There Are More Things in Heaven and Earth: An Impossibly Small Object (2017)

Director and cast member David Verbeek in An Impossibly Small Object.

An Impossibly Small Object (2017), Dutch filmmaker David Verbeek’s second feature set in Taiwan and third feature set in the Far-Eastern Sinosphere, is two stories thinly interconnected: a grade school friendship between a girl and a boy just as it’s ending, and a Dutch photographer (Verbeek) torn between homesickness and wanderlust. The first tale is an atmospheric work of magical realism reminiscent of the work of Apichatpong Weerasethakul, albeit with more dynamic camerawork; the second tale is little more than subtitled mumblecore. But an enigmatic third act, though brief, manages to transmute unanswered questions into mysterious ambiguities.

Three Musicals: Once Upon a Mattress, She Loves Me and A Wonderful World

Sutton Foster as Princess Winnifred in Once Upon a Mattress.

Once Upon a Mattress, the Looney Tunes alteration of Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale “The Princess and the Pea” with book by Jay Thompson, Marshall Barer and Dean Fuller, music by Mary Rodgers and lyrics by Barer, opened on Broadway in 1959 and has been playing high schools and children’s theatres ever since. This musical is so familiar to stage kids and their loyal parents that it’s easy to forget how jovial and funny it is, and how tuneful and witty the score is. So it was a boon to New York theatregoers that Encores! opted to stage it early in the year with Sutton Foster as Princess Winnifred – a production, adapted by Amy Sherman-Palladino and staged by Lear de Bessonet, that wound up in the current Broadway season, with most of the Encores! cast, for a limited but enthusiastically received run. (There was a revival in the late nineties starring Sarah Jessica Parker.)

The Big Carnival: Billy Wilder’s Ace in the Hole (1951)

Kirk Douglas in Billy Wilder's Ace in the Hole. (All movie stills courtesy of Paramount Studios.)

“The biology of the shadow has yet to be fully explored.”

Andrei Biely, 1913

“We are a nation of hecklers. The most hard boiled, undisciplined people in the world.”

Billy Wilder, 1950

I think it’s fair to say, at least from my perspective, that someone has finally come along and fully studied the biology of the shadow. After their divorce as filmmaking partners, both Charles Brackett and Billy Wilder went on to make solo efforts that pushed film noir even further towards an unexpected edge. Brackett produced Niagara with Marilyn Monroe in 1953, and Wilder created Ace in the Hole (a.k.a. The Big Carnival) with Kirk Douglas in 1951. By a strange coincidence, unless it was synchronicity, just after writing the section of the tumultuous story having to do with their final noir masterpiece as collaborators, Sunset Boulevard, I happened upon a TCM broadcast of Wilder’s first independent effort after their break-up. I had seen Ace in the Hole several times previously; however, it had seldom resonated in quite the same way as it did while I was watching it from a retrospective point of view. So I sat back with a glass of wine and my notebook, prepared to venture once again into Billy’s post-Brackett domain. My instinctive initial response was even more severe than my first viewings had been.