Music was a major component in the staging of Blood Wedding. The use of music made the production unique, but at times the music became distracting. In Scene 1, the Groom talks with his Mother in his home. Professor Babatunde Lea, who did the percussion for the show, was featured in this scene with regular sequences on a bongo drum, which were interjected into the dialogue. Had this technique been used more sparingly, and only to emphasize the key moments in the scene, it would have been effective; however, the constant interjections weakened the scene, making it feel broken up and confusing.

As a whole, Blood Wedding was a unique script with unique staging. Though much of the audience was skeptical at first of the “rotation” staging (meaning each scene took place in a different location, either in Stevens Theatre, the scenic shop, or in Kline) many were pleasantly surprised by the overall impression. There was also precise, symbolic meaning behind the director’s decision to move the audience members. Blood Wedding was about emotional journeys, and the audience was literally taken with the characters as they moved from setting to setting, from passionate emotions to rash actions.

The next show to expect from the ambitious Department of Theatre Arts and Owl and Nightingale Players will be Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, to be directed by Chris Kauffman and performed in the winter of next semester.

Last week the Department of Theatre Arts presented its first Mainstage production of the year: Federico Garcia Lorca’s Blood Wedding.

In the program, Susan Russell noted that the play is distinguished by its characters’ feelings of being trapped; the Mother of the Groom is trapped in her hatred of the Bride’s former sweetheart’s family, Leonardo and his Wife are trapped in unhappiness, and the Bride is trapped in her father’s bidding. This is a fitting description of the play, a play with many related themes such as passion and the desire to break free from societal bonds.

The show itself had its strong aspects of performance and its weak aspects. Featuring the Owl and Nightingale Players of course, three of the strongest actors in the performance were Anna Maria Charalambous, Mariem Diaz, and David Wemer.

Anna Maria’s portrayal of the Mother of the Groom was very revealing of her character’s motivations, concerns, and inner struggles. As mentioned previously, one of the most important themes in the play is passion; she vividly illustrated her character’s passion for family and the family members she loses to murder.

Mariem, who played the Bride, also effectively captured her character’s passions. In particular, she portrayed her character’s passionate internal struggles and the passionate choices she makes. It is clear that deep within, she loves Leonardo, her former sweetheart, and follows her passions by running off with him.

David, who played the Moon, was remarkable in the fact that he played a role that was traditionally female. His expert portrayal of the sinister spirit challenged the audience’s perspectives on gender casting.

Rachel Weisz is Kathy Bolkovac, a real-life policewoman on whose book the film is based, who traveled to post-war Bosnia as part of the UN International Police Force and found a deepset and far-reaching web of sex slavery. For an excellent, concise and historical perspective on the ethnic aspect of Bosnia’s problems, read Patrick Geary’s introduction to his 2002 book, The Myth of Nations (http://press.princeton.edu/chapters/i7124.pdf ). For an emotional but unflinching approach, watch The Whistleblower.

Sometimes it takes dramatization to make an issue ‘real. I rarely take a stance on anything and explain my feelings through my sex, and I am ashamed that scripted sexual violence made me realize the horrors of human traffiking, but I am even more disgusted at the New York Times review by Stephen Holden which dismisses the affect of the film with pithy language. (http://movies.nytimes.com/2011/08/05/movies/the-whistleblower-with-rachel-weisz-review.html ) As I said, very seldom do I have a genuine emotional reaction as strong as the one I had to The Whistleblower. Whether that’s because I’m jaded and it takes a true melodrama to reach me, or because it is a film meant far more to evoke feeling than as an exercise in technique, and it takes a special kind of something for me to stop and quit dissecting how a movie was made to simply watch it. There is no happy ending, or even resolution to the plot (as Mr. Holden so blithely comments on), but the shock is not the same as a film that pushes proprietary boundaries or places stomach churning gore on screen. It is rather the shock of awakening and terror, like water hitting your face as you sleep, and for a moment you think you’re drowning. Thank God I’m no longer sleeping, but I wish I could stop feeling as though I was drowning.

Through a barrage of 70s color and film pastiche, The Guard tells a story somewhere between a western, a Greek myth and a Wodehouse story, about Gleeson, an Irish policeman (a member of ‘the Guard’) and his ill-matched FBI partner (Cheadle) who must contend with a trio of philosophizing drug barons, corrupt police, and the inhabitants of Galloway. It is a well-trod path but an immensely  enjoyable one, which manages to be unique within the ‘James-Bond-is-the-only-suave-law-enforcing-Brit-so-let’s-make-an-action-comedy-about-the-UK-police’ genre thanks to deft direction and writing on the part of John Michael McDonugh. There was not a moment of the film that felt ill-used, out of place, or unpleasant. I can’t recommend a movie this year more than The Guard, because it is one of the year’s best.

