Pablo Berger’s Blancanieves is an art-house trifecta: It’s black-and-white, foreign, and silent, triple the insurance that it will alienate the “average moviegoer.” Which is a shame, because the film, which rescues Snow White from its Disneyfied associations and restores to its Grimm foundations, is filled with exactly the kind of escapist excitement and pure imagination that … [Read more...]
‘White People’ examines dispiriting history of racial constructs
The spectacle of Americans choking with rage at Tea Parties, or tossing around racist epithets at Sarah Palin rallies, has our European friends worried. Recently, French journalist Jean-Sebastien Stehli, writing in Le Figaro, bemoaned the “climate of violence” in American politics, which he identifies as white fear and resentment at the rise of a black president. Nativist … [Read more...]
GableStage’s ‘reasons’ mines white-hot emotions
Neil LaBute’s reasons to be pretty, with which he made his overdue Broadway debut last season, is considered more gentle than his usual exercises in the gender wars. Maybe so, but you would never know it from the opening tirade by a young, attractive woman who goes ballistic at her boyfriend and breaks up with him. His crime? She heard from a girlfriend -- and he eventually, … [Read more...]