Anita Bryant tells it, once more, to Playboy magazine 1
Sep
6
2016
Less than 10 years after the Stonewall Riots, Anita Bryant launched a successful campaign to repeal gay rights in Dade County, Florida. Bryant’s notorious campaign gave legitimacy to a new style of right-wing politics and helped launch the Moral Majority and similar right-wing movements that continue to the present day. Bryant’s rumblings had a major ...
Review: Natalia Osipova rules the boy’s club of “Tour de Force III” 2
The latest edition of packaged ballet entertainment wrangled by impresario Sergei Danilian, the force behind “Tour de Force III” presented Saturday night at the Segerstrom Center for the Arts, brandished a sorry statistic. That each of the evening’s four repertory items was the creation of a male choreographer unfortunately goes without saying. The marginalization, no, ...
Worldly woman shocks small-town America! Pola Negri, you go girl.
Jul
14
2016
“A Woman of the World” (1925) stars Pola Negri in a comedy about a sophisticated European countess (do they make ’em unsophisticated?) who encounters culture shock during her visit to small-town America. Her continental freedoms — she smokes in public, she wears flashy makeup — clash with local morals. A crusading District Attorney enters the ...
Gwen & Chita’s ‘Nowadays’ better than ours
In this yummilicious snippet from the Tony Award broadcast of 1984, Broadway goddesses Chita Rivera and Gwen Verdon deliver a pastiche-pairing of numbers from Bob Fosse’s “Chicago.” Chita electrifies with her song-and-dance forcefulness in “All That Jazz.” But Verdon, joining for “Nowadays,” gives a lesson in subtle upstaging — no easy feat considering her dance ...
Jazz singer Jeri Southern, appreciated
There were other female jazz pianists who also sang in the 1950s, but none shared Jeri Southern’s formidable pianistic technique, vocal individuality, and unerring choice of good material. She sang the most bittersweet love songs in the most intimate manner. And few could inspire the nightclub reveries Southern conjured—of melancholy, infatuation, optimism, idolatry, disconsolation, and ...
Cindy Sherman, Broadly speaking
Jun
14
2016
“As a man, it makes me agitated to see images of women looking so distressed,” a fellow critic remarked to me as we inched through the progressively disturbing galleries of The Broad‘s first dedicated special exhibition. “Imitation of Life,” a 120-image, encompassing career retrospective, showcases the prodigious output of renowned self-portraitist/performance artist/photographer Cindy Sherman. As ...
TCM Fest: Angela Lansbury brings wit, hauteur, menace to ‘The Manchurian Candidate’
In 1961 Angela Lansbury was playing the mother of rising star Warren Beatty in All Fall Down, an intense family drama adapted by playwright William Inge from the novel by James Leo Herlihy. In that film she seemed thoroughly convincing as the overbearing mother to Beatty, even though she was only 11 years older than ...
Gina! The great Lollobrigida appears @ TCM Fest 2
Apr
30
2016
So much fun, at Friday’s TCM Fest 2016, to view director Carol Reed’s marvelous Cinemascope circus movie, “Trapeze,” a color-drenched treatment of a world gone-by; the setting, a circus smack in the middle of Paris. Cast as a foxy and ambitious she-acrobat, Gina Lollobrigida brings her earthy presence to the film, as she jockeys her ...
A visit with Anna Karina @ TCM Fest 2016
Apr
28
2016
Looking forward to hearing French New Wave film goddess, Anna Karina, introduce Jean-Luc Godard’s Band of Outsiders at TCM Fest 2016 this weekend. Karina, a Danish-French actress, director and writer is known for roles in influential French New Wave films, including A Woman is a Woman (1961), Band of Outsiders (1964), Alphaville (1965) and Pierrot ...
Fonda & Friend feted by Pasadena Playhouse
Mar
16
2016
The inestimable Jane Fonda, two times an Oscar winner and an inspirational figure to many women, together with her significant other, record producer Richard Perry, will be honored at an annual fundraiser at the historic Pasadena Playhouse. Billed as “the best party in Pasadena,” this happy occasion merits a wish, You go girl! And you ...