Clerks calls to mind Eddie Murphy’s story of his first standup routine, performed when he was an adolescent. He had had none of the sexual or other adult experiences that comedians normally draw on for material, so he used the only “blue” subject he was acquainted with, and told jokes…
After much carping, since recanted, by author/adapter Anne Rice about Tom Cruise’s suitability as one of the leads, the film version of Rice’s wildly popular novel Interview With the Vampire has at last reached the screen. With it, the New Gothic arrives full force as a mainstream vogue, though it’s…
Since the mid-’80s, Woody Allen has maintained a steady output of films, working in two distinct modes. The ambitious Allen of Manhattan, Interiors, Another Woman and Crimes and Misdemeanors deals, sometimes with humor but usually not, with issues of art, love, sex and existential angst, trying like crazy to be…
Before we dip into the treasure chest of sound this month, let me tell you to go see the Fastbacks. Simply one of the best bands ever to emerge from the Pacific Northwest (that means Seattle). That’s at Boston’s on Tuesday, with Jeff Dahl. And, on the home front, Idols…
Putting features on the faceless hordes of homeless that roam the streets and back alleys of urban America is the goal of Galeria Mesa’s juried exhibition “Going Home-less.” The show successfully dredges up some real humanity, with some very real emotions, from the bottom of those overflowing grocery carts typically…
The theatre as an art form seems to be receding from relevance to our lives. With the exception of Tony Kushner’s epic Angels in America, plays about contemporary problems have yielded to film as the art form of preference in our contemporary culture. But theatre in America, which has been…
The most erotic moments in movies, as in life, tend to have a spontaneous, uncontrived quality. This may be utterly illusory–intense thought and care may have gone into crafting the abrupt kiss or smoldering stare or well-turned piquant phrase that seems so urgently and inexplicably sexy. But at their best,…
Though it has been remade at least a half-dozen times for film and television, and at least twice for the stage, no adaptation of Gaston Leroux’s 1908 penny dreadful The Phantom of the Opera makes quite the same claim on the emotions as the original film of 1925. It’s a…
Watching a documentary about the lives of people of no notable accomplishment could be as entertaining as watching winter grass grow. 35 Up has watched 14 people grow for 28 years, and it is fascinating. In 1964, Great Britain’s Granada television program, World in Action, interviewed a group of 7-year-old…
The October 10 cover of Time magazine boldly proclaims the advent of a black renaissance here in America. The cover declares that “African-American artists are truly free at last”–at least in an aesthetic sense. But photographer Rene Cox, an African-American artist from New York, would probably take great issue with…
Presumed by many to be Shakespeare’s first play, The Comedy of Errors is a terrible comedy. Based on an ancient Roman farce written by Plautus 1,800 years or so before Shakespeare, the plot is so mechanical and the exposition so cumbersome, it is amazing a writer of any skill would…
An injudicious case of grand larceny is taking place at Dial Corporate Center’s Playhouse on the Park in downtown Phoenix. It might be termed “Crimes of the Art.” The occasion is Phoenix Theatre’s production of Beth Henley’s 1981 Pulitzer Prize-winning play, Crimes of the Heart, and it blatantly steals from…
The term “art film” might have been coined to describe Peter Greenaway’s movies. They embody everything, good and not so good, that is suggested by that usually unhelpful label. They play in “art house” theatres, and they are arty in their (not always unjustified) pretensions. But above all this, Greenaway’s…
If Pirandello had ever made a splatter movie, it would probably have been along the lines of Wes Craven’s New Nightmare–the title might be Five Knives in Search of a Sequel. Wes Craven, writer-director of the first (and only good) A Nightmare on Elm Street film, back in 1984, has…
When audiences went to Peter Greenaway’s 1989 film The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover, expecting to see a sexy comedy in a restaurant, they were perhaps among the most unprepared audiences in film history. Rather than a knockabout farce, Greenaway served up a baroquely ferocious black comedy…
Pulp Fiction is rubbish about scum. The plot is a tangled mess of collisions between hit men, drug dealers, crooked boxers, murderous junkies, perverted security guards and the like. The script is packed full of ferocious violence and sadism, and even more full of savage racial and sexual invective. It…
I Like It Like That is the movie that should have had the title Mi Vida Loca (My Crazy Life). This comedy is about the crazy life of Lisette (Lauren Velez), a young, black-Hispanic woman living in the Bronx. Her husband, Chino (Jon Seda), is in jail. Her son, who’s…
Stacking the Decadent The Academy Award-winning movie Cabaret is available at your local video store (even supermarket), with career-defining performances by Joel Grey, Liza Minnelli and Michael York. So why not snuggle up with some microwave popcorn and give it a replay? Why would you want to drive all the…
If overheated histrionics is your bag, Dingo Troupe’s production of A Prayer for My Daughter delivers a fix to satisfy the most insatiable melodrama junkie. The first play by Thomas Babe, a protege of the late Public Theater impresario Joseph Papp, this potboiler premiered in the mid-Seventies, so it is…
Robert Redford’s new film, Quiz Show–his fourth, and perhaps best, effort as a director–stars Ralph Fiennes as Charles Van Doren, the “champion” of the Fifties game show Twenty-One. The role of Van Doren, who was publicly disgraced by revelations that Twenty-One was rigged, is one which, two decades ago, would…
Neither rain nor smog nor threat of armed insurrection can keep any really hard-core Mexican folk art aficionado, including me (and, at one time, Nelson Rockefeller), from tracking down the objects of this insane aesthetic obsession. Recently, as Mexico was in the throes of electing a new president amid highly…
Mutilated human corpses pile up in Port-au-Prince, severed body parts strew the roads of Rwanda, blood flows in Bosnia to cleanse Yugoslavia of ethnic impurity. Even on the eve of an invasion, ruthless dictators cling to power in the name of the people, ignoring the will of the electorate. And…
