Osburnt: Dispatches From a Life Seared by the Arts

  • Our Last Tango

    Our Last Tango

    The Wim Wenders produced OUR LAST TANGO, by German Kral, reconciles art with life and narrative cinema with documentary. The lives are those of María Nieves Rego and Juan Carlos Copes, probably the longest enduring couple in Argentine tango as a performing art. I am careful how I put that, because there are social dance…

  • Antigone

    Antigone

    ANTIGONE is the most sedate of the productions I have seen directed by Ivo van Hove, but it might be the most deeply thought-provoking. There is little to be gained from it without thought. It hasn’t the sadism of his Hedda Gabler, the pain of his Cries and Whispers, the angst of his Scenes from…

  • From the Earth to the Moon

    From the Earth to the Moon

    He was, when I was growing up, a boy in a normative Middle American family, essential reading, along with Conan Doyle, Tolkien, and a few others. But I have the sense, hoping that I am wrong, that Jules Verne is not, at least in this country, so much read anymore. Part of this is simply…

  • New Combinations

    New Combinations

    NEW COMBINATIONS is a program of three stylistically similar ballets, one just premiered, another that was new last fall, and a third dating from 2000. They work remarkably well in juxtaposition, with their emphasis on historical allusion and reconsideration, a marked sensitivity to the interaction of color and choreography, and a deep appropriateness for a…

  • Alondra de la Parra

    Alondra de la Parra

    I had no sense, before seeing her, of the impact Alondra de la Parra would make when she conducted the Philharmonic Orchestra of the Americas in a Dia de los muertos (Day of the Dead) concert at the Town Hall. There is an expression I heard once from a professional dancer – “making air” –…

  • Faust: A Love Story

    Faust: A Love Story

    In retrospect, it is not that surprising how easily the Faust story adapts as a Christmas play. It’s just that it had never occurred to me as it did to the Vesturport and Reykjavík City Theatres of Iceland whose FAUST: A LOVE STORY is playing – in English – this weekend at BAM. Poinsettias greet…

  • Ruby Sparks

    Ruby Sparks

    RUBY SPARKS is sensitive at every turn, and captures a sort of emotional truth about the nature of identity and even its link to existence itself. Ruby Sparks is a young woman with certain traits, qualities and a rough biography who is invented by an author struggling to equal the success of his bestselling first…

  • Take This Waltz

    Take This Waltz

    I was a little hesitant about going to this one, even though I like and respect both the actress Michelle Williams and Sarah Polley, the writer/director. That’s because TAKE THIS WALTZ seems on the surface to be another indie movie of an all too familiar type, an earnest little drama about twenty and thirty somethings…

  • Trishna

    Trishna

    Michael Winterbottom’s TRISHNA is sumptuous. It adapts Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles to a contemporary Indian setting and in the process retains the essential beauty of the tragedy while stripping from it the nostalgia and romanticism to which period filmmaking is prone. The past is everywhere in the images – the colonial edifices, the…

  • Savages

    Savages

    On the day I saw SAVAGES, I heard two critics on NPR call it one of the worst movies ever made and read a review in the New York Times that made it sound as if it were touched by poetry. Then I discovered on the app I use to check for show times that…