“V” Revamped; The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
V The Ultimate Variety Show
By Chuck Rounds
Chuck’s website, www.igoshows.com, gives you the latest news on what is going on with the Vegas entertainment scene
“V: The Ultimate Variety Show” is playing at the “V” theatre inside the Miracle Mile Mall at Planet Hollywood. The show has recently undergone the largest revamping it’s had in recent years. There are a lot of new acts in this show, as well as a couple of the old favorites. The show is fresh, vibrant, and as fun as it ever was. It is a great evening that showcases the talents of some of the best variety acts in town. These are all part of the “A” list of talent that we have in our city. Many of these acts play multiple gigs—doing this show as well as other major production shows on the Strip. I have personally recommended this show to more people than probably any other show in town. It is simply a show that cannot miss. There will be something that everyone can enjoy in this show.
Variety Acts have always offered us a break in a regular production show. The beauty of the acts is that they are self contained, generally take up only a small amount of space, and have to immediately capture the attention of the audience. They are quick, fast-paced, and usually amazing. David Saxe first opened this show over a decade ago at the C2K showroom inside the Venetian. It immediately struck me that this was a brilliant concept—brilliance in the realization of the obvious…why hadn’t anyone thought of it before. The form and format has been duplicated and copied many times over at this point (this show opened before there were any other talent based showcases,) and still, no one does it better.
The evening moves very quickly from one act to another, and the show covers a large assortment of elements: magic, comedy, juggling, and other wonderful surprises. While the show maintains a core of people for the show, some of the acts rotate throughout the week. This allows for a greater variety in the show.
“V: The Ultimate Variety Show” encompasses and embodies the very essence of the term, “entertainment.” Having been fortunate enough to see most of the shows in town, I have watched almost every one of these acts in prior productions. David has done a good job at selecting the cream of the crop. It was like watching a “greatest hits” variety show. Each of the performers does a good job at overcoming that barrier which separates audience and performer. It is part of the very nature of variety acts–each segment is fairly short, therefore, the performer must bring a high-energy performance that makes a quick connection with the audience. Without that connection, a variety act would more than likely fail. These experienced artists are all masters at seducing the audience, and none of them had problems.
Having seen all of these acts on multiple occasions, I sometimes feel a bit jaded…I don’t remember the impact that these acts had on me the first time I saw them. So…I like to watch the audience… I loved watching the man sitting next to me that stared open-mouthed and muttered to himself in amazement at these acts. There was a woman two seats down that held her hands to her mouth and kept saying, “oh, my God,” over and over…it was apparent that both of these audience members were stunned and amazed at what they were witness to. I loved it.
“V” is a masterful production that brought the variety act to the forefront. It shows off some of the most talented people we have in our city. It is a show that is brilliant in its simplicity. This production spawned a series of imitators, but none does them as well as “V.”
You can only truly appreciate and do justice to these acts by going and seeing them. It is a fun and wonderful evening of entertainment.
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‘The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo’ is too frigid
By Kenneth Turan, courtesy of the Los Angeles Times
David Fincher’s ‘The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo’ loses what made the books and Swedish films so successful — Lisbeth Salander’s humanity.
It’s not like “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo” was ever going to be “Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm.” Not even close.
As readers of the Stieg Larsson novel and viewers of the recent Swedish film version know all too well, what’s on offer is a bleak and savage story of crime and punishment that features generous portions of sadistic rape, twisted torture and murders that can charitably be called grotesque.
Still, adding David Fincher — the director of “Seven,” “Zodiac” and “Fight Club” — to the mix has proved counterproductive.
Fincher is without doubt a gifted, uncompromising filmmaker with enviable skill and exceptional collaborators, here including screenwriter Steven Zaillian and cinematographer Jeff Cronenweth. And as the director says of his films in his press bio, “He hopes that people like them, but if they don’t, it’s not for lack of effort.”
Though Fincher’s gift for disturbing, twist-the-knife cinema made him the obvious Hollywood choice, using him here feels, in a coals-to-Newcastle way, like shipping truckloads of ice to the far reaches of the polar regions. More than that, it betrays a misunderstanding of what’s at the heart of the phenomenal international success of the Millennium trilogy books, which clock in at 65 million copies and counting.
That would be the character of Lisbeth Salander, one of the most unlikely, idiosyncratic and compelling crime fighters to hit the scene since Sherlock Holmes. One reason Salander is catnip on the page is that she is anything but in real life. Antisocial when she’s not downright furious, a sullen 24-year-old computer hacker with more piercings than friends, she is fierce, furtive and feral. You never want to get in her way.
Though less well-crafted than the Fincher version, Niel Arden Oplev’s “Dragon Tattoo” did have the crucial advantage of actress Noomi Rapace. Her savage Salander was as skittish and tattooed as she should be, but there was always a sense of an actual person inside those fierce defenses that enabled audiences to connect on screen in the way readers do on the page.
Playing Salander this time around is Rooney Mara, an intense young actress who had a fine scene with Jesse Eisenberg’s Mark Zuckerberg at the opening of Fincher’s excellent “The Social Network.” She committed herself totally to the “Dragon Tattoo” role and clearly did everything her director asked of her, but this film’s cold, almost robotic conception of Salander as a twitchy, anorexic waif feels more like a stunt than a complete character, and so the best part of the reason we care enough to endure all that mayhem has gone away.
Before Salander appears on the scene, “Dragon Tattoo” introduces its nominal protagonist, Millennium magazine journalist Mikael Blomkvist, played with relentless surliness by an effective Daniel Craig. A crusader for truth against the bloated capitalists of the world (and likely Larsson’s version of himself), Blomkvist is not having the best of days.
The journalist has found himself on the losing end of a libel verdict. Facing imprisonment and wanting to take a break from his magazine, Blomkvist is receptive when he gets a phone call from an attorney saying that one of Sweden’s most powerful men wants to see him.
That would be Henrik Vanger (Christopher Plummer), a retired industrialist who lives on the family-owned Hedeby Island a few hours north of Stockholm and has, in his own words, “spent half of my life investigating the events of a single day.”
Those events, which have something of the flavor of a classic locked-room mystery, involve the disappearance of Vanger’s favorite niece, Harriet. On the day in question, when a bridge accident made leaving the island impossible, 16-year-old Harriet simply vanished. Vanger not only suspects she was murdered, he thinks it was done by a member of his family, and he wants Blomkvist to put his investigative reporting skills to work finding the truth.
So the journalist moves into a frigid cabin on the island, abandoning his it-works-for-us relationship with his married publisher (Robin Wright) and starts making charts and tacking photos onto the wall like he was one of the hard-core Baltimore cops on “The Wire.”
Circumstances soon make Blomkvist aware of Salander and her particular skill set, and he convinces her to work with him. She is having deep troubles of her own, including a vicious sexual predator who thinks she is an easy mark (ha!). The Salander-Blomkvist collaboration is good for both them and the film.
Screenwriter Zaillian has adroitly pared down the 500-plus-page book (the chatter about a change to the ending is a tempest in a teapot) and what’s on screen also benefits from the work of “Social Network” collaborators including production designer Donald Graham Burt, editors Kirk Baxter and Angus Wall and composers Trent Reznor & Atticus Ross. But unlike that film, which profited from Eisenberg’s humanity in a not particularly human role, “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo” is too frigid around the heart to be really effective.
