Maybe all you want out of your pop music is a few minutes of escape, a radio-friendly respite from the heavy humdrum of your workaday existence. Maybe you likes to hang with 50 Cent, who survived a few gunshots (and doesn’t let you forget it) to party another day; or…
March 21, 2003–though he never knew the precise date, it was the very day Nile Southern had been waiting for longer than he cared to remember. On that day, Southern went into the Chelsea Mini-Storage facility on Manhattan’s West Side, grabbed the largest dolly he could find–it looked like a…
It’s hard to believe they were originally going to release Basic before bombs started falling over Baghdad; if it isn’t the worst movie of 2003 so far, it’s only because Boat Trip hasn’t screened yet. Now, in the shadow of smoke rising from the rubble in Iraq, it’s even more…
War, as it turns out, is good for absolutely nothing when it comes to anti-war songs. At the risk of sounding like Bill O’Reilly (who, no doubt, listens only to Wagner), it’s time to protest the protesters, most of whom are blowin’, all right, just not in the wind. The…
When Neil Burger’s debut as feature-film writer and director, Interview with the Assassin, was being shopped around more than a year ago, it had many intrigued but few interested enough to buy it for distribution. The theory goes that some distributors, among them Miramax, thought its subject matter felt a…
This is a story with a happy ending, because, so far, nothing bad has happened to indicate otherwise. There are no ratings to sweat over, no network executives to fight with, no cancellations to suffer through. The rough territories lie ahead, over the horizon of 8:30 p.m. this Sunday, when…
This should really piss you off: What follows is a story about a very funny movie you will have absolutely no chance of seeing any time soon. The powers that be who distribute movies–who copy prints, print up posters, deliver them to theaters, collect receipts, split profits (well…)–do not want…
Tony Grisoni can always tell when his old friend Terry Gilliam, the visionary who sees too far for his own good, is in pain: He laughs. The worse the pain, the harder the laughter. If that is the case, then the Terry Gilliam seen throughout Lost in La Mancha, Keith…
It was supposed to be make-believe, a disturbing but ultimately uplifting work of science-fiction from a celebrated author of grim futurama and glorious fantasy. The subject matter of Orbiter, a hardback graphic novel about a spaceship that disappears for years and returns sheathed in skin after visits to faraway places…
Rawson Thurber has been so busy the past few days that by the time he finally returns a reporter’s phone call, he does so at 1:30 in the morning–and he doesn’t even realize the late, or early, hour till he hears the groggy croak on the other end. He’s sorry…
If nothing else, because there’s nothing else to this movie, Shanghai Knights allows Jackie Chan, he of halting dialogue and poetic movement, to pay direct homage to his idols. He hangs from the arms of Big Ben, dangling off the stories-tall clock like Harold Lloyd in 1923’s Safety First; he…
Last October, Sue Vertue found herself in a Los Angeles soundstage watching the filming of a pilot for a would-be NBC sitcom. The storyline of this particular episode dealt, more or less, with the horrific (and, of course, capital-H hilarious!) fallout that comes when a man’s girlfriend finds his porn…
First off, make no mistake: Biker Boyz is not, and has no intentions of being, The Fast and the Furious on two wheels, which will be considered a serious shame by the 12-year-old demographic that was hoping to chug a little more Diesel fuel till the official sequel’s release this…
It’s easy to presume About Schmidt isn’t much of a movie, since its protagonist, Warren Schmidt, isn’t much of anything. He’s portrayed by Jack Nicholson, but the actor is actually someone who looks like he used to be Jack Nicholson. This Warren, this rinky-dink actuary banished to the wasteland of…
Everything about Catch Me If You Can, the loosely based-on-fact tale of a teenager who swindled millions while posing as, among other things, a Pan Am pilot, a doctor, and a lawyer, is breezy and easy to swallow. Its maker, Steven Spielberg, hasn’t had so much fun in two decades,…
Adaptation is the most overrated movie of the year (of all time?) by people who should know better. Film critics have either been suckered in by its gimmick (Being John Malkovich screenwriter Charlie Kaufman can’t adapt a book for the big screen and winds up writing himself into his screenplay,…
Maid in Manhattan, in which Jennifer Lopez goes from pauper to princess, comes not from a screenplay but from a handful of self-help books, fairy tales, and fashion magazines cut and pasted together in a glossy montage committed to celluloid. It has all the spunk of a math problem, all…
Notes from a network executive’s forthcoming biography, pilfered from the desk of an editor at a major publishing house. This was hard to read, as it was scribbled in crayon on the back of a copy of Highlights taken from a pediatrician’s office. From page 412: “Last week, I met…
The acolyte will deride the obvious misses amid this collection of hits; the casual fan won’t even notice, since the casual fan skipped most of the band’s ’90s output anyway. Still, it’s amazing that could fill two discs this go-round, since there were half as many albums to choose from…
It’s doubtful Robert Louis Stevenson imagined his Treasure Island populated by cyborgs and scored to Goo Goo Dolls outtakes. And one has to wonder what the author would have made of his characters being turned into talking and walking dogs and cats who (gulp!) copulate and reproduce mangy hybrids. Far…
Things you will learn from a forthcoming oral history of Saturday Night Live: Dan Aykroyd slept with, among others, Gilda Radner, Laraine Newman, and writer Rosie Shuster, the latter of whom was, at the time, married to the show’s producer and creator, Lorne Michaels. To this day, Chevy Chase regrets…
So there’s no confusion, the star of Sweet Home Alabama is Reese Witherspoon, who graces the film’s poster in full-body pout and appears on the press kit in closeup, mug-shot smirk; any closer and we’d shoot up her nostrils and exit through her pores. Of course, there’s a great deal…
