Ira Glass is prepared to disappoint you. On the street, in the grocery store, at a restaurant, the witty, stuttering, guffawing, nasally, dorky, much-loved host of This American Life knows that he cannot live up to the expectations people have for him. Nobody can. They’re not real. They’re his show’s…
4/24 Kay Armstrong tossed her toe shoes and trashed her tutus a long time ago, preferring the business end of ballet and contemporary dance to performing or teaching. Armstrong heads up the Dallas Dance Council, but before that she was part of a team that organized the Houston Ballet and…
4/24 Many years ago, when I did more basketball playing and a whole lot more drinking (but never at the same time, though I suspect that would make for an interesting story), a friend persuaded me to fill in for him in one of those ubiquitous three-on-three hoops tourneys that…
4/24 Want to humble a bunch of seventh-graders? Well, that’s weird, but it’s still easy to do. Hand them a camcorder and make them film a five-minute movie in only one week. Their cheers of “That sounds simple” should soon turn to irritated groans as the endless setting up, reshooting…
4/28 All they’re doing is re-creating bits from The Carol Burnett Show, but it’s still going to be funnier than hell. Onstage Tim Conway is the best physical comedian not named Chris Kataan, and Harvey Korman does this thing where he plays it straight but gets pissed off in the…
If only Dogville were at least involving enough to be perplexing. Sigh. In simplest terms–which it definitely deserves–Lars von Trier’s latest thingamabob is a large, pretentious blob of coulda-been. As in, it coulda been deep and insightful. It coulda been sociologically challenging. It coulda been formalistically thrilling. But it isn’t…
The six-month intermission is over; those of you left in the lobby, wondering if Uma Thurman ever did kill Bill, may now return to your seats and unbuckle your belts and resume your gorging. Rest assured that Kill Bill: Vol. 2, the final half of Quentin Tarantino’s fifth movie, offers…
Here’s a subject with which no one should ever have to grapple: Is this new version of The Punisher, starring Thomas Jane as the comic-book assassin, better than the 1989 adaptation with Dolph Lundgren? They both offer slight variations on a tale first told in a 1974 Spider-Man comic, where…
In Israeli writer-director Nir Bergman’s Broken Wings, we never see an automatic weapon, a military roadblock or a horrific explosion on a city street. Rather than dealing with the volatile politics of the Middle East, this quiet, soul-wrenching film examines the unresolved traumas of one middle-class family trying to cope…
When we first see the title characters of Connie and Carla, a penny-dreadful imitation of one of Hollywood’s most inimitable comedies, they are loud-mouthed junior high girls mugging in the school cafeteria. A minute later, they are loud-mouthed grown-ups (well, they’re the size of grown-ups) screaming out show tunes in…
Heavier almost than the mood-setting smoke hanging over the Kalita Humphreys stage for the Fats Waller musical Ain’t Misbehavin’ is the sense of irony that the Dallas Theater Center would choose this show as the follow-up to Topdog/Underdog. Back in March, the theater staged a top-notch production of Suzan-Lori Parks’…
An Inspector Calls The old J.B. Priestley ghost story finds an upper-crust British family interrupted in the celebration of their daughters engagement by a mysterious Inspector Goole (Neil Carpenter). A poor young woman has committed suicide. The inspector questions each member of the family and makes connections between the dead…
Concentrations 44: Matthew Buckingham, A Man of the Crowd Installed deep within the recesses of the Museums contemporary art galleries, Matthew Buckinghams video piece is an exercise in refracted perception. The piece consists of photographs and video in two adjacent rooms. The juxtaposing of somber black-and-white photographs and the pyrotechnics…
Perusing all the possibilities at an expo devoted to stringed instruments, we miss our childhood ukulele. Man, we could rip it out on those four nylon strings. While we pretended to be Bernadette Peters, with our sister playing the Jerk, we’d sit on the tailgate of Dad’s pickup and perform…
Thursday, April 15 Many German fairy tales, though cute and fun, offered a stern moral for those who listened. Playwright and actor Fred Curchack’s one-man show Gauguin’s Shadow could be interpreted as a similar warning: Girls, don’t date artists. The play, which combines acting, masks, puppets and video projections, illustrates…
There was a kinder, gentler time in America that had nothing to do with any member of the Bush family. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, while the plumbers burgled the Watergate, student protesters of the Vietnam War were gunned down on college campuses and newly liberated women burned…
4/17 It’s no secret that today’s kids are just a little more chunky than they should be. According to the American Obesity Association, about 15.3 percent of children ages 6 to 11 are obese as well as about 15.5 percent of adolescents ages 12 to 19. Giving youths something to…
4/17 We had only one question, really, for Supercross rider Joe Oelhof: That whole “nac-nac” thing–how do you do it the first time? A nac-nac–stop smirking, it’s not what you think–is a stunt frequently performed by indoor dirt-track motorcycle racers in which the rider, while flying three stories or so…
4/16 If it’s not glossy, bulleted or catchy, I’m just not interested. A shortened attention span plagues me (and everyone else). In fact, I’m surprised you noticed this. The photo above must have caught your eye. It’s the pictures that get you. From April 16 through May 29, 55 black-and-white…
4/16 This tale, with its bride-stealing, relentless pursuit of immediate gratification and self-centered wandering peasant, is better suited to soap operas than ballet performances. But a good soap opera can capture an audience’s attention like more, um, respected works of art. Peer Gynt, Ben Stevenson’s choreographed interpretation of Henrik Ibsen’s…
Up front, it’s “full disclosure” time. Let it be confessed here, publicly, that I have never been a religious Neil Young fan. Always liked him OK, always appreciated his adventurous spirit, never bought his albums. But since I’ve also never met a Canadian I didn’t like (apart from Mike Myers),…
It is, to those of us born and raised in Texas, the Greatest Story Ever Told and Retold; who can forget the Alamo when it’s on every Texas history class final exam? At 5 a.m. on March 6, 1836, some 189 Texian soldiers and volunteers were slaughtered while trying to…
