Arts Alive

A glamorous actress who was known as the “Queen of Scream” and her Oscar-winning screenwriter husband are the unconventional subjects of a UCLA film series this month. I’m Gail Eichenthal. In one of our periodic conversations about the latest movie offerings, I learned from Arts Alive and LA Times Film critic Kenneth Turan the series started with a book.

It’s music of meditation and consolation this weekend as the LA Master Chorale performs the Requiem of Maurice Duruflé and a “secular requiem” called How to Go On, by Los Angeles composer Dale Trumbore. In the work, Trumbore offers an answer to the question posed by poet Barbara Crooker following the death of a loved one, “How can we go on, knowing the end of the story?” Trumbore says her music is an exploration of how we confront grief and doubt in our own lives.

Thought Experiments in F# Minor is a new LA Phil commission, but you’ll have to follow the cat in the suit and tie to the parking garage to experience it. It’s a dream-like 40 minute walking tour via iPad and surround-sound headphones that experimental opera direct Yuval Sharon says will change how you see Walt Disney Concert Hall.

KUSC’s Alan Chapman has a lot to say about music, but can he say it in 60 seconds? That’s the Chapman Challenge. We ask a question and Alan has a minute to answer it. Today’s question is from Sarah in Los Angeles who writes “I hear you identify pieces as adagios. What exactly is an adagio?”

Some works that evoke less-than-sunny weather today… Not all nature-inspired works can be twittering birds. Sometimes you need to have a bit of rain too. Whether it’s a light drizzle or a full on thunderstorm, composers have been trying to convey the sound and mood of wet days for centuries.

Composer Ludwig Goranssen is basking in the golden glow of an Oscar. He won the Academy Award for Best Original Score for Black Panther. During a recent visit to KUSC, Goranssen said one of the biggest challenges of the project was figuring out how to combine traditional African instruments with an orchestra trained in western classical music.

Costume designer Ruth Carter, whom he mentioned, also took home an Oscar. See some of those costumes and hear more of our interview with Goranssen at KUSC.org.

Imagine this for a moment. The year is 1988. You are opening your brand-new Nintendo Entertainment System for the first time. You carefully insert the game cartridge and hear the opening strains of the “Ground Theme” from Super Mario Bros. Did you at any time think that this music or the famous melodies from Legend of Zelda would lend itself to Mozart? Pacific Opera Project and their artistic director Josh Shaw have taken on the challenge of bringing Nintendo to the opera stage with their new production of Mozart’s The Magic Flute.

Gail Eichenthal joins film critic Kenneth Turan to discuss this weekend’s UCLA Festival of Preservation and several of the incredible films as part of the festival.

Now at FIDM, you can see the annual “Art of Motion Picture Costume Design Exhibition“. The exhibit features over 100 outstanding costume designs from more than 25 films released in 2018, including all 5 Academy Award Nominees. Admission is free and the exhibit runs now through April 12, 2019.

Barry Jenkins is a storyteller, with an interesting story of his own. He grew up in a low-income part of Miami (“the projects,” in his words) and played football in high school. Then he went to film school at Florida State University, where he fell in love with foreign art films—particularly those of Claire Denis and Wong Kar-Wai—and studied both film and creative writing.

The world fell in love with Jenkins in 2016 with Moonlight, the story of a gay black boy who grows up and comes to terms with his sexuality in the Miami projects, which earned Jenkins an Academy Award for best adapted screenplay and went on to win best picture. He followed that up with If Beale Street Could Talk, the first English-language film adaptation of a James Baldwin novel, which has earned Jenkins yet another Oscar nomination. The movie is set in 1970s Harlem, and it’s about Tish (KiKi Layne) and Fonny (Stephan James) being in love and with child inside a storm of injustice.

I spoke to Jenkins on a recent, extremely rainy day in his office in downtown L.A. (where he also lives). The drizzly ambiance is fitting; in Beale Street, the tender lovemaking scene has a similar rainy backdrop. We talked about Jenkins’ youth in Miami, the way his camera loves his characters, and the music—and musicality—of his films.