Mostly Musical Theatre

CALM law not being enforced and not being followed by TV stations

Remember last December when the CALM act was passed?….That law that says that television commercials can not be played at higher decibels than the actual tv show?….

Well, it worked for about two weeks, and then it was universally ignored by almost all television stations and its next to impossible to enforce.

It appears that the law is only enforced if consumers file complaints to the government (the same one that can’t manage to come up with a budget or get anything else done for that matter), similar to the Do Not Call list — and we all know how well that works.

Filing a complaint is ridiculously hard — you can’t just report the tv station and the show, you have to list every single commercial, the time, the date, the show, the station, etc….its nearly impossible to file the complaint unless you sit in front of your tv and log every single piece of data over the course of an hour — and frankly, nobody is doing it.

So the CALM act basically went out the window. And there’s your random Tidbit for tonight (as I sit watching ABC Family and the commercials are easily twice as loud as the movie I’m watching as judged by the number of marks I need to decrease the volume during commercials on my remote.)

To file a violation complaint, see this website and links to the correct websites:

http://usgovinfo.about.com/b/2012/12/16/how-to-file-loud-tv-commercial-complaints.htm

Stellar “25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee” at Two Muses Theater (review)

Get in the car, get out to Bloomfield, and catch Two Muses production of “The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee”. Located in its own theater inside the Bloomfield Barnes and Noble, the production is in a word stellar — its the best production you are going to see locally, and it has a strong sense of integrity to the original NYC production. See it now so you will know why its going to win all those local Wilde awards next summer.

Adults play elementary school kids in a local spelling bee, complete with sassy organizer Rona (terrific Diane Hill), Vice Principle (hilarious Alan Madlane) and “comfort counselor” (outrageous John DeMerell). There’s nothing subtle here — and that goes for the “kids” themselves (who occasionally play other adult parents) and you won’t find a more stellar assembly of spelling bee participants than you find here. Representing the boys, Jason WIlhoite plays an, ahem, energetic Chip Tolentino; Richard Payton is an over-the-top-but-never-off-the-mark oddball Leaf Coneybear; Jared Schneider is a star-in-the-making “magic-footed” William Barfee (“pronounced barf-ay”). The girls are equally matched: Liz Jaffe is simply pitch-perfect superb as Logainne SchwarzandGrubenierre; Stafanie Bainter explodes in pent-up rebellion as Marcy Park; and Halle Bins brings heart and a great voice to Olive Ostrovsky. She also delivers my favorite line at the end of the show.

There is no surprise in knowing that there is some audience participation involved, and at this afternoon’s performance the cast was simply spot-on when a senior citizen participated in the spelling bee and decided it was his moment to hog the spotlight and throw in his own unscripted lines. Richard Payton didn’t miss a beat by tossing out a “Thanks for the stories” comment during his “goodbye” sequence. I haven’t laughed this hard at a single live theater stage moment at a show in years.

But there is more to this show than just a spelling bee — it speaks to the anguish and fears in every kid placed in the spotlight — by choice or by parental meddling. You recognize these stereotyped characters and you laugh with them, not at them — okay, well sometimes you do laugh at them…but there are moments of true heart in the show, and it is what lifts it above the norm. Halle Bins “The I Love You Song” is one of the finest interpretations of that scene that I have seen.

Credit director Barbie Weisserman with fast-paced and clever staging and in bringing out the best of every performer, male and female. Jason Wilhoite has done good work as Musical Director (as well as appearing on stage). Mackenzie Moffat finds the humor in the dance sequences. Bill Mandt has done excellent work designing and building a deceptively simple set that is anything but.

25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee has become a favorite of theater companies because of its minimal technical requirements, small combo band, and variety of character roles. When done right, it is far far more than a small-theater production — and I can honestly state of the half dozen productions I have seen of this show locally, this is far and away the best. Its tight and fast and every single performer is spot-on. Bravo.

Tickets are available at twomusestheatre.org and the show continues through October 20th.

iPhone 5S vs Samsung galaxy S4

Upfront: I’ve used an iPhone since 2007 when they first came up, upgrading to each subsequent version. About three months ago, I plain old got bored of the iPhone and tried the Samsung Galaxy S4 for a month. This past week, I went back to the iPhone with the new iPhone 5S. This is based on my experience comparing the two.

