Hilarious! Quentin Tarantino directs ‘Pulp Fiction’ dance number

Dance · Film

An on-set devil captured footage as Quentin Tarantino directed Uma Thurman and John Travolta in their iconic twist to a Chuck Berry song. It does beg the question: Is that how John Ford directed?

Tarantino demonstrated on a British talk show host his inspiration for the choreography.

artsmeme interviews a dancer/choreographer who did not do the number but was on set while it was filmed. read here.

an artsmeme smoochie to ian birnie for the share

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Neutra’s quiet revolution in residential design: Silverlake’s Ohara House (1959)

Architecture & Design

Los Angeles is a living museum of mid-Century modern architectural design, those notably pared- down geometrically driven homes that interact copacetically in nature. So the house on view here is one of many. But it’s special. It’s historic. It’s one of the nine homes built on the edge of Silver Lake as a “Neutra Colony,” between 1948-1962.

“The aura of a Neutra House is calmer and quieter, the view from the street is unimportant; Neutra sends you into a slow moving trance. The blurring of indoors and outdoors is part of the spell,” wrote Alex Ross in the New Yorker.

The Ohara house’s ample front yard, and stone steps that merge into a water feature welcomes the visitor. The blurring effect here is fully realized in the living, dining and study area on the main level. A series of outdoor “rooms” connect with intimate interior spaces generously expanding the habitable area. The residence includes: 3 bedrooms, 2 baths, original built-ins, front balcony, side yard, hot tub and car port at the rear of the property.

Contact our friend Brian Linder for house tour and/or purchase.

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Pre-Code movies rediscovered in Los Angeles (TCM Fest) & New York (MoMA)

Film
loretta young, spencer tracy, man’s castle At the fifteen annual Turner Classic Movies TCM Fest, just completed in Hollywood, we most enjoyed two marvelous movies, Only Yesterday (1933) in which Margaret Sullavan bucks the stigma of her single motherhood and The Good Fairy (1935) with Sullavan, again, playing a young innocent entangling with marital norms, ...

Attend New York City Ballet — in a sensitive way

Dance
On a day when five highly sensitive creatures — a cluster of the British monarchy’s beautifully bred military horses — got “spooked” (an actual term for when horses react and skitter and scamper) and proceeded to throw their riders and gallop around London causing havoc, it’s time for human beings face the limits of our ...

Pas-de-deux in perpetuity: Travolta & Thurman in ‘Pulp Fiction,’ at TCM Fest 2024

Dance · Film
At the conclusion of the witty dance duet between Vincent Vega (John Travolta) and Mia Wallace (Uma Thurman), on the dance floor of a kooky retro coffee-shop-style restaurant, the full auditorium of TCM Fest 2024‘s opening night gala at the TCL Chinese Theatre broke into spontaneous applause. The occasion was the screening of Pulp Fiction ...

Hooray for the ‘Discoveries’: lesser-known gems of TCM Fest 2024

Film
by 
When the TCM Classic Film Festival opens its 15th year in Hollywood this week, you may well choose to see some of the high-profile events at the festival—the star-studded opening night screening of Pulp Fiction, Lady Sings the Blues with co-star Billy Dee Williams in person, North by Northwest introduced by filmmaker Nancy Meyers, or ...

Mesmerizing balletic ode to Virginia Woolf new signature work for American Ballet Theatre

Dance · Reviews
American Ballet Theatre, now in its eighth decade, reclaims its mantle as a font of top international dance, dancers, and repertoire with “Woolf Works,” a theatrical evocation of three novellas written by the most poetic of 20th century authors, Virginia Woolf. The ambitious full-evening ballet has contemporary-classical choreography by Briton Wayne McGregor to a moody ...

‘Komorebi’ connects us to natural world in two recent Japanese movies

Film
We noticed it right away. Evil Does Not Exist, the new film by Ryusuke Hamaguchi, director of Academy Award-winning DRIVE MY CAR opens with a long montage of treetops in a forest. Hey! We just saw something very similar in Wim Wenders’ Academy Award-nominated movie, Perfect Days (2023). This marvelous film, an artsmeme favorite, also had ...

What’s in ABT’s ‘Woolf Works,’ soon at Segerstrom?

Dance
We’ve been seeing intriguing images, not to mention advertisements, including ones running here on artsmeme, for American Ballet Theatre‘s new production of Wayne McGregor’s Woolf Works, playing at Segerstrom Center for the Arts in five performances, April 11 – 14. Inspired by the writings of Virginia Woolf — an author this woman writer so greatly ...

Film museum … or oil refinery?

Film · Visual arts
Everyone thinks that the Academy Museum at Wilshire and Fairfax, was a repurposed May Company department store, but as a story in Curbed L.A. demonstrates, it was inspired by an oil refinery. We’ve been living around them forever! And to prove it, the Museum is staging a new exhibition featuring the kinds of clothes people ...