Raavan (2009, dir. Mani Ratnam). Aishwarya Rai’s Ragini remains too little marred by abduction, rock-scaling, near-drowning, food refusal, traumatic witnessing, being dragged from cave to pit to cave and so on. The camera still fondles her face as it might any cover-girl—confirming this face to be as fascinating as that of some infant cyborg. Abhishek […]
Mughal-e-Azam again and forever, but this time on the big screen at Walter Reade, in the original version, not 2004 full colorization. As heady a myriad of beauty and sensation as ever. The full ten scintillating seconds of pearls sent scattering, pattering onto a polished patterned floor. The billet-doux secreted into the lotus flower, the […]
Saturday, January 30, 2010 at 8 PM Chicago Symphony Orchestra, cond. Pierre Boulez Stern Auditorium / Perelman Stage RAVEL | Le Tombeau de Couperin DALBAVIE | Flute Concerto (Mathieu Dufour, flute) BARTÓK | Bluebeard’s Castle (Michelle DeYoung, mezzo; Falk Struckmann, bass-baritone) To carry Bartók’s Bluebeard’s Castle to its bloodcurdling pitch without recourse to hysterics is […]
Tuesday, December 8, 2009
[Anita Rachvelishvili before her admirers] If I were to reduce to a single word Anita Rachvelishvili’s La Scala debut yesterday as Carmen (the HD simulcast of which I saw at Symphony Space), it might be “sovereignty.” She reigned supreme. This Carmen was the center around which all else could only hope to hold and the […]
Also filed in Love, Music, Opera
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Tagged 2009, anita rachvelishvili, barenboim, bizet, carmen, december 7, erwin schrott, georges bizet, georgia, georgian, hd, jonas kaufmann, la scala, live broadcast, netrebko, rachvelishvili, simulcast, symphony space
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Sunday, September 13, 2009
A long-form poet of political cinema, Robert Kramer (1939-1999) may be the greatest American filmmaker we hardly knew. His unique alloys of fiction and documentary chronicle the doings and undoings of the revolutionary Left from the Sixties through the Eighties. Yet the perspectives offered in his films are prismatically personal: the hesitations of a militant […]
Also filed in Cambridge, Labor, Politics
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Tagged American Left, americana, anthology film archives, bridgeport CT, cinema, Documentary, films, Grace Paley, harvard film archive, ice, jesse jackson, leftism, milestones, movies, Newsreel, radicalism, Robert Kramer, route one / usa
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Madame Butterfly in HD [rebroadcast of the live March 7 Met performance] March 17, 2009, Walter Reade Theatre at Lincoln Center Metropolitan Opera Conductor: Patrick Summers Production: Anthony Minghella Cast: Patricia Racette (Cio-Cio San), Marcello Giordani (Pinkerton), Maria Zifchak (Suzuki), Dwayne Croft (Sharpless) The drama was taut, the gorgeousness detailed. The staging: imaginative, often exquisite, […]
Also filed in Asiana, Love, Music, New York, Opera
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Tagged cho-cho san, hd, lincoln center, madame butterly, marcello giordani, minghella, Opera, patricia racette, pinkerton, puccini, puppetry, puppets, reviews, theatre, walter reade
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Thursday, December 18, 2008
Like Last Tango in Paris and Unfaithful, Damage is a film that explores—with punishing severity—the nightmarish consequences of lustful abandon. The acting excels within the category of tense facial tableaux: Jeremy Irons as MP Stephen Fleming, at once wooden and craven, Juliette Binoche’s Anna Barton trancey and transfixing, her gaze by turns pleading and rejecting. […]
Also filed in Love, Politics
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Tagged betrayal, damage, dyad, fatalism, jeremy irons, josephine hart, juliette binoche, louis malle, lust, monogamy
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[A still from Земля] Chinese National Symphony Orchestra at Boston’s Symphony Hall. Kiarostami’s A Taste of Cherry and Dovzhenko’s Земля [Earth] at the Harvard Film Archive. Labor and land preoccupy both; and in each, a visual symphony of tractors. One is reminded of Russian cinema’s obsession with the sun-baked, dirt-caked, beard-bristling face — eyes always […]
Also filed in Asiana, Labor, Music
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Tagged dovzhenko, earth, faces, harvard film archive, kiarostami, land, orchestras, russia, symphonies, taste of cherry
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Fidelio at the Met. Karita Mattila sang Leonore’s role gorgeously, and she was impressively spry as Fidelio, too, scampering around the stage with boyish aplomb, scooting up and down ladders, bearing groceries. Apart from the limpid quartet in the opening act and the arpeggiated vocal mountaineering of the ‘Abscheulicher!’ duet in the final act, it […]
Also filed in Love, Music, Opera, Philosophy
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Tagged alex ross, beethoven, ben heppner, brattle theatre, claire denis, drama, fidelio, florestan, french films, harvard film archive, heldentenors, james levine, karita mattila, leftism, leonore, peter watkins, richard margison, the left, theatre, zizek
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Saturday, October 22, 2005
I’ve long been haunted by toilet scenes in two particular films — Coppola’s The Conversation and (less famously) Andrzej Zulawski‘s The Possessed. It was nice to discover, then, that artist Margaret Morgan has compiled some other cinematic toilet scenes in her video Toilet Training — which, she writes, ‘began as a response to my research […]
Also filed in Labor, Philosophy
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Tagged coppola, duchamp, Film, hitchcock, movies, possession, psycho, rheingold, the conversation, toilets, zizek, zulawski
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