Listening to some ’90s rap music is like mowing your lawn with a hamburger. It’s satisfying, but when it’s done, you’re left with a feeling that nothing has been accomplished. Now, this analogy may not make sense to anybody but me, but just think about it for a minute. The…
Cats are better than dogs. Oh, I know you’re thinking that’s just my opinion, but you’re wrong. Having just dog-sat for a friend, I can prove it. To wit: Cats don’t smell; they don’t make you feel like the orphanage guy in David Copperfield when you eat; and not once…
Ah, the honky-tonk dive is a great source for storytelling. A rich mine of characters, relationships, problems and story arcs await and are explored in Stage West’s presentation of Nice People Dancing to Good Country Music. A comedy by Lee Blessing set in a Houston bar, the play deals with…
“What is so dangerous about a character like Ferris Bueller is he gives good kids bad ideas.” I suppose if you’re an aficionado of Serious Cinema, you could substitute the words “film directors” for “good kids” in that line from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and blame Ferris creator John Hughes…
You shouldn’t be, even if Edward Albee’s 45-year-old masterpiece of marital discord does go on well past the three-hour mark. WaterTower Theatre puts on a finely calibrated production directed by René Moreno. Lead actor James Crawford is an SMU drama prof by day, so he’s deliciously authentic as George, a…
A few friends of mine who’ve adored Judd Apatow’s Knocked Up at early screenings have nonetheless voiced a similar complaint: There’s no way pin-up-pretty Katherine Heigl would end up with soaked-in-bongwater Seth Rogen, not even while drunk on a gallon of Everclear and stoned on a field of your finest…
Mr. Brooks—in which Kevin Costner plays a respectable Seattle businessman who kills for thrills, thanks to the goading of an imaginary friend who looks a lot like William Hurt—is stunningly tepid, neither the clever and poignant metaphor for addiction it strives to be nor the darkly comic Harvey it could…
The most volatile, least easily psychoanalyzed of ’70s auteurs in Peter Biskind’s classic New Hollywood tell-all Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, William Friedkin may have mellowed since unleashing The Exorcist, sliding into box-office hell and marrying a major studio boss. Indeed, the recovering bad-boy movie brat—now 71, believe it or not—has…
There are first films like Citizen Kane or Breathless, which, as radically new and fully achieved as they are, unfairly overshadow an entire oeuvre. And then there are first films, perhaps even more radical, which haunt an artist’s career not through precocious virtuosity but because they have an innocence that…
The idea of “getting axed” is exploited for maximum double-entendre value in Severance, a grisly horror-comedy from the U.K. that has its tongue planted so firmly in its cheek that you half expect it to pop out the other side. Yes, heads (and, in one indelible bit, a severed foot)…
CANNES, France—The world’s preeminent film festival celebrated its 60th birthday party — the opening banquet catered by the world’s hippest, or is that once-hippest? — filmmaker. Hardly the disaster many feared, but far from the triumph others anticipated, Wong Kar-wai’s first English-language feature, My Blueberry Nights — starring Norah Jones…
CANNES, France—The Cannes Film Festival is chiefly revered as a showcase for prolific, careerist auteurs, so the appearance of Savage Grace, the first feature in 15 years by New Queer Cinema co-instigator Tom Kalin (Swoon), was certainly striking — not that a film in which Julianne Moore stars as a…
Cannes, FRANCE — Sometimes the competition is actually competitive. No one disputes that the official section at the 60th Cannes Film Festival has been the strongest in recent memory. The heavy favorites are the Coen brothers’ No Country for Old Men; Julian Schnabel’s surprisingly restrained and bizarrely chic French-language adaptation…
I never gave much thought to the subject of health insurance until, in October of 2005, an odd swelling in my groin prompted me to make one of my infrequent trips to the doctor’s office. A referral to a urologist and one ultrasound later, the diagnosis was indisputable: testicular cancer…
Cannes, FRANCE —”Whaddya love about it so much?” Abel Ferrara — director of the strip-club-set Go Go Tales, my favorite film at Cannes — is interviewing the interviewer. Well, I say it’s consistent with the Ferrara oeuvre — King of New York, Bad Lieutenant, Dangerous Game, et cetera — in…
My, my, Michael York looks happy. Why shouldn’t he? He’s starring in a national tour of Camelot, getting away with sleepwalking through a role for which he’s 30 years too old. But he’s famous! He’s charming! He’s British! That appears to be enough for York and for his languid King…
Hannibal Rising (Weinstein) Pointless beyond belief, Hannibal Rising serves more as a cautionary tale than horror story. Made for $50 mil, the movie pocketed half that during its U.S. run and likely wound up in the red–an appropriate adios for a franchise starring a peripheral character better served by shadows…
Dating games have come a long way since the days when Chuck Woolery invited mullet-sporting contestants to bump uglies on Love Connection. In Japan, the “dating simulator” video game craze has raged stronger than a schoolboy’s hormones since the early ’90s. But here in America — where our gaming interests…
Above the Law (Genius) The Andy Griffith Show: Complete Series Collection (Paramount) Big Train: Seasons One and Two (BBC Warner) Biography: Legends of the Silver Screen (A&E) Circle of Iron: 2-Disc Special Edition (Blue Underground) The Closer: The Complete Second Season (Warner Bros.) Drive Thru (Lionsgate) The Foursome (Universal) Free…
Two weeks ago, I trekked out to Frisco with a small soccer, er, futbol-lovin’ posse to watch Oduro, Gbandi, Toja and the rest of the FC Dallas smoke out Real Salt Lake with two of the sweetest goals this season. We cheered. Loudly. We ate elote and hot dogs. Drank…
As much as I’d like to think that all the best music happened in the ’60s, it has to be conceded that one or two good things happened after the first Star Trek series went off the air. In recognition that maybe not all the musical highlights of Star Trek…
Sure, the Irish can throw a mean parade, but can they throw a telephone pole? While wearing a skirt? Probably not, I say. We Scots have to make do year-round with the concessions our Irish friends are willing to make to the shared elements of our culture—sure, they’ll put on…
