Outside Tinseltown, not everyone may be aware of the Hollywood Forever cemetery, which specializes in memorializing lives via a process the franchise owners call “LifeStories.” The century-old former Hollywood Memorial Park, retooled for the new millennium, presents carefully edited video montages of the lives of celebrities (from Rudolph Valentino to…
It would be so easy to titter and scoff at Shall We Dance?, a Miramaxed-out version of the 1996 Japanese film of the same name, which told of a bored businessman who is reinvigorated after a few dozen sessions of dance lessons. This version, with its cast of glow-in-the-dark movie…
Most film festivals–at least ones not in Toronto, Manhattan, Cannes or Park City, Utah–have no rhyme or reason to their schedules, no more than a street-corner proselytizer does to his ramblings. They’re subject to the fancies of a small group of programmers and the whims of distributors pushing new product;…
What is it about the blues that makes feeling bad feel so good? Two new productions are singing the blues in different ways–one musically, one satirically–but there’s something immensely satisfying for the theatergoer in both. It Ain’t Nothin’ But the Blues, the nostalgic revue that just opened the new season…
Dreaming America: In the Bunker With George What’s a comedy show this blatantly feminist, left-wing and intellectual doing in a red state like Texas? Echo Theatre’s Rhonda Blair, Terri Ferguson and Jerrika Hinton risk getting shipped off to a re-education camp if they keep performing material this smart, funny and…
This and That–Remember 9-11 at The MAC, Masami Teraoka with Lynda Hess, Adam Teraoka and Young Jo An Teraoka It’s a family affair at The MAC. “This and That” is a showing of paintings by Masami Teraoka and his partner Lynda Hess and the sculptural objects of his son, Adam…
Every generation has its underground music, buoyed along by a subculture of anti-pop music fans. In the 1940s, Akira Sato says, while the GIs got their girlfriends’ skirts twirling to the popular big band sounds of Benny Goodman and Glenn Miller, the fanatical fringe was hanging out where orchestras led…
Thursday, October 14 You don’t have to love watching cars drive around and around for several dusty, stinky hours to enjoy Firestone Fan Jam. But you do have to love sitting in traffic for hours in order to get to Texas Motor Speedway, where Thursday’s fan jam kicks off the…
Sure, Lord of the Rings is phenomenal, but don’t ever try to tell us that Peter Jackson proved his genius for the first time in 2001’s Fellowship of the Ring. The scruffy New Zealand native has had us in his grasp since the deliciously gory Dead Alive (aka Braindead). Jackson…
Dallas’ antiques road show 10/16 My dad may not remember exactly what he was doing in 1957–he was only 5, though he claims to have a mind like a steel trap–but that year has always held significant memories for me. It was the year Dad’s old Chevy was manufactured. It…
Check out the Mavs’ new roster 10/19 It’s going to take awhile for the Dallas Mavericks to coalesce. They all say that, all 18 or 19 of them, or however many they have left today. Actually it’s a good thing that it’s going to take them time because it’s going…
Nasher Sculpture Center turns one 10/15 Chances are, in the last 12 months, you’ve visited the Nasher Sculpture Center, the two-acre sculpture garden at 2001 Flora St. that celebrates its first birthday this weekend. But we bet that those visits weren’t as odd as ours. Last time we walked through…
Rocky’s back with his sweet transvestite 10/15 The Rocky Horror Show is a theatrical haven for all manner of sexual deviants. Are you an S&M-loving transvestite? So is the lead. An incestuous man with an attraction to phallic weaponry? Climb on board. A sexually confused, less-than-a-day-old, muscley sex toy? Look…
There are at least three movies contained within the covers of H.G. Bissinger’s best-selling 1990 non-fiction book Friday Night Lights. One is concerned with the socioeconomic life of a small West Texas town built on the wobbly foundations of oil and racism and the out-of-whack worship of a high school…
Maybe it’s the mark of a great film that it can affect an audience member even when he sleeps through the entire thing. Such was the case with my father at a recent preview of David O. Russell’s I Heart Huckabees, a philosophy lecture masquerading as a comedy in which…
Before he made Primer for some $7,000, Dallas software engineer-turned-writer-director-actor-editor Shane Carruth had no idea how to make a movie, and some who see his on-the-cheap creation will argue he still doesn’t, while others will lavish upon it hearty praise reserved for visionaries who leap from the shadows to the…
Now this is a party. Uptown Players close out their third season with an orgy of writhing bods and steamy hook-ups in a production of Andrew Lippa’s Jazz Age musical The Wild Party. It has it all in terms of R-rated box-office appeal: nudity, boy-boy kissing (what would this theater…
For those of you who secretly find comfort in alien postures–who find yourself always the observer rather than the participant, forever the wallflower and never the butterfly–you’ll be happy to know that evidence shows this to be normal. We are alien by nature. Our collective provenance as humans may not…
Jesus Hopped the “A” Train Haven’t we seen this before? Murderers locked up in the notoriously harsh Rikers Island prison share their tales of woe and talk about God. Was it OZ? Law & Order? NYPD Blue? Of course, it was. Stephen Adly Guirgis’ two-act drama owes its thin plot…
The Dark Matters and the Lingering Lightness, installation by Michael Velliquette Installed in the small “project room” at Conduit Gallery is Michael Velliquette’s full-body multimedia environment, replete with voodoo-cosmic music and a myriad of interior accoutrements–aluminum foil doodads, construction paper chains à la second grade, and paper cut-out silhouettes all…
My dad never talked about World War II. The only reasons I even knew he’d served were the bent-edged black-and-white photos of him in his Navy uniform, with the flared legs many years before bellbottoms were cool. He was young, even younger than his sign-up papers said; he lied about…
Thursday, October 7 “Am I blue?/Am I blue?/Ain’t these tears in my eyes tellin’ you/Well, am I blue?/You’d be, too.” The Harry Akst/Grant Clarke tune may as well be the theme song for the ladies of Echo Theatre or at least Rhonda Blair, Terri Ferguson and Jerrika Hinton, the creators…
