via Facebook

Ethan Cyr has a dream. That dream is to build a 13-foot T-Rex with Christopher Walken’s head on it. And thanks to the Internet, his dream is going to come true.

Yesterday, Humans of New York received an email from the most awesome child in the world and posted it on Facebook.

It read: “I am a sixteen year old from the lower east side of Manhattan. I am building a 13 foot T Rex with Christopher Walkens head and I was wondering if you would be willing to help me gain publicity for my project. I totally understand if this is just too weird and you don't wanna help.”

Ok, it is totally weird, but HONY did want to help. They linked to Cyr’s indiegogo page, where he asked for $750 to build the “Walken Rex,” which, by the looks of his material list, he plans to construct out of PVC piping, chicken wire and paper mache. In just over 24 hours Cyr has raised $2,285 from over 200 contributors.

via Facebook

“I was inspired to design and build this piece after watching the movie Queen of Versailles. I saw how rich those kids were, and their lack of creation with all that money. I decided if I could get that much money I would make something great. The Walken Rex was originally thought of by a friend of mine, we are not completely sure where he got the idea from, but it seemed like the perfect thing to build,” Cyr wrote on his indiegogo page.

The teen promised incentives to anyone who donates to his cause—those who give at least $5 will receive a Christopher Walken Rex cartoon. A donation of $75 gets you a cartoon of you with Walken, and for just $1,000 you get to choose the face of Cyr’s next statue. Oh, the possibilities! How about a Meryl Streep Triceratops? Or a Jack Nicholson Velociraptor?

We needed to find out more, so we did a quick Facebook search for this creative genius. We think we found Cyr, and we pray to God he’s real. In addition to his cover photo, which is a pretty badly photoshopped mock-up of the Walken Rex, Cyr has a few other weird drawings of Grim Reaper-like figures wearing colorful sweatshirts.

We’re just looking forward to seeing if Cyr actually brings this thing to life—on Facebook HONY promised to document the project if it gets funded.

So please, as Cyr wrote on indiegogo, “Tell people, tell anyone, tell everyone, tell Christopher Walken.”

Ivanir, Hoffman, Keener and Walken in A Late Quartet.

In A Late Quartet, a somber, moody and uneven film about chamber music and the dedicated professional musicians who devote their lives to playing it, Christopher Walken takes some getting used to as a renowned cellist with Parkinson’s disease who is forced begrudgingly to end his career as leader of one of the world’s most celebrated string quartets. A far cry from the lurid and sloppy addicts, psychopaths and serial killers he usually plays as though walking in his sleep, it’s not the kind of role I would personally think of as perfect casting for him. Also, the movie is too slow, highbrow and sophisticated to draw the youth market that loves to see Mr. Walken play violent and stoned in trash like Seven Psychopaths. But playing the cello is such a pleasant change of pace that he eventually grows on you, scene by scene, proving for the first time since his role as Leonardo DiCaprio’s troubled father 10 years ago in Catch Me If You Can, that he really can act. He—along with the rest of the elegant cast—keeps A Late Quartet in tune when it threatens to go flat. 

The Fugue, a famous ensemble much like the Guarneri Quartet, has been filling concert halls for 25 years. It consists of cellist-concertmaster Peter Mitchell (Mr. Walken), first violinist Daniel Lerner (Mark Ivanir), second violinist Robert Gelbart (Philip Seymour Hoffman) and Robert’s wife, Juliette (Catherine Keener), on viola. As the new season begins, they are rehearsing all seven movements of the intricate Beethoven String Quartet, Opus 13. As soon as you realize the film runs the length of most chamber music concerts, you might panic at the thought of being forced to sit through the whole thing. Not to worry. Director Yaron Zilberman soon makes it clear that he is more interested in the emotional upheavals in the lives of the four high-strung musicians than he is in the music they play. It takes a long time to get around to the program they’re rehearsing, and by then you might wish they had started earlier. As soon as Peter’s crippling disease is diagnosed, the theme becomes “Move Over, Beethoven.”

