Fanalysis
Fanalysis NR, 20 min. Directed by Bruce Campbell, Narrated by , Voices by , Starring . Cult actor Bruce Campbell filmed this documentary of his fans during several convention appearances. As he describes the film on his Web site: “I got to thinking one day what if I turned the ol’ spotlight around? What…
Duel in the Sun
Duel in the Sun 1946, PG, 138 min. Directed by King Vidor, Narrated by , Voices by , Starring Gregory Peck, Joseph Cotton, Jennifer Jones, Lionel Barrymore, Lillian Gish. David O. Selznick produced and wrote the script (based on the novel by Niven Busch) for this sexually charged Western. Jones plays a young woman of…
Tommy
Tommy 1975, PG, 111 min. D: Ken Russell; Roger Daltrey, Ann-Margret, Oliver Reed. An all-star cast (including Elton John, Eric Clapton, TIna Turner, and more) delivers this wild film treatment of the Who’s rock opera.
Phantom of the Paradise
Phantom of the Paradise 1974, PG, 92 min. Directed by Brian de Palma, Narrated by , Voices by , Starring Paul Williams, William Finley, Gerrit Graham, Jessica Harper. This cult favorite is a rock & roll retelling of The Phantom of the Opera.
Abandoned: The Betrayal of America’s Immigrants
Abandoned: The Betrayal of America’s Immigrants 2000, NR, 60 min. Directed by David Belle, Nicholas Wrathall, Narrated by , Voices by , Starring . In conjunction with World Refugees Day, the Political Asylum Project and Caritas of Austin will screen this documentary (which showed at SXSW 2001) about U.S. immigration laws. Following the film will…
Kill and Kill Again
Kill and Kill Again 1981, PG, 100 min. D: Ivan Hall. A scientist’s daughter hires kung-fu agent Steve Chase to rescue her dad from the evil Marduk, who wants to use the inadvertent mind-control byproducts of the good doctor’s experiments with potato fuel to rule the universe.
Green
Green 2000, NR, 50 min. Directed by Laura Dunn, Narrated by , Voices by , Starring . This documentary about environmental justice in Mississippi’s Cancer Alley is by the director of The Subtext of a Yale Education, which was part of the McCollege Tour. Green recently won the Silver Medal at the Student Academy Awards…
Born in Flames
Born in Flames 1983, NR, 90 min. Directed by Lizzie Borden, Narrated by , Voices by , Starring Honey, Jeanne Satterfield, Adele Bertai, Becky Johnson, Pat Murphy, Florence Kennedy, Kathy Bigelow. The setting is the future: New York City, 10 years after the Social Democratic War of Liberation. With sexual oppression the norm, women in…
Creature From the Black Lagoon
Creature From the Black Lagoon 1954, NR, 79 min. D: Jack Arnold; with Richard Carlson, Julia Adams. An expedition down the Amazon River goes horribly awry when a prehistoric swamp-thing, known as “Gill-Man” slinks its way out of the waters.
Local Bestsellers
Local bestsellers are based on recent sales at Austin bookstores selected to reflect varied reading interests.
The Innovators
Part 2 of “Jazz,” by Harvey Pekar
Naked City
This ad, said to be sponsored by the group “Citizens for Capital Punishment,” ran in Monday’s Terre Haute Tribune-Star after being rejected by The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, according to Tom Ungar of the Chicago ad agency the Ungar Group. Ungar insists the ad is serious and pro-capital punishment, although he…
Exhibitionism
The Gilbert & Sullivan Society of Austin’s new revival of the G&S operetta The Sorcerer proves a genial spoof of class prejudice, at least as staged by G’Ann Boyd. Her uncluttered approach allows the work’s understated satire to shine through the performers’ presence and delivery of the songs.
Page Two
Editor Louis Black praises the Texas Film Commission’s marriage of art and commerce, finds the Austin American-Statesman‘s coverage of George W. Bush’s European trip untrustworthy, and urges readers to vote in our annual “Best of Austin” poll.
