Osburnt: Dispatches From a Life Seared by the Arts

  • Personal Shopper

    Personal Shopper

    PERSONAL SHOPPER is a great film by Olivier Assayas and Kristen Stewart is great in it. It follows upon Assayas’ Clouds of Sils Maria, also with Stewart, a great film too and parallel in structure. PERSONAL SHOPPER swaps out the fictional for the supernatural or implies, perhaps, that the two are one and the same.…

  • The Crucible

    The Crucible

    The director Ivo van Hove has turned his eye on THE CRUCIBLE, Arthur Miller’s treatment, in 1953, of the Salem witch trials as analogous to McCarthyism. Van Hove’s version begins, as did his A View from the Bridge, also by Miller, with a black scrim interposed between the audience and the playing area. No –…

  • Thérèse Raquin

    Thérèse Raquin

    The whites, greys and blacks of the Roundabout’s THÉRÈSE RAQUIN are so muted that, when a brown-hued backdrop appears, it is like a flash of color, and so, later on, is a sparse scattering of autumn leaves, dropped and faded. The interiors, when they appear, are dim and woody, the windows opening, at best, on…

  • Let the Right One In

    Let the Right One In

    Eli, the adolescent vampire of LET THE RIGHT ONE IN at St. Ann’s Warehouse, is scary strong, and Rebecca Benson, the adult who plays her, is scary good. There is a scene in the second act that is, within the universe of the play, an agon between life and death, living human and undead adversary.…

  • A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night

    A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night

    There were times during A GIRL WALKS HOME ALONE AT NIGHT when it felt as though I were watching a movie for the first time in my life. It has been a long time since I have gone to anything so viscerally pure and original. It is a classic oddity: a North American release set…

  • Poe X 2

    Poe X 2

    It was interesting, recently, to see two stage treatments of the works, and in one case the life, of Edgar Allan Poe. Interesting, that is, in the differences and similarities between them and in the fact of their synchronicity. Each was flawed, but memorable, both singly and, by fortuity, paired. Each set Poe’s poetry to…

  • Only Lovers Left Alive

    Only Lovers Left Alive

    I have never been so admiring of Jim Jarmusch as have his acolytes, but he seemed the perfect choice to direct a vampire movie and had the good taste to include a scene of Yasmine Hamdan singing in a café, so I was drawn without resistance to ONLY LOVERS LEFT ALIVE. There is a lot…

  • Nosferatu

    Nosferatu

    I was the one in the audience who liked the TR Warszara and Teatr Narodowy production of NOSFERATU that closed Saturday night at BAM. The show was in Polish, with English supertitles, and presented by an ensemble cast whose names (some of which have showed up in press reports) were not in the program. The…

  • Sleeping Beauty

    Sleeping Beauty

    Michael Bourne subtitles his dance to Tchaikovsky’s SLEEPING BEAUTY – “A Gothic Romance.” He turns the tale, first told by Perrault, then by brothers Grimm, later by Petipa as choreographer, and yet again by Disney, into a vampire love story set around the fin de siècle. This is not completely inappropriate. An overlap may be…

  • Stoker

    Stoker

    STOKER is creepy. The images are put together in such a way as to make it seem that the full picture is perpetually out of reach. There is always something out of frame, or out of order, or seen only in outline, or out of focus. The truth is out there, but how do we…