Wasted Youth - A Greek Film Review

While Greece continues to suffer through a financial crisis, the country’s young film-makers probe and question, offering fresh insights into the country’s heart, soul and dilemmas. Wasted Youth, from director Argyris Papadimitropoulos teamed with German director Jon Vogel, is an important new film and an exhilarating one. Author Franz Kafka once wrote of the novel: “I think we ought only to read the kinds of books that wound or stab us. If the book we’re reading doesn’t wake us up with a blow to the head, what are we reading for? A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.” The same could be said of film.

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Vital Cinema of Hope and Tragedy

Wasted Youth fits the criteria. Like Dogtooth and Tungsten, the film is experimental, original, and disturbing. A young man was shot to death by the police during a night of partying, setting off the 2008 riots in Athens. This film takes inspiration from that real incident that turned the country upside down and made international news.

“We made the whole thing in ten days on a shoestring budget,” Papadimitropoulos told a New York audience. “We just decided to jump in.” Much of Wasted Youth was improvised. The result: a film that resonates with immediacy. Young Harry, 16, played by amateur Harris Markou, whom the directors selected for his skate-board skills and good looks, meets his buddies in Athens Constitution Square. It’s summer. They skate, smoke joints, and try to meet girls.

A scene with Harry and his father provides a heart-breaking insight into Greece now. Once the patriarch ruled. Now Harry returns home after a night out to find a nervous, troubled dad, who gently slaps Harris (no floggings here) and then pleads with him. He can’t take his son’s behavior. Harry needs to communicate with his father. He needs to get a job. The father takes off his shirt, and we’re witness to a thin, pale, spiritually impotent man in his undershirt, smoking a cigarette, his eyes filled with desperation.

Harry will visit his mother in the hospital where she’s recovering from an injury. According to Papadimitropoulos, she represents the “broken back of Greece.” A friend of the director’s played the mother. Harris’s actual pals played his friends in the film, all amateurs. Other roles were taken by professional actors, and intriguingly by film-makers who took small roles. For instance, a director plays a policeman. Says Papadimitropoulos, “We are a community of film-makers.”

Actor Ieronimos Kaletsanos scores as the brooding Vasilis, the policeman who will be Harris’s tragic nemesis. We see Vasilis stretched to his limits, a man on the verge of a nervous breakdown. He returns home after a long night shift to take a shower in the steamy heat and have perfunctory sex with his anxious wife. When it’s over, she rubs her eyes as if waking from a bad dream. Vasilis, although not a stock character, could be the Greek Everyman. He’s fortunate to have a job, but it’s minimum and frustrating. Yet he’s afraid to try anything new. His friend wants him to invest in a pizza shop. Vasilis ultimately rejects the idea. He’s afraid to lose what he has. Like Harry’s father, he finds himself alienated from his teenage daughter who largely ignores him as she tunes in to her ipod.

In Wasted Youth, the big, warm, argumentative but supportive Greek family has shrunk to the nuclear family with one child and, in Vasilis’s case, a mother who lives with them and passes her time watching TV.

Vasilis rides at night with his cop partner, a man addicted to flirting and watching pornographic films. They push vagrants off of the sidewalk and try to keep the peace. Ultimately, they encounter Harry and his friends outside a club. There is a confrontation. A gun is fired. Harris is shot dead and the film ends with his friends hovering over him, and the cops leaving the scene.

Vasilis did not fire the gun, according to director Papadimitropoulos. We could fault him here, for side-stepping this tragic move. (As a result of the real-life shooting, both policemen are currently serving prison terms). We could also critique the directors for falling in love with the skate-boarding Harris, holding the camera on him for too- long minutes. But the cinematography is brilliant. What makes Wasted Youth special is its empathetic embrace of a heart-breaking world in transition. It doesn’t pass judgment. But it raises questions and, just as important, keeps us cinematically engaged.

“As a citizen, the easiest thing to do is blame the politicians for the last 30 years of fake prosperity,” Papadimitropoulos said. “But I think we are to blame, too, because we took that pill. We said, ‘Let’s take the easy way out, even though we know it is not right’. Now we’re paying the price.”

