LAKEPORT, Calif. – Appearing at the Soper Reese Theatre on Saturday, June 13, is the nationally recognized group, Occidental Gypsy, well known as capable heirs and nouveau pioneers of the music of Django Reinhardt.

The group will take the stage at 7 p.m. to play a dynamic mix of original vocal and instrumental pieces, most notably a “gypsyfied” take of Michael Jackson’s Thriller.

All seats are reserved. Tickets are $20, $18 and $15.

Deftly blending gypsy swing, jazz and world music, the group features Eli Bishop, a Nashville prodigy who recently won First Place in the Mississippi Fiddle Championships and regularly stuns crowds with his lightning-fast, passionate violin.

Lead guitarist and composer Brett Feldman drives the sound with a masterful gypsy swing guitar.

Jeremy Frantz, a protégé of legendary jazz guitarist Joe Negri, brings his sultry, retro vocals and expert jazz guitar to the front line, and serves as an exquisite counterpoint to the down-and-dirty driving sound brought by Brett.

Guatemalan percussionist Erick “Banny” Cifuentes and bassist Jeff Feldman fill out the band’s rich sound to keep feet stomping and people dancing.

These energetic and charming entertainers interact with fans on a personal level and incorporate audience participation into every show.

Tickets are on sale at www.soperreesetheatre.com ; at the theater box office on Fridays from 10:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m.; or at The Travel Center, 1265 S. Main St., Lakeport, from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., Monday through Friday.

The Soper Reese Theatre is located at 275 S. Main St., Lakeport. For more information call 707-263-0577.

Poets often do their best work when they’re telling us about something they’ve seen without stepping into the poem and talking about themselves.

Here’s a lovely poem of observation by Terri Kirby Erickson, who lives in North Carolina.

Hospital Parking Lot

Headscarf fluttering in the wind,
stockings hanging loose on her vein-roped
legs, an old woman clings to her husband

as if he were the last tree standing in a storm,
though he is not the strong one.

His skin is translucent—more like a window
than a shade. Without a shirt and coat,

we could see his lungs swell and shrink,
his heart skip. But he has offered her his arm,
and for sixty years, she has taken it.

American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation ( www.poetryfoundation.org ), publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Poem copyright 2014 by Terri Kirby Erickson, “Hospital Parking Lot,” from A Lake of Light and Clouds (Press 53, 2014). Poem reprinted by permission of Terri Kirby Erickson and Press 53. Introduction copyright 2015 by The Poetry Foundation. The introduction's author, Ted Kooser, served as United States Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 2004-2006. They do not accept unsolicited manuscripts.

MAD MAX: FURY ROAD (Rated R)

The original “Mad Max” film gave Mel Gibson his big start on the road to stardom.

George Miller, a medical doctor by profession, proved to be an excellent director, launching a career that has now come full circle with “Mad Max: Fury Road.”

To put everything into perspective, when “Mad Max” debuted in 1979, malaise gripped America, radical mullahs took over Iran with the Islamic revolution, and the Soviet Union was only months away from invading Afghanistan.

With its emphasis on a desolate future, this dystopian action film seemed like a good fit for the era.

Now 36 years later, “Mad Max: Fury Road” may be tapping into the zeitgeist once again.

But Mel Gibson has been replaced by Tom Hardy, who’s wearing an iron mask that is reminiscent of his appearance as Bane in “The Dark Knight Rises.”

Best of all, George Miller, the mastermind of the post-apocalyptic worldview, still has a vivid imagination.

The future is bleak in George Miller’s world, a chaotic place, where there is no rule of law, no power grids, no water, and no mercy.

Once the battle was only for oil, not it’s just a matter of survival. Life on this forbidding planet is nasty, brutish and short.

Water is the key to power wielded by the maniac tyrant Immortan Joe (Hugh Keays-Byrne, who played the psychotic Toecutter in the original “Mad Max”).

The Citadel, a fortress spun into a cave system where water is pumped from the only aquifer for miles around, is like a chamber of horrors for the unfortunate.

What’s left of humanity roams the Wasteland in wild tribes or clings to survival at the foot of the Citadel, where the desert warlord favors his War Boys, pasty-white creatures fueled by constant blood transfusions and a diet of mother’s milk.

As the film opens, Tom Hardy’s Max Rockatansky (the same name for Mel Gibson’s character) is a veteran of some desert war with a skill set that allows him to survive alone. He’s a wanderer in search of an idealistic place that no longer exists.

Ambushed by a wild pack of marauding War Boys, Max is dragged back to the Citadel, the most fortified stronghold in the Wasteland, where his fate is to become a source of blood transfusion for Immortan Joe’s zombie-like army.

