Spartacus Ballet

For today's Through the Opera Glasses, here are two scenes from Spartacus, performed by the Bolshoi Ballet.

This is part of the lead-up to Thursday's Blogblast For Peace event.

Spartacus tells the story of a Roman slave who leads an uprising against the empire. In the first scene, a duel between a consul and Spartacus results in a show of mercy for one who has never shown mercy to others.

The following scene shows how wounded pride can fuel not only personal vendettas, but often lead to full-scale war.

October Art Show - Spooky

Just in time for Halloween, I draw your attention to the October show I've featured in my Sidebar Art Gallery.

This collection is called Spooky.
























Flying Dutchman illustration - Unknown artist



















Notre Dames gargoyle - Victor-Joseph Pyanet



















Duel after the Masquerade Ball - Jean Leon Gerome

























The Gashlycrumb Tinies - Edward Gorey

















The Apotheosis of War - Vasily Vereshchagin




















From Paradise Lost - Gustav Dore



















Macbeth, The Meeting with the Witches on the Heath - Joseph Kronheim




















The Ride of the Valkyries - William T. Maud





















Asmorod - Zdzislaw Beksinski


Happy Haunting...

Law Abiding Citizen

Just went to see Law Abiding Citizen tonight with my cousin and fellow Gerard Butler admirer Julianne MacLean.
















Bruce McGill, Leslie Bibb and Jamie Foxx play a team of lawyers who prosecute the murderer of Clyde Shelton's wife and daughter.













Clyde (Gerard Butler) is distraught when he learns the case will not go to trial - and that a deal has been struck, letting one of the attackers off with only a few years in prison.














He does not go quietly into a grieving future. A decade later, Clyde returns to address the the injustices he has suffered.
















He holds Nick (Jamie Foxx) personally responsible, but the entire justice system will feel Clyde's wrath as his devious revenge gets underway.
















Detective Dunnigan (Colm Meaney) and Nick attempt to stop Clyde from continuing with his hit list, but Clyde has been planning this for quite some time. Not even the prison walls can contain his calculated fury.















As I mentioned in a previous post over at Popculturedivas, when it comes to Gerry, I'm completely incapable of remaining objective when it comes to reviewing his work. If he's in it, I'm there, baby.

Especially if he's in chains, on his knees and on the edge of sanity.

Of course, Gerry wielding brutal force, intimidating opponents and gazing out with his Scorpio intensity is never discouraged.

More objectively, IMDB users give Law Abiding Citizen a 7.6/10 rating.

Pryvit, the Ukrainian Bread Dance

For this Thanksgiving, I'd like to share my deep feelings of gratitude to you all through this piece of dance, known as Pryvit.

Pryvit is a Ukrainian dance of welcome, where the honored guests are offered bread, salt and wheat.

Canada has a large Ukrainian population, mainly settled in the prairie provinces of Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba, with other large populations on the west coast in British Columbia, and in central Canada in Ontario.

When I worked as an usher at the live theatre in Toronto, we had a Ukrainian dance troupe who performed there, and I was so touched by this dance I welled up with tears. If you recall my story of the summer adventure with Russian sailors my sister and I had in 1984, you'll no doubt guess why.

While we were on board the ship, the sailors brought us several loaves of bread from below decks. This was their own food that they were sharing with my sister and me, who could have bought any number of loaves at the store anytime we wanted. I'm certain the stores of a Soviet ship were not quite as plentiful as all that.

So on this Thanksgiving, I'll let these dancers say for me what I hold deep in my heart for you.



The Yevshan Ukrainian Folk Ballet Ensemble, performing at the Vesna Festival in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan

Season 3 of Robin Hood at Last

After an agony of waiting, BBC's Robin Hood finally began broadcasting across the pond on BBC America and BBC Canada.















I freely admit I've already watched the entire season 3 on You Tube. When it was first broadcast in the UK in the spring, kindly souls uploaded it for those of us who were frothing at the bit to get a look at Sir Guy.














The season 3 uploads disappeared from You Tube as the North American broadcast neared.














But there's nothing like being able to watch the full episode on TV, as opposed to the tiny version in ten-minute segments on You Tube. However, I am eternally grateful to those angels who allowed me to see it when it first aired. *kiss*

Things have gotten a lot darker in Nottingham since our heroes and villains returned from the Holy Land. Gisborne has a lot of mental sorting out to do after taking Lady Marian's life at the end of season 2.

"Frankly, I sort of despise him for what he did," the actor says. "But it's also interesting when a character can start to take responsibility for his actions and have an opinion of himself, almost as if he is stepping outside his body, and that's really what Gisborne does this season: He steps out of his old shell and starts to become somebody new because of that action." - John Crook, No more Mr. Nice Guy














Robin is understandably out for revenge.













The sheriff puts Much through the mill when Prince John demands more tax money.














Guy is not so easily bullied now that he's looked into his own abyss.















Not so easy being sheriff, is it, Vasey?















