FILM: "Meatball Machine"

Meatball Machine is a splatterpunk reimagining of Mighty Morphin Power Rangers, shot with the patented cinematography of a shaky YouTube video, and with little care for lighting or particularly realistic blood. The film is streaked and splattered with this laughable gore at every turn, and is a bitter triumph of style over substance. Not much is particularly good about Meatball Machine, especially not the awkward romance-cum-action storyline, but at least some of the special effects go beyond the rubbery prosthetics and juddering camera.

I'm glad that at least the design is original; in terms of plot, haven't enough bad Japanese films been made about alien biotechnology (The Guyver comes to mind)? The film's audience is also very telling: while in most cases, the parasites simply infect their hosts and use them as tools--necroborgs--to battle each other as part of a game, there's a key scene that indulges in some tentacled live-action hentai before screwing giant lids through the host's eyes. Junya Kato certainly had as much fun writing this scene as he did with an earlier brawl between a transsexual and our feeble antihero, but you can tell that its the codirectors, Junichi Yamamoto and Yudai Yamaguchi, who wanted to stretch it out.

Then again, given the paucity of material, it's no wonder they chose to linger on their nifty monstrosities. Whether by mental erosion or an attrition of horror, Meatball Machine actually picks up once Yôji faces off with his near-girlfriend Sachiko. Their prolonged junkyard showdown can't possibly be taken seriously, but it's thoughtlessly entertaining: at one point Sachiko welds metal to the man who once harassed her and uses him as a gladiatorial shield. It doesn't matter that Yôji was infected by a mad scientist out to harvest parasites for his half-infected daughter to feast on, nor does it matter that Sachiko can technically still feel everything that the alien is making her do. It's cool to watch mutants shape new weapons out of their own bone, flesh, and organs, even if, as I mentioned before, the quality never manages to get far beyond that of YouTube.

The concept of Meatball Machine actually doesn't lag that far behind bigger budgeted catastrophes like Alien versus Predator, with humans caught in the middle. But the execution is too tightly targeted on certain fetish-minded and blood-thirsty cinephiles to have broader appeal, and there's really no built in fan-base for the rubbery acrobatics of adult Power Rangers. These fans may disagree, but on my end: I don't like my meatballs half-baked.

CD: This Is Me Smiling, "This Is Me Smiling"

Although a lot of This Is Me Smiling's self-titled album is about miscommunication, their musical vocabulary is a little too shaky to top the charts. It's not just the transitions between songs (like the harsh cut-off of "Ephemera" biting into the sweet summer of "Feelin' the Time Pass By"), but the transitions within songs themselves; these are tracks that can't settle for a single sound. The instrumentals that strum to nowhere and the interruptive techno sections (the accurately titled "Up In All Directions") disguise how lost the album is. It's an aggressively coy blend of tunes tethered together with poor lyrics, but certain tracks, like "Mixing up Adjectives," manage to speed through the weaknesses, and some pieces, like the folk duet "Say What You're Gonna Say," are transcendentally beautiful. Dan Duszynski and Sheldon Miller have wonderful voices (and can both play the guitar and keyboard), and when they don't drown themselves out ("For When You Don't Hear It Right"), they'll do just fine. Until then, they're stuck being the awkward, attractive little flaws they sing about in their perfect closing, "Alive in the Chase."

PLAY: "The People vs. Mona"

Photo/Sam Rudy Media Relations

The show might be called The People vs. Mona, but I doubt you'll find many people who don't fall in love with her hokey small-town charms. Tippo, Georgia might be filled with "gators and gospel," but what you'll remember from Jim Wann and Patricia Miller's lighthearted hit are the characters, and perhaps a few of the bluegrass (or perhaps "green"grass) numbers from the "McGnat" brothers (Ritt Henn, Jason Chimonides, and Dan Baily), a nice southern-fried trio that keeps even the most mundane of courtroom ordeals (swearing in, for one) lyrically aloft.

After a brief introduction to Tippo from our narrator, defense attorney, and straight man Jim Summerford (the pleasant Richard Binder), the play leaps from the neon-lit confines of Mona's Frog Pad bar to the oaken bench of the country courthouse, run by the hoochie- and coochie-less Judge Ella Jordan. The quick pace is designed to keep the witnesses and their songs a coming, self-parodying backup dancers and all, and it works: the lyrics aren't all that clever or catchy, but the antics of former kitten dancer Tish Thomas and Blind "They Call Me Blind Because I Can't See" Willy (a saucy and spry Marcie Henderson), or the lecherous Euple R. Pugh and sincerely happy motel owner Patel (a well-ranged Omri Schein) are.

As for our central characters, Wann and Miller go with the tried and true tale of new romance: Jim falls out of love with his pushy fiancée, the prosecutor Mavis Frye (Karen Culp), and into love with his client, the guiltily innocent Mona (Mariand Torres). Binder is appropriate stuck between Culp's high energy and Torres's low jazz, and the melodies seem to extend from the characters, with country songs like "A Real Defense," or the gospel showdown of bible passages in "You Done Forgot Your Bible" right up there with the sultry jazz of "Partner," the blues of "Lockdown Blues," or the marching band anthems of "Marching Thru Tippo." There's even a bit of operatic emoting, courtesy of the honestly awkward Officer Bell (a resonant David Jon Wilson).