Screen — Without a doubt the better screen is on the Galaxy S4 — it’s an inch bigger, which for my aging eyes makes all the difference in the world between being able to read a Kindle book on the phone vs squinting at the screen on the iPhone. The colors are super saturated, which I personally like, and everything looks fantastic. GS4 no doubt the winner here.

Battery — this is a tossup. Because the GS4 allows you to swap out batteries (which you can get on eBay for a couple bucks a piece) this would seem to be the no-brainer here — but its not. In real life, the iPhone 5S gets a good 2 hours more out of a charge per day with moderate use and similar brightness settings. That DOES make a difference and means you can make it through a normal day with one charge, which you can not with the GS4 without swapping out a battery in the afternoon, or recharging. In reality, the iPHone 5S wins here.

Memory — both come in 16, 32, and 64 GB models of built in memory. If you are a real music or video freak, you can add upto another 64GB of microSD memory to the GS4. I’ve never used more than 16-18 GB of data on my phones, ever, so if this is a necessity for you look at the biggest memory you can get. For others, the 32GB version of either phone will do you fine. Tie in real life, win for GS4 for the uber-memory hogs.

Software — another tossup as far as apps available — my experience (I am not a gamer so I can not talk there) was that every single App I had on the iPhone has an equal (or similar if not better) App on Android. They download faster on Android. And they are easy to manage within the Play store. BUT — in the years of having an iPhone I have never had a single App crash while using it. Not so on the GS4 — I had apps crash left and right every single day. I can’t remember that since the old days of Blackberry and Pocket PC. Apps available is a tie. App Quality and stability, iPhone5S wins.

Ease of Use — iPhone5S, not even worth discussing here. Everything works right out of the box. Nothing crashes, and you can do everything one-handed.

Customizability — again, not worth discussing. Galaxy S4 all the way if this is your thing. I loved having widgets on the phone that instantly update MLB scores, or have a sticky note app, or the Google notecards. Apple can take a lesson from Android here, at least as far as widgets are concerned. Also you have complete freedom over volume, sounds, where buttons are placed on the control screens, etc. GS4 wins by a landslide here.

Music and Movies — iPhone5S wins. If you have a mac, an iPad, and iPhone don’t even think about switching to a Galaxy S4 — it won’t play any of your purchased iTunes movies, and it won’t play anything older in your iTunes library that has any DRM attached to it (most albums purchased the last few years are DRM free on iTunes — but almost my entire Broadway record collection dates from the early 2000’s when I replaced all my CD’s with digital versions by either ripping the CD’s or buying new on iTunes. Those won’t play. If you are not tied to the iTunes world, you’ll find Google Play more than an adequate solution with multiple music and video players you can choose from. Transfering music and movies and photos on the GS4 is ludicrous — this is a total win for the iPhone5S and its iTunes integration.

Build Quality — iPhone5S wins again. Its solid, feels good to hold, and you know its not going to break. The GS4 is plastic, and while its a good size and heft, I several times found the back cover coming off and needing snapping back on. It feels cheap. When you hold it and type you can feel the back cover “give” as you squeeze. The hardware is decent on both machines, but lets face it. the iPhone5 is the Rolls Royce of smartphones. I might have a different story to talk about if I owned a HTC One, which are superbly built. But the GS4 is not an HTC One, and its not an iPhone. Apple wins this one.

Speed — The iPhone5S wins by a landslide. The new iPhone5S is 2 times faster than the GS4 in day-to-day use, and it has a screen that is 3.4 x more responsive than the GS4. That means faster and lighter finger taps will get the job down. That isn’t Apple advertising, by the way — that is research data provided by Android just this week.

