Weekend Review: "Love"

“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 […]

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 […]

[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 […]