The cream of this year’s crop are films carefully selected not only for their countless wonderful qualities, but because, as the list indicates, they form terrific thematic double features for contemplation and discussion. These days, there’s plenty of evidence to indicate that now, more than ever, movies may not be…
The year 1999 was too good to last, but did 2000 have to be such a big letdown? Did the best film year in at least a decade and a half have to be followed by one of the worst? This year, there are a good 20 films that would…
What’s that great whoosh you hear this week as you step into Dallas theaters? It’s the collective breath of artists and audiences finally released after being caught in 12 months of anticipation. Your blue pallor can return to its natural rosiness, people; your gin blossoms will bloom gaily again. The…
My handmade “Exorcism Kit” is still teetering on top of a stack of opened, scanned, mostly yawn-inducing art mail on the left side of my desk as I ponder the past year’s events, shortcomings, highlights, and surprises in Dallas and Fort Worth visual arts as 2000 is about to bite…
We can’t believe it’s about to be 2001, the year immortalized in this and previous generations by Stanley Kubrick’s space odyssey. It’s disheartening to think that Kubrick’s, and Isaac Asimov’s and Frank Herbert’s, for that matter, visions of our enlightened, space-traveling, robot-enslaving, high-tech-infused 21st century haven’t come to pass. Sure,…
Marilyn Manson may get most of the attention in the realm of controversial rockers these days (What? A rock musician taking on organized religion? No way!), but GWAR has been kicking it shock-rock style and waving its collective “cuddlefish” in the face of all that’s decent for decades, managing to…
Contained within a care package sent by C.D. Payne is a self-penned press release introducing the author as “the Rodney Dangerfield of comic novelists,” complete with a picture of the bug-eyed comedian and his shopworn catchphrase “I can’t get no respect.” As it turns out, this is the letter Payne…
It can be tough, and he knows it. Knows it’s a struggle. Knows his aspirations are lofty. Knows nosey columnists have their doubts. In fact, his may be the most difficult job in sports, or at the very least the most frustrating. Then again, in his mind it’s neither. He’s…
During the summer of 1994, while most of the world was greeting Robert Zemeckis’ Forrest Gump with dewy eyes and outstretched arms, this critic was grinning his fool head off at a very different tale of a lost, lone hero. While a featherweight Tom Hanks bumbled his lobotomized way through…
For slightly more than a decade, Chinese martial arts films have–directly and indirectly–gained a growing audience in America. Now the genre may find its greatest breakthrough coming from an unlikely source–director Ang Lee, best known for such comedy-dramas of social manners as Sense and Sensibility, The Wedding Banquet, and The…
The Family Man offers but a slight variation on the threadbare holiday theme of what life might have been like had Our Hero followed a different path–or never been born. Not only is it a redo of It’s a Wonderful Life–complete with an angel (played by a dreadlocked Don Cheadle,…
In Hollywood, all it takes is one big hit. Sandra Bullock’s ticket to stardom was the 1994 sleeper Speed, a rip-roaring action/crime thriller that elevated co-star Keanu Reeves to similar megawatt status. With her cute girl-next-door looks and ingratiating physical klutziness Bullock established an instant rapport with audiences. That perception…
Here you will find the ingredients required to spin an audience into throes of fuzzy warm-heartedness–the hope, the compassion, the joie de vivre–all blended with the skill of a consummate confectioner. Much like a box of sweets with a convenient guide inside the lid, there are no surprises in Lasse…
It’s where Walter Huston found paradise at the end of The Treasure of Sierra Madre, where the murdering lovers Steve McQueen and Ali McGraw rode into the sunset at the end of The Getaway, and where Thelma and Louise were headed when they ended up at the Grand Canyon. There…
I haven’t seen a stranger show in a while–one more packed with diverse agendas, crossed-genre elements, a bipolar alternating need to entertain and uplift–than the musical production currently running in the Stage West half of Allied Theatre Group. Indeed, because I could never quite get a bead on precisely what…
Jay Maisel is through the looking glass. What’s black is white; what’s white is black. The native New Yorker came to Dallas for a December weekend opening of an exhibition of his photographs at The Boyd Gallery, and it’s actually colder here than it was in New York. There are…
Growing up in the middle-class suburbs, we accompanied our parents every Sunday to the Caucasian Methodist Church. Now, “Caucasian Methodist” is not an official designation of the United Methodist Church; in this case, it’s merely an observation. We pre-teen Methodists were lovingly and gently tutored in the liberal leanings of…
Nothing will send a Dallasite into a panic faster than an SUV’s broken air conditioner in July. Summer commands fear and respect while winter is merely a brief relief from the angry sun god. Already Winter Solstice is upon us and, after this week, the sun will start getting higher…
Fair warning: Enough time has passed that it’s OK to discuss the ending of writer-director M. Night Shyamalan’s Unbreakable. Those who have not yet seen the film and intend to might want to keep on moving. Or perhaps not: To reveal the ending, all 180 or so seconds of it,…
On an unseasonably warm day, the smell of charcoal and beer wafting through the air, I slow my midnight-green Honda to a stop in a faraway parking lot. I step out, inhale deeply, and begin the trek toward a grim reality, one I never believed possible. I despise the Cowboys…
Assessing the merits of Quills, the lusty new feature by director Philip Kaufman (Henry and June), it’s tempting to seek correlative characters from popular movies to illustrate just how radical this business is not. In Kaufman’s film–affectionately constructed upon a screenplay by Doug Wright, who adapts his award-winning play–we discover…
What Women Want could be the first movie to win a Clio Award for Advertisement of the Year. No fewer than two dozen products receive prominent placement in the film, from Federal Express to Foster’s Lager to Cutty Sark to L’eggs pantyhose to US Airways. After a while, you begin…
