Every Day I Write the Book: Reach Me, reviewed.
Chris Klimek
Kevin Connelly & Tom Berenger arrange one of those popular public readings of self-help books.
It's no Jack Reacher, this star-studded, tone-deaf ensemble drama. Reviewed for The Dissolve.
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On Around Town, talking Sex with Strangers, Julius Caesar, and How We Got On
Chris Klimek
For more on how abysmal I am at looking into a camera and smiling when someone says my name, we take you now to the studios of WETA, where I was pleased to join Around Town host Robert Aubry Davis and Washington Post arts writer Jane Horwitz for very brief discussions of three shows I recently reviewed for the Washington City Paper, starting with my favorite of 2014, Signature Theatre's production of Laura Eason's Sex with Strangers.
Read MoreCan of Wormholes, or Accretion Discography: My Interview with Kip Thorne, Interstellar Progenitor and Scientific Adviser
Chris Klimek
Kip Thorne on the set of Interstellar. (Paramount/Warner Bros./Legendary Pictures)
For my day job at Air & Space / Smithsonian, I interviewed Kip Thorne, the theoretical physicist who with his friend the movie producer Lynda Obst, conceived the film Interstellar back in 2006. Thorne remained closely involved with the picture throughout its writing, production, and editing, and has now published a 324-page companion to the film called The Science of "Interstellar" laying out his scientific rationalization for every aspect of its story -- even the Love Tesseract Wormhole.
DUH: Don't read this interview if you intend to see Interstellar but haven't yet.
And if that's your situation, and you live anywhere in the Washington, DC diaspora, make sure to catch the movie in 70mm IMAX at either the National Air & Space Museum downtown or at the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center out by Dulles International Airport. I've seen it both this way and in digital IMAX, and the 70mm presentation is more painterly and majestic. It also sounds better, curiously. The muddy sound mix we talked about on Pop Culture Happy Hour last week (based on a digital IMAX screening in Silver Spring, Maryland) was not a problem when I saw the film again at NASM in 70mm.
Raised by Wolves!
Chris Klimek
Jack Nicholson in Mike Nichols' Wolf in 1994. Wolves is not as good.
I wish I could report that Wolves, the silly horror film I review for The Dissolve this week, is an ante-upping James Cameron sequel to Wolf, the Mike Nichols-Elaine May-Jack Nicholson-Michelle Pfeiffer-James Spader expose of lycanthropy in the publishing industry from 20 years ago I'd vaguely wanted to revisit even before this Grantland exegesis ran last summer.
It is not.
Pop Culture Happy Hour #215: Interstellar and Plausible Space Movies
Chris Klimek
I was happy as always to be the fourth crewmember on this week’s Pop Culture Happy Hour, wherein regular panelists Linda Holmes, Stephen Thompson, and Glen Weldon discuss Christopher Nolan’s thrilling (to me, anyway) sci-fi opus Interstellar. We also talk about some of the other films that’ve angled for a plausible approach to sending our species beyond what the early rocket scientist Konstantin Tsiolkovsky called “the cradle of humanity.”
Read MoreThe Fault Is Not in Our Stars: Interstellar, reviewed.
Chris Klimek
Matthew McConaughey in Interstellar
My NPR review of Interstellar, a grand spacefaring epic I saw twice in three days and in which I am inclined to forgive many flaws. I Want to Believe, even if there's a lot of it I just don't.
We Can Do This Like Brutus: Julius Caesar and How We Got On, reviewed.
Chris Klimek
My reviews of Folger Theatre's Julius Caesar and Forum Theatre's production of Idris Goodwin's How We Got On are in today's Washington City Paper.
Scholar Signs: Visible Language, reviewed. PLUS: The Keller-Bell letters, parsed!
Chris Klimek
My review of Visible Language, an ambitious original musical in English and American Sign Language being performed at Gallaudet University, is in today's Washington City Paper. One of the play's concerns is Alexander Graham Bell's relationship with Helen Keller, whom he met as his student, but who became a close friend of Bell and his wife, Mabel.
I'll say. While researching this review I found several pieces of correspondence spanning a 25-year period between Bell and Keller in the Library of Congress. I haven't made anything approaching a serious attempt at scholarship here, but I read the letters I found and I was moved and amused by the story they tell, or at least suggest.
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