There’s an unfun tendency in American life to fictionalize our national heroes as rigid statue-people who only speak as though they are delivering commencement addresses, a kind of unlovable, Al Gore-ish anti-charisma that would inhibit anyone in real life from becoming a national hero in the first place. Own it,…
If you Google the phrase “Danzig shopping for cat supplies,” you’ll find links to phone-cam shots of former Misfits singer Glenn Danzig crossing a grocery-store parking lot while wearing a Danzig T-shirt and carrying Fresh Step. He’s a striking figure, and, with his pale, vampiric aspect, totally incongruent with the…
If you saw Louis CK’s concert in Dallas two weekends ago, his monologue on last night’s Saturday Night Live may have been a bit disappointing. He did about seven minutes of material from his current tour, basically word for word. But he more than made up for it two sketches…
If NASA wanted to beam one video into space that encapsulates our achievement in the cinematic arts, so that distant, intelligent lifeforms might pause before blowing us up, this should be the one video. It’s a quintessential edit of IMDB’s top 250 films, set to a raucous re-mix of “Jump…
Denzel Washington sulks, soars in Flight
The yammering about “Oscar gold” and Denzel Washington’s potential three-peat will soon reach a deafening pitch, but such noise can only embarrass a fine character study like Flight, whose prevailing tone is a heavy, elemental melancholy. The mood is there from the opening pan across the Orlando airport under gray,…
It’s hard out there for a video game villain: always being attacked, never given the benefit of the doubt and forever pigeonholed into a role no one wants to see you escape. Such is the fate of Wreck-It Ralph (John C. Reilly), the bad guy in an old-school arcade game…
Attention, Eon Productions, Daniel Craig and Heineken: James Bond is not a beer drinker! Sure, I know. Getting all worked up about the new James Bond installment is like freaking out about a new Tim Burton movie — past glories don’t justify contemporary relevance. The year 2012 marks 50 years…
Sean Baker’s Starlet stars Dree Hemingway (Ernest’s great-granddaughter) as Jane, a 21-year-old “girl next door” porn performer whose off-hours are spent getting high in the Valley house she shares with fellow “starlet” Melissa (Stella Maeve) and Melissa’s small-time impresario boyfriend (James Ransone). The story in the movie, which screens at…
Pee Wee’s Playhouse was a collage of art forms, where furniture puppets turned into characters and wallpaper sucked you into a cross-dimensional portal. If you cracked open the snow-globe brain of artist Wayne White you’d see much of the same. He designed the set for the cult production back in…
The trailer for Cloud Atlas, the gargantuan new movie of David Mitchell’s 2004 novel that took two Wachowski siblings and Tom Tykwer to adapt, looks less like a preview than a whole slate of coming attractions, so many and varied are the times and places that it touches down. The…
Gossip Girl and The O.C., the two teen TV shows created in the past decade by 36-year-old Josh Schwartz, are sly bait and switches. Both are easily marketable for their hot (mess) fashion-plate stars, wide-eyed luxury fetishism, soapy season arcs and savvy self-reference, but both are also, at heart, deeply…
At around the four-minute mark of my first viewing of the Cloud Atlas trailer, as the M83 track swelled to its bursting point and a hoverbike darted through future-Korea, I remember emailing and GChatting at least a dozen friends with a link to the preview and my take: “Holy Shit.”…
There’s a scene from the 1929 surrealist film Un Chien Andalou that everyone who’s taken a film history class will remember: A man (Luis Bunuel, the writer-director) is sharpening a straight razor on his balcony. He then takes the blade and runs it along his thumb. The film shows a…
Sex. Love. Dope. Violence. Rock ‘n’ roll. Gary Oldman. Sid Vicious and Nancy Spugen set the bar for dysfunction in punk rock coupling. Their violence drove their passion. Their daily diet of heroin didn’t help the matter. Still, there’s something charming about that love story. Not fictitious film romance, “Rocky…
Every Texan’s favorite high-school football drama has been an amusing subplot in the presidential campaign ever since Mitt Romney co-opted Friday Night Light’s locker-room slogan: “Clear Eyes, Full Hearts, Can’t Lose.” The show’s creator didn’t approve; the author of the book upon which the show based did. And the Romney…
Cable channel HGTV goes big and goes Home, Strange Home with the new show about odd domiciles and the people who dwell in them. Premiering at 8 p.m., Friday, the weekly series starts with a visit to Carlos Cardoza’s “Mod House,” a mid-century gem in North Dallas decorated retro style,…
This week’s Paranormal Activity 4 continues the story of an extended American family whose members own a lot of surveillance cameras, camcorders, smartphones, baby monitors, webcams, Talkboys and other consumer electronic devices with which they record the haunting of their homes by a terrifying demonic entity. The original Paranormal Activity,…
English filmmaker Andrea Arnold’s atypical, impressionistic approach to Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights is her adaptation’s main hook. As with Fish Tank and Red Road, Arnold’s last two feature-length dramas, the new Wuthering Heights is very much about the act of looking. The novel’s tempestuous plot is unmercifully filtered through the…
“Positive characterizations are complex characterizations,” says writer-director Ava DuVernay, tucking into a serving of roasted potatoes. “That’s all we need to know. They shouldn’t be saccharine. They shouldn’t feel like medicine. You know, often films that are deemed positive, nobody wants to see them.” It’s a recent Sunday afternoon, and…
THIS VIDEO IS NOT SAFE FOR WORK DUE TO BOOBS Before Slumdog Millionaire and 28 Days Later, Danny Boyle dragged us into Scottish drug addiction with Trainspotting. It’s a perfect encapsulation of club life flirting with damnation, but more importantly it proves the Ewan McGregor is still a heart throb…
Dallas knows a thing or 12 about being the target of one of Buzz Bissinger’s trademark tirades. So we feel for Peter Berg, creator of the Friday Night Lights TV show and the fictional rallying cry at the center of one of the dumbest campaign feuds this side of Bird…
The odds are good that you watched The Walking Dead’s season two finale — more than 9 million people tuned in and saw Rick and Carl set that zombie barn to flambé. Now with Halloween lurking in your periphery, the show returns for season three this Sunday, October 14, and…
