Stanley Tucci has earned a bundle of praise for playing the title role in director Paul Mazursky’s Winchell. The actor won both an Emmy and a Golden Globe for his portrayal of the legendarily brash gossip columnist Walter Winchell. Therefore, it’s not surprising that Tucci’s latest movie, Joe Gould’s Secret, features him depicting another journalist: the late New Yorker contributor…
Director Zhang Yimou is not just China’s premier director, but he also continues to prove that he’s among a handful of the world’s filmmaking elite. His movies (including To Live and The Story of Qiu Ju) are deceptively simple yet play like sweeping epics. The realism of Zhang’s work equals De Sica, and his heart rivals Capra. In Not One…
Basketball is the backdrop of a story about two childhood friends with mad b-ball skills who grow up together, fall in love, and struggle to maintain their relationship. Quincy McCall (Omar Epps, The Wood) is the son of a former NBA player, and Monica Wright (Sanaa Lathan, The Best Man) is a hotheaded tomboy. First-time feature director Gina Prince-Bythewood…
In his directorial debut, actor Tim Roth (The Legend of 1900) redefines the word “grim” in the well-made but unrelentingly gloomy and heartbreaking tale of a dysfunctional working class English family. Although veterans Ray Winstone (Nil By Mouth) and Tilda Swinton (The Beach) play Dad and Mum, the film focuses on newcomer Freddie Cunliffe as a confused 15-year-old named Tom…
“I lie much better than you tell the truth,” says Derrick (James Marsden) to his roommate, Jones (Lena Headey). Including third wheel Travis (Norman Reedus), these college students try to establish the bond between real news and gossip for a journalism class. They mastermind a scheme that involves spreading a rumor about a snooty coed (Kate Hudson) and her date…
Be careful to protect your ears. If theater operators follow the dictates of U-571 writer-director Jonathan Mostow (Breakdown), the decibel levels at your local Cineplex will rival the “Sensurround” gimmick that helped make 1974’s Earthquake a nerve-shattering success. If loud equals good, then U-571 is a masterpiece. One can only imagine what the moviegoing experience will be like for…
It’s usually best not to think too hard when watching movies about time travel. This is especially true when they deal with drastically changing things in some way; if even the smallest actions can alter the future, then what radical differences might there be if someone lives who was supposed to die or someone gets caught committing a crime they…
As in his previous directing effort, Big Night, the merits of Stanley Tucci’s new movie, Joe Gould’s Secret, are not apparent until well after the movie ends. Sir Ian Holm’s towering performance in the title role almost obscures much of what makes this film fascinating. Working from New Yorker journalist Joseph Mitchell’s essays, Professor Sea Gull and Joe Gould’s…
More to ROTC than meets the eye Your article in the April 13-19 issue on opponents of ROTC (“Opponents of ROTC Up in Arms About Military Presence in Schools”) was worthless. Andrew Miller should be disciplined by his superior for enabling these idiots to voice their antimilitary/antigun stupidity. Anyone who has experience with kids and guns knows that the best…
When organizers from the UMKC and Truman Medical Center (TMC) departments of obstetrics and gynecology decided on seminar titles for their Update 2000 conference, held at the downtown Marriott April 13 and 14, they wanted to spark interest and debate among the members of the national medical community who would attend the conference. Titles such as “Strategies to Optimize a…
Recently, while the House Commerce Committee in Washington, D.C., was discussing the pros and cons of conserving water with low-flush toilets, Harold Allen was hustling to find money for medications he needs to stay alive. Allen, 65, is a kidney transplant recipient, and the life-sustaining, antirejection drugs he must take — the cost of which Medicare pays only 80 percent…
Kansas City lawyer Sean O’Brien relates what he considers one of his failures: the sentencing of Brandon Juarez to life in prison. After three years of reading police reports, court briefs, rulings, and transcripts, he knows every aspect of Juarez’s case. Juarez is in the Crossroads Maximum Security Correctional Facility in Cameron, Mo., for second degree murder. Juarez, O’Brien says,…
It didn’t occur to me until after my third visit to the new Big Easy Café (15202 W. 119th Street, Olathe, Kan.), a New Orleans-style restaurant, but I don’t know what the expression “The Big Easy” actually meant. I knew it had nothing to do with food, but what? Voodoo? Sex? I’ve been to the legendary Crescent City on…
20 Thursday Maybe it’s just me, but when somebody starts singing the theme song to One Day At A Time I automatically think of Eddie Van Halen. Valerie Bertinelli just will always be the wife of that hair-band guy. Schneider will remain the constantly jingling, jean-clad guy in a wife-beater shirt who, frankly, was scary to any small girl…
The phone rang at 1:30 p.m. “Yes, Denise? Weren’t you going to call at 2?” asked Patti Breitman, co-author of How to Say No Without Feeling Guilty. “Uhhh, oh, what time zone are you in?” I asked, aware that the woman on the other end of the phone had written America’s latest attempt at corralling our language into one workable…
Henceforth, ponder a day trip to your personal purgatory. Imagine a vegetarian forced to eat meat. Throw an arachnophobe in a pit with thousands of spiders. Take a dominatrix and a Catholic school girl … wait, that one’s a fantasy. But, alas, what would it be like to become the world’s greatest bard only to be sent back to…
When Missouri Repertory Theatre’s artistic director, George Keathley, first came to the institution more than 20 years ago, he had been living in New York directing such soap operas as All My Children and the occasional play. His call to Kansas City was to guest-direct The Visit, a title that proved to be a lie. Six years later, the…
There’s no denying the signs: Near-naked coeds are carousing downtown, tulips are at full tilt, and everyone is feeling just a little bit prettier than usual. It’s spring! Time to spend an afternoon walking the broken sidewalks of East Lawrence to check out the locals’ unabashed art. It’s true — what Lawrence lacks in art spaces to show decent contemporary…
Chiefs coach Gunther Cunningham, working only 20-hour days over on Arrowhead Drive, agreed to spend his four spare hours a day in a newly created position for the Royals: defensive coordinator. Of course, with his background, things got a little confusing when he brought his philosophy to the other side of the Truman Sports Complex. “Hold the other team…
In an event as close to performance art as The Bottleneck is ever likely to present, Chan Marshall, a.k.a Cat Power, burrowed into the Rolling Stones’ “Satisfaction” Tuesday night, then paused at the chorus to move her microphone stand halfway across the stage. Because her hair covered her face for the duration of her brief set, it was impossible…
The Jazzhaus — Wednesday, April 19, 2000Outside the Jazzhaus Wednesday night, there was a hint of guitar music, a whiff of the kind of slickly orchestrated romp you hear when you tune in to the Weather Channel for the local forecast, or when you take a nighttime stroll down the streets of a hip town that plays soothing music…
On my way into Kemper Arena to witness KoRn’s performance Wednesday night, I passed a guy who was asking everyone he passed, “Could you please show me the way to God?” as if God were in the details of this sick and twisted show. It’s doubtful that the Almighty would sanction this sort of event, seeing that the majority…
Categories: Music Tags: Echo, Sabrina Staires
Hearing a true world-class orchestra is a rare event in Kansas City. The steady improvement of our local symphony is raising hopes that we will one day have an artistically viable classical music scene, but the recent performance by the stunning forces of the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra served notice of just how far we have to go. Performing…
