September 9, 1966: Adam Sandler is born in Brooklyn, New York. He is raised in Manchester, New Hampshire. September 1987: Sandler joins Ken Ober, Colin Quinn and Denis Leary as cast member on MTV’s game show Remote Control. Sometime in 1989: Sandler lands first starring role in a movie, playing…
Playwright-novelist-children’s author-film director Phillip Ridley is one of those multi-hyphenated artists who believe that the message transcends the medium or, plainly put, that a compelling story is paramount in every field in which he works. He does more than just “dabble” in all these professions. He understands that the tools…
One prominent stage director in town confessed to me that he found Blood Bondage, the quasi-evangelical vampire saga that marked ProgreXssive Arts’ first full production last year, perversely enthralling and funny. Any show that climaxes with a battle between an evil mentor bloodsucker with an English accent and a charismatic…
Southern Methodist University has always suffered from a bit of a split personality. Its better-known persona is as one of the nation’s top-tier party schools, a place of awe-inspiring intellectual perversity, full of not-too-bright frat boys and Idlewild debs and hometown princesses with eating disorders. It is a university with…
What is the potential of the human mind when everyday distractions are removed? Is there a wellspring of untapped aptitude waiting to be awakened and used for the good of all mankind? Or is the result more primal, focusing on the satisfaction of needs and desire for attention? Most likely…
For 14 years now, die-hard patrons of the annual Dallas Video Festival have set themselves up for heartbreak. If I attend the documentary about left-handed gay Soviet filmmakers, I miss the experimental piece that guy in New York did with his cat and various hand-sewn costumes. By choosing Barbara Hammer,…
Paul McGuinness has never thought of himself as a teacher of life lessons, so it comes as a bit of a surprise for him to hear it relayed that Kelly Curtis considers him an adviser–hell, a mentor. It comes as even more of a shock to discover that Curtis recalls…
This is how famous Denis Leary is: He begins and ends a story by saying, “To this day, when I see Mick…,” and by Mick, he means Mick Jagger. They became pals, oh, seven years back, when the Rolling Stones were on that week’s farewell tour, kickin’ it in the…
The auditorium fills for the mandatory meeting just after 10 a.m., brimming with crew chiefs and drivers and hangers-on. There’s Jeff Gordon and Bobby Labonte, Dale Earnhardt Jr. and Tony Stewart and a few other guys you see on SportsCenter, all looking on with passive stares as a NASCAR official…
Hello, what’s this? Why, could it be another cautionary tale from Hollywood about recreational drugs being–alert the media!–not particularly good for people? (If only they could try the same with guns. Messrs. Heston and Silver: You awake yet?) Indeed, with Blow, director Ted Demme (Beautiful Girls, Monument Ave.) has set…
French director Patrice Leconte is a chameleonlike talent: Among his films to reach American screens are the psychological thriller Mr. Hire, the period satire Ridicule and the offbeat comic romance The Girl on the Bridge. But in truth, all of Leconte’s films are romances at heart, though they are often…
Easily the most creepy (and, by far, most interesting) thing about Along Came a Spider, yet another adaptation of one of James Patterson’s alleged mystery novels featuring beleaguered Detective Alex Cross, is how much co-star Monica Potter looks, sounds and acts like Julia Roberts. Granted, it’s hardly a startling revelation…
Somewhere, in deepest New South Wales, Australia, there exists a humble sheep paddock. (In this particular case, the paddock is nearly devoid of sheep–barring the odd sound effect–but never mind that.) The setting is rural, it’s pastoral, it’s quaint as all heck–and it also happens to be hallowed ground for…
Like most institutions that seek to divert children, Dallas Children’s Theatre is serious about mixing entertainment and edification. Surely one reason parents purchase theater tickets is to counterbalance the perceived sugary sleaze of American pop culture with exposure to “finer things” like the stage. But like most of its peers,…
The confluence of pop, op, conceptualism, minimalism, et al in the 1960s and 1970s coughed up video art like a fur ball. The portable video camera provided artists with a tool that had till then been the providence of movie studios with bigger bankrolls and enabled its early experimenters to…
Experiencing Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band from the cushy confines of your living room misses the point and then some, but HBO’s got it live (live on tape, actually) if you want it. It took 27 years to land Springsteen and the boys (and gal, counting Mrs. Boss,…
Few animals have been allowed to remain in the human-centric concrete jungle, not including those that call research laboratories home or are identified using the phrases “fresh” or “Grade A.” That leaves rats, squirrels, cats, dogs, cockroaches and birds. So much for biodiversity. In an ecosystem where teddy bears outnumber…
Ennio Morricone can tell you stories about each of his 400 children–where they were conceived, what they mean to him, why each one remains so singular and special he cannot and will not choose a favorite. He’s proud even of the orphans, the runts, the bastards, the children long ago…
PORT CHARLOTTE, Florida–It felt different. Almost radically so. Same game, sure, but that’s where the similarities ended for him and surely where the exigency began. It was all so fresh, so new–from the superior competition to the expansive crowds to the breadth of the media coverage. It was a lot…
Amid the plethora of films starring Freddie Prinze Jr., Mena Suvari, Chris Klein and Jason Biggs, it’s nice–in theory, at least–to see a contemporary romantic comedy like Someone Like You, where the characters, while hardly over the hill, are all over 30. In practice, however, “nice” is really about as…
Justice may be blind, but vengeance, it turns out, has a very short memory. So it goes in Memento, the much anticipated “puzzle” movie from Christopher Nolan (Following), which–as is already fairly well-known–plays out its plot more or less in reverse. Pitting the protagonist (and us) against short-term amnesia and…
As its title suggests, Spy Kids is an action fantasy aimed primarily at the preteen/early-teen audience. For all its thrills–and it has plenty–it’s strictly a PG film…which is all the more surprising when you consider its source: Robert Rodriguez, master of bloody gunplay and monster films that sometimes even push…
