With 1994’s Exotica, Egyptian-born Atom Egoyan clinched his claim to being Canada’s leading director. His new film, The Sweet Hereafter, a Cannes hit based on Russell Banks’ celebrated novel, should solidify his hold on that problematic title. Egoyan’s work, in general, is small-scale enough to seem arty and plain enough…
thursday december 25 All-Star Christmas Invitational: We dedicate this Christmas edition of “Calendar” to you, the friendless orphan who’s faced with wandering the cold streets alone instead of being cooped up with family and friends you stopped liking long ago. In our minds, Christmas, more than any other holiday, is…
Sitting in the cavernous, “temporary” Arts District Theater to watch Dallas Theater Center’s energetic but passionless A Christmas Carol, I couldn’t help looking around and noticing how much better dressed everyone else was than me. Of course, my friends would be quick to point out that even if I could…
The new Gus Van Sant film Good Will Hunting is like an adolescent’s fantasy of being tougher and smarter and more misunderstood than anybody else. It’s also touchy-feely with a vengeance. Is this the same director who made Mala Noche and Drugstore Cowboy? Those films had a fresh way of…
If Quentin Tarantino’s Jackie Brown didn’t arrive weighted with post-Pulp Fiction expectations, it might be easier to see it for what it is: an overlong, occasionally funky caper movie directed with some feeling. It’s derived from Elmore Leonard’s 1992 bestseller Rum Punch, with the location shifted from Palm Beach, Florida,…
The ad line for As Good As It Gets is “A comedy from the heart that goes for the throat.” Isn’t this simply another way of saying, “You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll gag”? Jack Nicholson plays, of all things, a prolific romance novelist who’s a virulent xenophobe and a hopeless…
Woody Allen’s Deconstructing Harry is a film made by a free man. Liberated, for whatever reason, of the need for playing a nice guy, playing the bad man he does here frees Allen of the optimistic sanctimony that has weighed down so much of his recent work. Allen the filmmaker…
It has been almost a decade since Randy White got paid by the Dallas Cowboys to hit someone. It has been almost 15 years since Billy Joe DuPree caught a Roger Staubach touchdown pass. And it has been nearly 20 years since John Fitzgerald proved himself the master of the…
Regular readers can now tell this whiny Scrooge of a stage critic that he finally got what he’s been bitching about for weeks–a new and decidedly nontraditional holiday play titled Greetings!. I must say that, as much as I enjoyed looking at it, I’m not sure what the hell to…
Now that the Japanese Tora-san series–with fiftysome entries in 30 years–has presumably drawn to a close, following the death of star Kiyoshi Atsumi last year, the James Bond films constitute the longest-running continuous series around. They’ve had their ups and downs, but something about the Bond formula has proved enduring…
If one is in a Biblical frame of mind, the sinking of the White Star Line’s R.M.S. Titanic about 400 miles off the southern coast of Newfoundland in 1912 could well be characterized as an act of divine one-upmanship. The 46,328-ton “ship of dreams” was struck down on its maiden…
thursday december 18 Holiday on Vice: We’ve all heard the hilarious and haunting statistic that suicide crisis hot lines receive more calls this month than during any other time of the year. We’ve also heard that depression is anger turned inward, so, marrying the former fact with the latter hypothesis,…
Was Steven Spielberg fated to make Amistad? “Amity,” you might recall, was the name of the shark-bedeviled island in his breakthrough picture, Jaws; my dictionary defines it as “friendship, esp friendly relations between nations.” Amistad, too, means “friendship”–although the ship the movie is named for is a slave ship, and…
Downstairs, the beat writers were scrambling for quotes. Just moments earlier in the bowels of Reunion Arena, Ross Perot Jr.–the man who owns the Dallas Mavericks and, it seems, a good hunk of the Dallas City Council–had introduced Don Nelson, Mavericks general manager, as the team’s new head coach. Junior…
I hope that Quincy Long’s bracing, cheeky “children’s play” A Por Quinley Christmas is revived often over the next few generations, the way Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol has been for us. That will allow future, cyberspace theater critics to one day rail against it as toothless and overfamiliar the…
It’s hard for anyone under, say, 35 to understand the impact that the so-called French New Wave directors in general–and Jean-Luc Godard in particular–had on cinemaphiles (and on the art of film itself) when their films suddenly burst upon American art-house screens in the early ’60s. There was almost nothing…
Wes Craven’s Scream, which opened almost exactly a year ago, was the surprise hit of an overcrowded Christmas season. In part, the success was a triumph of counter-programming: In the midst of a glut of classy Oscar contenders, Scream was the only teen horror film. And it was helped by…
thursday december 11 La Virgen de Guadalupe Exhibition: She’s loved by millions in the Latino community; she can be seen in the back-window shrines of pickup trucks, and she’s made other people rich and famous off her image. Are we talking about Selena? No, it’s the Virgin of Guadalupe! The…
Dick Motta enters Reunion Arena quietly, with no introduction or applause. The crowd doesn’t even know he’s on the floor; they pay him no mind as he visits with a few of his former players, retired Mavericks whose faces are so familiar we take them for granted. Dressed in a…
Legendary American standup Lenny Bruce became a legend not because he was flat-out funny. Listening to his recorded material today–from his famous “Lone Ranger” routine to his various tours through the ethnic hothouses of the urban landscape–reveals a rather glaring lack of imagination, especially when you compare what has survived…
Movie special-effects maestro Phil Tippett has won billowing praise for the jaw-dropping digital transformations that turned models of alien bugs into the fearsome insect armies of Starship Troopers. But the 46-year-old founder of Tippett Studio in Berkeley, California, is his own most astonishing piece of transformation. If he’s at the…
thursday december 4 Cara Mia Theatre Company: A general perception is that immigrant and first-generation Mexican-American women are acculturated to keep silent and endure whatever life hands them. Director Marisela Barrera and Cara Mia Theatre Company, a troupe of Latina artists, have put together a show that posits a cultural…
