In the early ’90s, during a particularly dark time for the pro wrestling business, perennial jester and one-time Andy Kaufman accomplice Jerry “the King” Lawler proclaimed that he was going to do something that had never been done before: call play-by-play commentary on his own match. Entering the ring armed…
Chalk up another one for George Dubya. Recently, the U.S. Immigration Department refused to allow acclaimed Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi, director of both the Oscar-nominated The White Balloon and the Venice Film Festival Golden Lion-winner The Circle, to change planes in New York on his way from Hong Kong to…
The hugely influential 19th-century art critic John Ruskin is said to have influenced the success of the painter and poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti and to have earned the undying fandom of no less than Gandhi and Tolstoy. But the poor bastard is nowadays more discussed in art history classes for…
Snuggled into a desert overlooking the edge of the Pacific, Los Angeles’ very existence flaunts in the face of reason. As the longtime home of the movie industry’s dream world, it has always been a place for reinvention–of self, of place, of fact. It’s the sort of revelatory reinvention captured…
Yes, Your Teen is Crazy!: Loving Your Kid Without Losing Your Mind is the new book by psychologist Dr. Michael Bradley that has exactly the type of title that any teen-ager is going to hate. Further aggravating any young person is Bradley’s assertion that there is actually something physically wrong…
Those celebrities who would bemoan their fame–those penny-ante hack-tors who populate wretched sitcoms and crowd video-store shelves with useless product, those sad-sack musicians who write songs about how awful it is to sell out even as they line their pockets with suckers’ cash–have nothing on William Shatner. Imagine being so…
Judd Apatow tries not to think of what became of Sam and Lindsay Weir, Neal Schweiber, Bill Haverchuck, Daniel Desario, Nick Andopolis and the other freaks and geeks Apatow knew back at McKinley High School. Those kids were his family, the children born when Apatow and writer Paul Feig created…
The lights from the back of the room shine brightly as they bounce off his handsome face and expensive jewelry. Decked out in a pimp suit–that is a sharp ensemble, not a fedora and a fur coat and a cane, though that might be more interesting–he absorbs questions with style…
What is it that people get out of Shakespeare’s plays? Is it the stories? The flowery dialogue? The author’s ability to capture a time and place that is foreign to us, yet familiar via the emotions of the protagonists? It probably isn’t the stories. The fact is, Shakespeare often used…
“I never saw her first step,” laments the transplanted Margit (Nastassja Kinski) to her ambitious husband, Peter (Tony Goldwyn), regarding the infant daughter they left behind in Hungary during their perilous escape from the Stalin regime. That daughter–called Suzanne, wonderfully portrayed as a glowing old-country tot by Bori Keresztri and…
There is perhaps no explanation for why the soundtrack to Joel and Ethan Coen’s O Brother, Where Art Thou?, crammed full of bluegrass standards, chain-gang echoes and lullaby melodies, has sold almost 2 million copies and sat near the top of the country charts for months. The disc has received…
Critics reach a point in their careers when they need to be careful about heedlessly tossing out adjectives to praise a show. If we’re not paying attention, we go on autopilot and use a word such as “breathtaking” to commend a staging that floored us with its passion and quality,…
For those who care about art, reading art ‘zines and perusing “me too” exhibitions of contemporary art–which are, sad to say, the majority–can become dangerously deceptive obsessions. Too often, the results are akin to watching a Martian anthropologist or not-too-bright teen-ager try to divine the meaning of human life from…
Everyone needs to escape from the daily grind, and pretending to be a brave knight in shining armor or a beautiful princess frocked in a flowing, nearly transparent gown is just as valid a pastime as volunteering for Big Brothers/Big Sisters or holding up a bar stool in a neighborhood…
Those who like to get a buzz off the green stuff probably don’t think they’re addicts. It’s just for fun. It’s only recreational, right? The truth is green chiles can be addictive. What green stuff did you think we were talking about? See, chiles contain capsaicin, a substance that causes…
Far too often, those who work in the music industry are so concerned with making a living they often forget they’re capable, at their best, of making history as well. They sacrifice art and artists in the name of commerce, then sleep soundly wrapped in bedspreads made of silk and…
Beware the filmmaker who looks through the camera’s lens and sees only himself on the other side, blowing kisses. He’s the fool who confuses “personal vision” with “jacking off,” and he’ll try every time to convince you there’s something meaningful and imaginative in the shallow and hackneyed. He is so…
After nearly a decade’s absence from the big screen, Suture auteurs Scott McGehee and David Siegel finally deliver a second feature with The Deep End, an exciting, sharply realized melodramatic film noir, based on Elizabeth Sanxay Holding’s novel The Blank Wall, which was also the source for the 1949 Max…
Woody Allen’s latest romp through Old New York combines (among other things) a skirt-chasing insurance investigator with the charm of a rodent, a wisecracking Vassar grad who takes no guff and a nightclub hypnotist in a sequined turban who doubles as a major jewel thief. The year is 1940. The…
Festering somewhere between an after-school special and kiddie porn lies this frank but heinously melodramatic open wound from veteran Canadian director Léa Pool (Emporte-moi). Adapted by screenwriter Judith Thompson from the novel The Wives of Bath by Susan Swan, Lost and Delirious is about girl joy and girl sorrow, girl…
Not unlike Dean Devlin and Roland Emmerich–who, with ridiculously expensive spectaculars like Independence Day and Godzilla, transformed B-movie nostalgia into crass adventures in budget-busting–John Carpenter has a thing for the fanciful yet almost lurid trappings of the Saturday afternoon sci-fi flick. Fortunately for us, the veteran director also knows better…
When a show has been advertised with the line “Dreams Don’t Always Come True,” you know entering the theater that you’re likely not in for a giddy romp. And yet the ultimate word-of-mouth musical Floyd Collins, given a North Texas premiere by Plano Repertory Theatre, isn’t as relentlessly downbeat as…
