Word: geniuses
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...Moore has a genius for confrontational stunts - demanding a meeting with General Motors Chairman Roger Smith, chatting up an addled Charlton Heston on gun control, buttonholing Congressmen to see if any of them had actually read the Patriot Act - but the Cuba jaunt tops them all. It begins when he hears Congressional testimony indicating that detainees at Guantanamo were getting free colonscopies and nutrition counseling. (One female soldier cited in the film says, "They get way better health care than I do.") So he rounded up several volunteer rescue workers from the World Trade Center site who had suffered respiratory...
...those documentaries that tells you everything you already know about its subject. It features many talking musicological heads, falling back in insight-free awe at the composer's apparently genial genius (a refreshing exception is the crankish Jonathan Miller, who has directed many a Mozart opera). Since Mozart traveled endlessly in search of gigs - 25,000 miles all told - the director, Phil Grabsky gives us many useless out-the-window shots of his own car chugging along modern European highways as he duplicates those journeys, many sequences of contemporary citizens wandering aimlessly and inelegantly in front of buildings Mozart visited...
...loved every minute of it. Why? Because Grabsky is generous with his performance footage; operas, symphonies, concertos, chamber works tumble forth, giving us a sense of the composer's fecundity, tireless ambition and quite modern need to make a living when the traditional patronage system was beginning to falter. "Genius leaks out the around the edges," says the conductor Roger Norrington, "while he's doing something totally practical." In other words there is a serenity, a wit, an economy in this work that belies the haste and occasional desperation of its composition...
...conversations at once, in six different languages, and understand them all." Paravicini, who lives in a boarding school for the blind where he receives round-the-clock care, is one of a handful of recognized savants, unable to carry out the most basic everyday tasks, but a bona fide genius at the keyboard. Born 14 weeks premature, he weighed only 700 g and his heart stopped three times before the doctors could stabilize him. An irregular flow of oxygen through a tube left him blind and brain damaged. Unable to communicate verbally, the young Paravicini taught himself to play...
What Paravicini can't tell you is his story, so Ockelford has told it for him. In his book, In the Key of Genius, published May 3, Ockelford recounts the extraordinary story of Paravicini's bizarre early lessons, his TV appearances and his concerts for charity (one at Buckingham Palace, another with the Royal Philharmonic Pops Orchestra) and ends with him playing Scott Joplin's The Entertainer to 12,000 people in Las Vegas last year. Paravicini, who is related through marriage to Prince Charles' wife Camilla Parker-Bowles, was only 5 years old when he and Ockelford first...