It’s at the Citadel that we meet Imperator Furiosa (Charlize Theron), a shaved-head female warrior who is tasked with driving the War Rig to Gas Town, flanked by an armada of super-charged vintage muscle cars and trucks converted to armored vehicles.

Suddenly, Furiosa detours her rig and her convoy off their scheduled run, and it becomes clear she has a different agenda. Immortan’s kingdom erupts into bedlam.

Furiosa’s War Rig carries the precious cargo of the tyrant’s five wives, each one a sex slave prized for breeding purposes to produce a male heir.

Meanwhile, since Max is now an unwilling blood donor hooked up to warrior Nux (Hicholas Hoult), our hero is strapped to the front end of the car that Nux drives in pursuit of the wayward Furiosa.

Not long after the first run, things happen to make Max and Furiosa guarded allies as they flee for the mythical sanctuary of the Green Place.

While George Miller may be philosophical about the idea driving his “Mad Max” franchise being attributed to “Alfred Hitchcock’s notion about making films that can be watched anywhere in the world without subtitles,” the essence of “Fury Road” is action so intense that dialogue is a mere afterthought, and even when there are spoken words, it’s mostly in the service of driving the mayhem.

Dialogue is so minimal that Max never even utters his own name until late in the movie’s run. He’s like the Man with No Name in the spaghetti westerns, which seems appropriate to the desert wasteland that is the backdrop for what is essentially a non-stop road warrior chase.

Imagery is a key element. A symbolic leafless tree stands alone in the desolate sands. A monstrous, sweeping sandstorm decimates the landscape. Every detail from the gadgets attached to the pursuing vehicles to the armaments used by the warriors is a visual treat.

In pursuit of Max and Furiosa, some of the War Boys catapult on bending poles from their vehicles in attack mode, while others frantically beat war drums.

The high-octane Road War is orchestrated by a dude swinging from a bungee cord as he shreds metal and flame from a double-necked electric guitar-cum-flamethrower.

“Fury Road” unfolds in near-constant action, with only a few breaks to allow everyone to catch their collective breath.

Tom Hardy has nailed the role of the road warrior Max, but he’s eclipsed by Charlize Theron’s superior portrayal of Furiosa, a feminist icon for a dismal age.

George Miller has gone into overdrive to deliver an exciting, action-packed road thriller.

To be sure, “Mad Max: Fury Road” has plenty of action violence, some of it graphic, but all of it necessary to drive the plot.

George Miller has a great bag of tricks that make this installment a most worthy component of the venerable franchise. 

Tim Riley writes film and television reviews for Lake County News.

People speak of “hearts and flowers” when they’re talking about poems with predictable sentimentality, but here’s an antidote to all those valentines, from Sally Bliumis-Dunn, who lives in New York.

Her most recent book of poems is Second Skin, Wind Publications, 2010.

Heart

She has painted her lips
hibiscus pink.
The upper lip dips
perfectly in the center

like a Valentine heart.
It makes sense to me—
that the lips, the open

ah of the mouth
is shaped more like a heart
than the actual human heart.
I remember the first time I saw it—

veined and shiny
as the ooze of a snail—
if this were what
we had been taught to draw

how differently we might have
learned to love.

American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation ( www.poetryfoundation.org ), publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Poem copyright 2014 by Sally Bliumus-Dunn and reprinted by permission. Introduction copyright 2015 by The Poetry Foundation. The introduction's author, Ted Kooser, served as United States Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 2004-2006. They do not accept unsolicited manuscripts.

HOT PURSUIT (Rated PG-13)

The notion of a female buddy comedy that pairs mismatched partners in a clash of personalities that would remind one of Melissa McCarthy and Sandra Bullock in the wildly funny “The Heat” would seem like a successful formula for a really good comedy.

Maybe that’s what director Anne Fletcher (“The Proposal”) had in mind for “Hot Pursuit.” Or maybe she was thinking of a twist on “The Odd Couple,” with one person fussy and uptight and the other the complete opposite, but also hilarious in the same way that Robert De Niro and Charles Grodin were totally incompatible in “Midnight Run.”

“Hot Pursuit” is not that kind of movie. It’s not even close to being reasonably funny, which in itself is a great disappointment given that Reese Witherspoon and sexy bombshell Sofia Vergara offer, at least on paper, the perception of comedic polar opposites capable of delivering some laughs.

I believe that another critic referred to this film as a “hot mess,” and being stymied at the moment for a more original thought, I just have to say that there may not be a better description for what unfolds in this attempted comedy that misfires so badly.

Witherspoon’s Officer Cooper is an uptight and by-the-book cop, who after an unfortunate incident with the use of a Taser on a civilian, has been relegated to the evidence room.

