Arts And Entertainment
The Theater: Zimmerman’s ‘Argonautika’ at Berkeley Rep
By Ken Bullock, Special to the Planet
Friday November 16, 2007
Awash with the spray of the yet-unconquered sea, the stage at Berkeley Rep (designed by Daniel Ostling) represents the wooden ships and wood palaces of preclassical times, as the cast does the heroes, demigods, goddesses, kings, witches and nymphs from legend that move through.
-more-
The Best of Italian Cinema in San Francisco
Friday November 16, 2007
The New Italian Film Festival, playing this week at the Embarcadero Center Cinema in San Francisco through Sunday, offers a rich course on the best new filmmakers in Italian film. After this weekend, most of these films will likely never be shown again with English subtitles or ever be released on DVD in the United States.
-more-
Moving Pictures: PFA Examines the Complexities of Chaplin
By Justin DeFreitas
Friday November 16, 2007
Our image of Charlie Chaplin is a simple one: a daft little man in baggy clothes, with bowler hat and wicker cane. He’s just a comedian—a silly clown.
-more-
Moving Pictures: Reilly: A Career-Defining Performance
By Justin DeFreitas
Friday November 16, 2007
“Wow.” The word permeates The Life of Reilly, a new film of a one-man show by the late actor Charles Nelson Reilly. And with each utterance of the word, we get the sense that it’s the only time when this consummate entertainer is not totally in control of his performance. The word just seems to seep out, almost reflexively, at quiet moments during the show. It is as though Reilly himself is still marveling at his own past, reliving his memories, experiencing the formative events of his life all over again, but with the wisdom and awe of an older man keenly aware that he was too young to fully appreciate the depth, the pain, the humor and the madness of his life as he was living it.
-more-
The Theater: Aurora Revisits Mae West Blockbuster
By Ken Bullock, Special to the Planet
Tuesday November 13, 2007
“What do I know about a heart? To me, a man’s an asset!” Mae West’s very intonation is proverbial—though just after the start of Sex, her 1926 Broadway blockbuster now revived at the Aurora, she intones, not too piously: “Don’t give me that church business again; you’ll get me goin’ back to the old homestead.”
-more-
