Night At The Museum Dvd

About Town: Area Event Listings

Music and Theatre

Concerts in the Park, in Petoskey, have begun. The Charlotte Ross Lee Concerts series offers lunch time music and evening events. The Crooked Tree jazz ensemble performs in Pennsylvania Park on July 7 at 12:15 p.m. Upcoming evening concerts featuring St. Louis, Missouri bands Gumbohead and the Funky Butt Brass Band perform original flavorful Mardi-Gras style at 7 p.m. on July 8 in the Gazebo in Pennsylvania Park. Performances continue every Friday night in July. In case of rain, concerts are held in Crooked Tree Arts Center's Ross Stoakes Theater. For a complete listing of events, see the “Events and Exhibitions” page at www.crookedtree.org.

Children of the World in Harmony, international youth choir and dance festival will showcase, The Chorknaben Boy Choir, from Uetersen, Germany will perform a choir concert at Harbor Light Community Chapel at 7 p.m. on Wednesday, July 13. The Chorknaben Boy Choir’s appearance in Harbor Springs is part of the festival which runs from July 12-17. Additional information about the Festival may be found at www.vwbchoir.com. Thursday, July 14, 7 p.m. Symbolica, part of the World In Harmony Festival, will perform in Harbor Springs during Street Musique.

Petoskey Film Theater, will be Wednesday, July 6 at 7:30 p.m. at the Carnegie Building. "Heartbreaker" is the perfect date movie with a sweetly hilarious, Dirty Dancing-inspired finale that you'll never forget. Call the PFT Hotline for more information, 758-3108. Bay View Music Festival, an annual series, features concerts beginning at 8 p.m. in Hall Auditorium. The festival runs through August 14. The public is welcome to all musical events, as well as the myriad of educational, religious, and recreational activities offered by the Bay View Association. For tickets, call (800)595-4849 or visit www.bayviewfestival.org. The Bay View Box Office is open 9:30-12 p.m. Monday -Saturday and one hour prior to concerts. General questions should be directed to Chris Ludwa at (231)347-4210 or emails sent to cludwa@gmail.com.

Strings program, at Crooked Tree Arts Center is offering Summer Strings Classes during the months of July and August in Petoskey, Boyne City, and Charlevoix. Classes are available for every playing level and all ages are encouraged to join. Class offerings include Intermediate class, the Concert Orchestra class and the Chamber Orchestra. Fiddle Workshop classes are also available. Registration is available online for all classes by visiting www.crookedtree.org or by phone by calling Crooked Tree Arts Center at (231)347-4337.

Review: Tom Lennon and Ben Garant tell all about Writing Movies ...

Let's start with the obvious:  these are very funny guys.  I find it a little disconcerting to realize that "The State" is almost 20 years old at this point, but when I signed up for Netflix Instant and watched several episodes again, I was struck by how conventionally funny the show is, how classically constructed most of the sketches were, and how even the most absurd moments were clever and not just thrown away.  Even at that point, Garant and Lennon were thinking like writers, so when they moved into feature work, it wasn't much of a surprise.  Their Comedy Central show "Reno 911" is a great example of their sensibilities at work, character comedy with plenty of room for improvisation, and the show was often ridiculously funny.  As both performers and writers, they were consistently impressive. I made a comment in my "Night At The Museum 2" review that I half-expected that the guys would one day publish a book in which they revealed that their big-budget screenwriter career was actually a practical joke involving them writing the worst movies possible for Hollywood while using the money they earned to make genuinely funny smaller projects.  While Writing Movies For Fun And Profit is not that confession, it is one of the more bracingly honest looks at what it's like to write for major Hollywood studios right now, and I think the book manages to defend their filmography without excusing what doesn't work, something I wouldn't have thought possible.  And since their films have cumulatively made a billion dollars, something the cover touts proudly, I would say whatever they're doing works on at least one level, and should be paid special attention. I've worked for studios myself, writing films for Revolution and Sony and 20th Century Fox over the years, and I've collected plenty of nightmarish development stories over the years.  I've had experiences both good and bad, and I've worked with people I still like as well as people I hope to never see again.  I've been put in the position of turning in drafts I didn't like in order to please people I didn't agree with, and I've been fired so that directors could bring in their own people to do terrible things to scripts.  The thing I haven't done yet is seen one of those studio films make it all the way to the screen, and that can be frustrating.  It would probably have helped me if I wasn't a loudmouth who has always been honest about my opinion, even when it wasn't terribly political.