5/16 This is a story about a boat race, so let’s talk about baseball. First off, an admission for all you baseball fans: We’re stupid. All those subtleties and chess-like strategies, the Zen-like purity of the game? Don’t see it, never did. On our fun-o-meter, watching a baseball game ranks…
5/20 You can go in a car. You can come from afar. You can arrive by train or by private plane. You can hitchhike like a hobo or bounce in on a pogo. It doesn’t matter where you’re at, the time has come to see the Cat. “What Cat is…
5/17 It’s nearly summer in Deep Ellum. The bare midriffs and pierced navels are just beginning to hatch from their shells and peek out into the world. The vomit and urine are starting to bake onto the pavement, the smell fresh and brand-new all over again, but changed slightly by…
5/15 Things found while cleaning a closet: three roaches (one for smoking), one skeleton and a Robert Schimmel interview transcript c. 2001, from which only a few words were excised for a short piece written the last time Schimmel was at the Addison Improv, 4980 Belt Line Road, where he…
In March 2002, days before President Bush was scheduled to visit Peru, a car bomb exploded near the U.S. embassy in Lima, killing nine and injuring dozens. Government officials, here and in Peru, blamed the attack on Shining Path–a Marxist terrorist organization with roots dating to the 1960s, though it…
Neil LaBute is back to his old self, and the cinematic world is a better place for it. Honestly, what was he thinking when he made Possession? Did the charges of misogyny, still lingering from In the Company of Men and Your Friends & Neighbors, get to him so much…
What a strange enterprise, making a movie about reading a book. It’s the kind of paradox philosophy students chew over at 3 o’clock in the morning–and a prospect any Hollywood producer would flee from as fast as his Ferragamos could carry him. But for Mark Moskowitz, a lifelong bibliophile re-examining…
Long ago Eddie Murphy had grown tired of Eddie Murphy parts: the fast-talking high-jiver, the preening put-on. Even before he began parodying himself in Bowfinger and Showtime and I Spy, the latter two perhaps accidentally, he accepted high-paying roles in low-rent movies that neutered and humiliated the character he had…
Whoever said that “laughter is the most subversive weapon of all” could have been talking about Palestinian director Elia Suleiman’s sly and corrosively funny political comedy Divine Intervention. A film-festival favorite both in and outside the United States (it won the Special Jury Prize at last year’s Chicago International Film…
Two women, dressed in standard waitstaff uniforms, emerge from the bar and into the well-appointed lobby of the hotel built 90 years ago by beer magnate Adolphus Busch, who tried to bring the Jazz Age to what would become a Muzak town. About 50 feet away, an interviewer and his…
Bat Boy just wants to be loved. Is that so wrong? In the creepy, funny, disturbing Bat Boy: The Musical, now playing at Theatre Three, a feral creature emerges from the depths of a West Virginia cave and tries to find his place in the world. With pointy incisors and…
Winslow Homer is one of those rare topics on which the hoi polloi and the critics have always agreed. Nearly a century after his death, he retains the critical and popular acclaim that followed him through life; from Robert Hughes to Meyer Schapiro, critics who couldn’t agree on the time…
The pinnacle of our public television contribution history came when we weren’t even old enough to have an allowance. We were in preschool (or would have been if we hadn’t cried and screamed until the teacher called our mom to pick us up early…and never come back). We cried and…
Thursday, May 8 The two raunchiest and yet completely enthralling autobiographies we’ve ever read: Klaus Kinski’s Kinski Uncut and Lenny Bruce’s How to Talk Dirty and Influence People. Their juxtaposition of real-life heartache and happiness with gutter-dwelling and porn-ish anecdotes is a literary treat when well-written. OK, so no one’s…
Near the beginning of her Sex Tips for Girls, author Cynthia Heimel complains that so-called “women’s magazines” like Glamour and Cosmopolitan are actually all about men. How to please men; how to take care of men. Even how to keep men around. But we don’t see how Heimel’s stream of…
5/9 The idea is brilliant: Give aspiring and professional video-makers a prop, a location, a theme and 24 hours to produce an original five-minute video. Make it a race to the finish line. The results? Ahem…well…judging by last year’s entrants in the Dallas Video Festival’s 24 Hour Video Race, “brilliant”…
5/10 Ladies and gentlemen, the time has come to face the truth, and we at Night & Day want to help you heal through the loss we have all suffered. Here goes: Tatu has retired. Not the industrial-pop underage-lesbian duo, but the 18-year star of the Sidekicks, Dallas’ finest (or…
5/14 A while back we realized that the four years of French we studied in college were kind of pointless. Living in Texas and all, we didn’t get much use out of it. So we decided to learn Spanish. The classes were expensive, though, and they wanted us to give…
5/10 Baby, if you’re lookin’ for the real thing, check out Ashford and Simpson. Married songwriters Nickolas Ashford and Valerie Simpson created some of the grooviest love tunes of the 1970s for the likes of Ray Charles (“Let’s Go Get Stoned”) as well as duo Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell…
5/10 To fully appreciate the gritty production of the prison drama In the Belly of the Beast, being staged by the Kitchen Dog Theater from May 10 through May 31, one should know its origin and the dark life of killer-turned-writer-turned-killer-again Jack Henry Abbott. Son of a prostitute, he spent…
It is rare to find a film that defies one’s expectations as sweetly and satisfyingly as this coming-of-age comedy-drama from first-time feature writer-director Peter Sollett. The surprise isn’t in the plot–that would be too easy–but, rather, in the extraordinarily subtle and convincing ways the characters grow and change before our…
At some fast-approaching point in pop-culture evolution, we’re due to hit Total Outsider Saturation, wherein everybody is an outsider and therefore there is no longer an outside. In the fleeting meantime we have scintillating reminders of the struggle like X-2: X-Men United, the latest bid from comic book land to…
