Thursday, June 10 If there had been some ancient Japanese rule banning those with physical or mental disabilities from brandishing swords, then contemporary Japanese film would be totally different. Think of any iconic Japanese film, and it’s likely the plot involved someone who shouldn’t be trusted with a pointy, life-taking…
Brad Meltzer, former attorney and now writer of best sellers set in and around the courtroom, makes no apologies for his love of comic books. By his own admission, his chart-topping novels, among them The Zero Game and The Tenth Justice, read very much like the superhero stuff of his…
6/12 No one plans to see a good movie at a drive-in. Because, according to American tradition, you should pick a flick plotless enough to convince your date that the best action’s not on the screen, but in the backseat. (Anything with a title that includes the phrase “Attack of…
6/12 Kids these days have all the fun. Back in the olden days, a trip to a science and history museum was about as exciting as staring at a pile of old bones. Actually, that was the exciting part. At the end of the long maze of boring exhibits about…
6/13 Party of Five, the television show starring Jennifer Love Hewitt and Neve Campbell, perfected the art of whiney, hormonal family dysfunction. Party of Five, the soiree featuring courses prepared by five swanky Dallas chefs, perfected the art of fine cuisine. This quintet from the leading chef-owned restaurants in the…
6/10 Kim Neal Nofsinger started to dabble in choreography the minute he became a dancer. “Choreography was as natural as what attracted me to modern dance in the first place,” he says. “There is so much freedom, and it’s a very personal medium. I found I could make a personal…
Every once in a while, you encounter a person who seems to have been born under an urgent, righteous star–a person who is both a fiery activist lit with the passion of his convictions and a dramatic storyteller who naturally occupies a place in the public eye. When this person…
As much of the civilized world now knows, the latest Harry Potter director is Alfonso Cuaron, best known for the explicit teen sexual awakening movie Y Tu Mamá También. As such, it may come as little surprise that his Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban begins with the teenage…
Ah, the peculiar genius that is Guy Maddin. Who else but the morose Canadian director, born and raised in one of the coldest cities in the world, would marry silent film, 1930s movie musicals, Prohibition, family melodrama, critique of capitalist zeal and monster-movie gore in a surreal montage about sorrow…
It’s a sign that a nation may be losing its collective mind when it grants a nutty hack like Quentin Tarantino an exalted title like officer of arts and letters, but there’s France for ya. Whether Gallic pop culture is rousingly progressive or embarrassingly adolescent is anyone’s call, but few…
If Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1963) sounded an early salvo of the feminist movement, the photographs of Jin-Ya Huang dance a worldly jig of the feminine in-between. The masterful blur of Huang’s images give form to the shuffle and swing of a woman-girl acting in between East and West,…
Cast: Photographs by Jin-Ya Huang In her photographs, Jin-Ya Huang turns fuzziness and blur into a visual vocabulary of the indecipherable. The illegibility of her images is by no means frustrating. The combined result of the artist’s secret prop choices and photo-digital process, these images will keep you guessing while…
Cocktail hour extends to nearly three in WaterTower Theatre’s bouncy, boozy production of Company. The Stephen Sondheim-George Furth musical finds a group of five upscale married couples gathering for the 35th birthday of bachelor Bobby (Donald Fowler), a 1970s Manhattan playboy with an aversion to settling down. Everybody sings, and…
Company Some 1970s musicals sound positively quaint today (heard Pippin lately?). Not this Stephen Sondheim-George Furth gem about a toxic Manhattan bachelor, Bobby (Donald Fowler), being talked into marriage by his 10 married friends. With a score packed with Sondheim classics–“Being Alive,” “Another Hundred People,” “Marry Me a Little,” “Side…
Gardening isn’t just for old, rich women and their retired husbands anymore. The do-it-yourself trend embraces home gardens with lively gurus in the media who demonstrate how to turn a brownish-green canvas of a yard into something special. And more of you have yards these days, since mortgage loans with…
Thursday, June 3 When we first heard of Classical Acting Company’s choice for their season finale, we got the creeps, chills and what Mom would call the heebie-jeebies. Then we learned that Georges Feydeau’s A Flea In Her Ear is not actually about an aurally tormenting insect. The play is…
Anthony Michael Hall talks of The Struggle, the decade-long odyssey during which he auditioned for everything and got only the occasional something. Some of it was primo stuff, a small role in a good adaptation of a great play (Six Degrees of Separation) or the chance to play Bill Gates…
6/5 Of all the rapid-fire, frantic gum-chewing, prayer-thought-pleas we’ve had during airplane takeoffs, we’ve never once wondered, “What forces of physics and other sciences allow this giant hunk of metal and many, many hunks of humans and all their bulging suitcases to take flight?” Or even, “What inspired the Wright…
6/4 We don’t know a whole lot about Scottish traditions around here. We know they wear skirts, which are called kilts but look very much like man dresses regardless of the name. We also know they play the bagpipes. Other than that, everything we’ve learned came from movies. We never…
6/5 So many milestones in life are celebrated early on: 16 years marks increased freedom, 18 heralds an ascension into adulthood and 21 promises the legal right to make a fool of oneself in public. After that, it’s a slippery slide into ageism, crises and, most deplorably, routines. Too young…
6/9 You’ve watched way too much Friends if you can name which stage performance freaks the pants off Chandler. (Zero points if you answered the naked Kathleen Turner in The Graduate.) The correct answer is Michael Flatley’s Lord of the Dance, since, as Chandler frighteningly explains, it seems that “his…
Sitting through Raising Helen is an exercise in frustration, because somewhere inside this big heap of Hollywood nothing is a something (someone, actually) worth saving and savoring. Her name is Joan Cusack, always a supporting player but never a star no matter her grace and warmth and charm even in…