You know it’s coming when Mr. Walken starts stretching his fingers to strengthen the grip on his bow. Clearly his reflexes and coordination are failing. The others, who have been with him for a quarter of a century, look the other way. But this is a pragmatic perfectionist. He starts to plan his farewell concert and seek a replacement. Robert, the second violinist, takes this inopportune time to announce his long-festering resentment of Daniel, the first violinist, who refuses to alternate solos.

The tension grows, opening a floodgate when Peter announces his plan to hire Robert and Juliette’s daughter Alexandra (Imogen Poots), who is a talented and promising cellist on her way to stardom, to replace him. Further complicating the volatility of an already complex situation is the fact that without Robert and Juliette’s knowledge, Alexandra, who feels neglected and ignored by her parents, is sleeping with the sensitive and petulant Daniel, her coach, who years earlier had an affair with Juliette, now causing a rift between mother and daughter. Worse still, Juliette, who never fully committed to her husband, catches Robert working out his frustrations in bed with another woman, and their marriage collapses. What began as an intelligent film about real music (instead of the junk that poisons contemporary rock soundtracks) loses its way and collapses under the weight of a shameless soap opera. With so much sturm und drang,it’s a miracle these musicians ever find the time to play a simple adagio.

Everyone ends up emotionally shredded, with the future of the Fugue Quartet endangered. Like all passionate artists, however, they come to their senses in time to realize that craft comes first and personal lives are a lower priority, and in the final minutes, we at last get around to the Beethoven. The movie sometimes gets stuck in its own awkward groove like a needle on a warped phonograph, but it has its moments. The script, co-written by the director Mr. Zilberman and Seth Grossman, contains technical information about how to construct, polish and cherish a good violin, and the four actors make you believe they actually know how to play their instruments. They skillfully demonstrate how each member of the quartet brings to the table one of the four legs that hold it upright: Mr. Ivanir has enough precision and driving perfectionism for four, Mr. Hoffman adds color and texture, Ms. Keener provides the mournful passion, and Mr. Walken is the patriarch of the group, with the heart, soul and discipline to keep the music balanced. The pileup of romantic entanglements and competitive egos gets in the way of the music, but the soundtrack is glorious, even if it is truncated. The final concert was filmed on the actual stage at the Metroplitan Museum, where the Guarneri Quartet gave its final performance after 45 years together. In A Late Quartet, life imitates art in more ways than one.

rreed@observer.com

A LATE QUARTET

Running Time 105 minutes

Written by Seth Grossman and Yaron Zilberman

Directed by Yaron Zilberman

Starring Philip Seymour Hoffman, Christopher Walken and Catherine Keener

2.5/4

You go, Paul Ryan. (TIME Magazine)

– Just in time for the vice presidential debates, here's Paul Ryan looking like Zach Morris's stand-in during a TIME Magazine photo shoot that teased him by saying it was considering naming him its man of the year. Yeah, right!

– The reason Lindsay Lohan was fighting with her mom on Tuesday? Apparently it had something to do with a $40,000 loan Ms. Lohan gave to her mother to keep her Long Island home from being foreclosed on.

– Last night was the New York premiere of Seven Psychopaths. Watch Christopher Walken, Sam Rockwell and Colin Farrell reenact a scene from Here Comes Honey Boo Boo last night.
http://youtu.be/NzIsz3fU9xQ

– Here's how you know you've been hanging around brooding British vampires too much ... you start referring to yourself as a "miserable c**t." In Marie Claire of all places. Oh, K-Stew!

Harrelson and Walken in Seven Psychopaths.

Garbage comes in all sizes, and every one of them seems to fit into a load of violent, hateful and incomprehensible trash called Seven Psychopaths. Written by talented Irish playwright Martin McDonagh, who shocked Broadway audiences with dark, funny, gothic creepshows like The Beauty Queen of Leenane, The Cripple of Inishmaan and A Behanding in Spokane,this movie is proof that moving to Hollywood is poisonous Kool-Aid to the creative process. Kneeling at the trough of Hollywood pop psychobabble that has come to symbolize the New Cinema, Mr. McDonagh seems to have taken leave (temporarily, I hope) of his senses. He proved in 2008, with a brooding job called In Bruges, about hit men on holiday in Belgium, that he cannot stretch his bristling ideas into one full-length feature. Unfortunately, he also thinks he’s a director—a job for which he shows no patience, aptitude or proficiency. The result is a twitching convulsion of vicious drivel passing itself off as a movie, which can be best appreciated by the kind of people who dig Showgirls, the Saw franchise and Spike Jonze-Charlie Kaufman flicks.

