The documentary Side by Side, which opened Friday and runs through this week at the Lake Worth Playhouse, is as inside-baseball as movies get. An unlikely passion project for narrator Keanu Reeves, this studious doc features Reeves interviewing countless directors, cinematographers, producers, editors and actors about the inexorable transition from 35mm celluloid to hi-def digital video. The movement, which can be traced back to the low-grade handheld domestic exorcisms of Denmark’s Dogme 95 movement and which reached its commercial apotheosis with Avatar, has affected everything from shooting to editing to projection. Battle lines have been drawn between celluloid purists and digital progressives, and Reeves interviews mouthpieces for both camps, with Christopher Nolan the recurring voice for film and Danny Boyle a passionate advocate for digital.
I’ve made no secrets about my horse in this race, which is 35mm, and I’ve watched its forced endangerment with frustration and melancholy. To hear George Lucas insult the format with such contempt as he does in Side by Side is typical and revealing of his inclination to bulldoze anything that isn’t engineered by Industrial Light and Magic, but the crushing thing about Side by Side is that he’s not alone. The subjects interviewed by Reeves overwhelmingly favor digital technology, slanting what may have been a 50/50 balance a decade ago. Side by Side will be enlightening to movie lovers of all technological bents – and conversely, it may bore the mass of audiences that cannot identify one format from the other. But to me, it’s entertaining less as a documentary than a horror film, with a century’s worth of photochemical film acting as the decapitated prom queen. – John Thomason
Theater: Alfred Uhry drew on his own Southern Jewish background for his Pulitzer Prize-winning Driving Miss Daisy, a story of the friendship between an elderly white lady and her black chauffeur. Made into a much-admired movie with Jessica Tandy and Morgan Freeman in 1989, it’s a nuanced exploration of race, society and friendship. South Florida theater veterans Harriet Oser and John Archie are Daisy and Hoke, in a production that opened Thursday and runs through Nov. 18 at Alan Jacobson’s Plaza Theatre in Manalapan. Tickets are $45; call 588-1820 for more information.
Music: This might be the first busy weekend of the new season, in all kinds of genres, but it might be Fort Lauderdale’s Culture Room where you’ll find some of the bigger crowds. Tonight, it’s Ani DiFranco, long absent from the stage and likely even longer from South Florida. Now a mother (and pregnant with her second child), DiFranco’s Whose Side Are You On came out earlier this year; her show starts at 8 p.m. ($25) Tomorrow night, it’s Chris Robinson of the Black Crowes, appearing with his spinoff project the Chris Robinson Brotherhood. Robinson has one of those truly soulful voices that sounds best in bluesy work, and the band’s Big Moon Ritual, which came out this summer, is in keeping with that tradition. The Brotherhood appears at 8 p.m. Sunday ($20).
Also this Sunday, one of the great veteran singer/songwriters of folk-pop, Bonnie Raitt, brings her slide guitar and inimitable voice to a set at Boca Raton’s Mizner Park. Featured this week in an Austin City Limits episode on PBS, Raitt’s new album, Slipstream, is selling well and keeping her before the public. The show begins at 8 p.m., and it’s likely to be great weather for the outside venue. (Tickets available through ticketmaster.com).
Tonight at the Arsht Center in Miami, one of the finest cellists of our time, Yo-Yo Ma, makes an appearance with the New World Symphony in a concert that reunites him with conductor Michael Tilson Thomas. Ma will play the echt-Romantic Cello Concerto (in A minor, Op. 129) of Robert Schumann on a concert that will include the Eroica Symphony of Beethoven (No. 3 in E-flat, Op. 55), and American composer Steve Mackey’s Lost and Found. (8 p.m.; the concert is sold out, but perhaps there will be some returns).
Art: This weekend, Fort Lauderdale marks the 25th anniversary of the Las Olas Art Fair. The fair, which features paintings, sculptures, photography, ceramics, glass art, woodworking and hand-crafted jewelry from leading artists from around the country, runs from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturday and Sunday on Las Olas Boulevard. Admission is free. Veteran Las Olas Art Fair artist Todd Babb has created a steel sculpture called Perpetual Bliss in honor of fair’s milestone anniversary. For more information, visit www.artfestival.com. – Lucy Lazarony
Editor’s note: Posting of this entry was delayed by technical difficulties.