Lord, just what is it about rock and roll that so befuddles filmmakers? Save for This Is Spinal Tap, there has never been a movie about the music business that got it right…or, for God’s sakes, merely half-wrong. Too often, these films are made by people who seem to have…
Fran Lebowitz once observed that if the problem with communism is that it’s too boring, then the problem with fascism is that it’s too exciting. This aphorism neatly sums up the strange sex appeal some people find in Nazi drag: high leather boots, padded shoulders, shaved heads, various daunting interrogation…
Most among us don’t love or hate The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Rather, it’s a matter of how much you love it — a little, or a-rice-throwing, Windex-bottle-spraying-lot. Maybe you’re just a Brad if you don’t dig a schlock-and-roll musical that lampoons ’50s uptightness and old sci-fi movies, dolled up…
“It’s one hollow thing meeting another hollow thing.” This is how London art critic Matthew Collings describes the hubbub over the Brooklyn Museum’s recent staging of the traveling exhibition Sensation. Collings, who has viewed the über-trendy Brit art show in all three of its venues — The Royal Academy in…
I would have said that the October chill had solidified resolve in the Dallas theater community, but temperatures have reached the upper 80s and lower 90s, so there’s some other explanation for the bold confidence displayed in this month’s productions. 11th Street Theatre Project offers up one of its simplest…
Bats This horror picture about mutant killer bats terrorizing a little desert town is basically just like Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds. There are two major differences: First, The Birds was about birds, while Bats is about bats; and second, The Birds was a flawed but brilliant work by one of…
Pat Toomay’s name is not so prominent in the history books, perhaps because he played for the Dallas Cowboys between a beloved veteran (George Andrie) and a would-be Super Bowl MVP (Harvey Martin). Or maybe someone has gone into the history books and erased his name, since he did not…
Even from this distance, a long city block away on the courthouse square in Waxahachie, you can tell something’s not quite right with Perry Murphy. The sight of him, half-shuffling across Franklin Street, grabs the attention of the dozen people gathered early this evening for Stephen Anderson’s art opening at…
Gorey Stories, the autumn production of Scott Osborne and Patti Kirkpatrick’s Our Endeavors Theater Company, is an exciting theatrical event for one reason, shared by two entities: Sitting in the audience, you are watching a company (Our Endeavors) and an institution (Deep Ellum Center for the Arts) tumble out of…
And on the subject of turning an unwieldy performance space into a suitable showcase for theater, I have to say that Teatro Dallas artistic director Cora Cardona and her design crew have made me a believer in the potential of that shoebox of a “converted” rehearsal space that resides in…
Local angle Fort Worth Modern Art Museum chief curator Michael Auping says that after one final conference call this week, he’ll wrap up his decision as one of the six curators for New York’s prestigious Whitney Museum of American Art 2000 Biennial. Selected artists won’t be announced until December for…
“That reminds me of the movies Marty made about New York,” stammered Lou Reed somewhere in the mid-’80s. “All those frank and brutal movies that are so brillyunt.” It was a clumsy, rhyme-impaired album track (“Doing the Things That We Want To” from New Sensations), but, as has often been…
Boys Don’t Cry, the first effort from writer-director Kimberly Peirce, unfolds as slowly and deliberately as the reel of film it’s printed on, dawdling on the minor, mundane moments of growing up and growing bored in a small Midwest town. It’s as though Peirce wants to show just how easy…
Since there is no way to talk about The Best Man without eventually invoking the phrase “Spike Lee’s cousin,” let’s just get it out of the way: The Best Man is the directorial debut of Malcolm D. Lee, who is Spike Lee’s cousin. Having worked on various S. Lee films,…
Based on his directorial debut, there are three things we can safely say about Antonio Banderas: He’s an actor’s director, meaning he can pick a good cast and coax great performances from them; he knows how to make a good image and where to point the camera; and he has…
There have been so many recent movies about modern gay teenage life, you’d think a filmmaker would be hard-pressed to find a new wrinkle on what has become an increasingly familiar tale. But Head On isn’t a pro forma drama of self-discovery and self-acceptance. As directed by Ana Kokkinos and…
Fort Worth is a prime town for a film festival. It’s got that historic look (even if it is brand-new), it’s easy to negotiate by car, and its city center is accessible by foot. It’s big enough to offer some non-festival options for those suffering celluloid burnout, and small enough…
The skeptics among us might be tempted to dismiss an archaeological find making its premiere at Dallas’ suspicious-phenomena clearinghouse The Eclectic Viewpoint; it’s just too easy to think of it as the doings of the far-out, the paranoid, or the just plain crazy. But it’s too hard to resist a…
David Fincher needs a hug, the poor bastard. Or possibly a diaper change. Ever since 1992, when he ruined the Alien series with the excrescence of his pointless, senseless third installment, he’s been making the same bratty, obnoxious movie over and over again: gloom, doom, indestructible protagonist, bureaucratic evil, quasi-religious…
Steven Soderbergh may have had some rocky times after his 1989 breakthrough with sex, lies, and videotape, but these days he’s on a roll. Last year he produced Pleasantville and directed Out of Sight, two of the year’s most praised films. This year he has The Limey, a complex, introspective…
Toward the end of his published journal on the making of the watershed indie film sex, lies, and videotape — his 1989 million-dollar feature debut that jump-started the independent-film-is-hip craze, put the Sundance Film Festival on the map, upset Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing for the top award at…
Am I a traitor to my gender because I didn’t find this unabashed film about female sexuality erotic, brave, or even — can I say it — interesting? The ironically titled Romance, directed by the audacious French filmmaker Catherine Breillat (36 Fillette), has become something of a cause célèbre wherever…
