It’s not easy to pull off a good morality tale. Too often, movies with a message, or about a movement, reduce characters and events to types. They pit unqualified good against unqualified evil–a dark narrative temptation–and, like so much of what issues from Hollywood, do so to ill effect. That’s…
Paul Weitz, with brother Chris, co-wrote and co-directed 2002’s adaptation of Nick Hornby’s novel About a Boy, in which a cocky grown man (Hugh Grant) learned how to actually act like a grown man by observing a gawky young boy (Nicholas Hoult) who was nearly abandoned by his suicidal mother…
Nobody messes with Samuel L. Jackson–at least not at the movies. He’s Shaft reinvented, the coolest cop on the street. He’s Mace Windu, the only swashbuckler in the Star Wars galaxy who gets to swing a purple lightsaber. Best of all, he’s Jules Winnfield, the ultra-hip hit man who spouts…
You have to hand it to Sean Penn. OK, you don’t absolutely have to, and if you’re a Red Stater through-and-through, you certainly won’t want to, but give him some credit. After being pilloried in the press for visiting Iraq under Saddam’s reign, torn apart by housecats in a puppet…
I’m approaching a sobering event that most people make every effort to forget: the high school reunion. It’s the pivotal point for just how unsuccessful you can be before someone calls you on it. You know, “Wow! You were voted Most Likely to Succeed, Andy. Are you really enjoying your…
Thursday, January 13 Like cats and babies, we have a fascination with sparkly things. A healthy one, though; there’s been no hiding in our closet hot gluing rhinestones to a vest or telling ourselves that we do need four types of cubic zirconia wrist cuffs (we have a strict limit…
Something foul is afoot. Not foul, exactly, but sinister. Well, more phenomenal than sinister. Phenomenal with a slightly sinister undertone. Your friends at the top Dallas art galleries are conspiring to get you out and about this weekend. The big dogs–Dunn and Brown, The Contemporary, Gerald Peters, Conduit, Craighead-Green–are holding…
1/14 Lick an envelope. Savor the putrid flavors, the lack of texture, the sharp tongue pain followed by the clean metallic taste of blood. Now consider this: The first “envelope” was a clay wrapper used by the Babylonians in 2000 B.C. to protect important documents. Clay was folded over the…
1/15 When you think of celebrity guests at fitness conventions you expect to see Olympic medalists or German-accented bodybuilders or (if you’re really lucky) Richard Simmons. But the Fifth Annual NBC5 HealthFit Expo has booked a pair of soap opera actors. (Both are from NBC daytime dramas; the convention must…
1/13 On the list of endangered species, the Richardson Symphony Orchestra sits next to the mighty rice rat. The orchestra, now in its 44th season, announced in November that it is in danger of closing because of a dire lack of funds primarily the result of a dearth of private…
1/18 My sixth-grade English teacher was obsessed with Cats. Too young to dispute, we studied that Andrew Lloyd Webber musical with the kind of scrutiny we generally reserved for the bathroom mirror. We listened to Cats, memorized Cats, even performed our own Cats–which, thankfully, transpired before the ubiquity of the…
Clint Eastwood began digging into the third act of his career–the one that reveals the mature, deep-thinking artist…with a little jazz piano on the side–a dozen years ago, with the discomfiting anti-western Unforgiven. Since then, he’s hardly come up for air or given himself a break. Last year’s Mystic River…
Over a three-month period in 1994, machete-wielding Hutu tribesmen in Rwanda hacked to death 800,000 Tutsi men, women and children. News reports, including film footage of the unfolding carnage, were broadcast around the globe. In the face of such unremitting acts of inhumanity, the world community did nothing. It wasn’t…
The Woodsman Anchored by a carefully studied, thoroughly compelling performance by Kevin Bacon, this portrait of a recently paroled pedophile still at war with his old demons is so thoughtful and provocative that we cannot help but become engrossed. Directed and co-written (from a play by Steven Fechter) by recent…
The audience is 50 percent of the performance,” said the great old actress Shirley Booth. At least that much, I’d say. Maybe more. A good audience can inspire and ignite actors into giving the best performances of their lives. And a bad crowd can do just the opposite. Every actor…
You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown The Peanuts gang seems poised for a pop culture comeback, and this lighthearted production of the old musical (reworked for a Broadway revival in 1999) is reason enough to get re-acquainted with Charlie Brown, Linus, Lucy, Sally, Schroeder and everybody’s fave black-nosed beagle, Snoopy…
Texas Vision: The Barrett Collection, the Art of Texas and Switzerland Why is it that regional art, from Texas to inner Pennsylvania, upstate New York to the hills of Tennessee, looks the same–all of it showing naturalistic panoramas of tumbling hills, arabesque trees and tumbledown, homey architecture? Perhaps this has…
Deb Reinhart, a veterinarian and avid jogger who lives in Seattle, was recently in town to visit her mother. Heading back from a run on her mom’s tree-lined residential street, Reinhart spots an opossum in the gutter, mildly mutilated from an unsuccessful encounter with a car. “If she’s a female,…
Thursday, January 6 If ever you’ve found beef stew or cream of potato soup so soothing that you wanted to curl up in it and nap, welcome to our world. It was winter for all of like 15 minutes, and during those minutes we hunkered down and got cozy with…
Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women is a book that everyone is supposed to love–women and men, little and big, bookworms and those who get their classic literature on the screen (there have been more than a dozen versions filmed or animated). Even Joey, the Friends character who is not known…
1/22 Oh, to be a pre-schooler or pre-teen growing up in Dallas, the heretofore undesignated “Hub of Under 18 Culture.” To have from one to four pairs of parental hands guiding you to enrichment activities. To have one to four parental vehicles at your beck and call; one to four…
1/8 Nothing in yoga seems quite as embarrassing as being stuck in the plow position while your curious feline investigates the posterior of her strangely inverted owner. On the other hand, there’s always the possibility of flatulence during your first ever Bikram class. Not that we speak from personal experience…
