Some memories of seemingly insignificant origin can last a lifetime. Ten years ago, I took a taxi from La Guardia Airport to Manhattan, and struck up a conversation with an elderly cab driver during the 30-minute ride to my apartment on the East Side. It began almost as a ritualized…
One of the most subtle, powerful, and potentially hazardous relationships is that which takes place between father and child. In an effort to project masculinity and strength, fathers sometimes trample hearts; as a legacy, they may leave behind mixed messages and hard memories. They don’t yield as easily as mothers,…
The opening tracking shot, at eight minutes even more protracted than the famous single-shot title sequence in Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil (on which it is obviously – and deliberately – modeled), launches Robert Altman’s new film, The Player, on a virtuosic, inspirational high. As the credits roll, the fast-moving…
Though E.M. Forster was a nonagenarian upon his death, it’s interesting to note that most of his novels – with the exception of his last one, A Passage to India – were written when the author was still in his twenties and early thirties. Forster the essayist traversed a sizable…
Guillermo Gentile is the David Lynch of playwrights: either you get his work or you don’t, either you fall into the fantastic and misshapen spell he weaves, or you leave the theater disturbed and confused. Challenging and surrealistic, his With Folded Wings won the 1989 Best Play Award from the…
It’s one of history’s sublime inversions that, just as Marco Polo traveled to China during the Thirteenth Century for egocentric discovery reasons, the wealthy Westerners of our own Twentieth Century cavort throughout the slums of India in pursuit of – can you guess? – selflessness. Which does not disparage the…
Having just coordinated a three-day conference with some of theater’s finest critics and scholars (hosted by New World School of the Arts, with performances by NWSA and Florida International University that did the area much good, as far as credibility goes), I attended numerous panels about the theatrical body, and…
By the time Orson Welles set about playing Othello in 1948, he had already established himself as one of the great cinematic innovators in the short history of the medium, as well as a gifted man of the theater – something people tend to forget nowadays, for understandable reasons. Indeed,…
What is fashion? Is it a craft devised to reflect the times, an enduring art, or an agent of change? Is there a parallel existence between Western and Eastern cultures that clothes can represent, address, and resolve? Are high fashion and film comparable artistic means? If so, are they suited…
In one senseless scene from The Lion in Winter, actress Susan Clark as Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine plants her body on-stage like a lead stump and bellows to the audience, “We have done a big thing badly.” She’s referring to her hellish relationship with husband King Henry II, but her…
When we first see Ray Levoi he’s cruising the Beltway donning opaque aviator Ray-Bans, a crisp white shirt, and regimental-stripe tie. As he impatiently twists the dial on the car radio, we can see he’s another ambitious young striver on his way to work in the nation’s capital. Another loyal…
After all the elevated blood pressures regarding Basic Instinct and its allegedly graphic bisexual assignations, it’s a pleasure to report that Vicente Aranda’s Lovers, a 1991 movie from Spain, has a more palpable sexual charge than Sharon Stone and Michael Douglas could ever manage, is engrossing in a way the…
Glasses clink behind the bar, air conditioners grind on and off, and bodies, covered in more make-up than clothing, swing from the rafters. It’s difficult to see, sometimes impossible to hear, but the rumble of excitement builds to a near-erotic pitch. These houses quickly sell out, no matter how bad…
In the spirit of growth, the New World School of the Arts (recently named the best arts high school in the country by Redbook magazine) presents a conference and play festival featuring the work of critic/translator/author/playwright Eric Bentley, who introduced American audiences to Brecht and Pirandello, and who today remains…
A movie’s genre will often dictate a critic’s approach to it. Which is why, under normal circumstances, Paul Verhoeven’s Basic Instinct, a sister-slashing film noir, and the new Woody Allen film, Shadows and Fog, would scarcely be whispered in the same breath, let alone survive being paired as a tandem…
During one wrenching scene near the end of Lee Blessing’s Independence, the oldest sister, Kess, tries to convince her unstable mother and two bitter siblings to join in a civil afternoon tea and say positive things about one another. According to the town psychiatrist, she insists, it’s more important to…
The label that has come to be known in the moviegoing lexicon as “the woman’s film” continues to strike an empty, intellectually fraudulent note, for the often-taken assumption is that its filmic sensibility has been honed by – and is directed exclusively toward – one audience: women. Thus, the argument…
It’s hard to begrudge the success of an Italian-American character player who doesn’t bawl like a child upon winning the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor, but instead merely shuffles up the gangway to receive his statuette, whispers into the microphone, “It’s my pleasure,” and walks away. But when that…
My husband, a research scientist and well-educated man, has a mental block when it comes to the arts. Using the logic and empirical knowledge that serves him so well in the laboratory, he wonders aloud at the end of a cinematic or theatrical disaster – as an impressive list of…
As director of John Hughes productions such as Pretty in Pink and Some Kind of Wonderful, Howard Deutsch has heretofore only been paid to point his teenpic camera at Molly Ringwald’s carrot crew cut, Andrew McCarthy’s BMW, Mary Stuart Masterson’s drumsticks, and Eric Stoltz’s stupefied mope. Both these films had…
In The Theory of Psychoanalysis published in 1913, Carl Jung speculated as to how the small world of childhood, with its familiar surroundings and characters, can be a model for the greater world. “The more intensively the family has stamped its character upon the child,” wrote Jung, “the more it…
Eugene O’Neill believed that artists who try to save the world lose themselves. I don’t think he meant to discourage the role of theater as a social or religious force, but instead recognized the contrivances possible when one tries to write something “important.” Like expert lovemaking, great plays insinuate themselves…
