Harry Belafonte, speaking to the Dallas Observer only weeks ago, insisted that had he never been an actor, it’s unlikely he would have become a singer. He spoke of his days reciting playwright Sean O’Casey’s words in a Harlem theater company and of a visit he received from Paul Robeson,…
I would rather wear a barrel Than conservative apparel For dress has always been My strongest suit Sir Elton John didn’t write these words (the musician lets Tim Rice handle the lyrics). He also didn’t sing them, but they may as well be his motto since he’s made a career…
When marching-band director Tyrone Brown asks his Jackie Robinson Steppers, “Are you motivated?” he’s not so much inquiring as presenting a challenge. It’s the middle of a sweltering summer in Brooklyn’s Crown Heights neighborhood, where tensions, temptations and distractions are omnipresent. Synchronizing 60 players–while diverting some of them from becoming…
Lakeboat is a film adaptation of one of David Mamet’s earliest plays. It’s set on one of the title vessels, the broad, flat-bottomed freighters that traverse the Great Lakes, and the characters are the tough-talking crewmen. But it’s not a sailing adventure; quite the opposite, as there’s no real plot,…
The opening sequence of The Glass House gives fair warning as to what is coming, presenting us with a nubile young beauty fleeing from a man wearing a mask that looks to be left over from a concert by shock-rock band Slipknot. Naturally, this is only a movie within a…
The directorial debut of actress-turned-screenwriter Agnès Jaoui (Same Old Song, Un Air de Famille), The Taste of Others is a work of delicate observation, falling somewhere between romantic drama and comedy of manners. Mr. Castella (Jean-Pierre Bacri, the director’s husband and co-writer) is a wealthy businessman whose life leaves little…
So why is it that every time they make a movie about a nerd, the character in question is always white? What’s Hollywood trying to tell us? Caucasians have a corner on the market in failing eyesight, office jobs and undernourished physiques? Or is it legitimately a white thing: How…
Faced with yet another sports movie in which a group of lovably troubled kids triumphs over adversity, it’s easier to scoff and grumble than to feel even partially uplifted. So let’s do it; let’s scoff and grumble, at least for a moment. In Brian Robbins’ Hardball, a degenerate gambler who…
The cold-bloodedness of some entertainment journalists is a thing to be admired; they’ve balls for brains, which gets you far in this profession. The Hollywood press corps’ cynicism is the source of its strength, and God bless the famous fool who plays along, answering every crooked question with the straightest…
“The people’s musical returns!” trumpets a poster advertising the appearance of Blood Brothers in an English theater. It’s kind of amusing that a show written by blue-collar advocate Willy Russell as relief from the budget-busting spectacles of Andrew Lloyd Webber would wind up competing with Webber in both ticket prices…
For a nation founded in a fit of religious rebellion, set up to serve as a city on a hill, America has produced remarkably little first-rate religious art. There are pastoral visions aplenty, and museumfuls of history painting; there is nature-painting-as-religion (Church), and abstraction-as-religion (Rothko), and even furniture-as-religion (e.g., Shaker)…
It may not be the end of the world, but it is a sign that things are bad when most people define an act of religious devotion as attending the latest televangelist superstar’s arena tour. Call us old-fashioned, but remember when “seeing the light” meant something other than watching a…
The forthcoming fall television season, which begins in earnest this week, looks far more promising than most in recent memory; better a saucy Jill Hennessy than a spent Bette Midler, anyway, or a screwing-around Richard Dreyfuss than a screw-you Geena Davis. This is the season that promises a new Star…
The beautiful little conceit at the heart of Brad Anderson’s Happy Accidents is that audiences will sit still once more for the crackpot notion of time travel–and in a movie that’s not science fiction. To his credit, and with an implied bow to Back to the Future and its predecessors,…
A year after Cameron Crowe climbed back aboard the tour bus for one last spin through rock’s golden days of giddy hedonism and phony heroism comes a film set a decade later, in the mid-1980s, when the parties got harder, the music got louder, and the musicians got prettier. The…
In the harsh realm where the smog burns one’s eyes all day and the night streets are disquieting at best, children are stumbling and swooping into adulthood, consequences be damned. Chain Camera delivers a group portrait of several youths from John Marshall High School in Los Angeles, located smack-dab between…
In the early ’90s, during a particularly dark time for the pro wrestling business, perennial jester and one-time Andy Kaufman accomplice Jerry “the King” Lawler proclaimed that he was going to do something that had never been done before: call play-by-play commentary on his own match. Entering the ring armed…
Chalk up another one for George Dubya. Recently, the U.S. Immigration Department refused to allow acclaimed Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi, director of both the Oscar-nominated The White Balloon and the Venice Film Festival Golden Lion-winner The Circle, to change planes in New York on his way from Hong Kong to…
The hugely influential 19th-century art critic John Ruskin is said to have influenced the success of the painter and poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti and to have earned the undying fandom of no less than Gandhi and Tolstoy. But the poor bastard is nowadays more discussed in art history classes for…
Snuggled into a desert overlooking the edge of the Pacific, Los Angeles’ very existence flaunts in the face of reason. As the longtime home of the movie industry’s dream world, it has always been a place for reinvention–of self, of place, of fact. It’s the sort of revelatory reinvention captured…
Yes, Your Teen is Crazy!: Loving Your Kid Without Losing Your Mind is the new book by psychologist Dr. Michael Bradley that has exactly the type of title that any teen-ager is going to hate. Further aggravating any young person is Bradley’s assertion that there is actually something physically wrong…
Those celebrities who would bemoan their fame–those penny-ante hack-tors who populate wretched sitcoms and crowd video-store shelves with useless product, those sad-sack musicians who write songs about how awful it is to sell out even as they line their pockets with suckers’ cash–have nothing on William Shatner. Imagine being so…
