“The cuts are a kind of idiocy. These people are buffoons and philistines. We cannot rely on an endless supply of good actors and directors with no investment. Funding is already right on the edge and these will not be cuts; they will be amputations.”
Tag: 03.13.11
Is Hollywood in Artistic Crisis? New York Times‘s Chief Film Critics Debate
Manohla Dargis: “I think that the movies are rotten when they’re not brilliant or blah, and that Hollywood is in crisis, a recurrent state for its affairs.” A.O. Scott: “You remind me that the decline of movies started long before most of the current movie audience was born. It was first reported, as far as I can tell, around the time of the introduction of sound.”
Cinderella Candidate After the Dance Leads London’s Olivier Awards
“A Terence Rattigan play that closed early and was largely neglected for 70 years until its revival at the National Theatre emerged as the biggest winner at last night’s 2011 Olivier theatre awards. … Last night’s other big winners at an unashamedly showbizzy ceremony in the West End were Legally Blonde, the Musical – and Stephen Sondheim.”
Advice on Fixing Spider-Man: NY Times Readers Chime In
“Cut the geek chorus. Cut the female spider. Beef up the roles of the bad guys (currently wasted in a fashion show).” “Beef up the Green Goblin and other villains. They need to be evil and scary.” “Stop rushing in new actors. Build safer set design with more padding and rubber.”
Philadelphia’s Kimmel Center Still Finding Its Way After Ten Years
“The region’s power brokers – Ed and Midge Rendell among them – promoted it as an economic engine, a town square pumping foot traffic in and out 18 hours a day, a friendly new face for classical music, and an antidote to the Philadelphia Orchestra’s longtime home, the acoustically dry Academy of Music. But on these fronts, the Kimmel – now in its 10th season and hundreds of millions of dollars later – is still very much a work in progress.”
Peter Zumthor, the Anti-Starchitect
The Pritzker Prize winner “has hardly been toiling in obscurity. But he has eschewed the flamboyant, billboard-on-the-skyline, globe-trotting celebrity persona, setting himself apart from, and in his own mind clearly somewhat above, some of his more famous colleagues.”
Robert Spano Hired to Heal Bruised Aspen Music Festival
The festival-cum-school has had a rough couple of years, with the contentious elimination of a week of programming and 11 faculty positions, the abrupt departure of ex-music director David Zinman, and a CEO who “was fired and rehired, given a vote of no-confidence and granted a contract extension.” As the new music director, Spano will have to not only conduct and teach, but also soothe.
Connecting an Artist’s Head and Hands
Edmund de Waal: “When I was a child there was a truism that anyone could make something (a rabbit hutch, say) or mend something (a bicycle) if they had a classical education. … This annoyed me. Partly because I could only stumble through my Latin lessons but mostly because my afternoons were spent in a pottery workshop learning to throw pots.”