San Fransisco Chronicle (Free subscription) | yesterday
Unfinished works leave tantalizing questions behind. What new doorways might Schubert have opened with that last symphony? Was Nabokov's half-done novel a masterpiece in the making? Did Orson Welles abandon various projects because he knew he couldn't finally...
San Fransisco Chronicle (Free subscription) | 05/09/2008
RATING: (POLITE APPLAUSE) For his 1913 pantomime ballet "Le Festin de l'Araignée" ("The Spider's Feast"), Albert Roussel owes a clear debt to Ravel and Debussy. While the diaphanous textures and fanciful conceit of this insect-world tale may sound familiar,...
San Fransisco Chronicle (Free subscription) | 05/09/2008
Emmanuelle Seigner has been on numerous covers of French Elle, publicizing her latest movies. She would often run into the magazine's flirtatious editor, Jean-Dominique Bauby. "He was a very bright guy, a bit arrogant and a womanizer," Seigner said. Because...
ArtsJournal (Free subscription) | 05/06/2008
Scientists "are trying to figure out why animals learn and why some have evolved to be better at learning than others. One reason for the difference, their research finds, is that being smart can be bad for an animal's health."...
San Fransisco Chronicle (Free subscription) | 05/02/2008
In person, Ewan McGregor looks even less as if he could be Colin Farrell's brother than he does onscreen. McGregor is tall but slight, with none of Farrell's potentially menacing bulk. But then Woody Allen, who chose Christopher Walken as Diane Keaton's...
ArtsJournal (Free subscription) | 05/01/2008
"Businesses hold creative-thinking seminars, universities teach creative writing, ministers makes speeches puffing our 'creative industries'. Even the splodges and squiggles that children daub in primary school are deemed creative. One could even say that the idea of creativity has become thoroughly debased."...
ArtsJournal (Free subscription) | 04/29/2008
Brain researchers for the first time claim to have found a method for improving the general problem-solving ability scientists call fluid intelligence, otherwise known as "smarts."...
San Fransisco Chronicle (Free subscription) | 04/28/2008
Here is a subjective list of the 10 best set-in-San Francisco movies and five lesser known flicks. The paperback "Celluloid San Francisco: The Film Lover's Guide to Bay Area Movie Locations" proved indispensable. "Vertigo" (1958) San Francisco became another...
San Fransisco Chronicle (Free subscription) | 04/28/2008
Christian Bale deserves a key to the city of Chicago or, better yet, to an apartment overlooking Lake Michigan to commemorate his six months working here. The actor spent a long, sweltering summer encased in a rubber suit as Batman in "The Dark Knight."...
San Fransisco Chronicle (Free subscription) | 04/27/2008
A stepping-out kind of crowd, dressed in cocktail party finery, gathered at the W Hotel late Saturday night to honor Rose McGowan and Jason Lee with the San Francisco International Film Festival's Midnight Awards. At 11:59 and 50 seconds, everybody began to...
San Fransisco Chronicle (Free subscription) | 04/27/2008
Ever since 1925, when Erich von Stroheim turned a camera on Hayes Valley for his silent movie "Greed," film crews have encamped in San Francisco to capture its hazy orange light reflecting off the Golden Gate Bridge and roller-coaster hills affording...
San Fransisco Chronicle (Free subscription) | 04/25/2008
RATING: (POLITE APPLAUSE) The rippling vocal invention and vibrant rhythmic pulses of Guillaume de Machaut's thrilling 14th century Notre Dame Mass radiate across the centuries to Tarik O'Regan's "Scattered Rhymes" (2006) in this appealing disc devoted...
San Fransisco Chronicle (Free subscription) | 04/25/2008
France/Austria, England. 90 minutes. 9:15 p.m. May 3, 5:45 p.m. May 4 and 3:15 p.m. May 5, Sundance Kabuki. With his resume of celebrated and controversial productions, ebullient demeanor and signature spiked hair, theater, opera and film director Peter...
San Fransisco Chronicle (Free subscription) | 04/25/2008
Rachel Portman was not an obvious choice to write an opera based on "The Little Prince." A noted film composer - her credits include "The Joy Luck Club," "The Cider House Rules," "Chocolat," "The Manchurian Candidate" and a 1997 Academy Award for "Emma" - she...
San Fransisco Chronicle (Free subscription) | 04/25/2008
At a party for the 51st San Francisco International Film Festival on Thursday evening, the conversation naturally enough turned to the opening-night film, "The Last Mistress." A bodice ripper about an illicit love affair in 1835 Paris, it calls for star Asia...
