NEWS
By Virginia Heffernan | July 22, 2007
New York -- Patty Hewes frightens Glenn Close. No wonder: Hewes is an ice-eyed trial lawyer and serpentine liar who disdains white-collar violence in favor of open sadism. She never settles for $100 million, in other words, when she can put everyone through hell for a nickel more. But Close is Patty Hewes, the central character in Damages, a cloak-and-dagger legal thriller that begins Tuesday on FX. In 40 years in theater and movies, Close has appeared as Norma Desmond, Cruella de Vil and Alex Forrest, the Medusa-haired bunny boiler of Fatal Attraction.
ENTERTAINMENT
By Diane Scharper | July 18, 1999
"Don Vincente," by F. Sionil Jose. Modern Library. 415 pages. $13.95.Sionil Jose does not include an epigraph for his novel, "Don Vincente." But he could have chosen John Donne's line: "No man is an island." Jose's characters are torn between acting against the injustice of the system and accepting the way of life offered to them. When they take the easy way out, they learn that all people are connected -- painfully connected.A Filipino writer and political activist, and likely candidate for the Nobel Prize, Jose writes absorbing novels in English, often about the struggle between the peasantry and landowners.
FEATURES
By Chris Kaltenbach | May 19, 1999
Eight seasons was plenty for ABC's "Home Improvement," says series co-star Patricia Richardson."I think it's absolutely the time" to stop, said Richardson, who plays Tim Allen's wife on the popular sitcom, which ends its run Tuesday on WMAR, Channel 2. "I always had a really hard time the last couple of years knowing where to take the characters. The hardest thing about a sitcom or a long-running series is that the characters can't really grow very much, because if they do, there's no show, you lose conflict."
NEWS
By DAVE BERRY | September 19, 1999
RECENTLY IT CAME TO MY attention that I was one of the eight remaining Americans who had not seen "The Blair Witch Project."In case you're one of the other seven, I should explain that "The Blair Witch Project" is a hugely popular movie that was featured simultaneously on the covers of both Time and Newsweek (mottoes: "We Both Have The Same Motto"). "The Blair Witch Project" stunned the Hollywood establishment, because it proved that, to make a hit movie, you don't need big stars, an expensive production and a huge promotional budget to generate hype.
FEATURES
By Jay Carr | October 4, 1999
It isn't true that life begins at 40, at least not for Kevin Spacey. Professionally speaking, Spacey, who turned 40 in July, has been surfing a jet stream since 1995, when he imprinted himself on our collective consciousness as the most unusual of "The Usual Suspects."He gave Hollywood its archetypal crazed movie exec in "Swimming With Sharks," turned slightly more lethal as the manipulative serial killer in the Stygian "Seven," and seemed to surprise even himself as a smooth cop working both sides of the street, then rediscovering his idealism, in "L.A.
ENTERTAINMENT
By Chris Kridler | August 8, 1999
"A Certain Age," by Tama Janowitz. Doubleday. 317 pages. $23.95.Thackeray's "Vanity Fair" is praised for its brilliant satire. But I can't remember a single character in it whom I actually liked. The latter is also true of Tama Janowitz's new novel, "A Certain Age." It's full of despicable people, but at least it fits the definition of satire. The problem is, she picks such easy targets -- the gilded automatons of New York high society -- that her victory is cheap.Janowitz's novels, which include "A Cannibal in Manhattan" and "The Male Cross-Dresser Support Group," have rarely strayed from the Big Apple since she made a splash in the '80s as the "brat pack" writer of "Slaves of New York."
ENTERTAINMENT
By Helen Ubinas | March 29, 1999
Call me a traditionalist, but if it was a board game when I was a kid, then so it should remain.This isn't just an egotistical request. My experience with other board games gone interactive has not been good. Hasbro's computerized version of Monopoly Hasbro, left me craving the good old days when players actually held the car or the hat in their hand.But when it came to evaludate Hasbro's Clue: Murder at Bloody Mansion, I changed my mind.All the elements of the board game aimed at solving Mr. Boddy's murder are here in this $30 Windows game, from the characters to the inevitable questions: Whodunit?
ENTERTAINMENT
By Michael Hill | September 12, 1999
"The Catastrophist," by Ronan Bennett. Simon & Schuster. 332 pages. $24.There is so much to like about "The Catastrophist," Ronan Bennett's novel set in the turbulence of the Congo as that massive central African country contemplated then realized independence 40 years ago.Essentially, this is a classic love triangle among James Gillespie, a dispassionate English writer, Ines Sabiani, a passionate Italian journalist, and the revolution that engulfs them.But in Bennett's skillful hands, it becomes a combination political thriller, adventure tale and love story.
FEATURES
By J. Wynn Rousuck | January 19, 1998
Performance artist Danny Hoch has been known to step outside the theater and drum up trade among the kids on the street."I see 50 kids playing basketball who live across from the theater and have never been there. I tell them, 'Yo, there's this kid across the street, he's [bleeping] hysterical, you should see it before it goes to HBO.' "It's not that theaters have trouble filling seats for this 27-year-old solo performer, whose newest show, "Jails, Hospitals & Hip Hop," begins a three-day engagement at Center Stage's Off Center Festival tomorrow.
FEATURES
By J. Wynn Rousuck | November 17, 1998
High school may not be an experience everyone cares to relive, but Rob Nash leaps boldly back in time to re-create the horrors, embarrassments, heartbreaks and occasional heartwarming moments of those formative years in his two-part, one-man show, "Freshman Year Sucks" and "Sophomore Slump" at the Theatre Project.And, like many an adolescent who struggles through an identity crisis in high school, Nash's uneven show, which is still very much a work in progress, suffers from an identity crisis of its own.The two one-acts that make up the evening are the first installments of an intended tetralogy, each set in a different year in high school and each in a different decade.