The most compelling element of Dogtown and Z-Boys, Stacy Peralta’s valentine to a crew of footloose Southern California teenagers who set a radical new style in skateboarding in the 1970s, is the documentarian’s heartfelt belief in the lasting importance of the enterprise. As a member of the tribe and an…
The thoroughly unlikable heroine of Life or Something Like It is a vain, starlet-like bleached blonde employed by a Seattle TV station. To call her a reporter is to defame reporters. Her hairspray outweighs her brain, and everything in her life — from her obsessive workouts at the health club…
Poor William Randolph Hearst. The snapping dogs of Hollywood just won’t leave the guy alone. It’s been barely sixty years since a little epic called Citizen Kane portrayed the great newspaper tycoon as a ruthless dictator who degenerated into an emotional basket case, and already there’s more bad publicity in…
1. Roses Are Red. But it wasn’t always so: In the initial runnings of the Kentucky Derby, which dates back to 1875, the winning horse wore a blanket of white carnations — now the symbol of victory at the Belmont Stakes. Early in the twentieth century, historians tell us, a…
The perpetrators of the new Sandra Bullock vehicle, Murder by Numbers, could be hauled in on any number of charges, including plagiarism and child abuse. But their most obvious crime is first-degree dullness. A thriller without thrills, a mystery devoid of urgent questions, this merely bloody piece of business spends…
I don’t know what most devout Christians expect from the Second Coming, but in a relentlessly inspirational new movie called Joshua, the Son of God does it all for the citizens of a small town in Alabama. He tosses a 500-pound log onto his shoulder as if it were a…
Women who exchange descriptions of their sexual encounters are certainly no more appealing than men who boast in locker rooms, but they seem to get more free passes. If, in the name of social candor, Jerry Springer can induce sisters to confess what they’ve done with barnyard animals and every…
Armed with today’s digital technology, any special-effects wiz in Hollywood can squeeze a camel through the eye of a needle. But can the movies get a rich man into heaven? Philip Anschutz, Denver’s favorite billionaire, may be hoping they can. Last month, Anschutz signed an acquisition deal that will make…
The two slacker anti-heroes of Alfonso Cuarón’s Y Tu Mamá También (And Your Mother Too) come furnished with all the usual glitches of late adolescence: raging hormones, impatient wanderlust, contempt for their elders and a jones for dope and beer. In fact, Julio (Gael García Bernal) and Tenoch (Diego Luna)…
In 1974 and 1975, when the dynamic arranger and bandleader Gil Evans set out to reinterpret the music of rock icon Jimi Hendrix, jazz purists cried foul. What in the world was Miles Davis’s brilliant collaborator, a man who’d written songs for Peggy Lee and conducted albums for Kenny Burrell,…
This may be Cowtown, but that wasn’t Moooo! the Coors Field multitudes started yelling at the top of the third inning Monday afternoon. An eminently catchable fly ball had just dropped for a hit between outgoing shortstop Juan Uribe and incoming left-fielder Todd Hollandsworth, scoring Houston’s Craig Biggio, and 50,392…
The eternal beauty and constant surprise of baseball are always getting sabotaged by Hollywood’s urge to reduce the grand old game to a set of cliches as tedious as spring-training drills. The ghost of Shoeless Joe Jackson elevated Field of Dreams, the Wild Thing’s errant fastball gave momentary charm to…
Before last week, I regarded the game of cricket as a stodgy ancestor of our baseball — as a peculiar English obsession no less mystifying than the love sonnets of Sir John Suckling or those gray clots of mutton you sometimes find on your dinner plate in London. That has…
Every young artist must try to climb Olympus, mix it up with the gods and maybe hang around for dinner. For Pat Bianchi, a 26-year-old jazz organist who means to make his mark, the big moment will come this week on funky old Larimer Street, when he plays a concert…
What disorder compels a man to neglect his accounts, shun his family, starve his dog and inflate his bar tab so that it looks like the U.S. defense budget? What terror binds the victim to couch or barstool, gazing at multiple boob tubes for twelve- or fourteen-hour stretches, day after…
For every year they spend at altitude, baseball players and newspaper writers lose a couple of IQ points. But don’t let that stand in the way of a reckless prediction: The Colorado Rockies will return to the playoffs this year. That’s right, Cracker Jack. Despite a shrinking payroll, the absence…
Over the last half-century, countless filmmakers great and obscure have stood in serious debt to The Bicycle Thief. But for my money, no one has borrowed so cleverly or shifted the weight of Vittorio De Sica’s 1948 masterpiece so gracefully as young Wang Xiaoshuai, whose Beijing Bicycle embodies the spirit…
What everyone has been hoping for — at least when sports are not actually being contested on ice and snow — is an Olympics about as exciting as happy hour at the Mormon Tabernacle. So far, so goody-goody. Osama bin Laden didn’t show up with a bomb in his turban…
Those who spend Sunday morning in church — or every morning watching The 700 Club — will likely embrace the new Welsh film Taliesin Jones as an affirmation of Christian faith. Agnostics, drunkards and horse players will probably see it as evangelical propaganda. Never the twain shall meet. By any…
They grin like famished wolves. Their eyes grow big. Obviously, they love the one-on-one drill. Who wouldn’t? Who could resist a thing so nakedly elemental? Stealthily, a lone shooter glides in on the crouching goaltender. The shooter swerves, he feints, he flicks his wrist and flashes the puck into a…
All of those war epics the big movie studios have rushed into release are certainly meant to reflect the present national mood, and if We Were Soldiers or Behind Enemy Lines or Black Hawk Down also happen to strike it rich, that will be fine with the box-office bean counters…
Ray Lawrence’s Lantana is high-toned Australian soap opera, which is to say that its philandering police detective and its grief-stricken psychoanalyst are a bit quirkier than their all-too-familiar televised counterparts. Its unhappy wives, gloomy husbands and alienated teenagers are more carefully constructed than similar characters in less ambitious movies. This…
