On the lips of many moviegoers, the name Joel Schumacher is tantamount to blasphemy. Visions of a blue-skinned Arnold Schwarzenegger and a head-bobbing George Clooney in rubber nipples instantly come to mind, inducing shudders of revulsion and indicating an oft-held view that Mr. Schumacher epitomizes the worst American directing can…
The Bath House Cultural Center sits along the shores (if you can call them that without a hint of irony) of White Rock Lake in an area that was, during its construction in the 1930s, a rural area outside Dallas. Now it’s only a few minutes by car–though a world…
We love the ladies who lust in Candace Bushnell’s Sex and the City and the subsequent HBO series not because we envy their strappy sandals that cost more per pair than all our shoes combined. And we definitely don’t covet how they fall in and out of relationships with unavailable…
Ten years ago, Robert Harris picked up the phone to find on the other end a relative stranger bearing extraordinary news. This man was at a film exchange in Toronto, where movies are housed and rented out to exhibitors, and he was holding in his hands canisters of film containing…
Today is an off-day. More or less. The morning practice was scrapped in favor of extra sleep and position meetings. The afternoon session? Changed from the daily grind of battling the heat and each other to more esoteric pursuits–special teams. It’s not that special teams aren’t important, because anyone who…
During this cinematic Summer of Dumb, it would be all too easy to celebrate half-assed clever as a virtue, especially when proffered by Bobby and Peter Farrelly, who elevated the gross-out to an Art Form (or, more likely, Fart Form) in Kingpin and There’s Something About Mary. Osmosis Jones, one…
There is something fairly amusing about this title, Apocalypse Now Redux. Think about it: Prophetic Disclosure Presently Shows Up Again Newfangled. Of course, in the 10 years since the release of the documentary Hearts of Darkness, we’ve been taught to revere the legend of Francis Ford Coppola walking the line…
For a few moments, American Pie 2 tastes every bit as stale as junk food left out on the countertop for two years. “Just like old times,” says one actor to another as they amble through settings borrowed from the first installment of 1999’s Last American Virgin revisit: Jim’s bedroom,…
It was about two years ago that there was real hope for the horror movie coming once again due for a decent revival. The Blair Witch Project made people remember how to fear the unknown, and remakes of The Haunting and House on Haunted Hill promised a return to the…
For the better part of two decades now, Fort Worth’s Jubilee Theatre has been relying on its musical ventures to finance the less commercial productions it stages. This is hardly a novel formula–it may, in fact, be the American theater’s single most reliable life preserver–except that Jubilee has distinguished itself…
Drummer Elvin Jones is an American treasure. The Blue Note regular and John Coltrane titan remains one of the few living holdovers from jazz’s tumultuous 1960s. He’s not only vital for his playing, which delicately mixes modernism’s smoothness with innovative panache, but also for being one of the voices that…
Guiding a silver ball at speeds as high as 90 mph through a maze of ramps, loops and bumpers to reach the ultimate “wizard award” still sounds exciting, but the opportunity to do so is about as rare as hunting a water buffalo or spotting a dirigible. At pinball’s height…
Jay Mohr’s been around long enough to be taken for granted, yet he’s not quite stuck in the pop-culture consciousness; he always seems this far from becoming a trivia answer in search of a question, which is less a knock on him than it is on the studio bosses who…
When last we spotted indie icons Vince Vaughn and Jon Favreau onscreen together, they were knocking back fruit-flavored martinis and chasing L.A. skirt in the inventive Gen-X hit Swingers. The goofy charm of that phenomenon now gives way, sad to report, to a labored fringes-of-the-mob comedy called Made, in which…
The mock religious Web site www.landoverbaptist.org staged a spoof protest outside the eight-month Los Angeles run of Del Shores’ Southern Baptist Sissies. A director friend of Shores’ turned it into a 15-minute movie that was equal parts parody and extended promo for the production. The verisimilitude to real-life conservative Christian…
A wag once defined philosophy as unintelligible answers to insoluble problems. Alas, contemporary art can too often be defined as semi-intelligible answers to questions that are simply not worth asking. Take, for example, the art world’s preoccupation with French eggheads and “simulacra.” At the risk of getting metaphysical, the supposed…
The Ramones are indeed legendary, and the recent death of lead singer Joey Ramone makes an inside scoop on the group even more timely. However, the band members’ jeans-and-T-shirt style and their stripped-down rock and roll tell us all we’d ever need to know about the band. But if another…
There is only one reason Jon Favreau’s new film is called Made. Not too long ago, his old friend and co-star Vince Vaughn called him up and told him, in no uncertain terms, “You gotta write something that can get made.” It was less a demand than it was a…
He opens his arms wide, accepts the ball, then skitters through the line of scrimmage past two would-be bodyguards into open field. Pausing for a second, he jumps right, then left, bouncing unpredictably, like one of those Super Balls you were so mesmerized by as a child. All eyes strain…
The most telling scene in Rush Hour 2 comes during the closing-credits montage of outtakes, which have become the most enjoyable part of Jackie Chan’s Hollywood outings. Chris Tucker, the poor man’s Eddie Murphy who now pockets more than the real thing per picture, and Chan have just pushed one…
“I want you to suck my big dick. I want you to lick my balls.” Thus begins Larry Clark’s Bully, a return to Kids territory, following a forgettable detour into adulthood named Another Day in Paradise that apparently didn’t kick up enough of a fuss for the guy. So he…
Chopper, the first feature from Australian video director Andrew Dominik, is a strong, effective but often stomach-churning portrait of notorious Aussie criminal Mark “Chopper” Read. It can be characterized as “sensational”–in both the positive and negative senses of the word. According to the filmmakers, Chopper Read is a legend Down…
