Andanh.com

I spent two months in San Francisco last year and, let me tell you, marijuana is totally fucking legal there. The pot clinics even advertise on the back of the goddamn alternative weeklies. In fact, throughout California there are pockets where it seems the wacky tabaccy is 100 percent legal. No wonder that Doug Benson, "America's second-best pot comic" (High Times), is based in the Golden State. Benson tries to take a calculated tact on the issue, going 30 days without smoking and then 30 days smoking nonstop. It's by no means a news story—and pot smokers are only funny to other pot smokers—but Super High Me is a fascinating survey of potheads, pot cooperatives, pot clinics, pot paraphernalia and lots of different pot. Let's hope this doesn't continue, though. Super Drunk Me is not such a good look.

UNIVERSAL STUDIOS

RATED | R

RELEASE DATE | 6.17.08

PRICE | $24.98

It's very interesting that Malcolm D. Lee thinks it's acceptable to perpetuate the same negative stereotypes that his cousin critiques in the modern-day minstrel show expose, Bamboozled. I also think it's very interesting that James Earl Jones, Margaret Avery (um, The Color Purple), Joy Bryant and Michael Clarke Duncan signed on to be in this offensive and beyond unrealistic waste of time. But that's neither here nor fucking there. They have bills to pay and who am I to judge why a self-respecting person would hop on the Tyler Perry Express? This piece of disrespectful shit hits all the predictable stops: crude sexual humor, animals boning and slapstick violence are the basis for this supposedly feel-good tale about a successful TV guru (Martin "I am setting back black actors at least 50 years" Lawrence) who returns home after nine years in LA for his parents' 50th anniversary in Georgia. Oh, and in case you were wondering, yes, there are jokes about ribs.

UNIVERSAL STUDIOS

RATED | PG-13

RELEASE DATE | 6.17.08

PRICE | $29.98

'Sup with the Joy Division attention these days? Microsoft is releasing a Zune Unknown Pleasures model—;(. Control just came out on DVD, like, 10 minutes ago, and now legendary cinematographer Grant Gee's Joy Division is ready for shipping. Joy Division is dark, spooky, uplifting and sometimes a little silly. It's different than all of the previous releases, because the cast consists of actual surviving members of the band and the people who helped put them on the map. Think of the best episode of Behind The Music and multiply that by 100. It even made my eyes water a little, like one of the 10 times Nikki Sixx died ... The cast's firsthand accounts, along with rare footage (I'm not talkin' YouTube clips, here), deliver a poignant chronicle of the band's history. Oh, and it also makes Peter Hook look like a selfish asshole.

THE WEINSTEIN COMPANY

RATED | UNRATED

RELEASE DATE | 6.17.08

PRICE | $22.95

Racking them up.

I'm sure you are aware that Menino's best friend for life Ed Jesser is married to a woman named Connie Kastelnik, who happens to be the rep here in Boston for WALL USA [the company that has a 20-year contract with the city for street furniture, including newscondos, as mentioned in the News to Us, 6.11.08—Ed.]. Small world. The other item that had me laughing was the comment from Steve Murphy that the City Council was going to take a hard look at something. That would be a first.

MIKE

DORCHESTER

That's us: Lazy and Smarmy

Dear Dig,

I'm not going to hold a grudge against you for being uninspired, just don't be so fucking lazy.

Case in point: Laura Dargus' review on Forgetting Sarah Marshall (5.28.08). Why the fuck are you running an article on a film that premiered a full 40 days prior to the publishing date of the edition? Just because you are a weekly doesn't mean you can get away with being untimely.

Now, in her article, Dargus lists a TV show and four movies that Seth Rogen either wrote/directed/or acted in. Her writing implies that she had seen at least some or all of these programs, which means that if she'd watched Freaks and Geeks when it was actually on-air she would've had nearly a decade of intermittent exposure to Rogen and his surname. However, in the article she spells it incorrectly five times.

Names can't be typos. Try harder.

Also, David Day, don't think I've overlooked your nonsense. It is your prerogative to use your position as the exit pollster to smarm your way into the delicates of the fairer sex, just don't subject us to the cheesy self-aggrandizing record of it. Keep your masturbatory pick-up lines a private memory and print funny, profound, peculiar or interesting interviews on the back page of the Dig.

Also, glossy still sucks.

Lovingly yours,

DAVID

VIA EMAIL

More Laws!

When medical professionals abuse persons accused of mental illness, they violate the Americans with Disabilities Act, the Rehabilitation Act and state law. Few medical professionals know the laws, and some ignore them with vulnerable persons unlikely to bring a lawsuit (News To Us, 5.29.08). If they ignore existing state and US laws, why would they obey new laws?

The DPH spokesman is correct in saying, "Our position is that further legislation is not needed right now." What is needed is enforcement.

