Entertainment
Can arts festivals matter anymore? LA28 Olympics can prove they do, with Salzburg as inspiration
The well-run 1984 Olympics transformed Los Angeles. Not through the Games, which thrillingly came and went, but through the Olympic Arts Festival, which taught us to dream and inspired us to do. Forty year later, we have added Walt Disney Concert Hall, Los Angeles Opera, the Getty Center, the Soraya, the Geffen Playhouse, the Hammer Museum, the Wallis, the Nimoy, the Industry, L.A. Dance Project, Wild Up, the Broad museum and the Broad Stage. The Olympic Arts Festival turned us into an arts capital in a remarkably short period of time.
Now that Paris has symbolically handed the Olympic torch back to us, our Games in 2028 no longer seem so far away. By then, we will have added Frank Gehry’s new Colburn Center, a 1,000-seat concert hall with the potential of turning Grand Avenue into an avenue of the arts unlike any in the world. A short Metro ride away will be the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s new Peter Zumthor-designed David Geffen Galleries.
This leaves the arts community excited and galvanized but also alarmed after Casey Wasserman, chairman of LA28, the private group putting on the L.A. Games, said following the closing ceremony in Paris: “We don’t have an Eiffel Tower. We do have a Hollywood sign.” Tom Cruise’s motorcycle tour from the boulevards of Paris to the Hollywood Hills in the ceremony’s tacky finale only increased concern. Meanwhile, the death on Sept. 30 of Robert Fitzpatrick, the force of nature behind the 1984 Olympic Arts Festival, has reminded us what he accomplished.
Obviously, in a changed city and a changed world, we hardly require a replay of the 1984 Olympic Arts Festival. But what? Should the ’28 model resemble the current PST Art festival of exhibitions related to science? Funded by the Getty, institutions throughout the region have come up with projects — and we get whatever the cat drags in. Or might the recently appointed chair of the LA28 Cultural Olympiad, Maria Anna Bell, a former Museum of Contemporary Art board chair, and her advisor, Nora Halpern, an art historian and curator based in Washington, D.C., the last two decades, find novel inspiration from Fitzpatrick’s brilliantly curated festival?
Tenor Sean Panikkar in Peter Sellars’ production of Prokofiev’s “The Gambler” at the 2024 Salzburg Festival.
(Ruth Walz / Salzburg Festival)
The Cultural Olympiad (can’t we go back to the friendlier Arts Festival?) is special. It is the only aspect of the Olympics that needn’t be politicized or commercialized. The budget for 1984 was $20 million. The Times set the festival rolling as the main sponsor with a $5-million donation. Around $6 million came from ticket sales. The Olympics supplied the rest. Fitzpatrick used all of it as he saw fit.
Two days after the closing ceremony in Paris in August, I flew to Austria, where I spent two weeks at the annual Salzburg Festival. Its 62-million euro budget ($67.8 million) puts Salzburg on a similar scale to the 1984 Olympic Arts Festival when adjusting for inflation. More important, grand and consequential Salzburg markedly demonstrates what makes festivals matter.
A festival in Mozart’s picturesque birthplace at the foot of the Austrian Alps, a city that attracts hordes of summer tourists along with well-heeled audiences in formal dress, may not exactly suit L.A. But L.A., in fact, serves as an inspiration for Salzburg.
This year, Peter Sellars’ new production of Prokofiev’s opera “The Gambler” and Gustavo Dudamel’s concert with the Vienna Philharmonic were among the highlights.
The festival itself needs no contrived theme. Instead, it becomes, as did our 1984 Arts Olympic Festival, an activist lens onto the world. In 1992, while Sellars was the director of the Los Angeles Festival (which grew out of the Olympic Arts one), he began staging opera in Salzburg, helping revolutionize what had become a stodgy music industry event. Indeed, Markus Hinterhäuser, the festival’s visionary artistic director, told me that Sellars is his most important artistic guide today.
On my first day in Salzburg, I headed for an 11 a.m. concert featuring Riccardo Muti conducting the Vienna Philharmonic in Bruckner’s monumental Eighth Symphony. The full Festspielhaus, the festival’s largest hall, had a worshipful air. We listened in rapt, reverential awe, cozied by Vienna’s velvet strings, velvet winds and velvet brass woven together in a perfect tapestry of lush sonic textures and instrumental colors.
Peter Sellars, photographed this year in Salzburg.
(Jan Friese / Salzburg Festival)
That evening, in an again packed Festspielhaus, Daniel Barenboim conducted the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra in another monumental Eighth Symphony, Schubert’s “Great,” (confusingly known as Schubert’s Ninth outside Austria and Germany). In place of velvet and luxuriant lushness, there was fixating intensity and raw power. The ensemble was so grounded that the feeling here was of everyone giving everything they had to hold the symphony — and symbolically the world — together.
