MOVIE REVIEW Harry’s ultimate sacrifice and the fans’ final farewell
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2 starts right where its predecessor ended and provides an epic finale for the eight-part movie adaptations to J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series. Harry (Daniel Radcliffe) and his friends Ron (Rupert Grint) and Hermione (Emma Watson) are seeking the deathly hallows, artifacts that will help them defeat the evil antagonist Lord Voldemort (Ralph Fiennes) by allowing them to destroy his horcruxes. The horcruxes are soul stones that grant Voldemort immortality as long as they are intact. At the end of the previous movie, Voldemort had managed to capture one of the three deathly hallows, the incredibly powerful “Elder Wand,” from Albus Dumbledore’s grave, before Harry and his friends could get it. The final Harry Potter movie flows seamlessly from is predecessor by opening with the same scene.
RESTAURANT REVIEW A piece of North Africa in New England
Tucked discreetly beside Creation “N” Hair and Cambridge Auto, its modest black and white sign blending in with the other businesses, Baraka Café doesn’t stand out to the casual observer. But behind the door plastered with Yelp! and Zagat recommendations lies an authentic North African experience, one I would never have heard about without the recommendation of a friend from pika.
MOVIE REVIEW A-meh-rica
When you’re writing a script, conventional movie wisdom tells us that you can’t go wrong with Nazi villains — everybody hates them. And if you make your protagonist Captain America, then you’re practically set … right?
MOVIE REVIEW Conversing with the stars
Midnight in Paris is Woody Allen’s most recent film. Like many of Allen’s past films, Midnight in Paris tends towards the more philosophical and the atmospheric. The film heavily references many influential figures in literature and draws a contrast between a modern-day man unhappy with his current life and the romantic atmosphere of Paris in the Roaring Twenties.
MOVIE REVIEW One small step for man, one giant leap for … wait, is that an alien ship?
Michael Bay’s newest installment of the Transformers movies, Transformers: Dark of the Moon, starts with a sequence explaining the “true” motivations behind NASA’s Apollo program: In 1961, scientists witness an alien spaceship crash on Earth’s moon. To explore the wrecked vessel, the Apollo program is initiated. President Kennedy makes his famous statement to bring a man on the moon within a decade, and when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin finally land on the moon in 1969 with Apollo 11, their true mission is to investigate that wrecked vessel on the dark side of the moon.
Music around town
Students staying on campus this summer should be happy that MIT is next to the lively city of Boston, Mass. and not Ithaca, N.Y. Here are some moderate-size, lower-cost venues that you should visit while you are still immune to p-sets.
GOING DIGITAL Maps of paint
Google Art Project was only unveiled in February, but already it has professional artists and amateur art lovers alike raving. It’s no wonder that people are impressed. A visit to the home page gives a crystal clear close-up of a famous painting. In the introduction video, painting after painting presents itself in proper Google Maps style as a voice tempts us to “discover hidden secrets, or get in close to see the most miniscule details, like the brushstrokes of van Gogh.”
ALBUM REVIEW Lost with a Valleyheart
By all rights, Los Angeles duo She Wants Revenge should trade in climaxes. The narratives of most of the songs on Valleyheart point dutifully at an acrobatic guitar solo or a cathartic spray of lovelorn bellowing that simply doesn’t arrive. The subwoofers are wired, but the bass never drops; the opener “Take The World” is five minutes spent absent-mindedly waiting for a gear change to kick. This furrow in their otherwise confident songwriting is baffling, but it makes the album sound like a series of promises breaking.
ARCHITECTURE@MIT MIT welcomes 21st century design
Archiprix International is an exhibition of the best graduation projects from top architecture design programs around the world. The biennial event was founded in 2001 in Rotterdam, Netherlands, as an attempt to create a global context for architecture education, and Archiprix now has 1527 participating universities. This year, MIT’s School of Architecture and Planning is hosting Archiprix International 2011, from the end of May to beginning of June.
MOVIE REVIEW The last eight minutes
Don’t let the title fool you into thinking that Source Code is a hacker movie, or even about anything remotely related to Course VI. “Source Code” refers to a fictional technology that lets people revisit the last eight minutes of a dead person’s life. In the wake of a bombing attack on a Chicago-bound train, the government sends Army Capt. Colter Stevens (Jake Gyllenhaal) into the Source Code again and again to learn the identity of the bomber. Through repeated visits, Stevens falls for his fellow passenger Christina Warren (Michelle Monaghan) and tries to find a way to save her, even after repeatedly being told by his commanding officers (Vera Farmiga and Jeffrey Wright) that it would be pointless. Source Code, they explain, is “not time travel, but time reassignment.” If that didn’t make sense, don’t worry, because it’s all quantum mechanics and “parabolic calculus.” Tricky stuff indeed.
BALLET REVIEW Pure movement, pure beauty
Tearing myself away from campus during the MIT150 open house to watch Bella Figura was a difficult feat. But as I watched the ballet, I knew it was a worthy sacrifice. I glued my eyes to the stage, completely blown away by the beauty of movement and the emotions that the dancers imparted to the audience.
