James Rhodes: Perhaps it is her wildly colorful style or the exaggerated use of glowing women and hidden cats or maybe it has something to do with the tranquility of her work that connects with the “common man” — certainly an artist of the people.
Movies and Memories of Our Racist Past
By
Charles Hayes: What 42 makes crystal clear is how shallow and superficial the strain of contempt is that enables and sustains racism as prejudice is handed down from one generation to the next.
Robinson Jeffers: America’s Neglected-At-Our-Peril Poet-Prophet
By
Gary Corseri: Jeffers gaze was not so much bitter as it was unflinching, steady, resolute and sui generis. “The cold passion for truth,” he wrote, “hunts in no pack.”
On Entertainment and Cordite’s Combined Long Grave Dug
By
Charles Orloski: Thankfully, no Chechen-American bombs crashed “The Office Party,” and for the most part, it seemed likely that throngs of druggies kept inner habits silent
Get Your Brecht On
By
Ed Rampell: Brecht on Brecht is precise in its stagecraft, adeptly acted, deftly directed and Gayle Bluemel does her musical forebears, Mssrs. Brecht and Weill, proud.
Play Ball, Jackie
By
Steve Hochstadt: I don’t know how my parents’ political views, our family’s history during the Holocaust, rooting for the Brooklyn Dodgers, and Jackie’s own nobility and fearless civil rights activism mixed together to make me hate racism.
Annual TCM Classic Film Festival Features Vintage Films and Stars Galore From Movies of Yore
By
Ed Rampell: Thousands of fans attended screenings of vintage films, discussions with and personal appearances by movie talents, dressed in period garb, partied like it was 1929 and witnessed an Academy Award winner’s footprints and handprints immortalized in cement at the fabled Chinese Theatre.
The Reluctant Fundamentalist Exposes American Hypocrisy
By
Michael Haas: Americans, deliberately kept unaware of their perceptions by the media, now have an opportunity to break through the brainwashing by immersing themselves in The Reluctant Fundamentalist.
Olivier Assayas Interview: Changing the World Through Cinema
By
Ed Rampell: Today, people don’t think of a revolution. They think of adapting society, of making the hope of more fairness, more justice, more social justice, more generosity, which are old things . But in the 1970s it would have been called “reformist,” which was an insult.
License To Philosophize, Sinatra-Style
By
Michael Sigman: We’ll never know the Chairman of the Board’s innermost insights about doing/being, if indeed he had any. What cannot be denied is that his choice of material covers a rich spectrum of emotional leaps and existential twists and turns.
Skeptic SINema Series: The Invention of Lying
By
For the next several months, Cafe Inquiry will be your host for major motion pictures with a secular, skeptical, or topical bent, followed by discussion.
Alvin Ailey Dance Theater: Ailey’s Comets Cometh
By
Ed Rampell: Ailey’s comets are soaring across the stage and illumining the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion through April 21 with three programs, all of them containing the iconic Revelations, created by Alvin Ailey himself in 1960.
The Real Story of Baseball’s Integration That You Won’t See in 42
By
Peter Dreier: The new film ignores the broad-based movement that helped make Jackie Robinson’s arrival in baseball possible, as well as the first black major-leaguer’s own activism.
Heart of Darkness: Yes! We Have No Bwanas
By
Ed Rampell: The Gang’s version of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness is psychologically and politically troubling; in other words, it is great, thought-provoking theatre, spearheaded by Finney’s bravura performance.
Unlikely Friends: When Victims and Perpetrators Meet
By
Diane Lefer: Punishment alone–though necessary and often satisfying–will not repair damage or help victims move forward with their lives. Restorative justice brings offenders and victims together to provide a chance for perpetrators to make amends and to promote social and individual healing.
The Lowdown on Accidental Racism
By
Bruce Reilly: The sensational buzz around country star Brad Paisley’s song “Accidental Racist” is perfect fodder for a Twitter blurb — but is this the extent of racial analysis we can muster in America?
