WH Smith – Britain’s biggest bookseller – is “demanding payments of £50,000 a week from publishers to get books on its supposedly impartial list of ‘recommended’ reads in the run-up to Christmas this year.”
Tag: 05.28.06
The Film That Won Cannes
The Wind That Shakes The Barley is set in Ireland in the 1920s and “recounts events that led to the formation of an independent Ireland and the creation of Northern Ireland, still under the rule of Great Britain. Director Ken Loach’s aim is to cast his political eye on events that are rarely discussed in the UK and beyond and remain open wounds for many Irish citizens.”
Why Wouldn’t You Want Some Star Power?
Critics have been clucking about celebrity casting. But so what? “If it takes a boldface name to bring out the crowds, so be it. Theatergoers aren’t chumps. They know Denzel Washington, who played Brutus last spring in the Broadway revival of “Julius Caesar,” is one of the best actors around, while Julia Roberts, who made her Broadway debut in Richard Greenberg’s “Three Days of Rain” this season, is a bona fide icon who has more depth than her film roles have typically shown. The Tony nominating committee may have snubbed them both, but these stars’ legions of fans couldn’t care less about such geeky honors.”
What Happened To Great Movie Music?
“What so many modern movies feature as music is a tuneless, thin, watercolor wash — musical doodling. It’s wallpaper music, music without a profile. I defy anybody to whistle a theme from any of the Lord of the Rings movies, which is precisely the kind of moviemaking that demands a great score. Even the occasional modern movie that summons some primal force, such as the recent King Kong, labors beneath a James Newton Howard score that’s thin gruel — not terrible, not inappropriate, but pallid compared to the force of the images.”
Radio And The Recording Companies Renegotiate Their Relationship
“New York State Attorney General Eliot Spitzer’s investigations into payola — and subsequent settlements with three of the four major record companies — have brought about sweeping changes in the way labels approach radio promotion. And those changes affect that summer marketing stalwart, the radio festival.”
Art Of Broadway – Don’t Give Up On The Musical
“While Broadway is celebrating the most bullish season in history — both in attendance and box-office grosses — the gulf between the artistic and the commercial seems wider than ever, the former solely as the province of the not-for-profit theaters, the latter as so much fodder for Broadway. Yet as bleak as some critics may paint the musical’s future — and they’ve been doing so for decades — there appears to be little hand-wringing these days among Broadway’s cognoscenti…”
Those Damn Charity Art Auctions
“Yes, it’s that nerve-racking time of year again: benefit-auction season. For the last three months New York has been awash in raffles, auctions and other fund-raisers where donated artworks go on the block to benefit all manner of causes. For the institution, the money can be a significant source of funds. For attendees, it can be a chance to acquire a work under market price… But for artists, many of whom spend the season fielding requests, it is not exactly a win-win proposition.”
How Millennium Park became Chicago’s Culture Hub
“With approximately 3 million visitors streaming into the place last summer, with gospel and jazz and highbrow music set to sing again from its main stage starting next weekend, Millennium Park has become our town square, our meeting place, our focal point for the arts — at least when the winter winds aren’t howling.”
A Script Over Headphones
Tim Crouch has an interesting approach to writing a play. “Instead of simply dictating a script, Crouch offers lines and directions to an actor over headphones and also performs himself in a moving story of a man who has lost control after killing a child in a road accident and then meets the father of his victim. Taking a different actor for each show, he ‘rehearses’ by chatting with them for an hour. He doesn’t tell them the story, but prepares them with other practicalities. This lack of knowledge enables the headphoned performer to give a particularly open, pure response.”
Has Success Of the Modern Novelist Dimished The Art?
“In 2006, the novelist has become a cross between a commercial traveller and an itinerant preacher. The cultural historians of the future will surely pick over the larger meaning of this festival fever, but one thing is indisputable: in just over a generation the novel has gone public in the most astounding way. In the process, the genre has sold out and become big business, the preferred medium of self-advancement and self-promotion for Blair’s children, and almost unrecognisable to fiction-lovers raised on the literary names of the Forties and Fifties.”