Theater workers don’t usually care whether you stay for the whole movie, assuming you paid admission. But Audition, directed by Takashi Miike, has prompted so many viewer walkouts in cities where it has screened that the Fine Arts Theater is giving anyone who sits through the entire film a free rental from its adjoining video store. Audition is a…
Maybe this won’t seem like such a big deal to you, since you don’t watch The Education of Max Bickford—which is on CBS Sunday nights. Or maybe you’re one of the 9 million who do, in which case, well, sorry about that. But stay tuned nonetheless, because this small tale will illuminate everything wrong with what you see on…
Give a playwright some kind of weather situation and watch the metaphors flap in the breeze — it’s a trick as old as The Tempest. In N. Richard Nash’s 1951 play The Rainmaker at American Heartland Theatre, a searing drought in a small Southwestern town stands for everything from the parched emotions of the town deputy to the cruel…
As I’m sitting in the dark and cold, writing in longhand, one thing that becomes obvious is that American popular culture would be less popular without technologies we take for granted, like electricity. Forget rice. If the United States really wants the Third World to buy into Western civilization, we should first consider stringing power lines across Afghanistan and…
The Stretchmarxxx’s Thursday night show at the Pub might be billed as Bitter Valentine, but that doesn’t mean scorn will greet any happy couples who intrude on the expected mopefest. “I think it would be a great date,” opines singer Venus, erstwhile Goddess of Love and current Kansas City music-scene heartthrob. “It would be like a great dessert, the…
The Winter Olympics might be more esoteric than its warm-weather sister event — as a Sports Illustrated writer recently pointed out, kids worldwide compete at running and jumping, while only a privileged few spend their leisure time on ski slopes. But that doesn’t mean the event won’t attract big-name athletes and musicians. Moby, Sting, ‘N Sync, Christina Aguilera, Dave Matthews,…
“You guys, man,” Mindless Self Indulgence singer Jimmy Urine says scornfully, chiding an unruly and mostly hostile audience. “You’ve gotta get organized. When I say, ‘We,’ you say, ‘Suck.’” After following through with this call and response several times, Urine tags “dick” on the end of the exchange. That concert snippet, an accurate portrait of MSI’s rapport with its crowds,…
Set in a POW camp during the final months of World War II, Hart’s War owes much of its existence to far superior films, chief among them La Grande Illusion, Stalag 17 and The Great Escape. The enormous shadow those three films cast hovers over Hart’s War like the blanket of gray clouds and muddy snow that envelops its camp…
Following his Oscar-nominated change-of-pace performance in Training Day, Denzel Washington returns in John Q. to more familiar turf in another of his trademark roles as One of the Best Human Beings in the World. The opening scenes establish quickly that John Q. Archibald is the finest possible incarnation of the American Everyman: He works hard at a Chicago steel…
Most bands abide by a couple of unwritten rules: Never include a drum solo in your set, and never play for free. While the enforcement of these and other edicts differs from band to band, there is one dictum that’s almost always accepted: Never, ever join a band containing a couple. Mates of State doesn’t have to worry about that,…
He who laughs last: I’ve been meaning to write to tell you how great I thought Greg Hall’s “Dick Ball” column was (January 17). I forwarded the Pitch Web site’s link for the article to about everyone I know, with the preface, “This may be the funniest thing I have read in over a year.” Kevin Brimmer’s cartoon next to…
Just last week, when a radio-controlled airplane reportedly fired a missile and blew up a tall al Qaeda dude surrounded by lackeys in eastern Afghanistan, it seemed that perhaps Halloween would finally be over for Kenneth and Beverly Burnett of Independence. At their house on Sterling Avenue, not far from Winner Road, a doe-eyed and bearded mannequin resembling Osama…
It’s February in Kansas City, which means I’m dreaming. I’m floating in a lake, the brilliant sun shimmering off the waves. A rope is slowly pulling taut in the warm water. I lie back and enjoy the smell of sunscreen and gasoline … then I’m up and off on my awesome Cosmic Ocean wakeboard, ripping across the hard white water…
The Kansas City, Missouri, school district spends more money on lawyers and legal settlements than it does on curriculum development. The district’s legal expenses will total more than $3 million this year, just over $83 a child. The St. Louis City School District — which has some of the highest legal bills in the state — spends $43 a student….
Mitch and Kathy Wright walked down the steps of Blue Ridge Nursing Home on November 5, 1999, carrying the few possessions left by Kathy’s mother, Norma Jean Hunsucker. Mitch clutched a wadded up trash bag in one hand. An empty suitcase dangled from his other hand. In the trash bag was a coat they had never seen Norma wear. Her…
Julie Shields possesses one of the rarest traits in modern pop music — a voice that might accurately be described as pure and sweet. That’s not “pure” as in a Britney Spears-style virginal tease or “sweet” like the inhumanly perky wide-grinned vapidity of Whitney Houston’s “I Wanna Dance With Somebody.” Shields, the former Shallow singer and current Capsules cooer, releases…
The Hi-Hat, a postage-stamp-sized coffee shop in Westwood Hills on State Line, is too small, too limited in its hours and, refreshingly, too unself-conscious to host a hootenanny. But it does offer music to go, thanks to one of its java jerks and three of his friends. Barclay Martin, who works part-time at the Hi-Hat, says music is “a hobby.”…
Stories about the people caught up in Hitler’s “final solution” frequently challenge playwrights and filmmakers. What other subject could be so moving or, if the ending isn’t tragic, so inspirational? For a writer who wants to take audiences into the camps, though, film turns out to be a better medium than the stage. A camera, using shadows and light,…
Cabaret Swings is the kind of show the U.S.O. might have put together for a 1943 tour through the Allied front. Its cast — one man and three women — is proportioned correctly for a time when most of the country’s able-bodied men had enlisted. And its equipment — piano, drums and bass — would have filled out the…
State of Emergency is a hot new PlayStation2 game scheduled for release next week. It offers mindless mayhem and free-for-all chaos to entertain the most hardcore sadists among us. Its title happens to be a pretty good description of Quin Snyder’s University of Missouri basketball offense. After two weeks ranked No. 2 in the nation earlier this season, Tiger tails…
“We have lapses. We don’t think quickly enough. We don’t handle pressure particularly well. Our big guys didn’t have the energy or the effort that I thought they would come with. They were knocked back. We became just a perimeter team, and eventually that is going to catch up to you. We weren’t strong.” — Quin Snyder, following the Tigers’…
When Joe Quesada, writer and illustrator of comic books, went to work as a freelance contractor for Marvel Comics three years ago, he found the so-called House of Ideas in ruin. The comic-book industry was, as Quesada recalls, “going down the toilet”: Every month, 10 to 15 percent of readers were moving out and moving on, and there was no…
Susan Orlean writes for a magazine, but she doesn’t care about breaking news or digging up dirt. Among the profiles in her new collection, The Bullfighter Checks Her Makeup, are: “The American Man, Age Ten” about Colin Duffy, who lives in New Jersey and loves video games; “Accommodating,” about a dry-cleaning establishment that takes great pride in one of…
When Eve Ensler started interviewing women about their vaginas, she couldn’t have imagined what a worldwide phenomenon those talks would create. Despite its graphic content — including a soliloquy on the word “cunt” — The Vagina Monologues has become something Gloria Steinem called “poetry for the theater.” “People were like, ‘Change the title. Are you out of your mind?…
