LONDON CALLING

What? You say you can't get to London for the fall theater season this year?

Here's the next best thing: why not enjoy London theater in the comfort and privacy of our own Del Mar Theatre, right here in downtown Santa Cruz.

Through the miracle of modern technology, Britain's acclaimed National Theatre of London is providing a live feed of each of the plays in its Fall 2012/Winter 2013 season to movie theaters worldwide. Productions in the National Theatre Live program are presented digitally, in HD, one Thursday evening a month, with an encore matinee the following Sunday, in the Grand Auditorium of the Del Mar Theatre.

The offering for this month, The Last of the Haussmans, debuts this Thursday (October 11), 7:30 pm, with an encore performance Sunday (October 14) at 11 am. The irrepressible Julie Walters (left) stars in this new dysfunctional family comedy by playwright Stephen Beresford. She plays an aging, ex-hippie matriarch retired to a seaside town in Devon, where she's visited by her two wayward grown children (Helen McCrory and Rory Kinnear), a granddaughter, and a couple of locals, for a summer of drinking, nostalgia, recrimination, inappropriate romances, and broken dreams.

This is the second season that these broadcasts have been available locally, but it's still the best-kept secret in Santa Cruz. In a theatrical town like ours, that supports so many stage companies, large and small, the NT Live program deserves to be better known.

NT Live productions have ranged from updated classics like A Comedy of Errors and She Stoops to Conquer,  to the blistering political satire of Collaborators, to challenging new plays like the recent adaptation of Mark Haddon's bestselling novel, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. 

In the recent production of Frankenstein, playwright Nick Dear's new take on Mary Shelley's classic novel, directed by Danny Boyle, lead actors Benedict Cumberbatch (Sherlock Holmes in the modernist PBS reboot) and Jonny Lee Miller alternated in the roles of Victor Frankenstein and his Creature.

The program's very first offering, the Commedia del'Arte-inspired romp, One Man, Two Guvnors, was praised by many smitten critics as the single funniest theatrical performance, ever.

So don't miss out. Here's what's in store for the rest of the season. Admission to the Del Mar is $15, with discount tickets of $13 for seniors, students, and Shakespeare Santa Cruz subscribers. Come see what you've been missing!

WIZARDS OF AWE

Nick/Del Mar digital upgrade brings the future of movies to Santa Cruz


You may not have noticed, but a revolution occurred in the Santa Cruz arts scene last December. While you were out Christmas shopping, the busy elves at the Nickelodeon and Del Mar theaters were taking a giant leap into the future of movie presentation.

Gone are the huge reels of 35 millimeter film, whirring away with a clattering of sprockets. In their place, the four Nickelodeon and three Del Mar auditoriums have now been converted to all-digital sound and picture projection. If you didn't notice, that was the point: they managed to make the conversion pretty seamless for the public, only canceling a few matinees here and there to get the new equipment in. 

But now that it's up and running, the folks at the Nick and Del Mar want to make sure you, the public, knows all about it. "We didn't cut any corners, we went for the top of the line," says Maurice Peel, Advertising and Publicity Coordinator for Nickelodeon Theatres.  He notes that owner Jim Schwenterley invested half a million dollars to place Santa Cruz directly into the forefront of this new technology. (Read more)

DIGITAL SURPRISE

Most movie technology is wasted on me, as we all know. I've suffered through various bombastic Sensurround, THX, and Dolby Digital sound systems over the years (often with my hands over my ears). And 3D? Oh, please. With the exception of Cave of Forgotten Dreams, which really made a case for a deeper field of vision, I still think of 3-D as a cheesy gimmick from the '50s. It doesn't do anything to enhance a mediocre movie, and a good movie would be just as good—if not better—without all that distracting visual clutter.

("They probably said the same thing about talking movies, once," my friend Michael scoffed at me when we were debating this point. Damn right; if I'd been around in 1927, I would've been one of them! Of course, by now, sound is integral to the storytelling process onscreen (she admits, grudgingly). But not so 3D, not by a longshot.)

However, I have to say even I am impressed by the new digital upgrade that went on over at the Nickelodeon and the Del Mar during the holidays. They managed to make the conversion to all-digital projection and sound pretty seamless for the public, only canceling a few matinees here and there to get the new equipment in.

