Category: Vital Signs

At Circus World, Mattel’s Rattlor, a Masters of the Universe character, glares at his potential purchasers. “Sounds fearsome battle rattle before attacking,” the package advertises. The action figure is an “evil snake man creature with the quick strike head.” Price: $3.98. LJN Toys, Ltd., on the other hand, offers Thundercats Berserkers Hammerhand, which comes complete...

In Fatal Attraction (1987), a woman jilted by her one-night stand strikes back: she leaves his six-year-old daughter’s rabbit boiling on the stove, pours sulfuric acid on his car, harasses him with vitriolic and abusive cassettes, stages an aggressive suicide, makes anonymous phone calls to his wife, kidnaps his daughter, and, half-crazed, stalks his wife...

It’s only too easy to be cynical about Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Phantom of the Opera, and particularly about the excess and emptiness it stands for. While lavish money and attention have been spent on all aspects of this $8.5 million production—in ways that are guaranteed to impress the child in every adult—its packagers forgot the...

I recently attended a performance by the quartet known as Montreux, a group which, as you may know, records for Windham Hill. I had first seen Montreux perform a couple years back during Detroit’s international jazz festival that’s called, coincidentally enough, Montreux/Detroit. Those whose sensibilities were shaped by rock and roll may know Montreux-the-city only...

An American television viewer will witness more violence in a single evening than an Athenian would have seen during a lifetime of theatergoing. Acts of violence were virtually prohibited in Greek drama, and Aristotle goes so far as to argue against the use of “mere spectacle” to produce the desired catharsis of pity and fear:...

I’ve Heard the Mermaids Singing written and directed by Patricia Rozema Vos Productions Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach? I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach. I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each. I do not think that they will sing to...

You don’t hear much about groupies anymore. This is strange, since the demographics of the rock audience—ranging from about 40 to 10—suggests there ought to be more groupies than ever slithering around out there. If Pamela Des Barres (I’m With the Band: Confessions of a Groupie, New York: Beech Tree Books) is a typical groupie,...

Lanford Wilson is consistently given the respect reserved for “great” American playwrights, but the distinction is a dubious honor at best. Each Wilson piece is overly scrutinized and judged ultimately as being a notch below what it might have been. Revivals of earlier neglected works become causes for celebration, but here too, there is always...

You are what you eat. Up to a point, I tend to believe that maxim. Because I am unwilling to apply it to my own life, I also tend to resent it. The food police are everywhere, and the harder they work, the less there is to eat. For instance, if you should eat an...

Less Than Zero directed by Marek Kanievska screenplay by Harley Peyton based on the novel by Bret Easton Ellis 20th Century Fox Tom Waits recently suggested to Musician magazine that if John Lennon knew that Michael Jackson would control The Beatles’ music, Lennon would “kick his ass—and kick it really good.” As I watched the...

This won’t be easy. But, it may be the future, at least according to a number of science-fiction writers collectively known as the “cyberpunks.” More disturbingly, there seems to be a number of scientists and researchers who agree. Hang on. The first part of the word cyberpunks comes from cybernetics, a term coined by Norbert...

There is a popularly held belief that the promise of theater resided throughout the country. According to the theory, if Broadway was dying, then American theater was thriving west of the Hudson and south of the Delaware Water Gap, nurturing not only the talent but also the audience. There has been a problem, of course,...

Matewan written and directed by John Sayles Cinecom Entertainment Group In 1920 Matewan was a little town on the western edge of Mingo County, West Virginia, right on the Kentucky border. It was a town owned and run by the Stone Mountain Coal Company, and when the miners tried to bring in the union, the...

When Thomas Mann joined the West Coast galaxy of refugees from Hitler, he was writing Doctor Faustus—a study of, among other things, national character and demonology. The word meant roughly the same as what Michael Rogin means by it: the countersubversive drives that label, persecute, and sometimes eliminate pernicious forces in the body politic. In...

In “Life-Line,” a story by Robert A. Heinlein, a scientist describes a man in the present as a “space-time event.” He explains, “Imagine this space-time event which we call Rogers as a long pink worm, continuous through the years, one end at his mother’s womb, the other at the grave. It stretches past us here...

The avant-garde, according to those who are supposed to know, has been entering the mainstream, but the commentators busy cataloging this development for future art historians seem to have forgotten that “avant-garde” and “mainstream” are mutually exclusive terms. Once our present has become past, it may become clearer that the greatest artists of this period...

Recently, NBC News, and the Wall Street Journal devoted features to what they claim, to an editor, is an American “obsession” with being thin. There may have been many more reports devoted to the topic—now that the passive-smoke issue is passe, people are refocusing their attention on the state of bustlines, waistlines, buttocks form, etc.,...

