"Fifty Shades of Grey" -- an inspiration to us all

Movie parodies appear nowadays as soon as trailers hit the Internet, sometimes even as soon as a film gets announced. But I have never seen people react as quickly and savagely as they have for "Fifty Shades of Grey," a picture that has triggered innumerable mashups and knockoffs. The one starring Steve Buscemi seems to have gotten ahead of the pack:

Or perhaps you'd prefer "Fifty Shades of Frozen:"



Or the take by Ellen DeGeneres, who does a lot of fake trailers for films:




There's also a short film called "Fifty Shades of Grey Gardens," in which Christian Grey tries to evict Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis' relatives from a decrepit mansion on "Long Island." I'm still waiting for "Fifty Shades of The Grey," in which man-eating wolves chase the young lovers around until Liam Neeson saves them (thanks to my friend Matt Brunson for that idea) and "Fifty Shades of Gru," in which the hero of "Despicable Me" -- who is rich, domineering and generous, after all -- ties up female Minions and has his way with them. Or do Minions even have a gender?

The original movie, which opens today nationwide, is a turgid story of dominance and submission that doesn't raise the erotic temperature in the theater one degree. But anything that inspires wit in others, however witless it may be itself, can't be all bad.

Former Charlotte actor MacLachlan pays movie dues

If you want to find someone who's having a typical Hollywood career outside the star circuit, consider Angus MacLachlan. The UNC School of the Arts graduate, who acted for Charlotte Repertory Theatre in the late '80s and early '90s, shot a short film called "Tater Tomater" in 1990.

He kept acting and writing plays, but filmmaking called. He wrote the script for "Junebug," which introduced Amy Adams to fans 10 years ago and earned her the first of five Oscar nominations. Five years later, another script ("Stone") finally got made. Three years after that, he wrote the screenplay for the Norwegian psychological drama "Förtroligheten."

Finally, he made his writing-directing debut with "Goodbye To All That," which broke out at last year's Tribeca International Film Festival in April. Paul Schneider won the fest's prize as best actor by playing a man whose wife (Melanie Lynskey) startles him with her announcement that she wants a divorce; he embarks on ill-advised encounters with women his age (late 30s) and younger, while trying to keep the respect of his young daughter. Here's Angus (right) with fellow director Justin Weinstein at Tribeca:

The supporting cast included Heather Graham, Heather Lawless and Anna Camp. But in a crowded marketplace of first-run theaters, "Goodbye" more or less disappeared. IFC films gave it a limited release in late December; it hasn't played Charlotte theatrically, because the Regal and AMC chains (which own almost all the theaters here) prefer not to show films that have a simultaneous release on DVD or video, as this one did.

"So far we have about 15 markets," MacLachlan wrote me last month. "We've done NYC, L.A., Pittsburgh, Sante Fe, Winston-Salem" -- where he lives and shot the movie -- "and other odd, obscure ones: Coral Gables, Fla., Waynesville, N.C. Go figure.

"It is on all other platforms, and I think that's the way small indies are going. No one can make any money off of theatrical. It feels like in 4-5 years, this size film won't get any theatrical release at all."

By "all other platforms," he means Video on Demand, iTunes, Amazon and the usual suspects. And if he's right about his prognosis, 2020 will be a sad time in movie distribution. There should always be room for a heartfelt, gentle film about a person you or I might know -- or even be -- who's struggling to hit one of life's curveballs. We can't spend our entire entertainment-based lives watching aliens and sorcerers and teen boys or girls coming of age with mighty feats.

Or can we? More and more, movie distributors seem to think we can. 

Elvis, Gandhi and 'Star Trek'

I've been buried with work over the last two weeks, or I'd have taken time to notice three crucial January anniversaries.

