“ACO: The End of Time - SOUNZ” plus 3 more |
- ACO: The End of Time - SOUNZ
- Dead Horses, Zombies, and False Equivalency - DAILY KOS
- Dangerous Corner boasts focused, honest, and nuanced ... - Georgia Straight
- Ann Hornaday interviews 'Please Give' filmmaker Nicole ... - Washington Post
| Posted: 07 May 2010 02:19 PM PDT Olivier Messiaen completed his Quatuor pour la fin du temps in a prisoner of war camp where it had its first performance. This piece is considered by many to be one of the great greatest ensemble works of the twentieth century. It speaks of intense spirituality, ecstasy, apocalypse and throughout it Messiaen's love of bird song. Performers on this occasion will be the New Zealand Chamber Soloists: Lara Hall (violin), Peter Scholes (clarinet), James Tennant (cello) and Katherine Austin (piano). Prior to the musical performance, Waikato University lecturer and composer Martin Lodge will give a presentation titled Messiaen's 'Quartet for the End of Time': facts and fictions. Five Filters featured article: The Art of Looking Prime Ministerial - The 2010 UK General Election. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction. |
| Dead Horses, Zombies, and False Equivalency - DAILY KOS Posted: 07 May 2010 11:06 AM PDT The wingnuts are STILL mad at ACORN, for, in their minds, registering millions of "illegals" to vote, 'stealing' the election from McCain/Palin. So, they continue to 'beat a dead horse', one that didn't do what they, in their fevered conspiracy filled worldview, think. As to the 'update', what are they expecting, that a zombie ACORN will mobilize millions of zombies to vote in the midterms? Five Filters featured article: The Art of Looking Prime Ministerial - The 2010 UK General Election. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction. |
| Dangerous Corner boasts focused, honest, and nuanced ... - Georgia Straight Posted: 07 May 2010 02:55 PM PDT By J. B. Priestley. Directed by Bill Dow. A Playhouse Theatre Company production. At the Vancouver Playhouse on Thursday, May 6. Continues until May 22 You can practically smell the mildew on the script's pages. The thematic content of J.?B. Priestley's 1932 play Dangerous Corner remains relevant, and the performances in this production are uniformly strong, but the melodramatic conventions of his drawing-room drama are so antique that they're laughable. The story is all about revelations of betrayal. Publisher Robert Caplan and his wife, Freda, are entertaining guests, including novelist Miss Mockridge and two other partners in the publishing house: Freda's brother Gordon and a man named Charles Stanton. Olwen Peel, who works for the firm, slinks around looking gorgeously guilty, and Gordon's wife, Betty, busies herself acting like a bimbo and resenting others for regarding her as shallow. Everybody has an earth-shattering secret, and I mean everybody. The play can't go 15 minutes without somebody declaring a long-standing illicit devotion to some other member of the party, or confessing to robbery or murder. Handled with psychological depth, any one of these revelations would be worth a whole play. But Priestley is a plot junkie, and by contemporary standards the endless accumulation of shocks—"I was a fool not to know!"—looks ridiculous. The opening-night audience was rolling with laughter—merrily, it must be said—but it would be hard to argue that merriment was the sought-after response; director Bill Dow recently told a local daily paper that he's sure that Priestley didn't intend the play to be a comedy of manners. Dow declared that he wanted to get at the "desperation of human life", but the play makes it difficult to care deeply about these bourgeois figures and their sins. Because the characters reveal little about themselves until they spill their guilty beans, it's hard to work up much retroactive sympathy. That's not to say that this play and production have no heft. The idea that we create fictions of loyalty and dependability in order to survive remains current—although it probably doesn't sting as much as it did in 1932. Dow ends this mounting with by far the most exciting image of the evening. I won't give away specifics, but I will say that it highlights audience complicity in the maintenance of illusions. The ensemble of actors deserves full credit for maintaining focused, honest, and nuanced performances, despite the melodramatic script and giddy public. Jennifer Clement brings out all of Freda's chilly sophistication and wracking sorrow. Tom Scholte is humbly and thoroughly present as Stanton. Recent Australian import Anna Galvin feels period-perfect as Olwen. And Vincent Gale is indignation itself as Robert. Designer Alison Green has created some gorgeous dresses—especially Olwen's apparently liquid sea-green silk number. But the big question, as with the Playhouse's last offering, The Love List, is: why choose this script? Five Filters featured article: The Art of Looking Prime Ministerial - The 2010 UK General Election. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction. |
