Among the qualities that make Fred A. Leuchter Jr. a buffoon who’s also an accomplice to evil, his desperate hunger for attention is the most obvious. He’s like the hick-town wallflower who’s always getting lured into the visiting hustler’s backseat for a quickie. When the state of Tennessee asked Leuchter…
It’s okay. You can say it. Just five little words. Don’t be shy. “I…am…a…wrestling fan.” You certainly wouldn’t be alone if you said it. Recent surveys show that as many as one in four Americans watch professional wrestling, and the World Wrestling Federation routinely has the number-one rated program on…
The film is called Erin Brockovich, but it might as well be titled Julia Roberts. Never before in the actress’s erratic career has a film been so custom-made for her; it’s as though a screenwriter has been replaced by a seamstress who knows Roberts’s every curve. No matter that she…
All of Ireland is like a small town — everyone knows everyone else’s business and often makes it their own. But that’s not necessarily a bad thing: In Cork, Ireland’s largest county, that simply translates into a deeply invested tradition of volunteerism among the women, who consider spreading good works…
Best-selling author Bryce Proctorr has a fat publishing contract and a debilitating case of writer’s block. Fortunately, he’s just bumped into fellow writer Wayne Prentice, who has a career that’s stalled in mid-list oblivion and a manuscript no publisher wants. That’s the setup in Donald Westlake’s new novel, The Hook…
There’s niche marketing and then there’s marketing in niches. If anything, they’ve managed to corner the market on both at the Bookies, the only bookstore in town with enough children’s poetry tomes to stock prominent displays of everything from the Robert Louis Stevenson classics to a volume of odes to…
The unbelievably good Matisse From the Baltimore Museum of Art, which opens to the general public on Sunday at the Denver Art Museum, is the third and final exhibit in a series of blockbusters there that have showcased the School of Paris. It is, hands down, the finest of the…
The turn of the century has put many people in the art world in a retrospective mood, but there are some dealers in the city who are way ahead of the pack — they’ve been looking back at local art history for years. One of these dealers is Elizabeth Schlosser,…
The thunderous applause that typically greets a successful Broadway opening can hardly compare to the joyful noise made by children anticipating that Babe, the Sheep-Pig is about to get under way. And once the play begins, the peals of laughter and murmurs of delight that greet the beautifully costumed characters…
Megan is a New York actress who, in addition to not having worked in six months, discovers that she has an overwhelming need “to love and be loved.” Past her ingenue days but not yet matronly enough for prime time, the former Broadway performer must decide whether to take a…
Dearly Departed. Most of the characters in David Bottrell and Jessie Jones’s off-Broadway hit behave as if they belong in a sketch on The Carol Burnett Show, and some of their collective yokeling is reminiscent of Hee Haw cornpone. And heaven knows that the two-hour exercise in escapism — welcome…
The creationists are going to have a field day with this one. Since the trailers for Mission to Mars reveal everything but the end credits, it would be near impossible to set foot into the theater without knowing the story, which is that three astronauts discover the true origin of…
The first thought you have while watching The Next Best Thing is “Was Madonna always this bad an actress?” It’s a question that soon fades from consciousness to be replaced by “Was Rupert Everett always this bad an actor?” and “Was John Schlesinger always this bad a director?” Since the…
In the closing years of the twentieth century, lowbrow white America finally learned to enjoy an ironic laugh at itself, led by Hollywood’s cheerful mockery of the culturally challenged working class. Outside the system, John Waters had this stuff pegged from the get-go, but the American grotesqueries of the original,…
Three decades after Rosemary’s Baby, two decades after The Tenant, and after a series of five non-horror films, Roman Polanski returns to the supernatural thriller with The Ninth Gate. What could be more promising? Regardless of what one thinks about Polanski’s personal life or legal status, the man is clearly…
Talkies may have cut off the short, electric rise of silent film, but who ever expected that the long-lost genre would be resurrected, decades in the future, to flicker again — not up on the silver screen, but on the stage? And that the result would be so modern and…
You have to wake up pretty early in the morning to fool a Greater Prairie Chicken. Though they’ll strut their stuff with authority in like company, the showy little creatures, slightly smaller than domestic chickens, are shy around humans, especially when it comes to mating rituals. But each spring, the…
There are big changes afoot at the little Mizel Museum of Judaica. First, the impending remodel of the BJ-BMH Synagogue, where it is housed, may put the museum out on the street, or at least into storage, and force it to cancel its upcoming schedule. The proposed design for the…
Right now at the Edge Gallery, there’s a quartet of very different shows, each of which has its own strengths and weaknesses. In the entry gallery is Theresa Ducayet: Architectural Textile, in which the artist combines sculptures and sewn silk-and-paper collages. The silk collages have small scraps of maps or…
Midway through Act Two of The Laramie Project, a pair of performers reenact one of the 200 interviews they conducted with the people of Laramie, Wyoming, after the murder of Matthew Shepard, the gay college student who was robbed, beaten, bound and left for dead on a remote rail fence…
Seven months after Arthur Kopit’s father suffered a stroke, National Public Radio commissioned the author of Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Mama’s Hung You in the Closet and I’m Feelin’ So Sad to write a play for NPR’s Earplay series. While Kopit longed for a deeper understanding of his father’s altered…
Garry Shandling does not have a face for the big screen. He has a mug that seems to spread to the edges of the theater; it’s like an approaching storm front, a sky full of billowing clouds roaring in from the north. And it’s a face built for two emotions:…