Papadimitropoulos has made an impressive USA debut with Wasted Youth, his second feature. The film was chosen to open the 40th Rotterdam film festival, and was shown in New York at the Disappearing Act IV Festival.

Wasted Youth will be shown at the Los Angeles Greek Film Festival in June and at the New York Greek Film Festival in October.

Born in 1976 in Athens, Papadimitropoulos studied media and film in Oxford and Athens. In 2003, he directed his first short, Pendulum. In 2008, Argyris made his first feature film, Bank Bang, which became a major commercial hit in Greece, and won the First Time Director Award from the Hellenic Film Academy. He has directed more than 100 commercials, and started his own production company, Oxymoron Films.

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Holiday in Heaven - Musical Review

A Heavenly Delight

By Annie Amos

Demetria Daniels takes us on a whirlwind tour beyond the pearly gates in Holiday in Heaven, her new musical that was staged in February in NYC as part of John Chatterton’s Second Annual Midwinter Madness Short Play Festival.

A lively cast sings us into the rollicking side of angelic living. It’s the end of year 2999 and the Heavenly Council has decreed that the turn of the 3rdMillenium must be celebrated in a special way. Appointed co-chairpersons of the committee, are an unlikely pairing of angelic hosts – Aloysius and Hortense – the English Gentleman and the All-American Girl Next Door. After some friendly bickering, they decide on a Harp Contest, the proceeds of which will be sent to Earth to end homelessness, and the search begins for the perfect judge.

Bemoaning the cliquish factionalism that has been dividing Heaven as of late – what with the “intellectuals, radical religionists, third worlders, and even Mother Theresa” - Aloysius and Hortense agree that it would be much more prudent to invite a living human from Earth to judge the contest.

The heavenly computer database pulls up names like Madonna but foreseeing the disapproval of the Pope – the winged co-chairpersons set their sights instead on the mousy do-gooder with a sensitive soul, Mary Smith. Sweet Mary helps the homeless, plays the harp, and dates a boorish aloof boyfriend that forgets her birthday and ridicules her for being a dreamer. But before we are allowed enough time to hate on Hank Billings, her boyfriend from gym rat hell, or swoon too long over the shy English pianist that is also trying to hail our Mary, a burst of angelus ex machina whisks our fair lady (via car accident) into the wondrous realms of paradise.

In Heaven, it’s Fringe meets the Frogs where unicorns roam free, Matisse is the graphic designer of choice, Jesus and the Apostles chill and play card games, and the fruit trees grow cotton candy and diamonds for all. How could Mary resist the offer for a one-month holiday in Heaven, in exchange for her services as non-factional, sweet, deserving harp contest judge? Well, she doesn’t, and neither would you if on top of all that you finally met the man of your dreams, like Mary does, in the spirit of hunky Alexander the Great. On Earth, poor Mary sang songs of maidenly woe, lamenting the absence of true chivalry…but in Heaven, her long awaited hero is there, in the non-flesh, right before her eyes. But alas – what fate for the love-struck doomed to eventual separation? Will Mary’s angelic hosts be able to help? Alexander, claiming he was too busy on Earth to fall in love and get married runs to find his friends Romeo and Juliet as "they may have some ideas."

Through boisterous song and dance and witty dialogue, we are taken along on this romantic holiday adventure that asks: do you believe in miracles? And what would you do for a Holiday in Heaven?

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Holiday in Heaven will be playing next at the Midtown International Theatre Festival, running from July 16th through August 12th in 2012, so keep an eye on the calendar for its scheduling.

The musical played at the NYC treat, the 2012 Midwinter Madness Short Play Festival, which ran this year from February 13th through March 4th and showcased 29 plays at the Roy Arias Studios, at 300 W. 43rd St., 5th floor Payan Theatre.

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Who Loves You, Baby? Evokes the Great Telly Savalas

Feeling nostalgic for ‘70’s glam and cool, sexy Greek guys? Hurry down to the Soho Playhouse where Tom DiMenna is brilliantly channeling Telly Savalas, the macho Greek with the growly voice in Who Loves You, Baby?.

