Director Peter Brook has stripped away a lot for his new production. But it took him a long time to do it. “I tell young people: ‘At the age of 80, I have discarded many, many things to find that my taste is for simplicity. Don’t take that as a formula when you’re at an age when you should be plunging into every sort of experience, as I was doing.’ “
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A Cannes Full Of Favorites
“There are no obvious hot-button films in this year’s lineup, which stacks up as a classic Cannes selection packed with critical favorites and sprinkled with both potential comeback kids like Atom Egoyan, and hot directors, including, notably, Mexico’s Carlos Reygadas and Italy’s Marco Tullio Giordana.
A New Time Demands A New Kind Of Plays
Last week critic Michael Billington compained that the new generation of 90-minute plays was creatively challenged. Ian Rickson begs to disagree: “New cultural and political eras demand new forms. There is a scepticism towards big ideas among the young – but that does not mean they are not engaged with or disturbed by contemporary society. We live in a time when there is a disappointment with unifying ideology and a greater consciousness of contradiction. The old forms in which the writer diagnoses and hypothesises no longer speak to today’s playwrights. In dramatising a more complex, atomised culture, playwrights may seek vivid, suggestive fragments as a better form.”
Congress Protects Those Who Alter Movies
The US Congress has passed a bill that would allow companies to strip out scenes from movies they find objectionable. “The Family Entertainment and Copyright Act would assure manufacturers of DVD players and other devices using such technology they would not be violating copyrights of the Hollywood producers of movies. The House passed it Tuesday on a voice vote. The Senate passed it in February.”
TV Turnoff Week
It’s time to turn off the TV. “That’s the idea behind TV-Turnoff Week, which for the 11th year is inviting everyone to “Turn off TV, turn on life.” From Monday (April 25) through May 1, you can join as many as eight million other viewers in pulling the plug on TV, the Internet and video games.”
The Great Wall From Space (After All)
“China’s schoolchildren have long been taught that the ancient fortification is one of the only man-made structures that can be picked out from orbit. However, last year, China’s first man in space disappointed the nation when he said he had failed to spot it.” Now a new photograph from space confirms the Wall is visible.
Israeli Report: Holocaust Cost To Jewish People Was $230 Billion
“An unprecedented report published yesterday by the Israeli government estimates the material damage caused to the Jewish people during the Holocaust at $230 billion to $320 billion. This estimate does not include reparations for the suffering of survivors, or for the murder of 6 million Jews. The report’s authors call on the government to remove obstacles to the process of restoring Jewish property, not only in Europe but in the U.S. and Israel as well.”
World Trade Center Dream Dies
Any hope for a good project to rise on the site of the World Trade Center is now dead, writes Ada Louise Huxtable. “The death of the dream has come slowly, in bits and pieces, not as a sudden cataclysmic event. It has not been a casualty of the more obvious debate over whether the replacement of the lost 10 million square feet of commercial space demanded by the developer is an economic necessity or the defilement of the land where so many died. This has been a subtler, more insidious sabotage, through the progressive downgrading and evisceration of the cultural components of Daniel Libeskind’s competition-winning design.”
Moscow Treasure Reopens After Fire
A major architectural treasure has reopened a year after a damaging fire. “Built in just six months in 1817 under the orders of Czar Alexander I for the fifth anniversary of Russia’s victory over Napoleon, Manege was considered architecturally unique from the start. Its recognizable neo-classical yellow facades and majestic white pillars were designed by the Russian architect Ossip Bovet, while its 150-foot-wide interior and triangular wooden roof were created by the French engineer Augustin Bétancourt. This hall could hold a regiment of 2,000 in addition to visitors and audiences. It was said to be the largest uncolumned interior space in the world.”
A Da Vinci Code Parody (On Publishing)
“The Da Vinci Code is obviously not a normal novel. It is enormously long and very badly written (“Everyone in the reception area gaped in wonderment at the half-naked albino offering forth a bleeding clergyman”). It is simultaneously bombastic and bafflingly banal, full of uncontrolled, wrong-headed prose, tin-eared dialogue and crazy errors of fact. The characters are drips. And yet I stayed up half the night reading it. So what is the secret?”