Super Bowl LX Halftime Show (National Football League, Apple, aired February 8, 2026)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Yesterday (Sunday, February 8) my husband Charles and I both stayed in and watched Super Bowl LX (“60” in those oppressive Arabic numerals New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani has forced all New Yorkers to use – that’s a real Right-wing meme I’ve seen online). The Bears San Diego were having a Super Bowl watch party but it was in El Cajon; the AWOL Bar in Hillcrest was also doing a Super Bowl watch party but I decided not to go and instead watched the game here at home with Charles. At least I got in three walks during the day, including a short one just before the game’s official start time at 3 p.m. – though the kickoff wasn’t until 3:40 because there were all the extended preliminaries before actual play began. (I wonder if the ancient Romans put the crowds at the Colosseum through this sort of thing.) I was particularly anxious to see the much-ballyhooed and, in Right-wing media circles, much reviled Super Bowl halftime show featuring Puerto Rican singer and rapper Bad Bunny (true name: Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio: “Martínez” is his family name and “Ocasio” his matronymic), which turned out to be marvelous. I wish it had been subtitled so we monolingual English speakers could have understood it, but otherwise it was vividly staged and as strong as I could have hoped for. It began with a crew of campesinos (Latin farmworkers) doing something with a crop that grew in high stalks; at first I thought it was corn but it turned out to be sugar cane, the main cash crop of Bad Bunny’s native Puerto Rico. There were nice traveling shots (courtesy of NBC’s drone camera, which also made periodic appearances during the Super Bowl itself) that came to rest in front of a barrio street set. Midway through Bad Bunny’s number he cut to two other singers, a blonde woman performing in English and a man with a guitar singing in Spanish. Once again I was put off by the lack of chyrons to tell us who they were – the woman was Lady Gaga and the man was Ricky Martin – but the music itself was so powerful and the vibe so strong I enjoyed it all anyway.

This morning I saw a clip from the so-called “All-American Halftime Show” put on by Turning Point USA, the Right-wing political organization formerly chaired by the late Charlie Kirk and headed since his murder by his widow Erika. The clip I saw was from Kid Rock’s performance, and even though it was nominally in English it was just as unintelligible as Bad Bunny’s and considerably meaner, nastier, and more in-your-face. At least part of the problem was that for some reason Kid Rock decided to lip-synch to a pre-recording instead of performing live. I was a bit disappointed in the cast list for the alternative halftime show because Brantley Gilbert, a country singer who attracted my attention for being the only person on Tim McGraw’s Academy of Country Music show Tim McGraw and Friends on May 19, 2013 to use a pedal steel guitar in his band, was on it. (This once-paradigmatic country instrument has been pretty much relegated to the sidelines as most modern country acts play music closer to the 1970’s “Southern rock” sound of Lynyrd Skynyrd and the Allman Brothers than the music of Jimmie Rodgers, Hank Williams, or Johnny Cash – though, come to think of it, Cash never used the pedal steel guitar either.) It’s taken me a while to realize why I like Bad Bunny’s music even though he raps (in Spanish) through most of his songs when I strongly dislike most rap. After the last Grammy Awards show I think I’ve figured it out: Latino rappers like Bad Bunny rap over a much more interesting, more complex set of rhythms derived from Latin vocal and instrumental music instead of the strict militaristic style in which most Black and white rappers perform. (“Hip-hop,” the alternative term for rap used by people who like it, reportedly comes from the strict cadence of military drill, which to an old peacenik like me is one more reason not to like it.)

I’ve seen a report that at the viewing party Donald Trump hosted for the Super Bowl at Mar-a-Lago (he didn’t attend in person, reportedly because he was afraid of being booed) he kept his TV on the regular halftime show instead of the “All-American” one, though of course he let rip with a nasty tweet on his so-called “Truth Social” site afterwards. Bad Bunny had already been causing Right-wing snits when he used his acceptance speech at the Grammy Awards to denounce the tactics of Trump’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) squads in Minneapolis and elsewhere in the country, though he ended his speech with the ennobling words, “The only thing more powerful than hate is love.” He used those words in his Super Bowl performance, too, projecting them on giant screens over the Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara, California where the San Francisco 49’ers regularly play their “home” games (even though Santa Clara is 45 miles southeast of San Francisco). Bad Bunny even included a real-life (straight) wedding in his show; both Charles and I assumed it was play-acting but later we learned from online sources that it was a real bride, a real groom, and a real officiant marrying them to each other. And one thing I loved about this year’s Super Bowl is that Bad Bunny was not the only performer they hosted who was guaranteed to draw hackles among the Trumpsters: in the pre-game concert the 1990’s punk band Green Day performed four songs, including their signature tune, the anti-George W. Bush song “American Idiot.” And before Charlie Puth sang the national anthem (surprisingly well; he managed the song’s notorious high notes adequately if not spectacularly), “out” Lesbian singer Brandi Carlile, one of my favorite modern-day country music performers, did an intense acoustic version of “America, the Beautiful.”

As for the game itself, the Seattle Seahawks beat the New England Patriots 29-13, though the relatively high score was deceptive because it was mostly a defensive battle. Seattle made four penetrations deep into New England territory in the first half but had to settle for field goals each time. Indeed, Seattle’s field-goal kicker, Jason Myers, set a new record for most field goals kicked (five) in a Super Bowl. I made a joke about the ad for TD medication, which (specially produced for a football telecast) made a pun on the fact that “TD” stands for both “touchdown” and “tardive dyskinesia.” Alas, the ad ran at a point in the game when neither team had scored a touchdown! Much of the play reminded me of the 1936 film Pigskin Parade, a largely forgettable movie except that it was Judy Garland’s first feature and it had a great voice-of-reason performance by Patsy Kelly in which she hears out newly appointed coach Stuart Erwin’s lament that his players know how to play basketball but not football. “Then teach them to play basketball-football!” she tells him. It was advice both coaches in last night’s game seemed to have taken to heart, since there were plenty of passes that were broken up and rendered incomplete by a defender leaping up and batting the ball away from the intended receiver in mid-air. Seattle running back Kenneth Walker III was named most valuable player of the game even though his most spectacular play, a 49-yard touchdown run, was nullified by a holding penalty. Still, he gained 135 yards on 27 carries. It’s been a long time since I followed football – it’s a game that has left behind too many brains permanently damaged by concussions for my comfort – though put me in front of a TV broadcasting a game and it all comes back to me from my childhood when my mother, stepfather, brother and I all kept track of the NFL. I’ve been to both baseball and football games “live” and I long ago came to the conclusion that baseball is more fun live than on TV while for football it’s the reverse. The reason, I suspect, is that the action in baseball is spread out over the entire expanse of the stadium, whereas in football it’s centered around wherever the ball happens to be at that moment.

