David Salo’s colleagues and classmates at the University of Wisconsin-Madison have absolutely no idea how he spends his free time. It’s not that the 32-year-old linguistics grad student is ashamed of his hobby (or obsession), which has occupied him for some 26 years. They simply cannot be bothered with it…
‘Tis the season to roll out the proverbial cash cows of Christmas–those obligatory feel-good productions, given a tragic twist perhaps or a comic shakedown, but ultimately setting their sights on invigorating the spirit and enriching the box office. After all, what would the holidays be without three different theatrical versions…
Beneath the hazy, mystifying layers of Vanilla Sky lies a remarkable Tom Cruise performance–one that, to a large extent, takes place beneath a makeup artist’s piled-on scars and a costumer’s blank “prosthetic” mask. As David Aames, hipster publisher of Maxim-like magazines, Cruise plays a lothario so vain he plucks out…
The combatants in Patrick Stettner’s compelling first feature, The Business of Strangers, are a middle-aged software executive (Stockard Channing) wearing a steel-blue suit and an air of professional hauteur; the executive’s mysterious new assistant (Julia Stiles), fresh out of Dartmouth and full of self-righteous aggression; and a cocky “headhunter” (Frederick…
At first look, the cloud of gloom that envelops Lucrecia Martel’s strangely affecting first feature, La Cienaga (The Swamp), seems to have no specific origin and no particular provocation. An alcoholic matriarch, Mecha (Graciela Borges), lolls beside a filthy swimming pool at a decrepit South American villa, sloshing glasses of…
It is December 5, the day AOL Time Warner-owned DC Comics has been anxiously awaiting for almost 15 years–the day writer-illustrator Frank Miller once more dons cape and cowl to resurrect the Dark Knight, his fiercely rendered vision of an obscenely obsessed middle-aged Batman. Today, stores will finally open their…
Don’t be scared by the title. Christmas at Ground Zero, a new collection of miniplays onstage at the Bath House Cultural Center through December 22, isn’t some hurried-up, played-to-order commentary on the national nightmare that started in September. Only one of the works in this sometimes touching, sometimes trivial production…
History, Bonaparte once observed, is a set of lies agreed upon. Thus when art-world eggheads bemoan “the end of art history,” or mourn the passing of the progressive historical narrative, or invoke unreadable dead German philosophers, they are really just misty for the not-so-old days when everyone agreed. Until the…
There’s a notion that, for theater companies, holiday stage productions are cash cows. They can throw together any old show related to the season–A Christmas Carol, The Nutcracker, Scrooge, A Christmas Story, The Best Christmas Pageant Ever–with a few costumes (usually passed along year to year) and they’ve got a…
Elves are back in style. Of course, to the average role-playing game enthusiast, they never went out. But those not accustomed to spending waking hours dreaming of the darkest depths of Mordor, there is about to be a big-budget introduction by way of the three Lord of the Rings films…
Comedy Backdoor Comedy: Linda Stogner, Doug Richardson and the club’s other comedians perform at 8 p.m. ($15) and 10:30 p.m. ($30, which also includes party favors, black-eyed peas and a midnight champagne toast). 718 N Buckner Blvd, 972-601-2204. Hotels The Stoneleigh Hotel: A single guest room is $89; the Celebration…
The lights go down, and the puzzlement begins. Ensemble cast of superstars? Check. Loose remake of amusing curiosity? Check. Built-in, prefab sense of cool? Check. A little something for wistful fans of Dino and Sammy? Check. So…wait a minute. Is this The Cannonball Run Redux? With his ambitious but unnecessary…
Written and directed by Olivier Ducastel and Jacques Martineau (Jeanne and the Perfect Guy), the disarmingly inventive road movie Adventures of Felix follows the idiosyncratic path of a sweet-natured, gay, half-French/half-Arab youth (Sami Bouajila) who, on being laid off from his jobs, decides to hitchhike across France to Marseilles, where…
“Mr. Human Rights,” they once called him, and though his was never the most famous name on the bill–that was Bono or Bruce Springsteen, Sting or Peter Gabriel–as the organizer of the Conspiracy of Hope concerts in 1986 and the Human Rights Now! world tour two years later, Jack Healey…
Emile Zola’s novel Thérèse Raquin offended French readers in the 19th century. Considered scandalous, even pornographic, it told of a repressed young woman who kills her husband to marry a rogue painter. The author’s tale has inspired New York-born composer Tobias Picker to create a more likable Thérèse for a…
Almost Famous made a meager $32 million during its run in theaters at the end of 2000; having cost more than $60 mil, the movie was deemed a bust–by DreamWorks, which footed the bill, and by more than a handful of writer-director Cameron Crowe’s old rock-crit running buddies, who thought…
There is only one serious flaw with Albert Maysles’ new four-part documentary series for the Independent Film Channel, With the Filmmaker: Each episode is too damned short. Thirty minutes with Martin Scorsese, as the director preps his 20-years-in-the-making Gangs of New York, is but a frustrating wink in time; he’s…
Though Behind Enemy Lines, set in Bosnia, was originally due for release next year, already it feels antiquated; that conflict is already a distant memory, a ghost lost in the shadow of the war on terrorism. The film tested so well 20th Century Fox pushed up its release date, and…
Ever endure a friend stuck in a deep depression who refused to lighten up but delighted in spewing ugliness to bring you down? Such is the method of The American Astronaut, a thematically inventive but woefully crude science-fiction jaunt that’s less engaging entertainment for us than perverse psychotherapy for writer-director-star…
A poem, written by an Academy Award-winning screenwriter, ends thusly: “If the Nazis have my penis–who has my arm?” Another begins, “Who rise to adversity, I shit on you.” Another, titled “The Hopping Poem,” reads, in its entirety, “Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck That Hurt, Fuck Fuck.” And another, called “Is…
This city can be full of wonder for the newcomer or the native, a neon-drenched metropolis offering plenty of eye candies. But once the allure of bright-green downtown skyscrapers wears off, the sights are replaced by the overwhelming smell of the Trinity River. Still, within the towers and other man-made…
As a longtime Thoroughbred racing aficionado, I had always turned up my nose at quarter horse racing. As a sport, I thought, it surely suffered; these were inferior creatures, guided by inferior riders, hurtling down a short track with only the simplest of strategies in mind: Run like hell. At…
