9/18 Remember when Johnny Depp stole our hearts and creeped us out a little with his unique performance of a pale freak with scissors for hands? We wondered how a few cuts here and there to shrubbery made him a god in a little suburban town, which must have been…
9/18 A comedian once remarked that we live in culturally strange times. It’s an era when the best-known golfer is black, one of the most famous rappers is white and the tallest guy in the NBA is Chinese. We may live in strange times, but the shake-up of cultural stereotypes…
9/17 One day last week, an actor named Marco Rodriguez was explaining what things used to be like in Dallas. “Every time they were doing Latin theater here, it was always very much about the blood and the guts and all the pain of the Latin people,” he says, a…
Silver City is being marketed as a biting, bitter send-up of George W. Bush. Hence the copious use of trailer footage in which Chris Cooper, as Colorado gubernatorial candidate Dickie Pilager, stumbles over simple sentences, dodges reporters’ questions with mindless macho explications (“My message to the criminals is this: You…
The most crucial piece of equipment in Hollywood is obviously not the movie camera. It’s not the casting couch. Not even the Rolls-Royce Silver Cloud or the personal trainer. It’s the Xerox machine–which was preceded by carbon paper. That’s why, over the years, we have had three Mrs. Norman Mains…
Rare is the film that caters to fans of rabbits, motorcycles, Gordon Lightfoot and fellatio, but now, thanks entirely to Vincent Gallo, we have that demographic nailed. With The Brown Bunny, the cinematic enfant terrible who gave us the awful pleasures of Buffalo ’66 returns, but don’t expect a retread…
Bonjour Monsieur Shlomi This Israeli dramedy is certainly not the most maudlin boy-meets-world movie released here this year (that’d be Valentin), but writer-director Shemi Zarhin doesn’t exactly surprise either. Precious Shlomi (Oshri Cohen) is essentially a mildly autistic teen Rain Man, master of instantaneous mathematical solutions but, you know, misunderstood…
As midlife crises go, Marjorie Taub’s is a monster. In agony over the death of her therapist, Marjorie, the main character in Charles Busch’s comedy The Tale of the Allergist’s Wife, is first seen by the audience at Theatre Three deep in menopausal malaise, wailing and whimpering like a wounded…
Secrets Every Smart Traveler Should Know Pack up your troubles and your high expectations for this 90-minute musical revue based on the travel columns of Fodor’s writer Wendy Perrin. It’s a light romp through tales of lost luggage and resort romance in this community theater production. Morgan Spollin, Meredith Morton…
Judith Rothschild: Abstract and Non-Objective–the 1940s While the paintings of Judith Rothschild may look old to the discerning eye, merely the recapitulation of midcentury abstraction, they are in fact bristling with the vibrancy of an artist just on the cusp of her prime. Rothschild made the large oils, midsized collages…
We’d like to think this election is like the ninth season of Dallas, and we’re going to wake up and realize it was all a dream. Unfortunately, it’s all real: the mock coffin processional, the real lists of killed soldiers, the debates over military service records, fights about who’s allowed…
Thursday, September 9 Thanks to his trademark beatnik goatee, Pat Dinizio always looked like the girls prep school literature professor from those 1950s pulp films. Indeed, he is a poet, but not a midcentury one. His skills were proven by his songwriting, which turned out hits such as 1986’s “Blood…
When Fort Worth’s Modern Art Museum opened in December 2002 with five times the gallery space of its former building, chief curator Michael Auping experienced exuberant glee unlike any he’d known in his long career in fine arts. Finally, Auping told anyone who would listen during the planning and building…
9/9 We didn’t attend the 17th annual GrapeFest last year in the heart of Grapevine’s historic district, but, man, we sure wish we had. That was the year that, according to the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, two two-person teams from the Farmers Branch Senior Center took on two teams from the…
9/11 “I wanna go kayaking,” former Dallas sweetheart Sara Hickman once sang. “I wanna make you my kayak king.” Released in the early ’90s, before extreme sports and niche cable networks, Hickman’s song seemed the ultimate in romantic quirk: floating down the river with your honey, not in a boat…
9/11 I’ve always thought that gene pools had a limited supply. My dad was good at math, so it’s OK that I can’t calculate change. My brother is a great artist, so my lumpy-headed stick figures were acceptable. It’s not my fault. They just stole all the good genes before…
9/11 Who says the Dallas Symphony Orchestra doesn’t know how to throw a birthday party? OK, so maybe the words “moderated discussion” don’t conjure images of a crunk b-day throwdown, but the DSO’s weekend-long celebration of the Morton H. Meyerson Symphony Center’s 15th anniversary does have something for those with…
Some of the people who helped bring you dank, morose amusements such as The Crow, Dark City and The Matrix have a new movie to offer. Like The Matrix, it features a dork who flies through the air. As in Dark City, we witness the protagonist’s world radically changing shape…
Oh, Janis. Oh, gorgeous, outrageous, soul-ripping, rockin’ bluesy momma Janis Joplin. She’s a volcano. She’s a tsunami. She’s a fearless, reckless, raging American beauty. Watch her tear open her chest to reveal her hot, pulsing wounds. Watch her rage with burning, glorious light. Watch her smile that sweet Janis smile…
What is Dallas afraid of? What is the source of this potentially cosmopolitan city’s pronounced dread? Why does it so willfully participate in the worldview of paranoia that threatens to undermine what has been since the nation’s inception a foundation at once steadfast yet supple, almighty yet benevolent, superpowerful yet…
The sun was beatin’ down hotter than a hog wearing wool when the Hopwood Gang rode into town. The streets were deserted. The townsfolk knew when the Hopwood boys were on the move, the best course was to leave well enough alone–iffin’ you wanted to avoid being shot dead and…
Thursday, September 2 We like to think of ourselves as a beer ambassador, spreading good will as we introduce various European beers to our American gastrointestinal system. But Mark Monfrey is really a bier ambassador, teaching people about Belgium and its 10 types of beers, from Saison, beers produced at…