Oscar Micheaux: The Superhero of Black Filmmaking (Quoiat Films, Sky, Kino Lorber, 2021)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Later that night (Sunday, February 8) Turner Classic Movies ran Within Our Gates, a truly great 1920 silent film written, produced, and directed by pioneering African-American filmmaker Oscar Micheaux which I’d seen at https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2023/02/within-our-gates-micheaux-book-and-film.html, and then followed it with Oscar Micheaux: The Superhero of Black Filmmaking, a 2021 documentary produced in Italy by Quoiat Films in association with Sky (Rupert Murdoch’s satellite video channel) and Kino Lorber, which has several of Micheaux’s films available on DVD and Blu-Ray. Oscar Micheaux (the family name was originally “Michaux,” without the “e”) was born on January 2, 1884 in Metropolis, Illinois, the fifth of 13 children born to parents Calvin and Belle Michaux, both of whom had been slaves. His parents were farmers and managed to scrape together enough money to move to a city, where Oscar began his education. But they soon fell on harder times and had to move back to the country, which turned Oscar into a rebel of sorts. Dad sent him off to the city to work in marketing, where Oscar had the chance to meet different sorts of people and broaden his horizons. At age 17, Oscar moved to Chicago to live with his older brother and worked in the stockyards and steel mills. Then he got a job as a Pullman porter, which oddly was one of the most prestigious employment opportunities then available to African-American men. Though the pay was pretty good for a menial job open to Blacks, it was reduced by management which insisted they had to pay for their own uniforms and meals. Still, it gave employees quite a lot of travel and allowed them to see new parts of America. According to the documentary, Micheaux supplemented his salary by skimming from the customers’ payments for meals aboard the train – as did a lot of the porters – though after he was fired in Illinois he got a similar job assignment in the South with no one the wiser in those pre-Internet days. When he’d saved enough money to do so Micheaux moved to Gregory County, South Dakota, bought land and set himself up as a homesteader on a farm he called “The Rosebud.” He prospered for a few years and also developed a second career as a writer, getting pieces published in the African-American newspaper The Chicago Defender.

When his farm finally went bust in 1911, Micheaux wrote a novel about his experiences as a farmer called The Conquest: The Story of a Negro Pioneer. The first edition was self-published in 1913 without an author’s credit, but in 1917 he reissued the book as The Homesteader and put his name on it. It attracted the attention of the Lincoln Motion Picture Company, run by brothers Noble and George Johnson, both actors (Noble Johnson would eventually have a film career and be best known as the native chief in the 1933 King Kong). The Johnsons were the first African-Americans to form a movie company, but negotiations between them and Micheaux broke down. So Micheaux decided to film The Homesteader himself, doing what would now be called crowd-sourcing to raise the production money. The film, which like all too many of Micheaux’s films is lost (of his 42 films only 20 survive in whole or part), was enough of a commercial success that Micheaux followed it up with Within Our Gates, a stunning movie that was widely interpreted – as it is here – as a pro-Black response to D. W. Griffith’s racist masterpiece The Birth of a Nation (1915). Though Micheaux denied having intended Within Our Gates as a response to The Birth of a Nation, he had certainly learned from Griffith. Within Our Gates and his later film Body and Soul (1925), which cast Paul Robeson in his screen debut as two brothers, a scapegrace phony minister and an inventor (https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2024/02/body-and-soul-micheaux-book-and-film.html) are both major works of cinematic art. One can watch Micheaux’s films – at least the surviving silents – and appreciate them not only for their historical importance but as great movies in their own right. Micheaux would not only fund the production of these films but also market them directly, taking his prints on trains and traveling from city to city, showing up at movie theatres in Black communities and offering to show them. (Charles pointed out that this meant he was taking highly flammable materials on passenger trains and risking a fire or explosion.) The documentary mentions in passing that Micheaux had watched the German Expressionist masterpieces of the 1920’s when they were released in the U.S. and learned from them, which accounts for the film noir-like sequences in many of his films.

As I’ve written before about Micheaux, the twin blows of sound films in 1927 and the Great Depression two years later blew his business model. In the silent era it was relatively easy to create a professional-looking film on a low budget and end up with a product comparable to that of the major studios – especially if you had a ready talent pool, which Micheaux did from all the underemployed Black actors in the U.S. In the sound era that became much harder, as state-of-the-art recording equipment was so expensive you practically had to have a major studio behind you to afford it. Micheaux settled in New York City and bought a house in Harlem with the money he made from his books and films, which put him in the middle of the “Harlem Renaissance” of the 1920’s, but once sound came in he lost the ability to self-finance and had to go hat in hand to white financiers for his production money. One Micheaux talkie that is shown being restored in this film is Midnight in Harlem (1935), based on the notorious Leo Frank lynching case. Leo Frank was a white Jewish man who was lynched in Marietta, Georgia on August 16, 1915 for having allegedly raped 13-year-old Mary Phagan. His story was filmed by Warner Bros. in 1937 as They Won’t Forget, but Micheaux beat the major studio to the punch by two years and, of course, changed the victim from a Jewish white man to an African-American. Alas, Micheaux didn’t have enough money to gain the production experience needed to transcend the limitations of early sound film. His 1930’s productions have many of the same crudities of major-studio talkies from the late 1920’s, including stiff, wooden line deliveries and those obnoxious pauses between the actors hearing their cue lines and speaking their own. A lot of his sound films feature musical numbers, but it doesn’t appear he was as capable of recruiting top-tier musical talents for his films as he’d been fine actors like Robeson and Evelyn Preer in his silents.

