As ill-titled a movie as you’re likely to discover this year, Henry Bromell’s Panic would deliver itself unto us with much more honesty were it called something appropriate, like Torpor or A-List Clock-Punchers Unite!. It’s a middling film, and while there’s no reason to pick on this fledgling feature with…
There’s a majesty to Michael Winterbottom’s new film, a majesty and a terrible, icy chill. There’s also a fair bit of invention, as the director of the wrenching Jude–based on Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure–has shifted the locus of that author’s fierce, beloved English west country to the much fiercer…
When you think of Communists, images of masterful sweet talkers and seducers don’t come immediately to mind. And yet the most widely read Spanish-speaking poet of the 20th century–more famous and admired, many insist, than Federico Garcia Lorca–managed to inspire both party commitment and feverish woo-pitching. On the political side,…
Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey it isn’t. It’s not Cirque du Soleil, either. There isn’t one ring, let alone three. The Tattooed Man’s inkings are drawings sewn on his clothing, and he has a bunny head. The Siamese Twins are joined at the hip–by a long, wooden table–and dressed…
It’s no wonder that the military is a source of so much paranormal interest when top-secret projects and experimental technology leave plenty of room for the imaginative mind to fill in the blanks. Area 51, the Philadelphia Experiment and UFO sightings have had their time in the spotlight. Now another,…
At this moment, Baz Luhrmann, control freak and self-proclaimed ringleader of conspirators “who conspire to something greater than ourselves,” is not in control at all. The cameraman trailing behind him, like a faithful puppy awaiting treats, does not work for the director; rather, he is in the employ of the…
He shuffles over, looking equal parts frustrated and defeated, but Frank Catalanotto is oblivious to his pain. At first. Cat sits hunched in a black leather chair for a second or two, shoulders rounded, before he notices a Rangers coach, Bobby Jones, thrusting a piece of folded paper in his…
Tamra Davis is bound by contract not to discuss the film that, at this very moment, she’s editing for release next year. “I’m officially not supposed to do any press for it,” the director says sheepishly, so she offers a few off-the-record comments about the movie, a road-trip comedy-drama starring…
Remember glee? Perhaps not, given our penchant in recent times to chuck giddy hearts aside in favor of being stupid, obnoxious and mean. But hey, it’s all right, because the fizzy, caffeinated beverage known as Baz Luhrmann seeks to re-create this elusive emotion for all of us in the form…
New York-based, Oklahoma-born playwright Clint Jeffries, who has had an artistic home with Christopher Street’s Wings Theatre Company since 1986, is far from the only country boy drawn to a major theatrical Mecca with footlights in his eyes. But he has chosen a somewhat unorthodox way to create small stage…
There is no son more proud of his father than Nile Southern. Nile has a family of his own, a career of his own (writer, filmmaker, dreamer), a life of his own, but somewhere between ambition and loyalty, he chose to put his own imaginings on hold and make sure…
From a Cartoon Network press release, dated April 10, 2001: “The ninth annual June Bugs Marathon on Cartoon Network will make the first time in history that every Bugs Bunny cartoon ever made will air on one network. The 49-hour marathon, which starts at 11 p.m. (ET, PT) on June…
It’s just another day. Another long day. Already, that’s the way it feels. Nearly everyone trudges through the motions–a battalion of zombies watching the clock tick painfully slowly. Hours before game time, reporters mill about. They poke around a locker room that feels more like a funeral parlor than a…
The publicist asks if I’d like to speak to D.A. Pennebaker to commemorate the 60th birthday of Bob Dylan, which falls on May 24. She asks this because, during the spring of 1965, Pennebaker made a documentary about Dylan’s tour of England, Dont Look Back, which captured a drained, cagey…
Pearl Harbor isn’t a movie at all, but a highlight reel prepared for a Jerry Bruckheimer career retrospective. It’s as impressive and empty as any movie the producer’s ever made, most of which seem to have been cut and pasted into this World War II monstrosity. There’s Top Gun: Two…
“The values that you grew up with are that people come before things,” offers the mother of one of the protagonists of Startup.com, “and that didn’t seem to be a part of this new world.” You sure got that right, ma’am. While this new video documentary by Chris Hegedus and…
Mainstream films about the sexual awakening of adolescent males invariably come in two forms: sappily self-important (Summer of ’42) or leeringly grotesque (American Pie). Consequently it’s hard to imagine what American moviegoers are going to make of Nico and Dani, a Spanish film about teen-age boys who are neither idealized…
You’d be hard-pressed to find a better song to pull you out of the lost romance blues (or any life doldrums, for that matter) than John Kander and Frank Ebb’s The World Goes ‘Round. It is, appropriately, the tune that provides the title to a revue of the work of…
A quick glance at Dorothy Antoinette La Selle’s “Santa Cruz Summer” can mistakenly lead you to read something into her work that’s not there. This dense arrangement is formed by geometric shapes that divide up her masonite canvas and are painted in primary and secondary colors. It’s the sort of…
The final half of this year’s Spike & Mike’s Sick & Twisted Festival of Animation–which is creeping around this country’s finer theaters, leaving in its wake a fine layer of slime–is damned near unwatchable. Or maybe your tastes run toward necrophilia and fecophilia, sprinkled with more oral sex than the…
The moral and ethical direction of scientific progress can certainly be called into question. Thankfully, it often is. But even its staunchest detractors cannot deny that, for better or worse, progress has been made. That claim cannot be made by fringe or psuedosciences that have been running in circles on…
There are not many stories left buried in James Ellroy’s past. In 1996, at the age of 48, he penned his memoirs, in which he paired his life story with that of his dead mother, Jean Ellroy, a nurse found strangled and beaten in the bushes of suburban Los Angeles…
