Review: No chopped liver, but still great: GATZ @ REDCAT 2
When I was a kid, my yiddishe grandmother would pack us sandwiches for Saturday movie matinee (she called it “the show”). My cousins and I would line up at the box office of Pittsburgh’s Manor Theater, clutching in our little hands a few bucks and our greasy brown-paper bag lunches. The theater concession’s stellar offerings ...
“Hold Back the Dawn,” part of Mitchell Leisen retrospective @ UCLA Film & Television Archive
Nov
29
2012
“Hold Back the Dawn” (1941) looks so good on the UCLA Film & Television Archive’s Mitchell Leisen retrospective roster. It opens a double-bill at the Billy Wilder Theater this Friday night. Charles Boyer plays a Hungarian hoofer stranded in Mexico who dupes an innocent schoolmarm (Olivia de Havilland in an Oscar-nominated performance) into an arranged ...
Carole Bayer Sager’s splendid nosherai @ William Turner Gallery
When the baseball stadium vendor cried out “peanuts, popcorn, cracker jacks,” little Carole Bayer Sager, as a kid, took that sing-song offering seriously. The prodigious lyricist/songwriter is also proud creator of a fun and poppy collection of super-sized snacks in serious, searing colors. The show’s early November opening at William Turner Gallery in Santa Monica ...
Cocktails, canapes & Esa-Pekka chitchat to benefit Hear Now Music Festival
Nov
27
2012
Can there be a more beautiful invitation [click on it for detail] than to hang around a cool Culver City designer home, with smart music lovers, just breathing in the exceptionally artistic vibe of our great Los Angeles Philharmonic conductor laureate, the composer Esa-Pekka Salonen? The event will benefit the Hear Now Music Festival, a ...
Fitz featured in “Gatz”
Here stands the great American novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald in what strikes me as his penultimate Los Angeles portrait. Bleary-eyed but putting a good face on things — what we do so well in L.A. Noshing one night at Greenblatt’s Deli on Sunset Boulevard, I chatted with proprietor, the son of the original owner. He ...
“Loves of a Blonde,” Milos Forman’s low-key masterpiece,@ UCLA Film & Television Archive
Nov
26
2012
About a month ago, perusing the library’s dvd offerings, I plucked from the shelf Loves of a Blonde (1965), director Milos Foreman‘s precocious 1967 Academy Award-winning film. A small romantic comedy, shot in black and white and only 90-minutes long, the film patiently unspools its minimalist plot, a droll dissection of life in a Czech ...
His Royal Greatness. Michael Jackson in “Another Part of Me,” Wembley Stadium, July 1988 1
Like this? Read more: MJ dances — a dance critic’s manifesto to Michael Jackson
Thanksgiving with MJ
By any stretch of a writer’s imagination, a good day this Thanksgiving Day. My advance piece about Trey McIntyre Project got front-page Calendar section placement in the L.A Times. But sharing the page with my writing, an even more exciting dance story (sorry, Trey!). It concerns tonight’s ABC-television broadcast of Spike Lee’s documentary “Michael Jackson: ...
Trey McIntyre, the pride of Boise and beyond
Nov
22
2012
Trey McIntyre seems to have it all going for him. He’s talented, a gentleman, personable, accessible, friendly to all, hugely handsome and hey, he’s tall. Six foot six to be exact. Interviewing the Boise-based choreographer for a piece in the Los Angeles Times we conferred with a friend of arts·meme, Nancy Wozny, a long time ...