It also didn’t help that Micheaux had his own racial agenda; he was big on stories contrasting hard-working “good” Blacks who got ahead and succeeded with lazy ones who stayed poor and blamed racism for their failures. Micheaux also frequently told stories about Black men who fall in love with white-looking women but are frustrated until the last reel, when a sudden last-minute revelation shows that the “white” woman the hero has been taking an interest in is actually Black, albeit super-light skinned. This reportedly came from an incident Micheaux went through in his homesteading days, in which he fell in love with a genuinely white woman of Scottish descent (though his biographers have so far been unable to come up with her name), only the relationship went nowhere because in the 1910’s interracial marriages were illegal throughout the U.S. (In 1946, Lena Horne and the white conductor/composer Lennie Hayton had to get married in Paris because no U.S. state then allowed white and Black people to marry. The California Supreme Court threw out the legal ban on interracial marriage in this state in 1949, 18 years before the U.S. Supreme Court invalidated it nationwide.) Micheaux’s later career was, in the words of Black author and film historian Thomas Cripps’s book title, a “slow fade to black.” After The Notorious Elinor Lee (1940) Micheaux made just one more movie, The Betrayal (1948), and died at age 67 in Charlotte, North Carolina. (A number of interviewees for this documentary wondered how someone who’d led an urban life in Chicago and New York ended up dying in so remote a locale as Charlotte.) Oscar Micheaux: The Superhero of Black Filmmaking features interviews with African-American filmmaker John Singleton, film historian Richard Peña, actor Morgan Freeman, musician Stace England, biographer Patrick McGilligan (who’s also written books about Frank Capra and Fritz Lang), and Turner Classic Movies “Silent Sunday Nights” host Jacqueline Stewart (who’s shown at least three Micheaux films ¬– Within Our Gates, The Symbol of the Unconquered, and Body and Soul – on her program). The film was written and directed by Francesco Zippel, who got his title from a strange quirk in the history of Micheaux’s birthplace, Metropolis. The city government has commissioned a giant statue of Superman and given it pride of place in the town square because in the Superman mythos his home town is “Metropolis.” Zippel argues that instead of embracing a fictional white hero who isn’t even from this planet, the town should have hailed Oscar Micheaux, the Black film pioneer who made it both artistically and commercially despite the long odds against him.

Rutles 2: Can't Buy Me Lunch (Above Average Productions, Broadway Video, Rutle Corps, Warner Bros. TV, NBC-TV, 2003)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night at about 9:45 p.m. Charles and I had finished dinner and were ready to watch a movie. Since he’s expressed interest in lighter fare, I picked out Rutles 2: Can’t Buy Me Lunch, the 2003 sequel to the marvelous 1978 TV-movie The Rutles: All You Need is Cash. The original Rutles film is the first “mockumentary” at once depicting a fictional rock band and lampooning it – This Is Spinal Tap (1984) usually gets the credit for that, but Eric Idle and Gary Weis beat Rob Reiner by six years. It was also a beautiful coming together of the original casts of Monty Python’s Flying Circus and Saturday Night Live for a spoof making fun of The Beatles but also paying loving tribute to them, especially in Neil Innes’s songs, which cleverly tweaked the Beatles’ oeuvre and managed to sound “right” and original at the same time. Charles and I got Rutles 2: Can’t Buy Me Lunch as a bonus item when I ordered the original The Rutles: All You Need Is Cash on DVD, and for some reason the version they got was significantly abbreviated: the running time listed on imdb.com for Rutles 2 is 84 minutes but the version we got was just over an hour. It showed Eric Idle, who directed (solo this time) as well as starring as a mock newscaster hosting yet another documentary about The Rutles, the infamous “Pre-Fab Four” (actually The Monkees, the fictional rock band organized by Columbia Pictures for a TV series that lasted two seasons, were also nicknamed the “Pre-Fab Four”) from Rutland, England who conquered the world’s culture and changed the face of music as we knew it. It wasn’t quite as funny as it was the first time round (sequels usually are, though I can think of at least three movie sequels that surpassed their originals: The Bride of Frankenstein, Ivan the Terrible: Part Two, and The Godfather: Part Two), and all too much of it just repeated gags that were done better and funnier in the first film. One new gag was that Eric Idle as Melvin, the narrator, was continually being attacked by another, much younger newscaster who’s also doing a documentary about The Rutles and going to the same places he is. This character is played by the young Jimmy Fallon and gets into a series of knock-down drag-out fights with Idle until at the end it’s revealed [spoiler alert!] that he’s really Idle’s long-lost son, and the two hug. This part reminded me of the Monty Python sketch “Wicker Island,” in which the joke was that the entire population consisted of newscasters continually trying to interview each other.

Part of the poignancy of this film is in the many people featured in the cast who have passed on since, including Robin Williams (brilliantly cast as a German scholar who keeps veering off the Rutles’ history to talk about other things), Carrie Fisher, David Bowie (who thinks Idle is there to interview him about his own music and abruptly ends the interview when he realizes all Idle wants to ask him about is The Rutles), Mike Nichols, and Neil Innes, who wrote the marvelous pastiche songs sung by The Rutles. Innes actually had a connection with the real Beatles; he was in the Bonzo Dog Band, which played a number in the film Magical Mystery Tour alternately called “Baby, Don’t Do it” and “Death Cab for Cutie.” (The later title was ultimately used as a name for an entirely different band, founded in 1997 in Bellingham, Washington.) This film also went into more detail about the private life of the Rutles’ manager, Leggy Mountbatten (patterned after the real Beatles’ manager, Brian Epstein), and in particular his sexual orientation. One interviewee said Leggy knew what sort of men girls would be attracted to because he was attracted to them himself – though the real Brian Epstein went quite the other way in his attractions, towards “rough trade” men who often beat him up after having sex with him. (One of the most interesting stories about Epstein is that when he went on vacation in Spain with John Lennon, when the two were eating in restaurants together Lennon kept asking him how he decided which men were sexually attractive. Obviously Lennon was treating it as a sort of anthropological expedition, investigating what turned a Gay man on and comparing it to what Lennon, a straight man, found attractive about particular women.) There were also some interesting interviews with Billy Connolly, playing himself as a Scottish actor, singer (he had a 1960’s hit in Britain covering, of all songs, Tammy Wynette’s “D-I-V-O-R-C-E”), entertainer, and game-show host who was put in to be the contrarian voice denouncing everything the Rutles ever did, said, sang, performed, or acted. Aside from that it was an O.K. documentary spoof which fulfilled my hope for giving Charles and I a nice light evening’s entertainment to take his mind off his current health issues, even though it was hardly at the level of the savagely brilliant original!