For starters, the title means nothing. Don’t even try to count the number of psychopaths who bang around from scene to scene without reason or rhyme. Colin Farrell, a fellow Irishman who bonded with Mr. McDonagh on the In Bruges shoot, plays Marty, a drunken Hollywood screenwriter who has lost his inspiration in the middle of a numbskull morality tale (called Seven Psychopaths, natch) about a serial killer who longs for love, murder and world peace. His best friend Billy (Sam Rockwell), an actor who can’t get a job in the movies because he keeps punching out the directors, is determined to help Marty finish his script at all costs, including a few massacres of his own. The first thing he does is introduce his hapless pal to his partner in crime, an aging Polish loser (Christopher Walken, looking like 10 miles of broken asphalt painted green) with a dying wife, who cooks up a scheme to steal dogs then return them to their desperate owners to collect the rewards. The blocked writer finally gets a glimmer of the Real McCoy when the dognapper makes the mistake of stealing a fluffy, yappy, sissy Shih Tzu named Bonny (played by a real Shih Tzu named Bonny) that belongs to a macho gangster (Woody Harrelson). The effeminate but brutal thug goes viral and tracks down the Polish thief and everyone he knows, beginning with his terminally ill wife, whom he exterminates in the cancer ward. Thanks to a plot that backfires and a newspaper ad that Billy places inviting closeted psychopaths to come forward and be interviewed, Marty the ill-fated scribe is suddenly up to his inkjet printer cartridges in real serial killers, including Tom Waits, who is not much better as an actor than he is as a tone-deaf musician (except he mercifully does not sing out of tune this time), as a maniac who ties his victims to a table and chops them up with a meat cleaver while a white rabbit licks up the blood, then pours gasoline on the corpses and sets them on fire. You sit there trying to figure out what’s going on, before you finally realize they’re making it up as they go along. As they act out their different versions of events in the unfinished screenplay, the movie is making it up, too.

Suddenly the entire cast is busy slaughtering each other as the screen is crowded to capacity with psycho killers and more psycho-killing psycho killers, including a pair of homicidal maniac lovebirds, a razor-slashing Quaker and a Viet Cong killer disguised as a priest seeking revenge against America. They all end up in Joshua Tree National Park in a blazing shootout that leaves almost everyone dead except the delusional writer, whose finished screenplay might be on its way to an Oscar. I’ve never seen such a colossal waste of talent. The acting is so bad in this picture that even the quirky, inventive Sam Rockwell can’t save it. The pulpy Quentin Tarantino-style dialogue mixes Little Caesar with Grand Guignol to no effect, the camerawork is garish, the pacing ludicrously twisted, the bloodshed gratuitous. The women in the film (Abbie Cornish, Olga Kurylenko and Gabourey Sidibe from Precious) are underdeveloped to the status of walk-ons. The direction has a scattered buckshot effect, which may be trendy but is not meant as a recommendation. At the recent Toronto International Film Festival, where it premiered in a sidebar event called Midnight Madness, one wag informed me that Seven Psychopaths is actually a comedy with a potential cult following and that I just don’t get it. Whatever. This time ignorance is bliss, but to me, the movie is genuinely humor-resistant. Any cult it develops will be chewing gum and wearing Halloween costumes.

rreed@observer.com

 SEVEN PSYCHOPATHS

Running Time 109 minutes

Written and Directed by  Martin McDonagh

Starring Colin Farrell, Woody Harrelson and Sam Rockwell

0/4

Al Pacino

“We have a Shakespearean, Elizabethean temper,” Al Pacino informed a seated crowd Monday evening in Central Park. As part of its 50th Anniversary Gala, the Public Theater was honoring Mr. Pacino with an award, in the form of a prop rapier he had once wielded on stage, “I’m a little nervous,” he laughed. “I wish I had water, but I have a sword,”

While the audience of hundreds listened to Mr. Pacino with rapt attention, a secondary scrum gathered across the fence. What appeared to be backup pitchers on a hapless softball team abandoned their game to listen to the famed thespian. Soon, a quintessentially New York amalgam of dog-walkers, skateboarders and bright-eyed Broadway hopefuls paused their iPods, essaying to hear Mr. Pacino over the Central Park din.

