Tag: The Orpheum

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Biggest Winner

The Biggest Loser reality TV star and weight-loss guru Jillian Michaels hasn’t always been the fit and confident woman she is today.

“I struggled with my weight as a kid. My dad had weight issues, and it was a family dynamic,” Michaels says. “My parents got divorced, and I went through some stuff as a kid. I utilized food to cope with all of it. My mom got me into martial arts when I was 12, and I learned when I felt strong physically that I felt empowered in other facets of my life.”

Michaels has turned her experience of self-empowerment into a successful career helping others do the same. She’ll be at the Orpheum on Friday, March 14th, delivering a motivational talk as part of her national “Maximize Your Life” tour. Rather than just going over weight-loss tips, Michaels says she’ll be teaching people to believe in themselves and build confidence.

“Expect to be inspired, informed, and empowered, but also expect to do some work. Expect to examine your life, look inside, and ask the hard questions. If we don’t do that, ultimately we’re not going to be able to take responsibility and turn things around,” Michaels says.

On The Biggest Loser, Michaels has been an inspiration to overweight contestants who’ve gotten into shape on the show, but she warns that efforts to lose weight can go awry if self-esteem issues aren’t resolved. Case in point: Biggest Loser champion Rachel Frederickson, whose 155-pound loss this past season made tabloid headlines when critics surmised that her now-bony frame was too thin. Michaels agrees.

“I think she was too thin. Any issues with food, be it losing too much weight or gaining too much weight, are all related and connected. It tells me that Rachel’s journey is far from over,” Michaels says. “Where the show failed her is significant, and it’s something that we will be addressing.”

Jillian Michaels’ “Maximize Your Life” at The Orpheum, Friday, March 14th, 8 p.m. $25-$160. orpheum-memphis.com

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We Recommend We Recommend

Good Catch

Frank Abagnale Jr. has been many things in his 64 years on planet Earth. The infamous criminal turned FBI consultant has traveled as a commercial airline pilot and filled in as a physician. He was a confidence man, prisoner, escape artist, author, and notorious check forger. In 2002, the shape-shifting Abagnale added one more line to his long, weird resume: He became a movie character when Leonardo DiCaprio played him in Steven Spielberg’s Catch Me If You Can. He became a character in a Broadway musical in 2011 when the creative team behind Hairspray (minus John Waters) first opened the campy stage adaptation that’s landing at the Orpheum Tuesday, October 16th.  

Musicals need larger-than-life characters, and Abagnale, who turned to crime when he was only 16, fits the bill. In 1967, at the age of 19, he forged Harvard credentials, passed the Louisiana bar exam, and took a job in the attorney general’s office. He flew over 1 million miles masquerading as a pilot for Pan American World Airways. When he wasn’t traveling around on Pan Am’s dime or running away from the FBI, Abagnale moonlighted as a pediatrician.

The musical Catch Me If You Can has Mad Men appeal. It promises “more curves than a Playboy bunny” and doubles as a tribute to prime-time burlesque and the golden age of variety TV, when Dean Martin’s tipsy antics were masked by a chorus of lovely dancing girls in revealing outfits.

“Catch Me If You Can” is at The Orpheum October 16th-21st. orpheum-memphis.com

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Film Features Film/TV

Linked horror classics double-date at the Orpheum.

As part of its summer movie series, the Orpheum has put together a dream double bill for Friday, July 13th: Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960), followed by Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980). Aside from the macabre appropriateness of the screening date, what else might two of the strongest films by two of the greatest directors in film history have to say to each other?

Kubrick’s affection for Hitchcock was well known, and there are several thematic similarities between Psycho and The Shining. Both films are literary adaptations set in and around ominous, forlorn hotels. Both films feature tragic females — poor, lustful Marion Crane (Janet Leigh) and poor, loveless Wendy Torrance (Shelley Duvall) — looking to start over in a new location. Yet both plots are driven by their central male characters’ loneliness, anxiety, and crumbling mental states. Both films are about disintegrating or dysfunctional families; the domineering Mrs. Bates could have been the first wife of abusive, murderous Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson). And both films are populated by supporting actors who behave like robotic humanoids with dwindling power supplies: It’s easy to imagine the state trooper who wakes Marion Crane on the roadside finishing his shift and sharing a drink with Overlook Hotel butler/axe murderer Delbert Grady at some creepy watering hole.