I assumed a technologically-challenged lay person such as myself would never even notice the difference, but boy, was I wrong! I was amazed at the crystal-clear quality of the image when Art Boy and I popped in last week for a matinee of Young Adult upstairs at the Del Mar; even the pre-trailer commercials were bright and vivid. Speaking as someone who used to work in a movie theater, I imagine it must get kind of lonely up in the projection booth without the comforting clattering of film sprockets, but it's good news for patrons who want to remember why they love movies on a big, beautiful screen. Check it out!

Big kudos to the folks at Nickelodeon/Del Mar for taking the plunge. At last, technology even a Luddite can appreciate.

(Above: Bwana Devil, 1952. The first but, sadly, not the last 3D movie.)

WHAT'S UP, DOC?

Real-life stories take center stage in 23rd Annual Pacific Rim Film Festival

Truth may not be stranger than fiction, but reality is every bit as compelling in this year's edition of the Pacific Rim Film Festival. Now in its 23rd year, Santa Cruz's favorite free film festival unspools October 14-19, at three locations: The Del Mar Theatre, the Rio Theatre, and Cabrillo College Watsonville Center. As usual, the festival presents films from all around the Pacific Rim, from China, Japan, the Philippines, India, South Korea, New Zealand and Australia to Mexico, Hawaii and the U. S. mainland.

And of the 19 films served up in this year's festival, nine are documentaries, including the opening night kickoff event and the closing night benefit. Three other films in the lineup are fact-based stories, lightly fictionalized accounts of real people and real-life events.

What sort of real-life stories are we talking about here? Hot doc topics include music, in many variations, Japanese-American soldiers in WWII, a Korean mother reuniting with her American son, murder in the Himalayas, and circumnavigating the entire Hawaiian Islands via outrigger canoe. In particular, the opening night film (Last Paradise) and closing night film (Patagonia Rising) concern extreme sports, eco-activism (and exteme eco-activism). (Read more)

And speaking off offbeat movies, here are two words you might not expect to see in the same sentence: Norwegian comedy. But that's Happy, Happy, a tart, acerbic domestic satire about two modern couples who don't know what they want and don't want what they have. A big winner at Sundance, and Norway's official entry to the 2012 Academy Awards, it's not exactly a laff riot, but rookie director Anne Sewitsky trades in a laugh-to-keep-from-crying sort of worldview.

City couple Elisabeth (Maibritt Saerens), a lawyer, and Sigve (Henrik Rafaelsen), along with their adopted young African son, rent a small guest house from warm, ebullient schoolteacher Katja (Agnes Kittelsen) and her sullen hubby, Erik (Joachim Rafaelsen) for a winter vacation. The cool Elisabeth thinks "Katja is desperate to be my friend," but it's Sigve and Katja who bond; both are lonely in the same way. Elisabeth was cheating on Sigve back in the city, and Katja is emotionally battered by Erik—who has demons of his own.

Director Sewitsky punches up these dark themes with ironic appearances by a quartet of white, Nordic males, singing a capella American gospel. (After a montage of illicit sex, the chorus comes back with a deadpan, yet somehow salacious "Good Religion.") In this way, Sewitsky develops her larger themes. When Erik and Katja's son, Theodor, starts playing "slave" games with the African child (including faux flogging with a towel), Sewitsky and screenwriter Ragnhild Tronvoll introduce the idea iof a bad marriage as a kind of enslavement for couples unhappily shackled together. This is alluded to again in a concert scene by the community chorus that the characters all join, where the oppressed Katja is chosen as a soloist on "Amazing Grace"—a hymn originally penned to support the anti-slavery movement in 19th Century Britain.

The narrative strays into some weird, off-putting moments as these characters attempt to find "tenderness and joy." And they can be alarmingly clueless. (Katja yearns to have more children, but if the results are more demon spawn like Theodor, we're glad she's been thwarted.) But Kittelsen delivers a mostly endearing performance as Katja; the viewer becomes invested in her emotional journey. And Sewitsky displays a droll sensibility (ironic, if not strictly comic) that keeps her feature debut interesting, however strange it may get. Catch up with it at the Nick before it disappears.