To judge from the glowing reviews of Horace Clifford (H.C.) Westermann’s traveling retrospective, now on view at Houston’s Menil Collection, it seems a major re-evaluation of this most American of 20th-century sculptors is well under way. Organized by Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art, the Westermann show has been roaming the…
Ah, yes. We remember it like it was yesterday. Taking a mid-afternoon break from high school, tooling down a two-lane blacktop doing 96 mph in a classmate’s jacked-up Chevy SS, smoking a fatty and listening to Skynyrd blaring on his cassette deck. Of course, where we’re from–the backwoods of the…
Ladies and gentlemen, children of all ages, step right up and get yourself a new gay-bingo card. That’s right. It’s that time of the month again for all local queens, and kings, of bingo. Saturday is Big Top GayBINGO night at the Lakewood Theater. Dallas’ own madam of ceremonies Kerri…
The tragedy is that even those who should have known better didn’t know at all; how could they? The names they sought weren’t listed, their contributions weren’t cited, their influences weren’t credited, so even those who spent hours and days and forevers wearing out the grooves in search of holy-mother-of-God…
Ah, Halle’s berries. Don’t care much for them personally, as they’re components of an actress (bane of the thinking man), but those golden globes are shifting loads of Hollywood product these days, the latest dose being Die Another Day, the 20th official entry in the 40-year-old James Bond franchise. As…
Goodbye, Mr. Chips. Hello, Mr. Hundert. If we can judge by the new Kevin Kline vehicle, The Emperor’s Club, the notions remain alive (if not particularly well) that a self-sacrificing boarding-school teacher can enrich the lives of his students while subsisting in relative emotional misery himself–and that the terrible furies…
When Neil Burger’s debut as feature-film writer and director, Interview with the Assassin, was being shopped around last fall, it had many intrigued but few interested enough to buy it for distribution. The theory goes that some distributors, among them Miramax, thought its subject matter felt a bit off post-September…
The advantage to making a Christmas movie is that, no matter how mediocre your final product is, it’s all but guaranteed to show up on at least one TV station, at least once a year, in perpetuity; even such woeful losers as the Nicolas Cage-Dana Carvey comedy Trapped in Paradise,…
Rarely does a theme unify a film festival; such gatherings, for the most part, are glued together only by movies few have seen and movies few will ever see, the unwanted or misunderstood offspring of would-be artists and could-be visionaries, kooky veterans who long ago ditched the mainstream for the…
So, you wish to know if Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets is as good as the first Harry Potter movie. Is it as charming, visually gratifying, faithful to filthy-rich author J.K. Rowling’s inescapable books? Well, that’d be yep times four, as it’s definitely an enchanting spectacular for Potter…
Writer-director Todd Haynes’ loving re-creation of a 1950s-style Hollywood melodrama (think Douglas Sirk) is a puzzling affair. Watching Far from Heaven is like taking a trip back in time–not to the real world of 1957 but, rather, to the reel 50s, as personified by such classic “women’s films” as All…
If the title is a Jeopardy question, then the answer might be “How does Steven Seagal come across these days?” or maybe “How will you feel after an 88-minute rip-off of The Rock with action confined to slo-mo gun firing and random glass-shattering?” Seagal, who’s slowly morphing into an untalented…
A tough Paris cop (Jean Reno) flies to Tokyo for the funeral of his great lost love, only to find out that she has left him in charge of the rebellious teen-age daughter (Ryoko Hirosue) whose existence she had kept a secret from him. When the girl turns out to…
It is the essential sexiness of holy archetypes that stirs up a ruckus in Carlos Carrera’s competent if unremarkable tragedy, adapted by screenwriter Vicente Lenero from the 1875 book by Portuguese author Jose Maria Eça de Queiroz. We first meet our young, present-day hero (and anti-hero) Padre Amaro (Mexican superstar…
So enchanting it takes your breath away, Jean Cocteau’s 1946 live-action version of the famous fairy tale remains one of the most magical films ever made. Boasting a new print, struck from the restored French negative, and an improved, albeit not perfect, soundtrack, this glorious black-and-white film–in French with English…
A good deal of rogering goes on in Cloud Nine, Caryl Churchill’s dark farce about sexual identity that’s now getting a first-class production by Echo Theatre at the Bath House Cultural Center. Rogering is British slang for you-know-what. Boffing. Having it off. All that nahsty nudge-wink, nudge-wink bedroom nonsense. In…
Four signs the show you’re watching is among The Greatest Series in the History of Television: It’s an ensemble comedy that often resembles a drama and airs without a laugh track; the series’ creator gives interviews in which he/she congratulates the network for having the guts to air the edgy…
“When I was a child, I spake as a child… but when I became a man, I put away childish things.” So the New Testament says, and like many passages in what Homer J. Simpson aptly describes as “a preachy book,” that passage sidesteps an important question, namely: Why? Why…
Three years on, the besieged phenomenon–the scourge, Antichrist or the Vanilla Ice of the ’90s, pick ’em–has been rendered beloved; when they, slick bizzers in suits and on cell phones, speak of “Eminem” and “gross” in the same sentence, they’re talking only receipts, merchandise, profit. The man, just touching 30,…
The repellent Casanova portrayed by Campbell Scott in Roger Dodger has an instinct for looking up skirts and down blouses, but no capacity for looking in the mirror. Part salesman, part caveman, Madison Avenue copywriter Roger Swanson is, deep in his cynical heart, as loathsome to himself as he is…
The question “All right?” is asked of every character, on many occasions, throughout Mike Leigh’s latest film, All or Nothing. In working-class London, it seems, it’s the preferred substitute for “Hello” or “What’s up?” Whether or not it elicits a response is almost irrelevant; the question itself is a formality…
Director Chris Eyre, whose engaging 1997 road movie, Smoke Signals, helped energize a modest new wave of Native American filmmaking, is bound to open even more eyes with his bold second feature, Skins. Filmed on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota and Nebraska, it’s a vivid look at two…
