See also: 55 Movie Trends That Need to Die Now. Somewhere on Earth right now, an Alf movie is in the works. Rebooting and rehashing big film ideas isn’t a new Hollywood trend, but the modern Hollywood is notable for taking a huge, caustic dump on an already-beloved franchise. Earlier…
Hit & Run: A ’70s Car-Chase Flick for the Utne Reader Set
Hit & Run, a new action comedy engineered by co-director/writer/star Dax Shepard, is as much about running mouths as running motors, and injects estrogen into the few remaining enclaves of American testosterone, muscle cars and FM cock rock. Shepard plays Charlie Bronson, a 35-year-old in Nowheresville whose life, as we…
Julie Delpy Brings the Paris Gang Stateside for 2 Days in New York
Calling back many of the same characters and more than a few of the same jokes, 2 Days in New York, Julie Delpy’s fourth film as writer-director, is a sequel to her 2007 2 Days in Paris. A spin-off of sorts itself, Paris piggybacked on the popularity of 2004’s justly…
Icy and barren, Alps Is Above All Human
In a gymnasium, a clandestine four-person group meets to discuss its name. One member suggests “Alps,” explaining: “The mountains of the Alps cannot be replaced by any other mountain. Anything else would be smaller, less imposing, thus, a poor substitute. While the mountains of the Alps cannot be replaced, they…
Marjane Satrapi: There Is No ‘Clash of Cultures’
“I have always been against this idea of the ‘clash of cultures,'” Marjane Satrapi says. “It’s the biggest piece of bullshit I’ve ever heard.” That’s apparent from her films and graphic novels, which bridge worlds. Born in Iran, Satrapi emigrated to Europe with her family when she was a teenager…
The movie of choice this week for people who hold the beliefs that A) America is the strongest, best-est country that God ever virgin-birthed and B) that that nation somehow just isn’t strong enough to survive eight years of centrist Democratic leadership, Dinesh D’Souza’s 2016: Obama’s America actually does not…
Ever do a search for “movies opening this weekend” only to find that none of the good ones are actually playing in Dallas? We’re here to save you from that disappointment. Wednesday 8.22 Hit and Run – You’ve got the Wedding Crashers producers to thank for this summertime brain liquifier,…
See also: City Artists To Hijack The Omni’s Lights, Dallas Gets More Blade Runnery Last year something miraculous happened in Austin. Choreographer Allison Orr’s performance piece “The Trash Project” came to fruition. It felt as though the entire city gathered to watch as municipal waste employees danced with garbage trucks,…
The film world lost a great auteur last night, as Tony Scott – director of such classics like Top Gun and True Romance – tragically took his own life at age 68. Tony was one-half of the Scott- sibling directing duo with his brother Ridley (Alien, Blade Runner, Gladiator). The…
Tom Hanks, who once met John F. Kennedy after downing several Dr Peppers, is currently developing a feature film with his production company Playtone about the JFK assassination. The film will be screenwriter Peter Landesman’s directorial debut. According to Variety, the film will chronicle the “events leading up to JFK’s…
What sets H.P. Lovecraft ahead of other horror and science fiction writers is his means of setting up a story. He drops a pin early in The Call of Cthulhu, his 1926 short work with this: “We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas…
See also: The Films Opening in Dallas This Week If you’re a lifelong horror fan like me, then ParaNorman is your kind of haunt. Chocked full of 70s/80s genre nostalgia, homages to the creepy classics, and a great social commentary, the stylish stop motion flick from writing-directing duo Sam Fell…
We were under the impression that The Hunger Games was something that happened during sorority rush at SMU. Actually, it’s another one of those kids’ books that adults have commandeered as “dystopian literature.” Apparently it was also made into a movie with a hosts of hot young stars and also…
In Celeste and Jesse Forever, the titular, newly separated female protagonist’s un-flamboyant queer co-worker (Elijah Wood) tells her “it’s time to get your fuck on,” and then immediately apologizes: “Sorry, I was trying to be your saucy gay friend.” Co-written by and starring Parks and Rec straight-woman Rashida Jones, Forever…
In anticipation of the remake of the 1976 girl-group melodrama Sparkle (which didn’t screen in time for our deadline), Whitney Houston’s posthumous film appearance and her return to movies after a 15-year absence, we look back at the handful of celluloid performances by the woman once known as “the Voice.”…
Ever do a search for “movies opening this weekend” only to find that none of the good ones are actually playing in Dallas? We’re here to save you from that disappointment. Wednesday 8.15 The Odd Life of Timothy Green Peter Hedges (author of What’s Eating Gilbert Grape) pens the screenplay…
A&E’s Storage Wars: Texas is adding two new faces during this season’s premier on Wednesday at 8, both of whom are local businesswomen. Mary Padian of Mary’s Finds on Market Center Boulevard and Jenny Grumbles of Uptown Country Home on Milton Avenue join RiverRegency proprietor and colorful Storage Wars veteran…
While promoting their new film The Campaign, funny men Will Ferrell and Zach Galifianakis stopped by Ft. Worth’s Naval Air Station to salute the troops, participate in an old fashioned tug-o-war, and answer my questions about who historically has the sexiest presidential mustache. Oh, and in true political fashion, kiss…
The Bourne films have more than just overstayed their welcome and outlasted the Ludlum books — they’ve been Van Halenized, with an abrupt change of frontman and a resulting dip in personality. The only big-ass popcorn franchise of the past decade to have not been spawned on computers, the series…
The Campaign begins with an on-screen quote attributed to Ross Perot: “War has rules. Mud-wrestling has rules. Politics has no rules.” The Texas billionaire/private-campaign-financing pioneer dropped this truism not during his historic third-party run for the presidency in 1992, but in the midst of his far less successful 1996 campaign…
“I don’t want to give you lessons in self-denial and social responsibility,” an art dealer tells her billionaire boy client in Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis, by way of refusing to entertain his demand to buy the Rothko Chapel. “Because I don’t believe for a second you’re as crude as you sound.”…
Exploitation Film
Like antidepressants, artificial sugars, Botox, and other miracle inventions of the past century, corporate culture became an omnipresent fact of life before anyone could know how it would affect the human body and brain on an extended timeline. One way to look at writer/director Craig Zobel’s second feature, Compliance—a pot-stirrer…
