Review: Time matters, challenges you in Annie Baker’s ‘The Flick’ - San Francisco Chronicle

Review: Time matters, challenges you in Annie Baker’s ‘The Flick’ - San Francisco Chronicle


Review: Time matters, challenges you in Annie Baker’s ‘The Flick’ - San Francisco Chronicle

Posted: 30 Aug 2019 04:48 PM PDT

Justin Howard as Avery in Shotgun Players' "The Flick." Photo: Ben Krantz Studio, Shotgun Players

How much longer, you might wonder, would this play dare to spend on no more than a couple of movie house workers silently sweeping popcorn off the floor?

Longer than you think.

Yes, Sam (Chris Ginesi) and Avery (Justin Howard) really are going to sweep every single row of seats in real time, and that's after the time it takes newbie Avery to learn how to hold a broom as if it's a broom and not a shovel or a pump.

But roll with your impatience with Shotgun Players' "The Flick" for a few minutes. Annie Baker's sneak-attack play, the 2014 Pulitzer Prize winner, reveals those feelings as something else. It's your mind and body slowing down, sinking in, stretching out. That first exasperating, interminable scene is a palate cleanser, a coat check for your expectations, a portal to a new continuum: Baker time.

Justin Howard as Avery (left) and Ari Rampy as Rose in Shotgun Players' "The Flick." Photo: Ben Krantz Studio, Shotgun Players

Contemporary American theater's champion of deadbeats and underachievers, Baker makes symphonies out of marking time, finding beauty and dignity in banality and defeat. In the three hours of "The Flick," which opened Thursday, Aug. 29, at the Ashby Stage, three workers sweep and mop floors, change reels and challenge each other on movie trivia in a dingy movie house in Worcester County, Mass. Puke green, 1981 orange and a whole palette of muddy browns cake Randy Wong-Westbrooke's set design, which seems to crawl with a sticky patina of spilled concessions and sludgy mop water.

That's what's on the surface. What's really happening is the terror and the joy of coexisting, of different bodies and souls colliding, shoving their conflicting norms, assumptions and desires into one petri dish of a cinema and hoping that somehow they can eke out a fragile equilibrium, or maybe something more.

Justin Howard as Avery (left) and Chris Ginesi as Sam in Shotgun Players' "The Flick." Photo: Ben Krantz Studio, Shotgun Players

Under the thoughtful direction of Jon Tracy, any understanding or connection between the characters feels miraculous, like it barely escaped explosion or collapse. It's as if everyone's always afraid someone else will say, "Ha! I found you out! You're not really a human," while also being on the verge of accusing someone else of the same.

What if Avery offends with his ramrod refusal to join in a dance party or his casual disgust with Sam's basic taste in movies? What if the others tire of the way he barks out replies like an adolescent about to slam his bedroom door in his mom's face? Or what if Sam doesn't feel he's been paid sufficient respect for his veteran's knowledge of how to properly clean the soda fountain? Or what if he loses his tight grip on his behavior around Rose (Ari Rampy)?

Justin Howard as Avery (left) and Ari Rampy as Rose in Shotgun Players' "The Flick." Photo: Ben Krantz Studio, Shotgun Players

What if Rose, who can't walk through a door without doing a series of pelvic thrusts or flicking her tongue as if she's pleasuring a woman, injects so much energy into the room that everyone loses it? What if her overflowing self-interest thinly disguised as proletariat class consciousness sucks everyone else dry?

Each moment is a dodged bullet, but one that breeds only another near-death. Each actor's performance seems to expand the finely drawn script, living in it comfortably, breathing open its series of feints, backhands, aborted gambits, stalls for time.

Ari Rampy as Rose (left) and Chris Ginesi as Sam in Shotgun Players' "The Flick." Photo: Ben Krantz Studio, Shotgun Players

Still, Ginesi is a standout. His hulking silence can be a clumsy come-on or he-man defenses. It can be skull-draining confusion or healthy self-regard. When his Sam tries out a fancy turn of phrase, Ginesi plays it off like it's no big deal. When Sam offers a profoundly not-profound line, Ginesi plays it as if Sam is offering his scene partner the perfect gift, as if he's tacitly adding, "It's no trouble. I'm Sam, after all." And when Sam finally makes a love confession, it's both forced out as if at gunpoint and bequeathed as a dying man's last gift.

