Email Author Peter Szatmary

1994 Stories by Peter Szatmary

• Screwball Comedy

  published July 21, 1994

  A director undertaking Shakespeare has one basic decision to make: present the play essentially in accordance with the Bard's intentions, thereby... More >>

• That's Entertainment

  published July 21, 1994

  The life of a chorus dancer: auditioning, undergoing examination from a faceless director -- part God, part Freud -- who prowls the rear of the... More >>

• Perils of the Paralyzed

  published July 21, 1994

  It's about time Jim Broadbent starred in a movie. An immensely endearing actor whose supporting roles provided ballast to such films as Enchanted... More >>

• Blue Thoughts

  published July 14, 1994

  If ever there were an avant-garde film that tested a cinephile's resolve, it's Blue: 75 minutes of a swimming-pool shade of the titular color... More >>

• A Lame, and Troubling, Lion

  published July 7, 1994

  "Sometimes bad things happen and there's nothing you can do about it." This sobering message -- only one of several downbeat pronouncements in... More >>

• It's Play Time!

  published June 30, 1994

  Since nobody got up to go to the bathroom during any of the summer theatrical productions for children I saw across Houston over the past few... More >>

• Hat Trick

  published June 30, 1994

  While there's no deep meaning in a rap song entitled "Come Pet the P.U.S.S.Y.," the fictional rap group that performs it in Fear of a Black Hat --... More >>

• Follow the Bouncing Body

  published June 23, 1994

  "One must shake the audience out of its expectations," bad-boy British playwright Joe Orton wrote. "They need not so much shocking, as surprising... More >>

• The Apple of His Eye

  published June 23, 1994

  While in graduate school in the '60s, writer and Rice professor Max Apple lived with his immigrant grandfather, an irascible former baker in his... More >>

• Dictatorial Love

  published June 23, 1994

  Cheery samba music certainly isn't the soundtrack you'd expect to accompany newsreel footage of Marshal Tito, the former Yugoslavian dictator,... More >>

• A Night at the Opera

  published June 16, 1994

  Phantom of the Opera arrives at Jones Hall, via the NationsBank Houston Broadway Series, with inescapable hype. Andrew Lloyd Webber, hit composer... More >>

• Surfing Safari

  published June 16, 1994

  If you know what "gank" means, you're the target audience for Bruce Brown's The Endless Summer II. As its title suggests, this movie is a sequel... More >>

• Music Man

  published June 9, 1994

  In a posh hotel room in Hamburg, dashing classical pianist Glenn Gould (Colm Feore), with rumpled clothes and abstracted gait, is feeling too ill... More >>

• Cordelia Tells All

  published June 2, 1994

  "An actor is in the eye of the beholder, isn't she?" Lynn Redgrave remarked last March while on a publicity visit for her autobiographical... More >>

• Yee-haw City

  published June 2, 1994

  What's with all these summertime Westerns? The cheesy Maverick and the stilted Even Cowgirls Get the Blues have already tumbled into town, while... More >>

• To Syrup with Love

  published May 26, 1994

  "This is a play, or rather a sort of a play," A.R. Gurney wrote in an author's note to his 1988 epistolary Love Letters, "which needs no theater,... More >>

• Murder Most Fine

  published May 26, 1994

  Film noir might soon experience a renaissance, thanks to John Dahl, one of the most exciting American directors to come along in years. His slick,... More >>

• Hot Sauciness

  published May 19, 1994

  "Oh, shut up, darling," one member of the Bliss family pronounces to another. The inflection is both cultured and frivolous, as are the characters... More >>

• The Perils of Being Human

  published May 19, 1994

  Bill Forsyth has never made a bad movie. Until now. Being Human, the writer/director's mostly flat and lifeless look at what he thinks being human... More >>

• Drunk, But Not Disorderly

  published May 12, 1994

  How realistic a portrait of substance abuse can a movie give when it features perky beauty Meg Ryan playing an alcoholic? That's the question... More >>

• Polanski's Passion

  published May 5, 1994

  The opening-credit sequence: ocean waves undulating behind a luxury liner's porthole while the camera slowly pulls in and out of the circular... More >>

• The Little Triumph That Couldn't

  published April 28, 1994

  If you had a great-sounding name like Pierre Carlet de Chamblain de Marivaux, it would behoove you -- indeed, you'd almost seem destined -- to pen... More >>

• Servile Fancies

  published April 21, 1994

  A poet and novelist as well as a playwright, Jean Genet viewed theater as a revolt against society. Without reformist intent, he willfully... More >>

• Imperfect Triangle

  published April 14, 1994

  "Learning undigested by thought is labor lost. Thought unassisted by learning is perilous," reads the ever-timely Confucian message chalked onto... More >>

• American Potluck

  published April 14, 1994

  If there's anything that binds the American films presented at this year's WorldFest, it's that they offer derivative pleasures. There is no... More >>