“Juan Rulfo (1917–1986), rightly revered in Mexico and outside, is regarded as one of the most influential Latin American writers of all time. … One reason for the surprising neglect of Rulfo today may be that his reputation rested on a slender harvest of work, essentially on two books that appeared in the 1950s.” Ariel Dorfman pays tribute to Rulfo – and explains why his work hasn’t fared as well in the English-speaking world as it might have.
Month: February 2018
What Directors Do About That Damned Dagger In ‘Macbeth’
“Few visual moments are as strange as the scene at the beginning of act two, in which Macbeth sees a dagger floating in the air, apparently leading him to Duncan’s bedchamber. This hallucination provokes one of Shakespeare’s most famous speeches: ‘Is this a dagger which I see before me?’ … For this strangest of plays, the paradox is fitting: its best-known prop is almost certainly invisible.” Andrew Dickson looks at the ways some of the great actors and directors have handled the scene.
Twenty Years Of Rotten Tomatoes And How It’s Changed Hollywood
Can Rotten Tomatoes really make or break a movie? It definitely has an impact, says Ethan Titelman, a senior vice-president at the Hollywood market research firm National Research Group (NRG). According to NRG’s annual survey, 50% of regular moviegoers frequently check the site, often immediately before buying their cinema tickets. And 82% are “more interested” in seeing a movie if it has a high Tomatometer score, while two-thirds are deterred by a low score.
‘There Is No Better Actress Working In New York Right Now,’ Says Director Bartlett Sher – And You May Not Have Heard Of Her (Yet)
Reporter Alexis Soloski meets Lauren Ambrose, whom Sher cast (over many more famous performers) as Eliza Doolittle in the upcoming Broadway My Fair Lady – and who, quite deliberately, “has always skirted celebrity.”
Picasso At His Most Revolutionary And Most Repugnant: ‘Les Demoiselles d’Avignon’
Sure, most of us who know about the painting know why it’s revolutionary: it’s arguably the birth of Cubism. On the other hand, says Picasso scholar Miles J. Unger, “You can’t look at Les Demoiselles d’Avignon without suspecting that this is a man who had some issues with women.”
All The Lies Great Novelists Have Told In Their Autobiographies
“Long before the rise of ‘autofiction’, … many writers in the first half of the 20th century were experimenting with the limits of autobiography. Joseph Conrad, Ford Madox Ford, Henry James, Wyndham Lewis, Gertrude Stein, HG Wells, Edith Wharton, Virginia Woolf: all wrote memoirs as inventive, in different ways, as their novels (which were often themselves very autobiographical). And that list is only the tip of the iceberg.”
How The Crop Of New Academy Voters Is Changing The Oscars’ Dynamics
“What kind of effect are these new voters having on the films and artists that are ultimately chosen to contend for an Oscar? … Of the 14 new members we talked to, who span several of the Academy’s branches, more than half were women, and more than a third were people of color. All of them spoke anonymously and with great candor.”
Another Chicago Theater Company Director Accused Of Abusing And Coercing Actresses
Less than two years after revelations of abuse led to the closing of Profiles Theater Co. and the creation of the advocacy group Not in Our House, “six Chicago-based actresses report an extensive pattern of verbal and physical abuse by Jeremy Menekseoglu, artistic director of the Dream Theatre Company (DTC), a small non-Equity company which recently relocated to the Atlanta area from Chicago.”
Facebook’s Censoring Of Famous Art As ‘Pornographic’ Reaches New Low With 30,000-Year-Old Statue
An image of the Venus of Willendorf was posted on the page of “artivist” Laura Ghianda, and Facebook removed it – and then stuck to that decision through four appeals.
Harper Lee’s Will Is Unsealed, And Clarifies Very Little
“The will, signed on February 11, 2016, eight days before her death, directed that the bulk of her assets, including her literary properties, be transferred into a trust she formed in 2011. Trust documents are private.” (Indeed, the Times had to sue just to get the will unsealed.) The executor of the will is also the head of the trust and the late author’s final attorney: the controversial, mysterious, secretive Tonja P. Carter.