G.W. Clift entertainments log from Manhattan, Kansas, written February 13, 2008

All of a sudden the basketball (http://www.kstatesports.com/) is good around here again. Having been at K-State during the Hartman era and the great seventies charge of women's hoops here, I suppose I always expect us to win. The arrival of Coach Huggins turned the men's program into a talent-rich one--we had previously had success because of superior discipline--and the fan base was swamped with front runners. The departure of Huggins, Beasley, and Walker and this year's team's indifferent early season play scared off some of those unintelligent and ephemeral fans, though. And the women continue to win with their brains. We'll see each of the teams at home in Bramlage this weekend.

Because of the t.v. time-outs (and most of the games are broadcast), there will be lots of reading time in the fieldhouse. I used some time-out reading time during recent games to finish the second of Colin Watson's mystery novels to feature Inspector Purbright. Bump in the Night is a superior comic foray to the small town of Chalmsbury. Purbright is loaned to the local police force to find out how a local prankster got the explosives he used each Tuesday to blow up local landmarks. Finally the cut-up blew himself up. Or was he done in? The story takes off about halfway into the book when Purbright arrives in Chalmsbury and is provided with a summary of the action so far. Watson is imaginative and his books are funny.

So are Dickens's, generally. But maybe Little Dorrit (1855-7) is the least funny of his three large late novels, the others being Bleak House and Our Mutual Friend. Unlike the shorter Hard Times, which comes immediately before it, and A Tale of Two Cities, which comes immediately after it, I have enjoyed Little Dorrit (http://www.kstatesports.com/) in the past. But it is long, and it is very Victorian. The story concerns the financial affairs of the title character's father. The book begins in prison and soon shows us Mr. Dorrit in The Marshalsea debtors prison where he lives for decades--the length of the book's first half (titled "Poverty"). When the sober and middle-class Arthur Clennam manages to untangle Dorrit's finances it is discovered that he is heir to an unclaimed estate. So off to the continent we go for much of the second part ("Riches"). This is the novel with the government department of Circumlocution, famous for establishing "how not to do it." But this satiric stuff isn't so funny nowadays as governments the world over vie to outdo each other in imitating the Barnacle's great bureaucracy.

A recent McCain performance by an outfit called the Russian National Ballet Theater (http://www.sara-artists.com/RNBT/russian_nat_ballet_eng.htm ) seemed to be staffed with veteran dancers who are ordinarily under contract to American companies. Olga Pavlova is an example. I believe she usually dances for the Fort Worth ballet. But don't misunderstand. I'm not complaining. These were really accomplished dancers, six pair of them, who danced a sort of greatest hits program of ten pas de deux from famous ballets plus "The Dying Swan" and a piece put together as a finale with all of them on stage together. I'd have rather seen a single ballet (and with a pit orchestra), but this show was well performed by skilled and disciplined--and experienced dancers.

K-State's theater program (in cooperation with Ebony Theater, which is just about exactly the same age as the Creative Writing and Dance programs) are putting on an interesting production of a contemporary play set in NYC in 1905. Lynn Nottage's (http://lynnnottage.net/) Intimate Apparel follows a romance carried on between a hard-working seamstress and a former Panama Canal construction worker. Several of her friendships are scotched or revived as she corresponds with, marries, supports, and is then deserted by this not completely unsympathetic man. Race figures, but the Jewish character, a fabric wholesaler, seems to be more influenced by attitudes about race than are the African-American characters. An interesting production.

When I was in London the t.v. news boys were ecstatic that Slumdog Millionaire had won the Golden Globe, I believe it was, for "Best Picture." Imagine. An Indian picture winning an award like that. Well, it turns out Slumdog isn't an Indian picture. It was written by the guy who wrote The Full Monty and directed by the guy who did "The Island" and "Trainspotting." "Slumdog" is nothing like the stereotypical, happy-go-lucky, G rated Indian musical. Instead it's Oliver Twist without humor or sympathy, but with "Who Wants to be a Millionaire" thrown in and a lot of intercutting. Not much fun. Bah, humbug.

And then Sam Mendes's Revolutionary Road maybe made its audience even more unhappy. It is tedious. For two and a half hours one is asked to watch Leonardo DiCaprio and poor Kate Winslet suffer from the knowledge that they aren't exceptional, that they fit into the suburban world they thought they had been trapped in. Very unpleasant, and to no end.

The week following there were three new movies, all of them formula pictures, all of them brief, and all of them fairly entertaining. The action picture was Taken, in which Liam Neeson is a retired CIA agent who kills about a hundred Albanian white slavers in the process of retrieving his virgin-napped seventeen-year-old daughter. Set in Paris, Taken moves well enough that one doesn't have time to think about its coincidences.

The psychological thriller was The Uninvited, one of those movies where we are mislead because the point of view character's perceptions are unreliable. The casting makes this movie go, and it was genius putting the easy-to-distrust Elizabeth Banks in the part of the nurse who may have killed our young heroine's mother.

The romantic comedy was New In Town, with Renee Zellweger (http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000250/) arriving in small town Minnesota to oversee the refitting of an old processing plant. She slowly comes to like the workers there and her neighbors and their unfamiliar rituals. Harry Connick is just one of the actors who has a good turn in this slight but sympathetic film.

The best of the new movies to arrive here over the last couple of weeks, though, is Coraline, made (in 3D for some reason) by Henry Selick, who made James and the Giant Peach and The Nightmare Before Christmas. The story has a couple of nice late turns in it, and the whole has been made (in stop-action animation) with great care. Little Coraline discovers a parallel universe--or at least a parallel apartment house--which at first looks comparatively attractive. But why does everyone there have black buttons for eyes? This may be too long for little children, but everyone else with an open mind will enjoy it.

Maybe the same is true, to a lesser extent, with Pink Panther 2. Steve Martin's second try at Clouseau is, again, mostly black-out comedy bits. Then in the last hour a story begins to take form. Emily Mortimer (novelist John's daughter), Jean Reno, John Cleese, Andy Garcia, and Alfred Molina (in a pink tutu in one scene) are all fine. But this movie doesn't aspire to be anything but an hour and a half of inoffensive diversion.

Almost the same thing can be said about Push, a sort of Jumpers but with bigger stars, a devotion to Hong Kong scenes, and less secrecy about the location of its specially talented young people--levitators, mind-washers, psychics, and like talents. Dakota Fanning plays a thirteen-year-old, which she probably is now. Chris Evans is the other star, and then there are good journeymen in supporting parts. Enjoyed the Chinese guys who could shout loud enough (and long enough) to bloody their enemies' eardrums. 

I was almost the one screaming in the theater during the showing of He's Not That Into You, a Ken Kwapis soap opera featuring Gennifer Goodwin, occasionally Drew Barrymore (who looks way too old for this sort of crud), and a host of known actors of uneven merit. None of the characters is laudable. Only Goodwin's and Barrymore's are tolerable. We cut between associated stories to learn that all women really want is husbands. My. To give you an example of how mis-designed the story is, Ben Affleck's character refuses to marry Jennifer Anniston's,. so she leaves him, then realizes he's perfect and comes back, and then he proposes to her and she accepts. What happened to his philosophical rejection of marriage? And why would anyone looking for entertainment stay with this boring, predictable, melodramatic, and depressing crap for two and a half hours?

If there had been enough light in the auditorium, I could have read during the last couple of reels of that film. Maybe I'll take a battery-powered book light with me when I go to the show the next couple of weeks and then report to you what I read while the movies were running. But just now I've got to select what I'm going to take to the KU game on Saturday. Do ghost stories go with intra-state rivalries?