The Inexpressible
Ferreting out the local avant-garde jazz scene
Naked City
The University Co-Op becomes a textbook monopoly.
Chopper
Story of legendary Australian renegade and dreamer.
Public Notice
Celebrate the emancipation of Texas slaves (albeit, two and a half years late) on Juneteenth!
It’s Not Just An Adventure
It was either blasphemy or genius; it’s often hard to differentiate. An amplified wire running across the church’s ceiling. Gutted guitars laid flat on tables, cables and coils protruding every which way. Flickering scenes of abstraction projected onto a backdrop. Mysterious glowing boxes and antennae, conjuring sounds that were at once unearthly and wholly natural,…
Naked City
Austin cycling activists worry that bicyclists and pedestrians’ concerns will lose out to drivers’ interests in the implementation of the Seaholm District Master Plan.
Atlantis: The Lost Empire
Atlantis: The Lost Empire 2001, G, 95 min. Directed by Kirk Wise, Gary Trousdale, Narrated by , Voices by Michael J. Fox, James Garner, Cree Summer, Leonard Nimoy, Jim Varney, John Mahoney, Starring . It’s no small understatement to say that Atlantis: The Lost Empire isn’t your average all-ages popcorn pusher. The in-betweeners and cleanup…
Day Trips
Fishing for striped bass in Lake Texoma.
Chanson Anglais
Air heads in America.
Naked City
The City Council moves forward with Austin’s regional transportation plan, but assures neighbors of road-widening projects proposed in the plan that they, not the state of Texas, have the authority to decide what gets built and when.
After a Fashion
“After a Fashion” reviews the recent Summer Sweat & Schmoozarama presented by Star Costumes & Clothiers.
Dancing About Architecture
Another Sixth Street club discontinues live original music, as Davíd Garza struggles to get his heard.
Naked City
This year’s Greater AustinWork job summit features talk of layoffs, better and earlier training, and sagging profits at companies around the city.
Mr. Smarty Pants
This is what your brains wants when you aren’t looking close enough.
Record Reviews
Matthew ShippNew Orbit (Thirsty Ear) For Matthew Shipp, a relentlessly aggressive pianist, nothing could be more avant-garde than orbiting his introspective side. A Monkish touch from the very beginning of his association with NYC indie Thirsty Ear in the early Nineties, his fractured modernism has more often evoked the brilliant abandon of Cecil Taylor. New…
The Hightower Lowdown
PG&E’s shell game, Bush Incorporated & Nestle’s genetic engineering
To Your Health
My 9-year old son is very active and somewhat easily distracted, so much so that I worry his teachers will someday suggest Ritalin or some other medication to control his behavior. If he really is ADHD, are there alternatives?
Record Reviews
Tim BerneThe Shell Game (Thirsty Ear) If jazz scares you, then don’t call it jazz. Tim Berne wouldn’t want you to anyway. The Shell Game is part of Thirsty Ear’s Matthew Shipp-curated Blue Series, dedicated to expanding and possibly eradicating the boundaries of jazz. And hell if it doesn’t do just that, due in large…
Capitol Chronicle
A healthy death penalty, the Jenna and Barbara bust, and the Fannie Lou Hamer Project
About AIDS
Prevention is the Key!
Record Reviews
Spring Heel Jack Masses (Thirsty Ear) Longtime fans of the British drum-and-bass duo Spring Heel Jack are likely to have one of two reactions to Masses. Reaction A: “What the fuck?” Reaction B: Disavowal of their baggy-pants, lightstick-wavin’ electronimizing, and embarkment on a lifelong affection for Charlie Mingus, dark clothing, and LSD. Part of Thirsty…
Thirty Years on Location
An overview of the Texas Film Commission, which has been wedding film production and the state economy for 30 years.
Coach’s Corner
What’s worse, Patrick Roy’s twitch, Dikembe Mutombo’s stare, or what NBC laughably calls its “halftime show”? Coach gets a midnight call from his old pal, the Whipp.
