| 04 June 2010
Pianist Leonard Gilbert.
Music: Earlier this year, the Chopin Foundation of Miami held its quinquennial competition, which was won by the American pianist Claire Huangci. But that February event wasn’t the last in the foundation’s series of concerts, and this weekend, the young Canadian pianist Leonard Gilbert offers an all-Chopin program in performances in Fort Lauderdale and Coral Gables. Gilbert, who’s all of 19, plans two big works in B minor – the Scherzo No. 1 (Op. 20) and the Sonata No. 3 (Op. 58) – along with the Ballade No. 4 (in F minor, Op. 52), the Polonaise in A-flat (Op. 53), a nocturne (in D-flat, Op. 27, No. 2) and two etudes (Nos. 5 in E minor and 11 in A minor from the Op. 25 set). Free admission; at 7 p.m. Saturday at the Broward County Main Library in downtown Fort Lauderdale and 3 p.m. Sunday at the Granada Presbyterian Church in Coral Gables. For more information, call 305-868-0624 or visit www.chopin.org.
Antonin Dvořák (1841-1904).
On Sunday, pianist Fedora Horowitz is featured in two major Romantic piano quintets at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Delray Beach. Joined by violinists Dina Kostic and Tina Raimondi, violist Scott O’Donnell and cellist Christopher Glansdorp, Horowitz will play the Quintet in E-flat, Op. 44, by Schumann and the Quintet in A, Op. 81, of Antonin Dvořák. These are among the most beloved of works in this format, and these veteran musicians should be able to pull them off with style and passion. 4 p.m. Sunday, at St. Paul’s on Swinton Avenue just south of downtown. Tickets: $15-$18. For more information, call 278-6003 or visit www.stpaulsdelray.org.
And if that weren’t enough chamber music, on Tuesday, Palm Beach Atlantic University’s Stringendo summer music program offers the first in four weekly concerts of this genre. Musicians from the Cleveland and Atlanta orchestras will be on hand for two of the later concerts, and Tuesday night the series gets under way with guests from the Naples Philharmonic. On the program are the Violin Sonata in B minor (BWV 1014) of J.S. Bach, played by David Mastrangelo, and the Brahms Violin Sonata No. 3 (in D minor, Op. 108), played by Glenn Basham; pianist Liera Antropova accompanies both men. The concert closes with the String Quartet No. 4 ( in E minor, Op. 44, No. 2) of Felix Mendelssohn, in which Mastrangelo and Basham are joined by violist Renata Guitart and cellist Claudio Jaffé. 7 p.m. Tuesday in the Persson Recital Hall on the PBAU campus in West Palm Beach. Tickets: $15. Call 803-2970 or visit www.pba.edu. – G. Stepanich
Samuel L. Jackson and Naomi Watts in Mother and Child.
Film: Human-scale dramas without special effects or car chases have become increasingly rare at any time, let alone in the blockbuster-fueled summertime. But writer-director Rodrigo Garcia (the son of Nobel laureate Gabriel Garcia Marquez) bucks that trend impressively with Mother and Child, a well-crafted tale of three women, each of whom is somehow connected to the emotional journey of adoption. Annette Bening is a relationship-phobic physical therapist who gave up her baby when she was 14, Naomi Watts is a cool, controlling attorney, an adoptee who never knew her mother, and Kerry Washington is a young married woman who is desperate to adopt after failing to have a baby of her own. Yes, it will all get tied up a little too tidily, but until then it is a compelling, exquisitely acted film that deserves to be seen amid the crowded field of superheroes. Opening locally this weekend. – H. Erstein
Angie Radosh and Beth Dixon in Three Tall Women.
Theater: Continuing through June 13 is a textbook example of what Palm Beach Dramaworks does best, select a challenging play like Edward Albee’s semi-autobiographical Pulitzer Prize winner, Three Tall Women, cast it with strong performers of the caliber of Beth Dixon and Angie Radosh and apply the laser-sharp direction of a J. Barry Lewis. The result is a production of this enduring drama of aging, regret and assessing one’s life that shimmers with remarkable clarity, in contrast to the national tour of the play that came through the area a decade ago. For tickets, call (561) 514-4042. – H. Erstein
The Disintegration of the Persistence of Memory (1952-4), by Salvador Dalí.
After an incredibly busy season in the Palm Beaches, one of my favorite places to escape is just a four-hour drive west to Florida’s Gulf Coast and an old and artful town, St. Petersburg. We stay on the beach and make daily pilgrimages into the downtown area, visiting the art districts and museums, including The Dalí Museum, where a docent named Kay Chiesa gave us an extraordinary insight into the life and mind of genius Salvador Dalí.
