By Tom Tracy Leonardo DiCaprio is wearing a living swan around his neck, while Allen Ginsberg is caught tying his shoe in a grungy bathroom. And the Rev. Al Sharpton sits in a beauty salon with his hair up in curlers under a dryer. Yet the laid-back Annie Leibovitz, one of American popular culture’s leading portrait photographers for four decades, said she has never pushed … [Read more...]
The Oscar nods: Affleck, Bigelow snubs baffling
To paraphrase Sally Field, “They don’t like him. They really don’t like him.” That is the only possible conclusion to be drawn from the snub of Ben Affleck from the Best Director nominations, announced early this morning in Hollywood. Affleck was assumed to have a lock on one of the five slots in the category for his audience-friendly, fact-based thriller Argo, but it simply … [Read more...]
‘The Impossible’: Too awful to respect real tragedy
As the bloodiest natural disaster of the aughts, the 2004 tsunami on the west coast of Asia needs a better movie than The Impossible. It had a much better one, in fact, in 2010’s Hereafter, of which Clint Eastwood’s expert rendering of the massacre was one of three sensitive stories connecting wayward souls. This time, there is no grace, no art, no intelligence, no cultural … [Read more...]
The View From Home 44: New releases on DVD and Blu-ray
Criterion has waited until December to release what should go down as one of the most monumental home video releases of the year: Godfrey Reggio’s Qatsi Trilogy, packaged together in glorious Blu-ray for the first time ($53.99, same price for DVD). Three earth-shattering experimental features set to the music of Philip Glass, the Qatsi films are wordless symphonies of cities, … [Read more...]
Theater roundup: Holiday shows from Albee to Frankie Valli
Revivals of some Pulitzer Prize-winning plays leave us scratching our heads, wondering what the awards committee saw in the work. At Palm Beach Dramaworks, however, a new production of Edward Albee’s 1966 A Delicate Balance ― the first of his three Pulitzers for drama ― is a convincing argument for this chilling, cerebral tale of unspecified terror, even if it will always be … [Read more...]
Weekend arts picks: Dec. 14-16
Art: Here’s something unusual and rather precious, which if you think about it is an ideal sort of something for the Christmas season. Britain-based artists Davy and Kristin McGuire spent four months in 2009 creating what can only be described as a multimedia pop-up book. The Icebook tells the story of a princess who lures a boy into the forest so he can warm her heart of ice; … [Read more...]
Mosaic Theatre’s Simon announces the company’s closing
South Florida may be experiencing another abrupt theater closing. Still suffering from the sudden shuttering of Florida Stage and the Caldwell Theatre Company in the past two years, here comes another unexpected closing. And for once, it seems to have nothing to do with a shortage or funding or audience. Sunday evening, the executive and artistic director of Plantation’s … [Read more...]
Pianist Simmons brings new savvy to the old business of classical music
When she took part in the Musical Awakenings educational outreach program for the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition, Jade Simmons tended to take the students she saw by surprise. “It takes you into 20 schools in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, with a mostly minority demographic,” said Simmons, who as an African-American female is a rarity in the world of classical … [Read more...]
Weekend arts picks: Dec. 1-2
Art: The American version of Impressionism is perhaps best-known in the work of painters such as Mary Cassatt and Childe Hassam, but there is a rich tradition that comes from eastern Pennsylvania, and today the Society of the Four Arts opens an exhibition that brings that tradition to a wider audience. Painting the Beautiful contains more than 60 paintings from the James A. … [Read more...]
The View From Home 43: New releases on DVD and Blu-ray
For decades, Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate has been remembered mostly as a monument to megalomania, rife with stories about its director hemorrhaging time, money and miles and miles of film to shoot his exacting vision. Heaven’s Gate went so over budget so much that it crippled its distributor, United Artists, and inspired an entire book – Final Cut – about its calamitous … [Read more...]