Tis the season and all that jive; beneath the tree this first week of November, you will find two films set during the final week of December, when sugarplums and candy canes go on sale at the concession stand for all the good little girls’ and boys’ parents to buy…
Even when people were watching Will Ferrell on television every Saturday night, they weren’t seeing Will Ferrell. They saw no more than a glimpse of him, beneath wigs and behind glued-on beards and buried under characters who became almost better known than he during his seven years on Saturday Night…
On October 12, BBC America aired the second-season premiere of The Office, the beloved mockumentary that follows paper-selling rats ’round the maze of cubicles leading to the office of head cheese David Brent, a pathetic little man who says in public things no rational human being would even think in…
The opening credits insist Kill Bill: Volume 1 is “Quentin Tarantino’s 4th film,” when it’s actually his 3.5th; it’s too incomplete to be measured as a whole; it’s really half a movie waiting for a proper ending, which is due to arrive in the next volume in February 2004. Until…
The publicity materials sent in advance of the at-long-last release of The Kids Are Alright on DVD suggest that the maker of the 1979 documentary about The Who has been on the lam–in the rock-and-roll witness relocation program, perhaps, far from the long windmilling arm of justice. A “recluse” is…
Harvey Pekar, star of a long-running comic-book series he writes and others illustrate, is reminded early in American Splendor that he’s no superhero. It’s Halloween, and the eleven-year-old Harvey, played by a bent-over, sneering Daniel Tay, stands on a stoop seeking tricks and treats from a woman who recognizes the…
A respected comedy writer sits over lunch with a man who, in the late 1960s, was very, very famous. This man, slender and balding, was a comedian who, with his younger brother, hosted a network television show that caused quite a ruckus–they talked too much politics, and pot, for prime…
On Sunday, HBO will air the final episode of what has been the most consistently entertaining–and aggravating–show of the summer television season. Project Greenlight will fade to black, and the people who populated the series–the first-time screenwriter who’s had the optimism beaten out of her, the rookie directors who’ve had…
Kevin Costner appeared in his first Western when he was thirty and looked to be in his early twenties. He was a slender, restless actor in Lawrence Kasdan’s Silverado, the 1985 film in which Costner played the blithe brother of a somber Scott Glenn — all giggles and gunshots, a…
He knows there are people, too many, who do not like him. He has to know. They’ve told him to his face–the studio executives who slice and snip the scenes he loves the most and suffer his outbursts for it, the directors he’s pushed out of the way so he…
There’s magic in Northfork, both in the movie, by twin brothers Mark and Michael Polish, and in the Montana town soon to be drowned by the opening of the dam keeping the baptismal waters at bay. Northfork is a beguiling and bittersweet fantasy set in a netherworld where the living…
David Wolstencroft moved from London to Los Angeles in November, and not only so he could rise each morning for a game of tennis–though there is that, and that might have been good enough. He made the trip, which is thus far temporary but may well prove permanent, for the…
Spy Kids 3-D: Game Over continues a fine tradition of turning third installments of film series into three-dimensional efforts; Amityville 3-D and Jaws 3-D exploited the gimmick long before Robert Rodriguez made clever use of the numeral signifying the milking to death of a franchise. But what Rodriguez lacks –…
I purposely avoided reading anything about Capturing the Friedmans before seeing the film, which was no easy task. Andrew Jarecki’s documentary — about a Great Neck, New York, family torn asunder in the late 1980s by allegations of kiddie-porn possession and the horrific sexual abuse of numerous children — has…
Stan Lee, for better or worse the most recognizable face in the history of the comic book, insists he has no love for rehashing his past. He claims to take no great joy from talking about long-ago yesterdays spent in smoky rooms co-creating the likes of the Fantastic Four, Spider-Man,…
You need not leave the house to know what’s playing in movie theaters in coming weeks. You’ve already seen these films, with titles consisting of letters followed by numbers. There’s no surprise in the dark, just the bumping into of familiar faces, legally blond or largely green, and furious franchises…
In November there will arrive on newsstands a music magazine edited by Alan Light, who left Spin to embark on his endeavor of publishing a journal devoted to that long-ignored audience: the over-30 CD-buyer, the old fart for whom “new music” is a mystery left to be fathomed by The…
You’ve been warned: This is a column about politics wherein a popular-culture critic (dunno what that is either, but says so on my tax returns) interviews a former rock journalist-turned-publicist-turned-band-manager-turned-record-label-executive about how the Democratic Party alienated everyone under the age of death. You may take this with a grain of…
Occasionally I can be convinced that it’s the singer, not the song. I’ve no love for Britney Spears’s “Baby One More Time,” but I can’t get enough of Brit band Travis’s laconic redo of said iconic single, which squeezes out the then-teen temptress’s toxic sugar till it’s just a bittersweet…
In March 2002, days before President Bush was scheduled to visit Peru, a car bomb exploded near the U.S. embassy in Lima, killing nine and injuring dozens. Government officials here and in Peru blamed the attack on Shining Path — a Marxist terrorist organization with roots dating to the 1960s,…
Long ago, Eddie Murphy grew tired of Eddie Murphy parts: the fast-talking high-jiver, the preening put-on. Even before he began parodying himself in Bowfinger and Showtime and I Spy — the latter two perhaps accidentally — he accepted high-paying roles in low-rent movies that neutered and humiliated the character he…
Two women, dressed in standard waitstaff uniforms, emerge from the bar and into the well-appointed lobby of the hotel built 90 years ago by beer magnate Adolphus Busch, who tried to bring the Jazz Age to what would become a Muzak town. About 50 feet away, an interviewer and his…
