Sister cities to the rescue! French Riviera Film Fest held stateside, at Beverly Hills Hotel
Sep
25
2020
French Riviera Film Festival co-founders Nicole Muj and Gotham Chandna were in a quandary. Every link in the chain of staging their second annual film festival in the south of France concurrent to the Cannes Film Festival was disrupted. “Due to the pandemic, we couldn’t hold our festival and awards this year live in Cannes,” ...
Hollywood 1952: Jack Cole’s ethnic dance includes voodoo & waltz
In the summer and fall of 1951, the dance maker Jack Cole undertook two major new choreographies, one each at the two leading film studios of the era. He staged and danced the lead role in a voodoo ceremonial-rite for Lydia Bailey, at Twentieth Century Fox, and choreographed a sumptuous ‘grand valse’ for The Merry Widow ...
L.A.’s greatest filmmakers revealed, on ‘Home Movie Day’
Sep
22
2020
You’re already at home. So why not be very meta and watch home movies? From the tidal wave of on-line screenings and events, this one popped out. It’s such a COVID-clever idea: a compilation of submitted movies starring your cigar-smoking Uncle Sam, pet parakeet, sister’s Bat Mitzvah, new lawn mower, first dive into a swimming ...
Bring Your Own Brie … to the French Riviera Film Festival
Sep
14
2020
Close your eyes. Don’t cheat … close ’em! Now … pretend you are on the French Riviera. Now open your eyes. Guess what? You’re not! You’re still hunkered down in your apartment hiding from a deadly pandemic! It’s ruined everyone’s movie-going fun, but COVID-19 is no joke. It is an easily transmitted virus that has ...
Fighting the virus of discouragement — with ballet 2
Sep
11
2020
Ed. note: It is a an honor to share words written by dance educator and director of the Anaheim Ballet, Larry Rosenberg. Larry is expressing feelings and ideas shared by dance educators and company directors world wide. Larry writes as follows: COVID-19 is dangerous and relentless, a real virus. But the virus of discouragement is ...
In ‘jazz quarantine’ with Josh Nelson Trio 2
For jazz musicians and their audience, the spring and summer months of 2020 have been, to paraphrase the rebel leader Don Jose in The Wild Bunch, the months of sadness. Musicians need to communicate, exchange, and create with each other. And most thrive before an audience. As clubs and music spaces shutter due to the ...
What a dump! Kidhood drive-in movie theater exposed by day
Sep
7
2020
Pittsburgh’s South Park Drive-In, 1970 Really? That mound of dirt on the uphill side of a crud Western Pennsylvania road? That was it? The pleasure dome we entered, exalted, five of us in a red Chevy station wagon? The car’s “back-back” piled with pillows and blankets? My father, captain of the ship, adroitly steering to ...
The world capitol of ‘colorblind’
new documentary from first line features According to the myth, that’s Paris. And we don’t mean Paris, Texas. For more than a century, Black artists, authors, musicians and others have crossed the ocean to leave behind the racism of the United States. What made these African-Americans choose Paris? Why were the French fascinated by the ...
Ballet & blistering jazz-dance collide in Paris
Sep
3
2020
Youtube, you’ve done it again! And again and again. That’s how many times I have watched this wonderful newsreel clip, clearly an excerpt from a longer British Pathe story concerning … la danse. It takes place in Paris, which is always an excellent start. The cameraman seems be following a haughty prima ballerina, Ludmilla Tcherina, ...
Best of: Guggenheim’s ‘Works & Process’ artist videos
Ed. note: We’ve been tracking the rollout of virtual (video) commissions by artists reacting to life in a new abnormal — a global pandemic. As part of her previous story about the commissioning of these works by the Guggenheim Museum’s Works & Process, writer Susan Reiter carefully selected “best of best” videos with commentaries, which ...