A lawyer representing the families of victims of Canada’s most notorious serial killers, Karla Homolka and Paul Bernardo, says that he may try to stop distribution of a new Hollywood film about the horrific killings by citing Canada’s child pornography laws. Homolka and Bernardo’s victims were underage, and were sexually abused and tortured before being killed, a terrifying ordeal which still haunts the entire country. Producers say that while the film is quite disturbing, it is not overly graphic, and attempts to show the crimes from Homolka’s perspective, rather than focusing visually on what was done to the victims.
Tag: 07.27.05
Harry Potter & The Language Barrier
The unusual level of security surrounding the release of the latest Harry Potter book has led to an unusual problem in the international marketplace: translators didn’t get to begin working on foreign versions of the text until mid-June, and at 672 pages, there’s a lot to work through. The Spanish language edition, for instance, won’t be on shelves until next spring. The first translations (German and Mandarin Chinese) are expected to be available this fall.
Living Well Is The Best Revenge
What do you do when your TV network’s critically acclaimed programs get snubbed year after year by the Hollywood insiders who pick Emmy nominees? Well, if you’re the WB, you keep your mouth shut, smile and wave at the more fortunate networks… and then schedule the broadcast premiere of Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers directly opposite the Emmy telecast.
The Accidental Blockbuster
“‘Toulouse-Lautrec and Montmartre,’ the new exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago, is showing signs of turning into an unexpected blockbuster. About 20,000 people saw the show in the eight days after it opened on July 16… Ticket sales leveled off in the second week, but by the end of the week, about 27,600 people had seen ‘Toulouse-Lautrec’… Box office is so boffo that Art Institute officials are entertaining the possibility that [the show] could substantially exceed its projected attendance of 250,000.”
Promotions In Beantown
Boston Ballet has promoted seven dancers for the upcoming season, but the personnel changes are nothing like the upheaval that occurred after artistic director Mikko Nissinen’s first season in the Hub. “When the upcoming season opens in October with ‘Cinderella,’ 37 of the 45 dancers on Boston Ballet’s roster will have been brought in by Nissinen.”
The Cows Are Partial To Morgan Spurlock
When you think of a film festival, you probably picture crowded city streets, with sleek, gritty, and urbane theatres screening cutting-edge films with unusual camera angles. What you probably don’t think of is a barn 40 miles south of Duluth, Minnesota. “The barn’s mow is permeated with the aura of old-time agriculture. It’s also, as the site of the 2005 Free Range Film Festival, outfitted with high-end sound and projection equipment, rows of chairs and old couches, and a 24-by-14-foot movie screen made from an old billboard… And they won’t just show two days of films about rural life. This year the festival received 70 submissions, from places as far-flung as Italy, Australia, and Grand Rapids.”
Elektra Too Pricey For Houston
The Houston Symphony, which has been struggling with deficits for several years, has cancelled plans for a concert version of Richard Strauss’s opera, Elektra, and replaced it with a program of operatic excerpts, which will be considerably cheaper to put on. The orchestra has also cancelled a planned new series of concerts designed to draw new audiences with theme concerts and onstage commentary.
Does NJ Arts Funding Favor Democrats?
In New Jersey, where political corruption is as ordinary as summer rain, the state arts board last week announced its annual dispensation of funds, and immediately, a question arose. Why exactly would such a large percentage of the overall funding be going to counties with a preference for Democratic legislators, while Republican counties were generally underfunded? Members of the arts board “lacked specifics as to why groups in one county got more than another, beyond that their applications may have been more noteworthy. They stressed politics plays no role and said evaluators are experts.” Some others in the state theorized that the Republican counties are less urban, and their arts groups less sophisticated at writing grant proposals.
Is Less Classical Music Really A Problem?
Rupert Christiansen has plowed through Blair Tindall’s supposedly scandalous new book, and is most intrigued with the author’s assessment of the state of the classical music industry. “A glut of young musicians were groomed to enter a profession that was both puffed up and weighed down with its own status and restrictive practices… [But] too much of the recent debate about classical music has focused on the decline in the quantity of performance or the size of audience, compared with the levels achieved in that brief post-war boom. Yet the quality of music-making should also be considered, and surely nobody who heard the Royal Opera’s Die Walküre or John Eliot Gardiner’s Nelson Mass at the Proms last week could come away worrying about a decline in standards.”
Reaching For The Sky (Terrorism Be Damned)
Following the 9/11 attacks, commentators and prognosticators swore up and down that this would mark the end of the global quest to have the tallest building dominating a city skyline. It hasn’t worked out that way. “Architecture buffs revel in the lore of such competition, recalling how the Chrysler Building beat out the Bank of Manhattan tower in 1929 with the last-minute hoisting of a secretly planned stainless steel top. In 1931, of course, the Chrysler was bested by the Empire State Building, which yielded the title to the World Trade Center four decades later… For all the talk about jitters deterring potential tenants of a future Freedom Tower, the 9/11 terrorist attack has done little or nothing to diminish a global appetite to touch the sky.”