It’s no surprise that the Louisiana-born novelist Rebecca Wells has seen her wildly popular books translated into 18 languages, with no fewer than 6 million copies in print. She’s no deep-thinking stylist, but she has an unfailing gift for injecting Southern sentimentality, low-grade neurosis and mischievous charm into stories that…
So this is what it’s come to: another week, another terrorist-with-a-suitcase-nuke movie. Last Friday, it was up to Ben Affleck to save the world from nuclear annihilation, an unsavory proposition; he succeeded, but not before the Super Bowl disappeared in a holocaust flash. This Friday, it’s Chris Rock’s turn to…
Perhaps the most remarkable thing about the French film The Piano Teacher, aside from Isabelle Huppert’s unnerving and masterful performance, is the totally nonexploitative manner in which the story is presented. A tale of sadomasochism and self-destruction, the film easily could have succumbed to the inherently lurid aspects of its…
Whatever problems Stolen Summer may have encountered during the production process, as documented on the HBO reality series Project Greenlight, it doesn’t feel like the disjointed outcome of a troubled shoot. For better or worse–plenty of both, in fact–it’s a movie that has a coherent vision. It’s a shame that…
A police detective (Koji Yakusho, star of Eureka and Shall We Dance?) is confronted with a series of inexplicable homicides. All have the same M.O., but they involve different perpetrators, who remember their actions but cannot explain why they did it. The police finally discover the common link: They’ve all…
Directed by Joe and Harry Gantz, of HBO’s popular Taxicab Confessions, Sex With Strangers follows three couples in the swinging “lifestyle.” Mississippians Shannon and Gerard realized they were cheating on one another, and decided to do so with other couples together so as to eliminate the whole dishonesty thing. Washingtonians…
As astute an appraisal of post-modern feminine confusion as today’s cinema has to offer, this freakish fish story from French-Canadian writer-director Denis Villeneuve (August 32nd on Earth) offers the flash of rock videos fused with solid performances and eerie atmosphere. Imagine an 83-minute Tom Waits video with good-natured twists. Bibiane…
It’s one of the great ironies of the modern-day smut biz that it took a boob burglar like Joe Francis to shake Hugh Hefner’s once-mighty empire to its creaky knees. Francis is all of 28, which means he wasn’t born the first time Hef bagged triplets on the merry-go-round bed…
Farewell, fourth wall. Actors are talking directly to their audiences in three shows, each of which tries to dissolve the invisible barrier between performer and spectator in a different way. Sometimes it works. Sometimes the in-your-face approach just gets annoying. Such is the case with Lanford Wilson’s Book of Days,…
I have a weakness for quixotic figures. In literature and in life, I’ve always been a sucker for the wisecracking cynic, the jaded guy (or gal) whose hard-boiled façade hides a marshmallow heart. Call me a hopeless romantic, call me unrealistic, call me what you will, just call me when…
The ultra-modern lost-and-found poster might read something like this: Claud the dog, brown with a red collar, good-natured, transponder code 8354690210. Now even pet locating has gone high-tech with hundreds of thousands of American dogs, cats and other pets running around with an electronic microchip identification device under their skin…
The new Martin Scorsese film is out, and, no, it’s not the delayed, high-priced Gangs of New York, but rather a delayed, low-budget documentary shot for television, though it did play L.A. screens last year. At a little more than four hours (plus an intermission), My Voyage to Italy (or…
There has always been something infuriating, if not appalling, about killing thousands of people in the name of blockbuster entertainment. Buildings would blaze, streets would turn into rivers of gore, corpses would stack like cordwood–and before September 11, no one thought much about it. Audiences accepted wholesale slaughter on the…
The first generation to be labeled with a letter suffered through some serious metaphysical shit in the ’90s (if you doubt this, try listening to the period-specific music–emphasis on try), but now this societal clusterfuck is searching for antidotes to its own pop-culture poison. Evidence of a renewed hope abounds,…
The weird thing about Rain is that there’s virtually no rain in it. Characters mention precipitation briefly and metaphorically, but the cloudburst never happens. Fortunately, we get light showers of emotion a couple of times, but then–strangely–these wane to an inconsistent and ultimately unsatisfying drizzle. It’s as if fledgling director…
The beauty of Malcolm D. Lee’s smart, sharp comedy lies in its dexterity, as it raises one fist in a friendly Black Power salute and firmly gooses the whole audience with the other. Based on the animated Internet series (at UrbanEntertainment.com), the script explores a soulful, secret solidarity known as…
This latest film from 82-year-old French New Wave stalwart Eric Rohmer is enough of a departure that it may either confound or irritate his fans. Unlike his usual stylistically restrained explorations of morals and manners (My Night at Maud’s, Claire’s Knee), The Lady and the Duke, based on the journal…
Here we have an intuitive, polyrhythmic art form bridging cultures and titillating the young at heart. This definition could easily apply to baby-making or gang-banging, but in Doug Pray’s trenchant documentary, it’s “turntablism” distracting the passionate kids from reproducing and/or mowing each other down. Immersing us in the endlessly inventive,…
A real missed opportunity, this update of a Herman Melville short story is all surface and no substance, like the pilot episode of yet another workplace sitcom. David Paymer steps into the role of the nameless boss, with Crispin Glover as the troublesome employee Bartleby, who for no apparent reason…
Only a darned good writer could turn the subject of methamphetamine addiction into a spirited comedy romp. The Abandoned Reservoir, now onstage at the Bath House Cultural Center, is evidence that Stuart Litchfield was such a writer. It’s a shame he’s not around to hear the laughter and applause. Litchfield,…
In one of his finest essays from the mid-’90s, an exquisite savaging of Mother Teresa, the columnist, critic and professional gadfly Christopher Hitchens leads with an anecdote about Private Eye, a defunct satirical magazine. As Hitchens tells it, when the editors and writers of Private Eye were casting about for…
When this column debuted at the beginning of 2000, readers and editors scoffed at its occasional subject matter, the comic book. Kids’ stuff, they growled, junk food for adults who still live in their parents’ basements. And maybe they were right back then. The industry was dying; the art form…
