In its very first shot, Martin Scorsese’s “Hugo” sucks you into a magical, wonderful new world and refuses to let you go. The camera pans over the 1930’s Parisian skyline, but this is not the “real” Paris; it is the enchanted city of lights and love that Americans have been so fond of imagining for decades now (we saw it most recently in Woody Allen’s “Midnight in Paris”).
Currently in its third season, “Glee” has evolved considerably from the cheery celebration-of-the-underdog show it embodied when it first aired in 2009. A satire on the world of small-town high schools, the show follows the lives of the members of a high school glee club and all of the traumas they suffer at the bottom of the social ladder.
Dovahkiin. Dovahkiin. For the past month and a half, this word has been haunting my mind. When I go to class and when I go to sleep it races through my thoughts, and pops into my head at times when it has no right. In my residence hall I see it scrawled on dry-erase boards and bathroom mirrors. And on the calendar in my common room under November 11, there it is written: Dovahkiin. Dovahkiin.
John Edgar Hoover took over the post of Director of the Bureau of Investigations in 1924 (they wouldn’t add the “Federal” until 1935), when an Amherst graduate sat in the White House, the Chicago Cubs hadn’t won a World Series in 18 years and race riots, union strikes and anarchist bombings made Occupy Wall Street look like child’s play. Hoover would remain in his office until the day he died 48 years later, when Tricky Dick ticked off entries on his enemies list, the Vietnam War just kept raging and the Chicago Cubs hadn’t won a World Series in 66 years.
In turning my attention to writing about music, something I must confess I am new to, I was unsure of what to write about at first. I thought to myself: there must have been something released in the past year that means something to me. Something new that I would want to talk about. Something new that I feel an uncontrollable desire to tell everyone I meet to go out and listen to. Something relevant to a modern audience. After pondering this option, I thought, why bother?
Currently in its eighth season, “The Office” is a television show about a group of workers in the small Scranton, Penn. branch of a dying paper company called Dunder Mifflin. Set in a mockumentary format, the show follows the lives of each of the workers as personalities clash, paper is sold and clients are lost within the isolated and seemingly self-sufficient world of their office.
The Metropolitan Opera’s new production of “Don Giovanni,” Mozart’s second collaboration with librettist Lorenzo da Ponte, was broadcast on Sat., Oct. 29 at the Cinemark in Hampshire Mall through the opera house’s Grammy-Award winning MetOpera Live in HD series. Under the baton of Fabio Luisi, both the singers and orchestral instrumentalists were competent at presenting a high-quality performance of Mozart’s ingenious opera.
