We’ve entered that time of the year when those of us who bitch about plastic sentiment and sequin-sewn optimism during the other 11 months now complain that there isn’t enough of it–or rather, that the treacle we’re being served lacks variety. What’s up with us? Even when somebody does try…
Until now the revisionist media tried to convince us that we missed out on something really big if we didn’t experience the revolutionary social changes and psychedelia of the ’60s. They made everyone appear to be either a mini-skirted model, a bearded protester, or a mind-expanding musician decked out in…
Webb SightsResolve to break free of other tired old holiday traditions. We suggest a mind-numbing, radio-blasting road trip this weekend to Waxahachie. Really. Get the hell out of town and escape to the Webb Gallery’s consistent, artful take on the Twilight Zone. Proprietors Bruce and Julie Webb cultivate quirky, obsessive,…
Unbreakable is such a quiet film that whenever a character speaks above a whisper, it sounds like the shattering of glass in a monastery. It’s also a terribly sad movie; almost no one cracks a smile or a joke, and everyone wears the look of someone who’s just spent the…
The moods of Kenneth Lonergan’s You Can Count on Me are so artfully mingled that it’s difficult to get a fix on this highly personal independent feature. Set in a quiet little town in upstate New York’s lovely Catskill Mountains, it is at once a drama about the unresolved traumas…
If the concept of dubious celebrity Ben Affleck romping in a water park with cinematic darling Gwyneth Paltrow and two adorable moppets does not inspire in you spasms of dizziness and nausea, then you may find plenty to tolerate in Bounce, the new romantic dramedy from writer-director Don Roos. This…
Playwright Nicky Silver insists he wrote The Food Chain, which is enjoying a raucous if sometimes shrill run at Fort Worth’s Circle Theatre, as relief from a more painful play he had to discontinue. Some may think this is the equivalent of choosing, say, electric shock to the tongue over…
You must call it curious that the nontraditional holiday meal of Charles Dickens served by Kitchen Dog Theater is called Act of Passion. They didn’t christen it so, of course. Playwright John Tyson, currently a company member at Houston’s Alley Theatre, chose to plunge through the great Victorian moralist’s surface…
The reports of Katherine Wagner’s imminent “death” are not greatly exaggerated. On December 15, the executive director of the Dallas Visual Art Center will succumb, after 11 years in one of the hottest seats in the Dallas art scene, to what she calls the “modern woman’s malady.” She won’t literally…
Art galleries and museums ought to get mad because the Internet isn’t working out so well for them. The Net sucks the life out of art; even high-resolution images look like something you’d see if you were hanging your head out of the window of a speeding car with your…
When a friend asked a few days before Halloween whether I thought we could get away with trick-or-treating–ya know, for the candy–I didn’t automatically say yes. Or no. I just let the idea hang with a noncommittal “Yeah, that would be funny.” It’s an unwritten rule that using fake blood,…
From here, the star doesn’t shine as brightly as it once did. The blue isn’t as deep. The silver isn’t as lustrous. From here, the future seems less certain, the past more distant. The salary figures appear more daunting, the talent less talented, the injuries more overwhelming. From here, problems…
The soon-to-be-talked-about sensations in Darren Aronofsky’s Requiem for a Dream include three or four flashing, near-subliminal montages that combine an eye’s iris and dilating pupil, an extreme close-up of heroin cooking in a teaspoon, and a sucking hypodermic needle; a surpassingly frightening sequence in which Ellen Burstyn, in the midst…
There once was a man, and he called himself Seuss, Who wrote the best children’s books ever produced. With drawings elaborate, and tales subtly moral Of his greatness, not even this critic would quarrel. Alas, he’s now dead, and so all is not groovy, For someone said, “I know! Let’s…
Refreshingly, the biggest wonder about the new Arnold Schwarzenegger ride is not that human cloning has become a reality, nor that the America of the future (“sooner than you think,” as an opening caption ominously suggests) very closely resembles present-day Vancouver, British Columbia, in Canada. It’s not even that technological…
Given the stress and emotional turmoil associated with family holidays, in the cinema, as in life, it’s very peculiar that anyone feels obliged to entertain the notion of Thanksgiving anymore. Really, thanks for what, exactly? Jammed freeways? Delayed flights? Overcrowded supermarkets? Big, dead birds? Witchhunts? Territorial conquest and genocide? Well,…
As an area of academic study, art history is a ridiculously young enterprise. To be sure, formal art education has long existed, and the European aristocracy could always just look at the walls. But the formal, ivory-tower study of art history qua history is a recent development. Begun at Harvard…
I have been neither fan nor foe of hip-hop. Most of my limited experience with the music has been filtered through the scrim of a good 15 years’ worth of near-hysterical mass media scrutiny. I have listened to it as “a cultural phenomenon” or “a social expression” rather than as…
This fall, two local film festivals celebrate their second birthdays, and already both have learned to run before they bothered to crawl. The Vistas Film Festival, which had its run last month, proved that no line exists between “great Latin cinema” and “great cinema”; Vistas featured some of the best…
I’ve lived in several run-down houses in Denton. One was a two-bedroom house that I shared with four roommates. We drank a lot and talked about how we were destined to rule the world because of our wonderful ideas. Rent was $125 a month, and I spent more money on…
Brute ForceIf we were as smart as writer Dorothy Parker, we’d try to paraphrase her infamous maxim that “you can lead a horticulture, but you can’t make her think” and poke fun–or a very sharp, pointed stick–at some of the freak shows going on around Dallas that are calling themselves…
No one likes to be seen as the roadblock to a revolution. The unfortunate soul–or the dumb bastard–who chooses to impede progress is likely to be mowed down by those charging toward tomorrow. He will become a thing to be wiped off the shoes of those who march, march, march…
