Pre-Code movies rediscovered in Los Angeles (TCM Fest) & New York (MoMA)
Apr
25
2024
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 1
Apr
24
2024
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
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
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 ...
R&B today, in Los Angeles festival
Apr
16
2024
Smooth sounds and infectious beats of rhythm and blues music, shortcode R&B, will fill the Los Angeles skyline in a one-day extravaganza for music enthusiasts. The line up of R&B royalty will include artists Ashanti, Ja Rule, Omarion, and Bow Wow, joined by a plethora of R&B sensations including Pretty Ricky, Fabolous, Ginuwine, Mya, Keri Hilson, Lloyd, Ray J, ...
Mesmerizing balletic ode to Virginia Woolf new signature work for American Ballet Theatre 2
American Ballet Theatre, now in its eighth decade, reclaims its mantle as a font of top international 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 and rambunctious original ...
‘Komorebi’ connects us to natural world in two recent Japanese movies
Apr
3
2024
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?
Apr
3
2024
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?
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 ...
A happy ceremony for La Cérémonie (1995) at Laemmle Anniversary Classics
ed. note: To mark the 30th anniversary of French auteur Claude Chabrol’s dark masterpiece, La Cérémonie (1994), Laemmle Theatres and the Anniversary Classic Series present a special screening of the film followed by a with a conversation between host Stephen Farber and actress Jacqueline Bisset, in person, at the Laemmle Royal Theatre in Santa Monica. ...