2026 Winter Olympics Opening Ceremony (International Olympic Committee, Banijay Live's Balich Wonder Studio, Olympic Broadcasting Services, NBC-TV, aired February 6, 2026)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Friday, February 6) my husband Charles and I watched the opening ceremony of the 2026 Winter Olympics from Milan and Cortina, Italy. The Olympics themselves are being held in both those cities, which are 200 miles apart from each other, and the opening ceremonies spanned over four Italian towns: Milan, Cortina, Livigno, and Predazzo. The whole event lasted three hours and 39 minutes, though typically for American TV we only got three hours of it, less commercials. The coverage on NBC featured one of the most annoying parts of how the Olympics are presented in the U.S.: the insufferable jingoism. An international event that is supposed to use sports as a way of bringing the various people of the world together gets turned into a bizarre display of chauvinist patriotism. It didn’t help that rapper Snoop Dogg, one of the most repulsive media presences on earth, was on hand to hang out with the U.S. team and cheer them on while the rest of the world’s athletes awaited their turns in the procession of teams that marked the opening ceremony. I was also amused by some of the spellings of the names of the countries, which were in Italian, and the teams themselves marched alphabetically in order of the Italian versions of their names. Thus Saudi Arabia appeared under the “A’s” because their name in Italian is Arabia Saudica.

One thing that I noticed was that the Czech Republic, which split off from Slovakia in the so-called “Velvet Revolution” of the early 1990’s, is now just called “Czechia,” and I couldn’t help but wonder if that’s a sign of the times that “republics” are “out” now and dictatorships are “in.” I was a bit startled that the parade jumped from Austria to “Cechia,” as it’s spelled in Italian, without any “B” countries. It seems that Belarus, a major ally of Russia in its war against Ukraine, was covered by the same ban the International Olympic Committee (IOC) imposed on Russia: its athletes are allowed to compete as individuals but not as representatives of a country. There was also a bit of “let them eat cake” in the sheer extravagance and outrageousness of the ceremony, which was directed by Marco Balich and produced by his company, Banijay Live’s Balich Wonder Studio. Balich, Lida Castelli, and Paolo Fantin designed the cauldrons – plural; there were two, one in Milan and one in Cortina. From the moment the Olympic torch bearers arrived I said to myself, “Thank you, Leni Riefenstahl,” since it was she who, tasked with making the documentary Olympia about the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin, cooked up this whole notion of having a relay run from Greece (the site of the original Olympic Games in antiquity as well as their revival for 1896 in Athens) to wherever they’re being held now, with a torch being carried en route and used to light a cauldron at the final destination, so she’d have a spectacular opening sequence for her film. (I remember one year before the 2016 Summer Olympics that NBC ran a promo for their coverage announcing that they’d mounted a camera on a catapult to follow the sprinters as they raced. They made it seem like their own idea, but sorry, guys, that was another Riefenstahl innovation from 80 years earlier.)

Most of the performance took place inside the San Siro soccer stadium in Milan. It began with a troupe of surprisingly androgynous dancers supposedly re-enacting the story of Cupid and Psyche, though I doubt I could have told you that if the sportscasters hadn’t said that. Then there were three bobble-headed dancers supposedly representing three of Italy’s greatest composers, Rossini, Verdi, and Puccini, to the strains of a disco-ized version of Rossini’s William Tell overture. (Charles once told me a joke he’d heard that the definition of an “intellectual” was someone who could hear the ending of the William Tell overture and not think of The Lone Ranger.) Three giant paint tubes, each emitting a long ribbon of cloth in its designated color (red, blue, yellow – I joked to Charles,” Shouldn’t I say ‘magenta, cyan, yellow’?” Charles joked back, “It’s not a printer”), descended from the rafters and hung in an uncertain position over the action. After that they had two rings descend from the stadium’s rafters, each carrying an acrobatic artist, one male, one female. As the two came down they joined hands in the middle and lowered themselves on a cable to the stadium floor to illustrate the event’s theme, “Armonia” (“Harmony”). Then three more rings emerged and formed the famous Olympic symbol. After that there was an appearance by Mariah Carey, whom I generally like but was miked so badly it was hard to tell just what she was singing, or in what language. First she sang “Volare,” an international hit for Italian singer Domenico Modugno in 1962, though she prefaced it with a verse I’d never heard before because Modugno hadn’t performed it. Then she sang one of her English-language hits, “Nothing Is Impossible.” There were more interminable dance numbers, including one that paid tribute to Chamonix, France, where the first Winter Olympics were held in 1924. The gimmick here was that the dancers would first perform in 1920’s style, then in 1970’s style, then in the style of today – though both the choreography and the music were too tacky to illustrate that.

There was also a strange number featuring an unseen violinist named Giovanni Andrea Zanon playing the 1716 “Berthier” Stradivarius violin while more dancers cavorted and an Italian actor read a poem by The Leopard author Giacomo Leopardi. Then came the procession of the athletes from various countries, following which a surprisingly strong tenor voice sang the aria “Nessun dorma” from Puccini’s last opera, Turandot. For a moment I thought I was hearing Luciano Pavarotti reincarnated, but it turned out to be Andrea Bocelli delivering one of the strongest performances I’ve ever heard from him. My husband Charles took strong exception to the choice of music: he pointed out that “Nessun dorma” is an aria sung by a prince who’s about to force himself sexually on a princess who’s had all her previous potential mates killed because, centuries before, one of her ancestors was abducted and raped by one of his. Charles said he would have preferred “Ritorna vincitor!” from Verdi’s Aïda, though that too would have been problematical: it's sung by the soprano lead, Ethiopian princess Aïda, who realizes she’s been so caught up in the crowd’s enthusiasm she’s openly rooting for the Egyptian general (who’s also her boyfriend) to conquer, occupy, and lay waste to her country. Then there was a performance by South African-born actress Charlize Theron and Ghali, an Italian spoken-word artist who was described as a rapper even though his act has little or nothing in common with the “rap” I’ve come to know and despise in the U.S. The idea was to illustrate the commonality of the world’s peoples and offer a prayer for world peace. There was also a weird sketch by Italian actress Brenda Lodigliani, who pretended her microphone was not working and illustrated Italian hand gestures. The ceremony ended with the hoisting of the Olympic flag in both Milan and Cortina and mezzo-soprano Cecelia Bartoli singing the Olympic hymn backed by Chinese pianist Lang Lang (who, though he wasn’t nearly as flamboyantly dressed, reminded me a lot of Liberace in his willingness to turn up in various locations and play quasi-classical schlock) and the children’s choir of Milan’s famous opera house, La Scala.

