Joel Schumacher and THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA was a match made in cinematic heaven. The key to successfully producing a screen version of THE PHANTOM is creating a visual feast that is on par with the extravagance of the score. Its a sweeping, soaring thing with crescendos that spill over the audience like so… Read More »
BRIDE AND PREJUDICE
When Jane Austen wrote Pride and Prejudice two hundred or so years ago, she was doing more than telling a story about lovers at cross purposes, she was also dissecting with her society with a deadly precision and wry humor. Gurinder Chadha has taken that classic story and updated it to the multicultural 21st century… Read More »
RENT
Perhaps the stage version of RENT won its Pulizter Prize for the way it dignified the people that society marginalizes out of existence, lumping together the junkies, the drag queens, and the rest who don’t fit into the pigeonholed roles that make the world at large comfortable, giving them a voice an identity beyond the… Read More »
IDLEWILD
IDELWILD starts with a bang, splashing across the screen with a raucous exuberance full of sass, attitude, and an irreverent visual sense that enhances the edginess to the life the protagonists have chosen. If it weren’t for a love story that plops itself in the middle of it, this would have been a classic. As… Read More »
DREAMGIRLS
If Jennifer Hudson never makes another movie, if she never sings another song, if she drops off the radar tomorrow, her place in cinematic history will nonetheless be cemented forever by her acting debut in DREAMGIRLS. It’s as though fate has conspired to keep the Broadway hit loosely based on the rise of Diana Ross… Read More »
COLMA — THE MUSICAL
malls and cemeteries, to the wistful production number staged among gravestones, but the experience, the limbo, if yoCOLMA: THE MUSICAL is a serious, sophisticated piece of filmmaking that takes three kids suffering post-graduation blues and makes their struggle to get on with their lives speak to everyone, not just 18-year-olds. The setting is Colma, the… Read More »