English-born filmmaker Rupert Wyatt is well aware that there was a 1974 movie called The Gambler, starring James Caan and Lauren Hutton, but to his mind he was never doing a remake. “I remember it being specifically a study of addiction,” he says of the earlier film. “So when I read the script that Bill Monahan had written, I knew immediately that we weren’t making the same … [Read more...]
Pacifica Quartet took epic journey with Shostakovich
One of America’s finest string quartets, the Pacifica Quartet, opens the musical year with a performance Friday afternoon at the Kravis Center of music by Ravel and Haydn, as well as the Piano Quintet of Johannes Brahms, for which they will be joined by pianist Christopher O’Riley, familiar to public radio audiences as the host of From the Top. The performance should start … [Read more...]
At Four Arts: Wild about more than just Henri
When a time is no longer being captured, but simply being copied, that is the signal for someone to grab it and portray it like nobody else. A group of rebel artists living in Paris heard that call in 1880. A new wind of creativity stormed the bohemian city for the next 30 years, stripping its walls of anything resembling old academic practices in order to hang fresh artistic … [Read more...]
Weekend arts picks: Dec. 13-14
Music: Time was when December meant the first opera of the season in West Palm Beach, but while those days have retreated into the past, that doesn’t mean the month goes by without Palm Beach Opera. This afternoon, the company presents its second free Waterfront Concert at the Meyer Amphiteatre in downtown West Palm Beach, with a full orchestra, singers and chorus. Tenor James … [Read more...]
The View From Home 65: Antonioni’s ramble, Malle’s anarchic comedy, another Korean shocker
L’Avventura: It is one of filmdom’s great synchronicities that Michelangelo Antonioni unveiled L’Avventura (Criterion, $27.59 Blu-ray, $26.96 DVD) the same year Alfred Hitchcock unleashed Psycho. These films, released in 1960, challenged cinematic conventions in similar ways by dispatching their ostensible protagonists within the first third of the movie, causing narrative … [Read more...]
Sundays: A shopping list from the catalogs
Editor’s note: To do our bit for the long shopping weekend, we’ve asked our friend Lou Ann Frala to go through the stacks of catalogs she gets at this time of year and find some things we might want to send to kin and kind. By Lou Ann Frala The first catalog I remember poring over was the Sears Wish Book. What a field day I would have had with Post-it Notes. My lists and … [Read more...]
Russian State SO, with Feltsman, glitters in Mozart, Rachmaninov
I think it’s safe to say the Kravis Regional Arts Concert Series, now celebrating its 40th year, has more visiting orchestras than any other venue in the world. There are seven this season, starting with the Russian State Symphony Orchestra on Wednesday evening with two Russian pieces and a Mozart piano concerto. This 90-piece ensemble opened with Glinka’s overture to his … [Read more...]
Weekend arts picks: Nov. 22-23
Dance: Sergei Prokofiev went through a great deal of trouble over Romeo and Juliet, and originally wrote it with a happy ending in which the star-cross’d lovers survive and dance off into the sunset. But the composer’s Soviet overlords didn’t think much of that idea, and forced him to reinstate Shakespeare’s original tragic outcome. Whatever the ending, he created a matchless … [Read more...]
At FAU: An absurdist 90 minutes with Martin’s ‘Picasso at the Lapin Agile’
By Dale King To describe Steve Martin’s absurdist play, Picasso at the Lapin Agile, as thought-provoking is an understatement. It’s like saying Hamlet is about a mixed-up kid. Perhaps the best barometer of the show being staged through Sunday at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton is the audience. On opening night last Friday, the 90-minute, no-intermission production … [Read more...]
Late review: Delray SQ vividly brings Herrmann, Ravel to opener
Bernard Herrmann was proud of the film scores he wrote for Alfred Hitchcock, and some of the music the American composer created in the 1950s and 1960s for the British master of suspense has become justly celebrated in its own right. The Delray String Quartet opened its 11th season Nov. 2 at the Colony Hotel in Delray Beach with a program of three works that included a suite … [Read more...]