The indie Let It Snow was originally titled Snow Days. Both titles are terrible — they suggest either a schmaltzy ’40s-era holiday musical or else a kiddy comedy from Nickelodeon. The movie is, rather, a derivative but likable romantic comedy, sort of a bus-and-truck When Harry Met Sally . …
Ralphie May, who is white, calls black men “niggers.” In his standup act, he uses the word repeatedly; he also riffs on Mexicans, who “see the Virgin Mary in everything,” and whose names are easy to remember “because they’re on their necklaces.” He was raised in the deep South, in…
There is a trick to making shofars — the hollowed-out rams’ horns blown on Rosh Hashanah — and also a trick to blowing them. Generally, though, rams’ horns are more easily mastered than French horns, and it is possible that you will walk away from the Shofar Factory, a shofar-making…
Judd Apatow tries not to think of what became of Sam and Lindsay Weir, Neal Schweiber, Bill Haverchuck, Daniel Desario, Nick Andopolis and the other freaks and geeks Apatow knew back at McKinley High School. Those kids were his family, the children born when Apatow and writer Paul Feig created…
In Lillian Hellman’s play The Children’s Hour, a little girl destroys her teacher’s life with accusations that the teacher is gay. In Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, mere mortals are tried and convicted as witches by their peers. In the best theatrical tradition, recent behind-the-scenes shenanigans at local companies have combined…
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Seldom are the advantages of a home-based art space so obvious as in the case of “A Good Way to Learn, Lesson 4: Chores (Content Clean)”; it’s performance art in the guise of mundane household chores, or mundane household chores in the guise of art. Either way, the piece comes…
God works in mysterious ways. How else to explain the sudden appearance of a press release about Elvis on the office bulletin board? Well, maybe the “PLEASE POST THIS ON YOUR BULLETIN BOARD” it requested in polite italics, pulsing with the gentle insistence of ALL CAPS, had something to do…
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 take…
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Far too often, those who work in the music industry are so concerned with making a living they often forget they’re capable, at their best, of making history as well. They sacrifice art and artists in the name of commerce, then sleep soundly wrapped in bedspreads made of silk and…
What I did this summer is scramble to find theater productions to write about, which is how I came to break my rule about never attending any play presented in a strip mall. But a summer season almost entirely bereft of theater found me last weekend driving up and down…
Anybody with siblings knows that, while birth order isn’t the determining factor in how we develop, it certainly provides a convenient excuse for any number of undesirable character traits. The eldest child can be insufferably responsible and bossy, lording it over his or her younger siblings, or wild and crazy,…
Woody Allen’s latest romp through Old New York combines (among other things) a skirt-chasing insurance investigator with the charm of a rodent, a wisecracking Vassar grad who takes no guff and a nightclub hypnotist in a sequined turban who doubles as a major jewel thief. The year is 1940. The…
Beware the filmmaker who looks through the camera’s lens and sees only himself on the other side, blowing kisses. He’s the fool who confuses “personal vision” with “jacking off,” and he’ll try every time to convince you there’s something meaningful and imaginative in the shallow and hackneyed. He is so…
Joe Rogan, who as a standup comedian works more or less the same hours that strippers do, is not a 9-to-5 kind of guy. He is, however, an 18-to-34. That’s the demographic group from which Rogan, a NewsRadio veteran and the host of NBC’s Fear Factor, draws most of his…
How many times must I tell you kids Before you shut your yaps? Yes, ‘n’ how many ways must I say the same thing Before I can get my nap? Yes, ‘n’ how many times must your parents be called Before they make you cut the crap? The answer, you…
The cowboy, that icon of the American West, proves to be more than the strong silent type at the 14th annual Arizona Cowboy Poets Gathering. Sponsored by the Sharlot Hall Museum in Prescott, the gathering brings together some of the West’s best cowboy poets. Wanna-bes in shiny boots and 10-gallon…
Nothing provokes a visceral response quite like, well, viscera — the smooth muscle stuff that younger generations of Americans, whose meat comes plastic-wrapped, find hard to stomach. It is possible to buy pig’s uterus in Phoenix, but not at Safeway, and it is unlikely that the salesperson could explain, in…
Having been born and raised 15 minutes from the Mexican border, it’s no surprise that I have a deep and abiding love for Mexican folk arts, crafts and culture. I’ve spent years traveling through Mexico’s interior, boarding buses, hiring drivers, renting cars, all in the ongoing quest to root out…
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: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse, we’ve been taught to revere the legend of Francis Ford Coppola…
Times certainly have changed. Twenty years ago, a musical about an East German transsexual rock singer would have premièred in one of New York’s off-off Broadway theaters or cabarets, run for a couple of weeks and remained the pleasant memory of a select few. But when John Cameron Mitchell’s Hedwig…
