“You can do anything with my legacy, but never make me boring.” The legendary singer and frontman of Queen, Freddie Mercury, was quoted as saying this before his tragic death from AIDS-related causes in 1991. This writer believes that even the most aggressive attempt to make Freddie Mercury’s story boring would be impossible. “Bohemian Rhapsody” — a biographical movie about Queen — is entertaining, but beneath its flashy surface, it is as hollow and clichéd as Mercury was complex and revolutionary. The film’s fun yet disappointing result can be attributed to a number of factors: pre-production limbo, cast changes, director replacements and questionable narrative choices regarding the singer’s sexuality. All of this culminates in an ultimately forgettable movie. But this movie is about Freddie Mercury — how is that possible?
Posts published in “Arts”
Meet Serena: she regularly gets kicked out of movie theatres, snaps at coworkers in her microbiology lab and corrects the grammar of her date mid-hookup. In her opinion, the fewer people she has to fake kindness towards, the better. But after taking a critique of a colleague too far, she must undergo sensitivity training if she wants to keep her job.
The beginning of “mid90s” is comprised of sudden images cut together. Skateboards, still on the ground, are scattered with a force. A hallway where an older brother pounces on the younger one, pelting him with his fists. And the younger brother — the thirteen year-old boy we will come to know as Stevie — looks in the mirror and pokes at his bruised chest, then punches it, groaning with the pain.
Students and their parents took refuge from last Saturday’s rain to enjoy performances by a variety of Smith’s ensemble groups in John M. Greene Hall. “Montage” is sponsored by the Smith music department, and this year’s theme centered around royalty, which came through both in the music and the names of the artists chosen to cover.
Upon opening the doors to the exhibit, you immediately lock eyes with a pale woman in a turquoise robe who looks out from her ornate frame with a small smile. She is one of the few in the gallery who will actually make eye contact with you; the rest of the women gaze demurely at things out of sight as if they are wishing for something their gilded world cannot give them.
“Concinnitas” was a term used by 15th-century scholar and architect Leon Battista Alberti to describe beauty in architecture, which he believed existed when — and only when — parts of a building cohered to a harmonizing whole. It was also used to name The Concinnitas Portfolio, to which Professor Pau Atela responded in his Re(Creations) and MathStudio. Both the portfolio and Atela’s work will be displayed at the University Museum of Contemporary Art at UMass until Dec. 9.
I have a complicated relationship with the word “slam.” Every time I hear the word qualifying some literary event — a poetry reading or a storytelling event — I feel my stomach lurch, as though I caught a whiff of some food that once gave me torrential runs. Not that I only have bad experiences with slams, not at all. But for every poem I’ve heard that revelled in the snap of a word as it rolled off the tongue, for every story I listened to that sparked against the speaker’s animated telling, there were five, ten, fifteen others that made me cringe back into my seat.
HODL! HODL! HODL! Blockchain! Decentralization! These are just some of new terms that will be featured in the museum’s bathroom walls as the Smith Museum…
The theatre department debuted a production of “The Wolves”—a new play by Sarah DeLappe on Friday, Feb. 23.
A finalist for the 2017 Pulitzer Prize Award in Drama, “The Wolves” is taking the theatre world by storm. Directed by Daniel Elihu Kramer, “The Wolves” tells the story about high school girls on a soccer team. This might make you groan, but DeLappe’s play disturbs stereotypical notions about teenage girls.
If you have put yourself through “500 Days of Summer” or watched anything involving Zooey Deschanel, then you know what a “Manic Pixie Dream Girl” is. The term, coined by film critic Nathan Rabin, is a trope. In the words of Lyssandra Norton MFA ’18, a “manic pixie dream girl is extremely quirky, plays the ukulele or a sport, and is weird as fuck.”