7/24 More than ever this summer, small, personal arsenals are appearing on every porch in North Texas. Rows of chemical missiles, contents under pressure, stand ready on every patio table. They’re WMDs, all right: weapons of mosquito destruction. There’s a blaster of repellent for grown-ups with 35 percent DEET and…
7/23 How does one go about earning the title of lingerie expert? Perhaps the claim requires years of graduate study, or maybe a correspondence course out in Montana sends syllabuses and silicone samples to novice panty-purveyors in training. The means behind getting that certification aren’t entirely clear, but self-proclaimed lingerie…
7/24 Of the two living Williamses–Hank Williams Jr. and Hank Williams III–it’s interesting that Kid Rock chose to tour with Hank Jr. this summer. Oh, sure, Kid Rock admired Junior’s music as a kid, and years later, as a rock star, he befriended the old man. But in age and…
Without risking much critical credibility, it can be said that Catwoman succeeds on its own feline terms. Much like a cat, the movie is a superfluous gob of fluff with an attitude ranging from idiotic to nasty. It’s a sleek and self-absorbed animal, adoring itself so ardently that those of…
7/28 Psychologists may try to blame America’s attention deficit disorder on scapegoats such as video games, MTV and DSL modem connections, but they should probably examine the three-ringed philosophy of P.T. Barnum, James A. Bailey and those rascally Ringling brothers. These provocative promoters understood back in the late 1800s that…
If you’re wondering how Hollywood could possibly adapt Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot, a collection of similarly themed short stories bound together by the slenderest of common threads, the answer is that it didn’t. The credits for I, Robot read “suggested by Isaac Asimov’s book,” but the canny sci-fi fan will…
“Is this one of those avant-garde things?” a dying Cole Porter (Kevin Kline) warily asks Gabe (Jonathan Pryce), a sort of Ghost of Musicals Past who appears out of the ether to shepherd the composer through the this-was-your-life montage that makes up Irvin Winkler’s biopic De-Lovely. “It’s a musical–it should…
The opening moments of The Door in the Floor are not promising. A little girl stands on a chair in a hallway of photos, pointing at the images and speaking about them. Soon, she is joined by a middle-aged man, probably her father, who takes her on a tour through…
For the last 40 years, cultural pundits have focused their attention on the ever-expanding dominion of the mass media. Whether broadcast through television or the Internet, its shimmering blue-light tendrils meander and creep kudzu-like into every aspect of our life. Yet if the play of the news and advertising extends…
The Dining Room In the stuffy but elegant confines of an East Coast WASP-ish household, 60 characters come and go over six decades of meals, arguments and reconciliations conducted around one large dining table. Playwright A.R. “Pete” Gurney, now a master at chronicling the lives of upper-crusters who turn out…
Ellsworth Kelly in Dallas This show should be called “Dallas Collects Ellsworth Kelly.” It would be more honest, not to mention more intriguing. This dainty collection of top-quality painting and sculpture by the mid-20th-century artist does little service to the importance of Kelly. Kelly’s brightly colored and experimentally shaped opaque…
A quick and easy way to silence a table of 20-something creative types performing the sharing-our-intellectual-opinions mating ritual in a chic bar: Start gushing about how your absolute favorite new thing is a public television show called History Detectives, in which four historians use archives, forensics and other sources to…
Thursday, July 15 Why is it that other people’s travels in exotic lands are so enticing? Maybe it’s our inherent desire to shift settings temporarily by living vicariously through others. Maybe it’s so we can learn without the risks of really stepping out there on our own. Maybe it’s the…
Though Mark Twain’s book Adventures of Huckleberry Finn has been a catalyst for heated PTA meetings, classroom protests and the occasional fistfight, a revival of the musical version, Big River: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, tries its darnedest to bring people together. Both tell the now well-worn story of young…
7/17 I have a feeling Susan Taylor’s one of those folks who like to find out your favorite Chinese restaurant, then tell you, yeah, sure, it’s OK, but it’s nothing compared with this little outtatheway strip-mall joint she knows in Chinatown. Then, when you say you didn’t know Dallas had…
7/17 Time was only Buddhists and hippies did yoga. And Pilates? That was for injured ballerinas, not out-of-shape grandmothers and glamorous movie stars. But now the two practices are as ubiquitous as the Stairmaster, and for good reason: They’re a good way to strengthen and tone muscles without the jostle…
7/17 What do you want to be when you grow up? In younger years, innumerable adults posed the question, and teachers made us illustrate it with Crayons on manila construction paper. Our fellow snot-dribblers drew rockets to the moon, stethoscopes, tutus and unicorns (OK, so some of us didn’t understand…
7/15 The Bath House Cultural Center is an Art Deco landmark, a former recreation center from when White Rock Lake was a swimming hole and Dallas’ first neighborhood arts center. But each summer it also becomes a makeshift homeless shelter. Not for people or for stray animals. But for the…
“Memory is a wonderful thing, if you don’t have to deal with the past,” declares French Celine (Julie Delpy) to her erstwhile American one-night-stand Jesse (Ethan Hawke) in Before Sunset, the meandering but reasonably charming follow-up to the duo’s 1995 Euromance, Before Sunrise. In the movies as in life, nearly…
Not one of this city’s countless film festivals is as much an extension of its founder, and programmer, as the Dallas Video Festival. To see but a handful of entries in this year’s fest is to know the two sides of Bart Weiss–the political animal who gnaws on movies constructed…
Anchorman, co-written by its star Will Ferrell, plays like a series of outtakes strung together more or less in random sequence. There’s a vague plot, about the fall and rise of a San Diego newsman whose polyester suits are brighter than he is, but this doesn’t propel the movie forward…
The King and I Tony Award-winning actress Sandy Duncan seems a bit long in the tooth to play Anna Leonowens, the widowed twentysomething English schoolteacher who boldly goes where few Western women have gone before: the 19th-century Siam of The King and I. But with her remarkable pipes, she manages…
