Pop packaging
Movie: Crossroads
Movie: Fat Girl
Fat Girl Length: 1 hour, 33 minutes Studio: Cowboy Films Website: http://www.cowboybi.com/fatgirl/ Release Date: 2002-02-15 Cast: Anais Reboux, Roxane Mesquida, Libero De Rienzo, Arsinee Khanjian, Romain Goupil Director: Catherine Breillat Screenwriter: Catherine Breillat Music Score: Laura Betti, David Bowie WorkNameSort: Fat Girl Our Rating: 4.00 Provocation is again on the menu for fans of French…
Paternal emission
Movie: John Q
Movie: The Mystery of Picasso
The Mystery of Picasso Release Date: 2002-02-15 Cast: Pablo Picasso Director: Henri-Georges Clouzot WorkNameSort: The Mystery of Picasso Our Rating: 4.00 When French director Henri-Georges Clouzot (“The Wages of Fear,” “Diabolique”) asked his pal Pablo Picasso to collaborate on a film with him, the result was this one-of-a-kind 1956 documentary of an artist at work.…
Movie: The Mystery of Picasso
Our Rating: 4.00 When French director Henri-Georges Clouzot (“The Wages of Fear,” “Diabolique”) asked his pal Pablo Picasso to collaborate on a film with him, the result was this one-of-a-kind 1956 documentary of an artist at work. Legalities kept the film out of circulation for more than 20 years; it was re-released in the 1980s…
Movie: Hart’s War
Our Rating: 2.50 Imagine “Stalag 17” as rewritten by John Grisham, and you’ll have a sense of “Hart’s War.” In the final days of World War II, greenhorn lieutenant Thomas Hart (Colin Farrell) is captured by the Nazis and sent to a P.O.W. camp where he comes under the watchful eye of Col. William McNamara…
Pop packaging
Movie: Crossroads
Movie: Fat Girl
Our Rating: 4.00 Provocation is again on the menu for fans of French writer/director Catherine Breillat, the woman behind such art-house scandals as the Lolita-lite “36 Fillette” and the sexually graphic meditation on female desire “Romance.” As “Fat Girl” opens, pudgy, pubescent Anaïs (Anaïs Reboux) and her slightly older sister, Elena (Roxane Mesquida), stroll through…
Paternal emission
Movie: John Q
Movie: Hart’s War
Hart’s War Length: 2 hours, 5 minutes Studio: MGM Website: http://www.mgm.com/hartswar/ Release Date: 2002-02-15 Cast: Bruce Willis, Colin Farrell, Terrence Howard, Vicellous Shannon Director: Gregory Hoblit Screenwriter: Billy Ray, Terry George, Jeb Stuart WorkNameSort: Hart’s War Our Rating: 2.50 Imagine “Stalag 17” as rewritten by John Grisham, and you’ll have a sense of “Hart’s War.”…
Killing the death penalty
On Jan. 21, Martin Luther King Day, about 80 activists began a 10-day march from Union Correctional Institution in Raiford, where Florida houses its 372 condemned prisoners, to the Capitol in Tallahassee, where Gov. Jeb Bush signs their death warrants. The activists wanted a moratorium on the death penalty. Yet despite the fact that Florida…
Pay it forward
Paying its workers a living wage wouldn’t cost Orange County a lot. Just $3 million, or 0.22 percent of its annual budget, would ensure that no employee of either the county or a county contractor earns poverty-level wages. Nonetheless, getting county leaders to ante up won’t be easy for the Living Wage Coalition. Less than…
‘Moral’ of the story
Church Street Station soon may be the city’s cultural haven, featuring galleries and theaters, a second Enzian Theater film screen, an Improv Comedy Club and a hush-hush venture with Lou Pearlman’s Trans Continental Records. At least that’s what Elizabeth Maupin, the Sentinel’s theater critic and ex-officio member of the Downtown Arts District Board, reported on…
Green ham and legs
Researchers at Kinki University in Nara, Japan, announced last month that they have successfully bred spinach genes into pigs. The scientists called the results the first-ever successful mammal-plant combination and claimed that the meat produced by the pigs would be “more healthy” than normal pork. “But,” added Professor Akira Iritani, “the significance of this success…
Suave sets the record straight
Now I’m bothering Gerardo. My life has fallen into a decade-old time warp. For those paying attention, I apparently left my heart somewhere in 1991, and am back peerlessly to venge the victims of that year’s heaviest rotation: Bryan Adams, Milli Vanilli, now “Rico Suave” himself — Gerardo. Except Gerardo has avoided my phone calls…
Cut down to a Bob?
Two appropriately “mega” guests top the bill at this year’s MegaCon comic-book-and-fantasy convention, Feb. 22 through 24 at the Orange County Convention Center: filmmaker/actor Kevin “Silent Bob” Smith and his on-screen sidekick, Jason “Jay” Mewes. But before you inhale a celebratory hit of the chronic or mouth a triumphal cry of “Snoochie boochies,” know that…
A very civil war
When I was asked recently if I’d like to attend a Civil War reenactment, I pictured a field the size of a large backyard on a foggy morning with about 40 guys milling around — men who don’t socialize much outside their own obsessed milieu. I pictured them in whatever blue or gray winter Goodwill…
Playing the language card
“War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.” George Orwell, who introduced all three of these tenets in his classic novel of totalitarian mind control, “1984,” knew a lot about how words can be twisted to mean something entirely different — how a government can brutalize language to manipulate a populace without having to…
Guitar family feud
Guitarist Jimmie Vaughan has been to the well and back: He has written top-40 hits, sustained major-label success, embarked on countless world tours and fielded invites to jam with the biggest of the big. Now the nimble-fingered player is rebuilding a solo career rich with Grammy wins and a bona fide respect that rivals his…
Quick bites from the Middle East
Every country has its own idea of fast food. Japanese doughnuts have bean paste filling instead of jelly. Egyptians eat macaroni and rice, the Chinese munch on scallion pancakes, and in Thailand nothing beats red-ant eggs on toast. We may not get ant-egg stands, but we now have a fast-food import from Saudi Arabia: Taza…
Playing with fire
Who could blame Don Ammerman for wanting to get to the bottom of things? After all, the allegations he set out to investigate on a Friday afternoon last August were alarming. They were revealed when Orlando firefighters alleged in a lawsuit that for 25 years doctors at a city-run clinic withheld the results of blood…