ROY

CAMBRIDGE

There is no question that M. Night Shyamalan can come up with a good concept, build a solid suspenseful scene and have it pay off with a real "gotcha" moment. Unfortunately, in his latest film The Happening, it's everything else that is the problem.

Yes, there are some real jump out of your seat moments and some very well-crafted visual sequences. Shyamalan uses the R rating, the first time one of his movies has received one, to really push the limits with massive amounts of gratuitous violence right from jump street. In fact, five minutes into the film a woman is jabbing herself in the jugular with a hatpin. Also shown in full detail is a man being run over by a thresher. Throw in a few other gripping thriller scenes and a massive body count and you have the beginning of a movie that will definitely make a strong, albeit disturbing, impression.

Regrettably, that's as far as Shyamalan got. The dialogue is very forced and unnatural, the plot doesn't make sense in a number of places and Shyamalan is so downright cheap at times that the movie should be entitled Deus Ex Machina. For example, when everyone is frantically running for their lives from an unexplainable deadly phenomenon, a random stranger has the line, "By the way, I think I know exactly what's going on here." While Shyamalan undeniably has the skill to write and direct good scenes, the movie as a whole feels unfinished and incomplete.

Bottom line, Shyamalan: You can come up with the concepts and whatnot, and please feel free to direct—areas where you actually have some talent. But please, please, leave the script to someone else.

THE HAPPENING

RATED | R

NOW SHOWING | AMC LOEWS BOSTON COMMON, REGAL FENWAY STADIUM, AMC LOEWS HARVARD SQ., SOMERVILLE THEATRE, AMC CHESTNUT HILL, SHOWCASE CINEMAS REVERE

Dear Reader,

Got any change? We sure do. For one, it seems every insane Gemini I know has to have a huge birthday party, and it's taking us about four hours to get there on the Red Line. It's also mid-June and we're obsessing over ... basketball? Weird.

So we're diving into change, exploring all sections of the city, from Fields Corner to co-op living, from drum & bass to violent playwriting. Ever had a hearty hot dog from a chocolate shop? Neither did we. How about gum bichromate artwork? Yeah, no. How about Clare and the Reasons? New to us, now we're in love. And if you have yet to dive into the wild world of the Sun City Girls, Thursday at the Brattle may be your last chance.

Speaking of change, don't forget to read our teary-eyed exit poll with the first Dig employee, Craig Kapilow. He was just a nubbin when we brought him in, and now he's all growed up.

Oh, and Craig? One thing remains the same: Yankees suck.

Clare and the Reasons might be the cutest band there is. Mind you, I haven't seen them in person, but with their baby-voiced singer Clare Muldaur-Manchon and layered chamber-pop arrangements, it's hard not to fall in love with them. Really, try not to smile when you hear "Pluto," the spacey tune about the icy planet's recent demotion from planetary status.

The band's 2007 debut, The Movie, fittingly sounds like a score written by Brian Wilson and Danny Elfman, sung by Nina Persson of The Cardigans. "In terms of sound," Muldaur-Manchon says, "there was no one film that inspired us, but more visual colors and textures. Oh, and cheese, too. That's why we formed the band: cheese," she says. "I'm also inspired by walking around New York, eavesdropping on snippets of conversations. That's always a good little window for songwriting."

Keeping true with The Movie's lush arrangements, the six-piece Reasons' live performance translates seamlessly to the stage. "Most everything you hear on the record," she says, "we do live. If people threw rotten fruit at us on stage, it meant we needed to make changes." For the summer, the band is touring Europe and then the US, "eating good food, then bad food." Sharing the stage with Clare is her husband Oliver, with whom she assures there is no awkwardness. "I let him think he's the boss and he lets me think I'm the boss, so it works brilliantly ... and we get nothing done."

CLARE AND THE REASONS

W/ MY BRIGHTEST DIAMOND

FRIDAY 6.20.08

BERKLEE PERFORMANCE CENTER

136 MASS. AVE. BOSTON

617.747.8820

8PM/ALL AGES/$20/$10 BERKLEE STUDENTS

BERKLEE.EDU/EVENTS

A'TRIS | LENSING

I wasn't going to start this sentence with this band met at Berklee, but they did and the fact of the matter is when talent meets more talent, with formal training, the result is much like A'tris: melodic, progressive rock with jazz sensibilities and piano-heavy ballads. atrishq.com

ESQUINA | FIRST CORNER EP

Zero G Sounds is at it again. Eddie O. and Late Season bring a rippling mix of drums and textured blips to their track "First Corner," and the subsequent remixes, Agnes' Deep Corner Dub and Ruoho Ruotsi's remix turn up the bass, transforming the track into two very different burners. zer0gsounds.com

I am not going to lie: When I met the Serious Geniuses at their practice space last week, I conducted an extremely unprofessional interview and we spent most of our time making fun of ourselves and each other. However, when I asked the obligatory question about their influences, they took what's probably the most direct path to winning my heart: "The usual kind of mid-'90s bullshit," says guitarist Nip Phinizy, "Archers of Loaf, Superchunk, Hot Snakes, Drexel."

