Jazz architect
All-star trombonist Curtis Fuller has built a super sonic reputation.
Ashes & diamonds
Activist folk-punk troubadour Billy Bragg’s labor of love helps reaffirm the bond between us all….
Spontaneous combustion
Jazz violinist Regina Carter brings the heat back home….
Marie Baei Des Anges
Whenever in Chicago, your scribe enjoys a visit to the Field Museum. There’s plenty to see, including a large selection of stuffed animals, beautiful but dead. Beautiful but dead. That’s the only way to describe this film by Manuel Pradal. If Jean-Jacques Beineix resurrected the French New Wave, Pradal has stuffed it and mounted it…
Why Do Fools Fall in Love
When Frankie Lymon sang “Why Do Fools Fall in Love” in 1955, it was the ideal convergence of singer and song. His soaring falsetto invests the tune (which he co-wrote) with a yearning that transforms it from a standard pop lament into a genuine, pleading inquiry. It wasn’t that original version, but a by-the-numbers cover…
54
What is it about Studio 54 that makes it the symbol of an era instead of just one more defunct celebrity-studded discotheque? Whatever that elusive quality is, it’s missing from writer-director Mark Christopher’s 54, which examines the hard, sparkling surface of the infamous Manhattan club (located at 254 West 54th Street) without ever locating its…
Rashomon
Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon (1950) was the film which brought its director his first international acclaim and, like all his best work, it succeeds on several levels: as an affecting morality play, as a visually poetic example of what cinema can be, and as a clever and rousing entertainment. Set in medieval Japan, its premise is…
