Raack ‘em Up; Breaking Dawn Disappoints
Raack N Roll
By Chuck Rounds
Chuck is the king of entertainment in Vegas. Go to his website www.igoshows.com and get all the latest info on what’s going on in Vegas
Raack N Roll is playing inside the Night Owl Showroom at Hooters Hotel and Casino. It is a topless dance revue that is suitable fit (and long overdue) for the Hooters brand. The dancers are beautiful and talented, and the music is great classic rock and roll. It is a small show, on a small stage, with a small budget; but they have done a tremendous amount to make the most of it.
Hooters has needed this show. With the state of the economy for the past several years and a bankruptcy to overcome, it is amazing that it has taken six years for this hotel to realize that it might benefit from having a topless show…at Hooters.
The dancers are great both as an ensemble and individually. Their talent shines through, and they make stale choreography work.
The expectation of dancing and choreography has changed in the last ten years…especially with the advent of shows like, “So You Think You Can Dance.” We simple expect more from the dancing and dancers. Most of the choreography in this show looks old. It looks as if they remounted and reused numbers from past shows without trying to reinterpret it for a new production. It is obvious that they didn’t have much of a budget, but coming up with great dances would have been worth the money. It is only because of the talent of the dancers that these numbers work at all, but the choreography certainly keeps this from being a great show.
Robert Nash serves as both the host and the interim act for the show in order to give the dancers a bit of a break. I must say, Nash is a great Robert De Niro impersonator…probably the best De Niro impersonator that I’ve seen. However…his other impersonations don’t fare as well. Some of them are even a bit painful to watch. Overall, though, he did a fine job—especially considering that most of the male dominated audience doesn’t want him there. They are there to see the women, and a male impersonator is not the type of break in the production that they want. It is a tough job.
For the most part, the show doesn’t make any bones about what it is supposed to be about…this show is about sexy, topless, dancing women. They ply their trade to rock and roll music, and we have a good time. And the fact that it is set in Hooters is a plus…wings, beer, and boobs. It’s almost the perfect guy date. Is it a great show? No. Is it a good time? Yes. Could it be better? Absolutely.
As the show continues, I hope that the producers will take some time to upgrade the choreography. The show needs it, and the dancers deserve it. The props need to have more attention paid to them, and the lighting could be a lot more dynamic.
Playing in the Night Owl Showroom at the Hooters
Indefinite Friday – Sunday 8:30pm Tickets $43.99 +tax & fee
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The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn, Part One, Review
By Robbie Collin, Chief Film Critic
Robbie writes for the UK publication The Telegraph, www.telegraph.com.UK
The Twilight Saga, an up-to-now-entertaining set of films about a love triangle between a vampire with a quiff, a dour-faced schoolgirl and a werewolf who can’t act, has always attracted an unreasonable amount of bile. Unusually, it hasn’t come from critics, so much as the droves of young, straight males with a broadband connection who resent that a popular movie series has the gall to pander to an audience other than them.
Crowds largely made up of teenage girls and their approving mothers have so far spent £1.13 billion watching Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson), Bella Swan (Kristen Stewart) and Jacob Black (Taylor Lautner) brood and mumble their way through three increasingly well-made films that authentically captured the misery of being a love-struck teenager.
But this fourth and penultimate film, in which Edward and Bella marry and finally consummate their relationship, takes an Olympic-pole-vault-sized leap backwards. Director Bill Condon and screenwriter Melissa Rosenberg have adapted Stephenie Meyer’s awkward source novel into a formless, gormless soap opera: it’s a humourless, incoherent bore that lives down to the very worst stereotypes associated with the franchise.
After a brief prologue in which the cast receive their wedding invitations and Jacob gets so angry he takes his t-shirt off – don’t question it, it’s what he does – the film opens with Edward and Bella’s long-awaited nuptials. These are admittedly well-mounted and the bride’s Pippa Middleton dress is very on-trend. They also give the unsung heroes of the Twilight cast, Billy Burke as Bella’s father Charlie and Anna Kendrick as her friend Jessica, their once-per-film chance to show off: in this case, in an enjoyable after-dinner speech montage that recalls a scene from this summer’s sleeper hit comedy Bridesmaids. The happy couple then jet off on their Brazilian honeymoon, during which the groom’s enthusiastic lovemaking demolishes their four-poster bed – well, after 200-odd years of abstinence, it would do.
At this point, Bella falls pregnant and finds her human womb struggles to cope with a foetus that’s 50 percent vampire. She tells her father that she’s fallen ill and is checking into a Swiss clinic – which must have put his mind at rest – before she returns in secret to the Cullen house, where Edward’s family do their best to make sure she survives to full-term, making her drink human blood in an attempt to feed the baby (Edward thoughtfully decants it into a fast food cup first). Meanwhile, the local werewolves swear revenge on the Cullens, firstly because Bella’s life has been threatened, and also because they take a dim view of human-vampire procreation generally.
As the above paragraph shows, it’s almost impossible to make the plot of Breaking Dawn sound sensible, but it would have been nice if the film made a token effort to do so. Instead, Rosenberg’s screenplay foregrounds the book’s loopiest ideas while burying anything that might have made for compelling drama: Edward’s anxiety over fathering a child that’s killing his wife and Jacob’s strained loyalty to his revenge-hungry pedigree chums, for example, go almost completely unexplored. The script is often startlingly lazy: in one confused scene, Edward explains the nuances of werewolf behaviour to no-one in particular, just to give the audience a fighting chance at comprehension. Earlier, Bella croakily reveals that she wants to mix her and Edward’s mothers’ names together and call their baby Renesmee. The line is presented without a flicker of irony and was deservedly greeted in the critics’ screening with gales of scornockery.
The special effects sequences are equally bad. Unlike the superb werewolf-on-vampire battles in Eclipse, the David Slade-directed third installment, Breaking Dawn’s action scenes are muddled and gloomy. They’re also not particularly easy to take seriously thanks to the wolves speaking with bizarre half-human, half-canine voices that put me in mind of Scooby Doo.
Sadly, it’s unlikely that Breaking Dawn – Part 2 will be any better than this (both films were shot back-to-back by the same director), but an incongruous mid-credits teaser, featuring Michael Sheen as the camp vampire king Aro, hints that it might at least have a sense of humour. We can but hope. At least that way, some of the laughs might be intentional.
THE TWILIGHT SAGA: BREAKING DAWN – PART 1:
Dir: Bill Condon; Starring: Robert Pattinson, Kristen Stewart, Taylor Lautner. Cert: 12A, 117 min.
