Archive for June, 2011
Taking “Bad Teacher” to School
by Marcia Alesan Dawkins, Ph.D.
Let’s be honest. Teachers don’t get into the profession for the money. Nowadays they don’t get into the profession for respect either. So why do they do it? Or, as it was put to Elizabeth Halsey (Cameron Diaz) in “Bad Teacher”: “What has to go so horribly wrong in life that you end up educating middle school children?”
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Toilet-Scrubbing Boomers?
by Diane Ragsdale | Jumper
In last week’s post, I asked whether the nonprofit art sector in the US constitutes ‘good work’ from the perspective of the artists and staffers working therein. The paragraph on ‘scrubbing toilets’ sparked quite a bit of attention and stimulated several comments on succession planning. While succession planning (or the lack of it) in the More...
R.I.P., Peter Falk
The first movie I ever went to floor with as producer was Roommates, which we shot in Pittsburgh in 1994. It was a summer of two great Peters – our director, Peter Yates, and our star, Peter Falk. Falk was to play a 106-year-old man, based on screenwriter Max Apple’s grandfather, who had raised Max after his parents died, and whose life t More...
Cuban National Ballet’s ‘Don Quixote’
by Debra Levine | artsmeme
Our Cuban brothers and sisters cruised into the Los Angeles Music Center last night driving their charmingly ramshackle “Don Quixote,” a vehicle purring on high-octane Russian ballet technique that’s been passed through generations — similar to the classic cars parading Havana’s island coastline.
The ballet was choreographed in 198 More...
10 Things Screenwriters Do That Tick Me Off
by Adam Leipzig
At least ten times a day, 365 days a year, somebody asks me to read a script. And that’s now, when I’ve taken a year off from producing to write a book and start this blog! When I was running a company, I was asked 50 times a day, and I’d read two of them, so suffice it to say I’ve read a lot of scripts.
With this many pages turn More...
City of Life and Death
by Adam Leipzig
This purpose of a war film is not to entertain, but neither is it to exploit. All great war films are anti-war films, because they reveal the intrinsic value of human life in a way no other genre can. This is case with Lu Chuan’s City of Life and Death, which is one of the best war films ever made. It’s the kind of film people don’t flo More...
On Letting Her Have It
by Chloe Veltman
It's been an interesting couple of weeks for impassioned feedback on pieces I've written about various arts events in the Bay Area. The variety of approaches and fury-levels prompts me to create a short list of the most over-the-top ways in which artists and arts organizations have exerted their will in recent times:
1. Leave More...
Maybe it’s Excellent… But is it Good?
by Diane Ragsdale | Jumper
A few years back I heard Howard Gardner speak in a lecture series at MOMA in NYC called The True, the Beautiful and the Good, Reconsiderations in a Postmodern, Digital Era. I attended the lecture on ‘the Good’ in which Gardner described ‘good work’ (in the sense of one’s vocation/job) as work that is excellent, engaging, a More...
Candles in Babylon
by Denise Levertov
Through the midnight streets of Babylon between the steel towers of their arsenals, between the torture castles with no windows, we race by barefoot, holding tight our candles, trying to shield the shivering flames, crying “Sleepers Awake!” hoping the rhyme’s promise was true, that we may return from this place of terror ho More...