Robin's band acquires Friar Tuck and villager Kate.


















Little John and Allen a Dale soldier on despite their own sorrows.

What becomes of Guy when his father figure turns his back on him? You'll have to catch the next episode to find out.

Roman Polanski's Lifetime Achievement Award

Film director Roman Polanski flew to Zurich, Switzerland on September 26th to receive a lifetime achievement award at the Zurich Film Festival. Instead, he was arrested after fleeing a conviction for felony thirty years ago in California.

I can't help but imagine the hope of prosecuters as they waited to see if the filmmaker would show up for such a celebration. He'd always been careful to avoid picking up an Oscar, but surely within Europe he would be left alone to reflect on an astounding career.


I'm actually an admirer of his films. We studied Knife in the Water at Ryerson, as well as Chinatown in my screenwriting class.

His version of Oliver Twist is absolutely heartbreaking and haunting.

And The Pianist is unrelenting, searing and somehow hopeful amid all the horror of war.

It is my belief, however, that a man who flees justice is saying more by that act than any one of his celluloid masterpieces will ever hope to do.

What was the felony he was charged with?

Statutory rape of a 13-year-old girl.

Using sedative drugs to disarm the girl and ensure the victim's compliance.

Let's stop for a moment and recall a few statistics about pedophile predators:

"Al Carlisle, former prison psychologist, estimates that a pedophile may molest as many as 100 children before he is caught." - Stephen T. Holmes, Ronald M. Holmes, Sex Crimes: Patterns and Behaviour

"Ego-psychologists assert that pedophiles have never developed a well-defined sense of self. Having sexual contact with children enables the pedophile to surmount the sense of shame, humiliation or powerlessness experienced during victimization as a child." - Juliann Whetsell-Mitchell, Rape of the Innocent

Now let's look at Roman Polanski's early childhood:

At age 6 he was herded into the Krakow Ghetto in Poland, where he lost his parents to imprisonment in Nazi concentration camps. His mother perished, his father survived.

Roman escaped the ghetto and was taken in by Polish Catholics until he was reunited with his father.

Sufficiently traumatic for anyone.

For those wondering why a 76-year-old man should face charges dating back thirty years, would anyone ask the same question if he was a priest who had raped a child in the 70's? The public is generally eager to prosecute priests. Is it because they don't direct incredibly remarkable films?

For those remembering that in addition to Polanski's nightmarish childhood, his thirties were marred by the gruesome murder of his wife Sharon Tate, eight months pregnant, by Charles Manson's Family - surely one might think the man has suffered enough for one lifetime.

Certainly his films are colored by his losses and emotional pain: Repulsion, The Tenant and Rosemary's Baby.

I still return to the knowledge that he fled a conviction to which he pleaded guilty by jumping bail, and returning to France where there is a firm refusal to give up its citizens to foreign governments. Moreover, Polanski curtailed all travel plans if there included any chance of being returned to face US authorities.

Until this last decision to attend the Zurich Film Festival.

His lifetime achievement award became a jail cell.

Anticipation

Kim's year-long Blog Improvement Project at Sophisticated Dorkiness encouraged us to "look for blogging inspiration somewhere new.

There’s no real way to do this. If you’ve got a laptop, take it out of the house and write up a post somewhere different. If you don’t have a laptop, grab a pen and paper and do some brainstorming outside the house.

Go to the park, a local coffee shop, the library, a friend’s house, your backyard, wherever you feel like it. Just get away from where you usually blog to see what inspiration you might get from a change of scene."

I did this in a movie theatre while I was waiting for Gamer to start.

It wasn't hard to see that I was immediately drawing on sense memory for this exercise.


Many of you already know that one of my favorite places in the world - and favorite moment in life - is taking my place in a theatre seat, waiting for the show to begin.

It can be any kind of theatre, any kind of performance.

It can be a spot snagged among an outdoor crowd for the Busker Festival.

It can be a hardy sports stadium seat built to withstand drunken disappointment in a game, but serving me as a seat at the Royal Nova Scotia International Tattoo.

The hockey arena can be tucked out of sight so I can sit in surging anticipation for Lenny Kravitz and an amazing night of music.

It can be a no-frills wooden chair on homemade risers, awaiting a Fringe Festival performance.

It can be a seen-better-days upholstered seat scavenged from a renovated theatre as I sit just feet away from Michael Mahonen (Road to Avonlea's Gus) as he shows his acting chops in Salt Water Moon, a play by Newfoundland-born David French.

But there are two types of theatre seats that thrill me more than any other.

The basic cinema seat - where I have willingly whiled away countless sunny days in a darkened theatre. No matter how far technology takes us, no matter that I can watch films in an increasingly sophisticated home setting, I will always cherish viewing films as they are meant to be screened - in a theatre surrounded by other film lovers.



And the other one?

Why, a seat at the ballet, of course.

Where the orchestra tunes up as the lights go down to a quarter...