Both Eighths were occasions for community. The Divan is a training orchestra founded 25 years ago by Barenboim and Palestinian American scholar Edward Said to bring together young musicians from Israel and Middle Eastern Arab countries. The orchestra’s current members had spent the last year during the war in Gaza studying at the Barenboim-Said Akademie in Berlin, learning to work through their profound differences for a common cause.
To witness them supporting one another musically and showing inspiring devotion to a frail Barenboim, suffering from a debilitating neurological disease, may be the only gleam of hope we have for peace. At the end of what the players clearly knew was a performance of a lifetime, they lingered onstage, hugging one another. Tying the day together, the Vienna Philharmonic concertmaster that morning was a 27-year-old Muslim violinist from Nazareth, Yamen Saadi, who who got his start at age 10 in the Divan.
This first day became an introduction to the way that knowing creation can bring together a wide range of sources that result in a brave and profound cultural diplomacy, which is a disastrous lost art. This was furthered in much of what I attended during the festival.
Three major opera productions in Salzburg threw needed light on Russia and Ukraine. Two were Russian operas based on Dostoevsky novels: Prokofiev’s little-known “The Gambler” and Mieczyslaw Weinberg’s all-but-unknown “The Idiot.” Presented as compelling theater, they brought in-depth insight into our often simplistic attempts to understand the Russian mind, with its complex aspirations, fears and insecurity that can lead to greatness, grandiosity or outright malevolence.
Sellars revealed “The Gambler” as the dazzlement of addictive behavior, a road map for losing one’s mind. In gripping, high-wire performances, American baritone Sean Panikkar as Alexei succumbs to roulette. Lithuanian star soprano Asmik Grigorian as Polina loses her mind to nihilism. Young Russian conductor Timur Zangiev barreled through Prokoviev’s restless score with compulsive and relentlessness virtuosity.
“The Idiot” is a nearly five-hour slog by a Polish-Russian contemporary of Shostakovich about another Dostoevsky outsider who succumbs to visions of grandeur. But Weinberg’s 1985 barely known gloomy opera is also a profound demonstration of how and why misplaced power can destroy society. And thanks to a terrific cast, led by sensational Ukrainian tenor Bogdan Volkov, and the vivid conducting of Mirga Grazinyte-Tyla’s sleekly modern production by Polish director Krzysztof Warlikowski, “The Idiot” turned out to be Salzburg’s hottest ticket.
A scene from Krzysztof Warlikowski’s production of Weinberg’s “The Idiot,” at the 2024 Salzburg Festival.
(Bernd Uhlig / Salzburg Festival)
Unfortunately, the night I attended, Grazinyte-Tyla had taken ill and had been replaced by her assistant, Oleg Ptashnikov. But video of the production with the colorful Grazinyte-Tyla can be streamed via stage-plus.com and, as can “The Gambler,” on medici.tv.
What made Salzburg special and a little shocking was its daring belief in cultural diplomacy. This included bringing back Teodor Currentzis to lead a revival of an avant-garde production of Mozart’s “Don Giovanni.” The controversial Russian-based Greek conductor has been banished from the majority of Western institutions. While never expressing support for the war in Ukraine, Currentzis is said to have received funding for his Russian ensemble from corporations with ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin.
But Currentzis is also controversial because he is, on one hand, an obsessive perfectionist and, on the other, a showy radical with highly original musical ideas. All of that shows up in the “Don Giovanni,” which came close to perfection and extreme reinvention.
The surreal, visually hypnotizing production by Italian director Romeo Castellucci made little effort to make narrative sense. What’s an upside-down car hanging from the ceiling got to do with anything? But somehow the imagery, mostly against a bare stage, focused attention on a performance in which every single note, sung or played, every movement, every physical object, seemed to have been thought through and was riveting.
This international cast, led by striking Italian baritone Davide Luciano as the Don, brought yet more Russians and Europeans together. The marvelous Utopia Orchestra in the pit was composed of leading players from top European ensembles.
There is much, much, much more to the Salzburg Festival. And months later it still influences how I view international relations and political chaos, how I contend with world leaders, how I vote.
Yes, we’ve got the Hollywood sign, a real-estate advertisement-turned-landmark. But Walt Disney Concert Hall is also a landmark.
There is no time to waste. Planning takes time. But Salzburg does it every year, and there should be no reason why we can’t make a festival and mean it.
