Farewell Pawnee!
This past Tuesday NBC aired the last two episodes of its acclaimed comedy, Parks and Recreation. For seven seasons, the mockumentary followed the service of the Parks and Recreation department of Pawnee, Indiana, a fictional town.
Drawing Apart
Reykjavík artist Katrín Sigurdardóttir’s exhibit on display at the MIT List Visual Arts Center, entitled Drawing Apart, is powerful and agitating, a true treat for MIT’s artistic community.
What We Do In The Shadows: Twilight meets The Real World (in a good way)
I don’t generally go out of my way to see comedy flicks, but having grown up through an age of reality television and teenage vampire romances, I couldn’t resist. You know a movie is going to be interesting when “hipster vampire” appears in the description. But fear not: “Each crew member wore a crucifix and was granted protection by the subjects of the film,” so no humans were harmed in the making of this documentary, well, except for each course of dinner guests.
Human Capital: The Price of Greed
Human Capital is an Italian drama with an air of mystery. The film revolves around two families of very different social statuses as their lives are thrown together and torn apart by a single tragic accident. While the film certainly has the thrill and suspense of a whodunit mystery, make no mistake: this film is a socio-economic commentary through and through.
Julianne Moore shines in Still Alice
In Still Alice, Julianne Moore plays Dr. Alice Howland, 50, a celebrated psycholinguistics professor at Columbia. During the middle of a lecture, she draws a blank on a word related to her research. She apologizes, smiles and after a long pause fills the sentence with the word “thingy”. Shortly after, as she is jogging around campus her vision becomes blurry and she becomes absolutely disoriented. She tries to find known places, but nothing looks familiar.
ARTS IN REVIEW:
As in previous years, Boston was a prominent center of eclectic and exciting cultural events in 2014. In addition to hosting internationally known musicians and performers, like St. Vincent, The Knife, and Lily Allen, it also allowed up-and-coming recording artists and singer-songwriters like Holly Herndon, MØ, and London Grammar to showcase their work to the city’s concert-goers. Boston Calling, a musical festival that has now become the city’s trademark event, brought many musicians in the spring and fall, bolstering Boston’s cultural importance. Boston Ballet provided fans of ballet with versatile productions, from Cinderella and Pricked to Jewels and Close to Chuck. Those who appreciate theater and performance arts had many opportunities to see famous actors and performers, like Mikhail Baryshnikov, in Boston’s theater centers. The city was also a hub for movie screenings — the most critically acclaimed movies of 2014, such as The Grand Budapest Hotel, Birdman, and Boyhood, attracted extra attention.
Who knew a ukulele orchestra even existed?
When an eight-person ukulele band from across the Atlantic comes to Boston, you stop everything you’re doing to see what in tarnation a band with more than one ukulele could possibly do. A lot, it turns out.
Death, dogs, and songs surround MTG’s upcoming production, Lucky Stiff
The MIT Musical Theatre Guild has had a busy IAP preparing for the opening night of their latest production, Lucky Stiff. In the words of director Jon Sue-Ho ’13, the production tells “the story of a pathetic British shoe salesman who in order to inherit six million dollars from his uncle must take his uncle’s corpse on a vacation to Monte Carlo.”
Science through dance
It’s generally frowned upon to do a somersault in a research presentation, but this was an exception. As the music started, the students leapt onto the stage and wordlessly described their topic in a series of graceful pirouettes, dipping and weaving around each other while seeming to be propelled by their arms. “Motion of Bacteria through Flagella,” the program said.
Bloated fan service and CGI in Peter Jackson’s final Hobbit film
The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies, has sucked up over $700 million in global box offices, if only because the film is director Peter Jackson’s final trip to Middle-earth. But the movie, despite its expectedly breathtaking cinematography, is a mediocre lobster roll — there’s not much meat and quite a lot of filler.
The best show of the year is here — and it’s not on TV
In recent years, video-on-demand services such as Netflix and Hulu have begun to offer original programming, with mixed results. One of these new shows is Amazon’s Transparent, the story of the Pfeffermans, a dysfunctional Jewish family from Los Angeles. Mort (Jeffrey Tambor), the patriarch, is a retired political science professor who decides to come out to his children as a transgender woman, Maura.
Interstellar
Once upon a time there was a shuttle humanity sent out in the space-time loom. Imagination and curiosity have always been the longitudinal threads that allow for the shuttle’s expedition. The crew was full of storytellers, including many grandmothers, Stanley Kubrick, and a 44-year-old screenwriter, film director Christopher Nolan.
Ambition and money make for a dangerous mix in new Bennett Miller film
Based on a true story, Foxcatcher tells the story of schizophrenic millionaire John E. du Pont (Steve Carell) and his involvement with Olympic Gold medalists David (Mark Ruffalo) and Mark Schulz (Channing Tatum). Du Pont, heir to the du Pont chemical company, invites Mark, who has been living under his older brother’s shadow, to train for the 1988 Olympics at his private horse breeding farm, Foxcatcher. Powered by family feuds, personal ambitions and strong performances, Foxcatcher is a thrilling recount of an American tragedy.
First look at Harvard Art Museums
After a six-year wait, the red brick college down the road finally opened its Harvard Art Museums, a merger of three museums encompassing a history of world art, uniting them under a single glass roof.
Elena Ruehr’s “Cassandra in the Temples”
Elena Ruehr, who has been a lecturer at MIT in the Department of Music and Theater Arts since 1992, is premiering three new works this fall. Two of those, “Eve” and “It’s About Time,” had their openings in Boston and San Francisco this month, while the third one, an opera titled “Cassandra in the Temples,” will have its opening night in Kresge Auditorium at MIT this Friday.
Infinite record: archive, memory, performance
On November 14 and 15, MIT will host Infinite Record: Archive, Memory, Performance, an international artistic research project led by Østfold University College/Norwegian Theatre Academy. The project is done in collaboration with York St. John University in U.K, Muthesius Kunsthochschule in Germany, and MIT, which was chosen to host the final installment of the series. This will be one of the most significant events for MIT’s arts community, as it will bring some of the most prominent international artists on campus and expose research in performance arts to the student population.
MFA after dark
Last week, the MFA hosted College Night: MFA After Dark, a chance for college students to visit the MFA after dark and take in the spooky sights before Halloween. Appropriately, the keynote exhibit of the night was Francisco Goya’s “Order and Disorder,” a collection of over 170 works from the Spanish artist famous for his boundless imagination and extreme variety.
Inside Othello
Since its premiere over 400 years ago, the timeless story of Othello has seen many interpretations. MIT’s Shakespeare Ensemble presents the title character as a female boxer, an exciting twist on the tale of intrigue and betrayal. The Tech interviewed director Susanna Noon and lead actress Samantha Harper ’16 to learn about their vision for the play and the challenges they faced behind the scenes.