It’s interesting to see how Dalí’s work evolved from a youthful fascination with impressionism to surrealism and onto Classical imagery, most of which had mysterious reticent images and recurring symbols. If you visit, make sure to catch a docent tour, as it will make your tour much more meaningful. Early next year, a new and grander Dalí Museum will open to display the entire collection of Reynolds and Eleanor Morse, who spent their lives collecting his work.
The Dalí Museum is located at 1000 Third Street South in St. Petersburg. Hours are Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday and Saturday: 10 a.m.-5:30 p.m.; Thursday: 10 a.m.–8 p.m.; and Sunday: noon–5:30 p.m. Admission is $17 for adults, $14.50 for seniors and $12 for students.
There is much more to share about the art scene on the West Coast, such as the Florida Craftsmen, the Museum of Fine Arts, and the Morean Arts Center, and I will be posting more about it soon. – K. Deits
| 01 June 2010
Wilbert Rideau was 19 when he impulsively decided to rob a bank in Lake Charles, La., so he could flee to a new life on the West Coast. The botched 1961 robbery ended with Rideau taking three hostages. In the ensuing chaos he fatally shot and stabbed a female bank teller.
Rideau was black and the victim was white, and a seething mob nearly lynched him. He was quickly convicted of murder and sentenced to death.
In the Place of Justice is Rideau’s meticulous account of his 44 years behind bars, during which he became a model prisoner and won national awards for his work as editor of a prison magazine.
Rideau describes the brutal reality of rape, gangs and violence inside Louisiana’s Angola penitentiary, regarded for years as the most violent prison in America. Between 1972 and 1975, some 67 inmates were fatally stabbed and another 350 suffered knife wounds.
The author documents the racism that pervaded Louisiana’s justice system. In the parish where he was convicted, every black person accused of killing a white person between 1889 and 1976 was sent to death row. Whites who murdered whites during the same period were sentenced to death less than 25 percent of the time. Rideau was convicted in three successive trials by all-white juries, but each conviction was overturned on appeal.
At a fourth trial in 2005 a mixed-race jury found Rideau guilty of manslaughter instead of premeditated murder, and because he had already served more than the 21-year maximum for manslaughter, he was set free.
When Rideau entered prison, he was an angry young man with little formal education, but he began to read books, which “helped me survive the maddening monotony and boredom of the cell.”
He started to write and founded a newsletter for black inmates. Angola’s warden invited Rideau to become editor of the Angolite, a bimonthly prison magazine.
Over the course of two decades, Rideau turned the magazine into a publication that won national honors for its investigative reports about prison conditions. He wrote a piece titled The Horror Show documenting how inmates were burned and perhaps tortured by a faulty electric chair used for executions at Angola. Another exposé documented the plight of inmates who were blind, paralyzed or otherwise severely disabled and yet were routinely denied pardons. The article led to the release of about 20 men.
He became a correspondent for National Public Radio and flew to Washington, D.C., to address a convention of newspaper editors.
Rideau won the trust of inmates and officials alike. He was given wide freedom inside and outside the penitentiary, and became the beneficiary of enlightened prison leadership, which allowed him to publish critical articles without censorship, a unique arrangement in an American prison.
And yet his repeated bids for freedom failed. Year after year successive governors rejected commutation, even as scores of other murderers were freed. Rideau believes it had more to do with politics than anything else. Governors feared the public’s ire if they released a convict involved in a high-profile, black-on-white crime in a community with a virulent racist history.
Rideau comes across as truthful, remorseful, and straightforward. “I had been defined as criminal,” he writes, “but I knew I wasn’t an evil or monstrous person, despite my crime.”
In the Place of Justice is remarkably even-handed and generous. Rideau said he never could have accomplished what he did without the help of many guards and prison officials. Guards loaned him books, and officials granted him wide latitude to pursue stories without interference.
After his release, the author married Linda LaBranche, who had befriended him and fought for his release. Now in his late 60s, Rideau soaks up the little joys of daily life, such as being “mesmerized by the aerial artistry” of hummingbirds in his back yard.
“Having so long dwelled in a hellish place,” he writes, “I recognize paradise when I see it.”
Bill Williams is a freelance writer in West Hartford, Conn., and a former editorial writer for The Hartford Courant. He is a member of the National Book Critics Circle.
