There’s never been any shortage of film adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays. But the Bard’s work shows up most often in Hollywood as a twisted shadow of its original self, “an eclectic branch of ‘what if … ?’ cinema… Their production has always been underpinned by a commercial imperative, because most original-text Shakespeare has struggled at the box office.”
Tag: 04.07.07
2007 Forecast Has Hollywood Licking Its Chops
“The bulls are running in Hollywood. The new year is only three months old, but already executives are beginning to snort and paw the ground in the belief that 2007 will be not only a record year at the North American box office, but may even achieve an astonishing milestone: $10-billion (U.S.) in ticket sales.”
Animal Lovers Take On Vancouver Art Show
An art installation at a Vancouver gallery is drawing fire from animal rights activists, who claim that renowned Chinese artist Huang Yong Ping is mistreating the live animals used in the exhibit. The piece in question consists of “an array of creepy crawlies massed together under a turtle-shaped enclosure,” which the local Humane Society says is “deliberately designed to spur aggression among the animals.”
Are Sky-High Strad Prices Actually A Good Thing?
Another Stradivarius sold at auction for millions of dollars last week, and once again, it’s a sure bet that the buyer wasn’t a musician. In fact, there are nearly no musician-owned Strads left, thanks to the ever-escalating value collectors place on the Cremonese gems. But is this necessarily a bad thing? Yes, it does mean that most musicians, even great ones, will never get to play on the best of the old Italian violins, but it also forces the music world to pay attention to the stunning number of great instruments being crafted by living makers.
More Than The Sum Of Its Letters
The ubiquitous typeface known as Helvetica turns 50 this year. Wait, wait – you only think you don’t care! “Helvetica is one of those typefaces that everybody knows, everybody sees, but they don’t really see it at the same time because it’s so good at its job. It communicates efficiently and quickly without imposing itself.”
Preserving A Country’s Soul Amid The Rubble
There may be no sadder job than that of director of Iraq’s National Library and Archive in Baghdad. “After the U.S.-led invasion in 2003, looters pillaged and burned the library. Now, on the brink of the fourth anniversary of Saddam Hussein’s fall, and several weeks into a new security offensive, [Saad] Eskander and his staff are struggling to preserve the fragments of Iraq’s ancient heritage at a place he calls the ‘historical memory of the country.'”
The 96-Year-Old Rookie
Author Harry Bernstein is 96, and he just saw his first book published last month. The nonagenarian neophyte has been enjoying glowing reviews, and reveling in the novelty of his situation. “In a publishing world where first books by 20-something wunderkinds are often dissected as much for their authors’ photographs as for their prose, Mr. Bernstein is a refreshing antidote.”
Tech TV
Serious, jaw-dropping special effects used to be a luxury that only movie studios could afford. But advances in computer technology have allowed television to get in on the fun, and some new shows now rely on CGI effects that would have been prohibitively expensive, or even impossible, just a couple of years ago.
Broadway Star Told To Take A Week Off
“Christine Ebersole is giving a performance that critics hailed as one of the great star turns in recent Broadway history” in Grey Gardens. But the role is apparently so demanding that Ebersole has begun missing performances because of exhaustion, “causing the show’s producers to fret that she might jeopardize her chances of winning the Tony if she’s unable to do the show eight times a week. They met with her in her dressing room one night last month and told her to take a week off so she could pull herself together before the spring run-up to the Tonys, which are handed out in June.”
Lebrecht: “Synthetic” Classical Throttling The Industry
Classical doomsayer (and AJ blogger) Norman Lebrecht is out with a new book, in which he blames classical music’s decline in popularity on the overblown marketing machine that makes superstars out of crossover musicians of dubious ability. “In the Nineties, the classical side of the record industry suffered a fatal loss of nerve and substituted real classics with synthetics. These synthetics have finally sunk the ship.”