Thursday, May 13 You’d have to pay us to see New York Minute. But it would cost you only 15 bucks or so, enough to cover a ticket, soda and popcorn. We’re cheap. And the yard work can wait. So here’s a deal we can’t pass up. For the cost…
It is common knowledge that girls rule and boys drool. Also, while boys go to Jupiter to get more stupider, girls go to Mars to get more candy bars. These are immutable laws of the universe. Or, at least, as far as we remember from our jump rope days. Ah,…
5/15 South America is the neglected continent. North America has its excessive appetites; Europe, its art. Africa is the land of the troubling headlines. Asia is huge. But South America? Nobody knows South America. We certainly don’t. There’s the Amazon River and…those mountains–the Andes Mountains…and…and…does Colombia still have drug traffickers?…
5/15 It’s daunting to think that some birds fly hundreds of miles between their summer and winter habitats when we can’t even work up the energy to visit our parents twice a year. (Winging your way back and forth between the United States and South America is no picnic, but…
5/16 Author Alice Walker has been quoted as saying, “I’m always amazed that people will actually choose to sit in front of the television and just be savaged by stuff that belittles their intelligence.” But what does she think about radio programs? We think she would approve of intellectual shows…
Take a bite and bust a move 5/15 With more than 60 restaurants and live entertainment, there’s a lot going on at Taste Addison 2004. We’ll just start with our karaoke choice, “Hanging on the Telephone.” See, when karaoking, we always do Blondie, and we’ve always done Blondie. So when…
“We must keep the atmosphere electrified!” announces creepy Igor in reference to an abominable experiment in Van Helsing, but he could be appraising the entirety of this enormous event movie. Breathless cutting, nonstop special effects and a pummeling soundtrack camouflage very silly plotting and mediocre-to-sappy dialogue–and yet the thrash-and-burn technique…
If you’ve seen a movie at a Landmark theater in the past year or so, you’ve probably enjoyed the trailer for Shaolin Soccer. Over a lilting Asian flute that morphs into pounding percussion, airborne soccer players execute kung fu moves that send the ball blazing across the field (or, in…
That sound you hear is the stampeding feet of millions of pubescent and prepubescent girls racing to movie theaters this weekend to catch sisters Ashley and Mary-Kate Olsen in their first feature film since 1995’s It Takes Two. The Olsen twins began their acting careers at the age of 9…
Truth is, from the female perspective, all men are fixer-uppers. There’s always at least one thing he does wrong that, were he to fix it according to our instructions, he’d be just about perfect. Like that guy who wears tasseled loafers with shorts. A simple repair. Or the otherwise lovely…
The poet Ezra Pound once said, “Good art can not be immoral.” But can art be amoral–can it exist without any moral claims whatsoever? Is art lacking when it doesn’t teach us a lesson, when it doesn’t give us ballast and orientation in the proverbial sea of abandon in which…
Alex de Leon The question begs: What to do with art that makes avid if not heavy-handed political statements in an era so eager to wrest itself from the rant, screed and morality inherently connected with political art? Is it the responsibility of art to engender social revolution, much less…
Generally, we think Houston is yucky. Not that this stems from any Texas metropolitan area rivalry, but Houston has always seemed overcrowded and dirty with an unconscionable level of humidity. Like stumbling home after a long night at a dive bar, a sojourn in Houston leaves us feeling coated with…
Thursday, May 6 Spanish television, especially the telenovela, has always held a certain magic for us, from the zany, over-the-top, stick-on-moustaches of late-night love follies to the dazzlingly tragic Te Amare En Silencio, starring the multitalented former Miss Brazil USA Ana Carolina. American soaps just aren’t for us. We desire…
Our introduction to la lotería, the Latin American game of chance, was a very American one. We purchased a set from the toy section of a dollar store and took it home to try to decipher the rules using our high school Spanish lessons. Eventually we had to ask for…
5/8 “La Bamba” was the last thing we thought we’d hear on a London subway. “Mind the gap,” yes. “La Bamba,” no. But there it was: the oh-so-familiar melody and the oh-so-indecipherable words. We’ve lived in Texas our entire life, so Mexican culture is not foreign to us. The sound…
5/12 How many chances will you get to drive a hot new BMW and do some good? Four, if you’re in the Dallas-Fort Worth area during the 2004 Ultimate Drive for the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation, the eighth year this event has taken place. For every mile you…
5/6 Nobody knows the trouble they’ve seen at the Dallas Arboretum, all stirred up because of a simple event called Cool Thursdays. Every Thursday night during May, June and July, the arboretum hosted a live band on the lawn along the arboretum’s part of the White Rock Lake shoreline. For…
Claptrap The title word says it all. Empty talk intended to get applause, says the definition. That pretty much sums up Ken Friedmans farce, produced by Rover Dramawerks, which finds a novelist named Sam (Randeep Walia) battling writers block. Over and over, he types opening lines, only to wad up…
5/7 We chickened out. Suzanne Calvin, the always helpful communications manager for The Dallas Opera, said that she might have been able to arrange a phone interview with Carol Vaness, who’s performing at “An Evening With Carol Vaness,” presented by The Women’s Board of The Dallas Opera on Friday. We…
Those seeking a spiritual counterpart to the yin of Lynne Ramsay’s masterfully moody Morvern Callar will find their yang in David Mackenzie’s exquisitely sorrowful Young Adam. Art-house aficionados may recall that in Ramsay’s recent film, a young male writer commits suicide, leaving his simple girlfriend to absorb his very being…
Ever evolving, always changing, the universe nonetheless sustains many constants: Hair metal never really goes away. British women inevitably become besotted grumps. And short men always turn into intolerable control freaks. Another “true generality” holds that males of all statures develop their innate behavioral characteristics within patriarchal cultures that, while…
