Month: November 2002

Pinocchio apparently isn’t the only one who wants to be a real boy. At age 50, Roberto Benigni is perhaps more suited to play the grandfatherly Gepetto than the marionette whose nose grows when he lies. But to give him his due, Benigni’s best performances have always been touched with childlike wonder, and if anyone…

Famous for her Pulitzer-winning novel The Shipping News, Proulx’s carved out a literary niche chronicling the lives of down-and-out communities all across North America—Newfoundland in Shipping, New England in Postcards, and now the Texas Panhandle in Ace. The story is something like the film Local Hero as it might have been told by Flannery O’Connor…

It’s difficult not to connect the dots from Robert Crumb to Daniel Clowes. Crumb’s raw, realistic figures, oozing desperate human emotion (unrequited lust, mostly) spawned numer-ous other writer/illustrators like Clowes, Chris Ware, Johnny Ryan, Dave Cooper and Charles Burns that have have expanded comics beyond the green tights and trusty sidekicks that came before. Caricature…

Appropriately enough, Sam Fuller’s life sounds like something out of the movies. The director of such great cult noir films as Shock Corridor and The Naked Kiss penned this autobiography in the months before his death in 1997. Fuller grew up a poor Jewish kid in New York, raised by his strong-willed, widowed mother, and…

Though he’s scored with things like Disclosure and TV’s ER, Michael Crichton inevitably returns to the theme that’s served him so well so often before, Science Run Amok. The dinosaurs in Jurassic Park, the robot gunslingers in Westworld, the virus in Andromeda Strain (We could go on; he certainly did) are joined by the villain…

Coffee House Press has certainly been double-dosed on caffeine—or something—in the past year. One of our favorite local publishing houses just seems to go from strength to strength. Norah Labiner’s Miniatures got widespread acclaim (and even got thrown up on by the office cat, a special distinction we won’t go into here) and the world…