David Lindsay-AbaireRecensioni

More than a collection of the well-known childhood legends, "Rise of the Guardians" tells the story of a group of heroes - each with extraordinary abilities. When the evil Pitch lays down the gauntlet to take over the world, the immortal Guardians must join forces for the first time to protect the hopes, beliefs and imagination of children all over the world.

Adventure

Fantasy

D (Bad).

The Bogeyman wants to give children nightmares. The first two thirds are extremely mediocre, but with enough jokes to seem harmless. The last third is incoherent.

(Dec. 2023)½

Loved this play and would have like to go higher than 4 stars. Scene in the Dr's office is one of the best I have ever read. I'm going to go top 5. Great stuff.

Really good 1st and 2nd acts and decent ending. Hilarious dialogue. Love the stoner kid and the dad.

Incredibly funny. Loved reading this...

Didn't like this as much as Kimberly Akimbo, but still hilarious. Laughed out loud a few times. To be picky there were a couple of clunkers that surprised me and the ending was bit weak or I was too tired and trying to finish up the play before I went to sleep.

A gripping play about fortune, family, and luck in determining our circumstances. I highly recommend it.

As I add this to my list, I'm a bit shocked to realise I watched the movie recently without having any idea I'd seen the play in 2007. I can see that is partly because the movie could muck about the the play, but I rather suspect I must have slept through part of the play.

Redstitch is a tiny theatre, seating about 60 now, but back then maybe 30. One is practically part of the set, sitting in the audience. The cast is very decent about nodding off.

Niagara Falls is just like that.

About to direct this for the second time! Such great music!

Los guardianes son un grupo de superhéroes inmortales con extraordinarios poderes. Cuando un espíritu maligno llamado Sombra se propone inundar de miedo los corazones de los niños de todo el mundo, los Guardianes se unen por primera vez para plantarle cara y defender al mundo de su temido enemigo. (FILMAFFINITY)

This one is a little hard to rate. I have seen a production of this play, and I want to rate based on the book, since this is Library Thing, not The Play's the Thing. The trouble is, this one plays better than it reads, because the woman with the stroke and the man with the lisp are written out in stroke dialect and lisp dialect, and my brain gets tired. So I am trying to rate on the story rather than the ease of reading, and the story is...okay. Not great, not stupendous, sort of Hollywood, and sort of cop show. So, if that's the sort of thing you sit around waiting for all week, then this is a great play for you. For me? It's fine, it's a bit weird enough to hold the interest, but it will never be great.

Raw and powerful. No one responds the same to grief. There is no road map. There isn't even a guide on how to help someone through it. But with patience and love, we persevere.

Short stories are not my favorite literary flavor to begin with and I should have known better than to even try one. I got permanently stuck in the chapter without any punctuation marks. Could not finish this book.

If you found over a hundred grand in cash, would you keep it? What if it was stollen? And the dead gu's house where you found it is a theif? What would you do? "Good People" addressesx this conflict through the protagonists Tom and Anna, a middle class married couple struggling with debt, in this mind gripping novel.

I had heard so much praise for this stage play that I couldn't wait to read it. I was shocked at how cliched, stale, and bland this play was. There was not one unique element to this play. The dialog was not only boring but predictable, the characters were cardboard carictures, and the premise was unoriginal. With such a simple, commonly used premise the dialog and characters should've really stood out with fresh voices and actions, but "The Rabbit Hole" fell into cliche after cliche after cliche. I would say this is the worst play I ever read. I mention this play every time the pulitzer comes up in conversation (THAT won a pulitzer???). This was a shockingly bad stage play. Not even worth a whole star.½

Rabbit Hole is a play about a bereaved family, but it’s also just a play about family, about relationships, about life, and about all the tragedies and hopes it throws at us. It is so effective in its portrayal of grief and the process of grieving precisely because it does not present it in isolation, but as part of the awkward hotchpotch of the characters’ lives, informed and tempered by their past experiences and desires for the future. The play doesn’t have a strong dramatic arc, but the naturalistic presentation frames the scenes as a view into the characters ongoing lives. Just as the action is dominated by an event that happened several months before, it gives the impression that the character’s lives will continue after the curtain has fallen, and that allows the play to end on a cautiously optimistic note.

