Rapper Ice Cube’s debut as a director-screenwriter is a big step backward in terms of the representation of African-Americans and women in film. The Players Club features a group of up-and-coming black male actors who portray hardly anything other than rogue hustlers, abusive hip-hoppers, and capricious rapists. The film’s women…
If nothing else, the current edition of Michael Moore’s continuing self-love fest does have a great subject: the desperation hidden inside a “thriving” U.S. economy. While politicians and financial wizards point to unemployment on the wane and profits on the rise, Moore notes that the largest employer in the country…
The flimsiest hustle in movie promotion today–one perpetrated by film festivals and their camp followers–is that independent movies are starved for mainstream attention. The truth is, they often have an open field in big-city media. Major studios are usually unable to deliver a finished print of a would-be blockbuster until…
What follows are brief reviews of some highlights from the USA Film Festival, arranged chronologically. The festival runs Thursday, April 16, through Thursday, April 23. All events take place at the AMC Glen Lakes, 9450 N. Central Expressway, except for the Master Screen Artist Tribute to Christopher Walken, which will…
PORT CHARLOTTE, Fla.–Luis Mayoral answers the door wearing only a white T-shirt and red Jockey briefs. He has a lit menthol cigarette dangling from his smiling lips, and for the rest of the hour we spend together, this is how the Texas Rangers’ Latin American liaison remains–half-dressed, smoking, smiling as…
Driving to Mesquite to see a provocative, world-premiere play by a talented Texas playwright? Jeez, what’s next–performance art by a radical African-American collective in Garland? Actually, you shouldn’t be surprised that a stately construction like the Mesquite Arts Center, which sticks out like a good tooth among the day-care centers…
Barney the Dinosaur’s broad purple hide has sustained quite a few scars since Barney and Friends debuted on PBS in spring 1992. Bob Dole denounced him on the floor of the Senate as part of a public television scam. Rogue computer programmers made him the target of automatic weapons fire…
When you think about how some of the smartest, most surprising films about women have been made by men–and how, when a woman filmmaker manages to score a decent budget for her project, she does the same for stories about men–you start to realize: Directors should dare to speak for…
Nobel Prize winner Albert Camus thought life was absurd, but all the more meaningful for it. His contemporaries Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir thought him a cut-rate intellectual because he had a sentimental side. As early as 25, Camus was aware of the conflict between his brain and his…
Thursday April 2 If you just know Ship of Fools and “The Jilting of Granny Weatherall” from college classes, you don’t know the late Texas writer Katherine Anne Porter. Her one novel, Ship of Fools, felt, to some critics, like Peyton Place in a life jacket (plus one dwarf). Even…
Central Expressway at 3 a.m. is a different kind of war zone than its daytime persona. Instead of cars locked bumper-to-bumper in a familiar, maddening crawl through the center of the city, the after-hours Central is far more cinematic. Nearly surreal in its undulating grimness, the only cars it carries…
I recently spoke before about 30 members of the local volunteer arts fundraising group 500 Inc.–with more than a little trepidation. I was the guest of the Undermain Theatre, which, like all major recipients of grants from this group, must provide free “Sample The Arts” events for the organization. My…
I couldn’t see the bathtub in Richard Diebenkorn’s giant abstract painting. Didn’t even try. But two women who had broken off from our guided tour at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth did. Or so they said. In fact, that bathtub got ’em pretty excited. “And see, Susan. Right…
Probably every film director itches to make a western, so let’s be thankful that, with The Newton Boys, Richard Linklater has scratched his itch. Now he can go back to making movies about subjects for which he has some genuine feeling. Linklater should not be begrudged his chance to “stretch.”…
Lovers of American movies used to joke that foreign films wouldn’t look so good if you saw them without subtitles. John Sayles’ latest movie, Men With Guns, plays better than his other films because it does have subtitles. Bald dialogue always sounds better in Spanish and Indian dialects. Set in…
Radiohead is finally coming to town. Why do I hear groans? I’m so tired of critics trying to be perverse by denouncing Radiohead’s 1997 release OK Computer. Seems some of them are compelled to label it pretentious and arty and smug after the first wave of critics deemed it brilliant…
New Theatre Company may have lost a terrific space with the closing of the Theatre on Elm Street, but they got a helluva consolation prize: the almost-black box space called Theatre Too in the basement of Jac Alder’s Theatre Three in the Quadrangle. New Theatre’s artistic director, Bruce Coleman, admits:…
Thursday March 26 America’s intellectual elite hammers us daily with how television has rotted our brains. But the explosion of popularity in staged readings, poetry slams, and spoken-word performances suggests to us that many people have reached the saturation point with electronic sounds and images; the live, one-on-one exchange of…
For all the major American film critics who conspired to cram the ludicrously overpraised L.A. Confidential down the country’s throat, I have found a penalty befitting the crime. Fess up now that you got a little careless after downing a few too many macho-celluloid cocktails shaken by the likes of…
Though critics often compared Virginia Woolf’s nonlinear, almost cubist narratives to the then-burgeoning cinema’s use of montage, close-ups, flashbacks, tracking shots, and rapid cuts, the strength of Woolf’s novels lay in the rhythm of her arresting style, and in her heroines’ poignant and melancholic musings, which insidiously seep through the…
After a quick scan of a list of the past lectures presented by the Eclectic Viewpoint, it’s hard to resist the temptation to denounce the organization as mere coattail riders, snake-oil salesmen preying on the neo-conspiracy theorists who spend their time prowling anti-government chat rooms and their money on X-Files…
The American reissues of Jackie Chan films have met with declining box-office success since Chan burst onto the scene in 1996 with Rumble in the Bronx. With any luck, the latest Chan opus to be recut and redubbed for Americans, the year-old Mr. Nice Guy, should reverse the trend. No…
