The timing couldn’t be better for How Stella Got Her Groove Back. The dog days of summer are upon us, and few prospects could be more welcome to asteroid-weary moviegoers than a light romantic comedy that includes a trip to Jamaica as part of the package. Director Kevin Rodney Sullivan…
Darren Aronofsky’s debut feature, Pi, won the Dramatic Directing Award at Sundance this year, and it’s easy to imagine why: Whatever its faults–and it has more than a few–it is unquestionably different. It at least takes a stab at interpolating cerebral ideas into the format of a thriller. Max Cohen…
The editors who put together the TV ads for Return to Paradise deserve an Oscar. The spots are suffocating montages of suspense, claustrophobia, and desperation–each one a compressed 30 seconds of overwhelming doom that resonates after it’s gone. Lewis McBride (Joaquin Phoenix), captured on video, his gaunt and haunted face…
Victorian costume romance? Oh, no. Jewish Victorian costume romance? Oy, no. Historical romances–particularly Brontë sisters-style bodice-rippers–are difficult enough to swallow on-screen without feeling as if you’re gagging on a mothball. One colored with Hebrew Orthodoxy? That’s going to be one camphoric matzo ball. But Minnie Driver, fresh from her star-securing…
As long as there have been storytellers with the guts to explore all corners of the human experience, there have been listeners who’ve insisted–sometimes with the force of the state behind them–that nothing but harm can come from exploring traditionally taboo subjects…especially those that emanate from the dark, moist corners…
Fulvio descends on the casino oasis to impress his business colleagues and wakes up the next morning beside a blonde named Darla. Like an Italian-bred millionaire getting drunk in Vegas and marrying a Brooklyn-bred showgirl, there are matches made in irony heaven–not built to last, but a hell of a…
The Corvette is more than just a car–it’s a symbol of American culture. Well, it’s a symbol of American culture in other countries, at least; it’s the American dream wrapped in steel and fiberglass and powered by a Big Block V8. In reality, most Americans’ only contact with a Corvette…
thursday august 13 Riverdance is a celebration of Irish music, song, and dance that almost every person of Irish descent would probably like to see quietly disappear. Unfortunately, that’s not likely to happen anytime soon. The Irish dance troupe attracts inexplicably large crowds wherever it travels, including Dallas, where it…
Even Randy Galloway’s 81-year-old mother, herself a lifelong journalism veteran, couldn’t believe it when he told her the news. Margaret Galloway didn’t come right out and say it, but her 55-year-old son could hear the concern in her voice–feel it, actually, like a slap. It’s the way any son feels…
Although I haven’t always enjoyed Pegasus Theatre artistic director Kurt Kleinmann’s doggedly cinematic brand of live comedy, his dedication to it has a definite logic when you consider how the American stage and American film have both traded traditional theatrical acting for “authenticity.” Before Lee Strasberg, Sanford Meisner, Uta Hagen,…
Opening a gallery in Dallas is just this side of nuts. Even established spaces in our so-called “gallery district” play Russian roulette with nearly every show; rosters of regular clients are no guarantee of a sale. But opening a gallery here and showing works by a “never-heard-of-‘im” German painter is…
Nicolas Cage has never seemed more dazzling than he does in the new Brian De Palma thriller Snake Eyes. Playing Rick Santoro, a corrupt Atlantic City cop who likes to think he’s “everybody’s friend,” Cage for almost two continuous hours is boogying to his own inner beat. It’s like watching…
These are the kinds of people who show up in Hal Hartley films: a nun who writes pornography; a surly, amnesiac hit man; a gas-station attendant who plays Elizabethan ballads on his electric guitar and greets customers in French; and a “radical shortstop” who capped a decade playing for the…
thursday august 6 About the only thing that Red Jacket brags about more than its inclusion on InStyle magazine’s list of coolest nightclubs in the country is the rumor that Jack Ruby spent his last free night at the club. Ruby, as anyone within earshot of Oliver Stone knows, is…
They’re what makes living in Dallas tolerable for those of us who’d rather shove shards of broken Shiner bottles up our noses than go see another trite alterna-band play at another rock-club-cum-hell-hole. The Sons of Hermann Hall is a historic, wood-floored oasis in a land of concrete and noise (some…
It’s never been easy to keep a Deep Ellum crowd occupied. There’s always a better band or cheaper drinks somewhere else. Sure, you can get people to come in, but it’s getting harder to keep them there. And because each club has a separate cover charge, clubgoers are less willing…
The special challenge of children’s theater–namely, how the heck do you make live performance not only accessible to kids, but competitive with the technological media forms–has been addressed before in this space. It’s not really so different from the challenge of making live performance accessible and competitive to adults, who…
Do we really need to see the great Kevin Spacey fuming and fussing in one of those we-do-things-my-way-or-we-don’t-do-them-at-all roles? In The Negotiator, he’s playing Chris Sabian, an expert hostage negotiator for the Chicago police, whose job it is to talk down Samuel L. Jackson’s Danny Roman, another police expert who…
There are disconnected sequences in Whatever, the film debut of writer-director Susan Skoog, that evoke a unique and harrowing experience: the high school party that won’t end. Skoog obviously understands there are two kinds of students–those who can mess around with drugs, alcohol, and sex yet still observe boundaries, and…
The Walt Disney Company has a smart and highly profitable business strategy: Re-release the studio’s proven hits every seven years or so, thereby reaching a new generation of kids–and making another tidy bundle of dollars in the process. Or the Mouse House just remakes its classic films–see, or don’t, last…
The feature directorial debut of writer-director Theresa Connelly is a complete misfire. What is meant to be a somewhat farcical, but also fairytale-like, midsummer night’s sex comedy instead ends up a tedious, uninvolving affair, burdened with a slim premise, grating characters, and poorly realized humor. Clearly a heartfelt project for…
Thanks to the hungry maw of cable TV, nearly every movie production is now accompanied by a documentary crew, assigned with getting enough footage for at least a half-hour making-of short. Such sub-productions are traditionally arranged by the producers of the main feature; and, not surprisingly, it is the usual…
