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) Blade II “Goes for the jugular” Dir. Guillermo del Toro; writ. David S. Goyer; feat. Wesley Snipes,…
SOUTH SIDE STRADIVARIUS
In a renovated garage-turned-workshop tucked behind a well-kept house on San Antonio’s South Side, Alberto Macias is spinning gold. Actually, he is spinning brass, but in the natural light of the shop, the wire that leaves the spool inside his cupped hands as it winds around a second wire gleams like, well, gold. Before winding…
CD Reviews
DOWN Down II: A Bustle in Your Hedgerow (CD, Elektra) Down, the legendary side project jumpstarted a decade ago by heavy metal luminaries Philip Anselmo and Pepper Keenan (of Pantera and Corrosion of Conformity, respectively), is no longer an experimental, smoke-’em-if-you-got-’em musical one-shot. The good ol’ boys from the teeming morass of New Orleans have…
CD Reviews
DOWN Down II: A Bustle in Your Hedgerow (CD, Elektra) Down, the legendary side project jumpstarted a decade ago by heavy metal luminaries Philip Anselmo and Pepper Keenan (of Pantera and Corrosion of Conformity, respectively), is no longer an experimental, smoke-’em-if-you-got-’em musical one-shot. The good ol’ boys from the teeming morass of New Orleans have…
A TRIP TO BOUNTIFUL
Consider a couple of tomatoes: One has been genetically altered not to spoil as it’s trucked over thousands of miles of interstates; the other has been plucked fresh from the vine at your local farm. One is tainted with pesticides, the other doused with only rainfall and fortified by nutrients from the soil. These key…
LOWER EDUCATION
Historian David F. Noble’s brave, brilliant Digital Diploma Mills, which has been circulated for years on the Internet, is finally available in hardcover, and not everyone is going to be happy with what Noble has to say. His topic is “distance learning,” university courses taught online over the Internet. His thesis is that these courses…
ART FOR A FORGOTTEN UTOPIA
When Alexander Rodchenko was born in 1891, the science of photography had already been developing for about 60 years. The decade before Rodchenko’s birth, George Eastman introduced flexible film and the box camera, liberating the process from cumbersome equipment and making it available to a wide public. But the art of photography was just getting…
FINESILVER SHINES
The Africa, Oceania, and Americas exhibit halls at the Art Institute of Chicago in the late ’80s held a little-noticed zoomorphic form made in Africa in the first half of the 20th century. It was a pig, or maybe a hippopotamus — it wasn’t important what animal it represented because it represented, in fact, all…
DEMISE ITALIAN STYLE
The Son’s Room comes belatedly to San Antonio, trailing clouds of critical glory, including the Palme d’Or of the 2001 Cannes Film Festival and an Oscar nomination in the foreign-language category. Reviewers have likened it to In the Bedroom, since both tell the story of how a sympathetic middle-class family, whose patriarch is a reticent…
New Reviews
Life or Something Like It “Unappetizing TV dinner” Dir. Stephen Herek; writ. John Scott Shepherd and Dana Stevens; feat. Angelina Jolie, Edward Burns, Tony Shalhoub, Christian Kane, James Gammon, Melissa Errico, Stockard Channing (PG-13) Ever since the 1950s, when the upstart medium of television almost put motion picture theaters out of business, movies have been…
Video & DVD
3:10 to Yuma DVD, Columbia / TriStar A few years ago, at one of Quentin Tarantino’s Austin Film Society festivals, the Manic One ended an evening of crime films with a little-seen Western called 3:10 to Yuma. Odd pick, you’d think: It was directed by a man, Delmer Daves, whose name is now obscure; written…