First, Elvis Presley was born 80 years ago this month on January 8. Say what you want about his borrowings from black singers, country music and gospel: He remains one of the greatest entertainers of the last 100 years. As proof, here's an excerpt from "Jailhouse Rock:"




The ninth of January marked Pravasi Bharatiya Divas (Nonresident Indian Day), which commemorates the contribution of the overseas Indian community to the development of India. It celebrates the return of Mahatma Gandhi from South Africa to Bombay 100 years ago. Without his ideas about nonviolent protest, the life of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. might have been very different. We might not be wondering today if "Selma" was going to win an Oscar, because the march in that troubled Alabama town might have taken a very different turn.

And the third? The pilot episode of "Star Trek" -- "The Cage" -- was completed 50 years ago last Friday, with a very different leader of the Enterprise: Captain Pike, played by Jeffrey Hunter. NBC executives reportedly dismissed it as too slow and cerebral; the series debuted in 1966 with William Shatner commanding the ship as James T. Kirk, and this episode wasn't seen for two decades. Only Leonard Nimoy (as a more animated Spock than we came to know) and Majel Barrett made it to the series; she played "Number One" in the pilot under her real name, M. Leigh Hudec, but is best known as Nurse Christine Chapel to "Star Trek" fans. Here's the long-buried pilot in its entirety:

My favorite video of the year

The second half of this video provides the four most enjoyable minutes of watching I had in 2014. (Though the comic buildup helps make the piece, so I recommend the whole thing.) I don't know whether I was more amazed that someone could think this up or that they could execute it. Au revoir until 2015....

'The Interview:' The faceless cowards win

There's an emotionally stunted kid in every high school who thinks about calling in a bomb threat or pulling the fire alarm, then sitting in the bushes sniggering as people scurry out of the building. My high school had one, and I thought of him when I heard hackers had threatened Sony Pictures and theater owners if "The Interview" opened as scheduled on Christmas Day.

It never looked like a masterpiece to me, but it might have been funny. Here's the trailer:

As you see, it's about a tabloid show host and producer invited to meet North Korean dictator Kim Jong-Un, then assigned by the CIA to assassinate him. The announcement of its release prompted hackers to interfere with Sony's business affairs (including private internal communications) and threaten violence against movie chains that dared to show it. The film has been pulled everywhere, though I expect it to come out on DVD someday. That's where it would have made most of its money anyhow.

Commentators have correctly pointed out that a movie suggesting the death of a real person is in bad taste, even when he's a brutal swine. They've also mulled over the possibility that threats of real-world attacks were hot air (likely) and that further provocation of the still-unidentified hackers isn't worth the trouble (also likely, especially if the Chinese assisted the North Koreans).

Folks have also discussed whether this backing down by Sony will start a trend. Will ISIS threaten the same kind of reprisal if a movie makes the bad guys Islamic extremists? Probably not, unless someone declares open season on the prophet Muhammad -- we've seen that scenario play out in murder in Europe -- or ruthlessly mocks the Qu'ran. I'll be curious to see whether this incident triggers other kinds of reprisals, such as homophobic assaults on movies with gay themes.

Before the Internet, when bile was harder to spew anonymously and widely, people protested pictures in person. For example, the Catholic Church disapproved of the 1991 movie "The Pope Must Die," a comedy with no real people in it: A foolish priest was elected pope by mistake, arousing the ire of the Mafia and other villains. So church officials asked Catholics not to see it, to write letters of complaint, etc. Those protesters wanted demonstrations, not detonations.

Now the faceless cowards of the world call in their threats and hide in the bushes, laughing. We can't suspend them from school -- or from the Internet, for that matter -- so all we can do is weigh each menace and respond accordingly. No satisfactory solution has presented itself, and I don't think one will.

Goya in Boston: An unmissable exhibit

Before I heard anything more than the words "Francisco Goya" and "Museum of Fine Arts Boston," I knew where I'd be taking a mini-vacation this fall. Here's the scoop:



Goya remains unique in the history of western art. Over his 82-year-life, he evolved from rigorously formal paintings of the Spanish court to what could be considered the first "modern" art, surreal pieces that step out of time and come from some dark psychic place most of us don't dare go.

