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Howard Davis
Scoop Arts Editor
Educated at Cambridge and UCLA; worked on several major Hollywood feature films and as a Kundalini Yoga instructor in Los Angeles; currently enjoying life in Wellington.
Howard Davis - Latest News [Page 10]
Orson Welles' Masterpiece - 'Chimes at Midnight'
Thursday, 28 July 2016, 5:01 pm | Howard Davis
I wish today could be tomorrow, The night is dark, It just brings sorrow anyway. - 'Days,' The Kinks. More >>
La Casa Azul - Frida Kahlo in Her Own Words And Photographs
Friday, 1 July 2016, 11:23 am | Howard Davis
Frida Kahlo (1907 - 1954) was born Magdalena Carmen Frieda Kahlo y Calderón, the daughter of a German photographer and a Mexican mother, on the outskirts of Mexico City. Her life began and ended in in her home at Coyocan, known as 'La Casa Azul,' ... More >>
Firmly in the Spotlight - Lisa Fischer
Monday, 13 June 2016, 9:57 am | Howard Davis
Lisa Fischer is rightly celebrated for her far-reaching vocal range and remarkable grace as a hugely accomplished session singer. From recording with Billy Ocean, Dionne Warwick, Aretha Franklin, Sting, Alicia Keys, Bobby McFerrin, George Benson, Diana ... More >>
Mr. Weird - Wayne Shorter at the Wellington Jazz Festival
Thursday, 9 June 2016, 2:09 pm | Howard Davis
Year after year, the Wellington Jazz Festival attracts jazz luminaries from around the globe. Last year, we were treated to the mellifluous duets of Chick Corea and Gary Burton on piano and vibraphone. This year, the opening night headliner at the ... More >>
Securing NZ's Political Memory: Scoop As A Digital Archive
Monday, 30 May 2016, 12:45 pm | Howard Davis
As a callow undergraduate studying English Literature at Cambridge University in the 1970s, it was made abundantly clear to me that print was a dying medium. Original texts are constantly being lost and found as manuscripts and books disintegrate and ... More >>
King Lear at Circa
Tuesday, 17 May 2016, 10:13 am | Howard Davis
In order to celebrate it's 40th birthday, it is perhaps fitting that Circa Theatre should pick a production of 'King Lear,' since it's also somewhat fortuitously Shakespeare's 400th anniversary. If some of the more cerebral poetry is lost in Michael Hurst's ... More >>
Pie in the Sky: The Moral Ambiguity of 'Eye In The Sky'
Tuesday, 19 April 2016, 3:53 pm | Howard Davis
The use of UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles) has prompted both protests and legal action, but few films have engaged in the debate, forgetting there’s someone at the controls and instead emphasizing the alien nature of a remote, robotic death. Colin Firth ... More >>
Mick Fleetwood Rediscovers His Roots
Tuesday, 5 April 2016, 3:33 pm | Howard Davis
Back in the days before the British blues revival in the 1960s, it's fair to say that one man virtually pioneered the form - Alexis Korner. Korner originally worked for jazz band leader Chris Barber, who was responsible for bringing many American ... More >>
The Light-Hearted Hermeneutics of 'Hail, Caesar!'
Tuesday, 29 March 2016, 4:48 pm | Howard Davis
The Light-Hearted Hermeneuticsof 'Hail, Caesar!' Howard Davis Despite rave reviews in both 'Variety' and 'The New Yorker,' 'Hail, Caesar!' is a box-office dud, costing an estimated $22 million, but only grossing $29 million in the US since its 2015 ... More >>
Venus in Fur - Todd Haynes' 'Carol'
Friday, 26 February 2016, 1:42 pm | Howard Davis
At a total running time of almost two hours, 'Carol' is a long, slow, languorous exercise in chemically-pure visual cinema. Just as Nastassja Kinski saved Roman Polanski's 'Tess' from becoming a gorgeous snooze-fest, it's really only Kate Blanchett's luminous ... More >>
Review: The Building Blocks of 'Spotlight'
Friday, 5 February 2016, 12:21 pm | Howard Davis
'Spotlight' is a deeply disturbing film for at least three reasons. Not only does it reveal the systemic institutional corruption of the Boston Archdiocese in particular and the Catholic Church in general. It also shows how the process of investigative ... More >>
Documenting Dissent
Thursday, 21 January 2016, 12:19 pm | Howard Davis
Documenting Dissent Review by Howard Davis From time to time, a young photographer emerges whose choice of content and subject matter distinguishes their work from the plethora of amateur iPhone, Photoshop, and Instagram apps. This is indisputably ... More >>
The Revenant
Thursday, 14 January 2016, 11:56 am | Howard Davis
A revenant is someone who has returned from the dead. With a running time of 2 hrs and 36 minutes, audiences for Alejandro Inaritu's latest movie might well feel the same way. It's a chilling ordeal to undergo - but nothing compared to what the cast ... More >>
Tim Burton Finally Grows up
Thursday, 17 December 2015, 2:16 pm | Howard Davis
It took eleven years from development to completion and now Tim Burton's 'Big Eyes' has finally reached Antipodean screens. It's a heart-warming tale of the artist Margaret Keane's personal odyssey from dependency to empowerment. That she happened to become ... More >>
Ray Henwood: Wales and Aotearoa meet on Stage
Thursday, 3 December 2015, 3:16 pm | Howard Davis
The son of a Welsh publican, Henwood was born in Swansea in 1937. He was in his twenties when he saw an ad in The Times Educational Supplement for a science and mathematics teacher at Mana College in Porirua and what was originally intended as ... More >>
Houses and Halls
Wednesday, 18 November 2015, 12:25 pm | Howard Davis
Houses and Halls Howard Davis New Zealand is renowned for the natural beauty of its countryside, but three events I was fortunate to attend last weekend underscored that its built environment also deserves to be treasured. More >>
'Black Bird': Lonnie Hutchinson at the Dowse
Monday, 9 November 2015, 11:00 am | Howard Davis
'Black Bird: Lonnie Hutchinson 1997-2013: A Survey' is the first major retrospective of Lonnie Hutchinson's rich and varied practice over seventeen years. Born in 1963, Hutchinson received a Diploma in Textile Printing from AIT in 1992 and a Bachelor ... More >>
Living Traditions of Ngatu and Moko
Monday, 2 November 2015, 11:36 am | Howard Davis
Two stunning displays of indigenous art by Dame Robin White and Marti Friedlander are masterfully juxtaposed at Masterton's Aratoi Wairarapa Museum of Art and History. White's enormous Nagatu (painted tapa) were first unveiled at Auckland's Two Rooms ... More >>
Fat Freddy’s Drop – Bays
Monday, 19 October 2015, 9:08 am | Howard Davis
New Zealand’s self-styled "seven-headed soul monster," Fat Freddy’s Drop have come a long way from their humble origins in the 90s, as a group of local lads jamming together. They now regularly play sold-out shows across Europe and hold ... More >>
Gifted: The Entangled Lives of Frank Sargeson & Janet Frame
Wednesday, 14 October 2015, 9:02 am | Howard Davis
The Irish author Frank O'Connor has suggested that short stories often originate from "an attitude of mind that is attracted by submerged population groups." It's not difficult to identify short stories by New Zealand writers which have surfaced ... More >>
