Last weekend, Creative Alliance held its fourth Made in Baltimore Short Film Festival, a showcase of 11 outstanding movies that were made by, for or about Baltimoreans and the city they live in. The event, held online and hosted by drag queen Betty O’Hellno, was a great way of reminding us that there is more to watch than just Netflix, even if we’re stuck at home.
The Baltimore Museum of Art (BMA) has finally reopened. After long months of inactivity and being shut down due to COVID-19, a phased opening began on Sept. 16, which allowed for nearly every exhibit to be fully reopened by the end of that month. That’s right, the BMA is officially back.
Boys State, a week-long summer camp hosted in every American state by the American Legion, is a mock government with upwards of 1,000 17-year-old high school boys. At first glance Boys State looks like a mob of conservative white boys, which might make you think that the camp is nothing more than a failed attempt to organize adolescent chaos. But I can assure you — as a former participant myself — that it is something much more.
It’s 1884. Enola Holmes lives happily with her eccentric mother, far from society and its norms for women, but on the morning of her 16th birthday, she discovers that her mother is gone. The disappearance of her mother reunites Enola with her older brothers, Sherlock (yes, the detective) and Mycroft, who have both been long absent from her life. They barely recognize her.
The teaser trailer for Nomadland opens with its protagonist, Fern (Frances McDormand), walking languidly through a trailer park. The camera follows her, and we see diverse assortments of people gathered together in front of varying vehicular living set-ups. These are the nomads of our modern world. Fern continues on her path as it fades to black, and though we’re left wondering where she’s going, her slow stride could not be mistaken for aimlessness. She is going somewhere that only she knows, and effectively, the mood of the film has been set.
The Billie Holiday Project for Liberation Arts (BHPLA) and Hopkins at Home hosted “Baltimore's Billie Holiday: A Musical Tribute to Lady Day” on Saturday, Sept. 19. The online concert honored the Baltimore native legendary jazz vocalist Billie Holiday. Though BHPLA hosted its inaugural tribute concert in West Baltimore’s Lafayette Square last year, this year’s concert was adapted to an online format as a result of the coronavirus pandemic.
Shen Fever is a fatal respiratory illness that disrupts the nervous system of its victims. Spread through fungal spores, the disease infects a person’s brain and effectively turns them into harmless, slowly-decaying zombies. But don’t worry — it’s not real.
After rounds of delays due to the pandemic, the grand release of the live-action movie Mulan had gained a lot of hype and excitement. However, this only made it extra disappointing when I finally watched it. After its release in Chinese cinema on Sept. 11, the rating dropped sharply to 4.9/10 on Douban within two days.
The Bloomberg School of Public Health has been attracting major national attention since the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic hit the United States. According to Bloomberg’s Audience Development team, the Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center got hundreds of millions of views daily at its peak and is still cited daily as the main source of COVID-19 data for media outlets, schools and other institutions. Experts from the school have been featured in media coverage and consulted by people across the globe in these truly unsettling times.
Over the summer, like most people trying to deal with the anxiety-inducing, consistently weird times we’ve been going through, I succumbed to rewatching my favorite comfort shows ad nauseam. However, one new show managed to pull me out of binge-watching and return to the good old days of watching something new on a one-episode-per-week basis as it came out — the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) adaptation of A Suitable Boy.
Providing a renovation of the queer teen love story Love, Simon from 2018, the newly released TV series Love, Victor takes place in the same setting of Creekwood High School, with new characters and a different story. Victor Salazar, the protagonist of the new show, is a Puerto Rican with a “beautiful cinnamon complexion” from Texas who, despite financial shortcomings, has moved with his family to the more affluent school district of Creekwood High.
International pop star Jay Chou dropped his newest single, “Mojito,” on June 12. Released alongside a vibrant music video in which he wanders through Cuban streets with his band, it was a much-anticipated release for ardent fans of Chou, whose last album Jay Chou’s Bedtime Stories came out in 2016. He has only released four singles since, including “Mojito.”
While the obvious public health, social and economic consequences of the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic are well known, this period may also change, perhaps permanently, the way we see movies. During Lunar New Year 2019, the Chinese box office totaled $360 million in the first weekend alone. But this year, as over 70,000 theaters closed and major movies were postponed, that same box office grossed only $2 million over the holiday weekend, even though it was previously expected to generate $1 billion globally.
Intense percussion, frank and breathy lyrics, dog barks. Wispy lyrics spoken into silence with no soundtrack to support them. Hoarse growls full of energy and instruments that fall into hysteria, then pick up a new beat and begin once again. This is how Fiona Apple clangs into view on her fifth album Fetch the Bolt Cutters, a powerhouse of intricate rhythm, rising anger and joy.
When Hopkins announced that classes were moving online for the rest of the semester, professors in all departments were forced to think of ways to keep students engaged while still being able to effectively teach material. Perhaps this transition was most difficult for instructors in the Hopkins Center for Visual Arts (CVA). Students, some used to working with a variety of mediums from oil painting to charcoal, suddenly had to leave many of their art supplies behind.
Amid the storm of delayed releases to movies and albums, I found myself quite lucky that my most anticipated release of the spring was still on time. On April 17, 24-year-old artist, Jeremy Zucker, released his debut album, love is not dying.
In the April 20, 2020 edition of The New Yorker, Ben Lerner’s short story “The Media,” appeared under “fiction.” A writer from Topeka, Kan., Lerner is a distinguished poet, writer and editor (though this list is not exhaustive). Lerner has also been a Fulbright Scholar, National Book Award finalist, Guggenheim Fellow and MacArthur Fellow (again, this list is not exhaustive).
I’m not an obsessive for many TV shows, with one exception: the Eurovision Song Contest. Criminally underrated in the U.S., Eurovision is an annual arcade of countries and songs. Set up like a combination of the Olympics and American Idol, Eurovision is my annual fairytale. Each year, various European (and guest) nations toy with songs and artists until they come up with a perfect performance.
Last week saw the launch of Quibi, a new streaming service. Quibi seeks to differentiate itself through mobile-only, short-form content; the episodes of each series on the app are all under 10 minutes, which is seemingly ideal for our generation’s ever diminishing attention span.
