Five years ago, this interview would have been such the big deal–the coup of the year, the elusive great white at last wriggling on the hook. At least, that’s how she was treated back then, when she still took her meals in that velvet closet. She attracted the spotlight (some…
In only 70 minutes, Barbette, the new play from Kitchen Dog Theater, achieves what too few other stage works ever do: It makes art. That it manages to make art happen so quietly and with so much heart is a special, precious gift to its audience. Based on the life…
As with any earthly endeavor, museum-going is governed by certain immutable, objectively verifiable laws. Laws like Biederman’s Razor: The worse the institution, the greater its penchant for puffery. Fortunately, there is a corollary to this axiom. While far too many major museums put a postmodern faith into spin, quality shows…
While recently shopping at the Lush Cosmetics Store, I was bombarded by full-on sensory stimulation. The textured soaps and bath balls and the creamy lotions and potions looked and smelled so divine, I wished I could eat them. (Which reminds me of one unfortunate day when I mistakenly did. I…
Lewis MacAdams called the other day, and he began the conversation as though the person on the other end of the line had no idea who he is. “My old friend Angus Wynne said I should call,” he began, before proffering a brief bio: born in San Angelo, raised in…
The opening credit sequence of Windtalkers–a montage of Monument Valley–instantly invokes memories of the opening of John Woo’s immediately previous film, Mission: Impossible 2, in which Tom Cruise was dangling off a rock. It is the last moment of similarity between the two. Windtalkers is a World War II epic…
It’s no surprise that the Louisiana-born novelist Rebecca Wells has seen her wildly popular books translated into 18 languages, with no fewer than 6 million copies in print. She’s no deep-thinking stylist, but she has an unfailing gift for injecting Southern sentimentality, low-grade neurosis and mischievous charm into stories that…
So this is what it’s come to: another week, another terrorist-with-a-suitcase-nuke movie. Last Friday, it was up to Ben Affleck to save the world from nuclear annihilation, an unsavory proposition; he succeeded, but not before the Super Bowl disappeared in a holocaust flash. This Friday, it’s Chris Rock’s turn to…
Perhaps the most remarkable thing about the French film The Piano Teacher, aside from Isabelle Huppert’s unnerving and masterful performance, is the totally nonexploitative manner in which the story is presented. A tale of sadomasochism and self-destruction, the film easily could have succumbed to the inherently lurid aspects of its…
Whatever problems Stolen Summer may have encountered during the production process, as documented on the HBO reality series Project Greenlight, it doesn’t feel like the disjointed outcome of a troubled shoot. For better or worse–plenty of both, in fact–it’s a movie that has a coherent vision. It’s a shame that…
A police detective (Koji Yakusho, star of Eureka and Shall We Dance?) is confronted with a series of inexplicable homicides. All have the same M.O., but they involve different perpetrators, who remember their actions but cannot explain why they did it. The police finally discover the common link: They’ve all…
Directed by Joe and Harry Gantz, of HBO’s popular Taxicab Confessions, Sex With Strangers follows three couples in the swinging “lifestyle.” Mississippians Shannon and Gerard realized they were cheating on one another, and decided to do so with other couples together so as to eliminate the whole dishonesty thing. Washingtonians…
As astute an appraisal of post-modern feminine confusion as today’s cinema has to offer, this freakish fish story from French-Canadian writer-director Denis Villeneuve (August 32nd on Earth) offers the flash of rock videos fused with solid performances and eerie atmosphere. Imagine an 83-minute Tom Waits video with good-natured twists. Bibiane…
It’s one of the great ironies of the modern-day smut biz that it took a boob burglar like Joe Francis to shake Hugh Hefner’s once-mighty empire to its creaky knees. Francis is all of 28, which means he wasn’t born the first time Hef bagged triplets on the merry-go-round bed…
Farewell, fourth wall. Actors are talking directly to their audiences in three shows, each of which tries to dissolve the invisible barrier between performer and spectator in a different way. Sometimes it works. Sometimes the in-your-face approach just gets annoying. Such is the case with Lanford Wilson’s Book of Days,…
I have a weakness for quixotic figures. In literature and in life, I’ve always been a sucker for the wisecracking cynic, the jaded guy (or gal) whose hard-boiled façade hides a marshmallow heart. Call me a hopeless romantic, call me unrealistic, call me what you will, just call me when…
The ultra-modern lost-and-found poster might read something like this: Claud the dog, brown with a red collar, good-natured, transponder code 8354690210. Now even pet locating has gone high-tech with hundreds of thousands of American dogs, cats and other pets running around with an electronic microchip identification device under their skin…
The new Martin Scorsese film is out, and, no, it’s not the delayed, high-priced Gangs of New York, but rather a delayed, low-budget documentary shot for television, though it did play L.A. screens last year. At a little more than four hours (plus an intermission), My Voyage to Italy (or…
There has always been something infuriating, if not appalling, about killing thousands of people in the name of blockbuster entertainment. Buildings would blaze, streets would turn into rivers of gore, corpses would stack like cordwood–and before September 11, no one thought much about it. Audiences accepted wholesale slaughter on the…
The first generation to be labeled with a letter suffered through some serious metaphysical shit in the ’90s (if you doubt this, try listening to the period-specific music–emphasis on try), but now this societal clusterfuck is searching for antidotes to its own pop-culture poison. Evidence of a renewed hope abounds,…
The weird thing about Rain is that there’s virtually no rain in it. Characters mention precipitation briefly and metaphorically, but the cloudburst never happens. Fortunately, we get light showers of emotion a couple of times, but then–strangely–these wane to an inconsistent and ultimately unsatisfying drizzle. It’s as if fledgling director…
The beauty of Malcolm D. Lee’s smart, sharp comedy lies in its dexterity, as it raises one fist in a friendly Black Power salute and firmly gooses the whole audience with the other. Based on the animated Internet series (at UrbanEntertainment.com), the script explores a soulful, secret solidarity known as…