The show came to a sudden ending at 11 p.m. our time when NBC’s local affiliate abruptly cut to their regular news show. This was billed as the longest Olympic ceremony in history, though I remember an even longer one at the Vancouver Winter Olympics in 2010, which climaxed with a stunning performance of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” by k. d. lang, who I think sang it better than anyone besides Cohen himself (sorry, Jeff Buckley fans). The most spectacular Winter Olympics opening ceremony I can remember was the one at Lillehammer, Norway in 1994, featuring a dance by supposedly evil spirts from Norwegian mythology called vettas. Their closing ceremony featured “good vettas” to counteract the malign influence of the evil vettas from the opening. I enjoyed the sheer over-the-topness of the whole kitschy spectacle, even though compared to k. d. lang, Mariah Carey was a definite step down in the pop-vocal department.

68th Annual Grammy Awards (National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences, Fulwell Productions, Grammy Studios, CBS-TV, aired February 1, 2026)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Sunday, February 1) I watched the 68th annual Grammy Awards on CBS, hosted by Trevor Noah (the not-very-interesting Black South African Comedy Central brought to the U.S. as a replacement for Jon Stewart, who’s now returned). Noah began the show by announcing that this would be the last Grammy Awards show broadcast on CBS. He didn’t say what’s going to happen to it after that, though my fear is it’s going to end up on one of those abominable and expensive “streaming” services that have systematically destroyed all the media through which I prefer to experience entertainment. Noah also said it was the last time he would host it, which is fine by me. The show was the usual lumbering beast; it was slotted for three hours (5 to 8 p.m. Pacific Time so the East Coast media mavens can have it on so-called “prime time” in their part of the country, though at least starting it at 5 is better than tape-delaying the whole thing, which used to be the norm before the Internet) but actually ran three hours and 40 minutes. I just downloaded an article from Billboard magazine by Joe Lynch that gave the names of the performers and their songs better than I could decipher them easily from my notes (https://www.billboard.com/lists/grammys-performances-ranked-2026/tyler-the-creator-thought-i-was-dead-like-him-sugar-on-my-tongue/), though I noticed that my critical judgments didn’t always coincide with his. For example, he has a much greater tolerance for rap – or “hip-hop,” to use the euphemism for rap by people who actually like it – than I do. The program started with a typically over-the-top opening song by Bruno Mars and a white baby dance diva-ette named Rosé doing their joint hit “APT.” Next up was Sabrina Carpenter doing a song called “Manchild” and cavorting around what looked like a replica of an old-fashioned propeller-driven airliner labeled “SCA,” as if she has an airline named for herself.

After that came the first on-camera awards presentation for Best Rap Album to the despicable Kendrick Lamar for an album called GNX. I’ve loathed Kendrick Lamar ever since an earlier Grammy telecast on which he did an extended, largely incomprehensible rap (the only words I made out with clarity were “insufficient funds”) which the Los Angeles Times reviewer the next day proclaimed the highlight of the show. I couldn’t have disagreed more; Lamar’s piece of shit came on right after the cast of Hamilton performed their show’s opening number, and just as I was starting to think based on the Hamilton excerpt that rap could be beautiful, moving, and express an artistic point, along came Kendrick Lamar to remind me of what garbage it usually is. Then Lamar won the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for music, and I went around for several days bitching, “They wouldn’t give it to Duke Ellington, but they gave it to Kendrick Fucking Lamar.” I even found myself rooting for Tyler, The Creator last night in hopes that Lamar wouldn’t win for Best Rap Album, but not only did Lamar take home that prize, he also won Record of the Year for a song called “Luther” on which he was accompanied by the genuinely talented and musical neo-soul singer Sza (pronounced “Sizzah”). “Luther” sounded lyrical, though I suspect that wasn’t due to Lamar so much as to Sza and the origins of the track in a song by Luther Vandross (hence the title). Lamar said during his acceptance speech that the Vandross estate’s one condition for licensing the song to him was that his track contain no swear words (good for them!).

After the “Best Rap Album” award came a medley of all eight Best New Artist nominees doing abbreviated versions of their big songs: The Marías doing “No One Noticed” (a quite beautiful and lyrical ballad); Addison Rae singing “Fame Is a Gun”; KATSEYE (apparently their all-caps spelling is correct) doing “Gnarly” (appropriate since Charles and I were eating a pizza from Gnarly Girl for dinner); Leon Thomas singing “Mutt” (I wonder if he’s any relation to the 1960’s/1970’s jazz singer Leon Thomas, who sang on Pharoah Sanders’s “The Creator Has a Master Plan”; according to Joe Lynch, he’s been around the business for 20 years even though he broke through recently enough he was eligible for a Best New Artist nomination); Alex Warren doing “Ordinary” while being lifted off the stage and suspended in mid-air on an elevated platform held up by wire cables (it reminded me of the 1943 film Presenting Lily Mars, with its big number showing Judy Garland singing on the stage floor while Tommy Dorsey’s entire band was suspended above her, and I feared for her safety in case the cables broke and the platform smashed her like a pancake); Lola Young doing a version of her song “Messy” backed only by her own piano; Olivia Dean (the ultimate Best New Artist winner) doing a nice bit of neo-Motown soul called “Man I Need”; and sombr (the all lower-case spelling is correct) singing “12 to 12.” Nobody noticed his vocal because I suspect everyone was oohing and aahing over his outfit, a jacket and pants made up entirely of glass (at least I think they were glass; I hope for his sake they were plastic!) mirrors. I joked to my husband Charles that this was a costume Mick Jagger and David Bowie had rejected as being in bad taste. Of all the Best New Artist nominees the one who most impressed me by far was Lola Young; while a later sound clip of “Messy” indicated that it’s a normal pop ballad in the modern style, for the show itself she reduced it to just her own voice and piano, in the manner of the late Laura Nyro or the still-living Carole King (who later appeared on the show as an awards presenter). I’d love to hear her do a whole album that way!