Keyboard — both the iPhone5S and the Android have touchscreen keyboards that, as far as I am concerned, SUCK. I hate them. I would trade for a real keyboard anyday for speed and accuracy. That being said, the iPhone’s keyboard sucks less than the Android but for different reasons. The iPhone tends to predict the correct words less often than the Android, but it spells them correctly. Android, on the other hand, can use swipe-to-type which rarely gets the correct words you want in a sentence, and otherwise is just a disaster when typing. If my Blackberry typing speed is 65 wpm (which it is), and my iPhone speed is 25 wpm (which it is – it sucks), then my Android speed was about 15 wpm and of those half were typed incorrectly, spelled wrong, or just gibberish. You can swap out the touch keyboard with many others available through App download — none of them were much better. I did find that Swift keyboard allowed me to at least type faster by their use of almost eerily correct text prediction — but that wasn’t typing — it was touching words as the keyboard would predict them, kinda like the old T9 thing only better. Not satisfying and not for me. iPhone5S wins for speed and accuracy, but not really for speed nor accuracy. Just better than the Android.

Accessories — the iPhone5S wins again. Cases, chargers, screen protectors, speakers, car stereo players are available just about everywhere. Cases look better and are cheaper for the iPhone5S and readily available without special order. Vacation sites sell iPhone 5 cases (i.e. Walt Disney World, etc) and none of them have GS4 cases. I was never able to get my Roadster2 to pair with the GS4 in the car. iPhone connected instantly. iPhone5S wins.

Camera — the iPhone5S has sharper photos hands down. Easy to compare and many websites have. I found it a battle to get a sharp photo with the GS4 even in sunny situations. Close focusing was very difficult with the GS4. While it comes with better bells and whistles software wise built in by Android and Samsung, you can get similar (and generally better) software post processing apps on the iPhone. But for sheer image quality, which is really all I care about, the iPhone5S wins.

Extras — iPhone 5S’s fingerprint ID offsets the many better hardware-based specialties of the GS4, so I’ll call it a tie.

No matter which phone you choose, you will be using either Apple or Samsung’s top of the line model. You’ll be generally happy with either — but I couldn’t help but think during my month of GS4 that I felt a bit like someone using the phone because I couldn’t afford the iPhone (not true). It has little glamor and certainly no “wow” factor other than the better and larger screen.

For your thought before purchasing or upgrading:

Do you own a Mac, iPad, previous iPhone and you use iTunes — stick with Apple, you will be very very very disappointed with the Android system and its sync and backups.

Do you prefer to customize things so they look and work the way you want, even if it takes hours sometimes to get it to do that? I.e. are you a gizmo-whiz and a tinkerer? Then the Galaxy S4 will be more to your liking.

Do you like setting a lot of different ringtones and notification sounds? Do you like customizing them with rings that you want or make yourself? iPhone is the way to go.

Do you want the sharpest photos possible? iPhone.

Do you prefer to use a PC and PC-based software (word, excel) etc? Then the Android will be more to your liking when it comes to smartphone features.

Are you using iCloud to sync your Mac, iPhone, and iPad for contacts, calendars, tasks, and notes? Then iPhone is the way to go. You can get third party software to sync to your iCloud — my experience was that it was spotty and slow, often VERY slow (things showed up in iCloud hours later). There are no guarantees that Apple will not block access to its iCloud ports with subsequent iOS updates. Don’t switch to Android if you are dependent on the Apple systems.

How to watch Downton Abbey Season 4 in the USA before January

As you are probably aware, the hit British series Downton Abbey airs in the US beginning in January, though the new episodes are currently showing in the UK. These are streamed for 28 days following each showing, but you can’t access the players from the US as it is “locked out”.

Until now.

With the program “Tunnelbear”, you can (for a nominal cost, either 5.00 monthly or 49.00 once per year) trick your PC or Mac into presenting itself as whatever country you want. You can get it here: http://tunnelbear.com

You simply download, install, and when you are ready to watch Downton Abbey (or other British shows) you click the “on” button in your menu for the program, and turn to the country you want.

Then go to https://www.itv.com/itvplayer/downton-abbey/ — click on the episode you want, and viola!

Note: This is the program that I use (there are also Apps for the iPhone and the iPad and for Android devices) and your use of this software is subject to your own security precautions. Works fine on the Mac. There are also other streaming video sites that allow you to watch, but this one seems to be the “cleanest” and easiest by far.

NOTE: turn OFF your mail (especially if you are using gmail or have mail push enabled) on your computer and your mobile devices until after you are done viewing — it will send out security alerts to Gmail in particular which will cause you to reset your passwords. JUST TURN IT OFF UNTIL DONE. After you have finished with Tunnelbear and turned it off you an reconnect to your mail and you are good to go. You’ve been warned.

