Unfairly, the word “amateur” is usually a pejorative term. The literal definition is “one who practices any art, study or sport for pleasure and not for money.” Unfortunately, “amateur” also can imply a lack of skill or finish, and such is the case with Theater Works’ current production of John…
Marlon Brando’s star turn in 1990’s The Freshman was possibly the greatest piece of self-parody in the history of film acting. Sending up his Godfather persona, the actor transcended it–he gave soul, warmth, humor and true innocence to the bleak old don, and the performance had both vitality and a…
Style matches content in Exotica. The film is set in a strip club, and writer-director Atom Egoyan, a Canadian of Armenian descent, doles out his story as slowly and strategically as a stripper doles out skin. Sadly, having slipped your six bucks under Exotica’s garter belt, you may find it…
If it were possible to run Four Weddings and a Funeral, Strictly Ballroom and The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert through a blender together, the result would look a lot like the new Australian film Muriel’s Wedding. From the first, there are two weddings and one funeral; from…
During the mid-’80s, I heard director Richard Donner interviewed on television. He was plugging his film Lethal Weapon and noting, with a touch of Reagan-era pride, that on this project, he had gone back to the old, discreet conventions of action movies and TV, where the actor who was shot…
Cynics beware! Phoenix Theatre has booked a show as irrepressible as an untrained puppy. And like a puppy, this entertainment promises to knock you over and bathe your face with wet kisses, these of homespun wisdom. It will make you giggle with delight if you can withstand the Hallmark-greeting-card pretensions…
Robert Anderson had just finished his first year of art school at St. Francis College in Fort Wayne, Indiana. “I had won just about everything I entered in the Midwest,” he recalls. “My teachers were entering the same art contests, and I was winning. I expected them to congratulate me,…
In 1981, I attended the Humana Festival of New American Plays at the Actors Theatre of Louisville, where a new writer made a stunning debut with a series of monologues grouped together under the title Talking With. The festival was abuzz. Who was this mysterious writer whom no one had…
Despite insistence from some commentators that it was worthy of an Oscar nomination for Best Picture, Hoop Dreams failed even to cinch a nod in the Best Documentary category. Veteran Oscar buffs won’t be too surprised at this. Again and again, those rare documentaries that demonstrate anything resembling wide popular…
Set in 1979, Strawberry and Chocolate is a small, idyllic comedy about the political re-education of a young, conservative, staunchly Communist student by a gay, liberal, intellectual artist. It would seem an unlikely film to come out of Cuba, yet it’s that country’s entry for the foreign-language Oscar this year…
I was in my early 20s when Billie Holiday became my personal idol. Her heartfelt phrasing of the simplistic truths of Tin Pan Alley captured the ache, the wonder, the joy of my young soul as no one else could. She had died three years before I ever thrilled to…
The considerable charm of the new historical epic Queen Margot is that, when all is said and done, it’s really about how a nice, sexy, slightly wild Catholic girl manages to break free of her dysfunctional family. The historical Margot of the title was a political bargaining chip in 16th-century…
Brian Friel writes buckets of language that we are invited to smear over our faces as we greedily savor the taste of words, like blueberries plucked from the bush of memory. If this is an obscure image, you will appreciate it more after seeing Dancing at Lughnasa, presented at Herberger…
Most political thrillers, even the well-made and exciting ones, are cop-outs in the end. Of dozens of titles one could name, from The Manchurian Candidate to The China Syndrome to Capricorn One to The Pelican Brief to Clear and Present Danger, all, good and bad, start by dramatizing some valid…
The Scottish film Shallow Grave is an imaginative little noir thriller with a lively, grisly wit. Like Miami Rhapsody, the film is full of more or less open references to other movies in its genre–Brian DePalma’s Body Double and Martin Scorsese’s GoodFellas, most notably. But unlike director David Frankel’s act…
Stark type against a black background, actors’ names listed alphabetically, Louis Armstrong singing “Just One of Those Things”–Miami Rhapsody’s titles let us know at once that we’re in Woody Allen Land. The letters are in purple, however, not in Allen’s traditional white, presumably to suggest the flashier colors appropriate to…
Very few moviegoers today, even those who would consider themselves film buffs, have had more than passing exposure to the films of the silent era. Yet it is in this period that the vast majority of the art’s fundamental techniques were invented and refined, often to levels of great accomplishment…
Some theatre historians have attributed the decline of theatre to the diminishing stature of the dramatic hero. Greek tragedies centered on kings and gods, Shakespeare’s plays on dukes and princes. By the time O’Neill wrote about actors, poets and prostitutes, Miller about salesmen and movie stars, Williams about football heroes,…
The notion of an exquisite young woman becoming emotionally and/or sexually fixated on a paunchy, balding, poorly dressed older man is one that has a certain special appeal for the average movie critic. This may have more than a little to do with why Red, the third film in Krzysztof…
Grand Canyon University’s production of Georg Kaiser’s 1918 play Gas I has scored a bull’s eye on a virtual blind spot in my experience. Never having seen productions of Capek’s R.U.R., Cocteau’s The Infernal Machine, or any of the 73 plays Kaiser apparently wrote in addition to Gas I, my…
Samuel Beckett was arguably the most important writer for the theatre of our century. Winner of the Nobel Prize for literature in 1969, Beckett wrote three masterpieces for the stage: Waiting for Godot (1952), Endgame (1957) and Krapp’s Last Tape (1960). Many people would add Happy Days (1961) to this…
True to its title, French director Nicolas Philibert’s documentary In the Land of the Deaf approaches deafness not as a handicap but as the unifying condition of a subculture. It’s a very simple, unaffected piece of filmmaking, smoothly intercutting several unconnected strands of narrative–the marriage of two young people, a…
