CLEARLAKE OAKS, Calif. – Dell’ Arte International School of Physical Theatre returns to Spring Valley June 2 to 11.
This year’s team consists of 11 students from around the world who have been studying and training in Blue Lake for the last eigh months.
They are now extraordinarily excited to be traveling to Spring Valley to create and explore movement and art with the residents.
The students seek to be in community with the people of Spring Valley, teach workshops in areas such as movement, acrobatics, creative writing and mask, and finally to devise a piece that is specifically for Spring Valley.
“I can't wait to see what is created when our international ensemble of artists meets the community to engage in play, work and performance,” said Dustin Allen from Canada.
These students from Canada, Iran, Georgia, the United States and Brazil couldn’t be more excited to get to know everyone.
“Our class has lots of unique training and the students are eager to share,” said Maggie Lally from L.A. A Dell' Arte performance and workshop sign-up will be held on June 3rd at 5pm at the Spring Valley Community Center.
All workshops and performances are free and all ages are welcome.
The free final performance will take place on Tuesday, June 10, at 6 p.m. at the community center.
All are encouraged to check out the fun workshops and attend the final show.
The fictional Don Draper could be just as impressive as an self-centered, arrogant, fast-talking sports agent as the driven, philandering advertising executive he is in the TV drama series in “Mad Men.”
That’s because actor Jon Hamm brings the same charisma and hardened attitude to the role of Los Angeles sports agent JB Bernstein in Disney’s fascinating feel-good sports drama “Million Dollar Arm.”
The difference, this time, is that JB Bernstein is a real-life person, and his story of searching for Major League Baseball pitching talent with cricket bowlers in India, of all places, is factually-based. Don Draper, on the other hand, remains pure fiction.
As a baseball fan, I find heartening sports movies almost irresistible, chiefly if they combine underdog triumphs, personal redemption, inspirational hope and determination to succeed as the essential ingredients. Thus, “Million Dollar Arm” is in league with films like “The Blind Side” and “Miracle.”
The story begins with JB Bernstein almost coasting, at least financially, on his past success with a large firm, where he handled big name talent, and ended up with a big house, expensive sports car and tailored suits.
Now struggling on his own with his Indian-American business partner Ash (Aasif Mandvi), JB finds keeping the doors open is tough, mostly since he can’t close on a hot NFL prospect who contemplates signing with the high-powered competition.
Focusing his attention on deal-making with a baseball team owner to find untapped talent sources, JB hits on the unique idea of conducting a televised talent contest in a foreign country with a million dollar payoff.
Not a fan of cricket, JB comes up with this idea on a late night TV viewing that consists of alternating between Susan Boyle belting out tunes on “Britain’s Got Talent” to a sports channel carrying an Indian cricket match.
Heading over to India with a deadline to get prospects in place within a year, JB and Ash get help from salty, cantankerous, narcoleptic retired baseball scout Ray (Alan Arkin, in fine form) who can judge the speed of a pitch even with his eyes closed.
To help navigate the cultural differences in India, the American team is joined by eager go-fer and translator Amit (Pitobash), an unabashed baseball fan in a country dominated by a cricket-loving population.
JB announces that his mission is to find the next Yao Ming, except for baseball. He figures that in a country with more than a billion people the odds favor finding undiscovered raw talent.
Hyped by Indian TV programs, the Million Dollar Arm bus tour covers the rural areas of India, where eager young men jump at the chance to show their talent. Mostly, though, the team has no luck at first locating anyone who can throw the ball at a speed above 50 miles per hours.
Ultimately, JB finds his best prospects in Rinku Singh (Suraj Sharma from “Life of Pi”) and Dinesh Patel (Madhur Mittal from “Slumdog Millionaire”) and then brings them home to Los Angeles, where culture shock is a rude awakening.
At first, the boys are put up in a hotel, but that proves to be disastrous since they are mystified by the vagaries of American life. JB’s ordered life is then upended when he brings them to live in his big house.
