Frédérik Sisa

Okay, I admit it. No, no, really: I admit it. I’m a big enough person to confess I’m wrong when something happens against my expectations. Although I didn’t think it possible, the new Star Trek movie by J.J. Abrams rekindled my great, though long-dormant, affection for Star Trek.

The legislature has finally done it – passed a budget. (http://www.latimes.com/news/la-me-budget25-2009jul25,0,7575547.story) And yet as far as victories go, this one feels rather Pyrrhic – a lot of people are going to suffer from all the cuts, especially since they weren’t softened by some tax increases to make up for lost revenue.

The play that needs no introduction gets a woodsy handling at the Theatricum Botanicum. It’s an ideal setting for Shakespeare’s much loved play, and the folks at this little gem of a theatre nestled in Topanga Canyon know it; A Midsummer Night’s Dream is, quite rightly, a signature feather in their repertory cap. Performers zip on and off the built-up stage from a hill or trail, swing from a tree jutting out in the middle of the stage floor – it adds three-dimensional magic to the production. But where this magic was blunted in the Theatricum’s enjoyable but hit-or-miss, overperformed production of Cymbeline, it gets full expression here.

There’s a scene in Michael Mann’s seminal crime drama “Heat” in which Lt. Vince Hanna invites master criminal Neil McCauley to coffee. The scene is notable, of course, for being the first in which Al Pacino and Robert De Niro share screentime together. But in terms of the story, it marks a rather rare kind of encounter between enemies. Here they are sitting together, the cop and the thief, sharing personal life details they undoubtedly don’t share with their colleagues, achieving a sort of understanding and mutual respect despite the fact that their goals put them at potentially deadly odds with each other. In watching the two, there is the feeling that their opposition is not personal but professional, making the way in which they carry out their antagonism something rather noble. Yet the idea of noble enemies is not one we’ll find in Washington or in the vast sea of commentary that spills into it.

With beloved subplots – Percy Weasley’s entrenchment in the Ministry of Magic at the expense of his family, ongoing quidditch games, and so on – either merely hinted at or expunged from the Harry Potter films altogether, the hugely successful series has become something of a litmus test for purists.

Who among us hasn’t wondered about an individual’s parenting qualifications? We hear stories in the news, we see people in the neighbourhood restaurants – examples abound of parents who neglect their children and, in some tragic cases, harm or kill them outright. While my colleague Mike Hennessey and I would disagree on abortion, we certainly share concern over the welfare of these children. I would even take it beyond the children themselves.

“Spamalot” not only keeps the venerable and ever-silly name [of Monty Python] alive, it delivers more laughs and entertainment in a couple of hours than entire seasons of popular sitcoms.

When notorious bank robber John Dillinger and Special Agent Melvin Purvis finally have a face-to-face in “Public Enemies”, the result lacks the primal tension of master thief Neil McCauley meeting Lieutenant Vincent Hanna for coffee and mutual understanding in Michael Mann’s defining cops-and-robbers opus “Heat.” The scene’s lack of charisma is not rooted in any shortcomings on the part of Johnny Depp or Christian Bale, who each benefit from the absence of fantasy genre dressings to dig into earthier parts, but from a film that teases with the mirror-like structure and sustained intensity of “Heat” only to fall into the easy trap of romanticizing its subject. Critically, “Public Enemies” lacks the impartiality that made “Heat” such a riveting study in contrasts.

While the news is filled with reports of celebrity deaths; while valuable and scarce taxpayer money is shoveled onto providing police supervision for what should be a private event; while an ultimately tragic figure goes from quasi-pedophilic freakshow and object of ridicule to canonized saint of pop music; while people feel pain in regards to a person with whom they had no tangible, personal relationship; while people express their grief in that most capitalist and American of ways, by buying tee-shirts and trinkets; while it’s hard to resist saying “He’s dead, people. Get over it!”; another far more important death goes unnoticed.

Fiction always has to make more sense than reality; someone apparently forgot to tell this to screenwriter Maude von Ehrenkrook.