Daily Archives: January 16, 2025

Local LA theaters bring puppets and movies to families for respite from fires

The carpeted floor of the main theater at Vidiots is drizzled with popcorn as dozens of children and their families crowd around a puppet show. Show tunes blast over the speaker as a puppet named Yellow Cat (who is, indeed, a yellow cat) prances and twirls across the floor.

Vidiots is a historic theater in northeast Los Angeles, a few miles from where fires are still burning in the Altadena and Pasadena neighborhoods. Vidiots joined forces with the Bob Baker Marionette Theater nearby to give families and parents a way to take their minds off the devastation.

Ryan Kellman / NPR

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NPRDiego Montoya shows off a marionette puppet.

“The show was planned as a way to give families some relief, an opportunity to do something that’s fun and silly. To sit back and get away from the chaos of the world right now,” says Yellow Cat’s puppet master, Diego Montoya. Vidiots also screened movies and gave out pajamas and coloring books. Many of the families at the free event earlier this week are victims of the fire in one way or another — some have lost homes, others have children who have lost schools.

Three-year-old Leo Bane is one of the spectators of the puppet show. Part of his school burned down in the Eaton Fire, so this event is a welcome distraction for Leo and his mother, Tania Verafield.

“I think this is the only two hours I haven’t been constantly checking my phone and trying to get updates and I feel just some relief at watching my son giggle [as he watches] these amazing puppets,” says Verafield.

Ryan Kellman / NPR

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NPRIris Wong (left) sits with her mothe, Tina Yen, and Tania Verafield holds her son, Leo Bane, as they watch the show.

Schools in the Pasadena and Altadena areas are largely closed as the fires continue to burn. The YMCA and local government are offering child care, but slots are filling up fast, and it’s falling on many families to look after their young ones. Many told me they’re relying on each other to get through this time.

“People don’t know LA. It’s an amazing community,” says Ursula Knudsen. Both of her children lost their school campuses to the fire, and her younger daughter saw her school in flames as she evacuated with her father. Their home was also severely damaged.

“It’s not like Altadena needed a tragedy to come together as a community. That’s what’s wild. It’s only showing up 100 times more than it already was,” Knudsen says.

Ryan Kellman / NPR

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NPRBuster Balloon shows off a puppet to children at the Vidiots theater.

Coming to this free event with puppets, movies, and even a 6-foot-tall roving giraffe mascot has brought a moment of relief for Knudsen and her friend, Kate Mallor, whose children’s schools were also severely damaged by the fire. “It’s been so beautiful to see other moms here and to see our classmates and be able to hug,” says Mallor.

The puppet show in the main theater draws to a close with a grand finale. Yellow Cat is dancing to Barbra Streisand’s “Don’t Rain on My Parade,” and that’s no coincidence, says Montoya, the puppeteer.

“It’s got a great message, you know, ‘Don’t rain on my parade, I’m going to have fun no matter what,'” Montoya says. “‘I’m going to do what brings me joy.'”

Ryan Kellman / NPR

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NPRPeople walk by the exterior of Vidiots, which has a sign that says, “Here for you LA.”

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Tom Hanks’s new film Here is a stilted, manipulative disaster

Your support helps us to tell the storyFrom reproductive rights to climate change to Big Tech, The Independent is on the ground when the story is developing. Whether it’s investigating the financials of Elon Musk’s pro-Trump PAC or producing our latest documentary, ‘The A Word’, which shines a light on the American women fighting for reproductive rights, we know how important it is to parse out the facts from the messaging.At such a critical moment in US history, we need reporters on the ground. Your donation allows us to keep sending journalists to speak to both sides of the story.The Independent is trusted by Americans across the entire political spectrum. And unlike many other quality news outlets, we choose not to lock Americans out of our reporting and analysis with paywalls. We believe quality journalism should be available to everyone, paid for by those who can afford it.Your support makes all the difference.Read moreRobert Zemeckis’s ambitions make sense. They’re admirable, even. From Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988) to Forrest Gump (1994), his career has repeatedly sought to discover how technology can be used to tell old stories in an entirely new fashion. But the quest backfires – and increasingly so in his run of uncanny valleys this century, among them The Polar Express (2004) and Pinocchio (2022) – when there’s a failure to ask how said technology informs the story being told, beyond simply allowing it to exist. In more simple terms, to quote a film by Zemeckis’s mentor Steven Spielberg: “Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could that they didn’t stop to think if they should.”Here fits the bill perfectly. It’s bold in theory, a struggle to sit through in practice. The film is adapted from Richard McGuire’s 2014 graphic novel, in which panels are layered over each other in order to depict an anonymous living room corner across time, as we become silent observers through decades and centuries of mundane incidents. It renders individual existence as small but precious.Zemeckis replicates those panels-within-panels as a way to transition between scenes but without the graphic beauty of McGuire’s drawings. He may slingshot between eras – dinosaurs, the Lenni Lenape people pre-colonisation, the American Revolutionary War – yet we’re largely watching snippets from 20th- and 21st-century life play out in a static wide shot. For the most part, we’re stuck with the same family: Al Young (Paul Bettany), returning from the frontlines of the Second World War, his wife Rose (Kelly Reilly), their eldest son Richard (Tom Hanks), and his wife Margaret (Robin Wright), who first moves in after she becomes pregnant at the age of 18.It’s an idea that’s fresher in the realm of cinema, yet fairly routine in the world of museums and theme parks. And because we’re so physically detached from these actors’ expressions, performances are locked in broad, theatrical mode: every line is terribly well-pronounced, and limbs fly about in exaggerated gestures. Wright and Hanks, in particular, often have to fight against the forces of generative AI, used to create a kind of “digital makeup” to age them both up and down – applied to the footage not in post-production but in real-time, on set. It renders them both dead-eyed and waxy.Here is seemingly intended by Zemeckis as a homage or companion piece to Forrest Gump. He wrote the script with its screenwriter, Eric Roth; has reunited its stars Hanks and Wright; and applied that same naive, sickly sweet optimism, in which America’s little dreamers are given the weight of the mythic. We meet the previous owners of the house: suffragette Pauline (Michelle Dockery) warning her husband John (Gwilym Lee) against those newfangled flying machines, and inventor Leo (David Fynn) with his adoring pin-up bride Stella (Ophelia Lovibond). But their lives are all primarily driven by the forces of dramatic irony. Not a single character or emotion feels genuinely human.Uncanny valley: Robin Wright and Tom Hanks in ‘Here’