Movie Reviews
Bandar Movie Review: Bobby Deol roars in Anurag Kashyap’s unsettling legal thriller that refuses to spoon-feed
Name: Bandar
Director: Anurag Kashyap
Cast: Bobby Deol, Sanya Malhotra, Sapna Pabbi, Saba Azad, Jitendra Joshi, Raj B Shetty
Writer: Sudip Sharma, Abhishek Banerjee
Rating: 3.5/5
Plot:
Bandar follows Sameer Mehra’s character, essayed by Bobby Deol, a fading star who is desperately clinging to his past glory. Just as he attempts to rebuild his life and finds solace in a new relationship, his world comes crashing down. A former girlfriend files a heinous allegation against him, dragging him into a vicious, high-profile legal battle. Written by Sudip Sharma and Abhishek Banerjee, the film moves away from standard Bollywood courtroom setups. Instead, it dives straight into the murky waters of social media trials, public perception, and a sluggish judicial system where the truth gets buried under layers of gray.
What works:
Known for his chaotic energy, Anurag Kashyap takes a remarkably mature and controlled approach here. He avoids sensationalizing a highly sensitive topic, choosing instead to focus on the psychological claustrophobia of the protagonist. The prison sequences are exceptionally well-shot. They create a suffocating, raw atmosphere that makes you feel the weight of the character’s confinement. The script successfully avoids preachy, black-and-white monologues. It bravely forces the audience to confront their own biases regarding modern-day public trials and the digital judge-and-jury culture.
What doesn’t:
Clocking in at nearly two hours and twenty minutes, Bandar feels heavily weighed down in the second half. The narrative stretches thin, and a few subplots demand too much patience, making you wish for a tighter edit. The film stubbornly refuses to take a definitive moral stance or offer a neat resolution. While film enthusiasts might appreciate the complexity, mainstream viewers looking for a clear-cut ending or emotional payoff might walk away feeling detached and frustrated.
Performances:
- Bobby Deol is the beating heart of this film. Stripping away the massive macho swagger and menacing villainy of his recent hits, he delivers a deeply vulnerable, understated performance. He plays Samar with a mix of arrogance, confusion, and raw helplessness, proving his immense range.
- Sanya Malhotra anchors her screen time with her trademark reliability, turning in a grounded and impactful performance.
- Saba Azad and Sapna Pabbi excel in their respective roles, bringing genuine nuance to characters that could have easily been sidelined.
- Jitendra Joshi is an absolute scene-stealer, commanding your attention every single time he steps into the frame.
- Indrajith Sukumaran and Raj B Shetty are absolute show stealers with their raw acting.
Final Verdict:
Bandar is an unsettling, morally complex thriller that refuses to spoon-feed its audience. It isn’t a comfortable watch, nor does it try to be. While the sluggish pacing in the second half prevents it from being an absolute masterpiece, it is worth a watch for Bobby Deol’s spectacular acting reinvention and Anurag Kashyap’s gritty, thought-provoking storytelling.
Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not reflect the official policy or position of Pinkvilla. No statement in this article is intended to defame, harm, or malign any individual or entity.
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Kathy Hilton will no longer be the grand marshal of West Hollywood’s pride parade.
The city and WeHo Pride on Wednesday released a joint statement, announcing that “The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills” star would no longer serve as the Grand Marshal Icon for the 2026 WeHo Pride Parade. The event is scheduled for Sunday.
“After thoughtful discussions, the City of West Hollywood, the WeHo Pride production team, and Kathy Hilton have determined that the 2026 WeHo Pride Parade will not designate a Grand Marshal Icon honoree,” read the statement.
The decision comes less than a week after Hilton was announced. That May 28 announcement was met with swift backlash from the LGBTQ+ community and allies, who called out Hilton’s ties to President Trump and alleged MAGA-leaning politics. Critics also cited accusations that the socialite had used a homophobic slur while on a trip with other cast members of “The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills,” an action she has previously denied.
In their joint statement, West Hollywood and the WeHo Pride team expressed their appreciation for “the respectful and sincere dialogue” around both the event and the “role and significance” of Pride honorees.
“The City of West Hollywood has always believed that Pride belongs to the community,” the joint statement said. “Since its earliest days, Pride has served as both a celebration and a platform for activism, visibility, resilience, and the ongoing pursuit of equality, dignity, and justice for LGBTQ+ people. … These conversations reflect the passion people have for WeHo Pride and underscore the importance of ensuring that WeHo Pride continues to honor the history, values, and diverse voices of the LGBTQ+ community.”
In a statement, Hilton expressed gratitude for being considered for grand marshal and reaffirmed her commitment to the LGBTQ+ community and causes.
“My reason for wanting to be involved in this year’s WeHo Pride weekend was simple: to celebrate, support, and share in the joy of a community that means a great deal to so many people,” Hilton said. “Pride is, and always will be, about celebrating and uplifting LGBTQ+ voices, experiences, and achievements. … My support for the community and WeHo Pride is unwavering.”
She also mentioned several queer advocacy organizations and events she has supported over the years, including GLAAD, the Elton John AIDS Foundation, the Elizabeth Taylor AIDS Foundation, Dr. Mathilde Krim, God’s Love We Deliver and Project Angel Food.
