everybody.  Here’s a bit on what I’m up to over the next couple of months.  If you can get yourself down to Sturbridge and the Stageloft theater, you’ll get to see me in the next three shows, starting this Friday!

I'm gonna look JUST LIKE THIS

First up, I’m pulling double duty as Bob Cratchit and Fezziwig in A Christmas Carol.  This show is becoming a bit of a Stageloft tradition, and I’m really happy to be a part of it.  You know the story of Scrooge, but I really like this production.  Great cast, sweet costumes, and lots of neat technical wizardry courtesy of super-talented director Jeremy Woloski.  We’re starting up this weekend and we’ll run for three weeks.  Check out the website for all of the performances (we’re cramming in about fifteen!) and reserve your tickets.  A great way to unwind amidst all of the Christmas hustle and bustle.

George W. Bush listening to a shoe

When Christmas Carol wraps, I’ll already be hard at work on my next role: Agent 86 of CONTROL, Maxwell Smart.  Get Smart is going to be just the kind of comedy to beat the winter blahs, and I’m really excited to get started on it.  The laughs are rapid fire in this one, and I’ll finally get to work with our fearless leader, Ed Cornely.   Would you believe it’s got all the charm and fun of the original series?  Would you believe we open on January 20th?  Would you believe I’m so dedicated to the role that I’m going to shave my beard?   (I’m gonna try to lose a little weight while I’m at it, but don’t hold me to that.)  Please, don’t miss this one, guys, it’s a three-week run and I hope you’ll be there.

Also not to miss – Woody Allen’s madcap Don’t Drink the Water, which follows Get Smart on February 24th.  Chuck Grigaitis started begging me to come audition once we started on Laughter on the 23rd Floor.  Here we are now, and I’m lining up to play Father Drobney, a priest seeking asylum in an unnamed Communist country in 1960′s Europe.  He also does magic tricks in his spare time.  That’s only a fraction of the insanity that this script has to offer, so I’m going to leave it to you to come join us during that three-week run.

That will wrap it up for me for the time being.  Three shows back-to-back-to-back is something I’ve never attempted, and I’ve got a feeling I’ll need a rest.  Sorry I can’t make it for The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, but you know I’ll be there to see it.