Reviews MUSTANG. Five sisters, on the last day of school in their coastal Turkish village, wander down to the beach in their school uniforms, splash in the water and play chicken with some of boys from the school who have trailed them down there, laugh and squabble, and then head for home. But when they […]
David Jervis
David Jervis is a freelance writer living in Arcata. He prefers he/him pronouns.
Posted inArts + Scene
All at Sea
Reviews IN THE HEART OF THE SEA. The history of whaling, that 19th century boomlet involving rowdy mariners, inked scrimshaws, tycoon investors and far-off isles, indeed deserves a definitive, epic story onscreen (or at least an eight-hour series from Ken Burns). This is, alas, neither of those, although it does deliver lots of sea mammal […]
Posted inArts + Scene
Hearth Warming
Louisa May Alcott’s iconic 1860s-era novel Little Women may seem an unlikely choice for a musical, but one person’s impossible task is another’s irresistible challenge. Much in the vein of the admonition that one chooses to go to the moon not because it is easy, but because it is hard, Alcott’s oft-adapted künstlerroman found its […]
Posted inArts + Scene
Golden Age
As a story, It’s a Wonderful Life took an odd path to the near-iconographic status it now enjoys. Frank Capra’s 1946 film, while not really bombing, was greeted with middling reviews and less-than-boffo box office, and fell into the lesser ranks of Capra’s pictures. An expired copyright in the mid-’70s opened up the movie’s availability […]
Posted inArts + Scene
Red Menace
Reviews BRIDGE OF SPIES. In 1957, accused spy Rudolf Abel scores insurance attorney James Donovan (Tom Hanks), a veteran of the U.S. legal team at the Nuremburg trials as his defense. While their pairing sends a global message that everyone is entitled to the best defense, it’s clear that everyone from the judge to the […]
Posted inArts + Scene
Footprints and Clues
Reviews THE WALK. You might remember that back on Aug. 7, 1974, a Frenchman named Philippe Petit walked for about 45 minutes on a high-wire cable strung between the tops of the World Trade Center towers in New York City. I do — it was all over the news that night and the paper the […]
Posted inArts + Scene
Smooth Landings
Prior to seeing it in Ferndale, Boeing Boeing was a play I only knew through the 1966 film version with Tony Curtis and Jerry Lewis — “The Big Comedy of Nineteen Sixty-SEX!” shouted the tagline on the poster. That line is enough to indicate that the film and the play belonged to that era of […]
Posted inArts + Scene
Spinning Wheels
Reviews MISTRESS AMERICA. I realized upon settling in to see writer-director Noah Baumbach’s latest that it was 20 years ago this summer that I saw his straight-outta-Vassar debut “Kicking and Screaming” in the very Minor Theatre auditorium in which I was sitting. Baumbach’s great first film laid a heavy marker in an era clogged with […]