Earlier, as guests arrived, many seemed to materialize suddenly from the Where’s Waldo-esque ether of the park. From the throngs of sunglassed and unknowing denizens, Julianna Margulies and husband Keith Lieberthal appeared, followed by Chelsea Clinton and Mac Mezvinsky, Kathleen Turner, Julia Stiles and Lily Rabe.

The red carpet, positioned on the West side of the theater, was situated atop a blind hill. With clipboard in hand, one unlucky PR staffer was tasked with running up and down the escarpment, alerting her superiors when the VIPS arrived—the Public’s own Paul Revere. (Listen, dear readers, and you will hear, her stage-whispering celebrity arrivals from far and near!)

Returning to the Delacorte theater was a sort of homecoming for Ms. Rabe, who acted alongside Mr. Pacino last year in The Merchant of Venice. “Working with Al Pacino was one of the great privileges of my life,” she told The Observer. “He’s a wonderful human being, and being able to spend a year of my life, a very complicated year of my life, with him through all of that was something that I’m very grateful for.”

She insisted she wasn’t nervous when she first met the actor, however, and made no special preparations for the occasion. “I didn’t do anything. I probably, I don’t know, I rolled out of bed and took a shower,” she laughed. (Such élan!) While meeting her idols does not make her ill at ease, other things certainly do: “You know, snakes. Snakes not for me. People, more for me.”

As Ms. Rabe headed toward dinner, Steve Martin appeared wearing a fedora. He rushed towards his seat, and declined to be interviewed, with an unconvincing half-apology. “But I like The Observer!” he called over his shoulder, “It’s a great paper!” God bless you Mr. Martin! Don’t worry, we’ll talk next time.

Bob Balaban, however, proved perfectly chatty when asked which of the Bard’s characters he most identifies with. “Easily Caliban, because no other Shakespearean character is almost my name. It’s the only one!” he exclaimed gaily. “What could it be, Richard III? No. That doesn’t sound like Balaban.” The actor went on to describe his busy summer, which includes a book tour for his upcoming title The Creature from the Seventh Grade. “Its completely autobiographical,” he said. “But in this case the boy turns into an eight and a half foot reptile, which I didn’t do.” Describing himself as “shortest, skinniest, most-incompetent boy in his class,” Mr. Balaban professed that he has “fabulously good and fabulously horrifying memories of the seventh grade.”

At dinner on the Delacorte’s northeasterly lawn, guests toasted the Public’s half-century of free plays. White lanterns bobbled in the slight breeze as Christine Quinn saluted the organization.

As the main course was being served, Tony Kushner shared his favorite Shakespearean play. “For various reasons, Midsummer, because I think its about theater itself. So it seems like to me it’s sort of at the center of things.” Sadly, we didn’t have the opportunity to press him further, as we were overwhelmed by hundreds of passing chicken breasts.

After the meal, the crowds sought their seats for the evening’s reading of Romeo and Juliet. Attempting to avoid the clogged corridors, full of chatting and meandering guests, many attendees hoofed it across the lawn, only to find they had to mount a thigh-high fence to access the stage. Revelers young and old, spry and not so spry, heaved legs over the railing in an show of theatric acrobatics. Several sets of unmentionables were unwittingly flashed.

Before finding our seat, we ran into Cynthia Nixon, whose fire-red hair is growing back after her stint as a cancer-stricken professor in the Broadway show Wit. The actress, however, doesn’t know if she will keep her tresses short. “People keep asking me that. I’m getting a lot of positive reinforcement about the length,” she said, pulling at the still downy strands.

