Michael Bilow

Black Maria Film Festival: Panta rhei

The Black Maria Film Festival tour makes a stop in Rhode Island Short films provide opportunities for independent filmmakers to explore the visual medium outside of the traditional constraints of narrative and documentary, sometimes becoming moving paintings. This more experimental and avant garde aspect of film dominated the two-hour Black Maria Film Festival tour stop […]

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A Christmas Carol Featuring Big Nazo: Haunting the House Pleasantly

When renowned masked puppet workshop Big Nazo produces visionary ghosts, no thin airy shoals are these. Charles Dickens prefaced his classic 1843 novella, “I have endeavoured in this ghostly little book, to raise the ghost of an idea, which shall not put my readers out of humor with themselves, with each other, with the season, […]

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A Very Merry Unauthorized Children’s Scientology Pageant: Drinking the Kool-Aid

If the children of Scientologists in their youthful innocence performed a stage musical in the mode of a Christmas pageant about their religious movement that has driven people to bankruptcy and suicide, complete with cheesy cardboard props and scenery, the result would presumably be this black humor extravaganza. The satire consists largely in simply exhibiting […]

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Disagreeable but Not Ridiculous – Doubt: A Parable

Doubt as a philosophical concept has a bad reputation in traditional religion, and its advocates have tended to be heretics and apostates. Voltaire, one of history’s most famous agnostics, said, “Doubt is disagreeable but certainty is ridiculous.” Rarely has that aphorism been more eloquently expressed than in John Patrick Shanley’s play Doubt: A Parable, a […]

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