If you didn’t spend the better part of puberty at a performing-arts high school, then any impressions you may have formed about such a creative curriculum are probably based on the idealized experiences depicted in Fame, the movie that chronicled a group of adolescent misfits who were young, gifted, talented,…
Robots always get a bad rap. They’re bad-mouthed for stealing jobs from hard-working folk, and they get exploited as man’s obedient servants. Then human-centric Hollywood portrays them as cold-blooded killers, or, worst of all, lets the likes of William Shatner outsmart them and thwart their nefarious schemes. Now the robots’…
Playwright-filmmaker David Mamet has the sharpest gift imaginable for shooting down the sins of American greed, the con games people run to get ahead, and the corruption that comes with success. Whether he’s haunting a secondhand junk shop, a poker room, or an outlying real-estate office, he always finds enough…
Thirteen Days is a suspenseful look at the American government in the grip of a crucial, minute-to-minute, real-life crisis that threatens to destroy the country. No, it is not–as the relatively brief time span referenced in the title makes clear–about the recent election struggles…or the 1998 impeachment…or the Watergate hearings,…
Skeptics will not take easily to the optimism in Thomas Carter’s teen love story Save the Last Dance, and outright cynics may find the whole thing absurd. The notion that a sheltered white girl from shopping-mall country and a knowing black boy from the inner city can dance their way…
In case you were wondering, here’s the most fulfilling way to enjoy the alleged thriller, Antitrust. Step One: Go shopping for groceries at your favorite supermarket. Step Two: When the smiling employee asks you whether you prefer paper or plastic, choose paper. Step Three: Seek out the young actor known…
It was a glowing neon sign at the entry of 500X that kicked off the inner debate. A few pink and blue tubes twisted smoothly into the run-on phrase “Daddy’s Girl Mamma’s Boy,” copped directly from every old, beloved Bruce Nauman neon piece that plays on words and stereotypes. This…
Paul Rudnick may be the funniest American playwright who can’t really write–at least, he has major problems with balance, structure, and especially with the delicate intermingling of the serious and the silly. In his widely staged plays I Hate Hamlet, Jeffrey, and The Most Fabulous Story Ever Told, which receives…
If the sitcom format were any more stagnant, it would breed mosquitoes. CBS’ vaunted primetime schedule is populated by shows that look like holdovers from the 1970s…or 1950s; Everybody Loves Raymond, The King of Queens, and Yes, Dear are vestiges from the glory days of the family sitcom, Mom and…
The first 15 minutes of our prepared childbirth course last summer was devoted to ice-breaking–that peculiar activity group leaders believe helps a room full of strangers bond. We dutifully stated our names, jobs, due dates, hobbies. One particularly stunning response came out of the bow-shaped mouth of a stay-at-home prego…
If M. Night Shyamalan makes movies to be seen twice, then Joel and Ethan Coen make films to be pawed over a dozen times. O Brother, Where Art Thou?, an opulent and often slapstick updating of Homer’s The Odyssey by way of Preston Sturges, Robert Johnson, and Clark Gable, sneaks…
At the time, it was meant to be read as a great compliment: Jaime and Gilbert Hernandez create comic books for people who don’t read comic books! A publisher or pitchman couldn’t have come up with a more glorious phrase, one magical sentence that would reel in the literate and…
“You’re right! I quit!” Until this moment–this shrill outburst that comes out of nowhere and startles both interviewer and subject–Marisa Tomei had been speaking in hushed tones, like someone making funeral arrangements. Every so often, she would punctuate her sentences with giggles–some nervous, some delirious–but suddenly, she is laughing uncontrollably…
The War on Drugs has become this generation’s Vietnam, the unwinnable conflict that will, in the end, destroy the innocent and reward the guilty. That, in a coke vial, is the premise of Steven Soderbergh’s Traffic, a film that gives flesh and face to bloodless government statistics and statements seldom…
The drub-drub-drub of a primered ’70s muscle car has joined the more common, but just as loud, boom-boom-boom of a lowered Lincoln sporting ground effects at the intersection by my house. Rarer in the custom-car world, the muscle car’s call thumps “alpha male” as indiscriminately as the usual bass rattle…
Last spring, as part of a New York Times series titled “Writers on Writing,” mystery novelist and satirist Carl Hiaasen groused about what must rank as one of the central artistic problems of the late 20th century. “Real life,” Hiaasen noted, “is getting way too funny and far-fetched…Fact is routinely…
Peruse the online newspapers of major American cities in December, and it’s clear that Langston Hughes’ 1961 Black Nativity is almost as ubiquitous within African-American communities as all the varieties of A Christmas Carol are to so many Anglo playgoers. Cleveland, Philadelphia, Seattle, Fort Worth, and Washington, D.C., have long-existent…
You have to wonder what’s going on at Fort Worth’s Yellow House Gallery, a recently expanded art space tucked into the light industrial no-man’s-land between West Lancaster Avenue and West 7th Street. Michaele Ann Harper opened Yellow House in 1996, but before the expansion it was hard to believe she…
Thank God for old Jews with shaky hands and the inability to tell this word (G-O-R-E) from this one (B-U-C-H-A-N-A-N). Without them–and Survivor Richard Hatch, that self-proclaimed “fat naked fag” who, as is turns out, is just a really concerned parent and not at all, uh, abusive–it would have been…
I’m not sure when the Alex Rodriguez talks became serious, or even how they began in the first place. In the beginning, I laughed, chuckled at the legions of fools who held close to them the possibility of an A-Rod signing the way children pathetically clutch stuffed animals. (Losers.) “No…
Maybe it wasn’t such a bad year for filmgoing after all, if only because it’s far harder to assemble a top-10 list this year than it was last year. Or maybe the best of 1999 towered so far above the worst (and the middling, which includes the grossly overrated American…
The cream of this year’s crop are films carefully selected not only for their countless wonderful qualities, but because, as the list indicates, they form terrific thematic double features for contemplation and discussion. These days, there’s plenty of evidence to indicate that now, more than ever, movies may not be…