Inside the theater, guests rose for a standing ovation as the cast took the stage. Meryl Streep larked a lighthearted vision of Juliet, while Kevin Kline read opposite, as Romeo. Christopher Walken earned the most laughs as a sometimes Queens-inflected Mercutio, and Christine Baranski appeared as the nurse. Throughout the reading, flashing, fluorescent underbellies of passing planes reminded viewers they were sitting beneath the midsummer Manhattan sky.

After the performance, we found Ethan Hawke. Asked what he would ask Shakespeare if he had one question, Mr. Hawke thought for several moments, before offering a response. “What happens when we die?” he concluded. Genius or cheeky (or both), we have not yet decided. We’ll give him the benefit of the doubt.

After the reading, guests returned to the Delacorte’s front lawn, and enjoyed dancing, desserts and drinks. “Can I get champagne and wine? Is that bad?” one guest asked her friend guiltily.

The clock neared midnight. The softball team had long since packed its bats (after yet another loss, it seemed), and the Great Lawn was quiet once more. The party at the Delacorte continued, however. With glasses in hand guests danced into night, ill-chosen spike heels sinking into the new summer sod.

editorial@observer.com

Jordan Gelber and Mia Farrow.

Todd Solondz is the sort of director beloved by fresh-faced film students when they first arrive at school—his films are superficially interesting for their shock value and their disconnect from reality coexisting with an insistence that this is how life really is. Once deep into the syllabus, though, the burgeoning filmmakers learn that these spectacles lack the control or craftsmanship that makes the movie-going experience so exciting. He’s in the sort of rut where fellow student favorite Wes Anderson was uncomfortably wedged before the release of the remarkable Moonrise Kingdom: each film a smeared carbon copy of the one just before, with an emphasis on aesthetics and not much more.

Mr. Solondz’s second film, Happiness, is still his best; it indulges in glum miserablism but still has compelling conflicts and a ’50s-melodrama directorial style that complements its ideas. Subsequent years brought a series of films in which Mr. Solondz intended to shock his audience with graphic sex or events and ideas that are outré for their own sake, as though the lesson he learned from Happiness was that making an audience uncomfortable is the ultimate goal. That’s why it’s a relief that Dark Horse, while bearing surface similarities to past Solondz films, begins on a dramatically different path. Like Happiness, the film begins with an uncomfortable meeting between a beautiful woman and a socially inept, unattractive man. Unlike Happiness, however, the first human interaction in Dark Horse doesn’t lead immediately to crushing unhappiness; the plot unfolds like a heightened version of life.

The socially inept man in question is the film’s protagonist, Abe (played by Jordan Gelber), whose attempts to seduce the lovely Miranda (Selma Blair) are off-putting and bizarre in a manner recognizable to anyone who’s ever reassured a friend going through a long dry spell. Abe calls Miranda late at night, when she’s zonked out on prescription drugs, and takes her attempts to end the call as an invitation to show up to her house with a bouquet of flowers. Their courtship unfolds like a silent comedy, with the ardency of Abe’s affection parried at every turn by Miranda’s pharmaceutical coyness. She’s probably into him—well, maybe; she doesn’t really have the capacity to respond to even the most quotidian of social cues, let alone the mania of Abe’s dating style.

One can’t fault Abe, really, for his inability to interact with people. The first third of the movie elucidates with great sympathy the reasons for his anxieties. Despite being long past the age at which he should have moved out, if his paunch and hairline are to be judged, Abe lives with his parents (Mia Farrow and Christopher Walken) and works for his father. The rage festering inside Abe—at his parents, at his brother, at his loveless and lonely situation—explodes outward in one early instance when he cannot get a refund at a toy store. Leave aside for a moment what a tired cliché the adult action-figure enthusiast may be. The story of a life spent as a "dark horse," hoping for literally anything to change, comes across in a moment; the remainder of the movie would have to be brilliant to be necessary.

But with his screenwriting so able to convey a human story, and his actor so well chosen and so resourceful, Mr. Solondz still cannot resist the impulse to bury his film’s best elements under a thick layer of that old freshman surrealism. Abe’s confidant is but a manifestation of his conscience, or his alter personality, or the self-critical voice in his head: this much is never clear, but she appears constantly to hector him.

