Free movie stuff!

Sometimes the second shall be first. Case in point: the Summer Blockbuster Series, a lineup of action-adventure films between now and August. People who participate agree to attend on the day after the movies have opened, so they probably wouldn't be the most rabid fans. But there are perks.

Here's how it works: Moviegoers who sign up via Facebook (http://www.facebook.com/pages/2012-Summer-Blockbuster-Series/391167347582076) get together for lunch or dinner, depending on the time of the scheduled showing. They eat, get prizes, watch the screening and agree to post comments about the experience on Facebook. Everyone who went to the "Avengers" screening got an Avengers bag, poster and key chain. Promoters also gave away 18 tickets to the Comedy Zone and two fireworks bundles from Phantom Fireworks.

Another group will go to "Battleship" Saturday. The list of screenings then stretches on to "Men in Black III," "Total Recall," "Prometheus," "G.I. Joe: Retaliation," "The Amazing Spider-Man," "The Dark Knight Rises" and "The Bourne Legacy."

Two thoughts occur to me. First, "Battleship" is the only movie on this list -- "Avengers" included -- that isn't a prequel, spinoff, sequel or remake, and even "Battleship" is inspired (however loosely) by a board game. Hollywood has always suffered crises of originality, but this one seems especially acute.

Second, there are some movies that should be seen only if someone gives you a gift to make the event  worthwhile. I need no inducement to see "Dark Knight" and "Prometheus," but anyone who wants me to sit through a "G.I. Joe" sequel had better provide a non-cinematic incentive. A Rolex would be about right.

The middle class gets dumped on again (or "Dearth of a Salesman")

My wife and I were thinking of going to New York and seeing the Tony-nominated production of "Death of a Salesman," starring Philip Seymour Hoffman and Andrew Garfield. Luckily for us, premium tickets were still available for a Saturday matinee at $519.35 apiece, including the $119.85 processing fee. Hmmm...pay the June mortgage, or see "Death of a Salesman"....

Wait, let me say that again: There was a $119.85 processing fee per ticket. Was a courier going to buy a round-trip on a plane and bring the tickets to my house in person?

All the other seats were sold out. But here's the brutal part: Had we been able to buy seats at the back of the theater upstairs, they'd have been $99.45 each. I can get center orchestra seats at Belk Theater for a Saturday evening performance of a big musical, "La Cage Aux Folles," for less.

The really grating thing is that Arthur Miller's masterpiece reveals the shabbiness of lives devoted to making money. It's about a guy in the lower-middle class who chases the futile American dream of financial security, instead of finding out who he's meant to be. And all the Willy Lomans of the world, the people this play is about, haven't a hope in Hades of buying tickets to it.

I'm seldom grateful to live in Charlotte instead of New York, culturally speaking, but I am right now. I look at the upcoming "Edge of Our Bodies" at CAST and "Marvelous Wonderettes" at Actor's Theatre and the current "Putnam County" at Theatre Charlotte, and ALL the tickets are under $30. In fact, you can get balcony seats to the Broadway Lights tour of "La Cage" for $20, if you're on a tight budget. On a value-for-money scale, Charlotte comes out ahead.

I realize the cost of paying Broadway unions and film stars such as Hoffman and Garfield drives ticket prices higher. But when you price your cheapest tickets at $100 a pop, you're telling ordinary folks that you have no interest in sharing one of the great works of the American stage with them. That's a pretty sad thing to do.

'The Avengers:' The good is the enemy of the great

Some fans of "The Avengers" asked me why I gave it three stars on a scale of four, after I'd said that it did everything it set out to do within the confines of its genre. How could a cheeseburger movie not get 4 stars, if it's the best cheeseburger movie of its kind around -- or maybe ever made?

Fair question. After all, the populist voters on Internet Movie Data Base have rated it the 29th best film in the 120-year history of world cinema, last time I looked. They're thrilled because it met every one of their expectations for that genre. I was hugely entertained but not thrilled, because it didn't exceed any of mine.

To be great, a work of art has to take you somewhere you haven't been before. Maybe a chef introduces you to new combinations of flavors. Maybe a painter makes you see a common household object in a new way, as Cezanne does with his miraculous pears and apples. Maybe a composer, bound as they all are by the dozen notes of the musical scale, arranges those 12 in a way that creates new beauty or drama.

