Film
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Showtimes Streams Mary Magdalene
Biblical Tale with Feminist Twist
By: - May 01st, 2020Showtime recently screened the intriguing 2018 movie “Mary Magdalene”, written by Helen Edmundson and Phillipa Goslett, directed by Garth Davis. This provocative, revisionist, version (with undertones of the current worldwide feminism movement) gives one the opportunity to think outside the accepted “biblical box” concerning the role of women in history both religiously and socially.
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Translating Movies into Opera
Why Operatic Movies Fail on Stage
By: - Jun 07th, 2020It is tempting for current composers of new opera to use films as a jumping off place. In two recent efforts, the creative artists miss the strength of the film's story arc and flatten their effort to create opera. Marnie at the Metropolitan Opera (and English National Opera) and Breaking the Waves (Opera Philadelphia) both overlook the strengths which provide drama in the films on which they are based.
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HERE Presents Disposable Men
James Scruggs Multi-faceted Picture of Black Men
By: - Jun 10th, 2020HERE has always been on the cutting edge of multi-disciplinary art. In 2005, they produced Disposable Men by James Scruggs. Scruggs presented the black man as the object of fear in communities. People in turn rise up against innocent men of color. Amadou Diallo, shot 41 times on his doorstep in New York in February 1999 is Scruggs' jumping off point.
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Palm Springs ShortFest
Upcoming Virtual Festival
By: - Jun 12th, 2020For the first time in the festival’s history, ShortFest, will not host an in-person event. Instead, the Palm Springs ShortFest, one of the most prestigious film festivals and the largest film market for short films in the world, remains undaunted and will present a ‘virtual festival’ that will run from June 16 through June 22, 2020.
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MoMA Streams "Right On" from The Last Poets
Produced by Woodie King Jr and Directed by Herbert Danska
By: - Jun 11th, 2020MoMA is streaming a restored print of Right On!, a classic film released in the early 1970s. Featuring The Last Poets, we are taken back to the origins of Hip Hop and of the first presentation of black culture by blacks. Felice Luciano, one of the original poets, speaks briefly about the prophetic poetry of the group. Fifty years ago they predicted today.
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Joseph Nechvatal’s Art Springs From Algorithms
Viral Venture Online at White Page Gallery
By: - Jun 15th, 2020Long before we had heard of, or even imagined, viruses like Covid-19, Post-Minimal painter, multi-media artist and art theoretician Joseph Nechvatal was generating them. Not the contagious types, but computer-robotic assisted ones.
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Man in an Orange Shirt
Vanessa Redgrave in Britich Film
By: - Jun 16th, 2020The real beauty of this engaging, powerful and achingly poignant film lies in the performances of its sublime ensemble cast. They’re experienced, talented, and spot-on in their portrayals, and all are in the thrall of the great 80-year-old (when she made the film) Vanessa Redgrave. The great ones never seem to lose that special gift of star quality.
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MOMA Streams Salacia by Tourmaline
Transgender Life in 1830 Seneca Village
By: - Jun 25th, 2020Salacia is a short film made by Tourmaline, a transgender artist who discovered a compatriot in a New York City Village located in Manhattan in 1830. It was one of the few places in America that black people could own land and vote. It was taken by eminent domain to make way for Central Park.
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Kendall Messick's The Projectionist
An Outsider Artist's Secret World
By: - Jul 09th, 2020How one man lovingly – and obsessively - constructed his very own movie palace in the basement of his suburban home.
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Downton Abbey the Movie
Sequel to PBS Series
By: - Jul 15th, 2020Just how successful was the popular TV series phenomena known as “Downton Abbey”? Mind boggling and totally entertaining and one of the most endearing and engagingly written Masterpiece Theatre/ BBC co-productions in the history of Public Broadcasting Service (PBS). It ran for six seasons with audiences clamoring for Julian Fellowes to write another season. He authored all 70 episodes of the series.
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The Weir by Conor McPherson
Irish Repertory Theatre Screens Performance
By: - Jul 27th, 2020The Irish Repertory Theatre has come up with the perfect play to stream. The Weir is a quintet, Four men living in a remote Irish country town are joined by a pretty woman from Dublin. Stories are told by four characters and the camera focuses on them during the telling. The scene broadens to include reactions. Sometimes Director Ciarán O’Reilly has an actor face the camera, deeply involving us in the drama.
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Lawrence Brownlee and Friends
Lyric Opera of Chicago Streams a Virtual Concert
By: - Jul 28th, 2020Lawrence Brownlee is an ambassador of song. He is not only a great bel canto tenor, but also leader in discussions on our racial divide. Identifying as a descendant of Africans and a person of dark skin tone, he has mentored young singers and helped direct the conversation on race in the arts and in the world about us. Yet he does not like the designation of Ella Fitzgerald as part of Black Heritage, her position on a postage stamp. Rather he sees her as a great American singer. Blacks are part of a larger community, not self-segregated.
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Irish Repertory Theatre Streams Love, Noel
Steve Ross and KT Sullivan Delight
By: - Aug 12th, 2020Players Club ,where the Irish Repertory production of Love, Noel is set, seems like just the right elegant space. Edwin Booth felt he had to make up for the assassination of Lincoln by his brother. Booth realized that a club where actors could socialize with the elite and elevate their status from rabble-rousers to artists was what New York needed. In 1888, he founded The Players Club at 16 Gramercy Park South together with fifteen other incorporators, including Mark Twain and General William Tecumseh Sherman. Players is the oldest club in New York City that’s still in its original location. Love, Noel graced its halls.
