Since this week saw the major networks give their “upfront” presentations of new fall shows, I thought it might be worthwhile to take a break from the recappage and run down what’s to come. GOOD TO GREAT Revolution (NBC) – A world of no electricity is, frankly, terrifying to me…
CentralTrak keeps doing its damndest to educate you chillun, and tonight is the fifth of six Thursday night Texas film screenings in “the Cage” at 800 Exposition Ave. They’re offering popcorn, cult celluloid and some serious nerdery — in addition to a Q&A with John Slate, who portrayed a Kennedy…
In his third collaboration with director Larry Charles, Sacha Baron Cohen plays Admiral General Aladeen, the young, dumb dictator of fictional North African nation Wadiya. Under Aladeen’s rule, oil-producing, uranium-enriching Wadiya is a hostile threat to global peace and capitalism. And yet, Aladeen himself is so attracted to Western culture…
Every once in a while, a movie comes along that’s so utterly shameless that it achieves a certain grandeur. Peter Berg’s Battleship, which I swear to God is described in its Wikipedia entry as an “American science fiction action naval war film,” is one such movie. Over the past few…
“I think that men are having an identity crisis, but they don’t really know it.” So says “biological anthropologist” Helen Fisher, speaking in Mansome, Morgan Spurlock’s anecdotal pop documentary about masculine self-presentation in the 21st century, which allegedly attempts to define that crisis. Mansome is divided into chapters — “The…
To the tired, the weary, the overly-energy-drink-indulged participants of the 24-Hour Video Race: We salute you. The annual competition concluded last week and gave a few parameters: a phrase, a theme, a prop and location for all participants to include in their films. After that, they had 24 fleeting hours…
1. Hollie Cavanagh’s puh-fect Idol dream ends: We were all thinking it. “She’s adorable, but how is our half-British McKinney flower still going strong on American Idol, when so many superior performers have been kicked to the curb before her?” But somehow, some way, our Hollie got by on a…
A significant portion of Tim Burton’s output over the past decade has been concerned with slipping the “Burton treatment” to susceptible texts: Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Stephen Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd, Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland — and now, Dark Shadows. A supernaturally themed daily daytime soap,…
Nobody took opera more seriously than Wagner, and no dork culture is more dedicated than hard-core Wagner fans. This is due largely to his famous Ring Cycle, a series of four operas seen as the most ambitious work any set of performers can execute. In the nerdiest of music circles,…
UPDATE 7/16: Turns out, The Dark Knight Rises will be showing in 15/70 format at the Cinemark 17. One caveat: the theater is a digital IMAX retrofit. Which means it’s big and badass, but the Omni theater in Fort Worth is a solid bet for seeing DKR in the optimum…
Being a huge Horror hound, not to mention Texas Frightmare Weekend veteran, my general advice would be to see and do everything! But obviously you only have limited time and one body (which hopefully stays unsevered throughout the three days) so allow me to help curate your TXFMW experience for…
Richard Linklater’s Bernie is the rarest of rarities: a truly unexpected film. It might be classified as a black comedy, for it deals with the murder of an 81-year-old woman in a fashion that is not exactly tragic. But unlike most movies that fall under that label, it never indulges…
At the start of Joss Whedon’s long-awaited Marvel superhero supergroup flick, The Avengers, the Tesseract — a powerful, potentially dangerous glowing cube that fell to the ocean floor after Captain America (Chris Evans) liberated it from the Nazis in his movie last summer — is in the hands of NASA…
Twentysomething Silver Lake couple Peter (Christopher Denham) and Lorna (Nicole Vicius) talk their way into an unnamed cult that meets in the basement of a San Fernando Valley split-level in the middle of the night to follow the teachings of the enigmatic Maggie (Brit Marling). A supposedly sickly yet ethereally…
The 81-year-old Texas Theatre in Oak Cliff may be known historically as the movie house that Howard Hughes built or the scene where police found Lee Harvey Oswald holed up on that fateful day in November, but for the past two years it’s been known as the place to go…
If you’re a gore geek like me or even just the general lover of the Horror genre, you’re going to want to clear your schedule because the Southwest’s premier Horror event, Texas Frightmare Weekend, is about to jumpstart its chainsaw and rip through the DFW Hyatt Regency. Every year, the…
It happens every Tuesday night at Texas Theatre: The cinematic garbage disposal gets all jammed up. Some brave soul then must plunge his fist in to find the source of the rattle — please don’t flip the switch during this delicate time. The slimy disturbance could be anything — a…
What’s that, lady? You want to cover yourself in fake blood and pose in a prom photo with Anthony Michael Hall? Yeah, get in line. This weekend is Frightmare, a three-day celebration of gore, grindhouse and general film havoc. Maybe you’ve heard of a certain 20th Century Fox project called…
Forty years ago this month, Peter Lord – along with his producing partner David Sproxton – didn’t realize the legacy they were beginning when they assembled clay figurines on a small kitchen table in Bristol, UK and proceeded to animate them. One. Painstaking. Movement. At. A. Time. Decades later, not…
There is exactly one unexpected moment in the otherwise drearily predictable The Five-Year Engagement that, though little more than a throwaway line, at least adds a bit of charged political reality to puncture Nicholas Stoller’s limp, hermetic comedy of deferred nuptials. Tom (Jason Segel, who co-scripted with Stoller), a talented…
The devil must have been really busy in the early ’90s; there were a lot of trends and careers who’s successes could only be attributed to fiery soul relinquishment. Angel Martin in Shock ‘Em Dead, tonight’s Tuesday Night Trash movie at Texas Theatre, is no exception. Played by Stephen Quadros…
There’s an over-arching theme in the show Battlestar Galatica that is an apt metaphor for Hollywood: “It happened before and it will happen again.” The “it” in Battlestar is the whole Machines-Become-Sentient-and-Kill-Humans-thing. But the catchy, ominous phrase could be viewed as a metaphor for Hollywood’s persistent ability to repeat mind-numbingly…
