Cool blues fuel philanthropy at Fire Island Dance Festival
It sure looks like summer, doesn’t it? The swanky seaside affair had the ultimate emcee, Joel Grey, introducing not the girls of the Kit-Kat Klub, but the Fire Island Dance Festival in its 25th year — an enduring charitable fundraising event on Fire Island Pines Great South Bay on July 19-21. The roster was replete ...
Dear Hollywood Boulevard … love, The Lare
Jul
22
2019
boulevard of dreams … and nightmares ed. note: a letter contributed by artsmeme’s friend Jeff Mantor of Larry Edmunds Bookshop on the cusp of the opening of ONCE UPON A TIME IN HOLLYWOOD. Dear Hollywood Boulevard, You are a short street, but a long road. A place & idea. A dream & a dirty nightmare ...
Can it possibly be fifty years since ‘Goodbye, Columbus’?
Jul
22
2019
One of the landmark comedies of the 1960s and perhaps the best screen rendition of the work of Philip Roth was the adaptation of the author’s National Book Award-winning novella, Goodbye, Columbus. The movie launched the careers of its two stars, Richard Benjamin and Ali MacGraw, who will both join Laemmle Anniversary Classics host Stephan ...
Jets ‘do the hustle’
The filmmakers behind the re-do of WEST SIDE STORY (1961) did not win a lot of internet love upon the release of a production still of Steven Spielberg’s redux filming of Jerome Robbins/Robert Wise’s iconic WSS “Prologue,” with menacing gang members dance-trawling the streets of Manhattan. It’s hard to give fewer points for either the ...
David Crosby’s ‘freak flag’ flies in new documentary
rock-and-doc star david crosby, photo by amy graves David Crosby, who almost cut his hair but didn’t, ended up having it shorn in a Texas state prison. After serving time for drug possession, he exited the big house as a drab-looking middle-aged, balding man of no particular distinction. Then he grew back his hair. Now ...
The Lubitsch touch — for a 1929 wedding gown
travis banton wedding gown forjeanette macdonald Really wonderful to see director Ernst Lubitsch’s THE LOVE PARADE (1929) starring Jeanette MacDonald and Maurice Chevalier, at Paramount Pictures where the movie was made 90 years ago. The delightful light comedy, peppered with MacDonald-esque coluratura and Chevalier-esque direct chatter to the audience, was screened at a fundraising event ...
REVIEW: Go to ‘Royal’ hell, in Wayne McGregor ballet
edward watson & artists of the royal ballet, photo: cheryl mann In the first of my two viewings of choreographer Wayne McGregor‘s explosive and brilliant dance collaboration with composer Thomas Ades and the Los Angeles Philharmonic, “The Dante Project Part 1 [Inferno]” danced by The Royal Ballet as a world premiere for Glorya Kaufman Presents ...
Get your gaze on.
Installation view of Donna Huanca: OBSIDIAN LADDER. Courtesy the artist, Marciano Art Foundation, Los Angeles and Peres Projects, Berlin. Photo by Joshua White/JWPictures.com In the past we would look. And sometimes we would see. But now, in the art world, the operative word is “gaze.” That’s nothing new, the expression “gaze” has been in use ...
University action fails to address racism of ‘The Birth of a Nation’
Jul
8
2019
Bette Davis and Lillian Gish in The Whales Of August (1987) Ed note: The following is an excerpt from a long interview with film marketing strategist/producer-director Mike Kaplan, a friend of artsmeme, concerning the removal of the name of Lillian and Dorothy Gish from a screening auditorium at Bowling Green State University in Ohio. The ...