The unveiling took place amid the giddy whirl of a $1,000 ticket, all-star production of Eve Ensler’s The Vagina Monologues on Feb. 10, 2001. Raucous merriment had come and gone: Ensler conducted a chorus of ecstatically groaning celebrities, Glenn Close urged the audience to reclaim the c-word by yelling it at the top of its […]
Noy Thrupkaew
Noy Thrupkaew is a Prospect senior correspondent.
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A Bad Film by Any Other Name:
If movies came with stage directions for how audiences might react — “audience cheers,” “audience screams” — there would be one scene in Who Is Cletis Tout? that’d be marked “audience leaves.” Not with the huffy fanfare — popcorn boxes rattling, purses gathered up with vehemence — that a really bad movie inspires. No, Cletis […]
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Squirm Inducing:
Perhaps what’s most disappointing about Gary Winick’s new film Tadpole is how little it resembles its amphibian namesake: It has none of the squirmy, half-grown, wonderfully and weirdly alive charm of a tadpole. And there’s another thing Â… . “Ooh, ‘tadpole’ just sounds so spermy,” said one Prospect colleague. There’s precious little of that, too, […]
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Hell is a Submarine:
Submarine movies are perhaps the most Sartrean films of the war genre: What better place to experience existential hell than a metal tube with no exit? The canned air, twisted spaces, and infernal company of others — all are fertile ground for despair, especially if the sub in question is the Soviet shitbox that is […]
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Road to Nowhere:
The film Road to Perdition resembles nothing more than a finely made coffin: all square, burnished heft, a regal showcase for a body painstakingly made up to look alive. The sophomore effort by American Beauty director Sam Mendes, Perdition not only maintains the visual impact of his first movie but expands on it, with exquisitely […]
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To Be Frank:
It takes a lot to make a pug unfunny. With a squashed face, bulgy eyes and oddly dainty legs, a pug is a natural comedian — especially if he is the pug from the first Men in Black movie. MIB fans may remember him as Frank, the gravelly-voiced, smart-mouth alien masquerading as a dog. In […]
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Exorcising Kubrick:
A warning to readers: This review reveals elements of the plot of the film Minority Report. Maybe Steven Spielberg is trying to exorcise the specter of Stanley Kubrick. Or maybe he’s trying to make sense of their boggling 2001 collaboration, A.I. Whatever the case, Spielberg’s latest film, Minority Report, is a much finer recasting of […]
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No Huddled Masses Need Apply
The walk to the H street welfare office from Washington, D.C.’s Union Station takes a good 20 minutes, longer if you’ve got small children in tow. You see manicured gardens give way to empty lots, bottles in brown paper bags, and a grocery store that’s fenced-in to prevent cart theft. When you get to the […]
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Blood Brothers:
A warning to readers: This review reveals much of the plot of the film Windtalkers, which opens this weekend. World War II movies have become Hollywood’s warhorses — big, hulking moneymakers that run roughshod over emotions. John Woo’s Windtalkers is no exception. Larded with war-movie clichĂ©s, tubs of gore and body parts, and multiple, unabashed […]
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Really Real:
The uber-rich and the wanna-bes from last week’s reality TV series The Hamptons ought to be ashamed. Ashamed, I say, because as they were buying heirloom tomatoes, trying to jostle their way into photos with Candace Bushnell, or going to “big hoochie-mama parties” (as one revolted viewer described the show to me), the men and […]
