Nobody is innocent in America, but there is one segment of the population that seems doggedly determined to deny its own ignorance, ugliness, and violence: the redneck. The sludge on the bottom of the melting pot, this offshoot of European ancestry continues, to this day, to foment racist terrorism, religious…
It is rare to find a movie that is as accomplished, multilayered, and rewarding as the novel from which it was adapted, but The Cider House Rules is such a film. Directed by Lasse Hallström (My Life as a Dog, What’s Eating Gilbert Grape?), the film displays the kind of…
If there’s anything that could make me believe in a cruel and vengeful God (or in the existence of the Dark Prince himself), it’s the incredible success of writer-turned-director Chris Columbus. Columbus is, in sheer dollar terms, the most successful comedy director of all time, having been at the helm…
It’s too tempting to resist. You see, there’s a secret about Stuart Little that the fine folks at Sony don’t want to blow. It’s not that each one of the half-million computer-generated hairs on the mouse’s head is cute as the dickens. It isn’t that human stars Geena Davis and…
I sincerely hope Jodie Foster gets a chance to relax and unwind this holiday season, because the lady has obviously worked like a horse to instill her latest role with humanity and significance. As intrepid British widow Anna Leonowens in the huge and poetic new Anna and the King, Foster…
There I am again, stuck in traffic and staring at the bumper of the orange ’80s Datsun idling in front of me. You know the kind of car — the one with the political bumper sticker that makes you want to do something drastic, violent, something that could raise your…
A lot of ink has spilled over director Tim Burton lately in the wake of his latest release, Sleepy Hollow. Reviews are mixed, of course, just as they often are for Burton’s films. But this time out, it seems critics are no longer referring to the director’s constant sense of…
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One of the most impressive things about Art isn’t that it won a Tony and an Olivier and an Evening Standard, blah blah blah, but that the script has legs long enough to carry it across the world. Since Yasmina Reza’s play debuted in France in the mid-’90s, it has…
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The Kimbell, weakly It’s getting harder and harder to believe Kimbell Art Museum spokesperson Wendy Gottlieb when she says Fort Worth’s world-class museum isn’t holding some sort of grudge against the alternative press. When Gottlieb finally returned Blink’s call for comment about the Kimbell’s lost bid for a pricey Botticelli…
Have you ever endured a relationship in which your partner beat you up mercilessly just to be able to “heal” you and play the redeemer later on? Granted, that’s a weird question and perhaps one better explored by Akbar and Jeff in Matt Groening’s Life in Hell strip, but it…
Millennial hysteria takes many forms. Some people fall prey to a travel agent and book a cruise to the Aegean, bent on passing New Century’s Eve with Aristotle’s ghost and a nice plate of moussaka. Others, of appropriate age and inclination, vow to get drunk and copulate at the stroke…
The heroines of Gavin O’Connor’s offbeat road movie Tumbleweeds are a struggling single mother named Mary Jo Walker (Janet McTeer) and her feisty 12-year-old daughter, Ava (Kimberly J. Brown), who set out together from a back hollow in West Virginia to make a new life — or something like one…
This is a little-told tale, perhaps because those who know it have signed confidentiality agreements — or, in at least two cases, they have died of “mysterious circumstances,” as the police reports read. Occasionally, a whisper will leak out or a rumor will be overheard in some Sunset Boulevard bar…
The Dallas Museum of Art has been enveloping Dallas with flowers and bones for a month now to promote its exhibit Georgia O’Keeffe: The Poetry of Things. There have been lectures, gallery talks, and symposiums discussing every aspect of her art and her life; O’Keeffe’s giant red poppies even adorn…
It’s not really unusual for gay men 35 and under never to have owned a single Bette Midler album. All joking aside, she really is a generational benchmark, beloved as much for her rise at a time when gay sex was healthy and plentiful as for her innocent bawdiness. I…
My slightly freaked-out attitude toward puppet shows (the more fluid and effective the puppeteers, the bigger the freak-out) is perhaps best explained by historical example. The Roman Catholic Church once relied heavily on puppets as evangelical devices used to illustrate Biblical stories about the birth and death of Christ and…
Call it insecurity, or the kind of intense inadequacy that makes the school bully lash out at the class Einstein. Call it some irresistible urge all humans have to topple the mighty, or even some perverse fantasy fueled by a very basic instinct — envy. Call it what you will,…
Potts bust Dr. Timothy Potts’ first try at a new acquisition for the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth since becoming its director a little more than a year ago has failed — to which, of course, Potts reportedly says, “You’ve got to be gracious in defeat.” Potts had his…
“A Joel Schumacher film.” Among a certain breed of filmgoer — say, anyone for whom theaters provide something other than shelter — there may no more frightening four words in the English language. Ever since he killed Batman, Schumacher’s name has become the equivalent of a swear word on many…
Being called “brave” all the time must be almost as annoying for a disabled person as living in a world designed for the abled. Sure enough, peruse reviews of Firdaus Kanga’s “autobiographical novel” Trying to Grow or the astringently unsentimental film version of it, Sixth Happiness, and you’ll find critics…
