To some, the story of Christopher Johnson McCandless, the 24-year-old Emory University graduate who starved to death in the Alaskan wilderness in the spring of 1992, will never be anything more than a case of a spoiled bourgeois brat with half-cocked survivalist fantasies (and possible suicidal tendencies) who ran away…
The Kingdom is the first film from Peter Berg since the actor-turned-director’s Friday Night Lights, which spawned an acclaimed, if struggling, franchise for NBC. There will be no small-screen spin-off of The Kingdom—there are too many corpses lying around to populate a sequel, much less a series. Besides, it would…
In his earlier plays, Killer Joe and Bug, writer Tracy Letts plundered the troubled lives of angry brutes and paranoid meth addicts, the sort of creepsters who dabble in homemade porn, homegrown reefer and homicide. So what’s he doing wasting his time and ours with the khaki-bland problems of Man…
Knocked Up (Universal)Apparently, as Judd Apatow was making Knocked Up he was also prepping for its DVD release, as most of the bonuses here were shot during breaks on location. And they’re no small treats, either. Finally, here’s a “collector’s edition” worthy of the moniker. Chief among the bounty affixed…
Director Robert Benton, best known for his zeitgeisty divorce drama Kramer vs. Kramer, has tapped into more than a few current trends in Feast of Love. There are the interlocking mini-stories, à la Crash; the different color filters for different scenes (happy moments in yellow, sad ones in blue), à…
“Killer timing! Manda Bala (Send a Bullet), Jason Kohn’s vivid, lean-and-hungry documentary about São Paulo’s fatalistic food chain of extreme poverty, violence, unmitigated corruption and overwhelming wealth arrives just as Vanity Fair’s “Viva Brazil!!” issue hits the stands. Can’t we find a new country to fetishize? Trading once again on…
In terms of the yawning chasm between what was promised and what has been delivered, Lair earns the distinction of being the biggest letdown ever for PlayStation 3. Worse, it’s also one of those games where massive prerelease hype merely ended up underscoring its flaws, transmogrifying a game that would’ve…
Leave South Beach a little early. Get in a whole ‘nother Zone. Tell Atkins you have a new doctor…and his name is Big Tex. Yep, folks, the State Fair of Texas is back Friday, and in the pavilions and amidst the tents, you’ll find not only midway rides, carnies, pig…
Let’s not try to dance around it—Betty Buckley was so awesome as Abby Bradford on Eight Is Enough. She kicks legal tail on Law & Order: SVU. She was sympathetic and awesome in Carrie. But it’s so very sad that most people that know the screen actress don’t realize that,…
With a name like Right Ho, Jeeves, you might be expecting a play about pimps and hookers. Sorry, guys. Banish the visions of high heels, fish-net stockings and short skirts that are dancing through your troubled little minds. Likewise, none of the cast will be sporting circa-1970 pimp suits. Right…
The Cotton Bowl Classic may be moving to Arlington, and sure, the Red River Shootout might follow them someday, but good riddance—that just means more fried cookie dough for us and the boys from Grambling and Prairie View A & M. After all, the State Fair Classic, or as we…
While the word “Momix” sounds like some new-fangled cat food (we can hear the jingle now: “Help your kitty/Get his fix/Feed your kitty/New Momix!”), it’s actually the name of a modern dance company that will blow you away. Often dancing all nude except for what’s called a “dance belt”—a kind…
At 7:30 p.m. this Saturday, head to the Harmony in the House benefit featuring Queen Latifah at The Majestic Theatre, 1925 Elm St. It’s the beginning of Latifah’s national tour for her new jazz album, Trav’lin’ Light (Seriously, Queen? Trav’lin’ Light? What, did the “e” and the “l” in the…
Anytime someone my age waxes nostalgic about our mid-’90s high school years being the “golden years” of alt-rock radio, I want to puke. My gorge rises because two song snippets will run through my head: Ed Kowalczyk hysterically over-emoting, “Her placenta falls to the floor,” during Live’s “Lightning Crashes,” then…
It’s really sweet to see a collaboration of entities all coming together for the benefit of the children. It’s like a Michael Jackson song come to life. So when the Children’s Medical Center and the Angelika Film Center of Plano united for a series of children’s classics, all I could…
An institution once held in the highest of regards, along with Mom and apple pie, as a symbol of unshakable American awesomeness, baseball has become somewhat of a bloated behemoth, all but collapsing beneath the weight of gazillion-dollar franchise dynasties, sordid doping scandals and unnecessary, if occasionally able, expansion teams…
When I first heard about photographer Terry Falke’s exhibition, Observations in an Occupied Wilderness, I thought, “Great, more thoroughly original African animal portraits.” Wrong. Falke captures the American Southwest, by (not an original idea by any means) “emphasizing the incongruities observed in humankind’s interaction with the environment,” meaning artsy shots…
During the eighth grade, every girl in my school came down with a raging fever that caused them to behave even more crazily than usual. The cause? Teenybopper rock band Hanson, who were in the process of taking over the world. My oh-so-edgy friends and I had but one recourse:…
Bad Religion was always made fun of as “Ph.D. punk” when I was in high school. Their 1982 debut LP, How Could Hell Be Any Worse, however, was a trend-setting release that laid the tracks for their later albums and established their trademark style. Future releases were filled with very…
You’d think it’d be hard growing up with a nickname like Fudge, but it’d be even more unfortunate to grow up with Fudge as a little brother. Long before the beloved Judy Blume classic Superfudge, there was Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing, the introductory story of poor Peter Hatcher…
You might have seen R&B singer/Tommy Hilfiger model Tyrese this summer battling giant killer Decepticons in Transformers. Or perhaps you caught him a couple summers back racing Japanese cars in 2 Fast 2 Furious. Or maybe you saw him co-starring in the Dennis Quaid remake of Flight of the Phoenix…
“Space” is one of those words that doesn’t really mean anything. It’s a concept that can’t really be put into a concise term. You can’t define space as boundary-less, because my half-empty Dr Pepper can has space in it. But then you have outer space, which is theoretically limitless. It’s…
