Beautiful Feet

Photo courtesy of Canstage This weekend presented me with a lot of cultural worldviews; this post and the following are a sample of the arts I enjoyed.   Kiss  caught me off guard; speaking to a friend after, it seemed that, unfortunately, half the audience thought this was a comedy and the political commentary was lost on them and somewhat ruined for us. Shout-outs to the cast.  WRITTEN BY  Guillermo Calderon DIRECTED BY  Ashlie Corcoran CAST Dalal Badr Liza Balkan Greg Gale Carlos González-Vío Naomi Wright Bahareh Yaraghi ASSOCIATE DIRECTOR/SOUND DESIGNER  Christopher Stanton SET DESIGNER  Jung-Hye Kim COSTUME DESIGNER  Jackie Chau LIGHTING DESIGNER  Rebecca Picherack PROJECTION DESIGNER  Alex Williams ARABIC TRANSLATION/LANGUAGE COACH S alma Al Atassi STAGE MANAGER  Natasha Bean-Smith APPRENTICE STAGE MANAGER  Lucy McPhee PRODUCER (THEATRE SMASH)  Stacey Norton ASSOCIATE PRODUCER  Cody McCallum PRODUC...

Whoa!! This Belgian show (2016), starring Joann Blanc, will knock your socks off.

I thought this was going to be a colder version of The Impossible (2012) and sadly had procrastinated in watching it, but the avalanche (clearly there is no need to raise a spoiler alert) is merely a prop to the action—or lack thereof. The pace is glacial and the mood is tense, and it's not coz you're waiting for another avalanche. This film is about relationship, and I mean that discretely from relationships, because that would have been to easy. Director Ruben Ostlund (2014) is picking at scabs and discomfiting the viewer, yet we're paralyzed with fascination at our own image. He also does very interesting things with music (not just the Vivaldi), and equally with silence, both aural and visual. The Force Majeure  here is definitely not made of snow.  Shout out to Ingrid Eng for the excellent subtitles.

I could have sworn I reviewed this but I can't find it here or on Beautiful Feet 1.0... Stumbled upon it and as soon as I saw and heard the E-S-A-R-I-N-T-U-L..., I remembered this wonderful film and watched it all again. Beautiful on so many levels. I appreciated it more this time, now that I knew more about director (2017) Julian Schnabel's work(s).  An absolutely heartbreaking and at the same time inspiring movie about the true mid-life trauma suffered by Jean Dominique Bauby, chief editor of Elle magazine in France in the 90s. Excellent performances by all, including Mathieu Amalric, Emmanuelle Seigner, Anne Consigny and (2013) Les Beaux Jours ' Patrick Chenais (who I know I reviewed but can't locate that post either. Grr.).  After the movie, I read some background of the events from his children's points of view, which was interesting but should not be investigated til after viewing. One amateur reviewer described it as "cerebral," which I gue...

Mark Alpert’s The Orion Plan took me back to a large astronomy poster I had as a girl; I’d get lost in looking at its details for hours. This Wine and Cheese Award -winner gets my grudging Ebertian thumbs-up: I whinge because the reading went by too quickly, so gripping was the storyline. Unlike The Six , which was a YA-oriented novel (see my review ), this is an adult sci-fi thriller. (Although really, either book is equally readable by any age group, thanks to the lack of gratuitous sex in Orion .) But like The Six , there is non-saccharine treatment of characters with flaws or University-of-Life knocks; Alpert comments unapologetically about the notion of punishment and the breakdown of Western correctional systems, and he illustrates compassionately the issues around homelessness, grief, addiction, the call to ministry, ecological disasters and colonialism. But he is not preachy. As Terry O’Reilly said in a recent radio show , “Story matters” and this novel centrifugal-...

It just worked out that four works I encountered recently — in a movie, a foreign film, a video and a novel — all dealt with various aspects of death. Surprisingly, none of it was depressing. Book cover design by Kelly Blair; image from www.goodreads.com Well, okay, some people find the apocalypse depressing, but I LOVE it. Especially when it's presented as well as in  The Road or Station Eleven. The Dog Stars  was recommended by a fellow editor when I put out a social-media call for apocalyptic-read recommendations. Peter Heller's first fiction book takes place in the next few decades after a pandemic has killed most of the population and left many of the survivors with The Blood Disease, an auto-immune system threat. The protagonist is tortured by an act in his past, let alone trying to survive a new agricultural production system, murderous gangs and loss. But despite his flaws, we cheer and cry with Hig all along. Best of all, the book manages to have a satisfying e...