Sometimes a filmmaker pulls familiar pieces into a new pattern, as "Avengers" writer-director Joss Whedon did with Drew Goddard in their script for "The Cabin in the Woods." But if you start out with a template and do all you can to stick to it, element by element, greatness remains beyond you. Nobody ever became a master by coloring carefully within the lines.

Schoolteachers have ratings of "meets expectations" and "exceeds expectations." Sometimes a student wonders, after doing work better than anyone else in the class, why he didn't get the higher rating. A likely answer: He didn't live up to his potential, which was also higher than anyone else's in the class. He settled for the best that others could do, not the best HE could do. And "The Avengers" isn't the best Joss Whedon can do. 

I blew up the Charlotte Observer today

Metaphorically, of course, as I can't afford to retire until well after the mortgage is paid. But I went to www.shredyourstreet.com, typed in "600 south tryon street charlotte north carolina" and watched machines from outer space devastate my block. Luckily, they left the parking deck across the street alone, so I should be able to drive home. ("Eyewitnesses claim that the aliens seem to be alive and are making intelligent decisions," said a newsflash on the screen. Well, there you go.)

This site can apparently load aerial photos from any common street address. And if you're having a rough day at work, watching your office explode may provide vicarious satisfaction. (Note to any editors reading this: I enjoy every moment of my wonderful job.)

The publicity stunt promotes the movie "Battleship," which opens May 18. The film can use all the help it can get: Early reviews describe it as a mix between a "Transformers" rip-off and a propaganda film for the U.S. Navy, and even lenient voters at the Internet Movie Data Base have been lukewarm.

This reminded me of an old adage: The cleverer the promotion is for a picture with a bad smell hovering over it, the less good the movie is likely to be. Back in the days when studios still sent critics promotional gimmicks, I was happy to get the shipments but always doubtful that the film themselves would live up to the marketing. (A notable exception: the jewelry-box coffin, fangs and Hollywood-style blood makeup kit sent before the original "Buffy the Vampire Slayer," which was good.)

I have no take on "Battleship" yet myself, as I haven't seen it. And hey -- the first "Transformers" movie was pretty entertaining. But the fact that I'm having fun with it now makes me think I won't have fun with it later....

Shut your *&^@%! mouths, please

I am addressing two sets of dimwits who sat behind me this weekend at high-ticket cultural events. The first was the Charlotte Symphony Orchestra's KnightSounds concert at Knight Theater; the second was "Come Fly Away," the touring show in the Broadway Lights series at Belk Theater.

At KnightSounds, two guys chatted blithely during a quiet moment in the Ravel Piano Concerto, superbly played by Swiss pianist Louis Schwizgebel. At "Come Fly," two women giggled and commented during the Frank Sinatra numbers choreographed by Twyla Tharp. (Good thing they weren't in New Jersey, where talking loudly during Sinatra's songs can earn you a seat in a dumpster.)

Now, I understand that people -- especially people under 30 -- have grown up with the idea that you can talk through a public showing of a movie, because they have gotten used to talking over DVDs at home; they don't make any distinction between the two experiences. But there's more leeway for loud behavior in a movie theater, especially if we're watching "The Avengers" or "Cabin in the Woods," and it's a different kind of communal experience.

These people all looked to be in their 50s, which means they were presumably raised to keep quiet at plays and concerts. I don't mean cathedral-style quiet: Laughing or applauding and speaking briefly between movements makes perfectly good sense. When you hear a song you recognize, nobody should look at you squinty-eyed if you emit a big "Ahhhhh" of satisfaction.

But the point of music is to hear it. If you talk, you don't hear it. And I, who actually want to hear it, don't hear it either. Yet these folks looked owl-eyed with surprise to see me turn around with a finger to my lips and say politely -- really, it was politely -- "Please keep it down."

Part of the problem was probably alcohol: You get a free drink ticket with each ticket you buy to KnightSounds, and I have a feeling these two guys also cadged a couple from teetotaler friends. (I'm sure concertgoers love the free booze, but...that's another column.)

Most of the problem is our cultural sense of entitlement. "Do what I damn well please" seems to be the motto of many Americans in many walks of life these days: "I bought a $70 ticket to the Belk, and that gives me the right to flap my lips if I feel like it."

By the same token, I suppose it would also give me the right to move to the seat behind you, gently kicking your chair every 10 seconds until you erupted in volcanic rage. But I would never do that -- unless, of course, you simply wouldn't shut up.

