In a season of lumbering big-screen circuses, Rough Magic provides a rowdy creative sideshow. It’s the kind of haywire high-wire act that suspends the laws of science and grows more involving and comical with every artful near-fall. It’s about magic as illusion and magic as genuine miracle, and it shuffles…
It lasted a mere four seasons, but thirtysomething lives on. Its legacy began the moment the show went off the air in 1991: The yuppie angst fantasy created by Marshall Herskovitz and Ed Zwick continues to spawn even now, its children looking almost exactly like the parents. First came My…
thursday may 29 Cruces de la Vida: In a culture that has prized the public display of machismo as highly as the Latino culture has, it’s inevitable that Latinas have traditionally been driven to find and exercise strength inside themselves. The Catholic Church has provided much fuel to help stoke…
Yes indeed, it’s Dinosaur Week in the 1997 Drive-In Academy Award nominations, time for our annual recognition of those who have just made too goldurn many B movies. This has always been a popular category, even though Morgan Fairchild once won it three years in a row and her dominance…
It says a lot about New Theatre Company’s collective skills that a play about boredom should come across so forcefully. Yet Keith Reddin’s Dallas premiere of Nebraska twiddles its thumbs with such homicidal intensity, the thwarted lives of the various couples it portrays are rendered from the inside out, all…
Picking up the press kit for the new gay comedy-drama Love! Valour! Compassion!, I was primed to find a dictionary noting the multiple meanings of “queen.” Of course, this enterprise is too self-consciously tasteful to commit such a faux pas. Terrence McNally’s Tony Award-winning work has been called “one of…
The appearance of The Lost World: Jurassic Park carries a double burden. Not only is it the sequel to the most popular movie ever made, but it is also the first film Steven Spielberg has directed since 1993’s Schindler’s List. Now that he has finally won his Oscar and achieved…
thursday may 22 Black Velvet and George and Scheherazade, sad, sad, sad: 11th Street Theatre Project brings these two short plays written by a playwright who graduated from Southern Methodist University to the Dallas area for the first time. Angela Wilson, who currently teaches on the faculty of Mountainview College,…
Last week I belted down three whiskeys, grabbed a couple of ammo belts, and prepared to enter the Place of Unspeakable Darkness. Rhett Beavers wanted to go to… The Computer Store. Why do all the people in computer stores look like terrorists? Their hairdos stick out in 17 different directions,…
Laurel Hoitsma, a company member of Undermain Theatre and actress about town, called a couple weeks ago to make a request unusual to these ears: “Please don’t review the new show I’m in.” Had I finally bored a Dallas actor to the breaking point? After being reassured that this disinvitation…
Sidney Lumet has had enough ups and downs in his long, prolific career that it’s never safe to count him out–even after two disappointing films in a row, A Stranger Among Us (1992) and Guilty as Sin (1993). Even the greatest directors frequently falter in their seventies, so it’s pleasant…
Gummy with heartfelt folderol and overbearingly chummy, Fathers’ Day comes across like a feature-length expansion of its sniffle-and-giggle trailer. Prior to this teaming, Robin Williams and Billy Crystal had never been in a movie together–though, along with Whoopi Goldberg, they appear together annually on the televised Comic Relief fundraiser–so there…
If you’re hankering to see a movie that sends up swinging ’60s London and Carnaby Street and vintage James Bond movies, don’t bother to check out Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery. What the movie mostly sends up is its star and screenwriter, Michael Myers. That’s not all bad: Myers…
thursday may 15 Harry Wu: A lot of American political leaders, both Republican and Democrat, wish that Harry Wu would just shut up. Scheduled as the keynote speaker for the upcoming Congressional hearings on whether China’s “most favored nation” status should be renewed, the 19-year gulag veteran, courageous activist, and…
I have this friend Donovan who has a thing for flight attendants. You’d realize why right away if you got a look at Donovan. He’s one of those Gucci-loafer-hanging-halfway-off-the-foot sorta guys. He’s got a Movado watch that’s so expensive it doesn’t have hands OR digital readouts OR anything else on…
At this writing, I’ve seen two performances of the Undermain production of writer-director Erik Ehn’s The Sound and the Fury–a Wednesday preview and last Saturday’s opening night. I must admit I didn’t start to enjoy the show until I’d kicked it around in my head during the interval. This made…
In The Fifth Element, the all-knowing, all-powerful Supreme Being of the Universe turns out to be Leeloo (Milla Jovovich), an orange-haired babe in a skimpy, Band-Aid-thin mod outfit who speaks in a kind of Slavic scat and cries a lot. It’s as if the filmmakers started out to make a…
Judy Davis is often at her ravaged best when she’s playing women pulled apart by their own warring impulses. Torn between their isolating desire for freedom and their need for solace, the women in such films as High Tide, Husbands and Wives, The New Age, and A Passage to India…
thursday may 8 James Kelman and Duncan McLean: Booker Prize-winning novelist James Kelman earned all kinds of comparisons to James Joyce–not all of them favorable–when his brutal, poetic novel How Late it Was, How Late stormed the world’s literary salons in 1994. His dogged pursuit of the perfect Scottish dialect…
I ran into Rusty Tisworthy down at the pool hall, where he normally takes up space by making bets on how many times you can twist the wingnut on the bottom of a Mixmaster. And Rusty started tellin’ this nasty story about the sex he had last weekend, and lemme…
The young heroine of The Holy Inquiry, a United States premiere presented by Teatro Dallas, makes two mistakes early on in the play–she learns how to read, and she saves a Jesuit priest from drowning in the river after his canoe capsizes. These may not sound like screw-ups, but for…
When Masterpiece Theatre aired a multipart Anna Karenina to mark the novel’s centennial in 1977, the series producer, Joan Sullivan, said, “I think that great stories [like Tolstoy’s] are what the series is about.” Now Bernard Rose, the writer-director of the new movie version, talks about how lucky he was…