Record Reviews
Archie SheppSt. Louis Blues (Jazz Magnet) Change has never come easy. The traditional jazz renaissance has invigorated sales, but also left a lot of the music’s true innovators in the dust. Many are perfectly comfortable marching down memory lane, locked in Ellingtonian half step, but the upheaval of the Sixties pulled jazz along for the…
Short Cuts
Landmark’s Paul Richardson talks strategy for saving the ailing theatre chain.
Second Helpings: Mediterranean
Meditteranean cuisine in this week’s “Second Helpings”
Eating Between the Lines
While lots of foodies brag that they read cookbooks in bed at night like novels, these days it’s just as easy to settle down with either a culinary memoir or a novel that’s chock-full of recipes. In some instances, the recipes are prominent features in the stories while in others they’re simply embellishments, but the…
Record Reviews
Kenny Barron & Regina CarterFreefall (Verve) Pairing Philly pianist Kenny Barron and Motown violinist Regina Carter could be seen as merely a commercial vehicle for Verve, which has released five Barron and two Carter albums. Instead, it’s a pairing of veteran and developing talent, two gifted NYC-based friends sculpting sound with the tape rolling. Barron…
Video Reviews
Delmer Daves’ A Summer Place is a juicy potboiler, oozing with angst over both young love and adultery.
Exhibitionism
Director Mark Ramont and his production team stage the world premiere of The Apeman of Manhattan fairly realistically, with some impressive acting, but Rosalyn Rosen’s script, in which a well-off advertising executive struggles with her feelings for a former lover who is using her in the worst kind of way, may have you wondering what…
Eating Between the Lines
On Rue Tatin Living and Cooking in a French Town by Susan Herrmann Loomis Broadway Books, 306 pp., $24 In 1980, American cookbook author Susan Herrmann Loomis went to Paris for a year of professional culinary training, fell in love with the cuisine, the country, and the people and ultimately made France her home. We…
Record Reviews
Carla HelmbrechtBe Cool Be Kind (Heart Music) At any given time the marketplace is flooded with dime-a-dozen female jazz singers of all stripes. So much so, that were it not for the fact that this particular “product” appeared on the Austin imprint Heart Music, it might easily have been relegated to my ever-expanding and dust-accumulating…
Video Reviews
This high-tech update of the beloved Rocky & Bullwinkle cartoon has none of the wit of the original.
Pills, Thrills, and Bellyaches
Irvine Welsh’s first novel ‘Trainspotting’ is one of the most successful first novels in recent history, but in this interview with Chronicle writer Marc Savlov, Welsh, whose new novel ‘Glue’ brings him to BookPeople on Monday, June 18, at 7pm, admits to thinking that “you had to be a bit strange to be a writer,…
Eating Between the Lines
Secrets of the Tsil Café A Novel by Thomas Fox Averill BlueHen Books, 224 pp., $23.95 Both literary and popular fiction abound with stories of families that struggle with the issues of race and religion, but Secrets of the Tsil Café is possibly the first book about a family that is regularly disrupted over the…
Somebody Has to Die
The conviction of Robert Springsteen in the yogurt shop murders leaves many questions unanswered.
TV Eye
PBS’s landmark documentary series, “Point of View,” announces its summer lineup.
Lara Croft: Tomb Raider
Lara Croft: Tomb Raider 2001, PG-13, 96 min. Directed by Simon West, Narrated by , Voices by , Starring Angelina Jolie, Daniel Craig, Iain Glen, Chris Barrie, Mark Collie, Leslie Phillips, Noah Taylor, Jon Voight. I knew things were bad when I felt my inner child go out to the lobby to monopolize the Ms.…
Postscripts
How to celebrate Bloomsday and other upcoming literary events in Austin.