Full Metal Jacket directed by Stanley Kubrick screenplay by Kubrick, Michael Herr, and Gustav Hasford based on the novel The Short-Timers by Hasford; Warner Bros. Funny, that a film about “Vietnam as it really was,” as Platoon was touted, should fall so wide of any mark of merit, and that Vietnam films with a surreal...

A year or two before Ann Beattie’s breakthrough second novel, Falling in Place, a cartoon appeared in The New Yorker showing a crowd of people, dressed in evening gowns and suits, drinks in hand, milling around what looked like an outdoor cocktail party with nearly all of humanity in attendance. The caption read simply: “Woodstock:...

The Fox Theatre—a grand movie palace of Detroit’s 1920’s, which is now used primarily as a venue for acts that won’t fill an arena—contained a chronologically mixed crowd in mid-March. Paul Young was in concert. Young, a slightly chubby, baby-faced British singer (he appears, to borrow a line from Elvis Costello, “teddy-bear tender and tragically...

A few months before I saw the musical Les Miserables—actually a few months before it opened at the Kennedy Center last December—I heard it. The show’s publicist had sent me a tape of the London version. When I first listened to it, I felt disappointed. It sounded more than a little like Evita, with the...

Making Mr. Right directed by Susan Seidelman written by Floyd Byars and Laurie Frank Orion Pictures Perhaps it’s living in New York that makes me like Making Mr. Right. Susan Seidelman’s latest (she did Desperately Seeking Susan with Madonna, remember) is just one step up from farce: a lighthearted comedy of manners and sexual politics....

Sunday, March 29. On the eve of Christie’s auction, Brian Sewell writes in The Sunday Times Magazine of Van Gogh’s intention to frame his Sunflowers series in slender wooden slats painted bright orange “to set the siennas, cinnabars, and ochres dancing.” The Observer predicts that the painting will “reach at least £10 million” in frenzied...

Entertainment industry awards shows are, almost by definition, public orgies of televised backslapping. Still, TV viewers stick with them, not so much to discover what the best movie, TV show, or record is—for each viewer already knows what’s best—but in order to see personalities in environments that put them out of character and in competition...

The present controversy around the restoration of the Sistine Chapel’s ceiling prompts the following reflections on restorative work in general, and that of our time in particular. Our age will be known by future historians as one in which all certitudes were questioned, while the True and the Good were on the defensive. Beauty, also...

Modern music criticism has engaged in a Herculean endeavor to misunderstand Romanticism, both as a historic and as a modern phenomenon. The 19th-century Romantics are relegated to the status of antiques. Their musical language is declared suitable for the musical museums of formal concerts but not worth taking seriously by modern composers. Above all, the...

While Kathleen Betsko and Rachel Koenig are desperate to find, if not manufacture, a “female aesthetic,” it fails to emerge from their Interviews With Contemporary Women Playwrights; in fact, most of the 30 represented playwrights deny either its existence or its relevance. Liliane Atlan (French) claims, “I don’t look for the masculine or the feminine...

Now that ain’t workin’ that’s the way you do it You play the guitar on the MTV That ain’t workin’ that’s the way you do it Money for nothin’ and your chicks for free (©1985 Chariscourt Ltd./Adm. Almo Music)   Dire Straits’ “Money for Nothing” ironically sums up the popular attitude toward the music business....

Platoon directed and written by Oliver Stone Hemdale Film Corporation & Orion Pictures Some opinions are communicated like a virus, and the received wisdom on Platoon is a good example of this cultural dissemination on the scale of an epidemic. It’s a movie that moviegoers have flocked to, and as for our collected punditry, bowing...

To an opera lover, a guided excursion through the mysterious world of the opera singer is irresistibly appealing. Are opera singers merely brainless, egotistical voices? Do voice teachers and vocal techniques make a difference? How much do opera singers worry about acting, about musical interpretation of roles? Helena Matheopoulos, author of Divo, is an enthusiastic,...

As one sign of Chekhov’s greatness, his very name is invoked (in adjective form) to assess the work of others. But even while Chekhovian has been called into service on numerous occasions—in recent years, for example, to epitomize such disparate playwrights as Lanford Wilson and Beth Henley, or a bit earlier to position Lillian Hellman...

Crimes of the Heart written by Beth Henley directed by Bruce Beresford De Laurentiis Entertainment Group When Perseus went to slay the monster Medusa, advice and presents from Minerva and Mercury were not enough; he had to seek out the Graeae—three crones with but a single prized eye they shared between them, which Perseus snatched...

“This is a wonderful country, my boy, but our legal system doesn’t work the way it’s supposed to.” —Harold Smith, in Remo Williams, The Adventure Begins America’s “major” film critics have been very busy—and very worried— lately. They have a lot to worry about; the movies just aren’t going their way anymore, which ought to...

