thursday march 4 Most of the time, reading a humor book is about as entertaining as running through a crowded mall wearing nothing but a few strategically placed pats of butter and a smile. (Well, that’s actually pretty amusing, so long as you’re not the one doing it.) The reason:…
While the hubbub over the American Film Institute’s list of top 100 films of all time has died down, the bright power of the films among its ranks has not. These celluloid masterpieces prove their visceral and technical impact with every viewing, and the bigger the screen, the better. No…
There are millions of drug addicts in this country. And that is a tragedy. But other groups have their worries too. Like homeowners, for instance. There’s burglary, dealing with property taxes, and being convinced by some washed-up athlete to take out a second mortgage on your home, but that’s not…
Here’s the pitch: It’s New Year’s Eve, 1981. Wait, there’s more. But not much. Kevin (Paul Rudd) and Lucy (Courtney Love) are best friends out on the town, dateless. He’s a sad sack of self-loathing; she’s into slapstick sex in bathroom stalls. Kevin was just dumped by Ellie (Janeane Garofalo),…
In Hungary, the Holocaust lasted only for a year. But the word only is deceptive in this context. The Nazis, who entered the country in March 1944, had been in the genocide business for a few years by then, and they’d gotten good at it. They were efficient, and they…
Director Garry Marshall (Pretty Woman, Beaches) has always tended toward unrealistically feel-good movies, and The Other Sister is no exception. Billed as “a love story for the romantically challenged,” it concerns a mentally handicapped young woman (Juliette Lewis) struggling for independence from her overprotective mother (Diane Keaton). With the exception…
So the Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza isn’t exclusively obsessed with the assassination. That’s probably a good thing. We wouldn’t want such a fine establishment to take on the creepy, narrow compulsion of its chief subject: November 22, 1963. For 10 years, the Sixth Floor Museum has offered far…
Name this movie: A wildly popular actress stars as a young, sassy, headstrong Jewish woman who masquerades as a man and falls in love with one of her colleagues. Sound familiar? Oh yeah, and this proto-feminist must flout tradition to follow her heart and…play a fiddle in a band of…
thursday february 25 When you talk to Fury III singer-guitarist Stephen Nutt, you get the feeling that one day, as he’s being led away in handcuffs, his neighbors will be standing in their front yards saying to reporters, “He seemed like such a nice guy.” And he does. But it’s…
Samuel Beckett has become more useful as an allusion, an adjective to qualify the heirs and pretenders of his perverse comic legacy. Rarely is the novelist-playwright spoken of as a living voice. Perhaps being widely regarded as one of the most influential theatrical sensibilities of the 20th century comes with…
Art-scenester folklore has it that Brice Marden and Julian Schnabel came to blows in a New York bar back in the 1970s. The story pits the established abstract minimalist and the emerging young painter against each other at Max’s Kansas City, the dark and smoke-choked stomping grounds of glam rockers,…
Jerry Heidenreich stood alone on the starter’s block, waiting for his teammate to touch the wall. Heidenreich had done this thousands of times before, waited God knows how many times for his turn to dive into the pool and put away a relay race. He’d been doing it since he…
There’s one moment in Global Village, the Actors’ Stock Company world premiere by playwright-collaborator Tom Grady, that arrives just before intermission and knocks the breath right out of you. I won’t be so thoughtless as to reveal it here. Suffice to say it’s the culmination of a slow tragicomic buildup…
What’s entertaining about October Sky is the unlikely-but-true spectacle of backwater West Virginia teens teaching themselves rocket science in the Eisenhower ’50s. They progress from a glorified cherry bomb to sophisticated missiles through trial-and-error-and-error. Their inner rocket fuel is the desire to avoid getting stuck in the dying coal industry…
Plot is a central problem in both Jawbreaker and Office Space, two comedies opening this week: The first has too much, and the second (and far better of the two movies) has too little. Jawbreaker’s 26-year-old writer-director, Darren Stein, says he wanted to make an homage to the films he…
The independent production and distribution company The Shooting Gallery probably got a lot more attention when Monica Lewinsky showed up in Washington wearing a cap with its logo than it is likely to from the release of The 24-Hour Woman, a modest, deserving film from writer-director Nancy Savoca. Savoca has…
thursday february 18 Dallas-bred screenwriter Owen Wilson and his Houston bud director Wes Anderson (Rushmore, Bottle Rocket) may have beat a path out of Texas you could lay a Supercollider in, but two other Dallas-raised University of Texas brats may be hot on their heels in terms of national exposure–but…
Anyone who caught Mexican director Eduardo Ruiz Savinon’s previous collaborations with Teatro Dallas knows that this man loves to walk on the dark side, stopping here and there to frolic in the downright macabre: Profane Games and The Tree were marvelously atmospheric Teatro successes that dealt, respectively, with children who…
The average American is exposed to more than 1,500 ads a day. Billboards, T-shirt logos, the sides of buses, drink coasters, matchbooks–advertisements have invaded every nook and cranny of our daily lives. Still we insist we’re not influenced by their messages. Not much, anyway. Talk about ego. Philadelphia filmmakers Harold…
There is one standard I hold for so-called “experimental” forms, be it in the novel or the poem or the play: Does it ripple? A delightful, now-deceased college English professor lectured at length on the phenomenon of “rippling,” and it has become an ideal bullshit detector for works whose creators…
In the archetypal dead-end town of Lawford, New Hampshire, cold-eyed men looking for trouble prowl the streets in four-by-fours with chrome spotlights and loaded gun racks. The gloomy barrooms are not gathering places so much as solitary confinement cells, and the most popular local sport is macho posturing. In wintry…
Short of nuclear holocaust, a major sale at Kmart, or a confirmed Clint Eastwood sighting back in rural Iowa, there’s probably no way to keep the movie version of Message in a Bottle from overwhelming the tender emotions of the hearts-and-flowers crowd. After all, this relentless assault on the tear…
