Leisure
Reviews and think pieces on music, movies, art, and theater.
Penn’s Into the Wild finds its niche
The premise sounds straight out of the Darwin Awards: boy graduates from college, gives all his money to charity and goes out to “find himself,” only to starve to death alone in the Alaskan wilderness.
Gimme that Darjeelin’ feelin’
Wes Anderson is a director who makes fanatics, not fans. Fanatics are precarious; each well-received film increases the potential backlash should the next one fail to exceed such standards. For the same reason, one cannot view a Wes Anderson film as an isolated work of art. Rather, it is in conversation with everything he has previously made.
Brotherly love, art and cereal
You’ve been counting down the hours until the upcoming three-day weekend, but you’re tired of the campus party routine. Why not treat yourself to a weekend in Philadelphia?
Eastern Promises bares heart, soul and Viggo
A man getting a haircut has his throat slit and a teenager hemorrhages as she gives birth. While the first five minutes of the film are intense, David Cronenberg’s Eastern Promises is to Russian mob movies what Wes Anderson’s Royal Tenenbaums is to the family comedy: the emphasis is on character development, not genre tropes.
Echoes from the Melting Pot reverberates
Next week, Georgetown’s Davis Performing Arts Center will host two interactive installations, an unprecedented event for the venue. From the British Council U.S. comes the Black Atlantic Project (BAP), an experimental musical collaboration that evolved from seven British and American musician poets who sampled and re-mixed each others works to create a trans-Atlantic hip-hop conversation.
