Show Reviews

A Little Imagination Can Go A Long Way

The fourth annual Elkland Puppet Festival was held Saturday, Sept. 19, and organizers put on an event filled with extraordinary feats of daring, strength, motion and mystery.

The event was hosted by the Elkland Art Center, which is in Todd, N.C., and the festival featured three puppeteers from around the world and around the state: Hobey Ford, creator of the foamies, Keith Shubert of Toybox Theater (Asheville) and Madison J. Cripps (Asheville), creator of Strings Attached Marionettes.

The event was a non-profit one that is held at the old Todd Mercantile and the Bank of Todd in Ashe County but close enough to Watauga County.

There were plenty of children, and adults, that just came out to have a change of pace from the norm. The skits were really well done and each puppeteer interacted well with the audience. Plenty of giggles could be heard from the children, and adults, when faced with having to use their imagination. Something we tend to forget we have in this fast-paced world.

Read more: Fourth Annual Elkland Puppet Festival

Quick Review for Summer Movies

by T.J. Royal

The summer movie season is taking a bow for 2009, with a wooly Wilkes County, N.C. native, a boy wizard who I bear some resemblance to, interstellar voyagers and jive-talking, smashing robots bringing home the bacon for the movie industry.

Out of those four, I have seen the fantastic buddy comedy The Hangover, with Zach Galifianakis being the wooly one, and the hyper-charged revamp of Star Trek. There was some desire to see Harry Potter and The Half-Blood Prince, but Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen dipped into tens of millions of wallets just fine without me having to lend a hand.

So, what’s important about these movies making upwards of $1.2 billion in box office receipts between May and this month? What’s important about critical and audience darlings like 2008’s The Dark Knight and The Lord of The Rings Trilogy making $1.5 billion at the box office between the four of them?

It shows that we, as American movie-goers, have a massive appetite for pure fantasy, (Lord of the Rings), raunchy (The Hangover), sardonic (The Dark Knight) and wizard-filled (Harry Potter) movies. And then there’s room for $400 million to go towards......something (Transformers: RotF).

Although I, and perhaps some of you too, could not possibly understand why anyone would want to go see G-Force, for all that’s within me, I would rather go see that than ever have to be exposed to the horror that is sure to be Rob Zombie’s Halloween II, the sequel to the worst movie anyone has ever paid a movie ticket to actually watch.

From a look at the box office receipts, people watched the awful Halloween remake at about the same clip as they saw the Meryl Streep vehicle Juile & Julia this summer, where the wonderful actress plays as cooking show icon Julia Child. Or take last year’s idiosyncratic Hollywood-action-movie-fop-fest Tropic Thunder, which made almost as much money as G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra has made so far in ‘09.

Read more: The Summer Movie Season is Ending