“Last year’s top five had one film, the fourth Twilight, with a US setting; two, if you count the last Transformers, which really belongs to the multimillion-dollar globetrotters that rule the roost now. The new orthodoxy is: if a film is set in America, with strong American themes, the less chance it stands in the new globalised mainstream.”
Author: Matthew Westphal
Foreign Countries Ban American Movies For The Darnedest Reasons
Sure, it makes sense that India would forbid The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo – all that rape and violence. But Burma/Myanmar banned The Simpsons Movie over pigment, the French government cut the entire second half of an African art documentary, Ireland banned the Marx Brothers’ Monkey Business for anarchy, and China blocks all films depicting time travel.
Metropolitan Museum To Revamp Its Fifth Avenue Plaza
“Now an ambitious plan” – by the design firm OLIN – “is in the works to transform this four-block-long stretch along Fifth Avenue, from 80th to 84th Street, into a more efficient, pleasing and environmentally friendly space, with new fountains, tree-shaded allées, seating areas, museum-run kiosks and softer, energy-efficient nighttime lighting.”
London Plan For Free Dance Training For Boys In Regular Academic Programs
“The Class would be a school for boys aged 11 to 16, located in London … [where] every pupil will take daily ballet classes as well as trying other dance classes across the week and studying an English Baccalaureate-style curriculum.”
Ambitious Plans For A For-Profit Cultural Center In Harlem
My Image Studios, in the ground floor retail space of a new condominium building on West 116th Street in Manhattan, will combine a restaurant “with three theaters for live entertainment and independent films, as well as post-production studios, all to create a $21 million ‘living room’ of black and Latino-flavored arts and culture.”
SF Opera’s Nicola Luisotti Named Music Director At Naples’s San Carlo
“San Francisco Opera Music Director Nicola Luisotti has been appointed music director of Teatro di San Carlo of Naples, Italy, effective immediately. … Founded in 1737, San Carlo is the oldest continuously active theater in Europe, and one of Italy’s most prestigious opera houses, famous for its beauty and acoustics.”
Antoni Tapies, 88, Painter And Sculptor
“[He] came to prominence in the late 1940s with richly symbolic paintings strongly influenced by Surrealist painters like Miró and Klee, a style he abandoned by the mid-1950s as he turned to what became his signature work: the heavily built-up surfaces that were often scratched, pitted and gouged and incised with letters, numbers and signs.”
Ai Weiwei And Herzog & de Meuron To Create 2012 Serpentine Pavilion
“Four years after designing the spectacular Bird’s Nest Olympic stadium in Beijing, the Swiss architects Herzog & de Meuron and the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei are to reunite … to design this year’s pavilion – the 12th commission in what has become a major annual event on the architecture calendar.”
Paula Vogel Is Sergeant At Playwriting Boot Camp
“[Write] a scene that would be impossible to stage. That was the first gauntlet Paula Vogel threw down to the 30 participants in her latest roving ‘boot camp’ on playwriting.”
French Booksellers Come Up With A New Kind Of Strike
“In Nicolas Sarkozy’s second crisis-budget plan, which raised taxes to try to plug the deficit, he raised VAT on books from 5.5% to 7%. … Booksellers’ unions are up in arms against the measure, which comes into force in April … Some booksellers have hinted at a possible ‘labelling strike’ where they simply refuse to stick on new price tags.”