MOVIE REVIEW Smiley, Smiley, where’s your smile?
A clandestine meeting at an outdoor cafe in Budapest ends with panicked shooting. Some cobblestones away, a baby still strains to suck on his mother’s breast, even as the blood begins to trickle from the hole in her head.
CONCERT REVIEW Sad songs about girls and life
The Airborne Toxic Event (TATE) has seen the spotlight this past year. They performed on the The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, were selected for the soundtrack of summer romantic comedy hit Crazy Stupid Love, and even made a cameo appearance on the season finale of Gossip Girl — and a cameo on Gossip Girl can mark the beginning of an indie band’s journey to mainstream fame.
VIDEO GAME REVIEW Zelda fans, rejoice
Skyward Sword might just be the best Zelda game ever made.
A night at the Brit-rock sock hop
Reading too many I Saw You MIT posts making you feel angsty? If you feel like you’re still going through the same tensions of high school over and over again, you’ll probably fit right in with The Postelles and The Kooks, two bands whom, although grown-up now, are still rehashing the trials and tribulations of their young romances. They certainly don’t take those pains too heavily though, both bands pairing their cheekily tortured lyrics with upbeat rock and roll.
Well, I guess this is it
Let me start out by saying that the trailer for The Descendants essentially reveals the entire plot, so either don’t watch the trailer or don’t expect much at the theatre. The premise of The Descendants is refreshingly creative: a mother, Elizabeth (Patricia Hastie), who has fallen into a coma because of an accident leaves behind a husband, Matthew (George Clooney), who is in charge of a large amount of land; a daughter, Alex (Shailene Woodley), who knows about the mother’s affair with another man; and another daughter, Scottie (Amara Miller), who imitates every rebellious act of her older sister starting with very obscene language. Despite the original plotline, however, I ended up leaving the theater rather peeved.
INTERVIEW The art of the documentary
Anne Makepeace, from Lakeville, Connecticut, has been making films for almost 30 years. Her most recent film, We Still Live Here, had its broadcast premiere on the Independent Lens series of PBS and also screened at MIT on Nov. 17. The film is about a movement to revive the Native American language of Wampanoag. It centers on Jessie Little Doe Baird, who spearheaded the movement and whose daughter is the first native speaker in over a century.
EXHIBIT REVIEW Tradition and modernity
Seven students sit typing on their laptops outside the Teachers and Students Center at Dhaka University. As with their Western counterparts, too much of their time is spent in idle Facebook gossip. But the context of the picture, “Global Gossip,” by photographer Md. Huzzatul Mursalin, differs strikingly from Western expectations. The background setting is worn and depressing, conflicting with the display of modernity in the foreground. And, despite the dirt, the typists have taken their shoes off, Bangladesh-style.
MOVIE REVIEW Tensions brew on Earth
Melancholia opens with a series of breathtaking shots resembling four-dimensional-surrealist-painting scenes. The powerful prelude from the opera Tristan und Isolde directs the visual phenomena. Nothing comprehensible about the plot is given; we only know the movie is going to be intense.
MOVIE REVIEW Going the distance — or not?
Like Crazy is perhaps one of the most ill-fitting titles for a film. When I first heard of the movie, I cringed a little inside and vowed that I’d box that title away into a corner of my mind and hopefully never touch it again. The title, coupled with the two young leading actors and a been-there-done-that long-distance sob story, seemed to reek of adolescent angst. Dubiously eyeing Yelchin’s peach fuzz, I scoffed and thought to myself, What would this high school movie know about love?
CONCERT REVIEW New talent, stale rhymes
I’ve been meaning to see Wale for a long time. As an immensely talented, aspiring rapper from the D.C. area myself, it means a lot to see a native from the tri-county blow up the way that Wale has. Now, our average young, rapless MIT reader should understand: for such a big city, D.C. is quite a different beast than a place like New York or Los Angeles. Sure there’s still plenty of hood projects, drug corners, crime and poverty to talk about. But on a day-to-day basis, people worry more about the temperature of their Chinese food and lines at the DMV than getting a bullet in the head or their mild but burgeoning crack addictions. After all, D.C. is the nation’s capital, surrounded by modest but serene suburbia on all sides. The most I’ve ever feared for my life in my 12 years of residency was the summer I interned at the Naval Research Lab and had to take a metrobus through Anacostia — I did crossword puzzles.
