If you’re looking for reasons to hate on director Jose Padilha’s RoboCop remake, I’m sure you can find them. It has its requisite number of head-shaking action-movie contrivances, where the bad guy can easily exterminate the good guy if he wouldn’t stop blabbering, and just as he’s finally about to pull the trigger, a second good guy materializes out of the ether to plant a … [Read more...]
Michael Fagien: Dr. Jazz sells music, magazines and a lifestyle
There are few stories in the local arts as unusual as that of Michael Fagien, M.D. The Boca Raton radiologist lives in two worlds, one of medicine, and one of the jazz music he’s loved since his youth in Hollywood, where he moved with his family in 1969 from New Jersey. As a medical student at the University of Florida in 1983, he founded Jazziz magazine, for which he … [Read more...]
Music roundup: SoFla Symphony, Delray SQ, PBAU Artists series
A very fine young cellist made an eloquent case Nov. 16 for an undeservedly neglected American concerto in the opening program of the South Florida Symphony’s concert season at the Crest Theatre in Delray Beach. Clancy Newman, a first-prize Naumburg Foundation Competition winner and a graduate of Columbia and the Juilliard School, tackled the Cello Concerto of Samuel Barber … [Read more...]
The View From Home 53: High school vérité, a horror classic and Bergman & Bergman
The We and the I: The We and the I (Virgil Films, $16.22) is another masterpiece from Michel Gondry, and it’s a film that goes a long way toward rendering irrelevant the distinction between fiction and documentary. Mostly putting his fevered visual imagination on the back burner, Gondry takes a vérité approach in this study of Bronx high schoolers on a real-time bus ride … [Read more...]
Sexuality, subjugation drive powerful ‘Augustine’
Sometimes, under the auspices of a director with a vision, a film’s opening shot can subtly reveal a lot, providing a prologue that foretells the grand theme. Such is the case with Augustine, debut French filmmaker Alice Winocour’s study of the real-life 19th century neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot and his vulnerable teenage patient Augustine. The opening image is of a crab, … [Read more...]
Strong singing makes for a rich ‘Traviata’ at FGO
South Florida has been a good place for the Mexican soprano Maria Alejandres. She has sung Lucia for Palm Beach Opera, Manuel de Falla for the Palm Beach Symphony, and Juliette for Florida Grand Opera, and Saturday night she returned to FGO as the best-loved of Giuseppe Verdi’s heroines, Violetta Valery, the doomed courtesan of La Traviata. She was joined by a very fine … [Read more...]
Ratmansky’s ‘Dances’ a fiery addition to MCB rep
By Tara Mitton Catao For the third program of its current season, seen Saturday night at the Kravis Center, Miami City Ballet has chosen a program of steadfast George Balanchine works and a huge, energy-laden new ensemble creation of Alexei Ratmansky, a new master of the ballet vocabulary. Two large ensemble pieces sandwiched two traditional Balanchine duets. The first … [Read more...]
Philadelphia Orchestra, Watts bring freshness to the warhorses
There is a celebrated sign on the road to the Marlboro Music Festival in Vermont that reads: Caution: Musicians at Play. That phrase suggests not just performers enjoying themselves in their craft, but also expert musicians who can do whatever they want with the material at hand and keep it fresh. That feeling of easeful mastery was all over the Kravis Center on Wednesday … [Read more...]
Peter Lord and his band of merry stop-action pirates
Grown men don’t usually play with clay, but Peter Lord has made quite a tidy career doing exactly that. A co-founder of Aardman Animations, the Bristol, England studio that gave the world the Wallace & Gromit series, Lord co-directed and co-wrote the 2000 feature Chicken Run and directs The Pirates! Band of Misfits, in theaters today -- all in playful stop-action. Fascinated … [Read more...]
In ‘Abyss,’ Herzog gently probes a diseased body politic
If any one theme connects the recent documentaries of Werner Herzog, it’s that the director, narrator and inevitable participant in his films boldly goes where few have gone before – whether it’s engaging with the few human inhabitants of the North Pole (Encounters at the End of the World), flying above rarely seen rainforests in a helium-fueled contraption (The White Diamond) … [Read more...]