The latest Pride-related dust-up follows the abrupt cancellation of the Long Beach Pride Festival in May. The city’s Pride Parade took place as planned.
Both snafus have occurred as conservative politicians and advocates continue to attack LGBTQ+ rights and visibility nationwide. Some Republican governors have even pushed for conservative alternatives to Pride month festivities. A recent Gallup poll has found that after years of steady gains, support for marriage equality and same-sex relationships has slipped, particularly among Republicans.
Movie Reviews
Movie Review: Travolta’s “Propeller: One-Way Night Coach” is One for the Ages — All Ages
Back in the good ol’days — the ’90s — John Travolta would love to get off the topic of “Michael,” “Pulp Fiction” or “Get Shorty” in interviews with film journalists like me and regale us with how utterly besotted he had been with his first flying experience, how that drove his passion for piloting and buying planes and airfield-adjacent luxury houses.
He didn’t even seem to mind having to move house when this or that development balked at him flying his Boeing 707 out of there on the way to locations.
Travolta would tell any journalist who asked that he was writing a kid-friendly book, “Propeller: One Way Night Coach,” based on his first flights as a child in old propeller driven airliners — cheap red-eye overnight treks with too many connections for your average jet age traveller to tolerate.
I remember picking up the book when it came out later in the ’90s — at an airport gift shop — and thinking “Well, that’s as cute as I figured.”
And now, decades later and trapped in the B-movie hell of his post “Gotti” career, Travolta’s turned that cute book into the most delightful, fanciful and colorful bon bon of a movie.
“One Way Night Coach” is a child’s fantasy of flight and flying the way it used to be — with pristine, uncrowded, futuristic airports, an early ’60s era of jets and prop planes with over-uniformed stewardesses in white gloves, the days “Back before every Joe Sweatsock could wedge himself behind a lunch tray and jet off to Raleigh-Durham,” as Sideshow Bob memorably sneered on “The Simpsons’.”
It’s a fictionalized account of Travolta’s childhood about an only child (at least two Travolta siblings have bit parts in this movie) of a never-made-it/never-will actress/single-mom (Kelly Eviston-Quinnett) who indulges her aviation-obsessed eight-year-old with a cheap cross-country overnight flight.
Little Jeff (Clark Shotwell) will revel in almost every Idlewild to Pittsburgh to Dayton to Chicago to Kansas City to Denver and Los Angeles minute. He strolls into the cockpit to meet pilots, charms the stewardesses and checks out the sleeping bunks on the TWA Lockheed Super Constellation, loving even the delays if not the Chicken Cordon Bleu he’s offered on legs of the journey that offer a meal.
And as he’s an observant child, he comments (Travolta narrates) on his 50ish mother’s vamping and posing, her choice of cigarettes (Newports) and drinks, the solo traveling men whose attention she pursues and earns.
“I was her best audience,” adult Jeff remembers of the mother who’d read him plays as bedtime stories and delusionally hopes that this trip to Los Angeles might be her “big break” even though she’s pushing 50.
“Hollywood called,” she’d explain about their overnight cheap flight arrangements to ticket agents and crew. “They told me to take the next flight!”
At every turn, Jeff meets or sees kindness — stewardesses who indulge his many questions and bump them up to first class on the mostly-empty planes, a captain who fixes his toy model of a Constellation, a mentally ill flyer who flips out but is calmed by a flight attendant who isn’t overworked and frazzled in jet-powered tin-can jammed with Joe and Jane Sweatsocks who think nothing of traveling in their pajamas.
Normally, I cringe at pictures this reliant on voice-over narration. I recoil from stars who populate their picture with Sandler etc. offspring. But “Propeller” is unfailingly sweet and never cloying.
Sure, it’s fictionalized. But if you’ve followed Travolta’s life and career, a lot of him is in this — his raptoruous engagement with flying, an indulged child who developed a taste for fine food and creature comforts, a mother who was his guiding star as an actor.
I get why there are less adoring reviews than mine floating around “Propeller.” It’s unfailingly sweet. Mom’s man-hunting is seriously dated. This TWA tale is decorated with Gershwin’s majestic “Rhapsody in Blue” — United Airlines’ signature tune. And Travolta’s been around long enough for recent generations to come up and not feel a connection to the “Saturday Night Fever/Get Shorty” star whose career has fallen off and life has been visited by too much tragedy.
But I’d hate to be seated next to anybody who doesn’t appreciate this adorable, pristine and nearly perfect aviation fantasy on any flight, much less an overnight one.
Rating: TV-PG
Cast: Clark Shotwell, Kelly Eviston-Quinnett, Ellen Travolta, Ella Beau Travolta, Olga Hoffmann and John Travolta.
Credits: Scripted and directed by John Travolta, based on his book. An Apple TV+ release.
Running time: 1:01
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