Author: Mary Beth

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The Promise

In theaters.

I'm a sucker for Chinese martial arts fantasies, the sort of movies in which warriors fly the air, so courageous and passionate that even the laws of physics can't bind them to the ground. The previews for The Promise made me smile with anticipation. Gorgeous costumes, dance-like battles, mythic stories, and a tragic woman escaping from a birdcage — what's not to love?

A lot, as it turns out. The Promise is no feast for the eyes; it's cheap fast food: synthetic, flavorless and dull.

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Liebeslieder Waltzer, The Red Violin, and Evenfall

The New York City Ballet on Saturday, May 20.

As much as I enjoy story ballets, there's something to be said for dance unhindered by narrative or melodrama, dance for the sake of dance, and on Saturday evening, the New York City Ballet showcased that kind of neoclassical dance beautifully.

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Great Composers of the Renaissance

Voices of Ascension on Thursday, May 18.

Good choral blend is difficult to describe and even more difficult to develop, but the Voices of Ascension have it. Under the direction of Dennis Keene, each talented singer adopts the same warm, full tone. Singling out an individual voice would be impossible; the choir has but a single voice. For a few moments, the singers are one instrument.

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The Penelopiad

By Margaret Atwood. Published in 2005.

Some parents worry about whether reading the original Grimm fairy tales to children is appropriate. My mother was not one of those people. In fact, she went a step further: She read Greek myths to my younger brother and me. Greek myths match Grimm's violence and add sex for good measure. We grew up on stories of young women fleeing lustful gods, children cut down to punish their irreverent parents, and unfortunate mortals turned into bears, stags and trees by vengeful deities — and we loved it.

I always gravitated to the myths and legends about strong women, so Penelope, wife of Odysseus, both impressed and frustrated me. Penelope stood up to the legion of suitors who sought to win her hand — and her throne — in her husband's long absence following the Trojan War. She put them off with clever deceptions and sheer will, but Odysseus simply didn't seem worth the trouble to me. He was unfaithful, selfish and smug, and I felt quite sure that wise, loyal Penelope could do better.

Margaret Atwood seems to have similarly mixed feelings about Penelope, whose story she retells in The Penelopiad.

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Ninotchka

On DVD. 

The tagline for Ninotchka, released in 1939, was simply "Garbo laughs!" That's all they needed to sell the movie: the novelty of the solemn dramatic actress in a comedy. Even today, the famous scene in which Greta Garbo's stern character finally breaks down is incandescent. She doesn't giggle in a ladylike manner. She howls, her body bent double, her eyes squeezed shut, her hand pounding the table in appreciation. I don't know how anyone could watch that scene and not laugh along with her.

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Kindred

By Octavia Butler. Published in 1979. 

When writer Octavia Butler died a few months ago, her obituaries intrigued me. They described how she used science fiction to discuss individuality and conformity, outsiders and insiders, history, identity, and humanity — all from her nearly unique perspective in the genre as a black woman. This, I thought, was writing I wanted to experience.

Other people must have had the same thought because the library had a waiting list for Kindred, Butler's best-known book. It was worth the wait. Kindred is a perfect example of the best kind of science fiction: The fantastical traits of the genre are not themselves the point but simply a way to get at genuine truths from a perspective realism couldn't achieve.

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Mission: Impossible III

In theaters. 

If Mission: Impossible III had come out two years ago, before couch jumping entered the national lexicon, would it have been a different movie? Would I still have rolled my eyes when Tom Cruise screwed up his face in faux determination? Would the opening-night audience with which I saw the flick still have tittered when he ostentatiously proclaimed his love for a naive, girlish brunette? Would the movie still have felt slick but overwhelmingly silly, the story not of a superspy but of a superstar playacting at espionage?

Cruise’s primary strength as an actor has always been his charisma, and his shenanigans of late have damaged that critical attribute. If he fails to convince us of his sincerity and sanity when he's just being himself, how can he hope to do so when he's playing characters on the big screen?

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The Lady Eve

On DVD.

I never know what to make of Preston Sturges. Wildly successful as a writer-director back in the 1940s, Sturges made a number of classic screwball comedies and is still considered one of America's great film directors. Everyone is supposed to love Sturges, and I just don't get him.

When I saw The Miracle of Morgan's Creek — a ribald middle finger to the puritanical Hayes Code — I sat dumbly through the pratfalls and outrageous antics. I considered Sullivan's Travels — Sturges' light-footed justification of his preference for comedies over "important" films — to be scattered and overlong. And now The Lady Eve, his absurdist take on the battle of the sexes, just alienated me. I didn't laugh much and spent the majority of the movie with my brow furrowed, trying to figure out how I was supposed to feel about what was happening on screen.

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Veronica Mars

Season one on DVD. (Season two in progress on UPN, Tuesdays at 9 p.m.)

For a teen drama — hell, for any kind of network TV show — the premise of Veronica Mars is brutal. As Veronica, the protagonist, explains in the pilot, the past year of her life has been an unhappy one. Her boyfriend, Duncan Kane, dumped her without warning or explanation — painful, certainly, but nothing out of the ordinary. But then Lilly Kane, her best friend and Duncan's sister, was murdered; her father, Sheriff Keith Mars, made the politically reckless move of accusing the Kanes' powerful, wealthy father of the crime; Veronica's former friends and fellow students cut her dead for supporting her father; the outraged town voted Sheriff Mars out of office in a special election; with Keith unemployed and scrounging for work as a detective, the Marses lost their house and moved to a dingy apartment; unable to cope with the changes, Lianne, Veronica's alcoholic mother, abandoned the struggling family without leaving a forwarding address; and just to make the year complete, Veronica woke from a party she had crashed to find that she had been drugged and raped. So as the show opens, Veronica is the high school pariah, helping her father make ends meet by assisting him in detective work and secretly investigating Lilly's murder in her spare time. She's a lonely, angry girl, but she has goals.

Going through that list, I'm once again shocked by how dark the show's backstory is. When Veronica Mars first premiered in 2004, I chose not to watch it because I thought the drama would either be unrelentingly bleak or, more likely, would betray the weight of its subject matter. But Veronica Mars received great reviews, and its small but devoted group of fans included a few of my friends, so when the first season came out on DVD, I decided to give it a shot.