Julia Stiles and James Wirt deal with the aftereffects of a one-night stand in PHOENIX
Cherry Lane Mainstage Theatre
38 Commerce St.
Monday – Saturday through August 23, $56-$66
212-989-2020
www.phoenixtheplay.com
www.cherrylanetheatre.org
At the beginning of Phoenix, Scott Organ’s two-character, one-act play, Sue (Julia Stiles) and James (James Wirt) meet up for the first time after what both agree was a fun one-night stand a month earlier. But Sue has some surprising news for James, something that shocks, confuses, and delights him. For ninety minutes, the two very attractive people examine the central issue from all angles as they contemplate whether they have any kind of a future together. Clearly, there appears to be a future for the play itself. There was major buzz in the air at one of the early previews as Al Pacino took an aisle seat in the intimate Cherry Lane Mainstage to check it out. (One of the producers, Poverty Row Entertainment, is run by filmmakers Julie Pacino, Al’s daughter, and Jennifer DeLia, the director of Phoenix ; the other producers are Rian Patrick Durham and Rattlestick Playwrights Theater.) The show officially opens on August 7 for a limited run through August 23, and it is being turned into a film as well, directed by Amy Redford, daughter of Robert. Stiles and Wirt are also set to appear in Poverty Row’s The First, a biopic about Mary Pickford in which Stiles plays Frances Marion and Wirt is Charlie Chaplin; Lily Rabe stars as Pickford.
So this is thirty-five. Norwegian filmmaker Martin Lund’s feature debut as writer and director, The Almost Man, is a mature, insightful, and very funny look at immaturity. Henrik Rafaelsen, a kind of cross between Liam Neeson and Jason Segel, stars as Henrik, a thirty-five-year-old man who isn’t quite ready to grow up yet. He has a new office job, a new house, and a loving girlfriend, Tone (Janne Heltberg Haarseth, a kind of cross between Julianne Moore and Diane Lane), but he’d rather goof around with his crazy high school buddies than take life seriously. In the opening scene, the happy couple, decorating their new place, lightheartedly imagine what their neighbors might be thinking of them. Next Henrik and Tone are grooving to Lionel Richie. “Let me see you dance without irony,” Tone says. During a group lunch on his first day at work, his fellow employees debate what his name should be. “But my name is Henrik,” he says, appearing unsure of his own identity. (Perhaps it is no coincidence that it is also the first name of the actor himself.) He is awkward and uncomfortable in his own skin, instead choosing to remain a kid who refuses to acknowledge the real world and the responsibilities he is facing. After an argument with Tone, he visits with his mother (Anne Ma Usterud), who still treats him like a child. But soon he is faced with important decisions that could have very serious repercussions on his and Tone’s future.
In James Franco’s faithful, brutally compelling adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s third novel, 1973’s Child of God, Scott Haze gives a courageous, unforgettable performance as Lester Ballard, a deeply disturbed man wreaking havoc on his small rural community in Sevier County in the Tennessee mountains. “His name was Lester Ballard, child of God, much like yourself, perhaps,” a narrator intones as the film opens. But Lester is not like everyone else. He is almost more animal than man, his speech hard to understand, his face hairy and rough, his gait hurried and uneven, a reclusive soul with no ability to differentiate between right and wrong, more at home in the woods and in caves than living among other people. When he lowers his head slightly and stares right into the camera, he evokes Charles Manson filtered through Charles Bukowski, with more than a touch of Jack Nicholson in The Shining; there doesn’t seem to be an ounce of humanity in him. (McCarthy has noted that Ballard was inspired at least in part by real-life serial killer Ed Gein, who also inspired Old Leatherface in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Norman Bates in Psycho.) Having been kicked off his family’s land, an angered Lester sleeps in a ramshackle cabin, venturing out primarily to kill an animal for food or to seek other carnal pleasures in his own, primal way. When he sees a young couple having sex in a car, his instinct is to get rid of the boy and take the girl for himself, with no thought of the consequences.
Chilean-born Mexican filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky’s El Topo is a psychedelic head trip, an acid Western that will blow your mind. Jodorowsky stars as the title character, a gunslinger traveling through a deserted landscape accompanied by his naked young son, who already knows his way around a firearm. After coming upon a town that has been decimated by a nasty group of marauders working for the Colonel, El Topo seeks violent revenge, eventually taking off with a woman and leaving his boy behind as he meets four masters on his path to proving he is the best there is. But soon El Topo is praying for redemption with a community of inbred cripples trapped in a cave. El Topo is a wild and bizarre journey through religious imagery, romance, and vengeance, a surreal spaghetti Western strained through the mad mind of Jodorowsky, widely hailed as the creator of the midnight movie. The film melds Bergman with Leone, Tod Browning’s Freaks with Hiroshi Inagaki’s Samurai Trilogy, filtered through Kazuo Koike and Goseki Kojima’s Lone Wolf and Cub. It’s like nothing you’ve ever seen before and, despite your better instincts, will lure you into the cult of Jodorowsky, which expanded this year with the release of his wonderfully surreal autobiographical work 