Accustomed to dating models and living in his own bubble, JB finds it challenging to get his new talent on the right course. He gets help on that score from sexy, smart medical student Brenda (Lake Bell), a tenant renting out his guest house.
JB also depends heavily on USC baseball coach Tom House (Bill Paxton), a former major league player, to get his green pitchers into shape for a showcase in front of skeptical baseball scouts.
Part of the movie’s core redemptive spirit is JB’s eventual grasp of his need to show some heart for his players. In fairly short order, he spends more time eating pizza with Rinku and Dinesh, and finds Brenda more enchanting than shallow one-night stands.
The fish-out-of-water experience for the Indian players brings a nice mix of comedy and drama. Though the young men will struggle to adapt to the necessary pitching skills, the eventual formulaic ending is a winner.
“Million Dollar Arm,” similar to a walk-off game-winning home run in the bottom of the ninth, is a truly enjoyable, satisfying sports story that ranks in the same league of comparable gratifying films like “The Rookie” and “42,” the inspiring story of Jackie Robinson.
Tim Riley writes film and television reviews for Lake County News.
Peter Everwine is a poet whose work I have admired for many years.
Here is a poem about an experience many of us have shared.
Everwine lives in California, but what happens in this poem happens every day in every corner of the world.
After the Funeral
We opened closets and bureau drawers and packed away, in boxes, dresses and shoes, the silk underthings still wrapped in tissue. We sorted through cedar chests. We gathered and set aside the keepsakes and the good silver and brought up from the coal cellar jars of tomato sauce, peppers, jellied fruit. We dismantled, we took down from the walls, we bundled and carted off and swept clean. Goodbye, goodbye, we said, closing the door behind us, going our separate ways from the house we had emptied, and which, in the coming days, we would fill again and empty and try to fill again.
American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation ( www.poetryfoundation.org ), publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Poem copyright 2013 by Peter Everwine, from Listening Long and Late (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2013). Poem reprinted by permission of Peter Everwine and the publisher. Introduction copyright 2014 by The Poetry Foundation. The introduction's author, Ted Kooser, served as United States Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 2004-2006. We do not accept unsolicited manuscripts.
The Impressionists, on both sides of the Atlantic, gave us a number of handsome paintings of rural scenes, and here’s a poem by the distinguished American poet, Catharine Savage Brosman, that offers us just such a picture, not in pigments but in words.
Cattle Fording Tarryall Creek
With measured pace, they move in single file, dark hides, white faces, plodding through low grass, then walk into the water, cattle-style, indifferent to the matter where they pass.
The stream is high, the current swift—good rain, late snow-melt, cold. Immerging to the flank, the beasts proceed, a queue, a bovine chain, impassive, stepping to the farther bank—
continuing their march, as if by word, down valley to fresh pasture. The elect, and stragglers, join, and recompose the herd, both multiple and single, to perfect
impressions of an animated scene, the creek’s meanders, milling cows, and sun. Well cooled, the cattle graze knee-deep in green. We leave them to their feed, this painting done.
American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation ( www.poetryfoundation.org ), publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Poem copyright 2014 by Catharine Savage Brosman, whose most recent book of poems is On the North Slope, Mercer University Press, 2012. Poem reprinted by permission of Catharine Savage Brosman. Introduction copyright 2014 by The Poetry Foundation. The introduction's author, Ted Kooser, served as United States Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 2004-2006. They do not accept unsolicited manuscripts.
LAKE COUNTY, Calif. – Three Lake County teenagers are raising funds in order to attend a national singing competition in Maryland next month.
Elisabeth Chaidez, Jordan Zabek and Joanna Parker have qualified for the Pentecostal Church of God's Youth Talent Expo Nationals, which takes place June 17 to 21 in Lutherville, a suburb of Baltimore.
The trio, representing Freedom Worship & Education Center in Kelseyville, won the 2014 multi-voice category for the Pentecostal Church of God's Northern California-Nevada District.
In years past, various national competitors have received scholarships and been awarded recording contracts as a direct result of their participation in the PCG National Talent Expo event.
