Samuel Beckett has become more useful as an allusion, an adjective to qualify the heirs and pretenders of his perverse comic legacy. Rarely is the novelist-playwright spoken of as a living voice. Perhaps being widely regarded as one of the most influential theatrical sensibilities of the 20th century comes with…
Art-scenester folklore has it that Brice Marden and Julian Schnabel came to blows in a New York bar back in the 1970s. The story pits the established abstract minimalist and the emerging young painter against each other at Max’s Kansas City, the dark and smoke-choked stomping grounds of glam rockers,…
Jerry Heidenreich stood alone on the starter’s block, waiting for his teammate to touch the wall. Heidenreich had done this thousands of times before, waited God knows how many times for his turn to dive into the pool and put away a relay race. He’d been doing it since he…
There’s one moment in Global Village, the Actors’ Stock Company world premiere by playwright-collaborator Tom Grady, that arrives just before intermission and knocks the breath right out of you. I won’t be so thoughtless as to reveal it here. Suffice to say it’s the culmination of a slow tragicomic buildup…
What’s entertaining about October Sky is the unlikely-but-true spectacle of backwater West Virginia teens teaching themselves rocket science in the Eisenhower ’50s. They progress from a glorified cherry bomb to sophisticated missiles through trial-and-error-and-error. Their inner rocket fuel is the desire to avoid getting stuck in the dying coal industry…
Plot is a central problem in both Jawbreaker and Office Space, two comedies opening this week: The first has too much, and the second (and far better of the two movies) has too little. Jawbreaker’s 26-year-old writer-director, Darren Stein, says he wanted to make an homage to the films he…
The independent production and distribution company The Shooting Gallery probably got a lot more attention when Monica Lewinsky showed up in Washington wearing a cap with its logo than it is likely to from the release of The 24-Hour Woman, a modest, deserving film from writer-director Nancy Savoca. Savoca has…
thursday february 18 Dallas-bred screenwriter Owen Wilson and his Houston bud director Wes Anderson (Rushmore, Bottle Rocket) may have beat a path out of Texas you could lay a Supercollider in, but two other Dallas-raised University of Texas brats may be hot on their heels in terms of national exposure–but…
Anyone who caught Mexican director Eduardo Ruiz Savinon’s previous collaborations with Teatro Dallas knows that this man loves to walk on the dark side, stopping here and there to frolic in the downright macabre: Profane Games and The Tree were marvelously atmospheric Teatro successes that dealt, respectively, with children who…
The average American is exposed to more than 1,500 ads a day. Billboards, T-shirt logos, the sides of buses, drink coasters, matchbooks–advertisements have invaded every nook and cranny of our daily lives. Still we insist we’re not influenced by their messages. Not much, anyway. Talk about ego. Philadelphia filmmakers Harold…
There is one standard I hold for so-called “experimental” forms, be it in the novel or the poem or the play: Does it ripple? A delightful, now-deceased college English professor lectured at length on the phenomenon of “rippling,” and it has become an ideal bullshit detector for works whose creators…
In the archetypal dead-end town of Lawford, New Hampshire, cold-eyed men looking for trouble prowl the streets in four-by-fours with chrome spotlights and loaded gun racks. The gloomy barrooms are not gathering places so much as solitary confinement cells, and the most popular local sport is macho posturing. In wintry…
Short of nuclear holocaust, a major sale at Kmart, or a confirmed Clint Eastwood sighting back in rural Iowa, there’s probably no way to keep the movie version of Message in a Bottle from overwhelming the tender emotions of the hearts-and-flowers crowd. After all, this relentless assault on the tear…
For better or worse, the father figure in Larry Clark’s ironically titled Another Day in Paradise turns out to be Mel, a foul-mouthed, 40-year-old junkie wearing a devil’s-red tennis shirt. His notion of good counsel is showing his surrogate son how to disable the burglar alarm at a medical clinic…
thursday february 11 Sitcom star is the comedian’s equivalent of a Mafia no-show job: They’re easy to get, and you get paid a lot for doing very little. Like every other semi-successful comedian in the past decade, Mark Curry had his own sitcom for a few years, ABC’s Hangin’ with…
This past year hasn’t produced much quality television. FOX, for one, seems to have completely abandoned ship, with its incessant airing of those When the World’s Most Dangerous Animals Attack Before They Were Stars specials. But the year has produced some memorable commercials, and some we wish we could forget…
Apparently, during the planning stages of Disneyland, Walt Disney referred to the castle–the one that’s become synonymous with not only the amusement park, but Disney itself–as a wienie. That’s right, a wienie. Maybe our minds are permanent occupants of the gutter, but we can’t help but notice the phallic connotations…
The round little boy wears a green plastic cowboy hat adorned with the Dallas Mavericks logo. The hat is a thousand sizes too small for his large blond head; it looks like a thimble resting atop a basketball. The boy sits next to Steve Nash, among the newest and richest…
“Racism is a device that, of itself, means nothing,” says a character from Lorraine Hansberry’s unfinished African liberation drama Les Blancs. “It is simply a means, an invention to justify the rule of some men over others.” The character, however, goes on to confuse his listener by declaring that racism…
The title of the mondo exclusive show at the Kimbell is disconcerting: Matisse and Picasso: A Gentle Rivalry. “Gentle” isn’t the best word to pair with “rivalry,” and even less of a match for the temperament of these artists, but how else can the Kimbell get the point across? These…
The new Mel Gibson movie, Payback, is arguably the first major-studio release this year to have even a modicum of aesthetic ambition. For his directorial debut, Brian Helgeland–who won an Oscar for his screenplay for 1997’s L.A. Confidential (cowritten with director Curtis Hanson)–has chosen to adapt The Hunter, the first…
In the 1993 hit Groundhog Day, Bill Murray played a show-biz smart-ass who grew into a human being. Murray added a core of warmth and romance to his comic arsenal without losing his zinging wit and crack-up irony, and he’s kept that progress going, even in piddling vehicles such as…