In the Place of Justice: A Story of Punishment and Deliverance, by Wilbert Rideau; Knopf; 366 pp.; $26.95
| 29 May 2010
Dennis Hopper in Easy Rider.
I was in college when I first came under the influence of Dennis Hopper, going with my roommate and fellow counterculture rebel wannabe to see a movie called Easy Rider, which Hopper wrote, directed and appeared in.
It was a call to all of us closet revolutionaries to leave our humdrum lives behind and hit the open road, preferably on a souped-up motorcycle. It was an infectious fantasy and a stirring film that I would be afraid to see again today, for it could never be as good as my memory has made it.
Hopper died today of prostate cancer at age 74, leaving behind a handful of first-rate films (Blue Velvet, Hoosiers, Apocalypse Now, Elegy), a few that would be unwatchable without his performances (Waterworld, Super Mario Brothers) and more than 100 others that were variously undistinguished.
By his own admission, Hopper never fully lived up to the promise of Easy Rider. As he said to me when he came to the Palm Beach International Film Festival in 2006 with another of those mediocre releases, 10 & Wolf, “I’m not sure that there’s a meaningful body of work there, but certainly not the kind of body of work that I wanted to leave.” The irony, of course, is that the festival had lured Hopper to South Florida to accept a career achievement award.
Much of his career output was thwarted by years of drug and alcohol abuse that led to Hopper being committed to a psychiatric hospital, sense memories of which crept into some of his recent performances. Still, he told me with unusual honesty, “I feel that after ‘Easy Rider’ I never directed the great movie that I wanted to direct. I never really played the great role that I wanted to play. They didn’t happen, in my opinion.”
Ben Kingsley and Dennis Hopper in Elegy.
Not by 2006, perhaps, but two years later, he gave a performance in Elegy, the screen adaptation of Philip Roth’s short novel The Dying Animal that shows the virtuoso actor he could be. He played the best friend and fellow academic of Ben Kingsley, two lecherous old men who meet for morning coffee, a brilliantly underplayed role that certainly deserved an Oscar nomination at the very least. Chances are you have not seen Elegy, which was underappreciated and under-distributed, but is worth seeking out.
(Yes, I know the Academy Awards get it wrong too often to use that as a measure of an actor’s skill. It is worth noting that Hopper played the snarling villian in Speed, the movie that brought Sandra Bullock to prominence. Now she has an Oscar, and a real actor like Hopper does not. I’m just saying …)
From our 2006 interview, Hopper commented on some of his cinematic career high points:
* Easy Rider: “I wanted to leave a time capsule of what was happening at the time. I never thought about directing when I was in the theater, but I got into the movies and there was somebody telling me every line, to do it differently. I realized the director was really an important guy.”
* Blue Velvet: “That was one of my first roles coming back out of rehab and detox. I finally got sober and it was a terrific experience.”
* Apocalypse Now: “It was unbelievably arduous, but a great creative experience.”
* Waterworld: “One of the best vacations I’ve ever had. It didn’t do well in the United States because everyone shot themselves in the foot talking about ‘the most expensive movie ever made.’ ”
When we spoke, Hopper was a month away from turning 70, a milestone that he could not quite fathom. “It seems ridiculous,” he said. “I was the one who said I didn’t think I’d live to see 30.” He scoffed at the notion of retirement. “I don’t think acting or painting or taking photographs -- the kind of stuff I do -- that one day you just stop because you’re too old. You continue doing them as long as you can physically do them, and I’m feeling pretty good physically.”
Dennis Hopper (1936-2010).
| 28 May 2010
Lee Byung-Hun in The Good, the Bad, the Weird.
Film: Even art houses have to compete with the action movies that major studios churn out in the summertime, so that probably explains the arrival of The Good, the Bad, the Weird, a rock-’em, sock-’em Korean western from director Ji-woon Kim, a master of camerawork and production excess. Set in Japanese-occupied Manchuria in the 1930s, the movie concerns a treasure that is stolen and re-stolen and the subsequent chase for the booty. Ji-woon displays an affection for the old “spaghetti westerns” of Clint Eastwood’s early career, but ups the violence quotient as if he were also emulating Quentin Tarantino. On now at Mos’Art Theatre in Lake Park and Emerging Cinemas in Lake Worth. – H. Erstein
John Herrera and Dan Domingues in When the Sun Shone Brighter.
