4/17 Just reading the rules of this weekend’s Swing Dance Championships gives us endless enjoyment. From Rule Four: “All swing styles are allowed, including Push, Whip, Shag.” Maybe we’ve watched the latest Austin Powers movie a few times too many. Americas’ Classic Swing Dance Championships Convention offers the opportunity to…
Among Anger Management’s copious flaws is the fact its premise doesn’t wash. Adam Sandler’s Dave Buznik, a designer of catalogs for overweight-cat clothing, isn’t really angry at all; he’s just a self-loathing, introverted mess whose insecurities date back to a crowded street party in Brooklyn circa 1978, when he was…
In 1997’s The Apostle, Robert Duvall took on a subject near and dear to his heart: Southern Pentecostal preachers. No one would make the film for him, so he went ahead and directed it himself, garnering much acclaim from media both secular and religious for his warts-and-all portrayal of a…
Imagine a large, dead Saint Bernard with its bones removed. Then visualize a hefty bellows inserted into it from behind, with a gorilla hopping up and down on it, causing the huge dog’s baglike corpse to twitch spasmodically, wheeze and croak. Voilà, this is today’s Nick Nolte. What’s amazing is…
The title Morvern Callar may sound like an Edward Gorey book or a job designation for telephone solicitors, but it’s actually a name–pronounced (roughly) “Mawvin Calla” (like the lily). Although some sources claim that “morvern callar” is Scots for “quieter silence,” the words don’t show up in online Scots dictionaries…
Maybe all you want out of your pop music is a few minutes of escape, a radio-friendly respite from the heavy humdrum of your workaday existence. Maybe you likes to hang with 50 Cent, who survived a few gunshots (and doesn’t let you forget it) to party another day; or…
Harold Pinter scares people. His plays can be obtuse, his characters off-putting and brittle. He likes to juggle time, tossing conversations around in a scene so that some characters occupy one plane of reality, while others exist somewhere else. He writes in choppy, stream-of-consciousness riffs. And then there are the…
David Sedaris is no stranger. He’s a regular on radio’s This American Life, he’s written best sellers, he’s co-written plays, he’s molded the minds of tuition-paying students. He’s also experienced the mundane and worked the shitty jobs that make for great anecdotes and not-so-great paychecks. And he’ll tell a little…
Thursday, April 10 We keep hearing the joke–a term we’re using lightly here–that Turkey should change its name to Chicken for not shouldering its burden in America’s war against Iraq. Those “comedians” who think Turkey’s lack of involvement is about cowardice need to check out the premiere screening of the…
When accused once of bias in favor of Lou Reed, rock journalist Lester Bangs replied (in paraphrase), “I would kiss the feet of Lou Reed for the same reasons that I would kiss the feet of those that drafted The Magna Carta.” That’s a grandiose statement to be sure, but…
4/12 Four decades have passed since that infamous November 1963 day in downtown Dallas when President John F. Kennedy was shot and killed. For elders in need of a refresher course or members of a new generation that hasn’t yet heard every minute detail of the assassination, the Dallas Historical…
4/12 Like it hot and heavy? Well, things are going to be loud and dirty at Texas Stadium this weekend. (It’s almost the same, right?) Supercross, the off-road motorcycle race, is coming to Texas Stadium, which granted has no roads, but it does seat 35,000 fans, an element apparently as…
4/12 When it comes to summer camp, there are two kinds of kids in this overrated adventure called parenthood. One kind begins whining around Easter that Jason, Jared, Jeremy and every other J-named boy he knows is going to camp and he wants to go, too. The other kind cries…
4/12 There’s been only one home we’ve ever cared about touring. And it was everything we thought it would be. From the tacky décor to the headstone in the back yard, Graceland was all we could hope for, as flashy as the man who once inhabited it. But, alas, we…
4/12 Witnessing the complete meltdown and failure of a live entertainer is one of life’s simple pleasures. American Idol is proof positive of such a sentiment. Don’t believe us? Why do you watch, then? Improvisational comedy consistently teeters between embarrassing breakdown and genuine inspiration, and this off-the-cuff unpredictability satisfies the…
The Philip Guston Retrospective organized by the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth is an ambitious and smart undertaking–smart for what it does not attempt as much as for what it does. Wisely, the show does not urge a re-evaluation of Guston, the abstract expressionist turned figurative painter who died…
The Guys is a simple movie about an overwhelming thing: grief suffered in the shadow of September 11. It has a small cast, but the camera stares only at two people: Nick, a fire captain who must speak at eight memorial services for men who died in the collapse of…
Even under our current government, drugs are still something of a problem in society, which means that the rockin’ and reelin’ Spun hasn’t arrived too late to buzz with significance. In modern pop culture, being young, hooked, miserable, depraved and endlessly self-pitying reached its zenith of coolness about a decade…
A man, peering through the scope of a sniper’s rifle muffled by a silencer, holds hostage someone he considers an evildoer. They communicate via telephone: The sniper insists that if his prey disconnects for any reason, he will shoot to kill. To prove he is serious, not merely a lunatic…
March 21, 2003–though he never knew the precise date, it was the very day Nile Southern had been waiting for longer than he cared to remember. On that day, Southern went into the Chelsea Mini-Storage facility on Manhattan’s West Side, grabbed the largest dolly he could find–it looked like a…
As escapist entertainment, Cole Porter’s Anything Goes hits all the right notes. Within its two hours of slap-happiness are heard some of American musical theater’s wittiest, loveliest tunes: “I Get a Kick Out of You,” “Friendship,” “You’re the Top,” “It’s De-Lovely,” “All Through the Night,” “Blow Gabriel Blow,” “Easy to…
The big F: not freedom nor France nor finance nor whatever else is going through those sordid Dallas brains. They’re talkin’ failure, and maybe a comment or two on freedom. The University of Texas at Dallas presents an innovative exhibit we’re willing to bet the good ole deans aren’t entirely…