Chris Ginesi as Sam (left) and Ari Rampy as Rose in Shotgun Players' "The Flick." Photo: Ben Krantz Studio, Shotgun Players

"The Flick" asserts that the time you spend in dead-end jobs, where no one hurries and it would be absurd to hurry, still matters, and not because you build character or learn valuable life lessons or make lifelong friends or anything cheesy like that. It says that time matters simply because you were there and you tried, because you held out something honest and pure for someone else.

N "The Flick": Written by Annie Baker. Directed by Jon Tracy. Through Sept. 22. Three hours. $7-$40. Ashby Stage, 1901 Ashby Ave., Berkeley. 510-641-8500. www.shotgunplayers.org

  • Lily Janiak
    Lily Janiak Lily Janiak is The San Francisco Chronicle's theater critic. Email: ljaniak@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @LilyJaniak

Netflix will release 10 fall films in theaters before their streaming debuts - The Verge

Posted: 27 Aug 2019 02:49 PM PDT

After months-long negotiations between Netflix and major theater chains, Martin Scorsese's The Irishman, starring Robert De Niro and Al Pacino, will get a November 1st theatrical debut before coming to Netflix on November 27th.

The film is just one of the latest to highlight the ongoing struggle between Netflix and the traditional film industry, as theater chains like AMC and Regal insist on a 90-day period of exclusivity before movies go to home streaming services. Theaters, which want to attract audiences for as long as possible before they have the option to stream movies at home, are at odds with services like Netflix, which prioritizes using its new content to keep and attract new subscribers.

At the same time, Netflix has been actively seeking awards recognition and the prestige and free publicity that come with high-profile award-winners. Streaming companies' bid for awards concerns traditionalists like director Steven Spielberg, who has said all Netflix's releases are "TV movies" and has suggested they should be ineligible for awards like Oscars. The attempt to put Netflix movies in theaters has been another part of the bid for awards, since film awards typically require a theatrical run for their candidates. Earlier this year, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences shot down a suggestion that the Oscar eligibility rules should be changed to make it harder for streaming movies to win awards.

Netflix is planning 10 fall movies with exclusive theatrical release windows ahead of their online release for subscribers. The list includes Steven Soderbergh's The Laundromat, which will premiere September 7th in theaters before making its way to the streaming service on October 18th, and Noah Baumbach's Marriage Story, which will be in theaters exclusively for a month on November 6th before hitting Netflix on December 6th.

For comparison, Netflix released just four films in theaters in 2018: Bird Box, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, Mowgli, and the Academy Award-winning Roma. In order to qualify for the Oscars, films must run for at least seven days in an LA county theater. With The Irishman being a strong Oscars contender, it's in Netflix's best interest to play by the rules (at least for a few weeks) if it wants to be known for a service that can pull in high-profile directors and award-winning films.

Here's a full list of Netflix's upcoming theatrical film releases:

  • The Laundromat​
    Sept. 27th (theatrical), Oct. 18th (Netflix)
  • Dolemite Is My Name
    Oct. 4th (theatrical); Oct. 25th (Netflix)
  • The King
    Oct. 11th (theatrical); Nov. 1st (Netflix)
  • The Irishman​
    Nov. 1st (theatrical); Nov. 27th (Netflix)
  • Earthquake Bird
    Nov. 1st (theatrical); Nov. 15th (Netflix)
  • Marriage Story
    Nov. 6th (theatrical); Dec. 6th (Netflix)
  • Klaus​
    Nov. 8th (theatrical); Nov. 15th (Netflix)
  • I Lost My Body
    Nov. 15th (theatrical); Nov. 29th (Netflix)
  • Atlantics
    Nov. 15th (theatrical); Nov. 29th (Netflix)
  • The Two Popes
    Nov. 27th (theatrical); Dec. 20th (Netflix)

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