Theater: It’s not easy staying ahead of reality when you are writing a fictional tale of Florida politics. Christopher Demos-Brown’s When the Sun Shone Brighter, a yarn about an ambitious Miami-Dade mayor preparing to run for an open U.S. Senate seat, despite being a closeted gay man and a Cuban-American with a politically toxic past, seems ripped from the headlines, though it actually precedes its non-fiction parallels. In Florida Stage’s final production in Manalapan prior to its move to the Kravis Center, director Lou Tyrrell demonstrates with this world premiere why the company is moving as well towards national recognition. Continuing through June 20. Call (561) 585-3433 for reservations. – H. Erstein
Cellist Anna Litvinenko.
Music: Tonight in Coral Gables, fans of the cello have a chance to hear a recital by a very young area musician who has been getting national and international exposure for the past three or four years, including an appearance on the From the Top radio program. Anna Litvinenko is only 16, but she’s played such milestones of the repertoire as the Dvořák Cello Concerto with the Miami Symphony. Tonight, Litvinenko plays the Shostakovich Cello Sonata, a contemporary masterpiece, along with a suite by the Catalan cellist Gaspar Cassadó, the prelude from the Cello Concerto of Eduard Lalo, and the deathless Elegie of Gabriel Fauré. The Uruguayan-born pianist Ciro Fodere, piano professor at the New World School of the Arts, accompanies. Free admission; call 305-444-6176 for more information. – G. Stepanich
Imogen Heap.
The English songwriter and one-woman band Imogen Heap broke through to wider fame a few years ago when the chorus of her song Hide and Seek was used as the backdrop to a key scene in an episode of The O.C. Her most recent disc, Ellipse, released in 2009, was nominated for two Grammy Awards, and next week Heap will be in Miami Beach for a stop on the tour in support of that record. She’s one of the more able users of technology as part of her art, and doubtless she will have a long, multifaceted career ahead of her. Heap’s concert at the Fillmore’s Jackie Gleason Theater is set for 8 p.m. Wednesday. Tickets are $27.75 and are available through livenation.com. – G. Stepanich
| 26 May 2010
Stagecoach (Criterion)
Release date: May 25
Standard list price: $30.99
As the legend goes, John Ford’s Stagecoach established the Western as an A picture, reviving it from its creatively moribund inception as disposable, one-dimensional nickelodeon fare and elevating it to the lofty standards of Whitmanesque poetry and pre-Wellesian compositional virtuosity that all of our great Westerns, from Red River to Unforgiven, now possess.
With the hindsight of an endless canon of these great Westerns, each of them one Netflix click away, it’s difficult for most viewers today to imagine what Westerns were like before Stagecoach. Because we remember the classic Westerns through the films of the masters – Howard Hawks, Anthony Mann, William Wellman and Ford, with his Monument Valley landscapes – we tend to forget how forgettable most of their genre antecedents were, and how important Stagecoach was. It was Ford who first visualized the Western as the iconic bedrock of uncharted American civilization and first gave its characters psychological complexity. Oh, yeah: and he kinda discovered John Wayne as a leading man, too.
With Stagecoach hitting stores in an outstanding 2-disc Criterion release, it’s a great time to reacquaint yourself with this epochal picture. These days, we can see that its deceptively simple story about a handful of familiar-seeming characters aboard a potentially hazardous stagecoach ride through the American West was well ahead of its time. Stagecoach was one of the earliest examples of the road movie, and the premise of clashing archetypes confined to an enclosed space established the template for every reality show long before televisions were even in common use.
Furthermore, Stagecoach was subversive in that it was an action-centric genre with little action. The first gunplay sequence, the famous shootout scene that pitted the weary travelers against Geronimo’s Apaches, doesn’t come until 70 minutes into the 98-minute film. Almost the whole film is building character, not plot, and during that time Ford balances crudeness with beauty and surprisingly bawdy humor with enormously affecting empathy. And every shot is framed like a painting, with Ford’s marvelous deep-focus photography going on to inspire Orson Welles, who recruited Ford cinematographer Gregg Toland to film perhaps the most exquisitely filmed black-and-white movie ever made in Citizen Kane.
As always, Criterion’s supplements are a comprehensive feast, spanning the technical, historical and theoretical aspects of the film and its director. The most prized extra included here, for the first time on DVD, is Ford’s 1917 silent feature Bucking Broadway, an early culture-clash Western comedy. From the technical side, we get a nice tribute to Stagecoach’s legendary stuntman Yakima Canutt, and from the revealing historical side, Ford’s grandson Dan discusses his grandfather’s intertwining personal and professional relationships aboard his fabulous boat, which we see in priceless home-movie footage.
