Merry Christmas!

by good ol' Giotto

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But There IS Joel Kinnaman...

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ALT: Joel Kinnaman as Tak Kovacs in a dark, strange world, wearing a blue coat and shirt; he's looking around in wonder. Oh god, I didn't know whether I could get past the first episode: I love dystopian futures, but this seemed hackneyed...  Altered Carbon has the feel of sometimes The Hunger Games , sometimes Harry Potter , often Repo! The Genetic Opera or Gotham City or Narcopolis .There's martial arts, comic booky treatments, digital effects and story content. Some of it is dumb, and the names for things in the future are lazy: The Array is the internet, a sleeve is a host, ONIs are basically smartphones, Poe is like TNG's Data, Meths are the 1%, and paying my chip-implanted fingers is technology that's already here. The "strong, independent woman cop" is the lamest character attempt/trope out there, and the actress is terrible. The producers seem to be trying to appease audiences on every front rather than trying to make a solid, consistent produ...
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Men and Their Work

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I never read reviews before I go to see or hear something. I want to form my own opinions, uninfluenced. So I'm surprised to see all the hoopla about a documentary and the less enthusiastic reviews about a story (that might as well be a documentary) which I saw this week. La loi du marché  or  The Measure of a Man  (Brizé, 2015) is a current tale of a middle-aged man sent for retraining as part of his employment search plan after being laid off. Vincent Lindon is again wonderful (as he was in Toutes Nos Envies or  All Our Desires , Lioret 2011), playing the frustrated and humiliated Thierry Taugourdeau with incredible yet affective restraint. This poignant character study and damning social commentary is top-notch film: nothing's Hollywoody-obvious and the viewer is left to decide the ending's result based on what they have judged Taugourdeau to be, when he is faced with a moral dilemma. The supporting cast is excellent, as are the untrained actors used to fill ...
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Interview with librettist/poet Jill Battson

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photo credit: Edie Steiner This week I interviewed Jill Battson, librettist for the new piece Dark Star Requiem , a world première from Tapestry New Opera & Luminato, the Toronto Festival of Arts & Creativity. It premières on June 11 & 12, 2010 at 8pm at The Royal Conservatory’s Koerner Hall. Tapestry describes it as ‘a dramatic oratorio on the history of HIV-AIDS in North America and Africa. In this marriage of content and form, poet Jill Battson and composer Andrew Staniland trace the twenty-five year history of AIDS from its origins to the present day. This evocative, poetic concert work interlaces such topics as ecology, myth, politics, and family. While this text includes fragments from the Latin Mass for the Dead, the overall perspective is humanistic rather than religious.’ Being a linguist, I looked forward to having a conversation with someone who loves the texture of language. We ended up discussing the production, the subject matter and opera in general. Ji...
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