I watch a fair amount of movies, but rarely do I have a reaction as strong as the one I did to The Whistleblower. It is a great shame that by the time this review is published, the movie will have left theaters (It is greater shame that it was only at the Majestic for a week), but then again, human traffiking is neither a popular nor easy subject to make a film about. The Whistleblower is no great piece of cinema, and it is also a hard film to take, but as an eye-opening call to action, it is as important as anything the Oscars will honor this year, and any expose on the front page.

Real Steel. I wasn’t good. Maybe it would have been good if I had felt any investment in the characters, or even liked any of them. Maybe it would have been good if I felt the robot boxing element was in any way plausible (not technologically speaking, I have no problem suspending that disbelief, but I just couldn’t buy that no spectators die while watching several tons of steel careen around a fighting ring, shooting sparks and losing limbs). Maybe it would have been good if the movie hadn’t stole rather than played loving homage to every underdog trope in filmmaking from the days of Chaplin through to pretending a cellphone is breaking up.  Maybe it would have been good if there was any chemistry between the love interests. Maybe it would have been good if the movie was stylistically unique or interesting in any way. Maybe it would have been good if it wasn’t at least half and hour too long.Maybe it would have been good if the plot holes were plugged rather than passed over. Maybe it would have been good if the main child character wasn’t an insufferable little piece of earwax, and maybe it would have been good if the main robot didn’t dance. But then again, we can’t have everything.

Rather than seeing Real Steel in any scenario that doesn’t involve Abu-Ghraib type torture, see The Guard (actually, it will be gone from the Majestic, but that’s usually the way these things go). From the opening scene of Irish police officer Brendan Gleeson dropping acid he found on a dead body, to the final meta speech about how Don Cheadle should sell his story to Hollywood, it is a brilliant movie. Sharp, well-paced and bitingly funny, and even manages those inescapable elements of ‘heart’ and manages never to deviate tone into sacrine manipulation.

I just didn’t care.

I wanted to, though, I really did. I went into Killer Elite looking for what I had heard was an enjoyable, well crafted action movie (thank you, Roger Ebert). What I found was an incomprehensible and self-serious excuse for grizzled men to drive boxy 1980s cars, blow things up and shoot each other, all in the name of a ‘political thriller.’

Before the film starts, a title appears which tells us the follow was based on a true story. For the majority of the movie I thought the director, Guy McKendry, might have been giving a tongue-in-cheek nod to Fargo, which opens with the same declaration. But whereas The Coen brothers said theirs was a patently false ‘stylistic choice,’ the end of Killer Elite featured an inane epilogue explaining that the film’s characters and events were culled from a memoir who’s author plays a key role in the film itself. So meta.

It would have been better had the movie been just a standard action-thriller rather than apparently trying to live up to reality. It’s painful to say any movie would have been better as a “standard action-thriller,” but there you go, desperate times. Depressingly, the movie took itself to be ‘smart,’ and felt little need to be enjoyable to just sit back experience. McKendry tries to pack in so much political wheeling and dealing, he ends up forgetting exposition or even explanation. The film is a mess of Arab/Euro relations, gun-for-hire guilt, military commentary and moralizing about sides and causes. The double-crosses are unintelligible, the characters single-dimensioned and strangely motiveless, and nothing invested me whatsoever in trying to puzzle my way through. Not even Robert DeNiro can bring the movie out a its own hubristic testosterone haze, considering he is on screen approximately 20 out of a very long 105 minutes. My God, it felt like twice that hours.

The movie jumps genres from heist movie to Bourne-clone and everything in between, without making any great impression, and is at least 45 minutes too long. Maudlin attempts to deepen the main character, Jason Statham’s Danny, are abandoned for the majority of the movie, with notable exceptions which stick out worse than hipsters away from Brooklyn. Danny is set up to be potentially interesting, considering he’s a conflicted man with a horrific job and actual human connection (as opposed to those he generally works with), but Statham is only really good at looking intensely out from under his Roman brow at men he’s beating to a pulp. And no other character even receives the cursory touches of development Danny does. Paradoxically, Killer Elite doesn’t even have a female character on screen long enough for the standard Hollywood titillation which goes hand in hand with this sort of film (and even when Yvonne Strahovski does appear, she’s dressed against type, for a far better and perhaps respectable picture).

Not even the technical aspects of the film are particularly interesting, which give the viewer little to distract themselves while the action simply skips off without them. Why was this wildly incompetent piece of film-school-rejection every made? There are no redeeming factors. But, I suppose DeNiro needed the check to renovate his (second) garage, and I just can’t fault him for that.