There are significant structural parallels, too. Both films feature some of the best stretches of “pure” filmmaking in either director’s career — the long Steadicam take in The Shining that follows a Big Wheel tour of the Overlook Hotel is as prominent in Kubrick’s career as Psycho‘s shower sequence is in Hitchcock’s. Key passages in both films attain a frightful power thanks to distinctive musical scores. And mirrors double and triple the visual information of any given scene, providing important psychological clues.

Hitchcock and Kubrick are performing some of their best and blackest movie magic throughout these films. Hitchcock’s economy and trickery in Psycho is less obvious until you’ve seen the film a few times. But multiple viewings reveal that Hitchcock’s roving camera heightens suspense and repeatedly conceals Mrs. Bates until the film’s climax. Kubrick’s trickery takes more time — and a little research — to reveal itself. The perfect, chilly winter light from the Overlook’s windows was artificially created by 1 million watts worth of light bulbs; the snow that buries the hotel was largely made of salt and Styrofoam.

Psycho is, for all its suspense, a fundamentally entertaining film that’s also the perfect mix of mystery, horror, and film noir. The Shining remains irreducibly tantalizing, hypnotic, and eerie, even though it has the brightest, boldest color palette of any horror film I’ve ever seen. Each film has generated reams of analysis both online and in print. But they surf on those oceans of text with ease. If you see them together this Friday, you won’t have a better time at the movies all year.

Psycho and The Shining

The Orpheum

Friday, July 13th, 7:15 and 9:30 p.m.; $7

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Music Music Features

Who Are You?

The Arcade Fire scored their biggest victory and suffered their greatest indignity on the same night.

On February 13th, the Montreal indie group’s third album, The Suburbs, won the Grammy for Album of the Year, upsetting Eminem, Katy Perry, Lady Gaga, and Lady Antebellum. The conservative National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences typically considers dance-pop too frivolous and hip-hop too menacing for its highest honor, so in retrospect an Arcade Fire win seems predictable, if not inevitable.

To their credit, however, the band ran through “Month of May” and “Ready To Start” (hijacking the stage for the unplanned second song) as if they had something to prove, and they reacted to the big news with a seemingly unfeigned excitement that’s at distinct odds with the perpetually nonplussed attitude associated with the indie community from which the band arose.

Even before the credits had run, the backlash began in a flurry of tweets, blog posts, and Facebook status updates. Shortly, a tumblr site called whoisarcadefire sprang up to document the collective bafflement. That some viewers had no familiarity with the band struck many other viewers as surprising, especially since The Suburbs debuted at number one on the Billboard album chart and the Arcade Fire sold out a triumphal show at Madison Square Garden.

That virulent reaction, which died down within a few days, perhaps says more about the fragmentation of contemporary pop audiences than it does about popular tastes. No doubt many Arcade Fire fans were equally dumbfounded to see nominally country act Lady Antebellum make so many trips to the podium that same night. The irony is that the Arcade Fire isn’t a cloistered indie-rock band that shuns such awards and spectacles. Just the opposite: More than any other band on an independent label in the 2000s, they have proved not only the most popular but arguably the most willing to embrace popularity.

Such ambitions inflect their music in intriguing ways, giving them license to grasp for immensity as well as intensity. Frontman Win Butler doesn’t just write lyrics, he skywrites them, addressing big topics in direct language. Sometimes too direct: “Ready To Start” begins with the questionable lines, “If the businessmen drink my blood, like the kids in art school said they would.” Only the barely contained tension in the music rescues the song after such a shaky beginning.

Parsing Butler’s lyrics line by line, however, would miss the point: The Arcade Fire work on a macro level. Each song serves its album, which is built around a lofty concept: death and grief on their 2004 debut Funeral, faith and doubt on 2007’s Neon Bible, and memory and disconnection on The Suburbs.

In fact, the version of the suburbs evoked on the band’s latest album is more a literary concept than an actual setting, a conflicted memory in a post-suburban America, where exurbs invade the countryside and the housing bubble has largely halted sprawl. These songs present the suburbs not as ersatz communities but as a repository for coming-of-age memories: “In my dreams we’re still screaming and running through the yard,” Butler sings on the title track. “Sometimes I can’t believe it, I’m moving past the feeling.”

He never discloses what “the feeling” is, seemingly because it’s too large to name, too devastating to confront. The past haunts this album, which is no mean feat for a band so young, and detractors have mistaken the Arcade Fire’s melancholy for self-seriousness. Yet, it is that unexpected gravity that makes their personal reminiscences resonate beyond themselves, that makes their music sound so immediate. Ultimately, the Arcade Fire know very well who they are, even if so many others don’t.