You’d think that after more than a decade in this business, I’d have learned one simple, sanity-preserving rule: January and February are excellent times for a movie critic to take a vacation. Not because the airfares are low or the weather sucks, but because what a critic must endure professionally…
In Absolute Power, Clint Eastwood plays Luther Whitney, a master thief who burgles on little cat feet. He’s as stealthy as the Pink Panther pilferer, though not nearly as amusing. Luther, you see, is presented to us as an artist. We first see him at the National Gallery dutifully copying…
thursday february 13 True West: With its slowly tightening Mamet grip and a wealth of comic relief that becomes less of a relief as the play goes on, True West is Sam Shepard’s caustic reply to the myth of American male camaraderie on the frontier. The fact that the frontier…
I just found out that one of my best friends is a glitter-that-flies-out-of-the-envelope person. She sends out those greeting cards where GLITTER FLIES OUT OF THE ENVELOPE. I’m reconsidering our whole relationship. Anyhow, who invented this? Who thought this was a good idea? Who had a meeting and said: “I…
thursday february 6 SubUrbia: Among the pioneering crowd that includes Quentin Tarantino, Kevin Smith, Edward Burns, and Eric Shaefer, whippersnapper filmmaker Richard Linklater has proven himself the most diligent not just in developing his vision, but in spending more time behind the camera than in front of it yapping about…
If Theatre Three’s comedies sometimes creak and lurch like a ship of fools set adrift, Norma Young and Jac Alder’s venerable Dallas theater-in-the-round has consistently demonstrated its wit and energy with musicals. You might’ve expected this standard to be compromised with 1995’s Lucky Stiff, a musical farce by Stephen Flaherty…
Billy Bob Thornton’s richly observed Sling Blade opens with a prologue that can only be described as its own small film, a laconically eerie sequence that, as the rest of Sling Blade unfolds, begins to take hold in the memory like a particularly dense nightmare. As Daniel Lanois’ quietly atmospheric…
William Faulkner’s novella Old Man has a biblical magnetism–a primal moral pull. During the horrifying 1927 Mississippi flood, convicts are conscripted for disaster relief. A guard orders two of them to take out a boat, find a man clinging to a cotton house and a woman stuck in a cypress…
Terry George, the director and co-writer (with Jim Sheridan) of Some Mother’s Son, has more complicated feelings about Northern Ireland than he can express coherently. They shoot out in piercing shards of action and potent gutter or pulpit rhetoric. Some Mother’s Son is about the fight to save the lives…
Richard Jewell got his half-million bucks, so I guess he’s satisfied with the whole deal, but I still wish he’d filed a case and pursued it to the Supreme Court. Even AFTER the Richard Jewell case–where an innocent man was hounded half to death by a media convinced of his…
While Tupac Shakur lay bleeding to death inside Suge Knight’s car last fall after an attack on the Strip–all his crack bodyguards couldn’t even ID the perps’ getaway car–Death Row Records realized it was losing a franchise player. But Hollywood may never have had a clue about what it was…
For years the brief, roaring life of runner Steve Prefontaine must have seemed an ideal subject for a movie. A no-nonsense, everything-to-prove kid takes on an intimidatingly prestigious history of track champions in his home state of Oregon and becomes the fiercest competitor, an unforgettable personality, and a mind-boggling distance…
thursday january 30 The Dump Trucks: Don’t dismiss the two suicide-related art exhibits at the McKinney Avenue Contemporary as just macabre, artistic shock tactics. Between the philosophies of Dr. Kevorkian and the ever-rising rate of self-destruction among young people, suicide can be used as a prism from which to examine…
With the release of Jane Campion’s confused Portrait of a Lady, all eyes are on the gay American novelist Henry James. In the world of popular cinema, which pits great literary artists against one another as if they were Hollywood players, James is called the next Jane Austen. Like Britain’s…
At a 20-year remove, Star Wars comes off less as the work of a wizard than as the weird obsessive outgrowth of an eccentric American primitive. George Lucas is a tycoon version of those self-taught craftsmen who fill back yards, storage rooms, and cramped city apartments with paintings or gewgaws…
How come when you go to an Indian casino, there aren’t any Indians? There USED to be Indians. There were Indians out the wahzoo. Indians parked your car. Indians ran the bingo game. Indians sold you your overpriced Wampum Breakfast Special in the Teepee Coffee Shop. But now you go…
Jean Cocteau, who died in 1963 at the age of 74, was the kind of artist almost nobody takes seriously anymore. Which is to say he was a man driven by the pure urge to create, rather than possessing a command of one particular medium. He wrote poetry, novels, and…
You can bet that at one point or another, some executive wanted the title of this long-awaited nonsequel to A Fish Called Wanda to be A Lemur Called Rollo (for the story does include such a character). While the latter wouldn’t have been the most commercial of titles, neither is…
Playwright Herb Gardner managed to immortalize retirement-age concerns on the American stage with his 1986 Tony Award-winning I’m Not Rappaport, and now his film version–which he also directed–comes along to try to reclaim geriatric humor from the Grumpy Old Men gang. Of course, one of those grumpy old men, Walter…
Hamlet (Kenneth Branagh) is Prince of Denmark. After his father (Richard Briers) dies, his uncle Claudius (Derek Jacobi) takes the throne and marries Hamlet’s mother, Gertrude (Julie Christie). When the late king’s ghost reveals he was murdered by Claudius, Hamlet must decide which course of action to take. Meanwhile, he…
thursday january 23 Band-Dude Karaoke: The concept behind karaoke is that non-musicians–or at least non-professional musicians–are forced to display musical talents they may or may not have. What people never consider is that the whole setup of karaoke is so awkward as to render even the most experienced singer stranded…
You know why I think gay marriage is a good idea? ‘Cause if they start letting the lesbos and the Castro Street beach boys get hitched, then what they’re gonna be saying is, “Anybody that wants to be married for ANY reason, it’s OKAY WITH US.” And I think that’s…
