Just after we all thought indie rock had saved the planet from overt guitar posturing, leave it to MARS, the super-slick chain of “music and recording superstores” to launch a contest for would-be rock stars. Seems the equipment-shop-cum-amusement-park knows its patronage well: money-spending lawyers and CPAs who still dream in…
Obviously, a Pulitzer Prize just isn’t enough to imbed a playwright in the firmament of American stage greats. Or, to paraphrase a famous line from The Boys in the Band: “So who do I have to fuck around here for a little theatrical posterity?” Novelist and playwright Paul Zindel nabbed…
There will always be a Britain; and that means there will always be movies about the pluck and sacrifice, during World War II, of the little people. Not Billy Barty little people–though surely there must have been a few of them involved–but the simple salt-of-the-earth types who kept muddling along…
Too many post-Woody Allen movies have been made about “sex in the head.” The smart, engaging Out of Sight is an action comedy about love in the head. The real thing ignites between bank robber Jack Foley (George Clooney) and U.S. Marshal Karen Sisco (Jennifer Lopez) when she stumbles into…
The 1967 musical Dr. Dolittle, which starred Rex Harrison, was a commercial disaster for its studio, Twentieth Century Fox. The new nonmusical Fox version of this material, starring Eddie Murphy, isn’t in the same overblown category as the Harrison film–its disasters are more mundane. It’s a kiddie comedy that really…
Not even the most diligent red ants can stop culture hounds from descending on Samuell-Grand Park with wine coolers and baked chicken: It’s Bard time again, kids! And while we all nobly extol the timeless wisdom of history’s most famous playwright, it seems the real draw of the Shakespeare Festival…
One of my best memories about summer is the time my mother tried to make cookies ‘n’ cream ice cream. Since she had never branched out from chocolate or vanilla before, this was pretty exciting. (Give me a break, I was 10.) Anyway, she had no idea how to go…
thursday june 25 The Liquid Lounge is poised to take over where the Dark Room left off, hosting rock shows in an intimate venue, shows that are a little quieter but much more special. Already the club has hosted two shows by Peter Schmidt’s Legendary Crystal Chandelier project. (If you…
Technicolor was a movie lover’s aphrodisiac during Hollywood’s Golden Age. It produced colors of astonishing depth, boldness, and subtlety via a complex beam-splitting camera that generated three separate negatives. Lab technicians built them into a photographic sandwich that was developed with a unique dye-transfer system called imbibition. Gone With the…
Harried parents don’t have time to wade through a review that yammers on about the sociopolitical ramifications of a children’s theater production. Yet being childless myself and, as a critic, inordinately fond of my own opinions, I can’t help but rhapsodize about the wonderful Wildean darts to the establishment heart…
The artist has something to tell us about how we process information, and Trenton Hancock uses the digestive tract to do it: teeth, throats, intestines, rectums–his as well as others’. Oddly enough, art hounds are eating it up. To kick off his one-man, five-week exhibition at the Gerald Peters Gallery…
It’s Christmas vacation, 1958. The movie my dad has chosen for a first-grade pal and me to see is the new Disney live-action adventure, Tonka, starring Sal Mineo as a young Sioux named White Bull who traps and domesticates a clear-eyed, spirited wild horse named Tonka. Having seen The King…
High Art is a low-budget, American independent movie about a junkie, lesbian photographer, Lucy Berliner (Ally Sheedy), who spends most of her time looking romantically mournful. She’s famished and abrasive and oh-so world-weary. When she smokes cigarettes, she exhales in a way that can best be described as existential–the smoke…
The X-Files is a movie that answers questions…No, wait a minute. The X-Files is a movie that asks questions…Hmmm. OK. The X-Files is a movie that makes me wanna ask some questions, like: What the hell does “Fight the future” mean? I mean, I can understand “The truth is out…
Although four years have passed since I last played in the Hoop-It-Up tournament, my experience there has scarred me forever–literally. That doesn’t mean that the annual three-on-three street basketball tournament is dangerous, just that it’s rougher than the typical driveway game. At the tournament in 1994, my two teammates and…
Hollywood’s been threatening to remake The Women, a 1939 razor of a film, for years now, with the likes of Julia Roberts and Demi Moore taking keen interest in the potential project. No surprise here; to resurrect Joan Crawford’s conniving vamp, Rosalind Russell’s catty blue blood, and Norma Shearer’s martyred…
thursday june 18 Tuna, Texas, may be a fictional city, but the characters who inhabit it are awful real. You can find them crowded around the back of a beat-up pickup truck in one of the countless one-stoplight towns that dot the back roads of Texas, or distributing “Free Richard…
thursday june 11 Stephen King once said, “I have seen the future of the horror genre, and his name is Clive Barker.” Barker hasn’t really lived up to King’s hyperbole, but the British author and director has built a rabid cult following based on his perverse, six-volume set of stories,…
What happened to car design? Seems as though the architects of the machines we practically live in have grown complacent lately. They’ve rolled out legions of cookie-cutter sport utility vehicles (what’s the difference, really, between a Range Rover and a Land Cruiser, besides ethnicity?) and look-alike econo-mobiles (the new Civics…
The life of the rodeo wife is filled with the constant anxiety that some day, a wild steer or a bucking bronco will stomp her husband to death. It is riddled with the gnawing realization that even the best of heroes can die in the arena, caught between the hard…
The essays and book-length ruminations of Susan Sontag, the American zeitgeist’s preeminent fag hag, are accessible, friendly, almost conversational in their explorations of camp aesthetic and AIDS mythology. But her mammoth first novel, The Volcano Lover, from which I had the fortitude only to snatch scattered sections, felt like–horrors!–a veteran…
Henry Jaglom’s movies offer everything that Americans hate about French films, but with little of the philosophical depth or visual daring that mark the best French cinema. He captures the annoying qualities of Woody Allen movies–the self-absorption, the feigned feminism, the pretentiousness–without achieving anything like Allen’s humor and charm. Talky,…
