As fun as a barrel of carcinomatous monkeys, Catherine Hardwicke’s Miss You Already is destined to be dismissed by audiences like yours truly. Not because I’m a man and Miss You Already is a “women’s picture,” but because it so proudly flaunts its endless reservoir of hydrogenated sap and eye-rolling ludicrousness, the kind redeemed only by the sleight of hand of its capable … [Read more...]
Pianist Dinnerstein to open Festival Miami with Lasser concerto
The American pianist Simone Dinnerstein made her mark on the concert scene with her peerless readings of the music of J.S. Bach, and the Goldberg Variations in particular. But her career has also brought attention to the music of a living composer, Philip Lasser, a Juilliard professor whose Twelve Variations on a Chorale by J.S. Bach was featured on Dinnerstein’s recording of … [Read more...]
Theater roundup: ‘Waiting for Waiting for Godot,’ ‘Lazy Fair’
Cleverness trumps profundity in a couple of new, brief plays currently on at area theaters. Neither Dave Hanson’s Waiting for Waiting for Godot at Thinking Cap Theatre nor Mad Cat Theatre’s Lazy Fair by Theo Reyna have that much to say, but they both know how to divert and entertain, which is saying a lot for them. Hanson clearly knows his way around Samuel Beckett’s seminal … [Read more...]
‘Watchman’ a letdown, not least for Scout
Go Set a Watchman recently became an overnight blockbuster, selling more than 1 million copies in the first week. Book critics understandably sought to compare the storyline in Watchman with the theme in Harper Lee’s first book, To Kill a Mockingbird, which was published in 1960 and won a Pulitzer Prize. Some expressed surprise that Atticus Finch, the lovable hero in … [Read more...]
Singer Rexha brings ‘genre-less’ vibe to Vans Warped Tour on Fourth
By Hilary Saunders It’s hard to believe, but this summer marks the 20th anniversary of Vans Warped Tour as a cultural institution for teens across America. Founded in 1995 by Kevin Lyman of Vans in conjunction with the Creative Artists Agency, the skate shoe company has sponsored the festival since 1996. And over the past two decades, seemingly every punk/pop … [Read more...]
The Broadway season, reviewed (Part 2): ‘On the 20th Century,’ ‘Hand to God’
Between her as yet unsuccessful attempts to get a foothold in the movies or on television, Kristin Chenoweth keeps returning to Broadway, and the theater is richer for it. This season, she has jumped headlong into a role she was born to play, movie star Lily Garland in a snazzy revival of 1978’s On the Twentieth Century, a screwball showbiz comedy adapted into an over-the-top … [Read more...]
Art-house patina can’t hide ordinariness of ‘Words and Pictures’
Having been raised in the drudgery of our non-airbrushed public school system and not in the Hollywood fantasy of a freewheeling private school, I couldn’t relate much to the milieu of Words and Pictures, a rival-teachers dramedy set in a mythical world of privileged academia. It’s the kind of environment where syllabi, curricula and sensible grades are jettisoned, if they ever … [Read more...]
The View From Home 46: New releases on Blu-ray and DVD
“This is kind of like an old movie, don’t you think?” Liza (Olivia Wilde), a runaway bandit in Stefan Ruzowitsky’s Deadfall ($24.99 Blu-ray, $13.28 DVD) asks Jay, a former pugilist newly released from prison who makes the mistake of picking her up as she shivers in a crepuscular blizzard. Thank the heavens for at least this brief semblance of ironic self-awareness in an … [Read more...]
Pianist Paremski plumbs depths of Rachmaninov
When it comes to the monumental Third Piano Concerto of Sergei Rachmaninov, the pianist Natasha Paremski comes by her affinity for it naturally. Born in Moscow, where she began piano studies at age 4 before emigrating to the United States with her family at age 8, Paremski’s family insisted on speaking and writing Russian, reading Russian books and watching Russian movies at … [Read more...]
Theater roundup: Crisp, sharp ‘Race’; uneven ‘Baby GirL’
David Mamet is known for crafting fragmentary street dialogue. But when appropriate, he can also be hyper-articulate, as he is in Race, with the ping-ponging smart, and often smart-ass language of the two law partners ― one white, one black ― considering how to defend an uber-wealthy client accused of raping a black woman in a hotel room. The incident has distinct echoes of the … [Read more...]