Interracial Love in Alice Childress’s Wedding Band: A Love/Hate Story in Black and White
By
Walter Moss: The Wedding Band indicated that even for a loving couple, the racial divide was difficult to overcome. For the rest of us, despite all our progress since the 1960s, it still remains even more so.
Argo Apostasy
By
Gary Corseri: Movies like “Argo” have nothing to do with “freedom of speech” and everything to do with suppressing free speech and the truth for the sake of profits, promoting wars and hatred and slaughter.
Poets Talk: Socrates, Cirino, Hunter Thompson, Tina Fey, et. al.
By
Gary Corseri and Chuck Orloski: Where is there a Socrates in the mainstream media? They fired Phil Donahue at the beginning of the rape of Iraq. The best we get is some ironic wit from Colbert or Maher or Tina Fey.
Barry Goldberg: Fifty Years Of ‘Chicago Blues’
By
Michael Sigman: The story of American music is often the story of race — and particularly of white boys and girls learning about music from black men and women. The tale of Elvis Presley hanging out in Mississippi juke joints is something like a gospel story in the history of American culture.
A Bite of the Apple
By
Ed Rampell: This version of “The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs” is a really important, well-executed one-man show that exposes the abusive working conditions of masses of Chinese laborers toiling away for low pay in abysmal circumstances.
Clang! Clang! Clang! Go the Dueling Divas: Garland versus Callas.
By
Ed Rampell: Tony Award-winning “Master” takes theatergoers to the realm of “high art,” featuring the life and career of Maria Callas, one of opera’s top sopranos and stars.
Tomorrow the World
By
Ed Rampell: In this new play, Donald Freed extrapolates elements from MacBeth and its murderous lust for power, interchanging them with the 2000 presidential election’s Bush v. Gore debacle.
Lincoln: How Spielberg Got It Wrong
By
Anthony Samad: Spielberg not only changed history, he misrepresented it. I’m glad the academy didn’t reward him for it. Lincoln was a story that had to be told. But it needs to be told correctly.
Class Struggle and Cinderella
By
Ed Rampell: This L.A. Opera production of Gioachino Rossini’s Cinderella <(La Cenerentola) is nothing short of a sheer delight. It ranks amongst the most enchanting of all of the operas I’ve ever seen.
Not A Feather, But A Dot — Screening April 22nd
By
“Not a Feather, but a Dot” is a synthesis of the Indian history, perceptions and journey in the United States, told through a first
person narrative of the filmmaker.
Cavalia’s Odysseo: A Show Unlike Any Other
By
Ed Rampell: Cavalia’s Odysseo is a high tech horse-themed show unlike any other. Under the world’s largest White Big Top a breathtaking new 21st century art form synthesizes stallions, stunts, stilts, circus, cinema, sight and sound, created by a Cirque du Soleil co-founder.
A Top L.A. Theatre Fest Highlighting Multi-Culti Women Turns 20
By
Ed Rampell: Spring is here and so is the annual Los Angeles Women’s Theatre Festival, which kicked off its 20th anniversary Emerald celebration with a champagne reception, awards ceremony and performances on March 21 at LA Gay & Lesbian Center.
Judy, Judy, Judy!
By
Ed Rampell: As great as Bennett’s live numbers performed during the nightclub scenes are — and her singing and hoofing is worthy of Garland in all her glory — End of the Rainbow is a cautionary tale. Fame is no substitute for a rewarding personal life offstage and offscreen, with loving family, friends, lovers/spouses.
PCL offers monthly Open House Events on the 2nd Saturday at 2pm and 3rd Thursday at 6pm. Click here to learn more.
Did Shaquille O’Neal Just Box Out Mumia?
Dave Zirin: Why did Newark’s only movie theater, co-owned by Shaquille O’Neal, just pull a scheduled showing of a documentary about Mumia Abu-Jamal? No one is talking, but this is a story that stinks worse than the Jersey swamps.