BOOK REVIEW Giving back the funk?
Perhaps I can explain the draw of Tony Rauch’s new book, eyeballs growing all over me … again, rather quickly through one analogy: The Mysteries of Harris Burdick (1984, Chris Van Allsburg). Harris Burdick was a collection of illustrations by Van Allsburg, each accompanied by a title and a single line of text. The goal, according to elementary school teachers, was to make children think creatively and come up with stories incorporating the text and the picture. “Mr. Linden’s Library,” a picture of a sleeping girl and vines sprouting from the binding of an open book in front of her, sparked a sea of creative juices from excited fifth graders; eyeballs does the same thing for the more mature reader.
INTERVIEW Storyteller of the ordinary and the fantastical
At age 37, independent film director, actress, artist, writer, and musician Miranda July already has various forms of creative work under her belt, ranging from web-based experimental projects to novels and multimedia performance. July’s stories, inspired by magical realism and the avant-garde, often involves ordinary settings and situations examined in great depths. Her most eminent work, Me and You and Everyone We Know (2005), won several awards, including Caméra d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival and Special Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival. July visited Boston last week to present her latest movie, The Future, at The Independent Film Festival Boston (IFFBoston), which took place from April 27 to May 4 and had more than 100 film screenings in theaters across Cambridge and Boston. At a roundtable, The Tech had the opportunity to speak with July about independent films, the artistic process, and, yes, school.
MOVIE REVIEW Forget Jason Bourne — it’s time to meet Hanna!
Hanna opens with some beautiful panoramas of the beautiful, snow-covered remote wilderness of Finland. In this silent, almost enchanted landscape, a girl — later introduced as Hanna (Saoirse Ronan) — hunts and eventually kills a stag, demonstrating some unusual skills for a 16-year-old. Soon it becomes clear that Hanna has mostly been living alone with her father Erik (Eric Bana). Erik, a former CIA agent, has been training his daughter her entire life to become an assassin. The two have been hiding from civilization since the day she was born, and Hanna’s only knowledge of the outside world comes from the languages and information that her father teaches her from books. This knowledge remains very abstract to the girl, though. In one scene Hanna asks her father about the sound of music — she knows the definition of “music” from an encyclopedia but has never heard any. Ronan lists this curiosity as one of her favorite aspects of her character: “We meet her as she goes out on her own, and when she does she is fascinated by everyone and everything she comes across. My favorite quality of hers is that she is non-judgmental; she shows an open mind to, and a fascination with, everything.”
THEATER REVIEW The prosecution of genius
The lights rise in the black box at the Central Square Theater. Alan Turing (Allyn Burrows) speaks nervously with the constable (Dafydd Rees). He is reporting a personal theft — committed, we’ll discover, by a lover many years his junior. The losses themselves are trivial — clothes, half a bottle of sherry — but are reported out of principle. It is principle, and idiosyncrasy, that defines Turing. He is a man unable to be untrue about his ideals — whether they pertain to science, mathematics, or love.
EXHIBIT REVIEW And then there was glass
Dale Chihuly has been working with glass for over 40 years, and his newest collection of glass sculptures is now on display at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts. Chihuly: Through the Looking Glass is not your typical art exhibition, it’s a celebration of installation art and fragility at its very finest. Of course, before we give Chihuly all the credit, you should know that he does not work alone. A dislocated shoulder from a 1979 bodysurfing accident left him unable to hold a glassblowing pipe; since then, he has relied on a team of glassblowers to carry out his artistic plans. Chihuly classifies his role as “more choreographer than dancer, more supervisor than participant, more director than actor.” The result of these artistic collaborations is an oeuvre focused just as much on presentation as craftsmanship.
ALBUM REVIEW Arresting, thoughtful, accessible
I am sitting on an American Airlines flight when they have just served the same vile plastic egg-y mess they have always dished up for so-called breakfast. Untouchable — I simply fail to understand why they persist in throwing such muck at their passengers. The 777 is surprisingly noisy, at least where I am sitting. But I have a pair of noise-canceling headphones, and I have The Great Deep — a new album from Duo LiveOak — within reach.
CONCERT REVIEW Mellow, folksy, hypnotic
The Low Anthem. Iron and Wine. This was quite the contrast to the other concerts I attended over this long weekend. Think Random Hall versus Baker — that’s how radically different Iron and Wine is from both the metal/hardcore festival I attended on Saturday and the electro-reggae Major Lazer concert I attended on Sunday at Wellesley. Tuesday night was a prelude to getting focused again, musically pre-gaming for the days ahead, prepping for the return from the four-day weekend. The concert whispered to me, telling me that this was the final moment of relaxation before I had to head back to the slave camp that had already consumed some of my friends for the whole long weekend.
THEATER REVIEW A-M-A-Z-I-N-G
The MIT Musical Theater Guild is performing The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee as their spring show, and this production is nothing short of phenomenal. Wisecracks about the unwieldy name aside, the Guild has put their best foot forward with Spelling Bee, and the result is a must-see.