LENTEN FARE: Rather than giving up sex for Lent, like Josh Hartnett in 40 Days and 40 Nights, we’d suggest you treat yourself to some music that will remind you what Lent is all about. The Spectrum Singers have an appropriate double bill planned for March 9: Heinrich Schütz’s sublime Musikalisches Exequien and Bach’s motet Jesu, meine Freude (BWV 227). And the line-up of soloists is a temptation you don’t have to resist: sopranos Roberta Anderson and Gail Abbey, mezzo Gloria Raymond, tenor Frank Kelley, and bass Mark Andrew Cleveland. That’s at 8 p.m. at Emmanuel Church, 15 Newbury Street. Tickets are $20-$30 ($17-$25 for students and seniors); call (617) 879-6287.
TERRASTOCK 5: Since its debut in a Providence warehouse in 1997, the Terrastock festivals — a series of annual weekenders organized by Ptolemaic Terrascope, the ’zine published by the Bevis Frond’s Nick Saloman — have become a kind of Woodstock for the woollier fringe dwellers of the far-out neo-psychedelic, noise, and space-rock landscape. This fall, the festival returns to New England, with Terrastock 5 scheduled to overwhelm the Middle East in Cambridge October 11 through 13. The preliminary line-up, which will expand prodigiously, is already a monster: Sonic Youth, Acid Mothers Temple, Bardo Pond, the Bevis Frond, Ghost, Barbara Manning, Tom Rapp, Subarachnoid Space, the Sunshine Fix, and Windy and Carl, plus a bevy of Boston-area acts that’ve become Terrastock regulars, including Damon and Naomi, Lockgroove, Twisted Village’s the Major Stars, and the Lothars. Festival passes are $70 and go on sale March 1; call (617) 864-EAST, or visit www.terrascope.org.
NEXT WEEKEND:
Labor of Love
When last seen on the big screen, Debra Winger was starring as the love interest in the 1995 flop Forget Paris, Billy Crystal’s desperate attempt to recapture the magic of When Harry Met Sally . . . It was about that time that Winger, an Oscar nominee for An Officer and a Gentleman (1982), Terms of Endearment (1983), and Shadowlands (1993), said to herself, forget Hollywood.
"Forget Paris was the last film I did," she acknowledges. "I stopped doing movies because there were no parts I wanted to play. I guess there might have been some, but I stopped reading them. It was sort of an atrophy. It’s pretty hard when a woman is in her 30s to get age-appropriate roles. Also, I thought, up to then I had chosen roles that moved me forward. You want to find something new. I didn’t. So I did some plays, some up in your neck of the woods [including How I Learned To Drive at the ART], and I taught."
That and raising three young boys kept her busy until her husband, the actor Arliss Howard, decided to make his film-director debut adapting some stories from Mississippi writer Larry Brown’s 1990 collection Big Bad Love. In the film, which is also titled Big Bad Love (though based mostly on the story "92 Days"), a Mississippi writer, played by Howard and not unlike Brown, drinks a lot, passes out, drives a pick-up, has magical realistic hallucinations, sends out manuscripts, pastes the rejection slips over his toilet, and ruefully neglects his two kids and his ex-wife, Marilyn.
"It was in the house," says Winger of her involvement with the project, first as producer then as actor in the part of the ex-wife. "The part grew because of my input, but not really. I was recommending other actresses who could play it. But it was something I was interested in. The question of bitterness and how a woman deals with the challenge of having the moniker ‘ex-wife,’ which is such a negative term to begin with. [Winger herself is the ex-wife of actor Timothy Hutton.] About 50 percent of American women deal with that. Not being bitter after carrying the weight and raising the kids, maybe with little help, maybe not having someone to step up and help out."
The film, however, is presented thoroughly from the point of view of the alternately soused and inspired writer, who’s played by a whippet-like Howard — a dead ringer for the real-life writer Richard Ford. The result is a bold fusion of fantasy, flashback, hothouse detail, and hardnosed dialogue, with a blues-addled soundtrack (Winger herself produced the soundtrack album, which ranges from Tom Waits to the Kronos Quartet) percolating under the simultaneous torpor, trivia, and catastrophe. In short, some will find it confusing.
"Like life," Winger points out. "Things happen simultaneously in life, but usually in the movies they say that’s too confusing. Yet it happens that you’re in the hospital getting your head stitched up and you’ll see someone you’ll never forget. Or I’m coming out of the hospital after a blood test and see my mother being wheeled in on a gurney just after having a heart attack. These things happen.
"Of course, films don’t represent life at all. They pretty much follow the recipe that requires nothing from the audience. But then there are those that are thoughtful, thought-provoking, and not insulting to the audience. Only in the movies do you have time to figure everything out. . . . In life it’s not quite that neat. Things fall on top of each other, thoughts happen when they shouldn’t."
Big Bad Love opens next Friday, March 8, at theaters to be announced.
BY PETER KEOUGH
