By Bob Hicks
At OregonLive, Marty Hughley has just posted a terrific interview with Stepan Simek about Vaclav Havel, the philosopher-playwright who became the unlikely leader of the Czech revolution and his nation’s first post-Soviet president. Havel died on Sunday at age 75.
Simek, a native of Prague and chairman of the theater department at Lewis & [...]
Kino Lorber, Inc.
By Bob Hicks
If you’re going to fall into a painting, choose carefully. Piet Mondrian’s Broadway Boogie Woogie might be exciting, but after a while you’d start to feel like a mouse in a maze. Edvard Munch’s The Scream? You don’t want to go there. One of Henri Rousseau’s Edenic wild beasty scenes would [...]
By Bob Hicks
That quotation comes from Claudia Dreifus’s interview in this morning’s New York Times with Ellen Bialystok, a cognitive neuroscientist who’s spent almost 40 years studying the ways that speaking two languages keeps your mind sharp, even possibly delaying the onset of Alzheimer’s symptoms. (Does that mean that Europeans and Quebecois are smarter longer [...]
By Bob Hicks
Must everything we see and do be an “event”?
Mr. Scatter noticed this pernicious form of marketing and advertising breathlessness beginning as a trickle a couple of years ago, and it’s become an all-taps-open flood. The most ubiquitous torrent is the “major motion picture event” — which means “movie that cost a lot to [...]
By Bob Hicks
Maryhill Museum of Art officially breaks ground at 3:30 p.m. next Friday, Feb. 18, on its $10 million expansion project, which will give the Columbia Gorge landmark some much-needed elbow room. Between an expansive plaza and expanded indoor spaces, the project will add 25,500 square feet. The museum will be open during construction: [...]
When Hollywood decides to depict a specific trade, dramatic license usually trumps veracity. Think all those cop movies truly depict an average day in the life and thinking of a policeman? How about the hilarious world of newspaper hacks in the likes of The Front Page? Black Swan, the new horror film with a ballet [...]
By Bob Hicks
One of the lasting impressions of Ragtime, director Milos Forman’s 1981 version of the E.L. Doctorow novel, is of the ravishing freshness and physical innocence of the young actress Elizabeth McGovern, playing Evelyn Nesbit. Her beauty was dreamlike, the beauty of a creature only just discovering self-awareness.
Beauty fades, of course, or rather, it [...]
By Bob Hicks
HARD NUT: It’s been a lot of years since I’ve seen The Hard Nut, Mark Morris’s pared-down version of The Nutcracker, but I’ve always more than liked it. It’s lean yet lush, beautifully framed, and intensely musical.
You still occasionally hear people refer to it as Morris’s winking bad-boy spoof of the ubiquitous holiday [...]
By Bob Hicks
Mr. Scatter had so much fun doing his cameo for Charles Deemer’s new micro-movie The Farewell Wake that by the time he actually saw the movie he was surprised by how complex the whole thing was.
He shouldn’t have been, of course. After all, Deemer knows this stuff. He teaches screenwriting at Portland State [...]
By Laura Grimes
Dear Mr. Scatter,
Everything’s fine. Really. No need to hurry home.
Both Large Smelly Boys are making noises about wanting to be an only child, but I’m sure it’s nothing.
The Large LSB has a Judy Garland film on the telly. The Small LSB does not want the Judy Garland film on the telly.
The giant moth [...]