The mood is not positive as this year’s Sundance Festival opens. “Though Sundance continues to be the most important platform for American independent film and the one place where the entire indie world comes together to make deals and to take stock, there is a widespread sense that the market for independent film financing is depressed.”
Tag: 01.16.03
Getting Used To Stardom
Ever since Salvatore Licitra stepped in to fill the shoes of an ailing Luciano Pavarotti at the Metropolitan Opera last year and brought the house down with his powerful tenor, he has been tagged as the Next Tenor. These days, preparing for his Carnegie Hall debut next week, Licitra is starting to adjust to being a star, but thankfully, he’s not speaking in cliches yet. He complains that Pavarotti never even called to wish him luck on the night of his unexpected Met debut, and jokes that being a tenor has its downside – all the operatic tenor characters, he insists, are “stupido” or “son of a beetch.”
Thumbs Up For Sundance
Pessimism? At Sundance? Well, maybe so, but you won’t hear any booing from Roger Ebert’s seat. “I have just spent an hour with the 2003 program for the Sundance Film Festival, and I am churning with eagerness to get at these films. On the basis of track records, this could be the strongest Sundance in some time — and remember, last year’s festival kicked off an extraordinary year for indie films.”
And Joni Begat Anne, Who Begat Celine, Who Begat…
What is it about Canadian women and their dominance of the American pop music scene? From Joni Mitchell to k.d. lang to Alanis Morissette to Avril Lavigne, Canadians produce an astonishing percentage of America’s favorite music. Is it the simple purity of the Great White North, as contrasted with the over-produced, predictable offerings coming out of market-driven L.A. studios? Is it savvy Canadian marketing infiltrating the Yankee sensibility? Is it just a big coincidence? Um, yes. All of that, and probably a few more things we haven’t thought of yet.
When David Sat For Lucien
Last summer David Hockney sat for a portrait by Lucien Freud. “Britain’s two greatest living painters spent 3 months in each other’s company, Freud sitting for Hockney for four hours before he became the subject of Freud’s gimlet eye for considerably longer: 120 hours.”
A Fake Van Gogh In Oslo Museum?
Is a famous Van Gogh self-portrait in Oslo’s National Museum a fake? One expert says he can prove it. “The main arguments for it not being a Van Gogh are, first, it does not resemble other of his self-portraits and an x-ray examination has shown there is another painting beneath it – though this is not very unusual, and proves little.”
Vancouver May Be Hot Again
The Canadian film industry has come in for plenty of criticism for its habit of luring Hollywood productions northward with lower production costs and a wide variety of natural locations in which to shoot, and the number of US productions made in Canada has dropped as a result. But after a couple of down years, the nation’s biggest film production center, Vancouver, appears to be making a comeback.
Washington Opera’s New Digs
Washington Opera moves into tiny Constitution Hall while its home at the Kennedy Center is renovated. “Longtime concertgoers have been shaking their heads. An opera house? With that tiny stage? In that vast, cavernous diffusion of bluish space? An opera house. It was not only home to the National Symphony Orchestra for that ensemble’s first 40 years, but it has been the site of countless recitals by the great, the near-great and the long-forgotten, both before and after the Kennedy Center opened in 1971.”
Morant Collection Goes To Banff
The Whyte Museum in Banff, Alberta, “is thrilled by the generous donation it has received of one of Canada’s most prized photographic collections. Thousands of personal photos taken by world-famous photographer Nicholas Morant, who died in 1999, were recently donated by Morant’s widow, Margaret E. Morant, to the prestigious museum in the Canadian Rockies… The ‘generous gift’ includes 23,000 photographs and three metres of textual material. There are also sound recordings and hundreds of items related to Morant’s photographic equipment, including virtually all of his cameras.”
Ma Bell, Now On Your TV!
Cable television rates are skyrocketing around the US, as service providers continue to be consolidated into a few, gigantic companies. What used to be an industry of diverse local monopolies is becoming an uncontrollable corporate behemoth with the authority to raise rates, yank channels, and gouge consumers at will, says Monica Collins. “The average household cable bill has climbed to $70 a month for television that used to be free.” And while countless lawmakers have called for Congressional hearings on the way the cable industry conducts itself, that public airing of gripes never seems to happen.