One of the most interesting, if occasionally eye-rolling, supplements, is Ford author and theorist Tag Gallagher’s video essay Dreaming of Jeanie, a creative remixing of Stagecoach clips with his own insertions, repetitions, superimpositions and semiotics-laced interpretations, which can be as pompous as they are illuminating. Some of his more pretentious, obsequious nuggets: “Has there ever been a bigger shot in movies before this one? Vast, like our aspirations in life.” “Every shot is a movie all by itself.” I love theory as much as the next cinephile, but the compositions, editing and spatial depth of Ford’s seemingly invisible directorial hand are so self-evidently brilliant that such deconstructionism is unnecessary and risks reading too much into things.
An essay like Gallagher’s is something Ford would no doubt scoff at. In my favorite of all the bonus features, we get to hear an hourlong 1968 interview with the man himself, conducted by British journalist Philip Jenkinson. Many of his questions, most of them commendable, are mocked by the prickly Ford, notorious for being a tough interview. Early on, Ford tells Jenkinson “I’m not interested in movies. It’s a way of making a living.” Like Howard Hawks, who, in a late-period interview for Turner Classic Movies, shrugged at the thought of Cahiers du Cinema critics like Andre Bazin and Francois Truffaut analyzing his movies as great art, it seems Ford never saw himself as anything but a craftsman. We’ve been arguing otherwise for decades, and we show no signs of slowing down.
Yesterday Girl (FACETS)
Release date: May 25
SLP: $26.99
FACETS’ long-awaited series of Alexander Kluge films begins this month with Kluge’s first feature, 1966’s Yesterday Girl. Kluge was one of the pioneering figures of the New German Cinema – Yesterday Girl predated the first features of arthouse heavyweights Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Wim Wenders – yet he is largely unknown in the West. FACETS is hoping to change that. The distributor is releasing 16 Kluge films, one a month beginning this week. Yesterday Girl reveals Kluge to be a visionary right from the start, his provocative style borrowing as much from the radical playfulness of Godard and early Truffaut as it does the associative montages of Eisenstein and the surrealistic shocks of Buñuel. Naturalistic in its presentation and fragmented in its storytelling, Yesterday Girl employs unexpected intertitles, silent-film collages, stop-motion animation and more, proudly treading on conformity as it follows Anita (played by the director’s sister, Alexandra), a petty thief and lost soul adrift in Germany’s postwar economic miracle. Anita is a cipher of a protagonist, but the film exudes life through her various encounters, which involve a dalliance with a politician, forays into philosophical thought and several inquiries into the morality of Germany’s judicial system. This is thinking-person’s cinema all the way, and I can’t wait for the future releases from this unsung titan.
Owl and the Sparrow (Image Entertainment)
Release date: May 25
SLP: $24.99
Tremulous handheld camerawork and naturalistic, on-location settings give an authentic air to this touching Vietnamese fairy tale about a wide-eyed, inquisitive girl laboring in her tyrannical uncle’s bamboo-blind factory after the death of her parents. That is, until she flees to the big city of Ho Chi Minh, selling roses to make a living until she decides to play cupid to two lonely city dwellers: A zookeeper whose fiancée abandoned him, and a sweet but promiscuous flight attendant having a passionless affair with a married man. The film’s heart is as big as its budget is small. It’s a lovely little romance about second changes, told in a minor key – it’s so charming that even the film’s overly sentimental, third-act Hollywood trappings can’t quell the honesty that runs through it.
Waiting for Armageddon (First Run Features)
Release date: May 18
SLP: $20.99
Tackling a subject of enormous breadth in a scant 74 minutes, this documentary directed by Kate Davis, Franco Sacchi and David Heilbroner examines the theories of rapture, tribulations and Armageddon that America’s 50 million evangelical conservatives ascribe to. The filmmakers interview religious leaders and extremist congregants who believe literally in metaphysical phenomena that much of the remaining population would consider nuts, and they do so without a shred of editorializing or condescension -- making Waiting for Armaggedon a more mature and compassionate work than Bill Maher’s unbearably smug Religulous. In addition, the film travels to the past – and, evangelicals would argue, future – Biblical battleground of Jerusalem, exploring the complex relationship between fundamentalists Christians and the holiest of Jewish holy lands. It’s all fascinating and revealing stuff, but it’s insufficiently comprehensive. For a movie with three credited directors, there simply aren’t enough sources to paint a complete picture of a movement.
