Why do filmmakers continue to adapt Hunter S. Thompson’s unfilmable pseudojournalism into movies? Critics and audiences alike lambasted the Thompson adaptations Where the Buffalo Roam and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, but that hasn’t prevented the green-lighting of The Rum Diary, a screen version of Thompson’s first published novel, about a freelance journalist’s … [Read more...]
‘That Used to Be Us’ an urgent call to recover American primacy
Three years ago, Thomas L. Friedman sounded alarm bells about global warming in his best-selling book, Hot, Flat, and Crowded, but predicted that America would wake up before it was too late. Now Friedman and co-author Michael Mandelbaum in their new book, That Used To Be Us, say they are frustrated, but still optimistic, about a range of issues, including global warming, … [Read more...]
The View From Home special report: The cinema of Jean-Claude Brisseau
I’ve never been to France, but when I visit, I’d prefer to avoid the parts of the country that seem to fascinate Jean-Claude Brisseau. This underrated French director avoids the picturesque Paris of Woody Allen’s latest time-travel reverie, the tourist-chic France of living postcards, fashionable bistros and perpetually beautiful women. Nor is it the snooty enclave of the New … [Read more...]
Spare novella of Japanese-American brides haunts
After Japan attacked Pearl Harbor in December 1941, U.S. authorities rounded up thousands of Japanese-Americans living on the West Coast and shipped them to internment camps, fearing they might be traitors. In her compelling new novella, The Buddha in the Attic, Julie Otsuka captures in spare prose the paranoia of that period. She opens by describing the arduous voyage by ship … [Read more...]
Camaraderie keeps PB Chamber Music Festival going, 20 summers on
It all began at Chuck and Harold’s. On a long-ago day at the popular Palm Beach restaurant, bassoonist Michael Ellert noticed something right away about Michael Forte, a clarinetist and fellow New Yorker who had just moved to Florida, and with whom he was playing as part of a trio. “I looked at Michael and I said, ‘Man, you and I must have learned how to play out of tune the … [Read more...]
Broadway Postcard No. 5: ‘Mormon’ is best musical of the season
Trey Parker and Matt Stone have been freaking out television’s Standards and Practices folks (a/k/a censors) for almost 15 years with their purposely profane animated series South Park, so it should come as no surprise that their first Broadway musical, The Book of Mormon, will never get any awards for good taste. They should, however, clear off their mantelpieces for the … [Read more...]
Broadway Postcard No. 3: Three Boca producers, and struggling with Stoppard
Tuesday was an even better weather day in New York, with the temperature climbing into the 80s, and locals shedding their clothes like it was the second coming of summer. My dance card was busy with interviews and, in the evening, a much-anticipated viewing of Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia. But first, always in search of a Florida angle on the Broadway season, I met and spoke with … [Read more...]
Playwright sees spirit of art in ‘Ghost-Writer’
If you knew that a book called The Iron Whim describes itself as “a fragmented history of typewriting,” you may not bother to pick it up. But you will be glad that Michael Hollinger did, for it led him to create Ghost-Writer, his latest work to be produced by West Palm Beach’s Florida Stage. For as dry as the book sounds, it is full of juicy literary anecdotes. “A couple of … [Read more...]
Quiet abstract sculpture at Norton speaks volumes about forms
Entering Beyond the Figure at the Norton Museum of Art in West Palm Beach, one enters a darkened gallery in which strange forms emerge from the shadows. Although artifacts from our own culture, these forms also point toward a parallel universe — a realm where we understand and know objects with all our senses and our imaginations. The roughly 20 sculptural works on view do not … [Read more...]
The View From Home 8: New releases on DVD
For My Father (Film Movement) Release date: June 1 Standard list price: $22.49 I normally reserve the space for the largest review in this column to wonderful films that are worthy of your time, but occasionally a film so indefensible – so patently contemptible – will arrive on my doorstep that it prompts the need to vent for more than 150 words. For My Father, the latest … [Read more...]