Van Gogh was a lunatic who cut off his ear. Picasso was a self-absorbed cur who abused women. Warhol turned out to be a weird, desperate loner, Basquiat a doomed junkie. Try as he might, shriveled little Toulouse-Lautrec failed miserably at romance. As for El Greco’s explosive affair with that…
Director John Herzfeld’s last feature, the droll and underrated 1996 2 Days in the Valley, was a more than adequate counterbalance to the catastrophe of his first feature, Two of a Kind, a 1983 John Travolta vehicle that, together with Moment by Moment, put its star on the fast track…
Hollywood appears to be developing a healthy sense of humor about Valentine’s Day, which, from this cynic’s perspective, is a good thing. In the new millennium, rather than dole out romantic trifles like Return to Me as per the usual plan, we’ve seen Valentine (bitter ex-nerd cuts beautiful people to…
Over my five years-plus stint as a theater critic in this town, actor after actor has told me that after the experience of directing themselves in a play, they’d never do it again. (Having seen some of the results of this overburdening of theatrical responsibilities, I have been tempted to…
Nothing nudges common sense out of any fruitful discourse quite like nudity. Ever since Homo sapiens began covering their bodies with “clothing,” from animal hides to Anna Sui, the necessity has arisen at some point or another to toss it off. The reaction to the absence of clothing, however, has…
Walt Disney Pictures is taking a famous singing nanny’s advice that a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down. It’s sweetening Mary Poppins, a 37-year-old movie musical about the virtues of cleanliness and proper behavior, with some interactive additions and giving it a revival theater run. In the process,…
While Saturday Night Live freed comedians from the reputations established by USO and radio-show performances, Penn & Teller were taking their craft out of the Doug Henning-dominated ’70s and making sure magic would have a life in a time when making tigers disappear wasn’t “cutting edge” anymore. Though performances on…
Sam Hamm is, relatively speaking, a successful Hollywood screenwriter, meaning he earns his keep penning screenplays without having to subsidize his income by tending bar or waiting tables. He has to his credit a handful of films, some little known (1983’s Never Cry Wolf, his debut), some enormously profitable (1989’s…
This? This wasn’t the norm. This was easy. No big deal, even though he had trained like a sadist for this bout, sparring and running and scrapping until exhaustion. Or that it took a long while to mold a body turned soft from lack of use and “too many enchiladas”…
As pure bang-up adventure, The Mexican is certainly more user-friendly than childish junk like The Way of the Gun, but the attempt to weave adult relationship psychobabble and cultural significance into the action rings utterly false, resulting in whiny gringos in taco-land. Along the road to the explosive conclusion, there…
Im Kwon Taek has long been the best-known Korean director in America; in fact, it would be fair to say that he’s pretty much the only even vaguely known Korean director, and even then his renown is strictly among festivalgoers. The general distribution of his latest film, Chunhyang, should be…
With In the Mood for Love, Wong Kar-wai solidifies his stature as the most subtle and most idiosyncratic of Hong Kong directors. In an industry best known for its accessible, crowd-pleasing comedies and action films, Wong has turned out a series of increasingly risky dramas that make little or no…
In a chat between the two acts of the brand-new musical Fat Freddy’s, Rudy Eastman defused the notion that such bawdy, rollicking material is guaranteed to graze on sold-out houses and fatten his company through the rest of a more adventurous season. The artistic director of Fort Worth’s Jubilee Theatre–who…
Imagine my surprise when I took a seat inside Fort Worth’s Sage & Silo Theatre for a revival of Bent, Martin Sherman’s pioneering if now somewhat quaint 1979 drama about the Nazi persecution of gay men, and watched as a nationally known porn star strolled on-stage. The program insert didn’t…
Al Capone is supposed to have groused that, “When I sell liquor, it’s called bootlegging; when my patrons serve it on silver trays on Lake Shore Drive, it’s called hospitality.” He would, no doubt, have enjoyed the fancy airs surrounding the Dallas Museum of Art’s new show, Henry Moore: Sculpting…
When I had the good fortune to travel to Ireland a few years ago, I was almost sent home at the first airport customs checkpoint because of how little money I was carrying. The thought of this happening had never crossed my mind–I’m American for crying out loud! Biggest military…
If nothing else, the addition of The Lone Gunmen to the Fox schedule means–for a few weeks, at least–the subtraction of The X-Files, which has become overbearing and, too often, simply unbearable. (Who among even the most die-hard True Believers doesn’t miss David Duchovny, whose presence brightens up even the…
It was to have been a routine stop on a routine press tour, yet another town in which the actress was to show up, chit and chat with the local media about her movie, then move on–the traveling salesman getting the word out, moving The Product. Denver, Dallas, San Francisco,…
Commencing with titles none too subtly placed over the bosom of a troubled young mother (Russian actress Dina Korzun) and wending its swift way through the generous advances of a lovable lout (Paddy Considine, the one-man goon squad of A Room For Romeo Brass), Last Resort is a film obsessed…
The last full Dallas production of a Suzan-Lori Parks play–not counting the workshop of her The America Play at Dallas Theater Center’s first Big D Festival of the Unexpected in 1993–was Undermain Theatre’s Southwest premiere of the playwright’s first big splash, Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom. Back in 1992,…
You have just one more weekend to catch I, Patty Diphusa, International Sex Symbol, the world premiere from Our Endeavors that has, not surprisingly, pulled in audience members beyond the typical Dallas stage crowd. The guy who cuts my hair was kicking himself last week when he had to cancel…
Hindsight doesn’t interest Gerald Peters. He didn’t get where he is today by looking back or wrestling with “what ifs.” It’s more in his nature to look forward, to survey his mini-empire of art galleries in Manhattan, Santa Fe, and Dallas, to surround himself with people who take care of…
