[Editor’s Note: Gen. Vang Pao of Orange County, a prominent leader of Hmong refugees in this country, was among nine persons arrested on Monday in an alleged plot to overthrow the communist government of Laos.]
I suppose the first thing I thought when I got a call saying Gen. Vang Pao had been arrested was “I told you so.”
But that did not last long.
In the first of two major events this week, Culver City High School’s Academy of Visual and Performing Arts — the faculty, staff and students — will host an Open House on Wednesday afternoon in the Robert Frost Auditorium, on campus, at 4401 Elenda St.
The program begins at 2:45 p.m. with a brief performance by students participating in Music Day, with a full day of music exploration scheduled. The Open House will continue until 5 p.m.
A Case Full of Rum!
With the “Pirates” trilogy, Gore Verbinski has surely proven himself to be a director on the level of Steven Spielberg or George Lucas. The Caribbean of his films, chock-full with human-fish hybrids, the undead, sea monsters, and, of course, more pirates than you can shake a peg leg at, is a candy store of wild action, rich set design and vivid visual imagination. As we rejoin the gang, left at the end of “Dead Man’s Chest” with Captain Jack (Depp) dead and Captain Barbossa (Rush) seemingly back with the living, we are thrust into yet another roller-coaster ride. The direction is a marvel, the special effects are top-notch, adrenaline levels are kept high and, surprisingly, we get occasional moments of poignant drama.
At Culver City High School tonight, the Academy for Visual and Performing Arts will stage its Spring Concert at 7 oclock in the Robert Frost Auditorium on the Culver High campus, 4401 Elenda Ave.
This free concert will feature the high school’s Concert Band and Concert Choir as well as the Middle School Choir.
The AVPA Chamber Singers and Jazz Ensemble are also included in the program. No reservations are needed for this musical evening.
These young musicians from the high school more than 75 of them are just back from the Music in the Parks Festival held at Savanna High School in Anaheim on May 12.
We’ve seen this kind of ending before; the standard horror movie type ending. It’s the last few shots of a horror film in which, after the protagonists survive a horrific ordeal, a predictable “twist” places their happy ending into question. Why this sort of “resolution” attracts horror filmmakers is open to interpretation. Perhaps it’s to make more money by leaving open the possibility of a sequel, despite the fact that films like the “Alien” trilogy (I’m ignoring the fourth) show how unnecessary open-ends are for making sequels. Or perhaps they think it’s frightening, as if fictional characters on a movie screen can ever engender anything other than fictional fear.
Culver City High School’s Academy of Visual and Performing Arts presents Java Drama 13 at the Ivy Substation, 9070 Venice Blvd., starting tonight and continuing through Saturday evening.
Each year all the students in the Academy participate in Java.
They offer audiences a unique blend of dance, film, theater, poetry, music and art.
Terry Gilliam’s “Tideland” – an adaptation of Mitch Cullins’s book – pretty much flew under the radar, never really getting into wide release. A critical roasting probably didn’t help. Rottentomatoes.com’s freshness rating for the movie is 28 percent, with the grim consensus summary for the naysaying majority reading “disturbing, and mostly unwatchable.”
Live morning television comes to Culver City — and the Culver Hotel — at the relatively bleary-eyed hour of 7 o’clock on Friday morning.
Direct from Town Plaza in the bosom of Downtown, the KTLA Morning Show will air from 7 to 10 at the juncture of Culver and Washington boulevards.
The channel 5 set will be positioned between the historic Culver Hotel, home of this newspaper, and the Pacific Theatres, on the Plaza, which still is seeking to become a true Downtown destination.
Invisibility makes for a pretty strong metaphor for teenaged alienation. In a “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” episode, for example, a socially invisible teen becomes, quite literally, invisible – and more than a bit nuts as a result. “The Invisible,” a remake of a Swedish movie that is itself based on a book, doesn’t follow the same slasher-ish route, but has an invisible teen concept whose pedigree could very well include “Ghost,” “The Others,” and, vaguely, “The Sixth Sense.” Bright student Nick Powell (Chatwin) finds his metaphorical invisibility realized when circumstances leave his body dying and his consciousness wandering around like a wraith, unable to interact with anyone or anything. Stuck trying to figure out a way to get himself rescued so he could rejoin the world of the living, Nick contends not only with his mother or learning how his peers really feel about him, but trying to reach out to the violent and volatile girl (Levieva) whose actions put Nick in his predicament.
The renamed, heavily reconfigured Culver City Music Festival — which has become a referendum about the producer Gary Mandell in recent years — has gone on a diet since the end of last season.
Call it the Jenny Craig Music Festival.
Numerous familiar trappings have been eliminated.
Principal casualty is the unique touch Mr. Mandell has brought to the series, growing it from a lightly noticed event to a center-ring attraction.
At City Hall, however, strong feelings have cropped up and spilled over into public view the last several years about Mr. Mandell’s style.
