My grandfather’s version of the classic admonition, “If everyone decided to jump off a cliff, would you?” was a little more original. It went something like, “If everyone decided to take off her panties and dance a jig, would you?” Well, truth be told, during the summer of 1980, when…
It takes only a few minutes of watching The American Nightmare for the viewer to get the point: Real life is far more horrific–more brutal, more bloody, more visceral, more abhorrent–than any fiction ever created. Director Adam Simon, a masterful film-history documentarian, splices footage of fact and fiction together until…
A cold breeze blows through an open window, and a football game silently unfolds on the television screen. The old man sitting on the couch regards the game with mild interest, though not long ago, football was his passion, a way of pocketing a little scratch during those long stretches…
On the eve of what was to be my first Texas-Oklahoma clash, a friend, who also happens to be a Sooner son, regaled me with enchanting tales of games past. He described momentous match-ups and courageous athletes, lavish pre-game festivities and rabid supporters. He imparted the details, but said the…
The lights are off here, creating a fitting, all-encompassing gloom. No one fills the seats or hawks the hot dogs or slugs the beers. No one occupies the dugouts or sends baseballs screaming into the fall air or makes diving catches on neatly groomed grass. It’s empty and quiet now–almost…
John Wesley Hall believes justice is a myth taught in classrooms, a fable found in law books, as imaginary as the unicorn and the mermaid. The Arkansas attorney mentions case after case in which he represented an innocent who wound up imprisoned or, worse, executed; in the course of a…
Meet the Parents has just enough class to make for Prestige Pop: Robert De Niro as star, Randy Newman as composer, Blythe Danner as wallpaper, Ben Stiller as schmuck. It has just enough “comedy” to qualify as crowd-pleaser: sight gags (Stiller chasing a cat across a roof before setting fire…
According to Patrice Leconte, women live to be vulnerable, men thrive when they are in command, and the two genders can only find happy fusion once they’ve tasted each other’s fates…unless they capriciously kill each other. At least, this seems to be the director’s thesis in Girl on the Bridge,…
With global overpopulation neatly intertwining with the advent of the home video camera, we have been afforded, as a species, several near-miracles. For instance, when supersonic jets explode, or when mobs impolitely loot and riot in urban centers, the common consumer can now document the event and sell it to…
Here’s some free advice for theatergoers that’s actually worth more than the price: If you want to enjoy an earnest play for children unsabotaged, don’t sit next to a restive 5-year-old who has chosen to speak aloud the thoughts you barely knew you were thinking, so far had they been…
Kitchen Dog has taken arguably the most famous–or at least, the most plundered–tragic love story of the English-speaking theater and turned it into a 120-minute, intermissionless actors’ stunt. As it turns out, this benefits Romeo and Juliet without ennobling or improving it. You cannot best Shakespeare, because he is both…
Television has so lowered our standards that we’ve convinced ourselves any show that doesn’t reduce us to a puddle of drool is: a) provocative, b) witty, c) cutting-edge, d) smart, or e) The West Wing. You know deep down that Will & Grace is pedestrian; you know it’s cowardly (Eric…
Every time I move, I make the same promise to myself: This time I’ll clean out all drawers and cabinets, tossing out Tupperware bowls without lids, dried-up ink pens, and all those stamps and postcards I’ve collected to produce a collage to make James Michael Starr proud. If I had…
In an essay titled “The Decline of the City of Mahogany,” the art critic, sometime fisherman, and all-around Aussie curmudgeon Robert Hughes frames an interesting hypothetical. What if, he posits, “there were only one copy of each book in the world, fought over by multimillionaires and investment trusts and then…
Remember the Titans–based on a true story about how a football team brought together a segregated Alexandria, Virginia, in the early 1970s–is the first film from producer Jerry Bruckheimer’s Technical Black production company, meant to offer more contemplative and slower-paced films than his hollow, slam-bang filmography suggests: Flashdance, The Rock,…
It takes a special mindset to celebrate castration, and audiences confusing feminine empowerment with the crude hacking off of seemingly oppressive huevos are certain to get a bang out of Girlfight, the gritty debut feature from writer-director Karyn Kusama. Metaphorical or otherwise, there’s already a movie about deballing to suit…
It’s a sorry fact that what everybody in Hollywood really wants to do–writer, actor, best boy, and caterer alike–is direct. This has led, over the years, to some embarrassing debuts and some unexpected triumphs. For many, the notion that Sally Field–after Gidget and Sister Bertrille and “You like me…you really…
One of the benefits of being a famous television actor is that you’re allowed backstage, that roped-off wonderland most audience members believe to be an orgiastic utopia of groupies and booze. Little do fans realize how mundane it really is behind the velvet rope–cold cuts and bottled water, and musicians…
Much has changed for urban gays in the 21 years since William Friedkin’s Cruising. That controversial serial-killer thriller–set in the leather bars and after-hours sex clubs of New York’s West Village–was derided by gay rights activists as a piece of cheapjack sensationalism leading only to trouble, seemingly designed to exacerbate…
Maybe the drive for self-expression must be fueled by conflict. Perhaps that’s why hormones ignite the fierce independence of adolescence and why families are torn apart when the free spirits among them break out, rebelling against the family values, willing to be disowned in order to be self-determined. “Deny thy…
Journalist, poet, playwright, and composer Dolores Prida is as radical in her politics and identity as the more famous stage artist Maria Irene Fornes (the two have collaborated in New York), yet, in my opinion, she goes about striking the establishment with a more conscious and formidable force–a sense of…
Consider, if you must, the forthcoming fall television season: You have John Goodman as a gay man, Charlie Sheen as Michael J. Fox, Gabriel Byrne as a single dad, Geena Davis as a pain in the ass, Bette Midler as Bette Midler, Jon Cryer as every character he’s ever played,…