The phrase ‘epic on a human scale’ gets bandied about fairly often in the film world. Or at least it did until someone realized it’s exceedingly pretentious and makes no sense. I suppose, however, that it can be the only colloquialism to truly describe Ben Sombogaart’s Bride Flight. Set in New Zealand in the 1950s, 60s and the present, the scenery itself could fill the myth-scale quotient, though the story spans 60 years, three generations, and the lives of four Dutch settlers.

The three main women meet on a flight from Holland to New Zealand, en route to meet the husbands they barely know. Esther (Anna Drijver), a driven Jewish fashion designer haunted by the Holocaust; Marjorie (Elise Schaap), an excitable and unimaginative woman with practical dreams of having many children, and Ada (Karina Smulders), a beautiful and compassionate farm girl who cannot help but quietly see joy in almost everything. They bond, but their strongest tie will come from Frank (Waldemar Torenstra), a man whose funeral we see announced at the beginning of the film, and whose life we see unfold throughout it.

This Citizen Kane style structure is as old as the day is long, and there is little suspense as to what will happen to all four characters after the first half hour. This is the stuff of paperback romance novels, and you know from the R-rating description of “strong sexuality and graphic nudity” what you’ll be getting. The only thing for it then is to have engrossing, fully fleshed characters. All three actresses put in a good deal of effort behind their stoicism, and Torenstra, as the sensitive hunk, has eyebrows ever-so-slightly darker than his sunbleached hair (which is apparently irresistible), but most the characters do not develop past the first act. Marjorie becomes possessive of her perfect life, Esther becomes successful but haunted, and Ada finds the best in her oppressive marriage—for a while anyway.

Horrible, heartbreaking and life-affirming things happen, and decades pass by in sumptuous period detail accompanied by a saccharine score fit for any grand romance. Supposedly one of the most expensive Dutch films ever made, the effort certainly shows. Maybe it’s too much to expect something more from a self-identified crowd pleaser, and maybe that’s the problem with foreign films that reach America: there’s this great expectation attached to every one that they will be something amazing. After all, they’re supposed to be the best of the best, that’s why they come to our shores. And Bride Flight is, all in all, a pleasant sort of distraction, which leaves you almost as soon as you leave the theater. But I could get that from any domestic film and not have to expend the energy of reading troublesome subtitles.

What better way to kick off the 150^th anniversary of the Civil War than with a new, Civil-War-themed exhibit in the Schmucker Art Gallery?

Titled Lisa Blas: Meet Me at the Mason Dixon, the exhibition features a variety of mediums, including photographed collages, paintings, and a unique wall installation. It opened on August 31 with a Gallery Talk featuring the artist Lisa Blas and her close friend Miguel de Baca, who is Associate Professor of Art History at Lake Forest College. The two shared their thoughts on the exhibit, discussing Blas’s interest in Civil War history in addition to the special arrangement of the pieces on display.

The name of the exhibition came from the mixed media installation piece, Meet Me at the Mason Dixon. Located on the large wall to your right when you enter the gallery, the installation is a collage of souvenirs, pamphlets, notes, and other items Blas acquired through her journey to unearth the history of the Civil War. The background on the wall is painted lavender, a color that, fittingly, combines the American flag colors of red, white, and blue. The piece also incorporates three paintings the artist did of the Union and Confederate flags.

Per Lisa Blas’s request, three full-figure portraits are displayed on the two walls adjacent to the collage piece. These portraits are unconventional by every definition of the word; the first is of John Wilkes Booth, assassin of President Lincoln; the second is of Pauline Cushman, an androgynous Union spy in the Confederate army; the third is of Emily Perez, the first African-American lieutenant to die in the Middle East. The portraits of Booth and Cushman are painted on Tyvec, a material normally used for construction. All three are gilded with metallic paints of gold and bronze.

Though the three subjects and the installation piece seem unrelated to each other, they truly are all connected in strange ways. Booth represents the Southern perspective on the war, which is so often ignored by Northern history books; Cushman, hanging next to Booth, represents the Northern perspective and tactics; and Perez represents the modern world that was allowed to be created through the Union victory. The wall installation, furthermore, incorporates all these ideas in addition to the artist’s personal journey, as shown through family documents also hanging on the wall.

Also featured as part of the exhibit are several photographs of collages Blas made inspired by the Civil War. The collages were made of old-fashioned slide labels and metallic star stickers. Each collage creates some symbolic form, such as the drum in After Johnny Shiloh, then Lincoln (Parumpumpumpum).

Lisa Blas clearly demonstrates her skill and versatility as an artist with her expert portraiture as well as her experimentation with collage and installation. The works on display especially probe the viewer to think and reflect on his/her own connection to the Civil War. On display through October 7, Lisa Blas: Meet Me at the Mason Dixon is a must-see for any true Gettysburg College student.

