"Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom": A Lesson in Blues
With raw and unapologetic performances by Viola Davis and Chadwick Boseman, stories about the hardships of Black musicians are weaved in with The Blues.

There's an uncompromising clarity to Blu-ray audio and video that really does bring the splendour of grand opera right into the living room. So it's all the more frustrating to get a compromised production as the final product. Jules Massenet's 1894 tragedy about a sex goddess humbled by an insistent Cenobite monk isn't produced very often, because of a demanding lead role and some difficult staging issues. But the music is gorgeous from beginning to end. When you have a great diva at centre stage, the three acts go by in a flash.
With raw and unapologetic performances by Viola Davis and Chadwick Boseman, stories about the hardships of Black musicians are weaved in with The Blues.
As an extremely avid fan of DC’s animation, I’ve become familiar with the way the studio uses Batman as a bit of a Trojan Horse to introduce some of their lesser known characters.
Not a lot of people realize that being introverted is not always a permanent state of mind. Being considered an introvert by others is a complicated thing; not everyone likes being labelled “shy.”
'Thirteen Lives' gives a dramatic adaptation of a humanitarian triumph that captured the global imagination.
“And I think to myself….what a wonderful world”. Louis Armstrong sang about this notion via his classic 1967 song, an ode to witnessing elements of our life that should be but some reminders of exactly what that concluding line of each verse indicates. Now we see our contemporary realities and, just being honest, it makes a sentiment like this seem SO overtly far away….perhaps even impossible….to accept or believe could be. It sounds harsh, but again, so much of what is occurring speaks not to beauty, but bedlam.
To say Hollywood has had a troubled past is the understatement of the century. In Ryan Murphy’s (American Horror Story) new Netflix series, Hollywood, that past is confronted and even rewritten.