“Geek” was probably one of the kinder words applied to us during our time in high school bands. But somehow the über-geeks in the drum line were always above the name-calling, possessing some innate cool for no other reason than they played drums. Heck, they even were allowed to wear…
There is no better network than Fox; there is no worse network than Fox. For every great series it offers, it counters with programming so puerile and sophomoric it threatens to undo its promise and, in the end, bring about the ruin of civilization–which is no hyperbolic generalization if you…
Science fiction can wow us with gadgetry, but only the truly ambitious stuff lights up our imaginations with disturbing and unshakable aberrations, be they incredible shrinking men, 50-foot women or Sting’s winged panties from Dune. In this vast genre, it figures that the ultimate human construct–time–proves most unsettling of all,…
By day, they drive their rippling torsos beneath the blinding desert sun, pausing intermittently to gaze sexily into the distance. By night, they head for the open-air discos of Djibouti to get squiffy with the locals. When time allows, they wash their socks, shave and wander around in cylindrical white…
Call it the art-house, or thinking person’s, Ocean’s Eleven. If you’re in the mood for an all-star ensemble but prefer conversation and reminiscence over thievery, try Last Orders, a Fred Schepisi film that features the strongest lineup of English talent this side of Robert Altman’s mega-cast in the forthcoming Gosford…
As bounty hunter Buccum, Ice Cube zaps people unnecessarily with tasers, points his gun at a kid, tortures a man using metal screws and engages in ethnic slurs–all in the service of obtaining some diamonds that aren’t rightfully his to begin with. Flawed heroes are one thing, but this is…
In the mid-1980s, San Francisco-based Paul Pena–a black blues singer/guitarist best known for writing the Steve Miller Band hit “Jet Airliner”–was listening to shortwave radio when he came upon a broadcast of “throatsinging,” a vocal style from the tiny region of Tuva, then part of the Soviet Union. The technique…
Shot 20 years ago and languishing unfinished on the shelf until 1998, this tale of an artist working at the edges of the New York music scene would have had a hard time finding an audience back then. Now, it just barely qualifies for one. The late Jean Michel Basquiat–playing,…
Cell phones and silk saris, dot-coms and arranged marriages–the latest film from Indian-born director Mira Nair (Salaam Bombay!, Mississippi Masala) captures the heady mix of old and new, rich and poor, traditional and modern that defines contemporary India. A sort of Father of the Bride set in New Delhi, it…
“Are we gonna play chicken here, Robert? Who’s gonna go first?” That’s Chris Moore talking, from the other end of a cell phone–the preferred means of communication for the Hollywood producer too afraid of standing still. Moore–a producer of Good Will Hunting and the American Pie films, partner with Ben…
For a musical without a real book, Blues in the Night, now at the Dallas Theater Center, tells a powerful story. Of broken romances and forbidden loves. Of late-night, gin-soaked laments for how things might have been. Most of all, of the power of a good woman, sadder but wiser…
Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Pablo Picasso didn’t have to worry about love-struck teen-agers carving their initials alongside wobbly hearts or “4-ever” on the wooden frames of their paintings. Auguste Rodin didn’t fret that “The Thinker” would become a urinal for dogs and man alike. Nor did Constantin Brancusi imagine that the…
“Best play ever, man.” Rushmore Academy groundskeeper Mr. Littlejeans says this near the end of Rushmore, referring to Max Fischer’s curtain-closing opus, Heaven and Hell. But he could be talking about the entire movie, which has, since its 1998 release, become something of a touchstone for a generation of young…
If We Were Soldiers smells at all familiar, perhaps you’re confusing it with the stink emanating from a nearby theater screening Black Hawk Down. After all, on their shiny blood-drenched surfaces, they’re damned near the same movie: Both are based on books that recount true-life battles that claimed the lives…
Sometimes genius draws nigh, mollifying the gnashing critic with the promise of wild narrative fusion, perhaps even rollicking wit. Alas, sometimes genius then languidly squirms aside, like a loathsome strumpet, leaving one’s hopeful wantonness piqued but unfulfilled. Both cases apply to the boldly peculiar Scotland, PA., which sweeps up Shakespeare’s…
Barry Skolnick’s remake of 1974’s The Longest Yard never gets as amusing as its opening sequence, a fake sneaker commercial in which soccer thug Vinnie Jones, playing soccer thug Danny “Mean Machine” Meehan, spoofs James Bond. It took three writers to adapt the Burt Reynolds vehicle about an incarcerated football…
Nanni Moretti’s meditation on a family’s trauma in the wake of a teen-age boy’s death in a scuba-diving accident is both spare and unsentimental, and that may surprise those benighted Americans who think all Italians are one part tantrum and one part tomato sauce. Best known here for the 1994…
The rock-and-roll Zapruder film, more or less, highlighted by the ultimate low: the murder of Meredith Hunter, committed by Hell’s Angels during a free show at the Altamont Speedway that proves everything gratis indeed comes with a hell of a price. A film within a film, David and Albert Maysles…
“One man is about to do the unthinkable. No sex. Whatsoever. For…40 Days and 40 Nights.” Um, hello? Is that, like, supposed to be hard? But Matt (Josh Hartnett) isn’t like the rest of us. Beautiful women throw themselves at him daily, and it’s such a problem. Why? Well, he’s…
For a few minutes toward the end of Cross Stage Right: Die! at the Pegasus Theatre, bumbling detective Harry Hunsacker stops bumbling. Under a hypnotic spell cast by his loyal and much smarter assistant, Nigel Grouse (played by Tim Honnoll), Harry suddenly begins to think he’s the reincarnation of Sherlock…
If the stereotypical country-and-western song sounds like “My wife left, my dog ran away and my truck broke down,” then the hackneyed blues song would go something like: “My wife ran off with my best friend, who stole my truck, knocked over my mailbox and hit my dog, then the…
Art critic-historian-essayist-Aussie badass Robert Hughes once wrote of American painter Thomas Cole that he “became something of a national culture hero…His death, opined a newspaper editorial, was ‘a public and national calamity.’ Even allowing for the high rhetorical tint required of such exequies 150 years ago, it’s hard to think…
