Welcome to one of the slowest film weekends of the year, second only to the first week in January, when all the classy holiday releases are clogging up the available screens. This is usually when distributors put out their saddest mistakes, looking for a few quick bucks on the way…
thursday september 4 Dancing at Lughnasa: Previously produced in Dallas by the Dallas Theater Center, Brian Friel’s ecstatically lauded family dramedy, Dancing at Lughnasa, gets another production by Fort Worth’s stellar Stage West ensemble. This’ll probably be your last chance to see Friel’s story of five unmarried sisters barely surviving…
It’s tempting (and just a little bit cheap) to read all kinds of incestuous undertones in Paula Vogel’s poignant, occasionally acidic, three-actor comedy, The Baltimore Waltz, not the least because Vogel’s newest Off-Broadway hit, How I Learned to Drive, has offended some in the New York theater community. That emotionally…
Mike Leigh’s new film, Career Girls, is compact and minor. I don’t mean that as a slam exactly. After the dawdling expansiveness of last year’s Secrets & Lies, his latest one is something of a relaxation–it’s appealingly small-scale. Leigh isn’t doing anything here he hasn’t done better before, but at…
Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation–a goofy remake of the 1974 scare, uh, classic–is a film so worthless that the admission ought to come with a $7.50 rebate coupon. In retrospect, the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre seems kind of quaint, its blood-red faded with the passage of time. When it…
If you’re nostalgic for the cockeyed let-it-all-out gabfests of the late John Cassavetes, She’s So Lovely will seem like dejà vu all over again. Cassavetes wrote the script more than a decade ago, and now his son Nick–whose first feature, Unhook the Stars, starred his mother, Gena Rowlands–has directed it…
thursday august 28 Amphitryon (Ye Gods!): Theatre Three is pleased to be able to present a premiere of a new translation by Richard Wilbur, a man who earned a Pulitzer for his poetry and the affection of English-speaking theatergoers worldwide for his translations of Moliere’s devastatingly witty 17th century comedies…
In critical circles, Harold Pinter has the reputation of being “an actor’s playwright,” mostly because he acted for a number of years in 1950s London under the pseudonym David Baron. His scripts go so far as to instruct the actors where and how long they should pause between dialogue. A…
Time has a way of slipping by when you’re not looking, but don’t worry: While you’re distracted, studio executives are keeping their usual keen eyes on the calendar, tabulating the simple economic arithmetic of boomer nostalgia. Hmmm…1997 minus 1957 equals 40 years. Forty years of nostalgic forgetfulness multiplied by the…
Critics and audiences outside France have been going on for so long about the decline in French cinema that it’s fun to see a French film–Irma Vep–that says much the same thing. The rap is, of course, somewhat unfair–most raps are–but there’s no question that even the best of recent…
In G.I. Jane, Demi Moore’s Naval Intelligence officer, Lt. Jordan O’Neil, is recruited as a test case to be the first female Navy SEAL. She gets a buzzcut and loses her period. She endures the indignities of the male volunteers snickering at her in the food line. She rolls huge…
When the beautiful entomologist rips open the chest cavity of a huge, bloodthirsty insect in the sci-fi nightmare Mimic, it turns into Thoraxic Park. This movie, like Spielberg’s, features evolution gone haywire and dramaturgy gone to hell. In the prologue, the heroine–the reckless and courageous (or foolhardy and stupid) Dr…
thursday august 21 My Head Was a Sledgehammer: Scanning the two-page, small-type press release that Our Endeavors Productions prepared for its Southwest premiere of playwright Richard Foreman’s My Head Was a Sledgehammer induces a little chill in even the hardiest of experimental theatergoers. Foreman, a six-time Obie winner and acknowledged…
Ask 34-year-old playwright Neil LaBute how he came to see his controversial debut feature In the Company of Men hit the big screen, and he’ll tell you he doesn’t quite know. “I became a filmmaker by accident, by proxy,” LaBute says during the Dallas stop on a 15-city international tour…
By the end of Event Horizon, an ocean of red nearly drowns half the cast–this is a literal bloodbath. Blood pours from their throats, from their eye sockets, from their exposed veins and entrails; it splashes down corridors, runs down walls, fills every inch of screen space and then some…
The cops in Cop Land carry on like a bunch of goombahs. On the take from the Mob, they mimic the Mob. The fuzzy line dividing cops and crooks is the subject of many a strong police movie, but Cop Land goes a step further–it says there is no line…
When Time magazine columnist Walter Shapiro referred to himself last month as part of a generation that still believes “A Thousand Clowns holds all the secrets to human existence,” I thought he must be daft. Yes, high school students took Herb Gardner’s hit comedy about an urban dropout (played by…
thursday august 14 Landscape: Ever participated in those silly “Be Handicapped For a Day” office events where you ride around in a wheelchair or wear a blindfold to help you sympathize? There’s something about being able to remove your handicap at the end of the day that makes it…well, not…
Ion was written some 500 years before the birth of Christ by a man who, infrequently honored with literary awards during his lifetime, wrote and lived alone in a cave. (Like all juicy tidbits about classical writers, this last item may be apocryphal, originally invented in the interest of characterizing…
Jerry Fletcher, the hero of Conspiracy Theory, is a comic, glamorous variation on Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver. Like Travis, he’s a New York cabbie obsessed with protecting a woman from the world’s hidden malignancies. Unlike Travis, Jerry snaps when he achieves sanity. Mel Gibson has been almost too willing…
In the not-so-brave new world of independent filmmaking, low-budget movies premiere at Sundance or Cannes and win plaudits from over-psyched audiences, publicity from desperate feature writers, and distribution from boutiques that are usually subsidiaries of major studios. Right now Tarantino-style thrillers are out; crazy-clan stories and upstairs-downstairs tales are in…
All you heterosexual men looking for a film to see with your girlfriend, consider this a warning–Neil Labute’s In the Company of Men is not a date movie. Nor is this slow-burn indie drama a “black comedy,” as some critics have dubbed it. The film could be described as a…
