Unlike any other opera, the so-called Beggar's Opera is not just one composition, but a lineage of adapted compositions, beginning with the original hugely successful 1728 political satire written by Englishman John Gay. Composers and writers have penned variations on it ever since. The most famous of these was A Threepenny Opera by Bertholt Brecht and Kurt Weill. Some things these compositions share in common is their setting among the poor and criminal classes, and the roguish character Macheath. This production is based on an adaptation of Gay's original by Vaclav Havel the freedom-fighter, writer and philosopher who became the first (and only) president of the united post-communist country of Czechoslovakia, and it retains many traces of its theatrical origins. Film reviewers were not too tolerant of what they called "slavish adherence" to the noted Czech writer's stage production, but theater, philosophy and history buffs may feel otherwise.
When a Conservative TV crusader threatens to shut down beloved brothel The Chicken Ranch, proprietress Miss Mona Stangley and her girls won't go down without a fight.
Seymour Krelborn is a nerdy orphan working at Mushnik's; a flower shop in urban Skid Row. He harbors a crush on fellow co-worker, Audrey Fulquard, and is berated by Mr.
A young beautician, newly arrived in a small Louisiana town, finds work at the local salon, where a small group of women share a close bond of friendship and welcome her into the fold.
In this Shakespearean farce, Hero and her groom-to-be, Claudio, team up with Claudio's commanding officer, Don Pedro, the week before their wedding to hatch a matchmaking scheme.
Michelle and Allen, who have reached the point in their relationship where they are considering next steps, decide to invite their parents to finally meet and to offer some understanding of why marriage works.
Southern matriarch Madea has a lot on her plate. Her nieces, Vanessa and Lisa, have relationship troubles - Vanessa moves into Madea's house with her 2 young children and Lisa is engaged to a controlling man that her mother set her up with.
In this film based on a Neil Simon play, newlyweds Corie, a free spirit, and Paul Bratter, an uptight lawyer, share a sixth-floor apartment in Greenwich Village.
Set in Prohibition era Chicago, bootlegger Robbo and his cronies refuse to pay the greedy Guy Gisborne a cut of their profits after Guy shoots mob boss Big Jim and takes over.
A disgraced sports presenter falls victim to an accidental head trauma and slips into a coma. He awakens months later to find that South Africa was not as he left it, he is now in the New South Africa, and his multimillion-Rand idea has been stolen from beneath him.
ITSOFOMO (In the Shadow of Forward Motion) is a multimedia performance collaboration created by artist David Wojnarowicz and composer/musician Ben Neill in 1989.
The tumultuous life of the controversial 1960s black revolutionary (and convicted murderer) Michael X is illustrated by a kaleidoscopic melding of sound and images.
Sixty year old Max is having something of a middle-age crisis. His marriage seems to go nowhere as the passion, tenderness and happiness vanished when their daughter moved out.
This short fiction film tells the story of a very unusual satellite named Zenon. Zenon is a product of the most up-to-date technology and so displays an unusual characteristic for a computer: he is conscious.
Carmen, a journalist with two children, is on her third marriage, to Antonio, a record producer. Over the course of a year, we follow her through her discontents: Antonio's lateness, his fatigue when she wants to make love, his insistence on her company when she prefers solitude, his treating her work as less important than his, his casual and cruel dismissal of her opinions, her boss assigning her an incompetent editor, bartenders ignoring her, her passage into middle age.
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