Category Archives: Archive

Come visit My Uncle Aug. 1st!

July 11, 2025 – 12:30 pm

What happens when your charmingly clueless uncle stumbles into the future—and starts pressing all the wrong buttons? That’s the setup for director Jacques Tati’s French comedy Mon Oncle—the follow-up to his masterpiece, Playtime—where the endearingly inept Monsieur Hulot still finds himself at odds with modern architecture, mechanical efficiency and consumerism in postwar Paris. From Tati’s […]

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Film noir meets spaghetti western

March 26, 2025 – 4:00 pm

The premise of Tokyo Drifter (Tokyo Nagaremono, 1966) is simple: a reformed yakuza hitman named Tetsu decides to quit his gang and marry his girlfriend, nightclub singer Chiharu. His boss has other plans. The rest is all bright color, stagy sets, songs, jokes, and a nearly incomprehensible plot. But when the mix is this good, […]

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In Memoriam: Stephen H. Grabow

January 28, 2025 – 9:29 pm

If George Beal, Curtis Besinger, and Eugene George were the fathers of KU’s modern architecture program, then Professor Emeritus Stephen Grabow, who died last week in Bloomington, Minn. at age 81, was its passionate, steadfast defender. Separated by one or two degrees from Frank Lloyd Wright and Walter Gropius, who strongly influenced the development of […]

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‘Modernism in Film’ runs on Dec. 6

November 11, 2024 – 8:50 am

Alfred Hitchcock’s playful light comedy North by Northwest, next up in our Modernism in Film series queue, is the perfect tonic to soothe our post-election anxieties. A film set in 1950s paranoia, it stars an urbane and witty Cary Grant as advertising executive Roger Thornhill, who gets mistaken for a spy and is on the […]

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‘Big G’ house gets big thumbs up

November 4, 2024 – 3:27 pm

Saturday’s delightful tour of Chris and Tom North’s renovated midcentury modern home in Western Hills was a case study of how love at first sight can sometimes be mistaken for Love at First Bite. As the Norths told a healthy crowd of Lawrence Modern attendees, the forever home they purchased “on the spot” in 2022 […]

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