Music Review: Oscar Peterson Trio at the Stratford Shakespearean Festival (1956)

In 1993, Oscar Peterson had a stroke that significantly impaired his left arm and hand. For a pianist, this was a potential death sentence. There was significant question about whether Peterson would ever be able to play the piano again. It took two years for him to return to the keyboard, and he never regained his previous (unparalleled) virtuosity—though it is worth noting that his friend, and amateur pianist Bob Rae, famously maintained that “a one-handed Oscar was better than just about anyone with two hands.”

Redbox Review: Winter’s Tale

With Redbox Review it is my hope to answer a simple question, to wit: having decided not to see a particular movie in the theater, is it worth the $1.25 to rent that movie from your local Redbox? 

The hardest thing to explain to students in any intro to film class is the importance of editing.
Students generally understand the function of the screenwriter, the director, and the actors and actresses who populate the landscape of a film. There is an intuitive understanding that someone selects the costumes, that someone sets the lights, and that someone points the camera. But this intuition breaks down in the face of assembling a final product. There is a person, in a dark room, assembling the individual shots into the final product? Having read the script, couldn’t a monkey successfully patch the whole thing together? Well, no. Perhaps the most widely known piece of cinematic inside baseball is that editors are the ones who make films work, and perhaps the easiest way to demonstrate this point is to examine the flaming wreckage of a film that not only went off the rails, but that fell a thousand feet into a canyon and exploded.