This production poses for the umpteenth time the hoary philosophical question, “If a tree falls in the woods, and no one hears it, does it make a sound?” It’s not the play itself that’s directly concerned with this conundrum, however. Rather, it’s the fact that the play is being performed…
There are isolated moments in writer-director Carl Franklin’s adaptation of Devil in a Blue Dress when you roll your eyes heavenward at the familiarity of it all. This is the story of a man caught between two different forces who would use him for their own ends, then throw him…
If you have to compare watching the NC-17 “erotic drama” Showgirls to a non-cinematic experience, it might be getting a mammogram. There are dozens of breasts on display in this film, and they are constantly being poked, prodded, criticized, praised, bitten, licked, rubbed with ice cubes, and generally wielded as…
Reading the press materials for A Month By the Lake, the latest bit of curdled whimsy from our mother country, you discover that there is a prestigious English film institute called the London School of Film Technique, and that director John Irvin (Widow’s Peak, Hamburger Hill) graduated from it. One…
thursday september 28 UAKTI: Although the sounds of the Brazilian trio UAKTI (pronounced wah-ke-chee) may sound completely foreign to you, they come from a tradition, that, in fact, preceded the arrival of the lighter-skinned among us on this continent. UAKTI is composed of Artur Andres Ribeiro, Paulo Sergio Santos, and…
The latest film by writer-director Todd Haynes (Poison, Dottie Gets Spanked) has barely earned a nickel in its limited theatrical engagements around the country, yet it’s the canniest, most intriguing American film to be released so far this year. The reasons for its box-office reception are not hard to fathom…
About a year and a half ago, while I was sitting in a doctor’s office with a tube in my ear, trying to figure out why I always almost black out in the second loop of the Shock Wave roller-coaster at Six Flags, the specialist began telling me how how…
Rosanne Rosanna Danna was right. It’s always something. Take paranoia. Just when we’ve learned to stop worrying about the Bomb, the Bug crops up to give us the collective willies. Mushroom clouds have been supplanted by super viruses as the peril du jour–a peril that threatens to spread across the…
The deeper you delve into the latest serial-killer thriller Seven–and the film’s damp, shadowy, claustrophobic look does make you feel like a spelunker at times–the more you’re likely to be annoyed by the visual excesses of director David Fincher. The man has one feature film to his credit–the underrated financial…
I get these catalogs all the time from big-deal art museums like the Metropolitan in New York and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and they wanna sell me art to either wear on my body or put on top of my TV set. And these are not SMALL…
You know how Wayne and Garth aren’t quite as funny as Beavis and Butthead, and how Bill and Ted aren’t as funny as Wayne and Garth, and how Pauly Shore isn’t funny at all. Well, Dags and Reggie aren’t even as funny as Pauly Shore–although they certainly try. Dags and…
thursday september 21 Andrew Sullivan: Although The New Republic’s 29-year-old editor has been called a conservative gay activist, in his publication – and the essays he’s written for The New York Times and other publications – Andrew Sullivan has carved out a fiercely moderate position on social issues (with a…
American cinema usually splits the difference when it comes to depicting the high-school experience. In a hormone-driven subculture where democracy exists only as a popularity contest, most filmmakers have been wary of spreading perspective too thin. So we’re offered the views of teachers (Up The Down Staircase, Dangerous Minds); the…
If there’s one thing audiences won’t put up with these days, it’s exposition. Like a horny teenager, they want to cut right to the chase. The current obsession with getting to the bottom line makes Murder on the Nile a tough play to stage. Agatha Christie, the old sot, likes…
There are two kinds of laws–Mom Laws and Dad Laws. Mom always wants to regulate, control and pass laws about every single second of human existence. Mom Laws are rules like, “Never go out without a muffler, even if you’re in a hurry.” Or “Never make anybody feel bad, even…
Don’t let the title mislead you–Unstrung Heroes doesn’t deal with an underdog sports team, or a state psychiatric hospital that wins big against the snobs of a private institution during field day. Still, the film does deal with mental illness–not to mention cancer, religious faith, the human imagination, family relationships,…
As soon as writer-director Spike Lee burst into the national arena with his masterful unwinding of an urban race riot in 1989’s Do The Right Thing, both Anglo and African-American audiences expected him to explain for us the strangling bitterness that lurks between black and white in America. Unlike the…
Mississippi State head coach Jackie Sherrill has long had a reputation as one of college football’s worst rogues. Now he’s got more than the NCAA on his back. Sherrill’s former divorce attorney, Edward G. Murr, is suing him for an alleged stiff-arm on $17,432.58 in legal fees. The Houston lawyer…
There are soreheads among us who claim to dislike musicals as a dramatic form because they lack verisimilitude. Orchestral music doesn’t well up and people don’t break into song at the drop of a hat in real life the way they do in musicals, these dry, mostly Norwegian nitpickers complain…
It’s been a strange summer. In July I accepted a position as a pop culture writer at New York Newsday. I gave my notice on a Monday. On Wednesday, my editors ran an affectionate Buzz item bidding me farewell. The editor of The Met, Eric Celeste, once my boss in…
Photographer Larry Clark’s debut feature film Kids is one of those tough critical calls for a movie pundit, although you wouldn’t know it by reading any of the rapturous notices printed in the national press about this eye-poppingly explicit look at the hijinks of a group of rootless adolescents on…
“What an actor that guy is!” “She is such a little actress!” When people say stuff like this, they usually mean, “What a liar!”‘ And this is a little annoying–especially if you’re an actor. Because I know a lot of actors, and they spend all their time, every day, thinking…