The Gettysburg College student body had no idea what the Theatre Department was up to a few months ago when an ad in the Student Digest proclaimed, “Actors of color wanted!” The mystery was finally revealed last weekend with the Mainstage debut of Aishah Rahman’s Unfinished Women Cry in No Man’s Land While a Bird Dies in a Gilded Cage.

To get a solid idea of what the play was about, imagine a plot as complicated, long, and confusing as the title is. Though multiple aspects of the show were well done, the majority of the audience was left perplexed upon exiting the theatre.

Unfinished Women follows two radically different story lines, both taking place in 1955. First, it tells the story of five young women living in a home for unwed mothers; each girl must decide whether or not to keep her child or have him or her adopted. Second, it tells the story of saxophonist Charlie “Bird” Parker in his final days. The musician’s scenes take place in the home of Pasha, his exotic mistress.

The set was extraordinarily well done for this performance, as was the saxophone music provided by Paul Austerlitz. Acting highlights were the roles played by Wes Jackson (“Charlie Chan”) and Danielle Coleman (“Wilma”); each portrayed their challenging part with ease and charisma.

One of the major flaws in the performance was the inability of  “Pasha” to convey an accurate French accent. Though actress Grace Musante expertly conveyed certain parts of the European seductress’s character, her attempt at an accent interfered with many of the Charlie Parker/Pasha scenes. Furthermore, the connection between the two actors simply wasn’t there. In one instance at the Friday performance, the audience even laughed at a highly serious and emotional scene in which Parker begs Pasha to “kick [him] in the ass.”

Present for the performance was playwright Aishah Rahman herself. Prior to the Friday evening performance she gave a talk in Kline Theatre about her work and journey as a writer. She answered many students’ questions about the storyline and script, as well as her inspiration for the piece. Rahman thoroughly enjoyed the Mainstage show.

As a whole, the production was mediocre at best coming from the same department credited with successful shows such as this year’s My Fair Lady at the Majestic and Our Town in Kline. Though the show made an interesting social statement, it did not live up to its full potential. Perhaps the next show should have a shorter title?

Nearly 16 years after its release, The Lion King continues to entertain generations of youth. Conventional wisdom has long held that the evil Scar, jealous of his new nephew Simba, usurped the monarchy and established a tyrannical rule based on authoritarian tendencies. But just how accurate is this interpretation of the film.

The character of Scar is far more complex than what we see in the traditional interpretation of The Lion King, and after taking a step back and getting the full picture of the conditions that exist in the Pride Lands it becomes readily apparent that Scar is not the villain Disney makes him out to be. Rather, Scar’s actions are in fact just when portrayed in a certain light.

When watching The Lion King it is easy to white wash over the rule of Mufasa, adopting the position that he is a wise and legitimate King. While it is understandable why this view of Mufasa is accepted, it seems that all the creatures of the Pride Lands respect him given the pomp and circumstance surrounding Simba’s birth, ultimately this interpretation of Mufasa is misguided.

Let’s not forget that Mufasa’s rule was built upon, among other things, what is in effect racism in the animal kingdom. He banished the hyenas to an elephant graveyard, and for what? Because they are different, they are unrefined or improper according to the lion’s standards. And for that the entire species is doomed to starve, forbidden from entering the Pride Lands.

Under Scar all of that would change, finally the hyenas would be accepted in the animal kingdom, rather than being banished as second class citizens. Scar’s rallying cry to the hyenas was simple, “stick with me and you’ll never go hungry again,” now that doesn’t sound like the heartless villain he is made out to be. No, in fact it could be argued that he had the best of intentions in assuming power, to rid the Pride Lands of hunger and introduce a new society based on equality.

Those opposed to Scar often times point to the condition of the Pride Land as proof of his despotic rule. But what was it that plagued the Pride Land? A drought. That’s right, Scar’s critics are quick to blame him for a naturally occurring weather event. It seems unreasonable to blame Scar for something beyond his control, he simply can’t make it rain any more or less than anyone else can.

To make matters worse, the lionesses punk out and refuse to hunt. Their visceral reaction to the new social order Scar hopes to create, one based on equality, where no animal is allowed to go hungry, further illustrates how blaming Scar for the problems at Pride Rock is short sighted. If the lionesses had been willing to share in the new social order then perhaps they could of constructively moved forward as a new society. We’ll never know, of course, because the lionesses decided it would be better to jeopardize the future of the entire community for the sake of an unelected monarch.

Of course Scar is not completely blameless, he did resort to questionable methods when murdering Mufasa and running Simba off the land, but his intentions were undoubtedly noble. Before Scar the Pride Lands were ruled by a despotic monarch who lacked horizontal legitimacy by denying whole groups of animals the basic rights given to all other animals. He tried to change that the only way he could, through a radical transformation of the social order. It might of worked too, if only the lionesses weren’t so tied to their traditions of social stratification and oppression.