| Ann Hornaday interviews 'Please Give' filmmaker Nicole ... - Washington Post Posted: 07 May 2010 06:08 PM PDT The writer-director, in town to do interviews about her new movie "Please Give," arrives at the Iron Gate's back courtyard fresh from a television studio. "That's probably why I look a little makeuppy, sorry." She's dressed in jeans, a prim button-down blouse, black cardigan and hip, heavy-rimmed glasses. After ordering a Diet Coke, she asks a waiter for a straw, only to be told the buzzy downtown restaurant doesn't use them. "Really?" Holofcener says in the peeved-amused tone of one of her heroines. "What's wrong with straws?" She smiles across the table, incredulous. "Isn't that weird? 'We don't use straws.' Maybe it's a wasteful thing." Holofcener pauses, presumably taking in a mental picture of a landfill brimming with crumpled plastic pipettes. "But I like my Diet Coke with a straw," she says meekly. Sigh. "This is a nice menu. What are you going to have?" Such are the absurdities and accommodations that bedevil and enchant the world of Nicole Holofcener. Since making her debut in 1996 with the friendship comedy "Walking and Talking," and subsequently with "Lovely & Amazing" and "Friends With Money," Holofcener has earned a cult following for her observantly witty humor, frank depictions of female relationships and tone-perfect portraits of cultural creatives striving and stumbling their way through bourgeois urban habitats. For a generation that came of age in the 1980s and 1990s, Holofcener is their Nancy Meyers, Woody Allen and Judd Apatow all rolled into one, a chronicler of what it means to be of a certain age (middle) at a certain time (turn of the 21st century) in a certain place (New York or Los Angeles). In "Please Give," Catherine Keener plays Kate, who runs a mid-century home furnishings shop in New York with her husband, Alex (Oliver Platt), and lives in near-constant guilt over acquiring their inventory from the children of dead people. Kate and Alex have purchased the apartment next to theirs, occupied by a bitter, unfriendly old woman whose demise will mean they can finally renovate. Kate's attempts to reach out to the woman and her nieces -- played by Rebecca Hall and Amanda Peet -- are nearly always met with mild disaster, as Kate grapples with her ambivalence over wanting and having and getting and spending. Like all of Holofcener's movies, "Please Give" is based on a real situation -- a friend of hers really did buy an apartment belonging to an elderly neighbor, but the two enjoyed a warm friendship. Given the Holofcener touch, the story becomes funny and sad, tart and tender, gimlet-eyed but never cynical. The film opens with a montage of close-ups of women's breasts being unceremoniously slapped, squeezed and otherwise smooshed into mammogram machines. It boldly confronts Hollywood's obsessions with women's breasts and the "chick flicks" that portray women's lives in high-gloss, perfectly toned fictions. "I definitely know that I was kind of blurting something out, which I tend to do," says Holofcener, who turned 50 in March. "I guess I do like to dispel myths and kind of counteract [expletive] that's in other movies. Like, 'Really? This is what my life looks like. This is what boobs look like in a mammogram machine.' " For Holofcener's fans, "Please Give" may feel like something of a geographical and topical bookend to her 2006 film "Friends With Money," which was set in Los Angeles and starred Frances McDormand, Joan Cusack, Jennifer Aniston and Keener as friends in dramatically different financial circumstances, which are thrown into sharper relief when one of them needs a loan. "I'm still working it out," Holofcener says, after ordering the crab-shrimp-and-avocado salad. "I'm still dealing with the money and the real estate and the blunders, making Catherine Keener play a buffoon, which she does so well." Keener has starred in all of Holofcener's movies, and the two are close off the set as well. They live close to each other in L.A. and their kids are friends (Holofcener has twin 12-year-old sons). "It's been great," she says of their collaboration, "and completely unplanned. And we're probably gearing up for a separation, of sorts. It just feels like it's time to work with somebody else. Not forever, but -- oh, look at that dessert. Is that bread pudding?" Since making its debut at Sundance in January, and opening in New York at the Tribeca Film Festival in April, "Please Give" has received good reviews, although Holofcener notes, "I keep reading reviews that feel free to say how terrible 'Friends With Money' was, and how good this one is. And it's sort of like, 'Ouch? Thanks?' " And she allows that, having mastered the art of pinching pennies (her movies cost just a few million dollars to make, the cost of the car chase in "Date Night"), she's ready for bigger budgets and maybe bigger audiences. "If the script is right, I'm not above doing a movie with broad appeal. If it's good," she says. "And I think some of them are good. And then I'd have a lot more money. But, I imagine, a much bigger headache." Holofcener is currently adapting Laura Lippman's crime novel "Every Secret Thing," with McDormand producing. Holofcener also rewrites Hollywood scripts for movies that rarely get made, and she directs for television, most recently the HBO series "Bored to Death." They're "good jobs," she says. "They pay not that great, but the residuals are great. And they're good experiences. I like to have fun, even if it doesn't pay well." A waitress comes by, asking if anyone wants dessert. "That was bread pudding, wasn't it?" Holofcener asks wistfully. "Yeah, no thanks. . . . I'm on the thin train." Sigh. She never did get that straw. "You know what, I don't want a straw," she says, before adding confidingly, "Let's pick another battle." Five Filters featured article: The Art of Looking Prime Ministerial - The 2010 UK General Election. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction. |
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