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Without Gorky a Netflix Documentary
Film by the Artist's Granddaughter Cosima Spender
By: - Aug 27th, 2020The artist of Armenian heritage, Matin Mugar, reviewed "Without Gorky" in 2012. Cosima Spender filmed the tragic story of her grandfather the surrelist/abstract expressionist artist Arshile Gorky. He came to America as a survivor of the Armenian Genocide in which his mother died from starvation. Growing up in Watertown as a young artist he took the name Gorky and denied his heritage remaining distant with little contact to relatives. His wife Agnes, then in her late 80s, convyed memories of terrible suffering and its impact on their two daughters.; particularly coming to terms with his suicide. Gorky was among the greatest artists of his generation. This superb and compelling documentary is now featured on Netflix.
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Hidden Figures a 2017 Gem
Streaming This Month on FX
By: - Sep 02nd, 2020Set in 1961 “Hidden Figures”, centers around the true and factual story of three brilliant African-American female mathematicians who worked at the Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, during America’s odious Jim Crow Law era – from 1887 to 1964. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 finally nullified the repellent second-class distinction Jim Crow law, by recognizing that all citizens of America are to be accorded full and equal protection under the law authorized by the US Constitution.
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I’m Thinking of Ending Things
Daunting Charlie Kaufman Film on Netflix
By: - Sep 06th, 2020Charlie Kaufman's "I'm Thinking of Ending Things" is being touted as one of the best new films of what proves to be a rather thin year. It is available on Netflix. You will need to see it at least twice. The first time to immerse in its convoluted twists and turns. Then, read the reviews, and follow the clues to figure out what the heck it is all about. Trust me, this is a work of genius, and while at times agonizingly, enervating and slow, it's well worth the time and effort.
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Demi Moore as GI Jane
An Oldie but Goodie
By: - Sep 09th, 2020When the 1997 movie “G.I. Jane” was released women in Israel were already hardened combat veterans. In the US. Military, however, women trying to integrate the male dominated ranks of combat soldiers were met with severe resistance from the heads of the armed forces. “Women will become a distraction and a liability in combat. Combat requires physical strength as well as stamina to handle the rigors of war and combat”.
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More on Alex Ross, Wagnerism
Ross Captures The Meister's Voice
By: - Sep 14th, 2020Alex Ross’s depiction of Wagner in America, in his new work "Wagnerism," is focused at the start on the author Willa Cather. Ross finds Cather and Thomas Mann the most musically educated and sophisticated of the many literary figures who infused their work with the ideas of the Meister. The boundless scope of a work, its inclusion of ancient myth made present, and leitmotifs bound together to organize a story, are key elements of the Wagner style.
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Royal Ballet Company
PBS Great Performances
By: - Sep 19th, 2020Classical ballet as performed by England’s Royal Ballet Company in this new film version by filmmakers Michael Nunn and William Trevitt, feature two new sublime, glittering, and accomplished principal dancers.
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Black Words Matter from New Federal Theatre
Poetry Jam
By: - Sep 22nd, 2020Leave it to Woodie King, Jr. mastermind of the now fifty years young New Federal Theatre, to get our new streamed delivery form better than anyone else (Irish Repertory Theater excepted). For two evenings, starting on September 21 and then on September 28, the NFT is presenting Poetry Jams. The first one, hosted by Rev. Rhonda Akanke' McLean-Nur is a marvel of commonplace images elevated to song. The Reverend at first sees herself as strong black women in history. She admits that neither she nor the Queen of the Nile bear much resemblance to Elizabeth Taylor.for starters.
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Images Cinema in Williamstown
Update on Lockdown
By: - Oct 07th, 2020Images Cinema, an art house in Williamstown. has been shut down going on eight months. Here is an update from executive director, Doug Jones.
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Howardena Pindell at The Shed
Artist, Filmmaker, Curator Brings Black Experience Close
By: - Oct 22nd, 2020Howardena Pindell exhibits at the Shed. "Working on my commission for the Shed has been a very rewarding and healing experience. It allowed meto conceptualize an idea as a result of an experience I had as a child. I put it forth as a performance piece to a group of white women artists at the AIR Gallery where I was a founder in the early 1970s. They turned it down. I was the only non-white member of the gallery.
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Tyshawn Sorey Plays His Deck
Alarum Will Sound in Video Chat
By: - Oct 31st, 2020Newark, New Jersey has given us Philip Roth and LeRoi Jones among others. Now we have Tyshawn Sorey, moved south to a studio in Philadelphia, 'conducioning' at a triptych of computer screens on which seventeen performers have gathered to create one of Sorey’s Autoschhiams, a spontaneous composition.
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The Last Vermeer
Art of Forgery
By: - Nov 21st, 2020“The Last Vermeer”, a TriStar Pictures film based on the book “The Man Who Made Vermeers” by Jonathan Lopez, opened in over 800 ‘live’ theatres on November 20, 2020; centers around one such court case and trial reparation event in the Netherlands in 1945.
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Andy On Line
Classic Warhol Films
By: - Dec 03rd, 2020The artist Andy Warhol focused on making "underground movies" from 1963 to 1987. Drawing on his entourage they were primarily shot in his studio known as "The Factory." As art they were deadpan and amateurish. The "actors" were primarily drama queens with no professional training. Andy turned on the camera and let them be themselves. In so doing he captured the flavor and essence of an era. While often enervating to sit through the films offer insidious insights of what was cool and camp during an era of great invention and energy.
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