Now that the Japanese Tora-san series — with 50-odd entries in 30 years — has presumably drawn to a close following last year’s death of star Kiyoshi Atsumi, the James Bond films constitute the longest-running continuous series around. They’ve had their ups and downs, but something about the Bond formula…
At a time when gang-related, drive-by shootings plague the nation’s major cities, a 40-year-old musical in which two rival packs sit down to a war council at the local soda shop and order “Cokes all around” would seem hopelessly dated. Yet when a police detective shows up spewing racial slurs…
Steven Spielberg’s Amistad is being given the Big Picture treatment — Schindler’s List big, not Jurassic Park big. Last week’s Newsweek featured the film on its cover, calling it “Spielberg’s controversial new movie,” even though it had not yet been released and the only “controversy” was a legal one about…
Wes Craven’s Scream, which opened almost exactly a year ago, was the surprise hit of an overcrowded Christmas season. The success was a triumph partly of counterprogramming: In the midst of a glut of classy Oscar contenders, Scream was the only teen horror film. It was also helped by the…
Her boyfriend recalled seeing her drenched in blood and coated with gold dust. The boyfriend, Alejandro Gomez Arias, and his eighteen-year-old companion Frida Kahlo were returning to their homes in suburban Mexico City that September day in 1925 when the city bus on which they were riding collided with a…
The rooms in the paintings and prints of the young Colombian artist Homero Aguilar are empty — at least for the moment. Someone may have just passed through, leaving a door ajar or a window open, or perhaps someone hesitates beyond the frame, just out of sight, waiting to enter…
Thursday December 11 When you’re trudging through an untamed mangrove, art, music, and literature are probably the last things that come to mind. Much less a steaming cup of joe. But in the program Mangrove Cafe — A Literary Coffeehouse, a swath of swamp has become remarkably civilized. It’s actually…
Victor Wooten owes his phenomenal bass-playing career to his oldest brother, Reggie. Inspired by a local band in their hometown of Newport News, Virginia, Reggie and his five brothers began making music any way they possibly could, including beating on cardboard boxes and shaking chains. Soon they were playing real…
Gary Davis is ready to unveil his second feature film, but will somebody — anybody — please just let the guy write the music for a major motion picture? “You need to create your own opportunities,” declares the 43-year-old Royal Palm Beach filmmaker/pianist/composer/martial arts instructor. And so he has. Writing…
Thursday December 4 It’s been in production for slightly more than two centuries, yet Mozart’s Don Giovanni still has the stuff to keep modern operagoers enthralled. First there’s the music. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was no slouch as a composer, so of course the music kicks. He also knew just what…
The average player is six feet, four inches tall and weighs 200 pounds. A study following the 1984 Olympic Games found they were the most finely tuned all-around athletes. Basketball players? Decathletes? Forget about it. As a recent TV commercial proclaimed while images of buff, battling bodies splashed across the…
According to Walter Andrus, Jr., who helped found the Mutual Unidentified Flying Object Network (MUFON) in 1969, there’s simply no way to count the large number of people who are abducted by aliens each year. Andrus can’t even tally the number of reports that come in over the MUFON hot…
First The Heiress was unofficially remade as Washington Square, then Ace in the Hole as Mad City, and then The Day of the Jackal as The Jackal. Now we get The Absent-Minded Professor, all dressed up in new threads, as Flubber. In this frenzy of plundering the past, is nothing…
Documentarian Errol Morris is by far best known for his 1988 feature The Thin Blue Line, which is often described as the only film that ever got an innocent man off death row. But Morris got his start with very different sorts of material: His first two films — 1978’s…
“Their music is incredibly melodic,” notes Mary Rodgers, referring to the work of famed songwriters Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II during a recent phone conversation from her home in New York City. “Human beings are constructed to enjoy that. We have something instinctive that needs that melodic base. And…
Thursday November 27 Timothea Beckerman grew up in a musical family in a musical city. By age nine she was singing and dancing in the New Orleans clubs where her mother kept bar, then quit school after sixth grade to perform in local revues; as a thirteen-year-old she was being…
In “The Jazz Photographs of Milt Hinton” there is a picture of Billie Holiday, reunited with the great Count Basie, rehearsing in a New York City television studio. Basie sits at a piano with Holiday standing behind him. She seems to be giving the pianist a serious chewing-out or at…
Jorge Nel glides across the dance floor, and his partner — an Asian-American woman dressed in an elegant, tight-fitting outfit of matching black bell-bottoms and blouse — follows shadowlike. A side step to the left, two steps forward, a side step to the right, two backward. Again and again. For…
In John Berendt’s beguiling travel-cum-true-crime book Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, the people of Savannah “flourished like hothouse plants tended by an indulgent gardener. The ordinary became extraordinary. Eccentrics thrived. Every nuance and quirk of personality achieved greater brilliance in that lush enclosure than would have been…
You can’t exactly call Alien Resurrection a pleasurable experience, but then again you wouldn’t say that about its predecessors either. Directed by the Frenchman Jean-Pierre Jeunet, who previously codirected with Marc Caro Delicatessen (1991) and The City of Lost Children (1995), this fourth installment in the Alien onslaught is once…
In 1996 Rent picked up the Pulitzer Prize for its rock and roll update of Puccini’s La Boheme, edging out another work that has ties to the classical canon: Jon Marans’ drama Old Wicked Songs. The latter play, about the life lessons a young pianist and his seasoned vocal coach…
The juxtaposition, faintly surreal, reminds me of a shop I once saw in the rural Deep South, housing both a beauty salon and a hardware store. But Needlepoint Originals and Paradise Gallery (the italics appear right there on the business card), an unassuming little establishment next to the Riverside Hotel…
