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Film Review: Brainstorming the Sweet Potato — El Bulli, The Movie

September 4, 2011
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The film is many things. It is a testament to the restaurant, immortalizing it on celluloid. It’s also a requiem for the restaurant, which you see as it is closing. It’s a manifesto for culinary invention. It’s a tribute to chef Ferran Adrià and what he has wrought, how he has transformed thinking about food. Screens at the MFA tonight through December 30.

Theater Review: A “Porgy and Bess” Made For Broadway

September 3, 2011
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The American Repertory Theater’s juggling/removal of the operatic elements in “Porgy and Bess” is clumsy, but the goal is to create a compelling entertainment for contemporary audiences, smoothing out the melodramatic story’s edges and cutting its length.

Theater Review: A Bright and Literate Version of the Darkly Comic “Measure for Measure”

September 1, 2011
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Director Gus Kikkonen and cast come up with a bright, literate presentation of William Shakespeare’s play “Measure for Measure,” a potentially dark comedy pregnant with power.

Theater Review: “Ten Cents a Dance” not Worth a Plugged Nickel

August 20, 2011
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Trapped in a cluttered set meant to evoke an abandoned nightclub (with old, upside-down flowerpots? why?), the cast of TEN CENTS A DANCE do little but wander about singing strangely uninspired arrangements of some of America’s best-known songs.

Film Review: Should We Fear Miranda July’s “Future”?

August 12, 2011
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THE FUTURE, director/actor Miranda July’s followup to 2005’s ME AND YOU AND EVERYONE WE KNOW is brave, unexpectedly poignant and devastatingly sad.

Book Review: “Deliver Us” — A Memoir of a Boy’s Life in a Small Italian Town

August 9, 2011
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Originally published in 1963, and today considered by some critics a landmark in twentieth century Italian literature, in English Luigi Meneghello’s memoir feels more like a duty than a delight to read.

Short Fuse: Eternal Recurrence — Freud, Marx, Mao Zedong Thought

August 8, 2011
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What I do suspect though, and find evidence for in BLOODLUST is that Freud is immune to any final dispatch or disproof, and will likely, through one portal or another, go on reinserting himself into our culture.

Theater Review: A “Turn” by a Prodigiously Gifted Actress

August 5, 2011
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A fascinating adaptation, well worth the trip to out-of-the-way Chester, MA, TURN OF THE SCREW is never less than interesting and often all-absorbing — especially when actress Allison McLemore lets loose.

Visual Arts Review: The Indispensable American Artist Fairfield Porter

August 4, 2011
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On bad days, I tell people that as far as I’m concerned, New York museums can all go to hell until one of them gives more substantial attention to Fairfield Porter as well as to give a solo show to Jane Freilicher.

Book Review: Violence, a la the Freudian and Biblical canon

July 28, 2011
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Short Fuse thinks Russell Jacoby’s “Bloodlust: On the Roots of Violence from Cain and Abel to the Present” is an unconvincing mix of refurbished Freudianism and Genesis.

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