FRIDAY 11/25
Victor Chernyshov
Roman returns to his old bowing grounds.
Mark Kitaoka
Paz as the future princess.
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Comedy: Not-So-Black Friday
In a career lately revived by his popular WTF With Marc Maron podcasts (and Twitter, which he uses avidly), comedian Marc Maron has gradually turned away from the dark side. His jokes have grown less caustic and more humanist. Indeed, he sounds downright reflective when reached by phone at a Los Angeles Costco—a retail excursion that dovetails with today's Black Friday shopping day following Thanksgiving. "As a culture," he says, "there's always something to be thankful for. In the midst of all the pain and chaos and insecurity and despair, sit down and make a list of what you're grateful for, and it will protect you from complete despair and cynicism. Sometimes you just have to dig for it a little bit. I'm very excited right now that I was able to go to Costco and buy a seven-pack of nicotine lozenges for about half the price I would pay elsewhere. I'm grateful for my health. I'm grateful that the country hasn't fallen into some sort of insane, chaotic Road Warrior situation. Yet." But do we take the holiday for granted? Should there instead be a National Day of Ingratitude for Americans to celebrate? Maron replies, "Aren't they already? Isn't entitlement a certain kind of ingratitude? Isn't every day Ungrateful Day in America? Because everybody feels they deserve to have what is completely out of their reach? Because they actually feel they're on the path to the 1 percent?" And of those in the bottom 99 percent, at Occupy Seattle and elsewhere, he notes, "Obviously, the roots of Thanksgiving are dubious, if you want to think about it on a Howard Zinn level. You're just basically celebrating the complete genocide or colonization of America. And that colonizing and the aggressive disenfranchising of the underclass still happens. It didn't stop with the Indians." Told how Issaquah-based Costco just got its Initiative 1183 approved, Maron sees a pattern: "Another example of how democracy works. People with the money can pay for their own initiatives. And it's a nice healthy outlet for those who are disenfranchised into the exurbs and underwater on their mortgages. Now they can be underwater with booze from Costco." The Neptune, 1303 N.E. 45th St., 877-784-4849, stgpresents.org. $19. 9 p.m. BRIAN MILLER
Film: Five Little Indians
Though Jeanne Moreau is top-billed in The Bride Wore Black (1968), it takes a good 15 minutes to figure out who the hell the film is about. Two douchey bachelors, one about to wed, discuss their various female conquests the way hunters compare trophy animals. Then there's the wedding, which Moreau's enigmatic Julie crashes, and where the new husband experiences an abrupt change in marital fortune. Adapting the crime novel by Cornell Woolrich, François Truffaut proceeds through two murders before, in flashback, Julie's exact mission is explained. Her five targets grant Moreau a chance to play five different roles, since each is an imposter seeking to get close to the intended. She is by turns a schoolteacher, a tramp, an artist's model, and so forth. You can't say that Bride is a particularly personal film for Truffaut (or Moreau), but each chapter offers the chance to savor how each successive d-bag is lured and skewered, as it were, by an instrument of vengeance. At more than four decades' distance, Bride satisfies by siding so firmly with Julie against these self-satisfied playboys (politician, artist, mobster, etc.). It's very much a '60s film, but French male sexism is obviously more entrenched, and unchanging, than the so-called sexual revolution. Julie is, in a way, an avatar of true love, a wronged woman determined to do right—but by killing for the sake of honor in a corrupt new world. (Through Thurs.) Northwest Film Forum, 1515 12th Ave., 329-1193, nwfilmforum.org. $6–$9. 7 & 9:15 p.m. BRIAN MILLER
Stage: A Victorian Update?
With two big new biographies just published on Charles Dickens, one wonders how ACT's annual holiday staple, A Christmas Carol, might be written in 2011 instead of 1843. Victorian England was a grim place, with the Industrial Revolution creating a grossly stratified society not so different from our economic inequality today. Marley's ghost, for instance, returns from the grave to warn against the mistreatment of workers being so cruelly exploited by nascent capitalism. In today's terms, this would be like receiving regretful e-mails from the late Steve Jobs, instructing Apple to raise the salaries and cut the hours at the Foxconn plant in Shenzhen. (Maybe it would take Mike Daisey to write that particular update on the novel.) Ebenezer Scrooge, who's taken on a Christmas tour by his old business partner, would be analogous to someone like Rupert Murdoch—a wrinkly old miser who, in the face of a phone-hacking scandal, must suddenly reconsider his ways. The poor clerk Bob Cratchit, an office drone who can't afford food or coal to support his family, is something like the former WaMu underling whose bosses walked away with millions before the subprime mortgage catastrophe took down the bank and the entire American economy. Cratchit today would be camped out with Occupy Wall Street, huddled in the rain beneath a blue tarp or living in his car. And what of lame, pathetic Tiny Tim, whose love and optimism imbue Scrooge with Christmas spirit? Today, of course, we couldn't use the term "cripple," nor has Justin Bieber developed a limp. Instead we have to look to the tech sector for a disabled, possibly doomed figure of such pathos: Who doesn't weep a tear for the tiny, orphaned Zune? (Through Dec. 24.) ACT Theatre, 700 Union St., 292-7676, acttheatre.org. $32–$42. 7 p.m. BRIAN MILLER
