Melrose Street in Shawnee, Kan., looks more like a road in a small town than one through a Kansas City suburb. Houses with outbuildings stand on irregularly shaped lots. Mature oak and hickory trees blanket the hillside, which teems with birds and wildlife. The area is resoundingly middle-class, a place where neighbors know and take care of one another. Professionals…
Unlike the federal AWA law, criminal animal cruelty cases are usually prosecuted at the local county levels according to local statutes. The torture case of Scruffy, the Yorkshire terrier in Kansas City, Kan., has become representative to many people of the need for stiffer animal cruelty laws, particularly in Kansas. Scruffy was stolen from his family and tortured in…
From the road, it looks like a typical rural dwelling. The only things visible from the gravel lane are a mobile home and a long, dirt driveway. Once on the property, there’s no barking or other evidence suggesting that at least two dozen dogs occupy a plot of land with their human caretakers. Randy and Suzie Long start their days…
(based on a complete meal for one, excluding alcoholic beverages): $: Inexpensive, up to $10 $$: Moderate, $10-$20 $$$: Expensive, $20-$30 $$$$: Very expensive, $30 and up Downtown Midtown Plaza/Brookside South: south of 75th Street on the Missouri side. North Johnson County: north of 95th Street. South Johnson County: south of 95th Street. West: west of State Line Road, between…
Wallflower at the orgy A culinary version of the Cinderella fable is playing out at the corner of 31st Street and Oak, where two swanky nightspots, The Velvet Dog and the yet-unopened Empire Room (which, judging from a peek through the window, already has a cool, sophisticated interior) get far more attention than the older, less hip R.T.’s Deli…
A sea of crimson and blue constantly swarms to the basketball. A hand occupies every passing lane, and a clean look at the basket is only a rumor. The Kansas Jayhawks women’s basketball team knows, heading down the stretch into the Big 12 Tournament, that its stifling defense is the key to postseason success. Bitter in-state rival Kansas State,…
Those who enjoy Quality Hill Playhouse’s usual fare will find Hi Hat Hattie by Larry Parr a nice change for the theater company, especially if they missed its previous production in 1995. Not only do you get the typical review of 16 songs from what may now be appropriately termed “early- to mid-20th-century popular music,” but you get the…
Although David Lean supposedly inspired Peter O’Toole’s Oscar-nominated depiction of an all-powerful director in The Stunt Man, John Frankenheimer could just as easily have been that man. Possessing a larger-than-life quality that only the most talented and surly of directors can manage to get away with, this 70-year-old filmmaker has used his imposing demeanor to handle some of the…
Any year is a good year to reintroduce filmgoers to an Alfred Hitchcock film. As welcome as was last year’s return of North by Northwest is Universal’s rerelease of Hitchcock’s 1954 classic comedy-thriller, Rear Window. James Stewart plays a photographer named Jeffries, who, bored with being stuck in his apartment wearing a leg cast, spies on his neighbors. He deduces…
Despite the presence of a fine cast, Simpatico never quite gels. Based on the Sam Shepard play, the film starts off promisingly when a slick horse-trader named Lyle Carter (Jeff Bridges) receives an urgent call from his one-time accomplice, Vinnie Webb (Nick Nolte at his most disheveled). After flying thousands of miles to discover the problem, Carter realizes that…
Famed Chinese director Chen Kaige (Temptress Moon) takes on nothing less than the story of Ying Zheng (Li Xuejian), the king who fought to unite China into one empire in the third century B.C. This is a beautiful-looking film, with breathtaking cinematography by Zhao Fei, and it has an appropriately grand, almost Shakespearean, sensibility. It’s also slow and frequently confusing,…
The Next Best Thing is the kind of film that, if it had been a TV movie of the week, would justify its overall lack of impression. Director John Schlesinger (Cold Comfort Farm), working from a script by Tom Ropelewski (Look Who’s Talking Now), has made lightweight and utterly forgettable entertainment that typifies the smaller screen. Likable characters saying…
Much of the charm of director Gavin O’Connor’s remarkably assured debut film, Tumbleweeds, could be because it was made for less than $1 million and features no major stars. The people in this film look much like those one might encounter in the street, so there’s a feeling of authenticity that’s missing from the bulk of mainstream movies. O’Connor…
