Musical mastery does not necessarily equal engaging entertainment, and rare is the case when serious musicians can tear themselves from technique long enough to consider the audience. But California Guitar Trio is a rare case: The combination of musicians of their caliber is something akin to a harmonic convergence, bringing…
It sounds like something manufactured in Hollywood: a group of individuals from different backgrounds form a tight-knit community around weekly dance sessions at clubs. The participants teach each other new moves and engage in some friendly competition for partners and, occasionally, a cash prize. “I thought it sounded like Saturday…
Gather ’round, children. Pull close now, and pay attention. Allow me to tell you a story from my youth, from a time when I was less cynical and the world didn’t seem such an evil, awful place. The year was 1993. The country bumped to gangsta rap while a president…
Cuddly outsider #63178D, please step forward. Well, my goodness, look at you! You are so alternative, so fringe, so punk! So artsy and alienated! So utterly aimless and oozing with angst! Tell us, girl, what ought we to call you? Edwina Scissorhands? That’s one easily justified reaction a viewer may…
The social lessons of Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, all of them suitable for framing in just about any dorm room, are these: War is bad. Love is good. The Italians love to sing, even when they’re supposed to be at war. The Greeks are freedom fighters. And whatever you do, don’t…
There is one joke in Rat Race, aka Cannonball Run IV, so stunning–most of all, because it’s the one joke in the film that actually works–it bears repeating here, if only to spare you the misery of actually witnessing this crime. Jon Lovitz, playing a character who might as well…
On the lips of many moviegoers, the name Joel Schumacher is tantamount to blasphemy. Visions of a blue-skinned Arnold Schwarzenegger and a head-bobbing George Clooney in rubber nipples instantly come to mind, inducing shudders of revulsion and indicating an oft-held view that Mr. Schumacher epitomizes the worst American directing can…
The Bath House Cultural Center sits along the shores (if you can call them that without a hint of irony) of White Rock Lake in an area that was, during its construction in the 1930s, a rural area outside Dallas. Now it’s only a few minutes by car–though a world…
We love the ladies who lust in Candace Bushnell’s Sex and the City and the subsequent HBO series not because we envy their strappy sandals that cost more per pair than all our shoes combined. And we definitely don’t covet how they fall in and out of relationships with unavailable…
Ten years ago, Robert Harris picked up the phone to find on the other end a relative stranger bearing extraordinary news. This man was at a film exchange in Toronto, where movies are housed and rented out to exhibitors, and he was holding in his hands canisters of film containing…
Today is an off-day. More or less. The morning practice was scrapped in favor of extra sleep and position meetings. The afternoon session? Changed from the daily grind of battling the heat and each other to more esoteric pursuits–special teams. It’s not that special teams aren’t important, because anyone who…
During this cinematic Summer of Dumb, it would be all too easy to celebrate half-assed clever as a virtue, especially when proffered by Bobby and Peter Farrelly, who elevated the gross-out to an Art Form (or, more likely, Fart Form) in Kingpin and There’s Something About Mary. Osmosis Jones, one…
There is something fairly amusing about this title, Apocalypse Now Redux. Think about it: Prophetic Disclosure Presently Shows Up Again Newfangled. Of course, in the 10 years since the release of the documentary Hearts of Darkness, we’ve been taught to revere the legend of Francis Ford Coppola walking the line…
For a few moments, American Pie 2 tastes every bit as stale as junk food left out on the countertop for two years. “Just like old times,” says one actor to another as they amble through settings borrowed from the first installment of 1999’s Last American Virgin revisit: Jim’s bedroom,…
It was about two years ago that there was real hope for the horror movie coming once again due for a decent revival. The Blair Witch Project made people remember how to fear the unknown, and remakes of The Haunting and House on Haunted Hill promised a return to the…
For the better part of two decades now, Fort Worth’s Jubilee Theatre has been relying on its musical ventures to finance the less commercial productions it stages. This is hardly a novel formula–it may, in fact, be the American theater’s single most reliable life preserver–except that Jubilee has distinguished itself…
Drummer Elvin Jones is an American treasure. The Blue Note regular and John Coltrane titan remains one of the few living holdovers from jazz’s tumultuous 1960s. He’s not only vital for his playing, which delicately mixes modernism’s smoothness with innovative panache, but also for being one of the voices that…
Guiding a silver ball at speeds as high as 90 mph through a maze of ramps, loops and bumpers to reach the ultimate “wizard award” still sounds exciting, but the opportunity to do so is about as rare as hunting a water buffalo or spotting a dirigible. At pinball’s height…
Jay Mohr’s been around long enough to be taken for granted, yet he’s not quite stuck in the pop-culture consciousness; he always seems this far from becoming a trivia answer in search of a question, which is less a knock on him than it is on the studio bosses who…
When last we spotted indie icons Vince Vaughn and Jon Favreau onscreen together, they were knocking back fruit-flavored martinis and chasing L.A. skirt in the inventive Gen-X hit Swingers. The goofy charm of that phenomenon now gives way, sad to report, to a labored fringes-of-the-mob comedy called Made, in which…
The mock religious Web site www.landoverbaptist.org staged a spoof protest outside the eight-month Los Angeles run of Del Shores’ Southern Baptist Sissies. A director friend of Shores’ turned it into a 15-minute movie that was equal parts parody and extended promo for the production. The verisimilitude to real-life conservative Christian…
A wag once defined philosophy as unintelligible answers to insoluble problems. Alas, contemporary art can too often be defined as semi-intelligible answers to questions that are simply not worth asking. Take, for example, the art world’s preoccupation with French eggheads and “simulacra.” At the risk of getting metaphysical, the supposed…
