8/13 Ever-advancing years don’t make this any easier to admit: My first exposure to a Broadway show was Disney’s Beauty and the Beast almost a decade ago…and it was fairly awesome. No offense meant to fans of the story or the production; it’s just that a high school senior typically…
You’re not likely to hear this critic utter the phrases “American remake” and “good idea” in the same breath. Godzilla, anyone? La Femme Nikita bastardized into Point of No Return? The Ladykillers? Just say no! Yet when Hidayo Nakata’s shocker Ringu was remade successfully as The Ring by workmanlike Gore…
Sheathed in a custom-tailored gray suit and sporting expensively barbered silver hair, Tom Cruise looks like an older, harder version of the self-absorbed L.A. sharpie he played 16 years ago in Rain Man. But in Collateral, a frenetic Michael Mann thriller that runs up a Baghdad-level body count, Cruise’s character…
Little Black Book, with its Carly Simon soundtrack all but daring you to tune it out before it begins, is being marketed as a daffy romantic comedy in which a woman plows through her boyfriend’s Palm to uncover his past relationships. In truth, the movie’s anything but light and frothy;…
There is nothing mysterious or subdued about Stacy Peralta’s enthusiasms. A product of Southern California’s vivid beach scene, he’s been a surfer since boyhood and was a professional skateboarder in the ’70s before he started making documentaries about the defining moments of those sports. The phenomenally successful Dogtown and Z-Boys…
As a reviewer, it can be very tempting to want in on the ground floor of a phenomenon, to say you were there first when some low-budget feature with a nifty premise made its festival debut, only to be picked up by a big studio and become a national phenomenon…
There is a phrase bandied about that other film industry–“gay for pay”–that means exactly what it says. The queer thing is, this switch-hitting work ethic obviously applies to the “straight” industry as well, since actors not infrequently launch their careers, or rev ’em up, by playing gay. Witness recently Heath…
Ellsworth Kelly in Dallas This show should be called “Dallas Collects Ellsworth Kelly.” It would be more honest, not to mention more intriguing. This dainty collection of top-quality painting and sculpture by the mid-20th-century artist does little service to the importance of Kelly. Kelly’s brightly colored and experimentally shaped opaque…
Porn for Puritans In just over an hour of sketches and songs, writer-performers Leigh Tomlinson and Tim Wardell attempt to show the funny side of wooing and winning the opposite sex. If only they weren’t afraid of the topic. Instead of driving their audience to ecstasy with saucy observations and…
You’ll come for the title. You’ll stay for 70 minutes. And you’ll go home thinking of punch lines infinitely funnier than the ones coming from the stage in Porn for Puritans, the comedy revue now playing in the little theater at The MAC. Written and performed by Leigh Tomlinson and…
While the matrimonial antics of thick celebrities may be fun to read about if there’s a dearth of painfully embarrassing anecdotes in your own life, most of the time they’re just a source of humor. But rather than bemoaning the day that Britney Spears was issued her first marriage license…
Thursday, August 5 Along with guidelines on where to park, what to pack and how to dispose of “personal toilet” output, the Burning Man Festival Web site offers this wisdom: “Trying to explain what Burning Man is to someone who has never been to the event is a bit like…
Our research has proven our theory: There is no breakfast food (Cookie Crunch notwithstanding) that is less nutritious than the toaster pastry. But that doesn’t make them any less desirable or tasty. What is interesting is that, while two pastries come in one pouch, the serving suggestion is a single…
8/6 If you want to leave the cineplex this weekend with that feel-good vibe–love solves everything and good always triumphs over evil–you should buy a ticket to Spider-Man 2 or A Cinderella Story. Stick to your family-friendly fare, and at all costs avoid the Inwood Theatre’s midnight movie–don’t you know…
8/7 Something happened to Daryl Sprout that day in the fifth grade when he found a speckled king snake in his grandmother’s back yard. That something was icky and alternately sweet: a lifelong affection for snakes of all kinds. By the end of the fifth grade, Sprout already knew far…
8/5 You probably prance to the thunderous, rolling boil of copper-clad kettledrums. Your drummer’s different. You’re curious about, interested in or at least tolerant of all sorts of art forms from cultures far and near. Of the performing arts, dance is the most inscrutable. To do it well requires mastery…
8/10 Things We Love About Little Shop of Horrors: a randomly appearing trio of backup singers. The dynamic between a sadistic dentist and a masochistic patient. A gigantic soul-singing alien plant-beast. In all honesty, our Little Shop experience is largely based on the 1986 Frank Oz movie musical, but seeing…
Perhaps the most unlikely thing to capture on film is the creative process–the spinning of gears, the tripping of wires, the breaking of hearts and the snapping of tempers that go into the making of art. Movies about writers and painters and musicians seldom collapse the barrier between inspiration and…
Jonathan Demme’s gutsy The Manchurian Candidate, which dares to rear its head just as the Democratic National Convention convenes in Boston, is the anti-Bush administration movie for those who refuse to see Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 or Robert Greenwald’s Outfoxed because, well, they just ain’t Right. It’s less a remake…
You may have already heard the stories about A Home at the End of the World. In what many viewers have deemed a big loss, Colin Farrell’s penis no longer appears in the film. The official line is that test audiences found it too distracting, though that seems unlikely, given…
Winner of the Dramatic Audience Award at the 2004 Sundance Film Festival, Maria Full of Grace is an uncomfortably realistic look at a 17-year-old Colombian woman who, desperate for a job, agrees to swallow capsules of heroin and transport them to New York. Although a work of fiction, the film…
Many is the promising playwright who cuts his teeth on a one-act play or at least attempts one during those fondly remembered starvation years. Likely, some have three or four one-acts or short plays sitting around in some dusty trunk waiting to be brushed off after the author gets discovered…
