With its soundtrack stockpiled with songs of romance and Christmas and a screenplay by the man who wrote Bridget Jones’s Diary, Four Weddings and a Funeral and Notting Hill, it’s appropriate Love Actually feels less like a brand-new movie than a greatest-hits compendium. It offers nothing new and instead makes…
A not terribly long time ago in an uninhabitable galaxy called Burbank, a generally astute movie studio founded by four Polish siblings alienated a young hotshot filmmaker. The studio was Warner Bros., and the project was a cold, disturbing, highly stylized vision of a mechanized future called THX-1138. Not wholly…
‘Tis the season and all that jive; beneath the tree this first week of November you will find two films set during the final week of December, when sugar plums and candy canes go on sale at the concession stand for all the good little girls and boys’ parents to…
The spooky beauty of Elephant, Gus Van Sant’s strange take on the Columbine massacre, arises not from the shock of sudden violence but from the filmmaker’s steady gaze at the numbing routines of life inside a suburban high school. With what first looks like cool detachment, Van Sant (My Own…
Even when people were watching Will Ferrell on television every Saturday night, they weren’t seeing Will Ferrell. They saw no more than a glimpse of him, beneath wigs and behind glued-on beards and buried under characters who became almost better known than he during his seven years on Saturday Night…
Each scene in The Life and Times of Tulsa Lovechild, now onstage at Contemporary Theatre of Dallas, is introduced with a cutesy caption projected on a screen. “Somewhere in Wyoming,” it’ll say in white Courier font on a black background, or “Busted flat in Babylon.” Tennessee Williams first used this…
New York performance artist Annie Murdock is the daughter of Robert Murdock, the former curator of contemporary art at the Dallas Museum of Art, and since graduating from Wesleyan University she’s been studying in New York and Oaxaca and working with paper sculpture artist Lesley Dill. So you could say…
Thursday, November 6 Big state. Big hats. Big country. Big hearts. Camp Summit holds its second auction in a style true to Texas. Dinner, dancing and bidding benefit the camp that caters to pardners young and old who have disabilities. Camp Summit’s Boots and Bandanas Benefit Auction and its presenting…
The moment was so tender that it could rival the memories of the greatest lovers in the world. In that crowded, dusky room, an image of soft, flowing lines stood out in the distance, and we were so impressed that we overcame intimidation to take a better look. Once close…
The riddles of identity that drive and disturb Philip Roth’s impressive body of fiction usually focus on contemporary Jewish characters whose conflicts between self-absorption and self-hate remain poignantly (and often hilariously) unresolved. But in The Human Stain, the first Roth novel to be adapted as a film in three decades,…
Remember that silly little-girl version of Meg Ryan in When Harry Met Sally, snuffling “I’m difficult!” through a charming tantrum? Well, make it a point to greet Ryan’s new incarnation in the psycho-sexual thriller In the Cut. Post-Crystal, post-Hanks and even post-husband Dennis Quaid (toward whom this performance almost plays…
Pieces of April, made by playwright-turned-novelist-turned-screenwriter-turned-director Peter Hedges, could be confused for a compendium reel of someone’s home movies. Shot on digital video using existing light, it looks like something assembled by a film student for a final and lost soon after, left behind for a stranger to find and…
In the beginning, there was The Evil Dead, and Stephen King looked down upon it and saw that it was good. Then God said, “Let there be Evil Dead 2: Dead by Dawn, that the message of writer-director Sam Raimi be spread across the land!” So it was written, so…
Beneath the jagged scars on the heaving chest of Dr. Frankenstein’s scary monster beats the heart of a true romantic. Just whose heart it is–or used to be–we can’t be sure. The giant creature is a crazy quilt of random body parts stitched together by a mad scientist and brought…
Philanthropist, n. A rich (and usually bald) old gentleman who has trained himself to grin while his conscience is picking his pocket. –Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary Ray Nasher isn’t a man given to grinning. At 82, he is a diminutive man, stern of countenance and bald of pate, with…
Having lived in Arlington all my life, I realize–like most of us residents–that it’s a city without a great reputation for nightlife other than the regular meat market/sports bars and the endless restaurant chains. I know this, yet I still think there’s hope in places where ESPN isn’t the focal…
Thursday, October 30 To us, Halloween’s scare factor has nothing on El Da de los Muertos celebrations. While All Hallow’s Eve offers the chance to scream and run from fake ghosts in haunted houses, the Day of the Dead is asking real ghosts–the souls of departed loved ones–to return home…
Tobe Hooper is one helluva frugal director. On a minuscule budget and with the slightest amount of gore, he crafted a classic horror film that some adults still avoid like week-old beef reduced for quick sale. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Hooper are legends. The movie has maintained both a…
11/1 Thanks to the Travel Channel and ESPN, which broadcast Texas hold ’em tournaments from ’round the world, every dude I know thinks he’s the next Scotty Nguyen. Or Phil Helmuth. Or T.J. Cloutier. This includes me, with my stacks of poker how-to’s sitting next to the bed (baby books,…
11/1 I was already excited about the 2004-2005 Dallas Mavericks before they traded for Antoine Walker and Tony Delk recently. And by “already,” I mean about two minutes after they crashed and burned against eventual champs the San Antonio Spurs in the Western Conference finals. My lady and I bought…
11/3 The International Museum of Cultures is an odd little corner of Dallas’ museum scene, with exhibits highlighting the indigenous cultures of little-known peoples in Papua New Guinea, Ecuador, Amazonian Peru and other Third World nations. It’s a small museum, something you can see in about an hour, with life-size…
11/4 In an entertainment world that serves up endless car chases, explosions and re-makes of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, documentary filmmaker Ken Burns is a shining beacon of class and quality. Like famed historian Stephen Ambrose says, “More Americans get their history lessons from Ken Burns than any other source.”…
