Remember the Titans–based on a true story about how a football team brought together a segregated Alexandria, Virginia, in the early 1970s–is the first film from producer Jerry Bruckheimer’s Technical Black production company, meant to offer more contemplative and slower-paced films than his hollow, slam-bang filmography suggests: Flashdance, The Rock,…
It takes a special mindset to celebrate castration, and audiences confusing feminine empowerment with the crude hacking off of seemingly oppressive huevos are certain to get a bang out of Girlfight, the gritty debut feature from writer-director Karyn Kusama. Metaphorical or otherwise, there’s already a movie about deballing to suit…
It’s a sorry fact that what everybody in Hollywood really wants to do–writer, actor, best boy, and caterer alike–is direct. This has led, over the years, to some embarrassing debuts and some unexpected triumphs. For many, the notion that Sally Field–after Gidget and Sister Bertrille and “You like me…you really…
One of the benefits of being a famous television actor is that you’re allowed backstage, that roped-off wonderland most audience members believe to be an orgiastic utopia of groupies and booze. Little do fans realize how mundane it really is behind the velvet rope–cold cuts and bottled water, and musicians…
Much has changed for urban gays in the 21 years since William Friedkin’s Cruising. That controversial serial-killer thriller–set in the leather bars and after-hours sex clubs of New York’s West Village–was derided by gay rights activists as a piece of cheapjack sensationalism leading only to trouble, seemingly designed to exacerbate…
Maybe the drive for self-expression must be fueled by conflict. Perhaps that’s why hormones ignite the fierce independence of adolescence and why families are torn apart when the free spirits among them break out, rebelling against the family values, willing to be disowned in order to be self-determined. “Deny thy…
Journalist, poet, playwright, and composer Dolores Prida is as radical in her politics and identity as the more famous stage artist Maria Irene Fornes (the two have collaborated in New York), yet, in my opinion, she goes about striking the establishment with a more conscious and formidable force–a sense of…
Consider, if you must, the forthcoming fall television season: You have John Goodman as a gay man, Charlie Sheen as Michael J. Fox, Gabriel Byrne as a single dad, Geena Davis as a pain in the ass, Bette Midler as Bette Midler, Jon Cryer as every character he’s ever played,…
You fall from bed hours before work on a Sunday, hours before the dreadful 49ers will come calling on the even more dreadful Cowboys. You’re too groggy for much more than basic motor functions–if that. Slowly, you stumble toward the living room, much to the chagrin of your legs. As…
“Howdy, Art Folks”Frank Campagna’s influence–and his art–is all over Deep Ellum. If there’s a mural inside or outside a bar or restaurant, chances are he painted it. He’s something of a leader to Deep Ellum’s long-standing community of streetwise artists, organizing art shows here and there, and tapping his compadres…
American culture has not been kind to the ’60s. Outside of the extraordinarily resilient appeal of the pop music of the time, the period has become–for more than one of the several subsequent generations of college students–the embarrassing punch line to a bad joke. The movies have also not been…
In the 1998 documentary The Fear of God: The Making of The Exorcist, made for the BBC and available on The Exorcist 25th-anniversary DVD, director William Friedkin spends a great deal of time explaining why he excised certain scenes from his film, scenes author and screenwriter William Peter Blatty had…
I didn’t know about comedienne-actress Margaret Cho’s struggles with depression and drug and alcohol addiction, nor about her near-death from kidney failure brought on by extreme dieting. In fact, I didn’t know anything about her at all except that she had been the star of a short-lived television sitcom I…
Some may find reason to embrace the romantic comedy Woman on Top as the nonsensical but sweet-tempered fantasy of two South American filmmakers who don’t understand life in this country very well but grasp all the magical powers of Brazil. After all, Brazil ranks second only to fashionable Tibet on…
We all have our little secrets, and it’s out-of-the-closet time with one of mine: Try as I might, I find it hard to dislike Dan Rizzie. There are plenty of reasons to cast a hypercritical eye on the SMU-educated artist, currently the subject of shows at the McKinney Avenue Contemporary…
At first, you don’t want to admit it, because it seems somehow wrong–just too easy. After all, the woman on the other end of the phone line is not that woman seen every Sunday night on HBO, lamenting the sad, sorry state of her love affairs. She’s not an actress…
Kander, Ebb, and FlowThere’s nothing worse than enduring the second-stringers, the Marilu Henners and Tom Wopats of this world slogging their way through the Broadway classics on their way to the bank. But director Sam Mendes’ revival of Cabaret, which opened in London in 1993 and cleaned up at the…
If you write about the visual arts long enough in this town, you start getting a little respect and a lot of perks. You get gifts in the mail–funky candles from Sock Monkey, death masks from Eddie Ruiz at Expo 825, and invitations to chichi dos, such as the Dallas…
“This song explains why I’m leaving home and becoming a stewardess,” says Anita Miller (Zooey Deschanel) to her well-meaning, overbearing mother, as the soundtrack begins to swell with the low hums of Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel. Just a few seconds earlier, Elaine Miller (Frances McDormand) had insisted she wouldn’t…
It’s unfortunate the title Being John Malkovich has already been taken, as it’s a far better one than Bait–and far more appropriate to boot. As Bristol, a computer expert and wily thief and cold-blooded killer, Doug Hutchison is the human sampling machine. His is a routine coddled together from the…
There’s a trio of duets in Duets. The film is set in the world of karaoke singing, but the title really refers to three sets of paired-off actors performing pas de deux to the tune of John Byrum’s Golden-Age-of-Television-ish dialogue. Only one of the three duos shakes fully to life,…
So many intense themes run rampant in Joe Charbanic’s debut feature, The Watcher, that it’s tricky to keep up. For instance, a young lady who lives alone with her cat seems ominously doomed. Then there’s the gripping premise that borrowing from nihilistic wanker David Fincher (Se7en) or industrial scamp Trent…