Zabek lives in Clearlake and attends Middletown Christian School; Joanna Parker and Elisabeth Chaidez are school attendees at Freedom Christian University in Kelseyville and residents of Middletown.
The plot of “Neighbors” is succinctly stated in the tag line of the film’s billboard advertising. Simply put, “Family vs. Frat” sums it up nicely, with generational conflict spawned when a rowdy fraternity house takes up residence in a peaceful neighborhood.
Seth Rogen and Rose Byrne are young adult professionals Mac and Kelly Radner with a cute newborn baby. Mortgaged to the hilt, they buy a dream house in a leafy suburban community.
The transition to mature adulthood with the attendant responsibilities of creating a nice family life is challenging. Spontaneity in their sex life and desire to party is inhibited by the ever-watchful smiling baby (one of the cutest infants in memory).
When the large house next door goes up for sale, the Radners are hopeful for friendly new residents. Instead, they get the neighbors from hell when the Delta Psi Beta fraternity moves in with the sole mission of designing party central complete with all-night drinking bouts.
The vacuous, party-boy frat president Teddy (Zac Efron), apparently aimless in his scholastic career, has the single-minded goal of putting his class into the annals of frat history with the most epic party ever held.
At first, Mac and Kelly, rightly concerned about the presence of party animals, don’t want to appear to be “uncool” old fogies, so they join a frat party one night and indulge too much in some hallucinogenic activities.
Of course, trying to fit in with the adolescent college types is not really a wise move, and Mac and Kelly quickly realize that, though they are far from being old, they are not going to recapture the wild abandon of their not-so-distant partying days.
As a result, an understanding is reached with Teddy that he’ll tone down the frat’s activities if their parties become too loud and raucous. All that Mac and Kelly need to do is call with a request to “keep it down.”
The inevitable sleepless night of coping with too much loud music from the neighbors soon arrives, and multiple calls to Teddy go unheeded. The only choice for Mac and Kelly is to report the rowdy party to the police for what turns out not to be an anonymous tip.
At this point, Teddy expresses his disappointment that Mac and Kelly went nuclear, and backed up by his wingman Pete (Dave Franco) and the entire fraternity, including a group of humiliated pledges, he decides to launch all-out war on the family next door.
The young couple takes their concerns about the fraternity to the college dean (Lisa Kudrow), who seems worried only about newspaper headlines that would shame the school. Still, they discover that Delta Psi Beta is already on probation and facing possible disbandment.
Some strategic thinking goes into a plot to turn the frat house into an unsustainable financial burden so that the boys would be forced to sell and relocate. Flooding the frat house basement is a good start.
And yet, the frat boys prove to be ingenious by raising money on campus by selling to willing, adoring female students sex toys that have been molded by using the frat members as models. The actual production of such tools is just one of the weirdly funny scenes.
Indeed, if the above is not sufficient warning, filmgoers should be aware that there are crude penis jokes, and not surprisingly, much like a Judd Apatow movie, lewd and salacious humor drives much of the comedic action.
The ongoing escalation of war between the neighbors is unavoidable. Even the frat’s Robert De Niro costume party offers many taunts to the Radners, with Teddy doing an impression of an unhinged Travis Bickle from “Taxi Driver” as an awkward method of intimidation.
Director Nicholas Stoller (“Get Him to the Greek” and “Forgetting Sarah Marshall”) has an Apatow-like taste for scandalous idiocy, but also taps into some resourceful ingenuity. The clever use of pilfered air bags from the Radner station wagon is a prime example.
A frequently shirtless Zac Efron shows off his chiseled torso, but the best comic use of his physique comes near the end during his summer job as an outdoor model for Abercrombie & Fitch, where he’s hilariously upstaged when the flabby Seth Rogen decides to go shirtless as well in an impromptu competition.
“Neighbors” is crude, profane, rude and even scatological in its humor, which is what one would expect in a movie that stirs memories of “Animal House” and “Old School.” Still, there’s a measure of sweet sentimentality that mutes the otherwise dark edges of comedy.
Tim Riley writes film and television reviews for Lake County News.
