A Belgian drama has won the top prize at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. “L’Enfant is a gritty urban tale of a young couple living on the breadline in France, directed by brothers Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne… It was the second Palme d’Or for the Dardenne brothers, having previously been awarded the prize in 1999 for controversial drama Rosetta. US director Jim Jarmusch’s Broken Flowers, starring Bill Murray as an aging Don Juan searching for a son he did not know he had, won the Grand Prix award – the runner-up for best film.”
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Hoping For Some Beginner’s Luck
Cannes is famous for giving novice directors a chance to compete alongside the legends of the film world, and the rookies are always grateful for the shot. But could there be a more nervewracking position to find oneself in?
Attack Of The Clones
It didn’t take the DVD pirates long to get illegal copies of the year’s hottest movie onto the streets of New York, and it didn’t take the NYPD long to launch a crackdown. “Cops seized 1,000 pirated copies of Star Wars: Episode III – just 36 hours after its debut. The illegal DVDs, selling for less than half the price of a movie ticket, were stacked nearly to the ceiling of a Harlem storage facility, alongside 40,000 other illegal disks.”
Canucks Shut Out
Canada’s film community had high hopes going into Cannes, with critically acclaimed new films by David Cronenberg and Atom Egoyan leading the pack. But when the festival wrapped up this weekend, Canada went home empty-handed. So what went wrong?
Reassessing The Creative Class
Richard Florida became a superstar in the world of urban planning and the arts a few years back when he wrote The Rise of the Creative Class, which claimed that creative types, artists, and free thinkers, were the essential component of a successful and thriving metropolis. But several urban planning experts have since questioned the validity of Florida’s thesis, calling it overly simplistic and a naked appeal to the type of people who could (and did) make Florida and his theory famous. Still, there’s no question that creativity and arts do offer at least some benefit to cities, so the question now seems to be, “What are the benefits the creative sector can deliver for cities, and what are the pitfalls of catering to it?”
The Strange Success Of American Gothic
Grant Wood’s famous representation of American farm life is one of those works of art so pervasive that it’s become a pop icon. But what is it about the stoic visages of that famous Iowa farm couple that has so captivated a nation that is increasingly uninterested in such unglamorous items as farms or the Midwest? The answer is complicated, stemming as it does from the painting’s origins, when no one from jaded New York critics to the very Iowa farmers represented in the work could decide for sure whether the artist was making fun of his subjects, or venerating them.
The Eakins Issue
The debate is raging over the legacy of Philadelphia artist Thomas Eakins. “Was he a heroic figure, a paragon of artistic integrity whose paintings of oarsmen, swimmers, family members and the distinguished citizens of Philadelphia expressed America’s emerging power in the 19th century? Or was he, as the art historian Henry Adams depicts him in a new biography, a tormented soul, afraid of going insane like his mother, sexually ambivalent, a bully, an exhibitionist, a voyeur who was possibly guilty of bestiality and of incest with female relatives?” That’s a wide interpretive gap, and scholars throughout the art world are lining up to argue the case. But the truth is likely somewhere in between…
Moscow School To Graduate Americans
“Russia’s most famous drama school, the Moscow Art Theater School, will graduate its first class of Americans on Monday, including six alumni of the LaGuardia High School for the performing arts in Manhattan. The drama school is the training grounds for the Moscow Art Theater, where Konstantin Stanislavsky developed his famous method for actors and where most of Chekhov’s classic plays, including The Cherry Orchard, were first staged… In a kind of extreme form of Stanislavsky method acting – which is based on personal experience and immersion in emotional depths – the LaGuardia students came to Moscow as teenagers in 2001 with no Russian language skills and no ties to the country but a love of theater and a passionate Soviet émigré acting teacher who inspired their leap of faith.”
Matisse’s Second Wind
Henri Matisse probably should have died in his early seventies, when cancer ravaged his body and he prepared his family for his demise under a surgeon’s knife. “But when the surgery was successful, Matisse quickly bounced back, declaring that he had won ‘a second life’ and, at 71, led his art in remarkable new directions… The 13 fruitful years that he unexpectedly gained after his cancer operation are the focus of ‘Matisse: A Second Life,’ an invigorating new exhibition at the Musée de Luxembourg.”
Music, Money, & The Politics of the Podium
Atsushi Yamada is a staff conductor with New York City Opera, and will lead a performance of Madama Butterfly this weekend as part of the company’s tour of Japan. But is Yamada really the top-flight conductor that such an assignment would indicate, or could his ascent to the podium have something to do with the millions of dollars he’s raised for his employer?