Profile: Max Sparber
Public information
- URL
- http://sparberfans.blogspot.com/
- Bio
Max Sparber is a writer and editor in Minneapolis. He is also the editor of the Talk section of Secrets of the City.
History
- Member for
- 1 year 2 weeks
Recently written
Endgame
Like all of Samuel Beckett's plays, Endgame, now being produced by the Ten Thousand Things company, is an odd piece. The author tended to write claustrophobic plays in which a few people bother each other over and over again; the most famous of these is, of course, Waiting for Godot, in which two bored men spend the entire play waiting for the titular character, who (spoiler alert!) never arrives.
Romeo and Juliet
It's hard to figure out how many times Romeo and Juliet have died onstage. The plays is four hundred and some odd years old, and one of Shakespeare's most popular, even when the playwright was alive. And so it is that his star-cross'd juvenile lovers get trotted out with great frequency, to sweet talk each other on a balcony and then protractedly dispatch themselves in the Capulet crypt. I suspect more Romeos and Juliets have died onstage than any two other characters in history, with their equally doomed friends and kinsmen Mercutio and Tybalt coming in close behind.
Fanboys
For some reason, it's very hard to represent nerds onscreen. Movies keep trying it, but, for whatever reason, they seem to end up with endless variations of the characters from Revenge of the Nerds, with their thick glasses, pocket protectors, questionable hygiene, and adenoidal voices.
Fired Up
Fired Up shouldn't be worth a damn, and, for the most part, it isn't. The film, after all, details the adventures of two smug, smartass high school jocks sneaking into a cheerleading camp in order to bed as many cheerleaders as they can. The leads, played by Eric Christian Olsen and Nicholas D'Agosto, aren't characters so much as walking punchlines machines, and are really only distinguished by the fact that Olsen, who mugs a lot, is quite a bit more unsufferable than D'Agosto, who has a Beatles haircut and spends a lot of time looking soulful.
Coraline
This is a good time for animation -- maybe one of the best ever. Just look at some of the films that have been made in the past few years, such as Pixar's Wall-E and Howl's Moving Castle from Studio Ghibli. Even a lot of the mediocre fare is great fun, such as the Shrek films, which might not be great art but know their way around pointed satire and clever parody. Heck, even television animation, such as Robot Chicken, is about as smart and as funny as you could hope television might be.