After the Best New Artist award, Justin Bieber came out wearing nothing but boxer shorts and socks to perform his song “Yukon,” which was actually one of the better pieces of the evening. He came out carrying an electric guitar (not an acoustic, as Joe Lynch reported) but it wasn’t plugged into anything and all the guitar chords, like his other accompaniment, came from a samples box he manipulated on stage. I’m guessing he performed (mostly) undressed to show off the stunning set of tattoos on his chest. Then came the award for Best Musíca Latina Album – or was it Best Musíca Urbana album – to Bad Bunny for Debí Tirar Mas Fótos (when Bad Bunny came on Stephen Colbert’s show to talk about the album – not, alas, to perform any of it – both Charles and I misheard the last word as “Hótos,” a derogatory Spanish slur for Gay people). Bad Bunny gave a speech denouncing Donald Trump’s immigration policy and the actions of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), but said our response should be rooted in love, not hate. This was actually an unusually political awards show for the start of the second year of President Trump 2.0, since most awards presenters and recipients have shied away from direct political comment for fear of retribution from the notoriously thin-skinned Trump and his minions. Not the Grammys, however; Bad Bunny is performing at the Super Bowl halftime show this year, which led to a slew of half-baked Trump screeds on his “Truth Social” Web site denouncing the National Football League for doing something as unpatriotic as inviting Bad Bunny to appear. Trump has also announced that he won’t be attending the Super Bowl this year (though more likely that’s due to the likelihood that he’d be booed there the way he was at the World Series), and it’s amazing that Trump is treating Bad Bunny as an “alien” when Bad Bunny comes from Puerto Rico, a commonwealth territory of the United States. (That puts Puerto Ricans in a curious Kafka-esque bind: they can’t vote in U.S. elections in Puerto Rico, but if they move to an actual U.S. state, they can.)

After Jelly Roll won for Best Contemporary Country Album with Beautifully Broken (like Merle Haggard, Jelly Roll – true name: Jason Bradley DeFord – is an ex-convict and has made a great deal of that in his marketing strategy; he devoted virtually his entire acceptance speech to thanking God and Jesus for turning his life around), Lady Gaga did a stunning performance of “Abracadabra” dressed in a typically spectacular outfit featuring a wicker headdress through whose grill she sang. Then she won Best Pop Vocal Album for Mayhem. I’ve always liked Lady Gaga since, unlike most dance-music artists, she actually writes songs with recognizable beginnings, middles, and endings. She doesn’t just bark a few words over a dance beat and call it a “song.” While I still like her even better as a standards singer (memo to Gaga: don’t let the death of Tony Bennett stop you from recording those sorts of songs!), she’s still one of my favorite current performers. After that Bruno Mars, who’d appeared in the opening number, returned to sing his current Billboard No. 1 hit, “I Just Might.” Every time I’ve seen Bruno Mars before this I’ve got the impression that he’s been auditioning for a biopic of Michael Jackson. Now that the Michael Jackson biopic has been made and is scheduled for release April 24 with someone else playing him (an actual blood Jackson: Jaafar, son of Jermaine and nephew of Michael). Mars definitely needs another act. Lola Young won for Best Pop Solo Performance for “Messy” (though as I mentioned above, the sound clip from that song with full band backing was hardly as haunting as the voice-and-piano version she’d performed earlier) and Carole King came out to present the Song of the Year award. Both she and the eventual winners, Billie Eilish and her brother Finneas O’Connell for “Wildflower,” were wearing “ICE OUT” buttons.

Then there were an O.K. rap number (and for me to call a rap number “O.K.” is high praise indeed given my usual detestation of the form): Tyler, The Creator with a medley of “Like Him,” “Thought I was Dead,” and “Sugar on My Tongue.” Between the latter two songs he drove a prop red car on stage (which reminded me of the red Jaguar a Metropolitan Opera director and the management recently fought over in a modern-dress production of Bizet’s Carmen; the management thought the mechanism to move the car around on stage was too expensive and cut it, and the director and set designer withdrew their names from the credits in protest; you can read the whole story at https://apnews.com/article/met-opera-carmen-dispute-cracknell-levine-fb2d40ec878eaac756a8c00930fb4d73) and crashed it into a gas pump. After another preposterously named award – the “Dr. Dre Human Impact Award” to Pharrell Williams (surprisingly he wasn’t wearing a strange hat, but the person who presented it to him, rapper Q-Tip, was), the show segued into a seemingly interminable “In Memoriam” segment. It began with brief tributes to Brian Wilson (by Bruce Springsteen despite the opposite poles of their music, both geographically and stylistically) and Bob Weir of the Grateful Dead (by John Mayer). Then it segued into two ultra-extended musical sections, one paying tribute to Ozzy Osbourne (and the nicest thing I can say about his death in 2025 was that it didn’t happen well before that; I’ll never forget the scene in the documentary The Decline and Fall of Western Civilization II: The Metal Years in which the film’s producer attempted to interview Osbourne while he was pouring himself a glass of orange juice, only he was so stoned he was missing the glass completely and pouring orange juice all over his floor) and one a joint tribute to producer D’Angelo and singer Roberta Flack.

The Osbourne tribute featured Slash from Guns ‘n’ Roses, Duff McKagan, Chad Smith, and singer Post Malone doing Osbourne’s song “War Pigs,” while the D’Angelo/Flack number presented Lauryn Hill (in her first Grammy appearance since 1999) and an assortment of mostly African-American performers opening with the Hill/D’Angelo song “Nothing Lasts Forever” and closing with an incandescent reading of Flack’s hit “Killing Me Softly with His Song.” Between the awards for Record (single) and Album of the Year, the Grammy producers squeezed in another song, this time a rap number by Clipse (brothers Gene “Malice” and Terrence “Pusha T” Thornton), the Voices of Fire choir, and Pharrell Williams doing some actual singing on a number called “So Far Ahead.” Then the Album of the Year went to Bad Bunny for Debí Tirar Mas Fótos. I wonder if the Los Angeles Times writer who did that article about Kendrick Lamar which pissed me off so much was gratified to see that a rap album finally won, but I didn’t mind so much because Bad Bunny’s style is the so-called “Nuyorican” variant of reggaetón, which uses elements of rap but with a genuinely infectious and creatively deployed Latin rhythm instead of the strict marching cadence of most rap (which is where the term “hip-hop” came from; when I heard that the term “hip-hop” derived from the rhythm of military drill, that gave me one more reason to hate it). Overall the Grammy Awards were a good temperature-taking of the current pop music scene (which is one reason I still like to watch it even though my musical tastes run far more to the past than the future these days), and if Lola Young makes a CD featuring just her voice and piano, I’ll gladly buy it.

