Alternative Film Guide

In addition to a screening of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences will have another East Asian cinematic event in the upcoming weeks: an evening dedicated to the Japanese magic lantern tradition of Utsushi-e, described as "a blend of moving images, light, color, music, storytelling and traditional art." Presented [...]

Variety reports that the New York City Opera has commissioned Charles Wuorinen to compose an opera based on Annie Proulx’s short story "Brokeback Mountain," the source of Ang Lee’s acclaimed 2005 film.
Brokeback Mountain — the movie — caused a sensation in 2005. The story of a two-decade-long love affair between a ranch hand (Heath Ledger) [...]

Benedict Nightingale’s "Paul Scofield: an overlooked acting great" in The [London] Times:
"Why didn’t most theatregoers think of Paul Scofield in the way they thought of Olivier, Gielgud and Richardson? After all, he had pretty well all the qualities, from Olivier’s danger through Gielgud’s grace to Richardson’s soul, that we admired in the 20th century’s most [...]

The New York Post is one of the vilest rags around, but Michael Riedel’s March 12 column on Edward Albee, who’s turning 80 today, is well worth checking out.
A couple of Albee quotes, remembering his lover of 35 years, artist Jonathan Thomas, who died of cancer in 2005.
"I learned something important about dying, about a [...]

Donna Freydkin’s "Rising star Amy Adams’ career seems enchanted" in USA Today:
"Amy Adams [right, with Jack Davenport in The Wedding Date (2005)] is having one of those enchanted Manhattan moments.
"’Look, it’s snowing!’ she cries, looking out of the window of an Upper West Side cafe to the snowflakes gently settling on the cabs and buildings [...]

"Retire? Why? Why is it everyone wants me to retire? Who cares about age? I don’t need to retire."
That’s Mickey Rooney, 87, voted by film exhibitors the top box-office star in the United States for three years in a row, 1939–1941.
Why such an enormous success? Well, pictures like Babes in Arms (opposite Judy Garland, [...]

Actor-singer Robert Goulet died Tuesday (Oct. 30) morning while waiting for a lung transplant at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. Goulet had been suffering from interstitial pulmonary fibrosis, reportedly a rare lung disease. He was 73.
Born on Nov. 26, 1933, in Lawrence, Mass., Goulet spent much of his youth in Canada. He became a [...]

Glenn Close has been slated to reprise her Tony Award-winning role of the faded silent-film star Norma Desmond in the film version of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s hit stage musical Sunset Boulevard. The original 1950 Sunset Blvd. was directed by Billy Wilder, from a screenplay by Billy Wilder, Charles Brackett, and D. M. Marshman, Jr., and it starred Gloria Swanson and William Holden.

Author Christopher Fry has died. Christopher Fry (1907-2005), was the author of The Lady’s Not for Burning, Venus Observed, and wrote (solo or drafts) the screenplays for Barabbas (1962), Ben-Hur (1959), The Bible (1966), The Beggar’s Opera (1953), and A Queen Is Crowned (1953).

Actress Margaretta Scott died last April 15. She was 93.
Although the London-born actress (on Feb. 13, 1912) is best known today for her role as Mrs. Pumphrey in the television series All Creatures Great and Small, Scott had what Michael Coveney in The Guardian described as a “distinguished career [that] spanned 70 years of theatre [...]

According to the BBC, Frank Capra’s beloved, diabetes-inducing It’s A Wonderful Life is about to become a musical produced by Jon Thoday, the man responsible for Jerry Springer - The Opera. Thoday is working with Steve Brown, writer of the award-winning musical Spend Spend Spend.
Capra’s 1946 tale about a desperate family man who is convinced [...]

Last night, Feb. 10, Pulitzer-prize winning playwright Arthur Miller died at his Roxbury home of congestive heart failure. Miller was best known for his play about the unachievable "American Dream," Death of a Salesman, which, under the direction of Elia Kazan, opened on Broadway to rave reviews in 1949.
Two years later, Death of a [...]

Notes:
Initially, Miramax wouldn’t even consider German-born director Marc Forster for Finding Neverland. "My agent called and said, ‘They don’t see the relationship between this and your dead-baby movie,’" Forster later recalled, referring to his first feature film, Everything Put Together, a 2000 drama about a mother whose baby dies of sudden infant death syndrome. (Radha [...]

Playbill has reported that Academy Award-winning actress and liberal activist Susan Sarandon will play U.S. First Lady Laura Bush in a reading of Tony Kushner’s Only We Who Guard the Mystery Shall Be Unhappy at the Long Wharf Theatre, in New Haven, Connecticut, on October 25.
In its exploration of "political morality and moral relativity," [...]