Encore has Company (review)

Stephen Sondheim and George Furth’s musical Company is now onstage at Dexter’s Encore, with some wonderful casting and a great vocal and acting performance by Steve DeBruyne.

Seen at the final preview, the cast is strong, and they sound great. The couples work well together. Sonja Marquis and Greg Bailey are a fun Sarah and Harry. Marlene Inman-Reilly and Andrew Gorney make for a fine Susan and Peter. Jenny and David are well-portrayed by Emily Rogers and Pete Podolski. Katie Lietz and Jess Alexander are both excellent as Amy and Paul. Wendy Katz Hiller and Mark Bernstein turn in strong performances as Joanne and Larry. Annemarie Friedo, Bryana Hall, and Elsa Harchick round out the cast as Marta, Kathy, and April — who turn in fine vocal and acting performances, but who are given the evening’s oddest choreography and movement.

The production as a whole looks good on Leo Babcock’s set and in Sharon Urick’s costumes. Hopefully, by the time the show opens they will have sorted out the lighting miscues and the sound which was hit or miss and which caused many of Sondheim’s clever lyrics to be swallowed up. It doesn’t help that director/choreographer Paul Hopper has the cast doing odd milling and marching movements during the intricate patter-based vocal passages. You hear every other phrase as they alternately face toward and away from the audience. This is certainly not the fault of Tyler Driskill who has done good musical direction here, and whose ensemble sounds very good.

The direction and pacing are slow, and it makes for a long evening. The fine cast saves the production. Overall, this is not one of Encore’s best, despite superb performers (who sometimes seem like they are making up their own blocking as they go) and in which the already too-long evening is drawn out even longer with curious blocking.

Maybe we’ve been over-saturated with Company here in SE Michigan for awhile — personally this is the 5^th local production of Company I have seen in as many years. Quite frankly, some of the other local productions have been stronger (and tighter).

Company won Tony Awards in 1971 for Best Book, Music, Lyrics and Musical. It was up against The Me Nobody Knows and The Rothschilds. Enough said.

Overall, you won’t dislike this Company — you just might not walk away from it overly awed by the production.

Company continues through October 20^th. Tickets: http://www.theencoretheatre.org

Superb “Bonnie & Clyde the musical” at Peppermint Creek

Those who follow my reviews know how much I love Frank Wildhorn’s musical “Bonnie & Clyde”. I loved it on Broadway, and I love it in its current incarnation at Peppermint Creek Theatre Company in Lansing.

The story, told in flashback beginning with the deaths of Bonnie & Clyde, shows the couple’s meeting, relationship, Clyde’s multiple arrests, and crime spree in late 20’s early 30’s deep south and Texas that eventually draws in his brother and his wife as well. Using a country pop rock score, and with plenty of laughs along the way, Wildhorn, Don Black, and Ivan Menchell assure that the show focuses on the lead players throughout and while not necessarily generating sympathy for them at least allows you to empathize deeply with that desire to escape your desolate surroundings and live the rich-man’s dream.

Adam Woolsey (as Clyde) and Brittany Nichol (Bonnie) are pitch perfect in their demanding vocal and acting roles, and Matt Bill and Mary Maurer lend superb support as Clyde’s brother Buck and his sister-in-law Blanche. A fine performance is also turned in by Scott Laban (Ted), love-stricken deputy watching Bonnie slip away from his protection and toward the criminal Clyde. Their vocal finesse makes WIldhorn’s best musical theater score soar.

Katie Doyle’s direction moves the show along at a fast clip and she makes excellent use of the clever and versatile set space, designed by Jeff Boerger. The excellent ensemble play multiple roles, while Brent Decker’s 7-piece orchestra never misses a beat. His vocal direction is crisp and polished. The sound design by Brian Ugorowski is very good.

While not a family-friendly show, parents will be glad to hear that the production is less nudity and gunplay oriented than the original Broadway production, but in the final sequence when the four leads are surrounded by the local deputies and authorities the menace is lessened and the “big shootout” never occurs — an instance where offstage action doesn’t fill in enough to substitute for the shortened action sequence on stage. The production is also lacking an important bathtub set piece.

