Film: Do you remember what you were doing on July 24, 2010? Well, neither do we, but that was the day that 80,000 anonymous filmmakers from around the world recorded their activities for a collaborative documentary called Life in a Day. The result was 4,500 hours of film, or at least digital material, which was boiled down to 95 minutes in a masterful task of editing. Of course … [Read more...]
Return To Forever, Dweezil Zappa make a Boca Saturday even hotter
Keyboardist Chick Corea occupies the rare air of a jazz superstar who can do whatever he wants. Some of his recent whims included a 2008 reunion tour by the popular fusion quartet version from among his various Return To Forever lineups from 1972-1977, and the recent Forever CD by three of that reunion’s principals (himself, original RTF bassist Stanley Clarke and longtime … [Read more...]
A critic remembers the day the world changed
Fittingly, when the Saudi terrorists were flying planes into the World Trade Center 10 years ago, I was at the movies. Yes, even at 8:46 a.m., the time the North Tower was hit, I was sitting in a theater with a pad in my hand, for I was at the Toronto International Film Festival that fateful day. I was watching a press screening of Mira Nair’s festive Monsoon Wedding, which … [Read more...]
The View From Home 30: New releases and notable screenings, Sept. 13-30
I understand that Sam Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs has been remade, with the Rod Lurie-directed film set to bloody cinema screens everywhere Sept. 16. It was only inevitable that a film whose shocking, graphic depictions of violence and sexuality, which were well ahead of their time in mainstream cinemas in 1971, would be mined and possibly exploited by a generation of moviemakers … [Read more...]
‘So My Grandmother Died,’ and so did the linear play
More than most other South Florida theater companies, Miami’s Mad Cat has been able to attract a young audience, pulling them away from pop culture and electronic media for a couple of hours. How? With plays like artistic director Paul Tei’s So My Grandmother Died, Blah Blah Blah, a messy grab bag of pop culture and Internet references with only tangential interest in a … [Read more...]
At Tanglewood, a sublime ‘Orlando’
LENOX, Mass. -- Conductor Nicholas McGegan brought San Francisco’s Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra to Tanglewood about two weeks ago to perform Handel’s rarely given opera Orlando in Ozawa Hall. Home of the Boston Symphony in the summer, Tanglewood is where James Levine, as music director, dazzled opera lovers in last year’s mounting of Strauss’ Ariadne auf Naxos. Alas, he left … [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...]
‘Six Years’ too shallow, soapy to make strong impact
In case you have bought the way World War II’s “greatest generation” has been idealized, playwright Sharr White now asks theatergoers to see those noble souls in a new, darker light. His melodramatic play Six Years considers the plight of that generation through the microcosm of shattered war veteran Phil Granger and his anguished wife, Meredith. We observe them in five … [Read more...]
‘Six Years’ explores dark side of the Greatest Generation
Ever since Tom Brokaw wrote about the men who went off to fight World War II and the women who sacrificed on the home front awaiting their return, they have been known as “The Greatest Generation.” But in the way his grandfather’s contemporaries had been idealized, playwright Sharr White sensed that the full story had yet to be told. That led him to write Six Years, the … [Read more...]
The View From Home 29: New releases and notable screenings, Aug. 8-31
J. Hoberman famously coined the term “hippie Western” to describe ’70s counterculture films like El Topo. But Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man, released in 1995 and a budget title on Blu-ray as of Aug. 9 (Echo Bridge, $7.99) could be read as a hippie Western for Generation X. Not that the film is necessarily about free love – though we do witness a cowboy receiving oral sex outside a … [Read more...]