“Love” Cirque du Soleil OPEN RUN Unlike VH1, Cirque du Soleil is never about the music. The performance group that somehow turned the clown-and-acrobat circus into an art succeeds because of the stunts onstage, not the musical backdrop that paces the performance. In Cirque shows, music acts as a metronome, an instrument of timing, and […]
Author Archives: Jake Tracer
Examining the end, only to realize it's a beginning
By my count, I’ve written anywhere from 60 to 63 columns for the Daily Bruin in the last four years. In every one of those, I’ve known the ending before writing the first word. That isn’t to suggest that I’m a master of column plotting, playing out every possible move in my head before committing […]
Living among stars, the big screen loses appeal
Without question or debate, Los Angeles has the best movie theaters of any city in the world. I’m not even considering the countless home theaters of incredibly rich people in the entertainment industry, which typically combine the quality of theatrical image and sound with the luxury of getting to watch the product while sprawled out […]
Modern classics
As a professor of Roman culture in the classics department, Robert Gurval naturally cares about dates. But as far as his research interests are concerned, “B.C.” may as well stand for anything prior to 1963, or, in other words, “Before “˜Cleopatra.’” Gurval’s work, which is focused on the political problems of the early Roman empire […]
Not all summer movies are a bust
Though the month of May hasn’t quite ended and the majority of Hollywood’s blockbusters still exist in the realm of anticipation, I’m getting worried. For any industry analyst, this is a problem. The Hollywood blockbuster as a genre almost exclusively relies on anticipation as a publicity tool; once you buy a ticket, the film’s job […]
[Screen scene] "The Da Vinci Code" ““ Ron Howard
During the opening credits of Ron Howard’s by-the-book adaptation of “The Da Vinci Code,” words appear on the screen in a very simple manner. Instead of materializing the cryptic subject matter of Dan Brown’s thriller into an opening sequence that has words and numbers flashing everywhere to eventually reveal their hidden meanings, Howard simply offers […]
Howard film has winning formula
I try not to make predictions, as they’re inevitably wrong. The last three predictions I made were that “The Aviator” would beat “Million Dollar Baby” for Best Picture, that John Kerry would beat George W. Bush for the presidency, and that UCLA would beat Florida for the national championship. It seems the only predictions I […]