No one even calls her by her first name or even seems to know what it is. Apparently, Cooper doesn’t fit in very well with the San Antonio Police Department.

Surprisingly, her superior, Captain Emmett (John Carroll Lynch), offers a field assignment that would seem more appropriate for a seasoned officer, namely escorting the wife of a mob boss to Dallas, where she and her husband will testify against a major drug lord.

Excited to get out of the property room, Cooper is an intensely enthusiastic policewoman who can cite every section of the Penal Code and does so, most annoyingly, with great frequency. She’s also very petite, even more so in comparison to Colombian beauty Sofia Vergara’s mob wife Daniella Riva.

There are few laughs (maybe just two or three, at most) in “Hot Pursuit,” but it is amusing when the stiff, tense policewoman introduces herself as “Officer Cooper” to Mrs. Riva, who in turn replies “Look at you, you’re teeny-tiny, you’re like a little dog that I can put in my purse.”

What starts off as a supposedly routine transport assignment, one that even the desk-bound officer could handle, turns into a danger-filled Texas road trip when Cooper and Daniella are forced to make a run after they become the targets of both the drug lord’s henchmen and a pair of corrupt cops.

Intent on obeying the rules and following protocol, Cooper rigidly tries to steer her charge, Mrs. Riva, on the road to Dallas, but Daniella is used to doing things her own way and in her own time. The bickering between the two women begins almost the moment they first meet.

Then things go wrong when Mr. Riva is killed in a shootout. The sassy, spoiled Daniella, who insists on carrying luggage filled with expensive, gaudy high-heeled shoes, has no choice but to make a getaway in her vintage bright red Cadillac convertible with Officer Cooper.

A series of bizarre events almost too coincidentally convenient to establishing the two women as fugitives from the law result in them being completely on their own.

It doesn’t help that Cooper and Daniella are completely at odds with one another, with Mrs. Riva ranting and raving like she just escaped from an insane asylum.

The film’s best running gag just happens to come from frequent television news reports seen in the background, which manage to keep decreasing the height description of the diminutive Cooper and increasing the age of the statuesque Daniella, much to the frustration of the latter.

While on the lam, Cooper and Daniella stumble upon a bewildered farmer (comedian Jim Gaffigan) they disarm by pretending to be lesbians who can’t keep their hands off of each other. Meanwhile, he shoots off his finger during the excitement. This is just of many lame efforts at humor.

A more pleasant encounter comes when the two desperate women commandeer a pickup truck, not knowing that its owner, the hunky Randy (Robert Kazinsky), is passed out in the back with a monitor attached to his ankle.

Being a felon himself, Randy is sympathetic and helpful, and oddly enough attracted to the pushy, forceful policewoman.

The misfiring gags run the gamut from Cooper in a disguise as a teenage boy sneaking into a drug lord’s birthday party to the two women taking over a bus full of senior citizens on a sightseeing trip in order to stage a highway demolition derby with pursuing bad guys.

As mentioned earlier, “Hot Pursuit” is a hot mess. The jokes are so redundant about everything from fashion faux pas to police procedures that the comedy is a complete miscarriage.

The collateral damage also taints the comedic talents of Sofia Vergara and Reese Witherspoon, but hopefully they’ll recover from this mess.

Tim Riley writes film and television reviews for Lake County News.

A couple I know adopted three very small children from a distant country, and the children had never been constrained in any way.

The airliner’s seatbelts were so fearful for them that they screamed all the way back to the States. But since then their lives have been wonderfully happy.

And here’s a similar story, this too with a good ending, by Patrick Hicks of South Dakota.

The Strangers

After we picked you up at the Omaha airport,
we clamped you into a new car seat
and listened to you yowl
beneath the streetlights of Nebraska.

Our hotel suite was plump with toys,
ready, we hoped, to soothe you into America.
But for a solid hour you watched the door,
shrieking, Umma, the Korean word for mother.

Once or twice you glanced back at us
and, in this netherworld where a door home
had slammed shut forever, your terrified eyes
paced between the past and the future.

Umma, you screamed, Umma!
But your foster mother back in Seoul never appeared.

Your new mother and I lay on the bed,
cooing your birth name,
until, at last, you collapsed into our arms.

In time, even terror must yield to sleep.

American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation ( www.poetryfoundation.org ), publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Poem copyright 2014 by Patrick Hicks, “The Strangers,” from Adoptable, (Salmon Poetry, 2014). Poem reprinted by permission of Patrick Hicks and the publisher. Introduction copyright 2015 by The Poetry Foundation. The introduction's author, Ted Kooser, served as United States Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 2004-2006. They do not accept unsolicited manuscripts.