None the less, those are minor quibbles and this is a terrific production that you should see if you can. I kid you not when I say that this production is very very good.

When I saw the original Broadway production, I knew that the show had posted a closing notice for the following Sunday. At intermission, the stunned audience reaction revolved around one general consensus: how could this terrific new Broadway musical be closing so quickly? Come see for yourself what makes this new musical stand out from the crowd. You will be glad you spent a few hours with Bonnie & Clyde & Buck & Blanche. And you will probably find yourself heading to iTunes to buy the original cast album. It belongs in every collection.

Bonnie & Clyde continues through next weekend and tickets are available at peppermintcreek.org

Updating to iOS 7

Make sure that you have your iPad or iPhone backed up — either through iCloud or preferably on your computer. This includes text messages and emails. Do not make any changes on your iPHone or iPad after backing up. This can not be overstressed. Make sure you have a backup. I usually do my backups through iTunes NOT through iCloud.

This is a good time to make sure you have all important notes and documents copied and pasted into Evernote before you update. Overall, its better than the built-in notes program, but it will also serve as a second backup just in case. YOU WILL LOSE any notes or documents that are not backed up before your update. Evernote is a great way to guarantee you have them no matter what.

Make sure that you have selected a wallpaper of your own and NOT one of the iPhone supplied wallpapers and have it on your iPhone or iPad before backing up — if you have not, ADD ONE NOW. Do not update with the standard Apple wallpaper.

Allow plenty of time to do the backup — it can range from 10 to 30 minutes and upto another hour to put photos, music, and videos back on.

Sit by your iPhone/iPad and watch the update — do not walk around the house, wander away or touch anything until it tells you that it is completely backed up. DO NOT do other things on your computer, or send or read email while the update is taking place. Keep a watchful eye out. You will see the iPad/iPhone verify the device…download the software…install the software…verify the device again…install additional firmware. The small bar on the pc/mac will move at a different speed than the one on your iPhone/iPad — watch the iPad. DO NOT DISCONNECT OR ALL IS LOST!!!!….eventually you will see a message that says “do not disconnect until you see the device reappear in your iTunes list at left” — it will totally reboot.

Don’t unplug anything or touch your iphone/iPad until it tells you that it has been updated and that the update has reinstalled your old files and has resynced everything. You might need to press SYNC on the bottom of your information page one more time to get everything to sync back.

All icons should be exactly where you left them, but they will look drastically different. If you like the new look, you are good to go. If not, you have to tweek from settings. The upgrade will put a dedicated FaceTime icon somewhere on one of your screens. Move that wherever you want after the upgrade. That should be the only icon change/addition.

Dig down into the iPad to change the settings you want. Start with these two websites and follow through step by step.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/apple/iphone/10320848/iOS-7-how-to-disable-the-most-annoying-new-features.html

http://www.maclife.com/article/gallery/90_ios_7_tips_and_tricks

If you’ve upgraded to ios7 and are getting the typing lag problem switch off documents and data in the cloud…known glitch at present (the update turns it on by default even if you did not enable it) Settings -> iCloud -> Documents and Data (switch it OFF)

Some things to keep in mind: After your upgrade, your icons will look very different — you’ll quickly adapt to these.

After your upgrade, if you did not heed my warning and place your own wallpaper on your iPhone/iPad, you will be upgraded to the horrible looking 3-d “parallax” view wallpaper and effects. YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED. Even if you have never put your own wallpaper on before, you should do so before upgrading unless you want to be faced with visual hell once you update.

If you did not back it up, it won’t be there after the upgrade. Seriously. If you didn’t back up notes, the new notes program will be empty. If you didn’t back up text messages, that will be empty after your update. BACKUP.

Here’s another great article on how to transfer data to your iPhone/iPad from different types of phones, using both iTunes and iCloud…

http://www.macworld.com/article/2049089/get-started-with-the-iphone-5c-and-5s.html

You’re A Good Man Charlie Brown – Ann Arbor Musical Theater Works

If you have your own blog, you might as well toot your own horn — so here goes:

Ann Arbor Musical Theater Works (my company) presents the musical You’re A Good Man, Charlie Brown on August 29-31st at the Children’s Creative Center Theater Space, 1600 Pauline, Ann Arbor, MI.