Back in the days before OPEC became a notable force on American street corners, high school, for most of us growing up in Detroit, meant one thing: a driver’s license. All we had to do was spend 12 weeks with a shop instructor, who was looking for a way to pick up a few extra...

During the ongoing, international celebration of Samuel Beckett’s 80th birthday, which commenced last spring, much is being said, written, and done to reiterate unequivocally his position as the preeminent playwright of our century. There is no debate, really, so much as an affirmation and an exploration of his unquestioned significance. The irony, of course, is...

As if he still had somewhere to get to, Neil Simon finally arrived in 1986: 25 years after his first play, Come Blow Your Horn, opened on Broadway 1 or 18 plays and four musicals later. With more than a third of the decade remaining, Time magazine had the audacity to proclaim Broadway Bound “the best...

William III took one look at Burghley House (the Elizabethan residence of the Cecil family) and declared it “too great for a subject.” Four hundred years old in the democratic year of 1986, Burghley is exposing some of it s treasures to the prying eyes of ordinary Americans. The Burghley Porcelains went on view at New...

Jim Jarmusch’s Down By Law opens with rolling shots of New Orleans townhouses) tenements, the down and out on a crummy side-street. From there we enter into two variations on the theme of domestic disharmony, Jack’s and Zack’s, and on to a story set in a South that never was, by a film maker who,...

In the Middle Ages and Renaissance, as far as I can tell, people played only contemporary music. Since then, it seems, there has been a complete turnaround, and only contemporary music is not stylish. Beginning in the 18th century, interest in old music has developed gradually, erratically, but inexorably, despite some resistance from musicians and...

In 1935 the Whitney Museum mounted the first comprehensive exhibit of Shaker artifacts, celebrating the simplicity and harmony of the Shaker artistic vision. This past summer, the Whitney opened a much more ambitious show of “Shaker Design,” later shown at The Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, from October through January. United Technologies Corporation,...

A year ago, the University of Maryland held a special screening of John Ford’s The Searchers (1956), followed by a two-hour discussion of the film led by representatives of the departments of history, English, philosophy, and communications. John Ford would have been publicly contemptuous of this attention from the egghead professors. In private, he probably...

The Stratford Festival Theatre in Ontario has been training and cultivating great actors for years now—William Hutt, Maggie Smith, Brian Bedford, Marti Maraden, Alan Scarfe, and Martha Henry have all done beautiful work—probably some of their best—there. However, with the slight exception of Smith, none have made the transition to film. So to find Martha...

The mass media have been particularly arid territory for children lately, treating our young as little more than vessels for advertising pitches. In fact, even theatrical films have become advertisement vehicles, as many of the recent releases aimed at children have been little more than blatant 90minute commercials hawking toy lines such as the Smurfs,...

“Gloria in Excelsis, The Virgin and Angels in Viceregal Painting of Peru and Bolivia” richly deserved its title. This glorious exhibition at the Center for Inter-American Relations in New York City exemplified the fascinating new styles of iconography that can result from cultural hybridization. In this case, the hybridization (mestizaje) was caused by European intrusion...

Tucked away in one of 2.3 Diary entries, Ned Rorem suggests that “inside every artist is a banker struggling to get out.” Though Rorem was merely penning another one of his inversions-for-inversion’s-sake, the particular aphorism he derived here seems curiously relevant to Spalding Gray. In his evolution (some would call it his “perfection”) of the...

So often the trouble with a play-turned-movie is that the screenwriter and director have fooled with the original too much—opened it up too much, added too many new characters and too many new scenes. In the case of William Mastrosimone’s Extremities, however, the problem lies in the fact that he and director Robert M. Young...

Cobra directed by George P. Cosmatos screenplay by Sylvester Stallone; Warner Bros. Sweet Liberty written and directed by Alan Alda. How did America’s movies ever get so bad? That seems to be the $99,000 question for American film critics lately, from Siskel and Ebert to American Film to New York Times critic Vincent Canby, right...

To judge by the tone, content, and amount of recent media coverage of Protestant Fundamentalism in general and television evangelists in particular. Fundamentalists are a collection of interchangeable religious parts that have grouped themselves into a united cultural force which grows stronger and more indivisible by the week. But the conclusion is incorrect because the...

For the critic, the sad inevitabilities are death and taxonomy. He cannot avoid genres, isms, and zeitgeists, unless he wants the past to be unintelligible and the present to seem as random and strung out as an evening of “performance art.” “Victorian art” did pass away, and its heirs were “modernists.” While reports of modernism’s...

One way to learn patience is to travel by train from Naples to Palermo. The train is excruciatingly slow, and the traveler seldom has a soul to complain to, but the journey is ideal for basking in the picturesque countryside. It was here that Caravaggio, fleeing the Roman carabinieri after assaulting a man, sought refuge,...