What IS this "Thing" called love?

If you are a Charlottean of a certain age or a New Yorker of a certain cabaret sensibility, you may already know about the late Earl Wentz. If not, let me elucidate.

He was born in Charlotte in 1938, graduated from East Mecklenburg High School and stayed a North Carolinian through college (Queens, Wingate, UNC Charlotte) and beyond. He acted all over the state, especially with the Vagabond Players at Flat Rock Playhouse; there he once played Felix to the Oscar of the respected Pat Hingle in "The Odd Couple."

But his love of the Great American Songbook eventually sent him to New York, where classic compositions can always get a hearing. There he created the American Composer Series, which produced 15 revues devoted to Tin Pan Alley masters, and served as a church organist at John Street Methodist Church for 16 years. He died in Charlotte in the fall of 2009 at 71.

Like composers since the days of J.S. Bach, Wentz led a double life musically. He wrote serious works, including an hour-long requiem for four soloists, and music for secular venues, including an off-Broadway musical with gay themes, "The Marital Bliss of Francis and Maxine." And like the vast majority of composers since Bach, he labored in relatively obscurity and would be forgotten after death -- except for his surviving partner, Bill Watkins.

Watkins has issued a CD through Sixpence Inc. titled "What Is This Thing? Earl Wentz Plays Love Songs of Cole Porter." On it, the soloist embroiders themes from "Night and Day," "You Do Something to Me" and 10 other standards. (Go to www.sixpenceinc.com to learn more.) Tempos are gentle, rather than jaunty; the piano elaborations are delicate, rather than dazzling. Wentz maintains an uptempo groove all the way through a song just one time: This is the kind of discreet playing he might have done at the Fontainebleau Hotel in Miami, where he once worked.

Watkins plans to issue another three volumes of Wentz's Porter. Incredibly, he has also begun to catalog all of Wentx' musical and theatrical activities over a six-decade stretch at The Earl Wentz Project (www.earlwentz.com), which offers photos, playbill covers and an astonishing amount of detail. You could almost call Watkins' dedication to Wentz obsessive, but that's the way minor figures get into the history books -- and also one of the effects of this thing called love.

Steal this book! (And CD, and DVD....)

I speak metaphorically, of course: You’ll have to pay a price so small you may be embarrassed to take away so much material for so little dough. But the best media deal of the year is available this week in the Friends of the Library’s spring sale.

I have already gone twice: first on the preview night, when all the Friends get invitations – not to mention free baked goods and coffee, a heck of a bargain for a $25 membership – and again on Sunday, when the place was virtually empty except, for smiling volunteer staffers. I sneaked my sack of bargains upstairs, so my wife wouldn’t know the full scope of my self-indulgence, but they included these winners:

Relatively rare cast albums for “The Triumph of Love” and “The Cradle Will Rock” ($2 each); a pristine DVD copy of the director’s cut of “Blade Runner” ($3, and why didn’t I already have that?); the Library of America anthology of Raymond Chandler’s later mystery novels, stories and essays, which retails for $35 and cost a princely three bucks; the collected short stories of Somerset Maugham, beautifully bound in a slipcase ($8); a fistful of CDs ranging from 1940s western swing to the violin sonatas of Mozart ($2 each).

I am shameless enough to get up early on May 4 and drag myself down one last time for Bag Day, when you can fill a sack with anything it will hold for $5. But prices have already been slashed, and pickings grow slim, so you may want to get there earlier. The hours are 11 to 6 until then and 9 a.m. to noon on Saturday. (The sale is on the ground floor of CBRE SouthPark Towers at 6100 Fairview Road, at the corner of Fairview and Barclay Downs.)

It seems a little weird to pore over these castoffs from someone’s collection: CDs that were probably played once, DVDs that are still (in some cases) sealed; books whose spines haven’t been cracked and whose pages aren’t riffled, showing utter indifference in the readers. Were they unwanted gifts thrown aside? Impulse purchases instantly regretted?

Whatever they have may been to the people who didn’t want them, they’re treasures to me. The thrill of finding a long-sought, out-of-print novel I’ve wanted to read for years always gives me a frisson of delight. I found that word in the French-English dictionary that was going for a dollar – if it’s still where I left it. I’m not the only hoarder who can recognize a bargain in a city this big.