Considering the play's not meant to be taken seriously, Kate Middleton does a surprisingly deft job of staging the cast of ten. Her work often takes a backseat to the choreography from Jill Gorrie, but the overall atmosphere is all hers, and the reason her actors nail so many of the jokes is because she doesn't emphasize them. The People vs. Mona is a smooth ride, right down to the clever confession scene, in which all the actors run through their key lines so that Jim can try to piece things together in his mind. The only thing really missing is the sense of southern heat: the play is so light that it never works up a sweat, nor gets the audience all atwitter.

Then again, with the sweltering weather outside, maybe a nice cool glass of clever, character-based musical comedy is just what the doctor ordered. The People vs. Mona is a taste of southern hospitality, in lyrical form: so go get you some.

PLAY: "Universal Robots"

Mac Rogers has done precisely what the humans of Karel Capek's seminal play, R.U.R., did: he's built a better machine. His reimagining of Capek's work, now titled Universal Robots, explains how the eccentric Rossum built robots for the Republic of Czechoslovakia with the assistance of the persuasive Karel Capek (a very sharp David Ian Lee). While the moral and some of the characters are the same, the story is filled with a far more emotional ichor, and although Rogers' script is a bit overlong with historical fact and satire of Capek's early years, his second act is a phenomenally well-acted and -scripted piece of theater. I don't think Universal Robots will rise up and conquer humanity, like robots of both Rogers' and Capek's play, but I with a few tweaks, this play can certainly conquer a larger house.

The way Rogers has rewritten characters to produce actual drama is very effective: Karel's brother Joseph is now his sister, Jo (Jennifer Gordon Thomas), and is the true emotional yin to his ethically solid yang. Unable to ignore the virtual slavery, her compassion recasts her as a robot activist, whereas the male dominated Republic only listens to the romantic science of Peroutka (a nicely nerdy Ben Sulzbach) and the fierce realpolitik of president Masaryk (a gruff, fittingly flustered James Wetzel). In another twist, the robot inventor, Rossum, is now actually Rossum's widow, who, in a maddened state of grief, assumed his experiments, oblivious to the toll this has taken on her daughter, the innocent and beautiful Helena (a bubbling Esther Barlow).

The structure and direction, both by Rogers, are also very clever. By using a narrator (One, played by the crisp, clear, Michelle O'Connor), Rogers is able to loop around in time and abbreviate scenes that would otherwise be too long. In this vein, he's able to mock Capek's original style, dabble in some Brechtian analysis of Communism, and make some nice statements of his own ("Who is the most dangerous man in the world?" "A beautiful dreamer with the means to realize his dreams."). The downside is that these early moments all come across as asides to the central narrative, and stretch the show. Given the excellent cast, it's not a terrible use of time, but it makes the first and second halves of the play quite disparate.

A great deal of this bias, however, may be due to the scene-stealing Jason Howard, who not only comes to life as Robot Radius, but also makes the show come to life as well. His eerily precise recitations of robot rules not only match the alienating qualities the script requires but are replicated in his motion and emotion. Mr. Howard isn't the only actor in the show to have such range (indeed, most of the actors are double cast), but his "upgrades" are the most apparent.

Save for a few moments of flubbed lines (of which there are many), Universal Robots is a widely appealing play, one that not only shows off Rogers' talent as a writer, but as a director as well.

PLAY: "Doppelganger"

If one buys into the scientific and stressed-out speech of Simon Heath's Doppelganger, then one cannot be sure of anything: in the great infinite binary, everything is both a one and a zero. But Emanuel Bocchieri's direction is bogged down in spastic direction and randomly generated cues (literally -- the show uses a technology designed to activate video and sound based on how actors move). There’s one thing the audience can be sure of: Doppelganger is a mess, consistent only in being dim and haphazard.

Our hero is a nervous nerd by the name of George (Jermaine Chambers): he's early to work so as to not feel claustrophobic in the elevator, and he's reliant on his boss, Frank (Matt Hanley) for tales of the thrills that are absent in his life. George is a watcher, not a doer, and he is just another modern human attempting to avoid pain by quantifying problems. But life is more erratic than that, and this is where Doppelganger's random array of multimedia effects, paper-scattered floor, and screaming file cabinets work. Despite George's careful planning, his world is shattered in 4.6 seconds -- the amount of time for his boss to fall forty stories to his death -- and he meets Marcia (Heather Carmichael), both Frank's lover, and the woman at the other end of those 4.6 seconds, a woman now traumatized by vertigo.

Rather than ground itself in connections, Doppelganger prefers to analyze from the fringe, using voiceovers and video clips that make the show as personal as a PowerPoint presentation and the text as comprehensible as an art-house film. Instead of exploring George's coming out of his shell to take--gasp!--drugs, the entire show seems like a bad acid trip, or the product of one, in which Mr. Heath looked in a mirror and looked up the word “doppelganger.”