He shuffles over, looking equal parts frustrated and defeated, but Frank Catalanotto is oblivious to his pain. At first. Cat sits hunched in a black leather chair for a second or two, shoulders rounded, before he notices a Rangers coach, Bobby Jones, thrusting a piece of folded paper in his…
Tamra Davis is bound by contract not to discuss the film that, at this very moment, she’s editing for release next year. “I’m officially not supposed to do any press for it,” the director says sheepishly, so she offers a few off-the-record comments about the movie, a road-trip comedy-drama starring…
Remember glee? Perhaps not, given our penchant in recent times to chuck giddy hearts aside in favor of being stupid, obnoxious and mean. But hey, it’s all right, because the fizzy, caffeinated beverage known as Baz Luhrmann seeks to re-create this elusive emotion for all of us in the form…
New York-based, Oklahoma-born playwright Clint Jeffries, who has had an artistic home with Christopher Street’s Wings Theatre Company since 1986, is far from the only country boy drawn to a major theatrical Mecca with footlights in his eyes. But he has chosen a somewhat unorthodox way to create small stage…
There is no son more proud of his father than Nile Southern. Nile has a family of his own, a career of his own (writer, filmmaker, dreamer), a life of his own, but somewhere between ambition and loyalty, he chose to put his own imaginings on hold and make sure…
From a Cartoon Network press release, dated April 10, 2001: “The ninth annual June Bugs Marathon on Cartoon Network will make the first time in history that every Bugs Bunny cartoon ever made will air on one network. The 49-hour marathon, which starts at 11 p.m. (ET, PT) on June…
It’s just another day. Another long day. Already, that’s the way it feels. Nearly everyone trudges through the motions–a battalion of zombies watching the clock tick painfully slowly. Hours before game time, reporters mill about. They poke around a locker room that feels more like a funeral parlor than a…
The publicist asks if I’d like to speak to D.A. Pennebaker to commemorate the 60th birthday of Bob Dylan, which falls on May 24. She asks this because, during the spring of 1965, Pennebaker made a documentary about Dylan’s tour of England, Dont Look Back, which captured a drained, cagey…
Pearl Harbor isn’t a movie at all, but a highlight reel prepared for a Jerry Bruckheimer career retrospective. It’s as impressive and empty as any movie the producer’s ever made, most of which seem to have been cut and pasted into this World War II monstrosity. There’s Top Gun: Two…
“The values that you grew up with are that people come before things,” offers the mother of one of the protagonists of Startup.com, “and that didn’t seem to be a part of this new world.” You sure got that right, ma’am. While this new video documentary by Chris Hegedus and…
Mainstream films about the sexual awakening of adolescent males invariably come in two forms: sappily self-important (Summer of ’42) or leeringly grotesque (American Pie). Consequently it’s hard to imagine what American moviegoers are going to make of Nico and Dani, a Spanish film about teen-age boys who are neither idealized…
You’d be hard-pressed to find a better song to pull you out of the lost romance blues (or any life doldrums, for that matter) than John Kander and Frank Ebb’s The World Goes ‘Round. It is, appropriately, the tune that provides the title to a revue of the work of…
A quick glance at Dorothy Antoinette La Selle’s “Santa Cruz Summer” can mistakenly lead you to read something into her work that’s not there. This dense arrangement is formed by geometric shapes that divide up her masonite canvas and are painted in primary and secondary colors. It’s the sort of…
The final half of this year’s Spike & Mike’s Sick & Twisted Festival of Animation–which is creeping around this country’s finer theaters, leaving in its wake a fine layer of slime–is damned near unwatchable. Or maybe your tastes run toward necrophilia and fecophilia, sprinkled with more oral sex than the…
The moral and ethical direction of scientific progress can certainly be called into question. Thankfully, it often is. But even its staunchest detractors cannot deny that, for better or worse, progress has been made. That claim cannot be made by fringe or psuedosciences that have been running in circles on…
There are not many stories left buried in James Ellroy’s past. In 1996, at the age of 48, he penned his memoirs, in which he paired his life story with that of his dead mother, Jean Ellroy, a nurse found strangled and beaten in the bushes of suburban Los Angeles…
Kids might well be amused by the frenetic pacing of Shrek, the latest computer-animated film from DreamWorks, which moves so quickly it’s nearly a blur; they need not get the jokes to enjoy frolicking in the muck (and the maggots) with a green, snaggle-toothed ogre who wants only to be…
Like nearly all Merchant-Ivory productions, The Golden Bowl, its latest book-to-film adaptation, is a feast for the eyes, with choice real estate, exquisite interior design and dazzling costumes all bathed in a golden light that not only enriches the colors but also helps to give the settings a sense of…
Chances are you don’t know a whole lot about Angel Eyes other than that it’s the brand-new Jennifer Lopez movie. Maybe you also know that it co-stars Jim Caviezel. It’s been described in some articles as a supernatural romance, and Caviezel himself has said that he can’t tell what the…
Irish. Sex. Farce. These are not three words you see snuggled up together very often. Given the ironclad no-no’s of the Catholic church, the preoccupations imposed by their political troubles for the last eight centuries or so and frequent commutes to the local pub, the Irish probably haven’t had much…
Lest you think backstage bitchery, outspoken narcissism and superficiality are just inventions for the all-male beauty contest spoof Pageant, check out the Web site that the creators of this internationally successful show have designed (www.pageantthemusical.com). They’ve devoted a page to 26 fun facts about pageant history from the years 1922…
It doesn’t take much time wandering the inaugural exhibition at SMU’s Meadows Museum to realize that Santiago Calatrava is no fool. A dreamer, certainly. A weirdo, for sure. A genius, perhaps. But when it comes to building a reputation, the Spanish-born architect and engineer is no quixotic figure. At 49,…