The Symbol of the Unconquered (Micheaux Book and Film Company, 1920)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Sunday, February 1), after the 68th annual Grammy Awards lumbered to a close, my husband Charles and I watched a couple of films on Turner Classic Movies. One was The Symbol of the Unconquered: A Story of the Ku Klux Klan (1920), written, directed, and produced by Oscar Micheaux. Oscar Micheaux was the pioneering independent African-American filmmaker who made 44 films between 1919 and 1948, including at least two near-masterpieces, Within Our Gates (1920) and Body and Soul (1925). Micheaux was born in Metropolis, Illinois on January 2, 1884, one of 13 children in a farm family headed by his father, an ex-slave. After flipping back and forth between rural and urban life, Micheaux moved to Chicago at age 17 and lived with his brother, a waiter. Disappointed in his brother’s relatively low status, after stints in the legendary Chicago stockyards and steel mills, he opened a shoeshine stand near a popular African-American barber shop and started learning how to run a business and save money. Micheaux became a Pullman porter at a time when this was one of the higher-status jobs available to Blacks; it meant good pay, steady work, and the chance to travel. Then Micheaux moved to South Dakota and bought land, setting himself up as a homesteader, which inspired his first novel, The Conquest (1913), and his first film, an adaptation of The Conquest called The Homesteader (1919). According to the Wikipedia page on Micheaux, “His theme was about African-Americans realizing their potential and succeeding in areas where they had not felt they could. The book outlines the difference between city lifestyles of Negroes and the life he decided to lead as a lone Negro out on the far West as a pioneer. He discusses the culture of doers who want to accomplish and those who see themselves as victims of injustice and hopelessness and who do not want to try to succeed, but instead like to pretend to be successful while living the city lifestyle in poverty. He had become frustrated with getting some members of his race to populate the frontier and make something of themselves, with real work and property investment.” Micheaux’s second film, Within Our Gates, fortunately survives and is a great movie; essentially it’s an “answer film” to D. W. Griffith’s racist masterpiece The Birth of a Nation (1915), though Micheaux denied that was his intention. Though Micheaux had no use for Griffith’s politics, it’s clear he learned from Griffith how to make a movie; Within Our Gates is state-of-the-art technically for its time, filled with close-ups, moving-camera shots, creative lighting, and the other innovations Griffith had pioneered. (Within Our Gates is being presented on Turner Classic Movies’ "Silent Sunday Showcase” Sunday, February 9, at 9 p.m. Pacific time, midnight Eastern time. If you haven’t seen this remarkable film, you owe it to yourself to grab that opportunity. I wrote about it on moviemagg at https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2023/02/within-our-gates-micheaux-book-and-film.html.)

As it stands, The Symbol of the Unconquered – Micheaux’s fourth film – doesn’t seem to be on the level of Within Our Gates or Body and Soul, though that may be because it doesn’t survive complete. The only known print is a partial one found in Belgium (which meant that the French titles had to be laboriously back-translated into English) that’s missing key footage, including the scene we’d most like to see (more on that later). It’s basically a frustrated love story between Eve Mason (Iris Hall), a light-skinned Black woman; and Hugh Van Allen (Walker Thompson), a virtuous Black prospector. In the opening scene, Eve is stuck in a big city and seeks shelter in a hotel run by light-skinned Black man Jefferson Driscoll (Laurence Chenault, who frequently appeared in Micheaux’s films as well as other relatively high-end productions aimed at Black audiences). Unfortunately, though Driscoll is Black (and looks it on screen), he’s tried “passing” for white, only to be repeatedly “outed” by his mother (Mattie Wilkes) in a situation Fannie Hurst would recycle for her 1933 novel Imitation of Life. This has given Driscoll an intense hatred for his own race, which he expresses by forcing Eve (whom he’s “outed” as Black by looking at her eyes) and a Black male who’s shown up the same night to sleep in a barn. Running out of the barn to seek shelter in the countryside, Eve encounters Hugh Van Allen, who’s also Black and is attracted to Eve but hangs back from expressing it because Eve looks white and he doesn’t want the opprobrium of an interracial relationship. According to TCM’s “Silent Sunday Showcase” host Jacqueline Stewart, Micheaux used this plot situation again and again – a Black man falls in love with a woman he thinks is white but turns out to be a light-skinned African-American – because during his homesteading days he’d fallen in love with a (genuinely) white woman who wanted nothing to do with him because of the racial divide. So he used his authority as a writer to imagine a wish-fulfillment fantasy of the happy ending he hadn’t had in real life (though the real Micheaux was married three times and his last wife, Alice B. Russell, stayed with him from 1926 to his death in 1951). Skulduggery ensues as Jonathan Driscoll hooks up with discredited white ex-judge August Barr (Louis Dean, whom for some reason Micheaux billed as “Déan”) and Indian fakir Tugi (Leigh Whipper) to swindle local landowners.

From a letter accidentally dropped by a sloppy mail carrier, Driscoll learns that Van Allen’s land is valuable – though it’s not until later in the film that we learn why – and intends either to force Van Allen to sell or get him to give up the property some other way. The “some other way” is to get a local thug-type white guy Judge Barr knows to lead raids on the Van Allen property in the white-sheets regalia of a Klan-like organization called the “Knights of the Black Cross.” They take advantage of a two-day trip Van Allen has taken to buy furniture for his home (though all we’ve seen him living in is a shack and a tent). Eve learns of this and gets on a horse to ride to Van Allen and warn him, but in the meantime the Klan is doing a number of night rides, first with just one Klansman waving a firework and then with a whole cadre of them. (There’s a certain Ed Woodian uncertainty as to when this is taking place because Eve’s ride is taking place at twilight while the Klan’s is happening in the dead of night.) In the missing scene whose absence is the most frustrating part of the film because it’s the one we’d most like to see, the Blacks successfully beat off the Klan’s attack by throwing bricks at them. The only way we know of what these scenes contained was by a contemporary review of the film in the New York Age, a Black-oriented paper founded in 1887, which is quoted in the restoration’s intertitles. When the film resumes it’s two years later, Hugh Van Allen is now an oil millionaire, his land is a broad expanse of derricks, and he’s running the entire operation while Eve is still in touch with him. But he won’t pursue her because he still thinks she’s white until she gets a letter from “The Committee for the Defense of the Colored Race” (read: the NAACP) documenting that she’s really Black, and the two clinch as the movie ends. The version we were watching was put together in 1995 and the soundtrack was by the legendary jazz drummer Max Roach, though instead of assembling a band to score the film with the sort of music Roach had brought to his early-1960’s albums We Insist! Freedom Now Suite and Percussion Bitter Sweet, Roach used his drums as the only instrument. The effect is to watch the film while hearing a great jazz drummer practicing in the next room. The Symbol of the Unconquered is a frustrating film, not only because of its incompleteness – imagine the thrill, just five years after D. W. Griffith had glorified the Ku Klux Klan in The Birth of a Nation, of seeing the Klan vanquished! – but because Micheaux didn’t bring the same level of directorial skill to it that he had to Within Our Gates or Body and Soul. Still, one thing Micheaux knew how to do as a director was get great, understated performances from his cast, and so he does here.