The four-piece team has been an active band for two years, but are only now preparing to release their debut LP: You Can Steal the Riffs, But You Can't Steal the Talent. "The album should be out by the end of June or beginning of July," says Phinizy. "We'll have it at our shows, but you should be able to pick it up at all the usual sort of online punk rock superstores."

In the wake of an enormously popular viral video entitled "Tony vs. Paul" (4.5 million views and counting) starring guitarist and vocalist Paul Cummings, Cummings spent much of the spring on the West Coast planning several upcoming professional shoots. This resulted in a short hiatus for the band. But with the LP, a couple of high-profile upcoming shows and an impending repress of their split EP with the terrifically named Jean-Claude Jam Band (their only other official release), the Serious Geniuses appear, by all accounts, to have had a fire lit under their asses.

The first such show, at Great Scott this Monday, features the SGs opening for up-and-coming pop-punk luminaries Lemuria. "We're psyched to play with Lemuria, they're awesome," says Cummings, amidst murmurs of agreement from the rest of the band. "Hopefully we'll have the LPs by then, but if not, we should, you know, have them by the record release show."

The YCSTRBYCSTT release show isn't until a month later (7.24.08 at Great Scott), but the whole band seems pretty excited about picking local openers. "There's a lot of good bands right now," says bassist Josh Hoey, as the rest of the band mentions locals such as Reports, The Secret Hideouts and the Cold Beat. "We're actually an extremely closed-minded band," deadpans drummer Dan Wilder. "I exclusively listen to our records."

Starting next month, then, it looks like we'll have a chance to do the same.

[Serious Geniuses at Great Scott. With Lemuria, Where the Land Meets the Sea and The Hollow Sound. Mon 6.23.08. 1222 Comm. Ave., Allston, 617.566.9014. 9pm/18+/$8. greatscottboston.com]

Don't go the Gurnet Theatre Project's production of Essential Self-Defense if you want to see a play. Go if you want to be in a play.

Director Brian C. Fahey and assistant director Susie Schutt have chosen a complex, frenetic composition for their first project together: A play with so many elements, played so close in so small a space, that the audience is drawn ineluctably into the action.

"The fight scenes are really close; in the bar scenes, you feel like you're in a bar," Schutt says.

The play, written by Pulitzer Prize finalist Adam Rapp, is comedy and commentary. It has something to say about modernity, paranoia and the promotion of fear as a means of social control—it's not happy subject material and the characters are neither happy nor charming. The levity in the play is derived from the interactions of two characters "that are very socially awkward and extreme in their neuroses," Fahey says. "That's the comedy."

It's a montage of incongruous personalities: a reclusive paranoid, an anxiety-disordered publisher, a punk librarian, a bourbon swilling butcher and a Russian janitor-cum-poet. Rachael Hunt, who plays Sorrel Haze—a punk librarian who spends most of her stage time shimmying about in stilettos high enough to secure railroad ties—says the quality of the writing and theme of the play pulls it together and makes it understandable. "It's about something everyone can relate to. It's about the overarching fear of a post-9.11 world," she says. "And it works because it's a really well-written play."

Much of the dialogue is a long series of polemics, elucidating the world view of Yul Carroll, the male lead played by a somatically unsettled Adam Henry Garcia, and timid rejoinders from co-lead Chelsea Cipolla as Sadie Day, the shaking leaf of the play. It doesn't sound pleasant to watch, but it is. There's no way to remain somber when Carroll and Day trade lines like: "They're part of the machine." "What machine?" "The machine with no off switch." Or when Carroll insists, "Talent is a fallacy created by gym teachers and Top 40 radio drones."

Place that dialogue into a karaoke bar that only allows original compositions, backs all singers with a live band and doesn't allow anyone to leave without performing, or a subterranean hovel where rats are fended off with a xylophone, and you've either got brilliant comedy or pointless literary immodesty. The play, thankfully, comes down on the side of the former.

All these elements make Essential Self-Defense "edgy in a way I've never seen in live theater," Schutt says. And the number of elements involved—the live band, the many, many set changes, the fight scenes—make it "the most ambitious we've gotten as a company," Fahey says. "I'm excited to see how people react to it because it is so out there."

ESSENTIAL SELF-DEFENSE

BY ADAM RAPP

PRESENTED BY GURNET THEATRE PROJECT

RUNS UNTIL SATURDAY 6.28.08

PLAZA BLACK BOX AT THE BOSTON CENTER FOR THE ARTS

539 TREMONT ST., SOUTH END, BOSTON

617.426.5000

9PM/21+/$5

BCAONLINE.ORG

GURNETTHEATRE.COM