On a Friday night in March, it was hard to tell where to look: at the flickering movie screen, where The Band was wrapping up a 16-year career with a farewell concert, or at a still Robbie Robertson, who was sitting in the audience at the Paramount Theater in Austin…
Quick, quote a famous line from Shakespeare’s Coriolanus. Don’t worry. Nobody can. Among the Bard’s works, this five-act tragedy is one of the least quotable, and it is performed less often even than Titus Andronicus and Timon of Athens. Probably for good reason. This hasn’t stopped the Kitchen Dog Theater…
Astronauts don’t get nervous. Like firefighters, police officers and Mariah Carey’s publicist, they exhibit unblinking courage when most mortals would cower. Such fearlessness is necessary during re-entry when a space shuttle is traveling 5 miles per second and ripping electrons in the rarefied gases above the planet, causing the plasma…
When Art Spiegelman’s Maus first appeared in 1972, it contained no references to Jews or Nazis but left no room for misinterpretation: It was a Holocaust tale, told with animals, that culminated at Mauschwitz–“which some people seem to have read as the punch line to the strip,” Spiegelman once recounted…
Women who exchange descriptions of their sexual encounters are certainly no more appealing than men who boast in locker rooms, but they seem to get more free passes. If, in the name of social candor, Jerry Springer can induce sisters to confess what they’ve done with barnyard animals and every…
It is possible to admire Frailty, directed by Texas-born actor Bill Paxton, without actually liking it. It’s not, strictly speaking, a gratifying movie: Too dependent on twists, both excruciatingly obvious and irritatingly ludicrous, it never fully satisfies; what you can’t guess you won’t see coming, because it’s too outrageous to…
Wending through the summaries of this year’s forthcoming blockbusters–dudes fight evil, chicks keep yanking up their trendy hip-huggers while fighting evil–it’s immediately refreshing to note a movie about furry freaks and saucy geeks whose primary goal is just to, you know, do it. In Human Nature, written by Charlie Kaufman…
One would scarcely imagine that the subject of gay and lesbian Orthodox Jews would have the makings of anything more than an exceedingly brief documentary. Leviticus 20:13, which says a man who “lies with a man” must be put to death, doesn’t offer much in the way of wiggle room,…
Directed by a focus group of 17-year-old boys (and their younger sisters, maybe) who titter at the mention of the word “punany” and guffaw at the sight of Selma Blair caught on a cock ring (surrounded, no less, by onlookers straight from a Village People audition), this is romantic comedy…
Ben Affleck is Gavin Banek, a slick attorney who can’t seem to get why people hate lawyers (and him) so much, even as he’s persuading a senile philanthropist to sign over power of appointment to his firm. Samuel L. Jackson is Doyle Gipson, an insurance telemarketer who attends Al-Anon meetings…
It’s never a good sign when a film’s star spends the entirety of the film in a coma; it’s worse when you begin to envy her condition. This direct-to-Beta bummer stars Mia Kirshner (Not Another Teen Movie) as Alicia, a lower-class student at an elite, upper-class North Carolina college that…
A callow, handsome, just-married professional finds himself attracted to his own sex when he meets another knowing, handsome, well-adjusted professional man. Sound familiar? No, it’s not Making Love from 1982, but a 1999 Spanish film directed by Gerardo Vera from a script by ngeles Gonzáles Sinde, starring Javier Bardem, Jordi…
Big news: Big Daddy isn’t such a bigot after all. That’s one of several important revelations to be found in WaterTower Theatre’s breathtaking new production of Tennessee Williams’ Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, where the emphasis shifts away from “Maggie the Cat” and onto the other feuding family members…
John Alexander has led the most charmed of painterly lives. True, he didn’t start out that way; he was born in Beaumont, raised among swamp critters and fundamentalists and educated in the sticks (B.A. from Lamar University, M.F.A. from Southern Methodist University). His inspiration to paint probably came as he…
On a good day, Mark Cuban might respond to a journalist’s query with a terse, unpunctuated e-mail that reads like something dashed off by a hostage while his captors are in the can. It’s understandable: The man’s running the Dallas Mavericks, investing in movie distribution and exhibition companies, sticking it…
For author and filmmaker Michael Moore, the old joke about having an angel on one shoulder and the devil on the other, each whispering commands, must be more like a daily battlefield. Except, for Moore, on one side there’s Corporate Crimefighting Chicken (his poultry-costumed crusader from his NBC series TV…
Remember back in school the excitement that surrounded getting to see a film during class? Either a projector or a television would be wheeled into the room, those dreadful fluorescent lights were turned off and suddenly we were free for 45 minutes. It would be a great day. Though it…
The two slacker anti-heroes of Alfonso Cuarón’s Y Tu Mamá También (And Your Mother, Too) (And Your Mother, Too) come furnished with all the usual glitches of late adolescence–raging hormones, impatient wanderlust, contempt for their elders and a jones for dope and beer. In fact, Julio (Gael García Bernal) and…
On September 10, Barry Sonnenfeld’s Big Trouble, a slight comic caper drenched in the sweltering muck of Miami, was a nagging chore to be tended to by film critics–one more mediocre multimillion-dollar all-star fiasco in which you can almost hear the filmmakers giggling behind the cameras. On September 11, Big…
Anybody who takes a second, sorrowful look at the charred rubble in lower Manhattan, the body counts in the West Bank or the brazen denials of Slobodan Milosevic will have to conclude that the brotherhood of man isn’t attracting many good recruits these days. Neither, for that matter, is the…
When it was first shown in rough-cut form two years ago, Bruce Weber’s documentary collage dealt primarily with his latest fetish object, college wrestling champion Peter Johnson, with occasional interludes about singer Frances Faye. Greatly re-edited, the film is now primarily about Faye, a lesbian hipster whose hard-driving style and…
Maryam Armin (Mariam Parris), a beautiful 16-year-old Iranian-born transplant so out of touch with her roots she prefers to be called Mary, has goo-goo eyes for a dim-bulb blond boy and dreams of becoming a newscaster–Jessica Savitch, actually. It’s November 1979, and Mary’s cousin, college student Ali (David Ackert), has…
