Hardhat Shakespeare Since Cliff Redd returned to his roots as executive director of the Shakespeare Festival of Dallas last April, all hell’s broken loose. “You might say we have a hyperactive staff,” Redd says of the ambitious programming changes for the festival this summer, plus the February launch of an…
Last year’s remake of The Mummy had all of Hollywood’s essential Egyptian movie standards — lots of sand, eternal love, priests and magic, Westerners who didn’t understand what they were messing with, treasure hunters and booby traps, and curses on those who entered tombs and disturbed the dead. While some…
James Lipton is so obsequious, it’s astonishing the man does not conduct his interviews from his subjects’ anal cavities. The host of Bravo’s hysterical, oddly riveting Inside the Actors Studio never misses an opportunity to suck up to the famous and talented who deign to accept his invitation. When Sylvester…
Once, a very long time ago, John Frankenheimer was scared of things. He was scared of being fired from his job directing live television dramas during the 1950s; scared of missing a shot, of trying something daring and failing so spectacularly that he would never work again. Once, in the…
Director John Frankenheimer has been putting bad guys on the street since Luca Brazzi slept with a teddy bear, and he shows no sign of letting up at age 70. In Reindeer Games, a relentless (and relentlessly witty) crime thriller set in the frozen wastes of northern Michigan, a sleazy…
Step right up, youth of the world, and receive the Boomer inoculation that is Wonder Boys, the first feature from director Curtis Hanson since his much-lauded adaptation of James Ellroy’s L.A. Confidential. (Indeed, this is yet another adaptation, this time of Michael Chabon’s 1995 novel.) Then marvel at Michael Douglas…
It’s not a startling breach of conventional wisdom to apply the term “masterpiece” to Alfred Hitchcock’s 1954 film Rear Window, which is being reissued this week in a nice restored print that, if memory serves, is better (though not that much better) than we’ve seen before. But critical reputations can…
What’s going on here? A tender, patient shot of a school custodian sweeping the floor? Frequent cutaways to branches teeming with singing birds, or to an unused water tower looming like an alien monolith? Split-level houses, bric-a-brac, and a freshly renovated kitchen? Is director Eric Mendelsohn attempting, in his first…
Some film aficionados are weaned on art-house offerings, savoring the mise-en-scène of Kurosawa, the montage of Eisenstein, and the imagery of Fellini. Others suckle on the teat of Cinemax, sneaking back into the living room after Mom and Dad have gone to bed to study the brutal disfigurement of bad…
Beating and being beaten about the head and torso until one of two bruised and bloodied humans drops — clever sport, boxing, which tops even American football for sheer poetic elegance. So it’s not surprising — and this is only half sarcastic — that so many fine films have been…
The Cup In a Tibetan monastery-in-exile in Bhutan, the head abbot (Lama Chonjor) is curious, though not the least bit ruffled, to discover that some of his monks are secretly sneaking off to a nearby town to watch World Cup matches on television. Not surprisingly, the abbot has never heard…
Twenty-seven-year-old Ben Younger delivers the message of his first feature, Boiler Room, with all the subtlety of a car bomb. To wit: Greed is alive and well in the new century, fueled by the material dreams of a generation bent on instant gratification and the distorted expectations of neophyte investors…
Even at just 92 minutes, this film feels endless. Intended as a humorous, heartwarming take on dysfunctional family relationships, Hanging Up doesn’t work as comedy or drama or anything in between. Given its wealth of above-the-line talent — director and costar Diane Keaton, writers Delia and Nora Ephron, and actresses…
Pitch Black is one of those films that becomes a distant memory while you watch it. Not only does it barely register as you sit through it — the film feels so distant, it occasionally seems as though it’s being shown in a neighboring theater — but it recalls a…
It’s hard to blame Kirk Douglas for choosing so formulaic a vehicle as a comeback film, especially after fighting back from a devastating stroke almost four years ago. Certainly no one can fault him for wanting to act again, to prove he’s still got it. However, the question is: Can…
“Fuckin’ long life, ain’t it?” Two characters in two different scenes of Jim Cartwright’s Road express this sentiment, not so much with weariness but as bitterly humorous testimony to all the ways they must distract their senses to make it through another night. Alcohol remains the diversion of choice, to…
So I’m leaving. Sitting on the floor of my apartment (which is in pre-move shambles), typing on my laptop (which is seizing up with an irritating little virus), and reflecting on my last two years as an art columnist for the Dallas Observer (which have been amazing), I can’t help…
Fighting fire It’s been quiet — too quiet — since Talley Dunn filed her lawsuit against former employer Gerald Peters in August. The scandal-curious were beginning to believe that a settlement must be in the works, since the dueling gallerists were quietly conducting business as usual. Dunn opened Dunn Brown…
It’s the kind of book that the educated liberal might approach from a cynical angle, or at least with a generous shaker of salt. How to take the spiritual musings of a dreadlocked single mother? As meditative ramble, soulful lecture, or worldly-wise confession? Anne Lamott sidesteps any category with the…
The South Dallas Cultural Center serves up a week that will satisfy all four major food groups of the arts — visual art, music, film, and theater — for the climax of OurStory 2000: A Diaspora Perspective, the center’s celebration of Black History Month. For the film portion, Black Cinematheque…
Jane Campion’s 1992 film The Piano was an intoxicating work of art, a film of such beauty and power, it literally took my breath away. Nothing the New Zealand-born writer-director has done before or since even comes close to matching it in form, content, or sensibility. And her latest film,…
La crème de la coiffure! A mock documentary about, of all things, a Scottish hairdresser who travels to America to compete in an international hairstyling tournament, The Big Tease is a mildly amusing romp that benefits enormously from an ingratiating performance by Scottish actor Craig Ferguson, who also co-wrote the…
