On opening night of 2001’s Festival of Independent Theatres, I’m not sure that the one-act duo being performed was well-served when paired together, although a festival official informed me that it was merely an (un)lucky draw. Two theater companies performed superior usurpations of narrative and character that, witnessed back to…
Judging from the superlatives being tossed about on the occasion of Ed Ruscha’s retrospective, he has finally shed regional cult-figure status, emerging as a full-fledged International Art Star. “If you can catch the traveling retrospective of Mr. Ruscha’s 40-year career, you should do so,” wrote The New York Times’ Michael…
Kevin Pollak’s been great in great movies and great in bad movies; too bad he’s been in more of the latter than the former. In fact, once you get past Avalon, The Usual Suspects, Casino, L.A. Story and–be nice, be nice–Grumpy Old Men and Miami Rhapsody, the guy’s been in…
You’d think, given the plethora of cable and satellite outlets dying to fill space between Miss Cleo infomercials, that every celebrated and adored (or even mildly liked) old TV show would find its own niche in the DirecTV wasteland. Why there isn’t a single network dedicated to the golden-age comedy…
Before we go any further, there’s something you should know: There are circus chimps milling about with more real-world skills than me–probably more smarts, too. Most of college was spent stumbling from one hall to another in a drink-addled stupor, pretending to pay attention about some subject or another and…
Now that A.I.’s out of the way and it’s safe again to read movie reviews without dictionary and NoDoz in hand, onward and downward to the Summer of Dumb. Who has time for serious and thoughtful when there’s plenty of stupid to slather all over audiences that like to stay…
Kiss of the Dragon–the latest vehicle for martial arts star Jet Li, a mainland Chinese talent who became a superstar in Hong Kong and has since succumbed to the blandishments of Hollywood–has a little of the best (and a lot of the worst) of Hong Kong films, and a lot…
There’s plenty of French star power in The Closet (Le Placard), a comedy written and directed by the prolific director Francis Veber. The movie stars Daniel Auteuil, Gérard Depardieu and Thierry Lhermitte, which in U.S. terms is roughly equivalent to a movie featuring Robin Williams, Nick Nolte and Tom Hanks,…
Patrons who wandered into the Undermain’s basement theater for a near-sold-out Saturday-night performance of The Hungry Woman: A Mexican Medea were warned solemnly that the world premiere of Cherrie Moraga’s dystopian tragedy contained adult situations and nudity. The house manager informed us that audience members on previous nights had been…
Imagine corralling 10 small, mostly homeless theater companies to perform scripts as diverse as Chekhov and a contemporary satire on Latino stereotypes. They are staged consecutively in the same modest space, with each production clocking in at an hour maximum. The phrase “organizational nightmare” comes to mind. But the gallons…
Mir may be the Russian word for “peace,” but when the space station of that name was launched in February 1986 peace seemed well out of sight. The threat of nuclear war between the Soviet Union and America was still very real. But times have changed, which is the focus…
Originally, this was to be a story about how Stan Lee, the industry icon who ran Marvel Comics for decades and co-created Spider-Man and the Fantastic Four, wound up remaking archrival DC Comics’ most venerable heroes in his own image. The 12-part miniseries, Just Imagine Stan Lee Creating, was set…
The German filmmaker Tom Tykwer has a gift for fusing psychological complexity and crackling plot without forsaking the excitements of either. The success of Run Lola Run didn’t exactly turn Tykwer into a household name, but it earned him his props as a young lion of the art houses. Moviegoers…
By his own definition, Bruce Campbell is a “midgrade, kind of hammy actor”–a B-movie star, in other words, a man whose career unfolds, like a Swedish porn loop, on Cinemax in the wee small hours of the morning. When I mentioned to a handful of people I was writing about…
The game is finished. His team won. Cameras swarm. Mark Cuban eats it up, grinning a grin somewhere between sinister and goofy, like he’s trying to decide whether to take over the world or Denny’s. Cuban and two Mavericks scouts–Morlon Wiley and Scott Lloyd, both of whom used to play…
For almost two decades, Stanley Kubrick wanted to make a film based on Brian Aldiss’ 1969 short story “Super-Toys Last All Summer Long,” about a robot child named David who wants only to be “real” so Mummy and Daddy will love him. The late director of 2001: A Space Odyssey…
Sexy Beast, the debut feature from British director Jonathan Glazer, is a riveting, scary and often funny foray into a traditional American genre: the gangster film. Like the western, the gangster film has always been predominantly American turf, but–unlike with the western–every decade or so the Brits come up with…
Like countless European-American filmmakers before him, African-American filmmaker John Singleton tends to operate under the faulty logic that vengeance equals heroism. Anyone who doubts this assertion is welcome to compare his grooveless, mean-spirited remake of Shaft to the deceptively simple and human original. This isn’t to say that he’s not…
Ever since man has been able to commit images onto moving pictures he’s been imaging what it’s like to leave the earth behind for heavenly bodies or galaxies far, far away. Georges Méliès sent a group of adventurers on le voyage dans la lune back in 1902, and though the…
This much I learned from watching an advance tape of TNT’s All-Star Tribute to Brian Wilson, which airs Independence Day (and I am declaring my independence from all-star tributes): Ricky Martin performs in a heretofore unknown key, Q flat. Either Elton John can’t remember the words to “Wouldn’t It Be…
Dallas gets its share of celebrity sightings, but the few-and-far-between-ness of them makes even B-grade celebrities seem fresh and exciting. Our favorite entries in the brush-with-greatness category are getting dirty looks from Jason Bateman (rumored to be a lousy tipper by local waitresses) when Necessary Roughness was filmed in Denton…
Alan Cumming is, in no particular order, the following: an actor, a pop icon, a Renaissance man, a sex symbol, a bon viveur and the boy next door. “I am a combination of all those things,” insists the 36-year-old Scot, who punctuates every other sentence with a sly giggle that…
