There are all kinds of things that pop up in my everyday life to remind me that of the 50 percent of the Beatles left on Earth, 50 percent of that 50 percent are lame. I’m looking at you, Ringo. Paul’s the only thing I have left—and what is he…
In 2004, when Beastie Boy Adam Yauch discovered a fan’s cell phone concert photo, an idea was born: give cameras to the fans and let them shoot enough footage to make a feature-length film. The result is awesome. Literally. The film Awesome: I…Shot That was made by 50 camera-toting fans…
You gotta hand it to President Clinton. He did more for the Arkansas economy after leaving the Oval Office. Friends of Bush are streaming into Little Rock to visit the Clinton Presidential Center. Now the University of Dallas and Southern Methodist University are panting after the George W. Bush Presidential…
One of the worst (or best, depending on your point of view) things about riding in an elevator or shopping in a grocery store is hearing Muzak versions of your favorite tunes. There’s nothing quite as disturbing as an angry and energetic rock tune mutilated and neutered by some douche…
Have you ever considered what Adam and Eve would look like as blow-up sex dolls? Me neither. But if you’re wondering, head on over to the McKinney Avenue Contemporary (the MAC) to check out the work of Vera Barnett, one of three artists whose pieces are currently on display at…
Whenever Cousin Pearl would cut loose with a yodel on The Beverly Hillbillies and the dogs would come a-runnin’, you pretty much knew where yodeling stood in pop culture: a hillbilly joke, the sound of hickdom. If you think that, then you’ve probably never heard Jimmie Rodgers sing “Train Whistle…
My other job is at a bookstore. With that comes the excessive tome exposure, and yet somehow it’s never too much. It was there that I discovered Augusten Burroughs, followed Oprah’s classic selections and even fell for The DaVinci Code. Then there are the few that I keep seeing but…
What do you get when you combine a man who is “the sleepiest, dullest, most British Britisher” with a woman who is “lavishly gifted with beauty and talent”? Oh, and don’t forget to add the perils of a seething, bloody French Revolution. Of course it would be the drama-filled tale…
“Girls who are boys/Who like boys to be girls/Who do boys like they’re girls/Who do girls like they’re boys.” The chorus to Blur’s gender-bending “Girls and Boys” is an homage to the notion that maybe the lines that differentiate masculinity and femininity are less defined than Pat Robertson might think…
My dad has liked two movies in the history of movies. One of them is The Bourne Identity. He watches it over and over. The other movie my dad likes is Body Heat. I’ve never seen him watch Body Heat. Sometimes at dinner, he talks about how he’s going to…
There is nothing more tranquil than watching waves lap around your feet. Or schools of fish swirl like graceful beads on invisible threads of ocean jewelry. That’s what draws us to ocean odysseys—the fluidity allows us clumsy bipeds a momentary experience of coordination and weightlessness. Choreographer Moses Pendleton pours this…
We tend to remember the bad teachers. The ones who went an entire year calling us someone else’s name. The good teachers sometimes inhabit our memories as blurry figures with chalk. Phillip Done has written a collection of essays about his adventures in elementary education. We read them and feel…
The posters for V for Vendetta read “An uncompromising vision of the future from the creators of The Matrix trilogy.” Uncompromising? It simply isn’t possible to translate Alan Moore’s multilayered comic-book masterpiece into a two-hour movie without making cuts that oversimplify, and it’s certainly not feasible to expect producer Joel…
John Fante’s novel Ask the Dust, published in 1939 and all but forgotten till its 1980 reissue with a Charles Bukowski foreword, is very much a work of thinly veiled autobiography; only the names have been changed to protect the guilty. Its protagonist, a struggling writer named Arturo Bandini, shared…
A gritty portrait of ghetto life in contemporary South Africa, Tsotsi packs an unexpected emotional wallop. Gavin Hood’s film tells a story of violence and redemption that’s even more remarkable when you consider that neither of the lead performers had ever acted in a movie previously. It’s little wonder that…
Hollywood’s a sucker for cross-dressing. When the American Film Institute chose the 100 greatest comedies of all time, a pair of drag films–Some Like It Hot and Tootsie–earned the top two slots. From Operation Petticoat to White Chicks, slapping falsies on a dude is the fast road to Chuckletown. Women…
The Boys of Baraka, a fine documentary about a group of inner-city, at-risk boys who travel to Kenya to attend a special school, comes very close to greatness. For over an hour, the film is a sharp and blazing account of how boys with multiple challenges and little hope for…
So wait. It’s a movie about the longest criminal trial in U.S. history, it’s directed by the legendary Sidney Lumet, and it stars…Vin Diesel in a wig? In a role originally intended for Joe Pesci? Can Lumet be serious? Actually, no. The characters may be based on real people, with…
Who knows? Maybe he developed writer’s block. Or joined Up With People. Or dropped dead from shock the day Bush got re-elected. In any event, the notorious Northern California serial killer who called himself, rather grandiosely, the Zodiac, hasn’t fired off a single letter to the editor since April 1978…
Writer, director, producer and actor Tyler Perry wins the perfect attendance award. The plays and movies featuring his cross-dressing alter ego, Madea, have become runaway box-office hits with black women older than 35, raking in more than $155 million over the past several years. Three performances of his latest show,…
Cloud Tectonics José Rivera’s dreamlike one-act play casts a powerful spell. On a rainy L.A. night, an airport worker named Anibal (Marco Rodriguez) gives a ride to a pregnant girl named Celestina (Marisa Gonzalez) and ends up taking her home. She’s a strange creature, but he’s attracted to her ethereal…
Francesco Patriarca’s L’Appartement The young Italian photographer Francesco Patriarca captures the collective memory of space and objects combined. Accompanied by the lyrical catalog essay by Sibylle Pieyre de Mandiargues, “The Apartment,” Patriarca’s photographs distill the remembrance of things past without any of the soupy navel-gazing to which similar pictorial peregrinations…