Tickets are available online at AnnArborMusicalTheaterWorks.com and are limited so get yours soon, because the theater seats only 100 per performance.

So — when Allison Pearlman posts her Lucy wig, things start to get really exciting:

Allison Pearlman plays Lucy; Colby Cesaro Spencer plays Snoopy; Hannah Pearlman plays Patty; Matthew Kurzyniec plays Linus; Andrew Buckshaw plays Charlie Brown, and Etan Klein plays Schroeder.

Its performed the way it was written back in 1967 — 6 adults playing the Peanuts characters, with geometric shapes that form set spaces, and with props and costumes filling out the rest in this “story theater” piece. Accompanied by musical director Brian Rose on the piano, its an intimate affair.

The space at 1600 Pauline is superb — three rows of seats arranged around a higher thrust stage; just right for the intimacy the show requires. I directed and choreographed this production to bring as much of it off the main stage and onto the thrust as possible — so that the audience is always “near” the characters.

Over the years, Snoopy has been played by both men and women, and in this production, I chose to go with a female snoopy — it rounds out the cast to three and three, and lends a nice balance to the songs. Since Colby is also a great tapper, it allowed me to play with tap moves in “Suppertime” along with a few other surprises.

The universal themes of Charlie Brown — fitting in, trying your hardest, making friends, stalking boyfriends (okay, maybe not the stalking part) resonate with adult audiences when played by adults in a way that the show does not when it is performed by youngsters. I kid you not, the final “Happiness is…” number brings tears to your eyes. I am not sure exactly why — maybe the adult recognizes the lost youngster within — a time when kids weren’t afraid to sing and dance, play outside, and hold your sister’s hand.

Thursday night’s 7:30 pm performance is a fundraiser with a post-show afterglow auction to benefit the University of Michigan Medical School campaign to create the Timothy R.B. Johnson M.D. Professorship in Global Women’s Health. What better match than to do a family-friendly show to raise funds for a teaching position to teach doctors to take care of women and children in developing countries. The auction items are amazing, and Susan and Mark Pearlman, and Jennifer Monk-Reising are putting together an awesome post-show event…with auction items that include trips to WDW (with airfare); other trips; UM football items, and many others! A handful of tickets remain to this special Thursday performance.

Friday and Saturday are rapidly selling tickets — moreso on Friday at 8:00 — Saturday’s show has been pushed back to 8:30 to accommodate UM’s football traffic after their late starting game that afternoon. A great day in Ann Arbor! Go to the game — grab dinner downtown, then head to 1600 Pauline for YAGMCB! Running time of the show without an intermission is 75 minutes.

Hope to see you there. This is the closest thing to a real “off-Broadway” production you are likely to see of this show in Ann Arbor for quite some time. AnnArborMusicalTheaterWorks.com

42nd Street at Croswell Opera House

Its bad form to review a show in a season for which one auditioned for, so I will refrain from any character reviews in this post, but a big congratulations to director Jen Letherer, Musical Director/Conductor Jonathan Sills, and Choreographer Allison Steele for a terrific and entertaining production of 42nd Street at Croswell Opera House.

From opening sequence to finale, the show is an example of what Croswell does best during its summer seasons — great dancing, performing, singing, scenic and costume design — and in this case throw hair design in there as well. The cast is all ages, sizes, and shapes, and they turn in high-energy performances. Old vets mingle beautifully with newcomers. The only name I will mention (pardon bad form) is the simply stellar performance turned in by Erica Wyman as Dorothy Brock.

Always one of my favorite musicals, 42nd Street is brought to life here by Jen Letherer’s perfectly timed direction, and a strong singing/dancing/acting cast that don’t miss a beat (though the lights occasionally do). Allison Steele’s choreography looks great for the featured dancers, and really good for the non-dancers in the cast — in some sequences you really can’t tell the difference unless you have a trained dancers eye.

Michael Lackey’s scenic design moves quickly and looks slick — particularly nice is the Broad Street Station design, a double-deck Regency Hotel set, and the use of the natural Croswell Opera House back wall.

