Music
Spiceworld
, by
the Spice Girls (Virgin). Critics call the British pop group a triumph of
marketing over taste (their debut album sold 18 million copies). Their new
album is deemed particularly offensive. "[B]land, half-hearted harmonizing ...
so slickly produced that most techno-pop sounds positively organic by
comparison," says the Los Angeles Times ' Natalie Nichols. The group is
said to have overplayed its fame by appearing in too many commercials.
Prediction: It will soon become a pop-history footnote. (A dissenting minority
calls the new album irresistible and compares the group to the Swedish band
ABBA.) ("Hi! We're the Spice Girls" is the official site. For
Slate
's take, see David Plotz's "Assessment.")
Museum
P.S.
1
Contemporary Arts Center (New York City). A Queens elementary
school turned art gallery undergoes an $8.5-million renovation and becomes the
"world's largest contemporary art space." Art critics welcome the expansion,
pointing out that the gallery now can exhibit oversized installations most
museums can't accommodate. Works by young, experimental, and overlooked artists
are also displayed in bathrooms, basements, stairwells, and halls. Highlights:
an entirely white painting by Robert Ryman hanging in an old coal bin and a
three-story steel chair by Marina Abramovic. "[A] highly entertaining
spectacle," says New York 's Mark Stevens.
Movie
Red
Corner
(MGM). Critics applaud Richard Gere's China-bashing activism but
sneer at his China-bashing movie. Gere plays an arrogant American
wheeler-dealer in Beijing who is accused wrongly of murdering a woman and then
subjected to the horrors of the Chinese judicial system. The plot twists are
dismissed as hackneyed, borrowed from Cold War thrillers and courtroom
melodramas. The depiction of Chinese life is said to be so grim that it "verges
on the xenophobic" (Kenneth Turan, the Los Angeles Times ). (See the
Red Corner site.)
Books
Violin
, by Anne Rice (Knopf). Has the gothic horror writer and
sometime soft-core pornographer lost her touch? Her "overwrought prose has gone
grotesquely rococo," says Entertainment Weekly 's Vanessa Friedman. This
novel, about a widow who finds happiness communing with ghosts, switches
narrators and plot lines so often that it is said to be unreadable--and
pretentious, particularly when Rice holds forth on Catholic theology and
classical music. But some reviewers claim to have relished the book's spirit of
kitschy fun. (Random House has a gothic page devoted to Rice.)
My
Brother
, by Jamaica Kincaid (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). Kincaid's
memoir of her impoverished childhood in Antigua, occasioned by the death of her
half-brother from AIDS. Some reviews praise the book, which was nominated for a
National Book Award, for sidestepping the clichés of the genre. She refuses "to
oversimplify, overanalyze or sentimentalize," says the New York Times Book
Review 's Anna Quindlen. Others take her to task for revisiting her favorite
obsession, her childhood. It's time for her "to tell us something new" (John
Skow, Time ). (Click here for Sarah Kerr's review in
Slate
and
here
for an excerpt from the book.)
Opera
Xerxes
, by G. F. Handel, libretto by Nicolo Minato and Silvio
Stampiglia, performed by the New York City Opera (New York State Theater, New
York City). Raves for the New York debut of 31-year-old countertenor David
Daniel, hailed as the " 'next Pavarotti' ... who stirs inarticulate passion by
singing very much like a woman" (Mark Levine, The New Yorker ). Critics
are surprised by the success of the New York City Opera at transposing Handel's
piece from ancient Greece to 18 th -century England. On other
occasions, the company has seemed more like a "postgraduate workshop for the
promising and ill-prepared" (Bernard Holland, the New York Times ).
(Click here for a schedule.)
Updates
Raves give
way to pans for the musical Triumph of
Love. New York 's John Simon says the Broadway adaptation of the
comedy by 18 th -century French playwright Pierre Marivaux includes
"rowdiness and bawdry [which] are as out of place as a belch in a declaration
of love." The New York Observer 's John Heilpern says the actors
"oversell their wares." ... In the New Republic , Robert Boyers
condemns John Updike for setting his sci-fi novel Toward the End of
Time in the aftermath of a horrific conflagration. "It uses the moral and
historical grandeur of a world war to promote its cranky local obsessions to a
level of universality and interest that they do not deserve."
Recent
"Summary Judgment" columns
Oct.
29:
Movie -- Gattaca ;
Movie -- A Life Less
Ordinary ;
Theater -- Triumph
of Love ;
Book -- Speaking
Truth to Power , by Anita F. Hill;
Television -- Rodgers and Hammerstein's Cinderella (ABC);
Television -- Lewis
& Clark: The Journey of the Corps of Discovery (PBS);
Music -- The Velvet
Rope , by Janet Jackson;
Dance -- Merce Cunningham: Forward & Reverse (Brooklyn Academy
of Music).
Oct.
22:
Movie -- The Devil's
Advocate ;
Death --James
Michener;
Book -- Jackie
Robinson: A Biography , by Arnold Rampersad;
Theater -- Side
Show ;
Architecture --New
Jersey Performing Arts Center (Newark, N.J.);
Fashion --Wearable
Computers (Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab);
Music -- Psyché , by Cesar Franck (New York Philharmonic).
Oct.
15:
Movie -- Seven Years
in Tibet ;
Movie -- Boogie
Nights ;
Fashion --Versace,
Spring/Summer '98 Collections;
Product --Internet
Explorer 4.0;
Award --Nobel Prize
for Literature, Dario Fo;
Book -- How the Mind Works , by Steven Pinker.
Oct.
8:
Movie -- U-Turn ;
Movie -- Washington
Square ;
Movie -- Soul
Food ;
Architecture --Guggenheim Museum (Bilbao, Spain);
Book -- Toward the
End of Time , by John Updike;
Death --Roy Lichtenstein.
--Franklin Foer