DOCUMENTARY REVIEW Reviving a culture through language
The Wampanoag people of southeastern Massachusetts, who helped the Pilgrims survive 400 years ago, had no spoken language to call their own until about 20 years ago. Anne Makepeace’s newest documentary, We Still Live Here: Âs Nutayuneân, delves into the fascinating linguistic — and consequently, cultural — revival of a tribe.
BALLET REVIEW Elegance in anguish
The curtains rise and we see a young girl teasing her nurse, pushing her this way and that, pulling at her dress, running circles around her. The girl turns shy when her mother walks in, but then can barely contain her excitement when she is given a lovely new dress to wear to her first big party.
THEATRE REVIEW J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan takes on CGI
Since J.M. Barrie’s inaugural London stage production in 1905, countless iterations of Peter Pan have graced film and the stage. Each form has its charm; the intimacy of Wendy caring for the Lost Boys shines on the small stage, whereas the majesty of cavorting through the London Sky on the way to Neverland seems a feat best left to cinematography. All of these iterations form a collective memory of the Peter Pan story, but no one adaptation can stand alone.
INTERVIEW Sylvia Deaton
Sylvia Deaton, 20, has been dancing since she could walk, and knew she wanted to be a professional dancer from a very young age. At age six, she began taking ballet, jazz and tap classes, and was soon participating in dance competitions and winning regional and national titles. She was inspired by Broadway shows and local ballet performances her family would bring her to, and would practice the moves at home, using her sister as a male partner and rows of stuffed animals as her audience.
THEATER REVIEW In thunder, lightning, or in rain?
The MIT Shakespeare Ensemble’s production of Macbeth summons such a strange intensity that the suspension of disbelief is hardly “willing”: we have no choice as the audience but to accept the truth of the tragedy taking place before us and partake viscerally in the trials of its characters.
MOVIE SHORT How is your research?
Jorge Cham’s Piled Higher and Deeper — Life (or the lack thereof) in Academia, aka PhD Comics have been capturing the grad student life in a humorous but always accurate way. The original newspaper and web comic strip started in 1997 when Jorge himself was a grad student at Stanford University. The comic deals with the topics that govern grad student life like struggles in research, the relationship between students and their supervisors, and most importantly, the constant quest for free food. Much material was built up over the years, and it almost seems that the movie version was long over due. Filming started in March 2011 and was a colaboration with a theater group at Caltech.
MOVIE REVIEW Tour of a painting
It starts with a sound and ends with a painting. Creaking. Voices. Echoing footsteps. The soft swish of fabric. Above all, darkness. When the scene opens, the camera slowly pans back and forth across an evolving painting: The Mill and the Cross is centered around Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s The Way to Calvary (1564), so what better way to open the film than with a tour of the painting itself?
EXHIBIT REVIEW Whirring into motion
Tucked inside a dim corner of the MIT Museum, a fun surprise awaits the viewer, or more accurately, the participant — for Arthur Ganson’s motionless sculptures spring alive at the touch of a button or the push of a pedal with seemingly little more effort than a whir of gears.
MOVIE REVIEW The Thing is …
In the 2011 prequel to the 1982 John Carpenter film of the same name, paleontologist Kate Lloyd (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) is called to Antartica for what could be the discovery of the century: an alien ship buried deep in the ice and a frozen organism that seems to have died when the ship hit Earth. Kate and her Norwegian colleagues perform experiments on the organism in the name of science but, to their utter horror, unleash an alien nightmare; this “Thing” engulfs and transforms into anything it touches. So here we have a bunch of Scandinavians and righteous Kate isolated in a cluster of wooden cabins in Antarctica, each of them vulnerable to becoming the Thing. That’s essentially the entire plot — now how do I begin to discuss The Thing?
MOVIE REVIEW Hey, does this haircut make me look like Voldemort?
50/50 is ultimately a film about friendship through hardship. When Adam (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) learns that he has a malignant tumor, his friend Kyle (Seth Rogen) and new girlfriend Katie (Anna Kendrick) try their best to help Adam deal with his emotional and physical pain. Unfortunately, Kyle isn’t the most eloquent character, and only has his mind on gettin’ some. Screenwriter Will Reiser depicts this story brilliantly — a story based on his own experience with cancer and his friendship with Seth Rogen.