Against a completely black background comes the low, ominous rumbling of thunder. A sense of unease washes over the viewer. When the first images appear on screen, they only heighten our level of apprehension, because in the middle of a curvy mountain road lies a figure. There is no way…
If you’re a college freshman, don’t read this. Just grab your newfound peers and go see Richard Linklater’s new movie, Waking Life, then head off to one of those ethereal late-night dining establishments for which you’ll desperately pine once the real world gets ahold of you. Discuss. For others, this…
It’s hell being an art-world skeptic. In many ways, the art critic’s gig recalls Pascal’s famous wager with non-believers. Since life is a cosmic crapshoot, Pascal argued, the pragmatist will always bet in favor of God’s existence. If you’re right, and he exists, you’ve won everything; if you’re wrong, and…
In a previous life in San Antonio, each February our boss would send out a memo encouraging employees to wear Western clothes to work to celebrate the annual arrival of the stock show and rodeo. His assumption was that a bunch of pasty, pudgy people who worked every day in…
Plenty has been said about the effect of the September 11 attacks on the entertainment industry. Movies have been re-edited to omit scenes of the World Trade Center and Pentagon. Others have been shelved indefinitely because of plots about terrorism, collapsing buildings or hijacked airliners. There have been quickly produced…
Two weeks ago, it would have been possible to use the name of the man interviewed below; indeed, it would have been expected, as he is no mere “spokesman,” the only identifier by which he is to be referred. Two weeks ago, it would have been possible to point out…
Ask David Lynch, and he will tell you apple-pie America just isn’t what it seems. People behave strangely, sometimes violently, and sometimes they even transform into different people without being polite enough to warn you first. Eerie and freaky, shot through with sporadic bursts of humor and sex, Mulholland Drive…
Here you’ll find madness, mayhem and murder, in no short supply. The Hughes brothers, Albert and Allen, have always had a knack for horror, as evidenced by their edgy gangster flicks, Menace II Society and Dead Presidents, which they’ve stated were influenced by the styles of Brian De Palma and…
Some guys have the kind of face that suggests they’ve been to hell and back. The narrow, steely eyes, graying hair and deep lines crisscrossing the countenance of a James Coburn or Clint Eastwood can practically do all of their acting for them in any role that calls for a…
There exists a devoted audience for whom Beverly Donofrio’s 1990 autobiography, Riding in Cars With Boys: Confessions of a Bad Girl Who Makes Good, is the stuff of by-the-book inspiration; such is the worship for her memoirs that in 1994 it was included in Penguin’s compendium of 500 Great Books…
In the new low-budget indie comedy Haiku Tunnel, former temporary office worker Josh Kornbluth plays “Josh Kornbluth,” a temporary office worker who, early in the film, faces a premature midlife crisis–whether to stay a temp or “go perm.” After great hesitation, the company makes him an offer he can’t refuse–they’ll…
It’s 1999, the end of history as we know it, with the Cold War over and the Western World infatuated with its own narcissistic reflection as it gazes into its navel and can’t see past itself. Forget the big picture. There are no more big ideas. There’s no more big…
Of all the nationwide changes that the terrorist attacks of September 11 have produced, perhaps none is more surprising or appropriate than the marked resurfacing of poetry in public forums. Internet memorial sites have become the anthologies for people spontaneously moved to pen elegiac remembrances for the lost and worthy…
The guest list for this Sci-Fi Expo-cum-Bat-Con Comic & Toy Expo (and never has a dorkier phrase sprung from this keyboard) keeps shrinking. Originally, Burt Ward (TV’s Robin, and no duh), Van Williams (The Green Hornet, at least for one season in 1966-’67), Ray Park (Star Wars’ Darth Maul and…
“It is hardly appropriate just now to be calling upon famous people to travel unnecessarily,” says the Fort Worth Film Festival’s artistic director and vice-president Dwight Greene, explaining why the annual fest–which has in the past hosted such names as Gregory Peck and John Waters–will be short on star power…
On October 3, there appeared in The New York Times an article about how movie studios are struggling to find new villains in a post-September 11 environment. Writer Rick Lyman rounded up the usual suspects: a few film producers, a couple of screenwriters and the requisite amount of film scholars,…
Plot aside–way aside, as it’s almost a non-issue in a film that telegraphs its final scenes during its opening moments– Bandits is really about only one thing: Billy Bob Thornton’s and Bruce Willis’ bald heads. As Joe Blake (Willis) and Terry Collins (Thornton), two bank-robbing fugitives in search of retirement…
No one has more to say about life than someone who hasn’t lived it yet. While pop culture’s juvenile slaves would shout down this concept to their last breaths–jeans slung at half-mast, navel-rings linked in passionate solidarity–there’s only so much material to be strip-mined from the angst of youth, especially…
Thanks to his justly lauded work as action choreographer on The Matrix and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, director Yuen Wo Ping is among the most famous creators of Hong Kong action in the United States. Following the latter film’s astonishing success, Miramax, with a prod from Quentin Tarantino, has wisely…
Tran Anh Hung’s beautiful meditation on family ties and family traumas, The Vertical Ray of the Sun, marks a captivating new chapter in the career of the writer-director who was the first to give Americans a glimpse of Vietnamese filmmaking. In 1994 Tran’s The Scent of Green Papaya made its…
There are two fundamental rules that must remain inviolate for my 4-year-old, Max, to enjoy children’s theater. First, never allow larger-than-life animal characters to frolic in any interactive fashion with the audience: Breaking the fourth wall scares the hell out of him. And second, make certain that the running time…
The late actor Anthony Quinn, who was known for having played characters of almost every ethnicity–except perhaps Nordic–during his 60-year career, surprisingly didn’t place too much importance on his own background. “It doesn’t make a difference as long as I’m a person in the world,” he said. In its third…
