Speed of Life

Three esteemed Mexican film directors are up for Oscars at tonight's Academy Awards: Alfonso Cuaron, Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu and Guillermo del Toro "Hollywood often makes socks," Cuaron said. "I work with the studios when they decide they want to make a film and not socks." Guillermo del Toro In Guillermo Del Toro's "Pan's Labyrinth," up for six Oscars including best foreign-language film, fascist soldiers in post civil-war Spain torture rebels as an eyeless, child-devouring demon lurks nearby in a mysterious underworld. Alfonso Cuaron and his daughter Bu Writer-director Alfonso Cuaron's adaptation of the P.D. James novel, "Children of Men," is set in a ruined, post-apocalyptic England. Cuaron directed the third Harry Potter film as well as "Y tu mamá también". Cuaron's take on Harry Potter brought an eerie depth and a sense of real danger. Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu's film ...

Installation View: Rothko at MOCA The recent exhibition of Mark Rothko's work by the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art at their Pacific Design Center satellite space was both profound and encouraging. The paintings, many originally from the Panza Collection outside Milan, were crisply installed in the high ceilinged space and gently lit. In one of the essays collected in the posthumous volume "The Artist's Reality", Mark Rothko expressed his hope that a democratically educated populace "through increased facilities for the seeing and practice and discussion of art, will actively and genuinely be moved by the creations of their contemporaries." I think that Rothko would appreciate the crowd that gathered to reflect upon his paintings. A group that took time to step away from an increasingly murky politcal reality to contemplate something deeper, richer and more lasting. Rothko wrote that "society profits most not when art at its highest applauds its...