Hal Sparks is a man of many talents–rocking his man-itude on Queer as Folk, hosting Talk Soup and rocking out with his band Zero 1. He’s even able to add personality to the unspeakably lame lines doled out to him on VH-1’s various I Love The Whatnot programs. But most…
The Merchant of Venice is a comedy? Oh, sure, that’s easy for you to say, white bread. If you’re Jewish or black–ol’ Willie Shakespeare’s play has some unflattering words about a Moorish prince’s complexion, and, of course, there’s Shylock–you might not exactly split your sides. On the plus side, liberally…
Someone (who was that?) once said “a picture is worth a thousand words.” If still pictures happen at 24 frames-per-second in movies…well, you do the math. The Museum of Modern Art in New York gets it. With more than 21,000 titles in their film collection, MoMA began Still Moving, a…
On the surface, Pineapple Express offers precisely what it advertises: a roll-’em-up, smoke-’em-up, blow-’em-up bromantic comedy from the freaks and geeks who have made Judd Apatow’s brand of stunted-man yuks a global franchise. Once more, Seth Rogen’s red-rimmed, half-shut eyes peek out from beneath his tousled Jewfro, which sits atop…
Even as the first girders were laid in the mid-1960s, something about the World Trade Center—that twin-pronged erection jutting from the loins of Western commerce—inspired fantasies of lustful conquest. As James Marsh’s documentary Man on Wire tells it, a mischievous French teenager was sitting in a dentist’s office in 1968…
Bottle Shock, which debuted at the Sundance Film Festival in January, is a great concept populated by great actors that works hard to make its audience feel great! Only, sadly, it’s far, far from a great movie—a little too sweet to the taste, almost sickly so. Indeed, it’s made-for-cable mediocre…
Slow and steady wins the race? Ha. Don’t believe it, kid. Let us tell you how The Tortoise and the Hare really went down: The hare, after a night of tweaking with strippers, got the shakes on race day and ducked off the track to vomit. Repeatedly. The tortoise, meanwhile,…
There aren’t many TV shows that I get excited about these days, and frankly I never thought a show on E! would ever be on that list, but if you haven’t seen The Soup, you are really missing out. The show, originally called Talk Soup and hosted by Greg Kinnear,…
Who is Shakey Amy? She’s an advocate, a Lakewood resident, a music lover, a wife, a videographer, a woman with dystonia. OK, so what is dystonia? It’s a neurological disorder causing severe, repetitive and painful muscle contractions. It’s not something to wish upon anyone as there is no cure–efforts can…
You know he rants. You know he raves. And you know he has zero qualms about giving you an earful when it comes to his opinions. Dennis Miller, the acerbic comedian, writer and pundit, takes to the Bass Hall stage to expose, satirize and poke fun at politics and social…
The first single off Joe Diffie’s debut album shot straight to No. 1 in 1990. Since then, he’s released more than a dozen top-10 hits, won a Grammy and, sadly, chopped off his mullet. Now, after nine studio albums, he’s joining the ranks of Merle Haggard, Roy Clark, Cross Canadian…
When I first heard the name of the play, Say You Love Satan, it conjured up a memory. I once read a true crime book about a Long Island teenage metalhead who called himself “The Acid King” and dabbled in Satanism. In 1984, he stabbed a friend 36 times while…
Photographer Kent Barker seems rather taken with the process of erosion–“There is a solitude and a quiet that for me is conducive to the act of ‘seeing’ and a unique visual beauty in the way that time and weather acts upon objects,” he says. Barker finds such beauty in the…
Who doesn’t need to be more productive? I’ll tell you who: Dr. Jeffrey Spencer. The man has not only been a Tour de France team member eight freakin’ times, but he’s also a chiropractor, lecturer and–oh yeah, this one’s good–he’s a life coach to the stars. Now, he may not…
Clearly I’m an idiot. I just now got the title of Uptown Players’ newest show, Zanna Don’t! A Musical Fairy Tale. The off-Broadway show sounds like Footloose meets High School Musical, introduced to In and Out and then touched by the irony of Planet of the Apes. OK, work with…
As a younger person in the age of the crystal shards, Fizzgigg, Kira and Jen, I was less about the fantasies and more about the comedies. I’d sit and watch The Jerk or Airplane! over and over but only just tolerate movies like The NeverEnding Story and The Dark Crystal…
To make a successful film, a director must cause the audience to suspend their disbelief. Fortunately for Hollywood many of us are only too willing to oblige. Hey, if we can buy Tobey Maguire as Spider-Man, then by gum, we can accept him as Red Pollard–a hard-drinking, tough-as-nails horse jockey…
I was raised to be a New York Mets fan. I have fuzzy memories of my father trying to teach me to bat when I could barely walk. I have a picture of myself with one front tooth missing, wearing a flannel nightgown and a Mets batting helmet. Oh yeah,…
When I was a kid, nothing sparked the flames of fantasy and adventure like a treehouse, a playhouse or a makeshift fort. I didn’t care whether the fort was built around the trunk of a tree, a quilt strung up across a few dining room chairs or the cardboard box…
I haven’t read Kathy Peel’s latest book, Busy Mom’s Guide to a Happy, Organized Home: Fast Solutions to Hundreds of Everyday Dilemmas, but I can tell from the title (and the woman pictured on the cover, a cross between Martha Stewart and Hillary Clinton) that it would bore the crap…
If it’s an American institution you’re looking for, don’t start with apple pie or the Smithsonian or Miley Cyrus. Ignore Chevy trucks, Toby Keith and Jack Bauer. There’s none more American than Helen Thomas, the legendary White House reporter who’s covered nine presidents since 1961, asking the tough and the…
When it comes to glorifying man-made means of transportation and feats of technology, the entire country of the United States of America serves as a pretty powerful altar to all that is great and good about human ingenuity. We celebrate our vast intellectual superiority by driving gas-guzzling Hummers at 90…
