You have wondered, perhaps, while watching footage of the Paris fashion shows, just where in God’s name the designers got the inspiration for their ill-conceived Halloween costumes. Director Douglas Keeve’s new documentary Unzipped gives us the answer: Nanook of the North. The subject of the film, renowned New York fashion…
The task of writing about the Grateful Dead phenomenon has fallen mainly either to Deadheads, who obviously lack objectivity, or to rock critics, who love to scratch their heads elaborately over the question of why a cult would grow up around this band’s pleasant if somewhat forgettable music. This question…
The actor’s nightmare is of performing in a play for which he has no memory of rehearsing or learning lines. For a movie director, the equivalent nightmare must be presiding over a set on which every imaginable disaster occurs, while attempting to shoot a difficult scene on a tight schedule…
Harold Pinter is arguably the most influential English dramatist in the second half of the 20th century. Traces of Pinter’s spare and oblique dialogue can be found in the works of Edward Albee, Tom Stoppard, Arthur Kopit, Sam Shepard, David Mamet and John Guare. Pinter spent the first ten years…
“I need a man!” screech female voices in the Planet Earth Multi-Cultural Theatre production of Federico Garcia Lorca’s classic tale of Spanish suppression, The House of Bernarda Alba. Since that sentiment suggests a solution rather simplistic for today’s women, one is left to ponder this play of sexual repression as…
The title character of Jeffrey, played by Steven Weber, is a young, gay actor/waiter in New York City. He loves sex, but nonetheless swears off it out of fear of AIDS. Shortly thereafter, he meets Steve (Michael T. Weiss), a beautiful young bartender he can’t quite resist. Before their first…
. . . Heaven admits no jest; wits that presum’d On wit too much . . . with foolish grounds of art Discover’d first the nearest way to Hell. –John Ford, ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore A young man starts sleeping with his sister, and she gets pregnant. When she…
The title of young director Bryan Singer’s The Usual Suspects refers, of course, to a famous laugh line in Casablanca: Police prefect Claude Rains has just witnessed Humphrey Bogart shooting a Nazi bigwig. Instead of having Bogie arrested, Rains turns to his subordinate and deadpans, “Major Strasser has been shot…
Early in Last of the Dogmen, Barbara Hershey and Tom Berenger are exploring the Montana wilderness when she tumbles down a bank to the edge of a cliff. He goes to help her and takes a spill himself. The two are clinging to a rope tied to Berenger’s horse, so…
Grand Canyon University has launched a promising season of Shakespeare with a scintillating production of Tom Stoppard’s contemporary classical romp Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. The sensation of the 1967 season on Broadway–it won the New York Drama Critics’ and Tony awards for Best Play–Stoppard’s witty deconstruction of Hamlet ran…
The Diviners came to my attention by winning the prestigious American College Theatre Festival Award at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. I brought author James Leonard Jr. to New York to participate in the Circle Repertory Company Plays-in-Progress series that spring. Based on the success of that staged reading,…
The big summer studio releases of 1995 cost millions to make. Some low-budget films play at selected art houses. Then there is the no-budget film like The Brothers McMullen. Brothers cost only $20,000 to make, which is less than one wet second of Waterworld. It was filmed mostly on weekends…
I fell for it. I believed, after glancing through the book Why Cats Paint, that the authors had really managed to document the unleashing of feline artistic finesse. And, indeed, at first blush, this slim volume, which outsold nearly everything last holiday season, seems to explain the little-known phenomenon of…
Probably the first risqu material worthy of the term “art” that many American males of my generation ever saw was the work of Robert Crumb, king of the underground comics movement of the ’60s. The obsessions and family psychology of this prolific cartoonist, most famous in the mainstream for the…
Teenage Lust is the name noted photographer Larry Clark gave to one of the collections of his work published in book form. The title has the ring of a drive-in exploitation picture of the ’60s. One can almost see the breathless ad copy on the poster: “SEE modern youth driven…
As with most science fiction, Waterworld requires a certain amount of ignorance of, or indifference to, science to enjoy the fiction. The film is an action-adventure set in the distant post-Apocalyptic future–a time when the polar ice caps have been melted by some cataclysm. Surviving humanity lives on skiffs and…
High school teacher LouAnne Johnson gave the title My Posse Don’t Do Homework to the 1992 book she wrote about her experiences teaching gifted but underachieving inner-city kids in California. The producers of the film version have changed the title to Dangerous Minds, which is meaningless, but somehow more painless…
This New York theatre season will be remembered as the year of the penises. The age of the gay play has arrived with a vengeance, and with an unprecedented display of genitalia. With five gay plays currently playing on New York stages, it is clear that repressing one’s behavior is…
I remember one night in college, my classmate Carol and I were cramming for Dr. Deleuze’s art history exam, smoking up a storm and bitching about the absence of women in our art history texts. One of the books was H.W. Janson’s History of Art. I remembered that night because…
There have been many versions of Victor Hugo’s classic melodrama The Hunchback of Notre Dame, several of them captured on film. Most memorable is the 1923 silent film starring “the man of a thousand faces,” the legendary Lon Chaney as Quasimodo. The hunchback received a voice in the brilliant 1939…
The Postman, a film by a Brit director, based on a Chilean novel and starring an Italian, is an example of a genre that’s become highly popular on the art-house circuit. It might be called the Paradisaical Film, or the Vicarious Vacation Picture–an easygoing romantic period piece set in a…
Sister My Sister is based on a celebrated criminal case from provincial France in the early ’30s–the same case on which Genet based his play The Maids. Scripted by Wendy Kesselman, adapting her play My Sister in This House, and directed by Nancy Meckler, the movie has plenty of lurid…
