Those expecting Himalaya to focus upon the beloved traveling carnival ride known for its liberal use of Def Leppard ("Do you wanna go faster?") are in for a few surprises. For one, this sensuous, exotic film is more like an issue of National Geographic come to life, rich with cultural...
Carolyn T. Lowery -- African-American neighborhood gadfly, city council candidate and ice pick in the toes of just about every authority -- has a penchant for sometimes spouting outrageous candor. So while others attending a June forum for candidates at the Saint Catherine's School on south Central Avenue aired platitudes...
The publicist asks if I'd like to speak to D.A. Pennebaker to commemorate the 60th birthday of Bob Dylan, which falls on May 24. She asks this because, during the spring of 1965, Pennebaker made a documentary about Dylan's tour of England, Dont Look Back, which captured a drained, cagey...
Home InvasionOwing to the NCAA playoffs and the Academy Awards, Sunday dawns a big TV day for the Flash. All other pursuits are discarded.The Flash is a bit perturbed when one regular hoops-watching pal -- we'll call him Paul -- skips the Flash's gig in favor of another. Paul is...
Gil Cates takes a long, deep breath before answering the question: Is producing the Academy Awards show the ultimate no-win situation? Cates has produced nine of the past 11 Oscar telecasts, and he returns March 25 after a year's layoff; for those scoring at home, Cates is not to blame...
Theater fans like to have it both ways. Sometimes it can be a small, bare-bones, black-box production with no frills to take away from the actor's work and the author's words. Other times it's the big expansive show filled with all the spectacle the stage can hold. Either choice can...
In honor of Mother's Day, here's lunch with the ultimate TV Mom. It's not June Cleaver, not Carol Brady, not the tortured alpha female from Malcolm in the Middle -- no, the honor has to go to the hip, bus-driving, back-up-singing, ostensibly keyboard-tickling matriarch of The Partridge Family.Not that this...
The pile in the road didn't look human. It was a cardboard box, crushed and mangled by Friday evening's rush hour, or a pile of stray clothes, fallen from the turtle shell carrier of a cross-country traveler's car. It didn't seem at all like a man. But it was. He...
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...
It was to have been a routine stop on a routine press tour, yet another town in which the actress was to show up, chit and chat with the local media about her movie, then move on -- the traveling salesman getting the word out, moving The Product. Denver, Dallas,...
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,...
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...
There he is, his eyes and body language as unmistakable as the flattened hat perched perfectly on his head. This little man in the shabby suit looks older than his 66 years -- he looks ageless, actually -- yet he performs physical feats beyond the capability of most people 40...
If fame is fleeting, it also has its own geography. While New York types and theater buffs the world over revere Stephen Schwartz as a superstar, much of the rest of the world has never heard of him. Although he's among the most successful composers working today, and despite a...
Far too many dead folks recently: The god of American natural guitar, John Fahey, bought the farm less than 48 hours after undergoing a sextuple bypass operation; Eddy Shaver, guitar-picking son of Billy Joe Shaver and co-founder of Shaver, died of a heroin overdose; and James Carr of "Dark End...
"You're right! I quit!"Until this moment -- this shrill outburst that comes out of nowhere and startles both interviewer and subject -- Marisa Tomei had been speaking in hushed tones, like someone making funeral arrangements. Every so often, she would punctuate her sentences with giggles -- some nervous, some delirious...
"This is some damn fine coffee you got here in Twin Peaks. And some damn good cherry pie. But I have to tell you something, sheriff: Last night, I had a dream in which a dancing midget talked backward, thus leading me to believe that our killer is a man...
Margo Channing came to dinner . . . Baby Jane stayed for breakfast!" That tantalizing teaser only sounds like a terrifying advertising come-on for one of Bette Davis' horror movies from the '60s. In reality, it's a line of dialogue from Me and Jezebel, a reality-based play about the legendary...
When the lights finally came up in the Washington, D.C., movie theater, Leonard Nimoy sat still, silent and a bit shaken. He could scarcely believe what he had seen -- and what he had not seen. The movie was beautiful, but beneath the surface sheen, there was no heart, no...
What we have here is a failure to communicate. We have other problems as well -- mistaken identities, innuendo masquerading as gospel, an abusive cop, unwarranted detention, dead and disabled witnesses, a trumped-up charge, justice run amok. It all swirls kinetically amid a vortex of racial tension. The protagonists are...
November may mean Thanksgiving to most of you, but in the film biz it means a rush of "serious" films trying to gouge an impression into the short memories of Oscar voters. This shouldn't be a bad thing, but since the relationship between "Oscar" and "actual interesting filmmaking" is nearly...
In assessing the merits of Quills, the lusty new feature by director Philip Kaufman (Henry & June), it's tempting to seek correlative characters from popular movies to illustrate just how radical this business is not. In Kaufman's film -- affectionately constructed upon a screenplay by Doug Wright, who adapts his...