I really don’t understand how David Lindsay-Abaire won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Drama with this play. I just didn’t feel anything reading it. And I have read a lot of drama. Sarah Kane is one of my favorites. I also really like David Mamet, Ionesco, Shaw, and Eliot. This was the first thing that I have read by Lindsay-Abaire. I only heard about it because of the movie that is now out based on this play. I guess I should try something else by him and not judge him on one book. He is obviously very successful. But I just didn’t get this book. Two stars at best.

I own a copy of this? Ok.

Well, I really hate when this criticism is used -- I technically disapprove -- but, well: this seems like "student work". It just does. It works at the level of, this is a play and it shakes out an ending. Even a thematic thread, or at least something repeated often enough to appear to be a theme. And it plots a lot of characters sufficiently.

But the ingredients don't blend. They're like a kid "baking" in the kitchen. The actions and statements of all the people are random and strange, and that's not my preferred style of theater. There's a bit of willful freak-show ick factor, which is one of my least favorite devices in theater also. Some of the humor would be funny with benefit of actors, but some of it totally not. And I guess Gene is the main character, but he's so insignificant he barely even belongs there.

Also I have no clue whether we're seeing the wallpaper devil on stage or not. Did I miss a direction? I thought it was imaginary until it "stormed in" or whatever. I'd like to be clear on that, since Brad's unscrewing was the most interesting.

It's all right. I only read this while I was waiting for Chris to finish Mockingjay anyway.

Мо Фолкхарта, обладающего даром оживлять книжных персонажей, похищает банда зловещего правителя. Дочь героя вместе с подаренными друзьями голосом отца отправляется на выручку пленнику.

В ролях: Брендан Фрейзер, Сиенна Гиллори Элиза Беннетт, Ричард Стрэйндж, Пол Беттани, Хелен Миррен, Мэтт Кинг, Стив Спайрс, Джэми Формен, Стивен Грэхэм

Baseado no best-seller de Cornelia Funke.

Mortimer “Mo” Folchart (Brendan Fraser) e a sua filha de 12 anos, Meggie (Eliza Hope Bennett), partilham a paixão pelos livros. O que eles também partilham é o dom único de trazer as personagens dos livros para a vida quando lêem em voz alta. Mas há um perigo: por cada personagem trazida para a vida, uma pessoa a sério desaparece nas páginas do mesmo livro.
Numa das suas viagens a alfarrabistas, Mo ouve vozes que já não ouvia há anos, e quando descobre o livro de onde elas vêm, sente um arrepio pela espinha acima. É Inkheart, um livro recheado de ilustrações de castelos medievais e estranhas criaturas - um livro que ele andava à procura desde que Meggie tinha três anos de idade, quando a sua mãe, Resa (Sienna Guillory), desapareceu para o interior do seu místico mundo.
Mas o plano de Mo para usar o livro e resgatar Resa é posto em causa quando Capricorn (Andy Serkis), o diabólico vilão de Inkheart, rapta Meggie e exige a Mo que dê vida a outra personagem ficcional. Determinado a resgatar a filha e mandar as personagens de ficção para onde elas pertencem, Mo reune um variado grupo de aliados, reais e mágicos, e embarca numa viagem ousada e perigosa, para colocar todas as coisas no seu sítio.

This was well-written, but there's little more I can say about it. In the author's afterward, he notes that overacting or extra sentiment (beyond what's written in the stage directions) bring on the danger of this becoming a life-time movie. Well, I have to say--to me, this was simply an un-fleshed-out life-time movie. It's about grief. That's it. The characters act in the stereotypical way, say the stereotypical things, and do, basically, exactly what the audience expects. It would be fair to say this is true to life, I suppose, but it may just be too oddly normal to Be true to life.

In the end, this wasn't a play I would go to see, and it's not something I'll come back to. If you've gone through grief over a loved one, this might ring true, but it won't do much else. Unfortunately, I have to say that it's forgettable, and that while the author can write, I don't have a clue why this particular play won any notice. I wouldn't be averse to picking up some of his other work if it comes my way, but I won't go searching it out, and I'm afraid I can't recommend this one unless you just want a slice of realism that you can read quickly and move on from with little effect.

Fantasy