The coming plague…yes, yes, that same one that’ll wipe out a third of our planet’s human population like ick in an over-crowded fish tank. The experts say it’s coming, that this earth is just too damn choked with people not to breed some kind of Yber-infection, one that’ll kill every…
The secret to Asian action films’ superiority to their American counterparts over the past 10 or 15 years is simple: Would you rather watch Bruce Willis huffing and puffing his way through a fight sequence–mostly just shooting everyone in sight and squinting too much–or Jackie Chan using any and every…
thursday february 4 How do you choose between an Asian film festival (see sidebar) and a French film festival? We’ll leave that one up to you. All we’ll say is that if French films are anything like French people, the choice should be fairly simple. We’ve never been to France–traveling…
“All women who’ve wanted to break out of the prison of consciousness…are strange monsters,” declared travel writer and poet May Sarton, “who’ve renounced the treasure of their silence for a curious, devouring pleasure.” She goes on to name Emily Dickinson, Christina Rossetti, and Sappho as examples, so we know she’s…
The place has been closed for seven months. While the great unwashed didn’t notice, the rest of the art freaks sure did. Dallas can’t afford to lose a gallery–especially a great alternative space–like Gray Matters. We’d drive by the closed doors on North Haskell every once in a while and…
Nearly everyone–certainly every film buff–who saw the last James Bond movie, Tomorrow Never Dies, came away excited, though the film was certainly no match for Goldfinger or From Russia With Love. Audiences were buzzing, not about the gadgets or about Pierce Brosnan, but about Michelle Yeoh–the Hong Kong actress who…
Between the current nostalgia for platform shoes and the epidemic of midlife crises that has so many baby boomers in its grip, director Brian Gibson’s Still Crazy just might be able to find an audience among the disturbed, the deafened, and the disenchanted. It is, after all, the comic tale…
No one messes with the King. No one. We learned our lesson a couple of weeks ago that our comments on the flurry of activity surrounding the 64th birthday Elvis Presley would be celebrating if he were alive–we said if–were a tad irreverent. Elvis may be dead, but his fans…
thursday january 28 The only positive thing to come out of a good band breaking up is that, occasionally, its members go on to form bands that are even better or at least as good. Legendary Crystal Chandelier and Centro-matic sprang out of Funland, UFOFU and Comet gave way to…
What would a week be without a mention in this paper of at least one of the following local wonders: The Dooms U.K., Centro-matic, Peter Schmidt, Corn Mo, or the Good/Bad Art Collective? None of these agencies is paying us under the table. We swear. This Friday, the Good/Bad Art…
It has often been written that while film is a director’s medium, theater is the province of the actor. Except for that phenomenon known as “director’s theater”–on the plus side, the current New York productions of Cabaret and Swan Lake and, on the minus side, Franco Zefferilli’s recent animal-costumed, boo-inspiring…
Elevate The Jerry Springer Show a notch or two–in other words, dispense with the one-legged serial killers who are having sex with their blind mothers, and other such nonsense–and you’ve got Willard Carroll’s Playing by Heart. Too harsh a judgment, some will say. After all, this well-meaning, relentlessly sincere ensemble…
“Freedom’s just another word for nothin’ left to lose,” Kris Kristofferson sings in his most beguiling song, “Me and Bobby McGee.” Stephen Frears’ The Hi-Lo Country tries in vain to be just as lyrical about love and liberty. In this 20th-century Western, a cattle rancher named Pete (Billy Crudup) narrates…
thursday january 21 The Lean Theater’s latest production, Kevin Kling’s Lloyd’s Prayer, is your typical boy-meets-girl story, except for one thing: The girl (Bobbi) was raised by raccoons, and the boy (Lloyd) is an ex-con who takes her on the tent-revival circuit to swindle money from the true believers. Hmmm,…
Even as you read this, 181 of this states’ most sought-after men and women are settling into their plush chairs in Austin preparing to do the state’s business. Since the Legislature is in session for only five months, lawmakers eager to show they’re worth the votes that got them there…
Maybe the last dance performance you saw was your sister’s ballet recital. Perhaps you vaguely remember long hours spent at the obligatory Christmastime Nutcraker and how the men in tights made you squirm. Maybe you’re one of those people who just never cared for dance, and you don’t see why…
Dallas Stars backup goaltender Roman Turek is having the best season of his National Hockey League career. He won 11 games all of last season; already, less than halfway into the 1998-’99 campaign that finds Dallas owning the NHL’s best record, Turek has seven wins. In the 12 games he’s…
Directed by Walter Salles (1995’s Foreign Land), the Brazilian film Central Station concerns the relationship between a homeless 9-year-old boy and the insensitive, acerbic woman who reluctantly agrees to help him find his father. Winner of the Golden Bear for Best Film at the 1998 Berlin Film Festival (as well…
History has always been among my weaker subjects: I carry around gaps in my knowledge that you could drop a war or a social movement through. But it was nonetheless startling to learn that Article III of the original Constitution was a clause forbidding theater critics. Frank Rich of The…
The lead story last week in the syndicated column News of the Weird was about how “Great Britain’s premiere art award, the Turner Prize, was won in December by painter Chris Ofili, whose signature finishing touch on his work is a few blotches of elephant manure. Ofili’s centerpiece…bears the title…
Viewers who find Hurlyburly one of the most weirdly annoying movies they’ve seen–which is likely–will probably locate different “last straws” in the self-indulgent bundle of hay that has been made from David Rabe’s grueling 1984 play. For me, it was watching Eddie (Sean Penn) stretched out beneath a glass coffee…
For critics (and for audience members who enjoy thinking too much), there are movie devices and there are movie effects. Movie devices–happy endings, sad endings, emotion-wracked confessions, harrowing confrontations–are those stock contraptions that filmmakers employ with varying degrees of subtlety to induce movie effects–making you laugh, making you cry, creating…