Dream sequences in films are very rarely useful; given that cinema is itself malleable enough to contain any experience the director wants to impose upon a character, why must we waste time seeing the character’s imagined experiences? Characters from the film appear like ghosts to torment Abe. The viewer knows with certainty that they are not there, and knows too that any chance of truly understanding Abe through his interactions with others has passed. There is not merely more satisfaction in watching the way Abe moves through the world; there’s unpleasant alienation in having the straightforwardness of Dark Horse snatched away in favor of an arch, overdetermined fantasy that proves only that life is brutal.

The film presents Abe with two variations on the same ending, one apparently real and one imagined. Neither of them provide Abe happiness, though one provides him the chance to think of himself as a doomed romantic idealist. His romance with Miranda is no romance at all, it turns out. This narrative turn is neutral vis-a-vis the film’s quality, but the manner in which it isn’t dealt with—after revealing a dangerous secret, Miranda just fades out of the narrative—is deflating. Shouldn’t Abe have fought for her, or fought with her?

While no one should expect a happy ending from a Todd Solondz movie, the film’s initial vigor and commitment to a muscular realism is exciting. However, the manner in which Dark Horse shifts back into the same fantastically unreal dourness is an unhappy ending indeed. While every director has his or her own style, Mr. Solondz’s has worn thin; his halfway realization that there are new ways he might tell stories is not enough to make Dark Horse the film it almost was.

Dark Horse

Running Time 85 minutes

Written and Directed by Todd Solondz

Starring Jordan Gelber, Selma Blair and Christopher Walken

Two out of four stars

Even famous health fanatic Rupert Murdoch was seen to grab a few while standing with his wife Wendi, who wore tremendously fetching turquoise blue sheath dress. The cocktail party was held outside the State Supreme Court House and the crowd milled around enjoying the balmy late spring weather.  

Christopher Walken is well-known for his ability to play crusty, stern military men, most notably in the Pulp Fiction sequence about the consequences of hiding the family jewels in...well... the family jewels. But has he served his country for real? Walken was put on the spot about his military career by friends and ex-marines Scott Glenn and Harvey Keitel. Mr. Keitel and Mr. Glenn, wearing exactly the same black shirt and black blazer combo, shared a moment of man love and had a hearty hug before Mr. Keitel shouted, "A fellow Marine - we have to stick together!"  Mr. Keitel called out to Christopher Walken standing nearby, "Hey, Walken were you in the Marines?" Taking a long sip of red wine, the slightly ashen actor replied with a smile, "I was but no one ever believes me."  (The Observer had a look and it appears that Walken never actually served in the armed forces.)

His friend and fellow actor, Scott Glenn did serve, and told us he was discharged from military service on November 22^nd 1967, "Which was a pretty interesting time to be in the marines." Mr. Glenn was both a judge at the festival and as well as promoting a movie he was featured in called Magic Mountain.  "I was in three movies this year, one had a budget of $100 million, another was $35 million and the one at the festival was just $600,000." When asked if he preferred Independent movies or studio ones, Mr. Glenn replied, "If money wasn't an issue, I would always choose Independents but studio films pay the rent."

Grayon Carter presided over his party in a natty green-checked spring tweed coat for the occasion. Other attendees included: Salman Rushdie paying hooky from his duties as the president of the PEN awards, Oscar award winning director Tom Hopper seen leaving with new squeeze Tara Subkoff and Robert de Niro surrounded by a huge and immovable crush of fans.

dprince@observer.com

Andrew Bovell’s play, which debuted in Adelaide, Australia, in 2008 and played in Sydney and then London before arriving in New York, recounts the tangled history of an English-Australian family over an 80-year period, from 1959 to 2039. I’m reluctant to reveal too much of the story, because the play’s point is its slow, careful revelations. One father is exiled by scandal; another has run off in fear. One mother is lost to alcohol, one to disease, one to the sea. Two sons are searching for their fathers. There are tales of historical natural disasters, and there is, always, that rain. (“Still, there are people drowning in Bangladesh, so we shouldn’t complain,” the characters say, one of several repeated phrases.)

