You couldn’t help but giggle, sitting behind wizened little Stanley Marcus at the world premiere of Blind Lemon: Prince of Country Blues as actors sang or spoke lines like “I can’t even make enough money to buy me a loaf of bread.” You had to wonder whether Marcus, who was…
Too often, we drain our best ideas by analyzing them to a pulp; the real juice is gone before we ever make the first move. After such hair-pulling, the concept that seemed brilliant at its inception finishes hollow and insincere–or so damn academic you wanna send it to detention hall…
While Hong Kong movies have been invading Hollywood through the success of Jackie Chan, John Woo, Jet Li, and others, mainland Chinese cinema has invaded the “classier” neighborhoods of the film industry during the last decade or so. The latest contender is The King of Masks, an affecting melodrama from…
In an early scene in Instinct, we’re told that a brilliant primatologist named Ethan Powell (Anthony Hopkins) is being brought back to the United States from Rwanda, where for several years he has been engaged in a close study of mountain gorillas. Actually, his study has gone a bit beyond…
Never have gone in for sci-fi cons, even as a little kid–save for that one time DeForest Kelley, James Doohan, and the late Gene Roddenberry showed up with Star Trek blooper reels at the NorthPark Inn in 1976. Back then, during the pre-Internet glory days, sci-fi was a hobby, not…
It would be easy to play innocent and imagine that Tim Cridland’s day begins very much like anyone else’s. Have breakfast, take a shower, brush teeth, comb hair. But Cridland is Zamora the Torture King, and his daily routine includes jamming sharpened bicycle spokes through his biceps and smashing concrete…
thursday june 3 Kraft Macaroni & Cheese is hosting a contest called I Want the Blues! The 12 winners will get their pictures on boxes of Kraft Macaroni, in addition to a $10,000 college scholarship and a family vacation in Orlando, Florida. Personally, we wish they’d hold a contest to…
Whitey Herzog does not regret much. His is an almost idyllic existence now: He spends his mornings watching the sun rise over fishing ponds, and spends his evenings bidding farewell to the sun as it sets over the golf course. Now that the man’s retired, it’s almost impossible to get…
I don’t know about you, but if any Old Testament story is primed to make me an atheist, it’s the saga of Abraham, the man who’s happy to stab and incinerate his son because God asked him to as a test of faith. You can talk about historical context and…
David Mamet–famous for his in-your-face characters, brutal and frequently raunchy dialogue, and deliberate, staccato prose about, ya know, dat thing–would seem an unlikely choice to write and direct a screen adaptation of British playwright Terence Rattigan’s genteel drama about injustice. But the Pulitzer Prize-winning author (for Glengarry Glen Ross), whose…
Deja vu is usually a sign of love at first sight. Says who? Says the heroine of The Thirteenth Floor to the hero she’s on the verge of kissing. Though they’ve just met a scene or two earlier, they both feel they’ve seen each other before. That maxim about dejà…
Maybe it’s the damned blinking thing, because it’s not simply the foppish hair and boyish face–or, for that matter, even the vaguely befuddled reticence and wry, self-abasing demeanor we Americans prefer to see in our Brits. It’s got to be the blinking. That’s what he does, almost all he does,…
I have a friend who is obsessed with immortality, and not in the figurative sense: He doesn’t want to accomplish a feat so great that his name will live forever; he wants to live forever. He’s on the Internet daily, like some cyber Juan Ponce de León, looking up the…
Having once served as a story-reader, I thought I knew what to expect when I arrived at Borders Books and Music in Preston Royal last Wednesday morning. My personal philosophy was: Read the story, do some silly voices, show the kids some pictures, and get out…fast. I expected the same…
thursday may 27 People tend to romanticize writers. They’re introspective geniuses living in decadence while waiting for that divine inspiration. Anyone who writes for a living will say that there’s nothing romantic about staring down a deadline, and that it’s really desperation, not divine inspiration. But, hey, if anyone still…
Whether it’s Tennessee Williams’ characters clinging to booze-soaked illusions or Flannery O’Connor’s thousand clowns spinning their wheels under God’s pitiless eye, American literature is rife with romanticized depictions of Southern eccentricity that spirals in and out of pathology. Yet native Southerners have always tended to roll their eyes at stories…
One of least gratifying things about being an arts writer is taking the piss out of someone who has good intentions. Don’t get me wrong; there’s something oddly exhilarating about kneecapping any contingent that really deserves it, and there are always a few floating to the top in this town,…
Nearly a quarter of a century after the fall of Saigon, only a small film industry has managed to grow on Vietnam’s war-scarred soil. And what has emerged is rarely seen outside of local cinemas. If ever there was a country that needed to seize back control of its cinematic…
The Love Letter has the dubious distinction of being the other studio film to open this week. In a week when all the other majors have run for cover, Dreamworks has taken a gamble with a classic bit of counter-programming–in nearly every way, this sweet romance/romantic comedy is the opposite…
Relentlessly hip? You’d better be. Enjoy pretentious talk about the great god Art and the hidden meanings in old gangster movies? Couldn’t hurt. Like to sit up till dawn smoking cigarettes and exchanging ironic barbs about the tragedy of life? Bingo. Amos Poe, an East Village-based avant-gardian since the Talking…
If your poodle is decked out in the complete Captain Kirk uniform, you’ve taken Klingon language classes, or you once mailed DeForest Kelley a joint taped to a piece of cardboard just “to return the favor,” the 86-minute documentary called Trekkies is must viewing–love it or loathe it. In the…
The return of Jesus Christ would have trouble living up to the advance billing of Star Wars: Episode I The Phantom Menace. (“I mean, it’s OK, but why isn’t he turning water into wine like he used to? And where’s Peter? He was, like, my favorite disciple.”) That’s not an…
