Pee-wee Herman charms the cognoscenti
Vanessa Redgrave and James Earl Jones may be pulling serious theatergoers in to Driving Miss Daisy, but the glory of Broadway is that just a couple of blocks away, you can catch Pee-wee Herman chatting with some flowers, arguing with a chair, and instructing the audience to scream every time they hear the word “fun.”
For a heady top ticket price of $227, The Pee-wee Herman Show basically recreates Pee-wee’s Playhouse, Paul Reubens’ legendary 1980s program for very advanced children, starring a bratty but lovable arrested child in a bowtie and a smirk.
Read More »Todd Solondz’ LIFE DURING WARTIME
After a stint of experimental flops – 2001′s STORYTELLING and PALINDROMES in 2004 – writer/director Todd Solondz’s latest film, LIFE DURING WARTIME, marks a return to the familiar world of HAPPINESS, his successful 1998 follow up to his break out film WELCOME TO THE DOLLHOUSE. HAPPINESS revolves around a family of three sisters: Helen, a successful, jaded writer, Trish, a Mrs. Cleaver type in pleated khakis and Joy, a frizzy-haired, soft-spoken, flower child screw up. Perversion and pedophilia, two of Solondz’s all-time favorite themes, are hard at work here, whether it’s Philip Seymour-Hoffman’s character jerking off to calls to random women in the phone book or Trish’s husband Bill, the unsuspecting nebbish (Dylan Baker) who rapes his son’s friend from little league.
Read More »Pee-wee’s NYC adventure
When Pee-wee Herman took to Twitter last week to announce his show, which I wrote about last year here, was coming to Broadway I nerded out in a major way. I view Herman as a style icon. His look and his show brought freaks even more mainstream. Via his TV show he taught kids of [...]
Read More »More Tim Burton: PEE-WEE’S BIG ADVENTURE
It’s a strange thing to reach adulthood and see, for the very first time, a film everyone else saw before they hit puberty. For me that film is PEE-WEE’S BIG ADVENTURE. I’m not going to lie; When I was a kid, Pee-wee really freaked me out. I thought he was creepy and weird and unnecessarily loud. But as part of Tim Burton’s retrospective, MoMA is screening all of his films, starting last night with PEE-WEE, his 1985 feature film debut. After Paul Reubens saw FRANKENWEENIE (a full-length remake is due out in 2011) he chose Burton to direct PEE-WEE’S BIG ADVENTURE, which had, until that point, been a stage-show at the Roxy in L.A. and of course, an HBO special.
Read More »Pee-wee’s back
Paul Reubens, he of public masturbatory fame, is reviving the character that made him world famous: Pee-wee Herman. Herman started out as a crude stand-up act and then became a popular children’s TV show and a feature film directed by Tim Burton. Beginning in November, Pee-wee will be performing live at the Fonda Theater in Hollywood. And yes, Chairry, Pterri the pterodactyl and Miss Yvonne will be present. Maybe a trip to LA is in order?
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