Eating Between the Lines
The Body in the Moonlight A Faith Fairchild Mystery by Katherine Hall Page Morrow, 243 pp., $23 Agatha-award-winning author Page’s amateur sleuth and caterer Faith Fairchild is on the case again in the eleventh outing of this popular culinary mystery series. In the fall of 2000, we find Faith, her minister husband Tom Fairchild, and…
What’s Next?
What happens next in the yogurt shop trials?
Waiting for Jerry
The arrangements were made, the interview set: Jerry Hall, one of the most glamorous and desirable women in the world, would be calling writer Stephen MacMillan Moser at home on his own telephone! And he waited. And waited. And waited …
The Ugly Kid
The Ugly Kid 2001, PG, 74 min. Directed by Hector Barron, Narrated by , Voices by , Starring Todd Bosley, Brendan Ryan Barrett, Mary Mara, Sammy Elliott, Kristen Parker, Patrick Higgins, Chloe Peterson, Taylor Negron, Tom Arnold, Tony Longo. Most kids’ films these days seem to fall into one of two categories: shameless, animated marketing…
Readings
Choke A Novel by Chuck Palahniuk Doubleday, 293 pp., $24.95 Under the heading “Praise for Chuck Palahniuk,” Choke’s back cover copy offers up this gem from Bret Easton Ellis: “Maybe our generation has found its Don DeLillo.” Considering how skillfully Palahniuk disemboweled our national psyche in 1996’s Fight Club and 1999’s Invisible Monster and Survivor,…
Food-o-File
If you’re like me, Cuisines editor Virginia B. Wood writes in this week’s Food-o-File, and wondered why April came and went without the usual anti-hunger fundraising dinner, here’s the scoop on what’s happening.
The Silent Witness
One potential witness, Roy Rose, never made it to the courtroom.
Austin Critics Table Winners 2000-01
On Sunday, June 10, the Austin Critics Table presented its annual awards for outstanding achievements in the Austin arts in a brisk ceremony at the Bad Dog Comedy Theater, 113 E. Riverside. It was the ninth such ceremony for the Table, an informal association of local arts writers who gather regularly for lunch, and this…
The Girl
The Girl 2001, NR, 84 min. Directed by Sande Zeig, Narrated by , Voices by , Starring Claire Keim, Agathe De La Boulaye, Cyril Lecomte, Sandra N’Kake, Ronald Guttman. Leave it to the French to come up with this erotically charged but intellectually shaped contribution to lesbian noir. A trail of cigarette smoke snaking through…
Readings
The Rose City Stories by David Ebershoff Viking, 222 pp., $23.95 Ah, the sweet promise of the future. The young gay men at the center of David Ebershoff’s biting short stories all seem to be looking ahead to a better time, when the awkwardness or closetedness of youth passes away to a life of open…
Mini-Review
Chronicle Cuisines writer Rachel Feit stopped going to Los Comales a few years ago after she was served a slightly overaged carne asada. She recently returned and is happy to report that Los Comales (both locations) is back on her family’s regular restaurant rotation.
Grounds for Appeal?
A brief list of possible grounds for appeal in the yogurt shop murder prosecutions.
Articulations
The scoop on the 2000-01 Austin Critics Table awards ceremony
Readings
Mother Jones The Most Dangerous Woman in America by Elliott J. Gorn Hill & Wang, 352 pp., $27 With the current establishment turning its compassionately conservative cheek to the working class, there’s a hole in this country’s political fabric and it’s shaped like Mother Jones. An Irish immigrant, Jones lost her iron-worker husband and four…
Mom’s Travel Advisories
Guerrillas, drug lords, landmines, limb loss, organ malfunction … According to my mother, these are just a few of the terrors that await me when I arrive in South America.
Naked City
Local news this week in Austin
Exhibitionism
With improv comedy all over Austin and even on the tube, it’s tougher than ever for improv newcomers to create laughs out of audience suggestions and comedic inspiration. But with a corps of female performers who are appealing and talented and share a sense of direction, the new troupe Catfight has the potential to fly,…