Celebrating Telly Savalas

“Who loves you, baby?” was a famous Savalas line from TV’S popular Kojak. Written by Hunter Nelson, and developed over a three-year period, the show takes the premise that sex and romance were for real in the ‘70’s. It’s ironic, touching and hilarious. With his shaved head and brown eyes (so Telly-like), DiMenna introduces himself as a “legitimate, card carrying sex symbol,” and admonishes: “Put the porno away. Wear a silk shirt. Learn about life.”

Set in a bar/lounge at the Soho Playhouse, Alex Leonard plays cocktail music that gets you in the mood. For an hour plus, you’re in a never-never Telly world. DiMenna captures the quality that made Savalas special. He himself seemed to spoof his macho self. A good guy, Telly created special intimacy with his audience. “Greeks don’t threaten. They utter prophecies,” says DiMenna/Savalas. We particularly appreciated comic-noir lines like: “Have you ever fallen in love and had a baby by a gal you met by the cigarette machine?”

The actor puffs on an electronic cigarette, drinks a Tequilla Sunrise (the lollipop that Savalas used in an attempt to break the smoking habit comes out later), and points to the current lack of alpha males like himself on the small screen. Telly was Kojak, a no-nonsense Greek cop. And as DiMenna points out --who do we have now? David Caruso of CSI. The actor/comic says: “The fish are disappearing. Your whiskey’s watered down. What’s missing is guys like me.”

During the production, brother George arrives for a loving reunion, and the two break into a Zorbas dance. Savalas himself would probably have approved of DiMenna’s rendition of You've Lost That Loving Feeling.

I met the real Telly back then, having a Scotch/Rocks in the Westbury Hotel Bar on Madison Avenue after lunch, and creating his own party by bringing his drink out to the sidewalk. A charmer, he dazzled me and my eight-year-old nephew Nicholas who loved him as Kojak.

Savalas played the title character in Kojak, a cop show set in New York, airing from October, 1973 to March 1978 on ABC TV. Kojak’s Greek-American heritage, shared by Savalas, was prominently featured in the series. Initially, the character was Polish but the actor rechristened the character, and it worked. Telly’s brother, George, appeared as a character on the show (a brother playing a brother).

In 1999, TV Guide ranked Theo Kojak Number 18 on its 50 Greatest TV Characters of All Time list.

DiMenna, 32, an Italian-American became addicted to Savalas watching old clips from his TV shows. Three years ago, he teamed up with Hunter Nelson to create the comedic tour de force. “What started out as a comedy show became a celebration of ‘70’s charisma,” says DiMenna. The actor, a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, where he played quarterback on the football team, also spent a year in Italy playing with the Bologna Warriors. Growing up in Connecticut, his mother, a cabaret singer, frequently brought him into New York, often to “Don’t Tell Mama,” home of classic cabaret.

DiMenna has worked with the Second City in Chicago, done improv, and performed Shakespeare in London. Who Loves You Baby played last summer at New York’s Fringe Festival.

Taylor Negron directs the “surreal retro-lounge act.” Our Chief Editor at Wall Street Greek talks of a welcoming Negron, accompanying "The Greek" for a bite after the show. Markos Kaminis described Negron as “a candid and engaging man who earned his fame as a film actor and comedian, but with depth that is perhaps better explained by the man’s artwork and skill with the written word.”

The show’s on every Wednesday, Thursday and Friday at 8 p.m. through April, 2012 at The Huron Club, Soho Playhouse, 15 Vandam Street (off Sixth Ave). The theater is easy to reach, three blocks from the Houston Street (1 train) and Spring Street (C & E) subway stops. Contact: TellySavalasLive.com and get tickets here.

Other critics have weighed in on the show:

“You will not see a funnier play than Who Loves You Baby?! As Savalas, Tom DiMenna is hilarious and cool like Telly.” New York Theater Com.

“Who Loves You Baby? is hilarious. Tom DiMenna is front and center as a dead ringer for Savalas. It’s a brilliantly breezily bombastic performance.” Nitelife Exchange.

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