Every once in a while, a film comes along that so blatantly disregards emotional authenticity that one fears for the sanity of its director. Can he actually believe that people talk this way? Act this way? Do these things? Worse, can he think he has made a coherent and feeling…
Stander has been waiting to be made for some 20 years, its screenplay having been written by Bima Stagg shortly after South African cop-turned-robber Andre Stander fought a gun battle with Fort Lauderdale police in February 1984. Writer Bima Stagg had lived in South Africa in the 1980s and fully…
The future is almost here. At least, it is according to screenwriter Frank Cottrell Boyce (Pandaemonium) and director Michael Winterbottom (24 Hour Party People), two cinematic visionaries whose combined vision in Code 46 sparks tremendous intrigue–and unrest. At once a weirdly familiar sci-fi trip, a bleak romance, a treatise on…
The conventional wisdom on Nicotina is that it’s a Mexican Snatch. Upon first blush, it’s easy to see where the comparisons come from–they’re both more or less diamond-swiping caper films in which the caper all but fades into the shadows of the guys and dolts incapable of pulling it off–but…
Summer movies don’t get much sillier or more empty-headed than Without a Paddle, and that includes Catwoman and King Arthur. What we have here is a low-wattage buddy flick proposing that a trio of boyhood friends, now 30 years old, can shed the last vestiges of their adolescence by traipsing…
New York–It’s not unusual that most of us find great comfort maneuvering in the vernacular. Whether spoken or architectural, the vernacular is familiar, easy, efficient and, at its base, local. It’s the slang that gets your order across to the waiter. It’s the back road that gets you fastest from…
Skid Row never looked so clean. Every ugly, filthy, creepy, scary detail of the original film it was based on has been scrubbed away in the oversized touring production of Little Shop of Horrors now going through its motions at the Music Hall at Fair Park. This version of the…
The Exit The new Labyrinth Theatre company debuts with Kevin Ash’s dramatic two-act answer to Sartre’s existential classic, No Exit. This time, writes Ash, there’s a way out of hell. Trapped together in a hotel room decorated in nauseating colors (and sans mirrors, beds or air-conditioning), three characters–a sweaty fat…
Ellsworth Kelly in Dallas This show should be called “Dallas Collects Ellsworth Kelly.” It would be more honest, not to mention more intriguing. This dainty collection of top-quality painting and sculpture by the mid-20th-century artist does little service to the importance of Kelly. Kelly’s brightly colored and experimentally shaped opaque…
Photographer, multimedia artist and fervent peace activist Laray Polk stirred up controversy several years ago over a nude piece in a Dallas-area arts center. Now she tries to ruffle more feathers with the opening of her latest artistic venture, Gaza Zoo. The name harks back to the day in May…
Thursday, August 19 We’re so despondent over the death of chef Julia Child that we’ve vowed to drink heavily and never cook again. All right, so those aren’t exactly new resolutions, but the passing of “The French Chef” has given them new meaning. Maybe it’s not as fitting a tribute…
Dorm rooms were forever changed in 1999. Another option was added to the poster selections. Joining Travis Bickle’s Mohawk and blood spatters, the menacing line of Mr. Pink/White/Blonde, etc. and Vincent Vega and Jules Winnfield’s brandished pistols was Brad Pitt’s fashionable Tyler Durden with a fistful of rendered human fat…
8/20 Listen up, Dallas, to some ugly truth: You’re fat. Not stout. Not pleasingly plump. Not big boned, but F-A-T, as in two-by-four, can’t get through the kitchen door. Men’s Fitness says so, ranking Dallas No. 3 on its list of the fattest cities in the nation. Even the mayor,…
8/20 As if it weren’t already hot enough in August, Highland Village has to prove that its air is hotter than everybody else’s air by throwing a hot air balloon festival. Yeah, that’s what happens when you chop down all the shady trees and throw down tons of black asphalt…
8/23 The “block parties” we remember from childhood involved myriad containers of green bean casserole, a teetering portable basketball hoop with no net and oft-shirtless men milling around Dad’s deer feeder inspecting the welded joints. Generally, the moms would discuss the infidelities of some PTA member while pushing around weird…
8/20 We’re not big on crying. For one, it’s not becoming. Swollen eyelids and a snotty nose? No thanks. But there was a time when tears came more easily for us. Say, 1989 or so, when we were 13 and a whole lot less jaded, and when Steel Magnolias was…
A good friend likes to say that there’s only one kind of great pop song–the song that someone had to create, as though the writer and performer had no choice. The song can be corny or cynical, upbeat or downhearted; it doesn’t matter. All that counts is that the person…
Garry Marshall is at it again. The director of Pretty Woman, Beaches and the original Princess Diaries has returned to peddle his particular brand of überschmaltz in The Princess Diaries 2: Royal Engagement, in which he disguises an insidious worship of wealth and privilege as a “feel-good” comedy about a…
Pierre Huyghe: One Million + Kingdoms Pierre Huyghe (pronounced “Weeg”) is an artist who’s in touch with the power of mass media–both as it molds our collective identity and as fodder for making good art. The three videos now showing at the Fort Worth Modern confront the manner in which…
Anton in Show Business Take three actresses of varying ages and levels of talent. Put them in a no-money production of Anton Chekhov’s The Three Sisters on a toilet-sized stage in San Antonio. Then let the angst begin. In this comedy by the pseudonymous Louisville playwright Jane Martin, the play-within-the-play…
“The American theater’s in a shitload of trouble,” the “stage manager” says to the audience in Anton in Show Business, Jane Martin’s roundhouse punch at the absurdity of the acting profession. That may be true, but the funny thing is, by choosing this dark, smart satire as its season opener,…
Have you heard the one about helping little old ladies across the street? No, of course, you haven’t. That’s because comedy and kindness rarely go hand in hand. There are no funny jokes about spending Christmas serving mashed potatoes at a soup kitchen. “Altruism” and “philanthropy” are words that would…
