Autism of Desire: Work by Lionel Maunz Lionel Maunz is obsessed with the body, human and animal alike. A combination of sculpture, painting, drawing and taxonomic expression, Maunz’s installations reveal him to be something of a young artist coming into his own, that is, a painter productively becoming a mad…
The Exit The new Labyrinth Theatre company debuts with Kevin Ash’s dramatic two-act answer to Sartre’s existential classic, No Exit. This time, writes Ash, there’s a way out of hell. Trapped together in a hotel room decorated in nauseating colors (and sans mirrors, beds or air-conditioning), three characters–a sweaty fat…
In We Don’t Live Here Anymore, an overwrought domestic drama about a pair of entangled couples, Peter Krause plays philandering writer Hank Evans, struggling to produce as he propositions female students at the college where he teaches. Blithely pretentious, fretful only over his writing, Hank observes from a distance as…
Some of the best performances of the year can be found in Mean Creek, a small independent film that marks the auspicious feature debut of 31-year-old writer/director Jacob Aaron Estes. An ensemble drama with a relatively unknown cast, the film looks at six kids and what happens when an innocent…
There’s a new movie called Hero. Don’t confuse it with that dusty Dustin Hoffman vehicle, nor with the epic Bollywood musical espionage extravaganza Hero: Love Story of a Spy (though that’s worth a mind-altering look if you can find it). America and India aren’t directly involved here, but huge imperial…
You know how fear is scary? Well, director E. Elias Merhige is into that, especially in his new serial-killer thriller Suspect Zero. Absent, however, is the dark-comic malevolence the director smartly cultivated in his successful and disquieting Shadow of the Vampire a few years ago, bullied and bulldozed out of…
Flapping and honking like geese in a yard, the six female characters in Steel Magnolias are exaggerated versions of pushy Southern women as seen through the eyes of a gay man, playwright Robert Harling. For Love! Valour! Compassion!, gay playwright Terrence McNally gathers eight stereotypes of artsy, East Coast-y homosexual…
Love! Valour! Compassion! Terrence McNally’s three-act play finds eight artsy gay men sharing a country house for three summer weekends. Couples form and break up. Infidelity abounds. There’s an evil twin, a picnic and a thunderstorm. Love means kissing a lesion. And somebody dies. Like an all-gay All My Children,…
Pierre Huyghe: One Million + Kingdoms Pierre Huyghe (pronounced “Weeg”) is an artist who’s in touch with the power of mass media–both as it molds our collective identity and as fodder for making good art. The three videos now showing at the Fort Worth Modern confront the manner in which…
Becoming a bona fide film buff is like making ranks in the Girl or Boy Scouts. You have to earn your marks. But instead of campfire safety badges or first aid pins, you have to see the right films, know your trivia and, like a good scout, be prepared…to fight…
Thursday, August 26 Presidential campaigns require a lot of energy. The candidates need energy to go out and promote themselves; the public needs it to deal with the onslaught of media telling them who to love and who to hate. It seems like with every campaign, mudslinging increases and the…
Step right up, ladies and germophobes, and see the amazing local artist maneuver the treacherous tightrope of everyday life! See him firmly plant one foot in the studio–time, tools, time, materials, time. See him wiggle the other foot in and out of reality–rent, groceries, laundry, maybe a family, maybe a…
8/28 “What took so long?” we remember a male companion asking as we emerged from a pit stop at a public women’s restroom. We tried to explain that there had been a queue, a woman with three children and an “out of order” sign on two of the toilets. He…
8/28 Did there used to be a treadmill in your living room? Did it move to the attic four years ago, where it now sits behind the stationary bike? Did you find that the problem with the stationary bike was its essence–in other words, its immobility? You were sweating, but…
8/28 In the topsy-turvy world of Hollywood, there are at least a few known absolutes: Eventually, you will do a film with Kevin Bacon; eventually, you will sleep with Colin Farrell; and if you happen to be one of those rare acting couples who stay together, then eventually, you will…
8/31 Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat is, perhaps, the best musical ever conceived. If it’s not the best, well, it certainly ranks pretty high up there. Definitely in the top five. Maybe six. This fact–which we will not dispute, not for a second–doesn’t have much to do with the…
Every once in a while, a film comes along that so blatantly disregards emotional authenticity that one fears for the sanity of its director. Can he actually believe that people talk this way? Act this way? Do these things? Worse, can he think he has made a coherent and feeling…
Stander has been waiting to be made for some 20 years, its screenplay having been written by Bima Stagg shortly after South African cop-turned-robber Andre Stander fought a gun battle with Fort Lauderdale police in February 1984. Writer Bima Stagg had lived in South Africa in the 1980s and fully…
The future is almost here. At least, it is according to screenwriter Frank Cottrell Boyce (Pandaemonium) and director Michael Winterbottom (24 Hour Party People), two cinematic visionaries whose combined vision in Code 46 sparks tremendous intrigue–and unrest. At once a weirdly familiar sci-fi trip, a bleak romance, a treatise on…
The conventional wisdom on Nicotina is that it’s a Mexican Snatch. Upon first blush, it’s easy to see where the comparisons come from–they’re both more or less diamond-swiping caper films in which the caper all but fades into the shadows of the guys and dolts incapable of pulling it off–but…
Summer movies don’t get much sillier or more empty-headed than Without a Paddle, and that includes Catwoman and King Arthur. What we have here is a low-wattage buddy flick proposing that a trio of boyhood friends, now 30 years old, can shed the last vestiges of their adolescence by traipsing…
New York–It’s not unusual that most of us find great comfort maneuvering in the vernacular. Whether spoken or architectural, the vernacular is familiar, easy, efficient and, at its base, local. It’s the slang that gets your order across to the waiter. It’s the back road that gets you fastest from…
