I learned an important lesson while watching Having Our Say, Emily Mann’s theatrical adaptation of the best-selling memoir from a pair of hundred-year-old black sisters in New York: African-Americans have indeed arrived in the mainstream. This huge Broadway hit celebrates the fact that they can be just as shortsighted and…
The gallery space feels womb-like–dark, humid, warm. Actual mist floats though the air. An old film whirrs on a tiny antique projector, little strobe lights throw images toward an old stuffed chair. Smoke and mirrors, if you will, where the claustrophobic meets the soothing in the strange and ominous microcosm…
Hong Kong director Kirk Wong (credited here as Che-Kirk Wong) is the latest defector from the troubled H.K. film industry. Until now, he has been best known in the United States for his Jackie Chan film Crime Story, which played art houses before being picked up for wider release by…
Gwyneth Paltrow gets another chance to show off her letter-perfect English accent in Sliding Doors, an engaging romantic comedy that employs a rather novel narrative device: After introducing the main characters and setting up the basic story, the film splits into two separate but parallel plot lines. It’s a twist…
Is the opposite of offhand, onhand? If so, The Spanish Prisoner is the most onhand movie since Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket. Writer-director David Mamet delights in his own supposed cleverness; he wants you to scratch your head while he manipulates your brain. Campbell Scott plays a researcher in some…
In writer-director James Toback’s quicksilver sex comedy Two Girls and a Guy, Robert Downey Jr. plays Blake Allen, a struggling New York actor who lives in a spacious loft in SoHo he probably can’t afford. He’s a pampered prince who has worked out for himself a cozy romantic subterfuge: He…
Two unrelated facts: the French Revolution happened more than 200 years ago. Painting has been called “dead.” So what’s an artist doing painting the clasped hands of Napoleon and the baleful gaze of Louis the XVI? He’s kicking beautiful dust in the eyes of narrow-sighted fact-mongers, that’s what. Toronto-based Tony…
This year’s USA Film Festival may have, uh, sucked, but that doesn’t mean that great films aren’t coming to Dallas. Witness the Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture’s special screening of The Night of the Hunter, the 1955 film that did for preachers what Stephen King’s It did for clowns…
thursday april 23 Let’s face facts: If wine were really “better than masturbating” (as the tag line for the Art Bar’s Generation X Wine Tasting argues), there would be more Internet sites devoted to full-bodied Merlots instead of Pamela Lee’s full-bodied implants, and peep shows would be replaced by $1-per-glass…
Just now, Cool Storm is anything but. The two-year-old thoroughbred rages beneath his rider, a bundle of nerves wound tightly inside a fierce and beautiful half-ton frame. He shuffles from side to side, rears backward, moves any which way but forward. The horse grinds his teeth so hard, so loudly,…
The caprice of totalitarianism burdened the thoughts of a 32-year-old Albert Camus when, in 1945, he staged a theatrical meditation called Caligula, or The Meaning of Death. He hid out while the Nazis plundered France, writing inflammatory articles for the Resistance and nurturing his philosophy of the absurd that would…
With I Love You…Don’t Touch Me!, first-time filmmaker Julie Davis has made a low-budget movie about love and abstinence among under-30s that looks less to the films of her generational peers–Noah Baumbach’s Kicking and Screaming or Kevin Smith’s Chasing Amy for instance–than to Woody Allen’s quirky romances of the ’70s…
From its very first frame, Neil Jordan’s The Butcher Boy whooshes us inside the rollicking, deranged world of 12-year-old Francie Brady (Eamonn Owens). Francie is a red-headed roustabout who lives with his alcoholic “Da” (Stephen Rea) and screw-loose mother (Aisling O’Sullivan) in a small town in northern Ireland in the…
Since 1993, Denton’s Good/Bad Art Collective has made the unexpected part of its routine. From its one-night-only installation policy to its constant stretching of the definition of art, Good/Bad has created art that not only involves viewers, it depends on them. The collective’s methods extend to the concerts that help…
Machine art. Interactive kinetic sculpture. Robotic performance art. Extreme technology art. Whatever you call it, it’s usually violent, incendiary, and nihilistic. That’s what makes it fun. The Seemen, a San Francisco-based machine-art collective, descend on the Orbit Room on Tuesday, April 21, to show this cloistered town the thrill of…
thursday april 16 In our rush to get out this year’s weak USA Film Festival schedule, we didn’t have time to include last-minute info about major changes that involved two of the festival’s best events. The hilarious, ruthless TV-sitcom writer satire Hacks has been bumped up to Thursday, April 16,…
I don’t know that the title Fireworks really fits the art show to which it refers. Clay works, huh? Real explosive stuff. I guess if you leave it in the kiln long enough… In case you haven’t noticed, an international “celebration” of clay and ceramic works has run through this…
Betting on horse racing is bad, or so we’ve been led to believe for most of our lives. Movies show us it’s bad through their alternating portrayals of track denizens as either pathetic losers or greasy criminals (for a look at both, check out Richard Dreyfuss’ surprisingly entertaining 1989 film…
Thursday April 9 Funny how fast things can change in Hollywood. In the early ’90s, Keenen Ivory Wayans was high on the success of his groundbreaking sketch comedy show In Living Color, and the prevailing wisdom around town was that his brothers and sister would still be waiting tables and…
For four innings, everything was perfect. After a while, you could hear grown men hold their breath each time the ball left the pitcher’s hand; you could feel the cheers every time an opposing batter struck out or a fly ball was snared in midflight or a ground ball bounced…
Playwright and screenwriter John Patrick Shanley loves words. Anyone with a similar depth of feeling for the currency of human communication cannot blame him; it’s easy to become enthralled with the sounds, even the look on the printed page, of words, and forget that they are symbols of meaning, not…
Damned if she does, damned if she don’t. Los Angeles-based Susan Otto faces the same speedbumps other female artists face in this post-feminist age, but she tackles them with a finely tuned sledgehammer. She pounds away at social constructs, at the notion that the female voice is a tired one,…
