The actresses playing conjoined twins Daisy and Violet Hilton in the musical Side Show, now on view in a fine, emotionally charged production at Theatre Three, don’t use any special tricks to achieve the illusion of being attached at the hip. Their costumes aren’t even stitched together. Julie Stirman (Daisy)…
The way the story goes, a famous Hollywood mogul was once asked why he kept so many screenwriters working on so many scripts. The reply: If you lock a dozen monkeys in a room with a dozen typewriters, eventually one will bang out Hamlet. I don’t know whether the movie…
Binge-drinking isn’t even remotely compatible with parenthood, so Sunday mornings find my husband and me clear-headed, albeit bleary-eyed-tired from a long week of toddler-chasing. We cling to two other vices when the baby’s asleep–chain-smoking and coffee-chugging–out on the porch. I’ll usually start the conversation with a button-pushing rant for my…
What’s most surprising about Nine Queens, a wry if awfully derivative caper come-on from first-time feature director-writer Fabián Bielinsky, is how easily it suckers you into its swindle. After all, you know from jump that something’s up. You’ve sniffed out this con before in the films of David Mamet and…
To the woman who broke Adrian Lyne’s heart all those years ago: Stop what you’re doing right this minute. Drop everything, pick up the phone and call him. Apologize profusely for cheating on him. Tell him it’s all your fault and you’re a worse person for leaving him. Offer him…
Last month GQ ran a disquietingly flattering profile of Joe Roth, who, in January 2000, quit his gig as Walt Disney Studios chairman to “revolutionize the industry” (GQ’s words) by forming his own studio. With a billion bucks on loan from men with money and bridges to burn–among them News…
The most remarkable thing about Bart Weiss, founder and director of the Dallas Video Festival, is not his patience or taste but his empathy for filmmakers and audiences alike. He knows there will be plenty of films, both short and long, screening in the 15th Annual Dallas Video Festival that…
In those old mummy movies from the 1930s, nobody could outrun the corpse. The angry and very dead 3,000-year-old pharaoh in The Mummy and its dozens of sequels and remakes traveled with a step-drag, step-drag cadence that couldn’t outpace a three-legged sloth, but somehow the creature always caught up with…
It’s cliché: Women at midlife suffer hot flashes; men at midlife buy hot cars. So what happens to a 53-year-old butch lesbian grandmother entering menopause? In playwright Peggy Shaw’s case, she puts on a double-breasted suit and suspenders, passes for a 35-year-old man and lets loose the tiger within. The…
Outside the Dallas Museum of Natural History is the Leonhardt Lagoon, a nice little pool intended to preserve a small ecosystem, a little part of the Texas habitat. Therefore small animals such as ducks, turtles, insects and grackles (as if they needed any help) have a small plot set aside…
Kick a boy enough times, and he’ll become a man. The question is, of what sort? In his long-awaited feature portrait of the comic-book hero, Spider-Man, director Sam Raimi brings forth a kaleidoscopic answer full of hope and verve. Flashy enough for kids and insightful enough to engage adults, the…
Ten years after The Scandal–and its negative effect on the size of his audiences and his power and independence–Woody Allen broke his longtime avoidance of the Oscar telecast with his pro-New York stand-up shtick at this year’s ceremony. The positive audience response suggested that all is forgiven, the industry still…
Actor Arliss Howard’s debut as a director explodes with brave ambition while falling a little short, perhaps, on traditional narrative sense. So be it. If devotees of the cinematic art were willing to slide down a tunnel into John Malkovich’s head a few years back, there’s no reason to balk…
In the late ’50s, the head of a Brooklyn street gang (Stephen Dorff) must fight off attacks from a neighboring gang run by a junkie (Balthazar Getty), who is fronting for a drug dealer (Norman Reedus) fresh out of prison. At the same time, our hero’s brother (Brad Renfro) is…
Kicking around the film-fest circuit since 2000, this football film (soccer, actually, but we are in Scotland) is the quintessential sports film, complete with a ragtag team of small-timers sniffing the big time, an aging vet (Jackie McQuillan, played by feature-film newcomer Abby McCoist) seeking redemption on and off the…
There is more than a little of A Beautiful Mind’s John Nash in Tom Jericho, the hero of Michael Apted’s World War II-era romantic thriller. Both men are brilliant mathematicians, breaking military codes for the government while hovering on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Nash, of course, was a…
“This is contrary to how we grew up,” Stacy Peralta is saying a few minutes after getting dropped off at a newspaper office by a limo driver. The 45-year-old Peralta, still SoCal handsome and boyish beneath a ball cap and behind a well-trimmed beard, grins long and hard–a real hell-yeah…
Imitation being the sincerest form of show business, Neil Simon simply imitated one of his own successful formulas with California Suite, the comedy now getting a fine go-round at the Richardson Theatre Centre. The premise–one hotel room, four different stories–already had worked in Plaza Suite, the 1968 Broadway hit set…
Had some wickedly funny novelist set out to satirize the excesses of contemporary art, she could do worse than to open the action at Wonder, the current show at the University of Dallas’ Haggerty Gallery. The place to start would, in fact, be with Bettie Ward’s CV, which sits at…
We competed in gymnastics as a child. We had medals, trophies, the works. But did we practice hour after hour, spraining our ankles and jamming our thumbs instead of playing Cabbage Patch and My Little Pony in order to learn about victory and defeat, experience the payoff of practice and…
For some reason we can’t quite fathom, someone once gave us a gift subscription to Southern Living, the magazine devoted to helping its readers live more elegant “Southern” lives. Maybe they were trying to tell us something. In addition to recipes for mint juleps (we drink beer) and many creative…
Poor William Randolph Hearst. The snapping dogs of Hollywood just won’t leave the guy alone. It’s been barely 60 years since a little epic called Citizen Kane portrayed the great newspaper tycoon as a ruthless dictator who degenerated into an emotional basket case, and already there’s more bad publicity in…
