My favourite critic, Terry Teachout, has a grim time at the new Broadway musical The Pirate Queen: "It starts out dumb, then gets dumber." But then the show's from the same people responsible for that tedious mega-spectacle, Les Miz, so what else can you expect? Like Norm, though, Teachout's co-blogger, Our Girl In Chicago, was much more impressed with the much talked-about German film, The Lives of Others:
While it's fantastically illuminating of the endlessly variegated ways of being a loyal or a skeptical subject of the state, its main achievement is a personal portrait of a soul in flux. That portrait sits quietly alongside the sometimes noisy melodrama involving the other characters, a drama in which it's certainly implicated but from which it's essentially separate. I left the movie theatre with E. M. Forster echoing in my head: Only connect.
I haven't seen it yet. Can't wait.
CORRECTION: I originally credited the film review to TT as well. Sorry about that.
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