Week of November 14 to November 20 (Mann)

What’s On At The Tropic
by Phil Mann

When is a movie theater not a movie theater? When it’s an opera hall. When it’s a ballet stage. When it’s a rock venue. That’s the Tropic.

Last Wednesday saw the opening of the new Tropic opera season with the Teatro La Fenice production of Rossini’s BARBIERE DI SEVIGLIA, with the sexy Rinat Shaham as Rosina. That opera will return for an encore matinee next Wednesday at 2:00pm. It’s only the first of a series from the great opera venues of Europe – including La Scala, the Glyndebourne Festival and the Salzburg Festival, all specially filmed in high definition with surround sound, and all with English subtitles.

You’ll shortly be hearing of the winter ballet season, with dance from the Kirov and Bolshoi companies, among others. So dust off your tux for some high culture on Eaton Street.

But if your taste runs to the other end of the music spectrum, how about THE WHO, live in concert from Gaumont State Theater in Kilburn, North London in December, 1977. Filmed in connection with the making of the documentary The Kids Are All Right, it was one of the last performances of the original group. Drummer Keith Moon died the next year. The footage was never edited for release until now, when a new DVD has been prepared for sale later this month. Thanks to the Tropic’s partnership with Emerging Pictures, they’re able to present this preview showing on the big screen in the Carper. It’s Roger Daltry, Pete Townshend, John Entwistle and Keith Moon, in high def and surround sound, larger than life. One show only at 10:00pm on Saturday.

Did I mention that both these shows will be projected with the Carper Theater’s new $25,000 Panasonic 3-chip DLP projector, which blasts a brighter image with blacker blacks and richer color on the 25-foot screen? It’s a fact.

Meanwhile, on the 35mm movie front, the new-classic western APPALOOSA brings Ed Harris and Vigo Mortensen to the screen as iconic Western figures, a team of itinerant lawmen hired to take on a corrupt and rapacious rancher, played by Jeremy Irons. Do you need to know more? Okay, there’s also Renee Zellweger as the femme who turns Harris’ eye, to the bemusement of his buddy. Based on a novel by Robert B. Parker, which supplies much of the snappy dialogue as well as the plot, this is a movie for anyone who loves the genre. As Variety might put it, it’s an “old-school oater,” with the clash between obvious good and evil, shootouts, tough guys of both ilks, and a pretty girl. And it’s all beautifully photographed, and directed with cool economy by Harris. As the Baltimore Sun puts it, “the tang of good old-fashioned Westerns only improves with time. Appaloosa, a story of two lawmen who clean up the title town at some personal cost, goes down like a single-malt aged for 25 years.”

For Mary Sparacio’s Monday night classic, she’s picked WILD STRAWBERRIES, one the trio of films from the fifties (along with Smiles of a Summer Night and The Seventh Seal) that established Ingmar Bergman as a master. From the time it was released, just over fifty years ago, critics have always seen parallels in the film to Bergman’s own life. With his death last summer, it’s an appropriate time for another viewing.

Full details and info at TropicCinema.com. Comments to pmann99@gmail.com.
[from Key West, the newspaper - www.kwtn.com]