I love it when a movie leaves me feeling wrung out and exhausted–as if I’ve been on a tortuous journey I didn’t expect to take, but one that showed me things I never would have dreamed I’d see. Belle de Jour, surrealist filmmaker Luis Bunuel’s 1967 film about a repressed…
thursday august 10 Surfabilly roundup: You say you don’t have 50 bucks to blow for the privilege of sweating your eyeballs out at Starplex, standing among zoned-out stoners and hopped-up acid freaks, and watching Courtney Love’s eyeliner roll in rivers down her cheeks? Well, join the rest of the city…
Imagine for a moment that the good citizens of Austin have Dallas surrounded and are lobbing mortar shells into the streets, gang-raping women, and “cleansing” the Metroplex of its men. Now imagine that you are a playwright who wishes to comment on these events, but in order to reach the…
Only in California. People keep getting kicked off the O.J. jury for “planning to write a book.” First of all, what difference does it make? Nine million people a day decide their life is so danged fascinating they’ll write a book about it, but none of them ever actually do…
It’s a small world after all–oppressively small, in fact. The announcement that the Magic Kingdom would be purchasing Capital Cities/ABC for an estimated $19 billion, instantly transforming the Magic Kingdom into the largest media conglomerate on the planet, shook the entertainment industry last week in ways that Westinghouse’s purchase of…
As of this writing, there are only three American actresses who’ve proven to Hollywood they can attract big audiences by name alone–Demi Moore, Meg Ryan, and Julia Roberts. Moore is by far the worst of the three, a relentless publicity machine whose presence in wretched box-office triumphs like Disclosure proves…
At Valley Ranch, David Lang is sitting barefooted in front of his locker, which sits next to Emmitt Smith’s locker and Emmitt’s empty sweaty shoes. It is good that the shoes are sweaty because that means Emmitt is healthy, and all that is loved more than God and family in…
Editor’s note: Beginning this week, P.B. Miller, a longtime Dallas Observer contributor, takes over our regular Stage column. Nora FitzGerald, our previous columnist, has relocated to the Washington, D.C. area. Before she passed, Eurydice-like, from these pages, Nora FitzGerald asked me to visit several area theaters she had been unable…
Let’s face it. What’s the No. 1 reason for bar fights in America? It’s the following words: “What are you looking at?” And we know what he’s looking at, right? He’s looking at a female. And the female is with a guy. And any other guy who looks at, talks…
About 30 minutes into Clueless, an utterly disposable new teen comedy starring MTV-spawned glamour gal Alicia Silverstone as a spoiled Beverly Hills princess, I started to picture myself as the protagonist of a post-apocalyptic science fiction movie. I’m playing a hardbitten journalistic loner, a cross between Mad Max and Andrew…
At first, adults might not see the delightful kid-flick Babe as an intelligent, even brave film. The film’s clever combination of stunts by live animals and incredibly expressive animatronic puppets makes you suspicious, a little fearful it might become an ordeal of gimmicks. The story unleashes a barnyard full of…
That carefree blond mop atop a paste-white, square face graced by dual ellipses of tortoise shell; that rigid frame; those nimble hands; these mark the presence of Ed Begley, Jr., one of the more reliable supporting actors in Hollywood. He etched himself onto our minds during his five years with…
thursday july 27 Taste of Deep Ellum Tour ’95: With their long series of art and music festivals, it seems obvious that the powers behind Deep Ellum are trying to allay fears that the neighborhood is headed toward tourist-trapsville. Although it may be one of the first places Dallas hosts…
The Indian in the Cupboard is an oasis of calm amid the glitzy din of summer. It rarely shouts when it can whisper. Like the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm and the stories of the Arabian Nights, it’s strange and complicated and contradictory. Working from a kids’ novel by…
I’m gonna start selling this new flag. It has 49 stars and 12 stripes on it. This is gonna drive the cops crazy, not to mention the Newt Nuts who are about to clutter up the Constitution with a don’t-torch-the-flag amendment. Just think. We can load up about a thousand…
On July 28, the most expensive movie of all time, the Kevin Costner sci-fi epic Waterworld, will sail into a multiplex near you. That’s why you can’t open a newspaper or magazine or turn on the TV these days without encountering yet another retelling of its cursed production. The features…
thursday july 20 Moving The Fire: Removal of Indian Nations to Oklahoma: There is nothing more haunting about the infamous “Trail of Tears”–the U.S. government’s brutal relocation of American Indian tribes to Oklahoma in the 19th century–than the fact that so many settlers left their belongings behind but brought with…
The sweat is running through Cal Ripken Jr.’s eyebrows, into his eyes, and it’s making him squint. It is just so surrealistically hot, like someone is burning the edges of this scene for a commemorative plaque. And there is Cal, eyes stinging like any man, body temp rising like any…
Discussing 1993’s year in movies, veteran Hollywood scriptwriter William Goldman–who wrote the screenplays for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, All the President’s Men, and Marathon Man and authored the classic how-to book Adventures in the Screen Trade– singled out Free Willy as a story he wished he’d written. He…
Jason Kidd is sucking a small Gatorade and sweating like a fat guy on a rec gym free-throw line. He is atop a trailer at “Hoop it Up” in the West End. The sun feels hotter up here. And he really hates that Texas sun. No offense, of course, he…
I write this, my final column for the Dallas Observer, from an otherwise empty townhouse I have just moved into, somewhere between the Beltway and Virginia’s Bible belt. It is the transitory nature of this business that just when you feel confident in your writing gig and your babysitter and…
The opening credits of the new sci-fi thriller Species are splashed across a panorama of stars while ominous, understated theme music lurks in the background. Veteran monster movie fans might be reminded of Ridley Scott’s 1979 Alien by this deliberately hushed but melodramatic beginning. Audiences will find another link between…
