SYNTHESIZING SIMONE
John Wayne, Marilyn Monroe, and Groucho Marx have been brought back from the dead to make new TV commercials: It’s not Christian resurrection, but technology and greed that have made it possible to manipulate existing images so effectively that it is probably only a matter of time and trademark before Gary Cooper appears in a…
Armchair Cinephile
Ving Rhames may be a boxer in the new Undisputed, but HBO’s freshly released DVD, Don King: Only In America, has him playing boxing’s most famous outside-the-ropes character. In its directing and script, the flick has “made for TV” stamped all over it, but once King starts conniving and cajoling, Rhames is splendificoriably entertaining —…
NEW REVIEWS
My Wife Is an Actress (Ma Femme est une actrice) “And his Muse is Woody Allen” Writ. & dir. Yvan Attal; feat. Attal, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Terence Stamp, Noemie Lvovsky, Laurent Bateau (R) Yvan is a sportswriter married to a famous French actress named Charlotte (as Yvan Attal, the film’s writer, director, and male lead, is…
A FESTIVAL CLOSER TO HOME
Kerrville Wine and Music Festival starts Labor Day weekend and runs four days. Like its bigger summer brother, it takes place on Quiet Valley Ranch nine miles outside Kerrville. The diversity of the people here is vast: Catholics, Protestants, Jews, Buddhists; Democrats and Republicans; hippies, yuppies, and Generation X’ers with pierced noses and eyebrows; vegetarians…
ALL EARS
Montréal’s FrancoFolies festival of French-language was a real ear-opener for a Texan music fiend — it is surprising, given the number of French-language films that are released here, how few CDs show up on our shelves. Luckily, we have the Internet, and I’ve been scouring the Web to see which of the artists I encountered…
SPECIAL SCREENS
The Apartment Dir. Billy Wilder; writ. Wilder, I.A.L. Diamond; feat. Jack Lemmon, Shirley MacLaine, Fred MacMurray, Ray Walston, Jack Kruschen, David Lewis (unrated) A casual movie fan could perhaps be forgiven if, when filmmaking legend Billy Wilder died this March, he didn’t understand what all the fuss was about. After all, Wilder didn’t cultivate a…
MY FRANCOPHONE FLING
Here’s a partial list of what I saw during my first 24 hours in Montréal: fire-breathers and flaming-baton-twirlers; an exhibition involving five or six fantastic drumming troupes from all over Africa, attended not by a small group of novelty-seekers but by an estimated 100,000 people; a seminary built in 1685, still standing next to an…
