Those who honored in May what they’d heard was Mexico’s independence day can do it again this week. They’ll be a lot closer to having the date right this time. Although Cinco de Mayo is sometimes mistakenly referred to as Mexican Independence Day in the United States, September 16 is…
When Robin Williams was America’s favorite funnyman in films like Mrs. Doubtfire, it always felt a little strange admitting that the guy seemed kinda creepy. When he “got serious” in irritating tearjerkers such as Hook and What Dreams May Come, it was certainly in vogue to proclaim him annoying, but…
If you’re looking for a horror film to revitalize the genre, keep looking. If you’re looking for a horror movie with believable characters…yes, you’re gonna have to keep looking. But if sudden loud noises, relentless strobe lights, digital hallucinations and mutilated corpses make you jump, and you believe that nothing…
To misappropriate a choice comment from TV-journalist-turned-music-biz-impresario Tony Wilson, I’ll just say “Ian Curtis.” If you know what I mean, great; if you don’t, it doesn’t matter, but you should probably read more. That is, one need not be a fan of the late Ian Curtis, the epileptic new-wave seer…
Jesse Peretz, founding member of the Lemonheads, has made the transition from musician to filmmaker over the past decade or so by way of music videos, commercials and MTV interstitials. His debut feature, an adaptation of Ian McEwan’s First Love, Last Rites, won an award at the Rotterdam Film Festival…
Hip-hooray and bushels of ballyhoo for the wide-open exuberance of 42nd Street, a musical so slap-happy with tapping and dripping with schmaltz, you could get giddy from it. The spectacular touring production now at the Music Hall at Fair Park is naughty, gaudy, bawdy and brimming with talent. The chorines…
Every so often, I get a semicoherent piece of hate mail that makes an interesting point: What I do is worthless. I’m not, mind you, referring to the usual bleating of aggrieved partisans, the rabid billets from fans or gallery owners or artists’ relatives. For those objectors, I have one…
The shop situated in Exposition Park feels like what Tom Waits’ voice sounds like. It’s edgy; it’s at times macabre, and it’s got a great sense of humorous realism. And like the voice that became increasingly iconic over the years, Forbidden Media has evolved into its own landmark destination. Fairly…
More than the bunions, calf muscles and hip joints of Dallas dancers are hurting this year. The tough economy is particularly rough on “the arts,” which are increasingly dependent on corporate sponsors when individual supporters get a look at what happened last quarter to their 401(k)s. We almost lost the…
Citizen-soldiers eager to renew hostilities in the American culture wars can shoot a couple of spitballs at each other this week over Little Secrets, a teen-anxiety movie that leaves no doubt where it stands on family values and moral absolutes: It approves. The shock troops of the Cinema Without Limits…
At a recent performance by the new ChelseaPark Productions troupe at the Trinity River Arts Center, the lights came up for intermission between two one-acts and half a dozen patrons headed for their cars. That effectively diminished the audience by a third. It’s a tough time to get a new…
When last we saw Piet Mondrian, he was a completely cosmopolitan man. To be sure, we all know the backstory: how Mondrian, the hero of De Stijl, champion of the abstract grid, started out as one more Dutch landscape painter. And plenty of books and courses and even minor exhibitions…
Things you will learn from a forthcoming oral history of Saturday Night Live: Dan Aykroyd slept with, among others, Gilda Radner, Laraine Newman and writer Rosie Shuster, the latter of whom was, at the time, married to the show’s producer and creator, Lorne Michaels. To this day, Chevy Chase regrets…
Annie Leibovitz has spent her photographic life capturing celebrities on film, including actors, musicians and models. Women, an exhibit of her work that has been touring for almost three years, may be a departure from her usual magazine work. “May be” because, at times, it’s hard to separate the personal…
I may safely claim to be the least qualified person to attend The Blazin’ Hot Poker Run for Big Brothers Big Sisters of North Texas. I rode on the back of a motorcycle once, and I held on so tight that I bruised the ribs of the driver. I drove…
Andrew Niccol keeps making the same movie over and over again and dressing it in slightly different clothes: the sleek charcoal Hugo Boss grays of Gattaca, the crisp Crayola hues of The Truman Show and, now, the silk-and-satin Hollywood resplendence of Simone. Niccol, writer and director, is obsessed with a…
Sometimes when a director shoots at a barn, the satisfaction comes in simply watching him hit it dead center. So it is with The Good Girl, wherein Miguel Arteta (Star Maps) targets Middle American ennui with wit, compassion and no shortage of ornery malaise. Like Arteta’s second feature, Chuck &…
Robert Evans wrote his autobiography in 1994 as much out of desperation as hubris; it cried out, “Damn it, look at me…please?” He’d produced one film during the past 10 years, The Cotton Club, which was such a colossal failure it rendered Evans a moot point in Hollywood, a position…
Director Neil LaBute (Your Friends and Neighbors, Nurse Betty) seems the unlikeliest candidate to direct the film version of British author A.S. Byatt’s Booker Award-winning best seller Possession. (OK, that’s an exaggeration: There’s always Michael Bay.) LaBute’s earlier films were resolutely tied to American culture, and Byatt’s book couldn’t be…
Up to a certain point, Paul Marino’s story is a familiar one, especially to any single guy in his 20s who likes playing with his joystick. Four years ago, Marino and his pals would leave their offices on a Friday night and go to another friend’s workplace, where they’d play…
How incredible it is to feel like you’re really there. Away from the consumers, the McDonald’s, the lattes…face to face with enormous stone constructions and things as delicate as blades of grass, as gritty as roof shingles. What’s more amazing is that this art is breathtaking on its own, not…
Just returned from the San Diego Comic Convention, the annual gathering of dork knights and wonder women (as in, “I wonder why women go to comic conventions”), the five men who founded and front Ghostwerks Comics are psyched. First of all, they paid top dollar to get their booth–“not just…
