Welcome to the world of haute couture, where grown men argue passionately about whether an overpriced dress looks more beautiful with 20 strips of sequin-laden material or with 18. Valentino Clemente Ludovico Garavani, known to followers of fashion as just Valentino, opts for the lesser number, but becomes agitated when an associate prefers the greater. […]
Doug Bentin
Posted inMusic
Designer makes for a colorful subject in ‘Valentino: The Last Emperor’
Welcome to the world of haute couture, where grown men argue passionately about whether an overpriced dress looks more beautiful with 20 strips of sequin-laden material or with 18. Valentino Clemente Ludovico Garavani, known to followers of fashion as just Valentino, opts for the lesser number, but becomes agitated when an associate prefers the greater. […]
Posted inMusic
Oklahoma City Museum of Art screens ‘Goodbye Solo’
The Solo of “Goodbye Solo” is a cab driver (Souleymane Sy Savane) in Winston-Salem, N.C. Originally from Senegal, he has family back in the old country to which he sends as much of his paycheck as he can afford. In the grand tradition of cabbies, he’s a chatty guy who can talk about almost anything. […]
Posted inMusic
Oklahoma City Museum of Art screens ‘Goodbye Solo’
The Solo of “Goodbye Solo” is a cab driver (Souleymane Sy Savane) in Winston-Salem, N.C. Originally from Senegal, he has family back in the old country to which he sends as much of his paycheck as he can afford. In the grand tradition of cabbies, he’s a chatty guy who can talk about almost anything. […]
Posted inMusic
Film follows an Israeli hero who frees Hungarian Jews from Auschwitz
The title “Blessed Is the Match: The Life and Death of Hannah Senesh” is from a poem by Hannah Senesh. The match in question is one that lights a single candle and thereby brings a glimmer of light into the darkness. Within the context of this documentary, Hannah is the match. Hannah Senesh, originally Szenes […]
Posted inArts & Culture
The Haunting in Connecticut
How much of a movie that is “Based on a True Story” has to be, well, based on a true story? Is it enough that a ghost movie that is marketed as portraying actual events be creepy, or does it owe its audience at least some degree of veracity? If you think being occasionally scary […]
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Five now-senior chorus girls revisit past performances
“Been Rich All My Life,” a 2005 documentary by director Heather Lyn MacDonald, has five things going for it: The Silver Belles, five chorus girls now in their 80s and 90s who met during the heady days of the Harlem Renaissance in the 1930s. They came from New York and the Deep South, and despite […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Quarantine
2008 “Quarantine” is something most horror movies aren’t: scary. Swallow-your-gum scary. Cry-for-your-momma scary. The film is an adaptation of a Spanish horror film called “REC,” but I won’t hold even its remake status against it. It borrows ideas from a raft of recent spook shows, but for once I don’t care about that, either, because […]
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Notorious
If “Notorious” were the movie I wanted it to be instead of the movie it is, I’d like it a whole lot more than I do. I suppose you can say that about any film —? if “Wall-E” had only not been animated and had a masked serial killer in it and lots of gratuitous […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Slumdog Millionaire
When everything shakes out at the end of the month, “Slumdog Millionaire” will probably top my list of 2008’s best pictures. An old-fashioned coming-of-age story, the film is set mostly against the exotic squalor of modern day Mumbai, India. We follow two Muslim brothers, Jamal and Salim, from the day their mother is killed by […]