Some of us remember that there are really two Tom Hankses–Saint Tom and his Evil Twin. Saint Tom won back-to-back Oscars for his charming, bloodless performances in Philadelphia and Forrest Gump. He helped make Apollo 13 one of the most effortless entertainments of 1995, although he couldn’t quite smother the…
For a few years now, I’ve been praying to the talent gods to give me the strength to keep liking James Foley movies. When Foley first began directing 12 years ago, his films ran the range from pompous and dull morality plays (At Close Range, Reckless) to the mind-bendingly idiotic…
thursday october 17 The Legalization of Marijuana: A political correctness not born of the American left has surrounded the debate over how to deal with drugs and drug addictions in our country. Former Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders got canned in part not for advocating the legalization of drugs, but for…
All right, girls, either be lesbos or don’t be lesbos, but make up your goldurn minds. You know what I’m talking about? I must know 30 women out there who go back and forth–homo and hetero. One week they’re making the Sign of the Twelve-Humped Anaconda with a Wal-Mart stock…
There are some who contend that Galt McDermot, Gerome Ragni, and James Rado’s 1968 musical, Hair, nearly dealt a fatal blow to the American musical. Without the ascendancy of Stephen Sondheim and the emergence of Andrew Lloyd Webber in the 1970s, musicals would barely have scored a blip on the…
Throughout the ’60s in England and the ’70s in America, the development of film as a form of popular entertainment began to explore areas of realism previously thought to lack a minimum level of escapism. Until then, conventional wisdom held that viewers might willingly pay to be moved by tender…
thursday october 10 Joan Osborne: The 1995 Joan Osborne single, “What If God Was One of Us?” was definitely one of the more intelligent songs to find its way onto alternative playlists in recent years, although heavy rotation, as is its wont, transformed a good thing into that I-can’t-stop-singing-it-to-myself phenomenon…
How come any time you meet a new gal who might be willing to have sex with you, every other woman you know can smell that she’s in town? They don’t know her name. They don’t know where she came from. They just suddenly know that there’s a possibility you…
In the canon of angry white males produced by William Shakespeare, Hamlet is hardest to figure out. Richard III chokes on self-pity; Macbeth buries himself alive with ambition; Lear is felled by the family neglect born of his own megalomania. To identify exactly which of Hamlet’s peccadilloes finally undoes him…
Los Angeles is an elastic city, the kind that people who have never been to feel comfortable projecting attributes on, usually based on nothing more than rumor, supposition, or a willingness to buy into popular cliches. Especially in the movies, it has the capacity to be all things for all…
Heterosexual Anglo moviegoers often find it difficult to understand why America’s various minority groups kick up a ruckus every now and then about the way they’re portrayed on movie screens. From Jesse Jackson’s protest outside this year’s Academy Awards ceremony to the recent condemnation of the action comedy Bulletproof from…
thursday october 3 Camping With Henry and Tom: In the spirit of Nicolas Roeg’s priceless script of Insignificance, which detailed a fictional conversation of the real-life hotel meeting between Albert Einstein and Marilyn Monroe, playwright Mark St. Germain wrote his comic exploration, Camping With Henry and Tom, in 1993, then…
I was asking my buddy Rhett Beavers which was better–to kick your girlfriend out of the trailer house, or to get kicked out of the trailer house. I say, “Get kicked.” Much cleaner. You’re on the road five minutes later. If she ever sues you, you’re the victim. And, most…
The 1950s often are cited as this century’s watershed for American theater. It was then that Lee Strasberg’s Actor’s Studio, whose members worshiped at the altar of a Russian psychoanalytic guru named Stanislavsky, dominated Broadway and off-Broadway headlines with a method based on recalling real-life emotional moments and transferring them…
Whenever food acts as a central component in a movie, it occupies a peculiar role–probably because, since eating is something everyone can relate to, it’s a reliable way to establish common ground with the audience even though everyone’s experience with it differs. Movie food delivers gratification without calories, even when…
I almost never react to situations the same way that people in movies do. Maybe I’m just too short-tempered and confrontational, but I always sense that if the hero isn’t as adept at defending himself against unwelcome verbal attacks as I imagine myself to be, then he’s not much of…
thursday september 26 Hamlet: Kitchen Dog Theatre stirs up an autumn blast of theatrical introspection with its production of Hamlet, one of Shakespeare’s most-produced tragedies. It’s also one of his least understood. This means that, unlike Romeo and Juliet or Othello–straightforward Shakespearean studies of human nature that should be mothballed…
Last week I decided it was time to update my personal ad. I think it had something to do with Wanda Bodine telling me that I was “the kind of scumball that no sane woman would ever date.” First I tried my usual flat-out lies: “Michael Bolton-lover likes trips to…
The critical disdain into which playwright Edward Albee sunk from the late ’70s through the early ’90s isn’t the surprise of his career. That he ever enjoyed the relatively brief affection of Broadway audiences and critics is the real anomaly. Albee has been called the heir to Arthur Miller and…
No two films should be more dissimilar than Girls Town and The First Wives Club, which open this weekend in Dallas movie theaters. Girls Town spent most of 1996 as a hot indie flick on the festival circuit, its story of a trio of New Jersey high-school seniors who strike…
American Buffalo, with Dustin Hoffman and Dennis Franz parrying with playwright David Mamet’s razor-sharp dialogue, promised to be the sleeper tour de force of the season. The opportunity to see Mamet’s sharply honed lines bandied about by actors with an innate understanding of the rhythm of words should have been…
friday september 20 Wallace & Gromit: The Best of Aardman Animation: Packaged together into one feature-length program are nine award-winning shorts from the British-based Aardman Animations studio, recognized throughout the world for cartoons and commercials that mix the surreal and the slapstick. Every studio has had its classic duos, and…
