A lousy daddy, that King Lear. A real crumb bum. Through five long acts of Shakespeare’s finest play, Lear nastily foments family squabbles, property disputes, madness, war, murder and suicide. He destroys his entire family and leaves his kingdom in ruins. Only at the end of his ego-driven life does…
The best thing about turning 80, insists the maestro who has been making music for movies for half of the medium’s lifetime, is that you no longer have to lie about anything to anyone. It’s too late for lies; the clock will no longer forgive deception. So you may feel…
One day you’ll just have to have your own parade, you white-bread, plain ole “Amuricans” of multi-British Isles and possibly Dutch ancestry. Seriously. Those of you with limited and/or ill-defined ethnic heritage (and nothing to prove) will simply get all dressed up one day and march your lily-pale, boring asses…
At the corner of Eighth and G streets in the nation’s capital lies the Old Patent Office Building, which houses one of the country’s better-kept cultural secrets: The Smithsonian American Art Museum. The Smithsonian, a vast government bureaucracy consisting of 17 separate museums, has always been known more as a…
‘Tis the season The Simpsons jumps the shark, literally; that’s how the first episode–second, actually, if you count last Sunday’s belated Halloween show, and you should not, ever–begins, with Homer, Marge, Bart, Lisa and Maggie donning water skis and tempting the great white teeth below. But, of course, the series…
With Frida–the story of profoundly passionate and uncompromising Mexican-Jewish painter Frida Kahlo–it’s evident that a few folks in marketing know how to work the demographics (it’ll be extremely PC, possibly mandatory, to gush in adoration of it), but that’s the first and last cynical comment of this review. Frida is…
Listen up, retards: Killing time is over. Melt down your weapons, now, forever. Wouldn’t it be nice if that sentiment echoed around the world? Well, certainly it does, every day, but weapons have a nasty tendency of drowning out sensible words. For this reason–now more than ever–it’s greatly inspirational to…
For Eric Schaefer, it all began when he was a masters film student at the University of Texas at Austin in the mid-1980s. One day, he stumbled across a reference to a forgotten movie called Birth of a Baby, which isn’t a prequel to Birth of a Nation but a…
The Santa Clause, released at the height of Home Improvement’s popularity, played like a Very Special Holiday Episode of that now-defunct television series–what might have happened if an egg nog-saturated Tim Taylor fell asleep with visions of sugar plums in his head and woke up sporting a white beard and…
Paul Feig remembers everything about his childhood you want to forget about yours–the ass-kickings, the name-calling, the overwhelming smell of a classmate’s vomit commingling with the odor of the red sawdust used to sweep it up, the tingling sensation down there brought on by climbing a rope in gym class,…
Sometimes, the search for romance can lead us down some interesting roads. There’s the special someone your aunt set you up with and thought would be perfect for you to settle down with. Or the blind date your friend set up. Then there was the time you got that misdirected…
There’s an angry little hornet’s nest of women in Dallas who have clung together and stung together for 20 years. At this point in their life cycles, the frenzy is about to peak, and no amount of swatting or spraying can get rid of them. Like their counterparts in the…
Sometime in the not too distant future, human actors vanish from TV. Their replacements? “Actoids,” programmable talking dolls designed to populate midday soap operas and by-the-numbers nighttime cop dramas without the need for contracts, union wages, lunch breaks or even scripts. Just punch a button, yell “Action!” and their electronic…
Emeril may have his own line of sauces and seasonings (and those pleasant memories of his bombed sitcom). Ming Tsai may be filling Target’s shelves with blue cookware. And Julia Child and Jacques Pepin may be able to dish out endless helpings of reheated cookbooks. But within the pantry of…
Don’t come whining to us if you wet your pants in the middle of the Arlington Museum of Art this week. You’ll get no sympathy here. We did it once, although sadly it had nothing to do with being scared silly during the museum’s annual October fright-fest, Dungeon of Doom…
There’s an invigorating, inspiring film about a famous dead person opening in a few days: Julie Taymor’s Frida, scheduled to arrive November 1, which is loving but never unconditionally so, and every bit as rousing as its subject matter, painter Frida Kahlo. Taymor uses the screen just as Kahlo used…
If you’re a fan of the baseball-cap-wearin’, Nader-votin’, muckrakin’, best-sellin’, corporation-confrontin’ son of a gun known as Michael Moore, all you need to know about his latest film, Bowling for Columbine, is that it’s more of the same. You know, the mix of easy humor, political potshots, attempts (some successful,…
Once more, it all boils down to the stamps–which, if you have seen Stanley Donen’s 1963 comic-thriller Charade, nearly ruins the last 10 minutes of Jonathan Demme’s remake, The Truth About Charlie. But Demme isn’t at all concerned with such mundane things as shock-’em finales; he won’t be bound by…
You ever notice those people? You know, the so-called “stand-up comedians”? Who are those people? What’s the deal with them? And what does that mean, anyway, “stand-up”? I mean, it’s not like we’re gonna think they’re sitting down unless they tell us otherwise! Yes, a decade or so later, it’s…
The current TV ad campaign for the sleeper hit My Big Fat Greek Wedding plays cleverly on the film’s cross-cultural appeal by substituting the words Italian, Jewish and Russian for Greek. The implication: A person from any ethnic or religious background will relate to this story’s characters, drama and humor…
Not as bad as its rep–Miramax has been hiding this sucker on the shelf for danged near two years–but not good enough to overcome its status as damaged goods, which is almost a shame, since audiences will miss Billy Bob Thornton’s best performance, and hairpiece, in years. (He’s having a…
The French word for turkey is dindon, so French New Wave auteur Jean-Luc Godard’s latest movie is basically fricasé du dindon. Snoots will no doubt rally to its cause, but rarely does an established filmmaker so ardently waste viewers’ time. It’s mostly to do with memory, presumably his own spluttering…
