Watching "Romeo and Juliet" is like dancing under a disco ball and strobe light for two hours - the effect might feel exhilarating at first, but then the novelty wears thin. Director Baz Luhrmann ("Strictly Ballroom") invites a new generation of high school students to ditch their "Cliffs Notes" in favor of his hyperkinetic, MTV-style adaptation.
Kinnear shines in fluffy 'Dear God'
There are times when a film based on some dramatic event like war or love is too intense to be appreciated; the idea of dealing with fictional problems along with realistic dilemmas can be tedious and simply not enjoyable. That's when the uncomplicated story is better. Even if the flick is far from receiving a single look from the Academy, the light hearted mood often successfully deviates from the trauma that we would rather avoid.
Art, nature come together in mesmerizing Butoh dance
The entire universe can be contained within a stage. Sankai Juku, Ushio Amagatsu's Butoh performance group, consumed Power Center this weekend with a world of heightened human emotion amidst a setting in which nature and art merge and humanity humbles itself to larger forces.
Butoh, begun in post-World War II Japan as a reaction against tradition and Westernization, sought to break all boundaries of established dance. Performers began to unearth taboos in their actions of showing the bottoms of their feet and touching their navels. Darkness, entropy, imbalance, multiple personalities, especially the demonic personality - all of these ideas are still explored in this movement form that digs into the subconscious and continues to question and express the human condition.
'Afterlife' CD-Rom flies high
Afterlife, one of the newest games put out by LucasArts, proves once again that the multimedia giant is at the top of the heap when it comes to creative and innovative CD-ROM games. As a "Demiurge," your job is to create two distinctly different afterlifes: heaven and hell. As with other simulation games, you plot out the land for different structures, roads, ports and housing, but, come on, this is heaven and hell we're talking about!
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