Mozart: The Magic Flute (Sverige Radio, Svensk Filmindustri, 1975)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Sunday, February 1) my husband Charles and I watched a Turner Classic Movies showing of one of the most delightful movies ever made: Ingmar Bergman’s 1975 film of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s 1791 opera The Magic Flute. This was originally produced for Swedish television, though it was released theatrically elsewhere in the world. Charles and I both saw it in the late 1970’s in its initial U.S. theatre run. I’m not sure if this was the first time I saw it, but I remember a screening at San Francisco State University when both my then-girlfriend Cat and my first boyfriend Bruce were students there. I invited both of them to attend it with me and read them a synopsis of the plot, and Bruce started giggling every time the synopsis contained the word “gay.” Cat got irked with him and said, “The word ‘gay’ does not always mean ‘homosexual’!” Bergman cast his opera with then little-known singers from the Swedish National Opera and had them sing in Swedish, though the sonorities of Swedish are close enough to those of German (the language in which Mozart and his librettist, Emmanuel Schickaneder, wrote the original) that the overall sound was right even though it was weird, in the scene in which Papageno (Håkan Hagegård, one of two singers in the cast who went on to international careers) is contemplating suicide and intends to do so on the count of three, says “en … två … tre” instead of “eins … zwei … drei.” Bergman and his co-writer, Alf Henrikson, did something that made the plot of The Magic Flute more sensible and dramatically coherent. In the original, Prince Tamino (Josef Köstlinger) is recruited by the Queen of the Night (Birgit Nordin) to rescue her daughter Pamina (Irma Urrilla) from the clutches of the sinister wizard Sarastro (Ulrik Cold). Only when he gets to Sarastro’s compound he finds that Sarastro is actually an enlightened spiritual leader and the Queen of the Night is a villainess who wants to kill him so she can take over the world. What Bergman and Henrikson did was to make Sarastro Pamina’s father, so the story becomes simply a particularly nasty and violent custody battle – even though it’s hard to imagine Sarastro and the Queen ever having had a sexual relationship. (I had the same problem with my parents; my mom and dad broke up when I was 1 ½, and so I not only never experienced them as a family, but they were so different from each other, and seemingly so incompatible, that my own existence remains the only evidence I have that they ever had sex.)

Papageno, the birdcatcher, is the comic-relief character; early in the opera the Three Ladies of the Queen (Britt-Marie Aruhn, Kirsten Vaupel, and Birgitta Smiding) kill a serpent that is menacing Tamino and thus save his life. When Tamino comes to, Papageno tells him that he killed the serpent, and the Three Ladies respond by literally putting a padlock over his lips so he can’t lie any more. The titular “magic flute” is given Tamino by the Three Ladies, who tell him that its music will cast a magic spell over anyone in the vicinity. They also give Papageno a set of magic bells, and one night in the original 1791 production (which was a major hit, by the way) Schickaneder, who was on stage playing Papageno, was startled when Mozart, who was leading the orchestra in the pit and also playing the glockenspiel to supply the magic music, got out of synch with him so his motions on stage no longer matched what the audience was seeing him do. According to Alicia Malone, TCM’s host for foreign films, Bergman originally wanted to shoot it inside the Drottningholm Theatre in Stockholm because it had been built in the 18th century and therefore was historically accurate for the production. Alas, the Drottningholm management vetoed it as a location because of the fire hazard, so Bergman had to re-create the Drottningholm’s stage machinery on a Swedish soundstage. Bergman cuts back and forth between a theatre audience (in modern dress) supposedly watching the opera being performed, charmingly anachronistic sets representing how The Magic Flute would have been performed when it was new, and a few scenes of striking realism: notably the one in which Pamina, put out by the fact that Tamino won’t say a word to her (because of a vow of silence Sarastro extracted from him as one of the three trials he’d have to go through to prove himself worthy of her and Sarastro’s order), contemplates suicide with the dagger the Queen of the Night gave her to kill Sarastro. (Among the audience members shown on screen were Bergman himself, actors who’d appeared in his previous films like Erland Josephson and Liv Ullmann, and his cinematographer, Sven Nyqvist.)

According to Malone, Bergman deliberately cast singers with relatively small voices to preserve the intimacy of the drama. He failed with just one cast member, Ulrik Cold as Sarastro, whose voice is nice enough but does not have the weight and gravitas to sing what George Bernard Shaw once called “the only music fit to come from the mouth of God.” Bergman also cast a tenor, Ragnar Ulfung, as Monostatos, the Moor who’s part of Sarastro’s entourage but is secretly an opportunist whom the Queen recruits to her side by promising him Pamina. Mozart originally marked Monostatos as a tenor role, but he wrote the music low enough it can be sung by a baritone and usually is in modern productions. Bergman also wisely avoided the temptation to have Monostatos play the part in blackface, and Ulfung was the other singer besides Hagegård in this cast to go on to an international career. The rest of the casting is fine and the film itself, with its magnificent shifting between the various levels of realism and stage artifice, is one of the best examples of filming an opera and making it live as a movie. Charles and I both found it charming in the late 1970’s, and we still do. It also makes me curious to watch Ivor Bolton’s 2012 DVD of The Labyrinth, Emmanuel Schickaneder’s 1798 sequel to The Magic Flute. With Mozart having died just two months after The Magic Flute’s premiere, Schickaneder needed a new composer, and after Beethoven turned him down (though Schickaneder signed Beethoven for another opera which became Fidelio) he signed a man named Peter von Winter (1754-1825) to compose it and concocted an even more convoluted plot than he had the first time around.