It is a sad play, full of tragedy and cataclysm; it is a good play, precisely, meticulously crafted; and it is a hard play, requiring real work from its audience. But when it ends and everything has been revealed, it is exhilarating.

The episodic exposition is even more tangled than that family tree: We meet different versions of the same characters—and different characters with the same name—in a series of overlapping, nonsequential scenes. For its first half-hour, When the Rain Stops Falling is opaque, but it’s also compelling. We don’t know what’s going on, but we’re held rapt by the fluid, intelligent writing and excellent acting, and we’re eager for the play to lock together, to begin to reveal itself.

Finally, at about the hour mark—When the Rain Stops Falling runs a bit shy of two hours and plays without an intermission—all those disparate building blocks finally begin to slide into place, making sense of the story and rewarding our patience. We’ve gone from curious to bored to fascinated.

Director David Cromer places David Korin’s fairly minimal sets—basically, the same kitchen scene, reused as different homes in different cites at different times—on a rotating stage within a rotating stage, keeping the action circling around itself just as the script circles around the truth. Phrases, ideas, and behaviors repeat themselves, circularly—we can’t get away from history, Mr. Bovell is saying; we always carry it with us.

“Fish don’t fall out of the sky,” a young character tells his newfound lover. “And fathers don’t leave their children, and mothers don’t drown themselves in the sea.” They’re all ridiculous, improbable, terrible. But they all happen in When the Rain Stops Falling, and they must be dealt with. That’s life, the play seems to say: Shit happens, and you never forget, but then you move on.

CHRISTOPHER WALKEN IS PERHAPS the ideal Martin McDonagh star: a uniquely offbeat actor who specializes in a certain air of menace, now paired at the Gerald Schoenfeld Theatre with a uniquely offbeat playwright who specializes in very profane, very violent horror-comedies.

And when the curtain comes up—really, it gets pulled aside, like a tattered drape—on Mr. Walken in the center of a beautifully dingy hotel room (sets and costumes are by Scott Pask) at the start of A Behanding in Spokane, everything seems to go together flawlessly: the craggy face, the crummy room, the depraved shenanigans sure to come.

They’re there from the beginning. Mr. Walken’s Carmichael is missing his left hand, stolen by rednecks 47 years earlier, and a couple of small-time crooks trying to make some cash have offered to sell it back to him. One of them is locked in the closet, whimpering (at least until Carmichael shoots him, or near him), and the other is out getting the hand—which turns out to have been stolen from a local museum, an aboriginal hand that clearly didn’t come from the pale (and, as it turns out, racist) Carmichael.

Things go badly wrong, as they tend to, and life-threatening hijinks ensue, abetted by the hotel clerk (a brilliant Sam Rockwell), who disdains his job, hopes for some drama in his life and has a bit of a crush on Marilyn (Zoe Kazan, a bit screechy), the female half of the con-artist couple. There is also Marilyn’s African-American boyfriend, Toby (Anthony Mackie), who tries to talk tough but frequently breaks down in tears, and offstage, Carmichael’s mother, a porn-loving racist who may or may not have broken ankles, who phones a few times.

A Behanding in Spokane is laugh-out-loud funny, but it’s also a bit disappointing. Unlike many of Mr. McDonagh’s earlier works, equally funny and typically gorier, it doesn’t seem to have any deeper point than the comedy. It’s also the first time he has set a play in the United States, which I think detracts: The skewed worlds he creates make sense on a remote, fog-shrouded Irish island; in a nondescript American city, the unreality bumps up against reality. And he doesn’t quite have an ear for American dialect: His working-class grafters use plenty of “ain’ts,” but they also use a few “mightn’ts.”

But Mr. Walken does his Walken thing marvelously and, for this play, perfectly. Mr. Rockwell is a smart-ass, manic delight. And Mr. McDonagh keeps the audience laughing. He has delivered more before, and he will again, but A Behanding in Spokane is simply an entertainment. And, in the end, for that he deserves a hand.

THERE’S NO PARTICULAR REASON you would want to see The Miracle Worker, which was revived at Circle in the Square last week. You know the story; you know how it ends. (Wa-wa!) And William Gibson’s play, first produced on Broadway in 1959 and adapted from a TV drama he’d written two years earlier—it subsequently became a feature film and then two more TV movies—only occasionally rises to the level of a good after-school special.

