Arts

So there I was, watching the movie Argo about the six Americans escaping Khomeini's Iran in 1978 in the aftermath of the embassy takeover and subsequent hostage situation. None other than the mighty Ben Affleck is the hero of the movie. Ahem. Otherwise it's a great movie. I mean, he hasn't changed his stone-dumb facial expression since 2003's stinker Gigli with J-Lo. Be that as it may... When the plot really started kicking in, when the idea of pretending to be making a science-fiction movie in Iran to smuggle out the six, Led Zeppelin's "When The Levee Breaks" comes on. It doesn't work. In the song, the levee is breaking or about to; in the movie, the tension was just being set up. Wrong. A bit later in an outdoor, sunny, pool-side Los Angeles mogul scene, with John Goodman doing a slimy L.A. film producer as fellow-cine-snake Alan Arkin and he schemed to get Affleck and his 'actors' out alive, on came a Van Halen tune. That worked. The energy was interesting. But the flow of the movie was jarringly marred by the Zep choice. Worse than Affleck's cast-iron face. Now, did a show ever do its music better than the The Sopranos? I think not.

I get the feeling I’m not the target audience for The Lego Movie. Not only am I not a kid who plays with Legos, but I’m not an adult who used to play with Legos. While others may see the flick as an extension of their playtime hours or a nostalgic reminder of their youth, I see it as one long product placement with really primitive-looking 3-D animation. Directed and co-written by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller (Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs), The Lego Movie is designed to appear as if it’s made with Lego toys. When the heroes end up in the ocean, even the water is constructed out of Lego bricks. At times, the plot developments likewise seem to have been dreamed up by a young Lego enthusiast, as when superheroes such as Batman, Superman and Wonder Women join forces with real-life figures like Shakespeare and Shaquille O’Neal. It’s the kind of conglomeration only someone with access to a variety of Lego sets could have imagined. Other times, the plot follows a well-worn path that seems numbingly derivative. At its center is Emmet (Parks and Recreation’s Chris Pratt), a construction worker who prides himself on being faultlessly normal.

We already know what you’re going to say. Valentine’s Day is a billion-dollar ruse, the brainchild of greedy card and chocolate companies who care nothing for love and want only to take your hard-earned cash. First of all, why are you so cynical? Stop that. Second of all, how about you take advantage of the opportunity that’s been presented to you. Okay? Okay. Now that you’re no longer behaving like you’re dead inside, it’s worth exploring your options for the holiday, should you decide to think above and behind cliché. A quick glance around the area shows there are some good options for couples interested in more than just dinner and Redbox. The Ohio Theatre will host one of the area’s more traditional pieces of Valentine’s entertainment. On Friday Feb. 13 and Saturday Feb. 14 the Columbus Symphony will perform a program entitled “Masterworks: Romeo & Juliet.” ($25-$68, Friday/Saturday) Kansas City Symphony’s Michael Stern will conduct selections from Berlioz, Bernstein and Prokofiev. Stern returns to Columbus after an almost ten year hiatus.

If you’re looking for tropical beaches populated by beautiful people, you’ll find them in Brazil. You won’t find them in the Wexner Center’s new building-wide exhibition, “Cruzamentos: Contemporary Art in Brazil.” But you will find lots of other things, some of which you’ll like more than others. For example: ▪ A trio of adjoining video screens showing a man struggling with, respectively, a tree, a goat and an angry crab. (Weird!) ▪ A wall topped with jagged glass. (Don’t touch!) ▪ A lighted cabinet filled with rotting oranges. (Hmmm…) In all, 35 artists contributed to the ambitious art show, which is part of the Wex’s ongoing “Via Brasil” project. If none of them produced works that fit Americans’ image of the land that gave us the 1960s hit “The Girl From Ipanema,” that’s probably because they’re too busy responding to their own reality. “I think the greatest thing about the show,” said Luiza Baldan, a featured photographer from Rio de Janeiro, “is it’s not a typical cliché about Brazil.” A similar sentiment was sounded by Paulo Venancio Filho, a Brazilian art historian who co-curated the show along with Wexner officials Jennifer Lange and Bill Horrigan.

The Columbus Film Council will present a collection of short films with a Valentine’s Day theme—love, sex and romance on Tuesday, Feb. 11. Join fellow cinephiles at Brothers Drake Meadery & Bar, 26 E. 5th Ave. in the Short North, to view the collection. The show is free and open to the public. Screenings begin at 8 p.m. Films to be screened include Love Stalk, A House, A Home, Grotto, and Sphere In Boxland. “We are thrilled to be able to present international short films as part of a community screening program with Brothers Drake Meadery,” said Susan Halpern, Columbus Film Council Executive Director. “The evening will be a dark and humorous look at love, yet with hope and romance as well.” Love Stalk (by Joe Fiorello, 20 minutes) takes place in Hong Kong and, hrough a young woman’s eyes, explores the world’s new digital capability of stalking via the Web. Sharon Ong (played by Angie Palmer, a former Columbus resident) is an executive from Singapore having a hard time finding love in the one-night-stand capital of the world.