His brush gave us handsome princes and wizened witches, nabobs and nightmares, deeply religious pieces and savage attacks on corrupt clergy. This show has them all in 170 works culled from his six-decade career. (It represents about one-tenth of his output.) Yet at the end of the exhibit, you come upon a beautiful piece in which a physician comforts the aged Goya -- bringing him back from death, in the painter's estimation -- and you realize he never lost his ability to invoke optimism and hope.

You'd have to go to the Prado in Madrid to see most of the large paintings for which he's famous. But the curators for this show, reputedly the biggest Goya retrospective in America since the 1980s, have done an extraordinary job of revealing the whole man. They've grouped galleries according to topics (portraiture, sport, etc.) rather than chronology, so we can see how Goya thought and rethought about ideas. The show includes paintings, etchings and especially drawings, where he did some of his most unsettling work. Here's a famous example, "The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters:"

Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes lived from 1746 to 1828. That span was marked by wars: The fight for American independence, the French Revolution and Napoleon's two attempts at conquest. In Spain, the latter took the form of the Peninsular War of 1808-14, when Napoleon installed his brother Joseph as king of Goya's native land.

Goya painted war like no one before him. A small drawing in the show depicts severed body parts hung on a tree like trophies, and no one until Civil War photographer Mathew Brady would make the battlefield seem so terrible. War was another form of "unreason," and Goya -- the greatest painter of the Age of Enlightenment -- spent his career attacking ignorance in politics, religion, social roles and the court.

If I had to take the collected works of one artist to a hermitage to study until I died, I'm not sure whom it would be. But if I took three, I know Goya would be one of them, and I would find something new every time I contemplated him.

Symphony Hall: Music like I've never heard it

I heard the Boston Symphony Orchestra for the first time Saturday night, and my ears are still tingling.

Guest conductor Leonidas Kavakos led a program of Bartok, Haydn and Mussorgsky. He used the broadest tempos for "Pictures at An Exhibition" I've ever experienced, luxuriating especially in the massive brass chords. And though I've listened to that piece live and in recordings dozens of times, I really heard it for the first time.

Yes, having so many musicians onstage made a difference, especially when they're all first-rate. But the special difference was Symphony Hall. The program notes rate it as one of the three best halls acoustically in the world, along with the Musikverein in Vienna and Concertgebouw in Amsterdam. I haven't been to either, but it could be so: Every note, from low grumblings in the violins to the high whine of the oboe, came across with perfect clarity and projection. Here's a look at the hall in transition from a Boston Symphony to a Boston Pops set-up:



That's the sound you get when you build a hall specifically for an orchestra, which Boston did in 1900. As the program says, "The walls of the stage slope inward to help focus the sound. The side balconies are shallow, so as not to trap any of the sound, and though the rear balconies are deeper, sound is properly reflected from the back walls. The recesses of the coffered ceiling help distribute sound, as do the statue-filled niches along the three sides."

Contrast that with the Belk Theater, which has 500 fewer seats (2097 to 2625), is shorter front to back and has three tiers above the orchestra, not two. The overhang in the Belk is much closer to the stage, and the seats under it get diminished sound even during the best of mixes. The Belk's a fine all-purpose hall, useful for opera and dance and Broadway tours as well as symphony concerts, but it's not designed for one purpose alone.

Lest you think only the Boston Symphony can shine in Symphony Hall, check out this video of the University of Massachusetts Marching Band in the same venue:



Charlotte won't build another concert hall in my time at The Observer, maybe even my lifetime. So I'll have to fly to Amsterdam, Vienna or Boston to get a bead on the perfect sound.

P.S. Unlike the organ pipes in the Belk, which are as handsome and useless as a chiseled eunuch in a harem, the ones at Symphony Hall are actually connected to an organ console.