Music

Gretchen Peters

The Redstone Room

Friday, September 6, 8 p.m.

Singer/songwriter/instrumentalist Gretchen Peters, in describing the origins of her professional success, is quoted as saying, "Until I found the guitar, I was interested in anything expressive. By then words were a friend, but music was a tall dark stranger that I've been in love with, or maybe stalking, ever since."

See? I told my lawyer there was no difference between love and stalking! But did he listen? No-o-o-o ... !

BLUE JASMINE

Woody Allen's new drama Blue Jasmine is modeled, both loosely and very specifically, on Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire, and if you're familiar with that stage classic - or, really, with Williams' oeuvre in general - you can correctly presume that the movie will not end on a note of cheer. Yet for the life of me, I couldn't convince my face of that, because Cate Blanchett's almost impossibly fine performance in the writer/director's latest left me smiling so contentedly you would've thought the screening came with an open bar and complimentary full-body massage. Catching up with me on the way out of the auditorium, a friend, regarding Blanchett's portrayal, said, "I think I'm gonna be high for a week." I'm pretty sure I vocalized my agreement but was feeling too high to be certain.

Music

Howie Day

The Redstone Room

Thursday, August 29, 7:30 p.m.

An award-winning, gold-certified recording artist will perform from his wide repertoire of originals and covers at the Redstone Room on August 29. That's a Thursday, but in honor of our area guest, let's just go ahead and call it Howieday.

ELYSIUM

In Neill Blomkamp's Elysium, the sophomore sci-fi effort from the writer/director of District 9, the Earth of 2154 is a poverty-infested hell-hole that the richest of humans have evacuated for the gleaming, rotating space habitat of the film's title. An orbiting gated community of luxury, privilege, and (from what we can tell) almost universally white people, it's the utopia that our hero, Matt Damon's steelworker Max, longs to escape to, particularly after a fatal dose of radiation limits his time left on Earth to five days. (Medical advances on Elysium have eradicated disease completely; after one cycle through a futuristic CAT-scan machine, even cancer cells are killed.) The unaddressed joke of Blomkamp's film, however, is that Elysium - with its sterile mansions and perfectly mowed lawns and vacuous non-entities sipping champagne from crystal flutes - looks like a dismally dull place to be compared to the lively, recognizably human Earth, even in its decimated state. What's less of a joke is that Elysium itself, once we land on the titular site in its last half hour, is also dismally dull - or at least, dishearteningly formulaic - compared to the Earth-set goings-on of the film's first 70 minutes.