EASY is a small independent publishing label and platform for experimentation and collaboration that local artists Samantha Rehark and Elijah Funk have been developing since 2011. “We need an intern.” Samantha Rehark and Elijah Funk joked from time to time during our interview at the No Place Studios located amidst an industrial ruin on the Southside of Columbus. “It’s a weird place to be to be… I don’t know if we even have time to make our own stuff,” says Funk of going from creating his own work to helping others. We were discussing the time-consuming labor of love the two artists have created with EASY. EASY started off organizing silent auctions, artist talks, skill-building events and a lot of informal drawing, bonding events in 2011. “We realized we were making a lot of print material through all of It.” said Rehark of EASY’s development from artist events to a zine publishing resource, which used Kickstarter in October 2013 to raise $2500 dollars to print publications by emerging visual artists, musicians and writers. EASY’s campaign is enabling them to publish Aiden Koch, John Malta, Sam Reiser, Nathan Snell, Heather Benjamin, Dan Rosser (Cult Ritual) and more.

There’s nothing like a little Full Frontal Nudity to put folks in the mood for Valentine’s Day. That’s the hope, anyway, as MadLab’s resident improv troupe gets ready to open its third annual production of Date Night. The show contains no actual nudity, of course, as the group’s name is a come-on. Instead, FFN’s players plan to engage in off-the-cuff storytelling based on what little they know about couples from the audience. Josh Kessler, an actor who’s been with the show since the beginning, explained how it works. “We try to get two or three couples out of the audience, one couple at a time, and we bring them up onstage,” he said. There, the lovebirds are given a seat on a couch, offered snacks and asked a series of questions about themselves: how they met, what they like about each other, what they do for a living and so forth. “Then,” said Kessler, “we go out and do our rendition of that.” “Rendition,” in this case, means an improvised story that may have little to do with the couple’s actual lives but still contains a kernel of truth about their relationship.

Toshi and Pete Seeger defy description except through the sheer joy and honor it was to know them, however briefly. Their list of accomplishments will fill many printed pages, which all pale next to the simple core beauty of the lives they led. They showed us it’s possible to live lives that somehow balance political commitment with joy, humor, family, courage and grace. All of which seemed to come as second nature to them, even as it was wrapped in an astonishing shared talent that will never cease to inspire and entertain. Pete passed on Monday, at 94, joining Toshi, who left us last year, at 91. They’d been married nearly 70 years.Somehow the two of them managed to merge an unending optimism with a grounded, realistic sense of life in all its natural travails and glories. Others who knew them better than I will have something more specific to say, and it will be powerful and immense. But, if it’s ok with you, I’d like to thank them for two tangible things, and then for the intangible but ultimately most warming. First: In 1978, we of the Clamshell Alliance were fighting the nuclear reactors being built at Seabrook, NH. An amazing grassroots movement had sprung up.

Remember back in the day when you used to take photos with cameras? The ones with film in them? Remember how you usually put those pics in frames or a photo album? Maybe you didn’t get around to doing that and you just kept them in the envelope and threw them in a box. And sometimes you didn’t get around to that and you had them lying around on a table or counter. Now do you remember how saddened and frustrated you got when one of those loose photos had water spilled on it and the picture was ruined with washes and discoloration? Artist Matthew Brandt goes toward those spills and damages amongst other photo destruction/creation processes in Columbus Museum of Art’s exhibition Sticky/Dusty/Wet. The exhibition shows an assortment of works representing the variety of experimental photo processes used by Brandt. In Lakes and Reservoirs, Brandt traveled throughout the country taking photographs of lakes and reservoirs in nearly a dozen different states. He would develop the beautiful landscapes on large scale color photo paper and then submerge them in the lake water they capture. The photos were submerged for days, weeks, or even months.

If live theater has a healthy future, it’s largely thanks to organizations such as Columbus Children’s Theatre and CATCO Is Kids. It’s well established that these local troupes have started many kids on the path toward professional thespianism. But it’s also likely that they started many others on the path toward a lifetime of theatergoing. CATCO Is Kids’ role in creating future audience members was on display last week at a preview performance of The Cat in the Hat. Before Dr. Seuss’s mischievous feline appeared, director Joe Bishara talked to the viewers—most of them very young students on a class field trip—to make sure they understood what was expected of them. Bishara began by asking if anyone could tell him the difference between a play and a movie. After a girl explained that plays have live actors, Bishara asked the viewers to list three things they could do to show those actors they were paying attention.