You're not likely to come out of the bone-chilling documentary Waco: The Rules of Engagement with the belief that David Koresh was angelic, or that he had no hand in the deaths of his Branch Davidian followers in Waco, Texas, in April of 1993. But, if you assumed that the...
About a year ago, Julia Roberts was a guest on Bravo's Inside the Actors Studio. Near the end of the show, craggy host James Lipton put her through his standard 20 Questions routine, profound stuff like, "What's your favorite curse word?" When Lipton asked Roberts what she eventually hoped to...
In a world where Hanson outsells Fugazi and "girl power" conjures images of the Spice Girls rather than Bikini Kill, there's a smug sense of satisfaction when entertainment institutions unwittingly recognize anyone from the indie-ground. Nearly a year ago, Elliott Smith was on the front porch of Revolver HQ, playing...
When guitarist Steve Larson celebrated his departure from Dead Hot Workshop last June by setting fire to his guitar at a Gibson's farewell gig, many assumed that the veteran Tempe band's future had likewise been reduced to a pile of smoldering ash. After nine years of ups and downs, a...
Danger, Will Robinson! Sensors detect boomer-TV redux once again. This time the victim is Lost in Space, Irwin Allen's enjoyably absurd sci-fi TV fantasy which ran from 1965 to 1968 on CBS, before ABC's Batman trounced it in the ratings. Grown-ups are likely to cringe at the prospect of sitting...
Though her contemporaries often compared Virginia Woolf's nonlinear, almost cubist narratives to the cinema's then-burgeoning use of montage, close-ups, flashbacks, tracking shots and rapid cuts, the strength of Woolf's novels lay in the rhythm of her arresting style, and in her heroines' poignant melancholia, which insidiously seeps through the reader's...
Thursday March 19 Ever seen Santo, the masked superhero-wrestler from Mexican fantasy-horror films? Imagine four Santos playing frenzied Dick Dale/Ventures-style surf-guitar rock, and you've got a good picture of Los Straitjackets. Touring in support of its excellent Upstart CD Viva! Los Straitjackets!--supposedly what Quentin Tarantino cried to the band from...
Set in 19th-century Australia, this tale of two gamblers--Oscar, a failed minister, and Lucinda, a glass-works owner--is too wispy to be an art thing and too heavy to be a toy. Its key symbol is a tiny glass teardrop. The "Prince Rupert drop" cannot be smashed with a sledgehammer but...
I've got some marvelous summer adventures planned. Among my ideas: 1) Hiking Squaw Peak during an electrical storm with a copper helmet strapped to my head; 2) Supplementing my income selling authentic Apache earmuffs at freeway off-ramps; 3) Checking with the IRS to see if I can continue writing off...
No question about it. Years from now, people will grill each other about it. "Where were you when you first heard the news?" And the response will go something like this: "Jeez, I was driving around in my car, I turn on the radio and I hear someone on there...
Brazilian director Bruno Barreto is best known on these shores for the lush romanticism of the Sonia Braga travelogues Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands and Gabriela, and in his country for teen fluff like The Boy From Rio. With the Oscar-nominated Four Days in September, he's likely to establish...
I attended The Heiress, a play about lost love, on Valentine's Day in the company of a couple of reformed bachelors. Until recently, each of us had bombed at romance, and had resigned himself to whatever the equivalent of male spinsterhood is. Our postplay discussion--about leading with your heart instead...
Back in the '60s and '70s, when its animation unit was in the doldrums, the Disney studio made a number of live-action "family" comedies (No Deposit, No Return and Freaky Friday, for instance) that were, within their limited ambitions, genuinely funny. The studio's latest film, Krippendorf's Tribe, is very much...
Most people take a job in the music business because they secretly want to be rock singers. Mary Lou Lord became a rock singer because she secretly wants a job in the music business. "I want to have a baby, I want to have a real life," says Lord, at...
The science-fiction works of the late, great Philip K. Dick haven't been served particularly well onscreen. The most recent adaptation, Screamers, was junk; Total Recall had its moments but was less ingenious by half than the short story it was based upon. Blade Runner, of course, was brilliant, but in...
It's been just two years since the Academy nominated the Italian film Il Postino (a.k.a. The Postman) for multiple Oscars, including Best Picture, Best Director and Best Actor. The arrival of Kevin Costner's epic The Postman raises the possibility of confusion in the Oscar history books--a very slim possibility, a...
Nothing's more frustrating than interviewing a rock band en masse. Everyone clusters around your tape recorder and blurts out stuff all at once, but rarely does anyone say anything revelatory. Generally too inhibited to criticize or too diplomatic to take all the credit for the sounds, musicians tend to respond...
With all the brutal competition from the big-ticket films prior to the December 31 Oscar deadline, Hollywood has established a tradition in recent years of dumping lost-cause features during the first few weeks of the year. In 1997, it was the airplane "thriller" Turbulence; in 1996, Bio-Dome and Two If...
When was the last time the audience applauded a trailer and the movie lived up to it? Independence Day enticed millions with its preview shot of the White House blown to smithereens, but that film was a dumb, elephantine sci-fi pastiche. The trailer for Wag the Dog, a far more...
Wes Craven's Scream, which opened almost exactly a year ago, was the surprise hit of an overcrowded Christmas season. In part, its success was a triumph of counterprogramming: In a glut of classy Oscar contenders, Scream was the only teen-horror film. And it was helped by the relatively lackluster response...
The ad line for As Good As It Gets is "a comedy from the heart that goes for the throat." Isn't this simply another way of saying, "You'll laugh, you'll cry, you'll gag"? Jack Nicholson plays, of all things, a prolific romance novelist who's a virulent xenophobe and a hopeless...
First, The Heiress was unofficially remade as Washington Square, then Ace in the Hole as Mad City, and The Day of the Jackal as The Jackal. But now we get The Absent-Minded Professor, all dressed up in new threads, as Flubber. In this frenzy of plundering the past, is nothing...
