Arts & Culture

The cleverly named On the Record threatens to dethrone the so-called “King of Hip-Hop.” The 97-minute documentary may be to music mogul Russell Simmons what the #MeToo movement and Ronan Farrow’s reportage have been to that other entertainment industry icon, Harvey Weinstein. But unlike the exposes of the disgraced movie producer, Record delves into matters of race, as well as of sex and gender.

Record’s protagonist is Drew Dixon, daughter of a 1990’s Washington, D.C. mayor, Sharon Pratt Dixon, and her father Arrington Dixon was a D.C. City Councilman. Growing up in the milieu of African American politics, Dixon saw Hip-Hop as a musical genre that expressed the voices, issues and concerns of Black people through an art form and decided to pursue a career in the music business. With an ear for talent Dixon rose in industry ranks, and she became an executive at Def Jam, the Hip Hop label co-founded by entrepreneur Simmons, who is also African American.

SHAME on these filmmakers for making a film like this, full of misinformation and disinformation, to intentionally depress audiences, and make them think there are no alternatives.

I am an award-winning documentary filmmaker making films on environmental issues and renewable energy for over 40 years, and from making these films became a leading activist in Nova Scotia on environmental issues, and also a renewable energy developer and advocate.  

Let me make it absolutely clear that the new documentary, Planet of the Humans, by Jeff Gibbs — with executive producer Michael Moore, is inaccurate, misleading and designed to depress you into doing nothing.

Wind power and solar energy produce huge amounts of clean energy.  Look up the environmental footprint of a modern wind turbine, or modern solar panel, and you will find that the embodied energy and emissions are offset within a year.

As people grapple with a planetary pandemic an exciting new movie is premiering just in time to commemorate the 75th anniversary of what marked the end of a much of our last global conflagration. Enemy Lines is available to rent or own on April 24 shortly before the platinum jubilee of Victory in Europe or V-E Day, May 8, 1945, which signified the Allied victory over Hitler and Mussolini. Swedish director Anders Banke’s World War II movie also reminds us of the all but forgotten Mission Alsos, and in doing so provides film and war buffs with a highly entertaining history lesson.

To fully grasp the extraordinary nature of Major Kaminski’s (Ed Westwick) daring operation, imagine if you will if a team of Nazi irregular soldiers had infiltrated New Mexico circa 1943 in order to “extract” nuclear physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, chief of the Manhattan Project’s staff, from Los Alamos in order to bring the scientist back to the Fatherland in order to work on Germany’s “heavy water” experiments to create an atomic bomb.

On August 9, 2019 the commander-in-tweet attacked “Liberal Hollywood” for having “great Anger and Hate! …The movie coming out [which] is made in order to inflame and cause chaos. They create their own violence and then try to blame others." The movie in question was The Hunt and the day following Trump’s Twitter tantrum Universal Pictures pulled the Blumhouse Production from its scheduled theatrical release on Sept. 27. Of course, if anybody knows anything about great Anger and Hate! and inflaming and causing chaos, it’s the president. But Universal didn’t scratch opening the movie solely because the studio was heeding the counsel of a world class expert in rendering incendiary public statements.

Sacred Fools has long been among my favorite theater companies and its West Coast premiere of Antigone, Presented by the Girls of St. Catherine’s only confirms this critic’s longstanding admiration and affection for this imaginative enclave of theatrical envelop-pushers.

The ancient myth of Antigone - a young woman who suffered for heroically standing up to authority - has been oft-adapted by top talents for literally 2,500 years, starting with tragedies by both Sophocles and Euripides. The 20th century saw Antigone-related stage productions by dramatists Jean Cocteau, Jean Anouilh, Athol Fugard and Bertolt Brecht, as well as a ballet and opera by the great Greek composer Mikis Theodorakis (who composed memorable scores for Costa-Gavras films, including 1969’s Z, as well as 1964’s Zorba the Greek and 1973’s Serpico).

Two years ago Laguna Playhouse hit the jackpot by presenting a stage version of a 1967 screen classic about sex, The Graduate, starring a famous actress, Melanie Griffith, as Mrs. Robinson. Now the venerable SoCal theater is panning for gold in the same river by presenting another theatrical rendering of a 1967 movie about love, featuring this time not one, but two, marquee names. Paul Rodriguez and Rita Rudner, both known as comedians and actors, co-star in Neil Simon’s Barefoot in the Park, which opened on Broadway in 1963 with Robert Redford, who four years later joined Jane Fonda for Hollywood’s take on the beloved romantic comedy.

However, Rodriguez and Rudner, who are both in their sixties, do not play the show’s leads. The newlyweds are portrayed by Lily Gibson as Corie, while Nick Tag - who co-starred opposite (or should we say underneath?) Melanie’s Mrs. Robinson in Laguna’s Graduate - graduates from Ben Braddock to Paul Bratter in Barefoot. Rudner portrays the young wife’s mother, Ethel Banks, while Rodriguez essays the role Charles Boyer played in the movie, Victor Velasco.

Writer/director Corneliu Porumboiu’s slyly stylish The Whistlers is one of those productions film buffs relish largely because of their cinematic references. In one scene characters appear in a theater where John Ford’s 1956 classic The Searchers is being screened. But while the 97-minute-long Whistlers’ Romanian characters may very well be searching for something (and/ or someone), the celluloid genre Porumboiu is most emulating isn’t the Western, but rather Film Noir.

There is also a Hitchcockian panache, paying homage to the Master of Suspense’s most famous scene from Psycho, as well as to mattresses, which hold a special place in the iconography of crime movies. Remember in The Godfather when they “go to the mattresses?”

Human Interest Story, playwright/director Stephen Sachs’ remake updating Frank Capra’s 1941 classic movie Met John Doe, has probably the most extensive multi-media stagecraft I’ve ever seen in an intimate theater production. Matthew G. Hill’s bravura video design conjures up the brave new virtual world of cable television, social media and beyond on the diminutive Fountain Theatre’s set, which Hill likewise wrought. One FX is a first: While an actor types on his keyboard the letters appear on an onstage screen.

Indies, Inclusivity, Equality

While addressing the press after winning the Best Supporting Male accolade for The Lighthouse Willem Dafoe epitomized the philosophy of the Film Independent Spirit Awards vis-à-vis big budget Hollywood studio productions. In the ceremony’s media tent, when a British reporter seized on the opportunity to ask the quirky actor about superhero flicks - because Lighthouse co-star Robert Pattinson is playing The Batman in the 2021 epic and Dafoe had portrayed the Green Goblin in 2007’s Spider-Man 3 and Vulko in 2018’s Aquaman - the thespian shut the brash Brit down.