“Love”
Cirque du Soleil
OPEN RUN
Unlike VH1, Cirque du Soleil is never about the music. The
performance group that somehow turned the clown-and-acrobat circus
into an art succeeds because of the stunts onstage, not the musical
backdrop that paces the performance.

By my count, I’ve written anywhere from 60 to 63 columns
for the Daily Bruin in the last four years. In every one of those,
I’ve known the ending before writing the first word.

Without question or debate, Los Angeles has the best movie
theaters of any city in the world. I’m not even considering
the countless home theaters of incredibly rich people in the
entertainment industry, which typically combine the quality of
theatrical image and sound with the luxury of getting to watch the
product while sprawled out on your couch.

As a professor of Roman culture in the classics department,
Robert Gurval naturally cares about dates. But as far as his
research interests are concerned, “B.C.” may as well
stand for anything prior to 1963, or, in other words, “Before
“˜Cleopatra.’”
Gurval’s work, which is focused on the political problems
of the early Roman empire involving the famous Egyptian queen,
doesn’t end when the historical dates do.

Though the month of May hasn’t quite ended and the
majority of Hollywood’s blockbusters still exist in the realm
of anticipation, I’m getting worried. For any industry
analyst, this is a problem.

During the opening credits of Ron Howard’s by-the-book
adaptation of “The Da Vinci Code,” words appear on the
screen in a very simple manner. Instead of materializing the
cryptic subject matter of Dan Brown’s thriller into an
opening sequence that has words and numbers flashing everywhere to
eventually reveal their hidden meanings, Howard simply offers the
necessary information and crisply moves on.

I try not to make predictions, as they’re inevitably
wrong. The last three predictions I made were that “The
Aviator” would beat “Million Dollar Baby” for
Best Picture, that John Kerry would beat George W.

Right now, at this very moment, part of me wishes I were 13
again. I fully acknowledge the masochistic implications of such a
statement and recognize that it romanticizes the youthfulness every
person not named Michael Jackson eventually loses to adulthood, but
I just can’t shake the feeling.

May is a month of potential and doubt. Named after Maia, the
Roman goddess of growth, the month can suggest the coming of new
and better things just as plants that sprout in April usually
flower about now.

Early in “Annie Hall,” Alvy Singer (Woody Allen)
gets into an argument with a stranger while standing in line at a
movie theater. The argument is about film, and when Singer decides
his opponent knows nothing about the work of media scholar Marshall
McLuhan, he simply walks McLuhan, playing himself, into the frame
to tell off the uninformed moviegoer.