But there’s Abigail Breslin. The 14-year-old Little Miss Sunshine star is spectacular. In more than two hours onstage as the blind, deaf-mute Helen Keller, she never gets to say a word. But her acting is sensitive and profound and beautifully conveys Helen’s intelligence, frustration, alienation and the joy she gets from occasional bits of comprehension. It would be easy for Helen to be a caricature, a lurching, grunting wild child, but in Miss Breslin’s hands she’s not; she’s a person, a horribly frustrated person.

Annie Sullivan (played here by a fine Allison Pill) saved Keller. Miss Breslin, as Keller, saves this show.

joxfeld@observer.com

Monday: Three Sheets
Because the only thing more fun than actually getting drunk at a bar is watching someone else do it from the comfort of your own couch, here comes Three Sheets. The series, now in its fourth season—the show moves from the defunct MOJO-HD to Fine Living Network starting tonight—finds host and “comedian” Zane Lamprey visiting countries around the world to sample their watering holes and local customs. Mr. Lamprey tries a bit too hard to be Joel McHale, and the postproduction team is too drunk on their use of wacky sound effects to underscore each scene, but you could certainly do worse on a Monday night in July than watching a bunch of New Zealanders get drunk on moonshine. And the best part? No hangover the following morning! [FLN, 10 p.m.]

Tuesday: Ted Williams
Toward the end of HBO’s thoroughly fascinating documentary about Ted Williams, biographer Leigh Montville—who’s book about “the Splendid Splinter” covers much of the same ground as this film—says that the slugger was a real man’s man, to both his credit and detriment. Who are we to argue? Part John Wayne, part Roy Hobbs and part Tony Soprano, Mr. Williams was a conflicted ballplayer and, apparently, one tough son of a gun to be around. He was also cut from a cloth that has long since disappeared. Think about it: He was a legitimate war hero who stopped playing baseball during the prime of his career to defend the country. Something tells us Alex Rodriguez wouldn’t make the same choice. [HBO2, 8:30 p.m.]

Wednesday: Michael and Michael Have Issues
Calling Michael and Michael Have Issues the funniest show of the summer feels like damning with faint praise—after all, there really isn’t that much in the way of laughs on TV right now (NYC Prep doesn't count). But don’t let the lack of competition fool you: The Comedy Central series is legitimately great. Michael Ian Black and Michael Showalter—refugees from Stella and, before that, The State—play versions of themselves, and they infuse their characters with such contempt that the series rises above its tired, “show-within-a-show” conceit. We promise: You will laugh, and laugh hard.  [Comedy Central, 10:30 p.m.]

Thursday: The Wackness
Was it only last summer that we sat in the Angelika during a sweltering summer night and watched The Wackness? Apparently! Jonathan Levine’s coming-of-age dramedy falls victim to the old adage of the parts being greater than the sum of the whole. Blessed with an outstanding cast—Ben Kingsley, Jane Adams, and, your 2008 Girl Crush, Olivia Thrilby—there is plenty to like about this nostalgic trip back to the summer of 1994. (Cue up Tribe Called Quest!) Unfortunately, like so many young filmmakers, Mr. Levine loses the thread sometime before the third act and the film sputters to an unappealing finish. Still, ignoring The Wackness wholesale would be a fool’s errand; the film captures the feeling of Manhattan-in-Summer better than anything we’ve seen in some time. [Starz, 3:30 p.m.]

Friday: Nick of Time
Nick of Time embraces its B-movie qualities with such gusto that it comes off like the kind of cheapie thriller Alfred Hitchcock would have directed to fulfill a studio contract. And that’s a good thing! The “real time” hook isn’t as fresh, especially now that 24 has spent the better part of the last decade making a career out of it, but John Badham’s film, with Johnny Depp being all Depp-y, is a potboiler of tension. That Christopher Walken shows up as a mustached baddie spouting ridiculous things like “I got the call, I put him down like a sick animal” is merely icing on the cake. This is pure pulpy fiction. [Thriller Max, 2:30 p.m.]