The Festival of New Musics will culminate tonight in the Hopkins Center's Spaulding Auditorium with "A Celebration of Music at Dartmouth," a wide-ranging showcase of the student performers and composers who organized the four-concert festival.
Courtesy of aceshowbiz.com "The Blind Side" (2009) tells the story of a hopeless and homeless black teenager fighting desperately to overcome obstacles correlated with race, poverty and his mother's drug addiction and it starts with a Sandra Bullock voice-over about football. If that isn't indicative of the movie's flaws, I don't know what is. There's nothing particularly bad about "The Blind Side" except that it could have been so much better.
Courtesy of citylife.co.uk.com The speaker-busting dance montage that accompanies the opening credits of "Pirate Radio" (2009) is a rousing tribute to the joy and liberation that rock and roll music brought to a generation in the 1960s. That "Pirate Radio" can entertain an audience for a full two hours on the sheer force of that jubilance is a testament to the strength of the cast and the staying power of rock and roll. In this retooled version of the British film "The Boat That Rocked" (2009), a group of bohemian DJs pump round-the-clock rock music from the basement of a rusty tanker just off the northern shore of Great Britain in 1966.
If you had asked me for my opinion of Maurice Sendak's "Where The Wild Things Are" (1963) before I saw the film adaptation that led the box office last weekend, I would have told you it was among my top three favorite children's books. Now, however, I'm pretty sure I need to reread the story again.
A number of familiar obstacles stand between Mark Bellison (writer-director Ricky Gervais) and his beautiful date, Anna McDoogles, (Jennifer Garner) in the first scene of "The Invention of Lying" (2009). They include Mark's lack of financial assets, his soon-to-be lack of employment, his lack of any apparent talent that could remedy those situations and the obstacle that proves most difficult to overcome his chubby, snub-nosed exterior. It is, perhaps, in recognition of our own superficial tendencies that we are first introduced to Mark through a voice-over.