Imagine: a war to end all wars, today’s music stars pitted against yesterday’s. A battle to the death in the name of rock and roll. From the beginning, it’s a massacre. Ouch! Vanilla Ice drawn and quartered by Carl Perkins. Yikes! The Pet Shop Boys bayonetted by Eddie Cochran. Kerrunch!…
It was the strangest sort of mass hypnosis, like Jonestown without the candy colors and the suicides. Only twelve months have passed since someone somewhere kicked sand across the line in the desert and E Pluribus Unum temporarily, tantalizingly, rang with high truth. Suddenly we were a country of drive,…
West German writer and director Monika Treut has devoted her film career to a study of sexuality, especially those sexualities viewed as taboo or deviant. Since she selected de Sade’s Juliette and Sacher-Masoch’s Venus In Furs as the primary texts for her Ph.D. thesis, Treut has forged bravely ahead with…
If you’ve started to swallow this generation’s subtle ethnic-assassination campaign – resolving Japan’s dominance of world business by denigrating the Japanese as button-down, honor-bewildered, investment-confounded numberheads – you should probably hop in your Toyota and go see Black Lizard. If you’ve ever hankered for a detective story in which the…
When John O’Keefe steps into the boxing ring at Coconut Grove’s Virrick Gym Saturday at 8:00 p.m., he’ll have no opponent. Or rather, no tangible opponent. But for more than an hour, O’Keefe will bob and weave through a host of conceptual challengers that range from his own troubled past…
Jack Thompson’s first novel doesn’t look like a novel. The unbound heap of 100-plus fax transmissions, electronically dispatched from Thompson to New Times over the past two years, bears little resemblance to Wuthering Heights, or The Scarlet Letter. Little superficial resemblance, that is. But you shouldn’t judge a book by…
Given: Frank Pesce, Jr., (Anthony LaPaglia), the youngest son of a New York trucker, is the hero of George Gallo’s savvy and affecting new comedy 29th Street, based on a true story about a young man who must come to terms with his family and himself. Prove: Frank Pesce, Jr.,…
Of all the nonexistent books, perhaps the most valuable is the indispensable reference Great Fishbone Quotations. Never published (though if it had been, it would have been by some hot-shot New York hardback house whose offices are in a building so tall you have to take the elevator down just…
Goodfellas may have been his finest movie, but Raging Bull is still the seminal masterpiece that future film students will watch to understand Martin Scorsese. Scorsese directs as if he’s boxing, with a powerful mix of physicality and strategy, and he has an uncanny knack for knowing precisely how to…
After being told that New Times had obtained an exclusive advance copy of Bruce Springsteen’s forthcoming album, publicists for the musician arranged a brief interview. Questions were faxed to his record label (Sony), which forwarded the queries to his personal publicist, who relayed them to Springsteen. The Boss agreed to…
Los Angeles may be the City of Angels, but Sharon (Mimi Rogers) – the protagonist of Michael Tolkin’s The Rapture – isn’t one of them. At least not for the first movement of this complex, disturbing film, which slips phantasmagorically from religious parable to suburban adventure to supernatural gothic. Thirtyish…
Bruce Springsteen’s new album, Parking Free, due out soon, returns the Jersey rock legend full circle to his roots and captures the true spirit of the man as husband, father, musician, and poet. The clear influence is not the folksy Dylanesque verbosity of Springsteen’s first album, 1973’s Greetings from Asbury…
The hope, I guess, was that phenom Patsy Kensit would light up every corner of Twenty-One, Don Boyd’s saga of how a spirited girl in modern-day London learns to juggle sex, love, and satisfaction. The reality is far different. Though Kensit’s wattage is high – she’s brilliantly blonde and beautiful…
Once in a great while, the world of literature is graced with a new birth so promising, so spectacular, that mankind’s faith in the power of expression rekindles. It happens perhaps every eon, or perhaps every epoch. For some, the epiphanic texts are Biblical; others find their souls stirred by…
The prospects for Dede Tate (Jodie Foster) are limited. She’s a high school dropout, a cocktail waitress, a single mother who has no contact with the father of her child. In short, her life is ordinary. But then there’s the matter of her son Fred (Adam Hann-Byrd). Fred – the…
In a year in which gangster-movie inflation is at its all-time high, director Robert Benton’s Billy Bathgate has turned a profit, and done it the old-fashioned way – with heartfelt storytelling, inspired camerawork, and impeccable timing. Based on the novel by E.L. Doctorow, Billy Bathgate explores the criminal education of…
Like the Pacific Northwest landscape that serves as one of its major characters, Gus Van Sant’s My Own Private Idaho has both dramatic peaks and flat stretches. In the latest film from the director of Mala Noche and Drugstore Cowboy, River Phoenix and Keanu Reeves star as two pretty-boy drifters…
The next time you find yourself at a movie, any movie, try a little experiment. Instead of watching the film for the plot, or the characters, or even for the director’s vision, watch it for details. And not just any details. Watch for bad language, for blasphemy, for violence, and…
Citizens of Florida should be aware of many things. The marine ecosystem, for instance, and the importance of peaceful cultural coexistence. And now, according to Governor Lawton Chiles, they should prick up their ears and widen their eyes for pornography. According to an official state proclamation, signed by Chiles and…
Garry Marshall once delivered sentimental films that didn’t scrimp on substance (The Flamingo Kid, Nothing in Common), but in the past few years he’s been content to plunk down cliches and wait for the registers to start ringing. He tapped our tear ducts with Beaches and then assaulted our common…
To its credit, Shout never pretends to be anything but a mealy-minded tribute to the liberating power of rock and roll. All this talk about music soothing the savage breast overlooks the fact that more often than not it’s used to inflame that very same breast. You know that feeling…
Ten years ago Virgin Records released The Flowers of Romance, the third studio LP from Public Image Ltd. During its infancy, PiL (fronted, of course, by former Sex Pistol vocalist John “Johnny Rotten” Lydon) insisted that it was not merely a band, but a corporate/terrorist amalgam issuing an ultimatum to…
