4 Little Girls
Director Spike Lee’s first full-length documentary, 4 Little Girls, offers a straightforward, clear-eyed view of a tragic moment in American history — the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Ala. in 1963, which claimed the lives of four young girls attending Sunday school there. Eschewing a narrator, as well as the visual…
Big Rock Chop & Brew House
Big Rock Chop House oozes northern lodge appeal and there are a variety of rooms in which to dine, including an outdoor patio. It looks like the kind of place where Hemingway would spend a lot of time and a good portion of his book advances.
11,000 VIRGINS: Chants for th Feast of St. Ursula
This disc’s title is a deft marketing stroke, guaranteed to garner attention. Fair is fair: Pop has its 10,000 Maniacs and classical music has its 11,000 Virgins. Notwithstanding the catchy name, the music on this disc by the 12th-century nun, Hildegard von Bingen, is altogether entrancing. Known as a mystic, healer, poet and composer, von…
Antonio Gaudi
Can one make Zen documentaries? If so, Hiroshi Teshigahara has made one. Teshigahara is best remembered for his 1964 existential drama, Woman in the Dunes. It was a film that located the romantic obsession between an entomologist and a woman in the physical and psychic midst of a vast and indifferent desert. The striking feature…
More funner than total oblivion
Sloan shuns the road to ruin of mainstream success.
Fire Down Below
“The best Steven Seagal film since Under Siege!” That blurb tops the ads for Fire Down Below; it will either make people want to see Seagal’s new movie or else have them rolling their eyes in ironic disdain. If you find yourself tending more toward response number two, it might be worth holding off on…
The Full Monty
“Sheffield, the jewel in England’s industrial crown,” says the enthusiastic narrator in the corny promotional film, circa 1970, that opens The Full Monty. Scene after scene shows prosperity and progress for this northern city. “Thanks to steel,” he concludes, “Sheffield really is a city on the move!” Twenty- ive years later, the steel mill and…
Let the games begin!
Although it is being pimped as a thriller, The Game is really all about that special American obsession, therapy. Indeed, the film amounts to not much more than a two-hour visit, with one man undergoing a convoluted and ridiculous form of shock therapy. A tepid Michael Douglas stars as Nicholas Van Orton, a shutdown tycoon…
Let the games begin!
David Fincher dominates! The director of that luscious downer Alien 3 and the devastating fright-hit Seven scores again with The Game, starring Michael Douglas and Sean Penn. Douglas (the cop or cheating husband or stockbroker you love to despise) is perfect as Nicholas Van Orton, a too-powerful-for-his-own-good investment banker. Everything works for him in spades;…
From Our Living Room to Yours
On some Indian summer days, there’s a twilight just before dusk when everything just seems perfect and soothing. It’s a moment we’ve all had that’s forever fleeting, a temporary transcendence that comes in soft shades of red and orange. If ever there was a way to bottle that feeling for repeat visits, it’s the music…
L.A. Confidential
James Ellroy’s sprawling, epic 1990 novel, L.A. Confidential, envisions the Los Angeles Police Department of the 1950s as a logical extension of Hollywood’s obsession with illusion: A glossy and appealing facade, created for the benefit of the general public, exists to cover up a cesspool of illicit activities, rampant corruption and matter-of-fact double-dealing. The cops…
