Humans are packed on this Arlington dance floor like a size 12 behind pushed into a pair of petite 6 Rocky Mountain Jeans. No room to spare on the hardwood, and Toby Keith is backstage, getting ready to sing. Cowboys Bar is rockin’, celebs are in the crowd, and there’s…
Where would children’s literature be without the Brits? Fairy tales and other traditional stories aside, it’s British writers, most of them active from the late 1800s to about 1950, who created the canon of works for children that most of us grew up with. Take away Lewis Carroll, George McDonald,…
I went out to El Lay last week and, for the first time in my life, I felt nekkid without a cellular. I actually wanted to hold a cellular in my hand. I went to lunch with three guys at one of those restaurants with a veranda where you can…
One of the biggest box-office successes in the history of Japanese cinema, The Mystery of Rampo arrives on these shores as a limited engagement in a few major markets. Indeed, the film has been booked for one week only at Landmark’s Inwood Theatre, so if you want to catch this…
When you hear that an upcoming film has generated a positive “buzz,” that usually means one thing–studios expect it to make money and win positive critical reactions and a fistful of Oscar nominations. Jocelyn Moorhouse’s multi-generational comic-romantic epic How To Make an American Quilt has created so much advance excitement…
thursday october 5 Women in Exile: Refugee Rights and Realities: The recently convened fourth annual U.N. World Conference on Women provided the first chance Hillary Clinton got in a long time to stop playing Barbara Bush and start spouting off on the issues of women’s health and safety across the…
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,…
