PUNK LIKE ME
There’s an entire epoch of punk that some of us just missed. Three years before I was born, the Ramones were recording their first fundamental album — and I didn’t hear it until nearly two decades later. Everything I know about the Sex Pistols I admittedly learned from a documentary, and my earliest encounter with…
The hut of happy things
The UFO hums above the Happy Hut, beaming illegal aliens with lithe limbs, huge eyes, and gray skin onto the ice house’s parking lot. “You and all your friends are welcome here,” says the bartender to Mr. Happy Face, who accompanies the aliens. “You can be a bad boy tonight.” He proceeds to pull out…
IRIS OUT
The BBC-TV evening newscast on February 8, 1999 announced the death of Iris Murdoch, at 79, before it announced the death of Jordan’s King Hussein. Murdoch lost fewer wars and wrote more novels (26), and besides she was British. Reputations are fluid, but Murdoch remains for the moment Albion’s most prominent woman intellectual since the…
Special Screens
Picnic at Hanging Rock Dir. Peter Weir; writ. Cliff Green; feat. Anne-Louise Lambert, Margaret Nelson, Rachel Roberts, Dominic Guard, Helen Morse (PG) As Guillermo Del Toro, director of the recent Devil’s Backbone, knows, horror and beauty are inextricably entwined. A ghost should always be so entrancing that you can’t stop looking at it even as…
New Reviews
We Were Soldiers “A good war movie for people who want to see a good war movie.” Dir./writ. Randall Wallace, from the book We Were Soldiers Once … and Young by Lt. Gen. Hal Moore and Joseph Galloway; feat. Mel Gibson, Madeleine Stowe, Sam Elliott, Greg Kinnear, Chris Klein, Keri Russell, and Barry Pepper. (R)…
Video & DVD
Seconds DVD, Paramount Home Video Remember your first childhood encounter with The Twilight Zone? That abrupt realization that you were looking at a different world, one that was scary, even when you couldn’t say exactly why? Or that, maybe, Rod Serling had just peeled away the veneer of the “real” world to look at what’s…
Still Playing
A Beautiful Mind “Pity, fear, and cognitive reverie” Dir. Ron Howard; writ. Akiva Goldsman, based on biography by Sylvia Nasar; feat. Russell Crowe, Ed Harris, Jennifer Connelly, Paul Bettany, Vivien Cardone, Adam Goldberg, Judd Hirsch, Christopher Plummer (PG-13) Black Hawk Down “Crash landing in confused territory” Dir. Ridley Scott; writ. Mark Bowden, Ken Nolan; feat.…