Jen Letherer gets vintage 30’s sounding patter out of her performers, which adds a lot to the sparse book. Lines are well delivered throughout, and Jonathan Sill’s musical direction assures that every syllable is understandable..even the infamous “slims and all curvy, sweet shy and nervy” which even the Original Broadway cast manages to mangle as “Simpson O’Curry sweet Charlotte Murphy”…Great job!

When everything clicks on all cylinders, 42nd Street is a hard musical to resist. Its billed as the musical for musical lovers. It is. Go see it. It continues through next weekend at Croswell Opera House in Adrian — croswell.org for tickets.

Sharknado is a howlfest and not to be missed (Review…kind of)

Its hard to review SyFy’s (to be fair, The Asylum’s) Sharknado without giving away most of what happens in the movie — so if you don’t like spoilers, don’t read ahead…just watch it next time it is on. Its actually a movie that can’t really be reviewed because the schlock-factor is so bad, its like watching live action MST3K in your living room with your own family doing the play by play. I am so glad I DVR’d this so I could watch it over and over (7 times so far). Its possibly the best bad movie ever made. Ed Wood would be proud.

Let me preface this by saying I loved this movie, for all the wrong reasons, or maybe the right ones. I couldn’t stop laughing from beginning to end — and in a good way. The production values, as high as they are for a movie of this ilk, range from superb to horrendous. As does the acting, Wait, what am I saying, you can’t review the acting. Even the actors knew they were immune from critical review in this stinkbomb, so they could do all the overacting and/or deadpanning that they wanted.

Led by superstar Ian Ziering and later featuring superstar Tara Reid, they act, react, swim, climb, look scared, look dumb, look sexy, look anywhere but at the camera for fear of laughing on screen. You know you are in for a treat when there are lines like “The water’s rising – I’m going to go up to the bridge and repel down”.

Here’s the scoop — The movie starts with a scene that takes place on a boat at sea (obviously filmed on several different boats) where some criminal types are making dealings about shark meat — though it doesn’t seem to have anything to do with the rest of the movie — and they get eaten anyway. Then this waterspout picks up a school of swarming sharks and carries them on land in LA where they swim in the sewers, enter houses, swim on highways, and defy gravity to leap into the air on repelling equipment. Sharks apparently can get very firm grips on nylon rope.

There’s a scene in which sharks attack swimmers in one foot of water. Later, sharks attack people in parked cars in one foot of water. It doesn’t come to anyone’s mind to just walk over them. The good guys race around in a traffic-less LA in first a Jeep, and then a Hummer. Later they hurl homemade bombs into the tornados and save human kind. And gladly so, because a sequel based in NYC has already been ordered by SyFy from The Asylum.

The Asylum (featured in Wired not long ago) churns out two schlocky sci-fi/horror/cheese flicks like this a month, so there’s a lot of great stuff you can pick up on SyFy, rapidly becoming my go-to tv channel when there is nothing decent on tv. This is the company that brought you Titanic II, so it should tell you something about the quality of these films.

But watching Sharknado is mesmerizing — it gets funnier and funnier as it goes along, complete with a howler at the end of the movie that you seriously need to make sure you have set your drink down before reaching — I won’t give it away, but it involves a toy chainsaw and finding a character you thought was already dead. My dog stared at me as if I was demented as I howled out load with laughter.

But there are plenty of other similar howlers along the way — you can’t take your eyes off the screen for a minute for fear of missing something outlandishly ridiculous. Watch the amazing editing from stock footage — in a scene “filmed” on a helicopter with a raging tornado outside, the view downward shows a full Hollywood Bowl of audience watching a concert. This is the same kind of stock footage that revealed the Queen Mary (standing in for Titanic II) at port in palm-tree-lined LA when supposedly in the Atlantic in that film.

But nothing compares to Sharknado in the classic film department. Its legen, wait for it, dary. Film classes will be studying this disaster-flic’s ineptitude, and having a laugh riot along the way. Please please do yourself a favor — DVR the movie when it next appears (7/27 on SyFyD and 8/22 on SyFy, but I bet other screenings will be added before those) because you will want to see this one over and over and over (without commercials, it runs about 85 minutes of pure cinematic delight).