Film actors are generally said to have good chemistry or no chemistry. But bad chemistry in movies does exist, and a sleep-inducer called Inventing the Abbotts is a case in point. In ascending order of age, Liv Tyler, Jennifer Connelly, and Joanna Going play Pamela, Eleanor, and Alice Abbott, sisters…
Over the past five years, action star Jean-Claude Van Damme has become one of America’s leading importers of foreign talent. In 1993, he hired Hong Kong action ace John Woo to direct Hard Target. For last year’s Maximum Risk, he brought over Ringo Lam. And now he has used a…
thursday april 3 Mary Williford-Shade and Jose Bustamante: Nationally acclaimed dancer Mary Williford-Shade has earned something of a reputation as an angst queen with her ferocious, frenetic style of dance. She teams with Jose Bustamante, a University of Texas at Austin dance faculty member who has choreographed in both Spain…
Have you ever noticed that, every time they do a survey of sex in America, it always looks something like this: Guys who have cheated on their wives at least once: 75 percent. Gals who have cheated on their husbands at least once: 20 percent. Guys who have had sex…
When my eyes landed on the definition of “arabesque” in Webster’s Dictionary, a thought hit me with the force of a quick, hard wedgie: I’m a fraud. I was researching to write this review of one program in Deep Ellum Opera Theatre’s March series, A Month of Dance. Webster’s was…
By re-releasing The Godfather, Paramount Pictures is both honoring itself a and perpetrating a crime. The honor is that one of the greatest and most influential films ever made is being rereleased on the occasion of its 25th anniversary. The crime is that Paramount, according to a studio spokeswoman, has…
In The Devil’s Own, Brad Pitt plays Frankie McGuire, an Irish Republican Army gunman with 24 kills to his credit–13 British soldiers and 11 police officers. After a bloody firefight in Belfast, he escapes to New York, where, helped by a pro-IRA judge (George Hearn), he is placed in the…
Although Russian director Sergei Bodrov has made half a dozen features and won a fistful of awards since the mid-’80s, he is virtually unknown in the United States–despite having lived in Los Angeles on and off for several years. Orion Classics is now distributing his 1996 film, Prisoner of the…
I spent the 68th anniversary of the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre watching The Godfather with the new soundtrack prepared for its 25th anniversary. The scene was a mixing room in the Saul Zaentz Film Center in Berkeley, and the master of ceremonies was much-honored editor and sound expert Walter Murch,…
thursday march 27 All’s Well That Ends Well: The Dallas Theater Center closes its 1996-’97 season with a whisper rather than a bang; one of Shakespeare’s more nuanced sex-role comedies with a heroine that makes Titania look like Edith Bunker. Strong-willed Helen chases a man who has sworn his antipathy…
I noticed my buddy Donald Trump’s casino company lost 31 million bucks last year. But isn’t it strange that this announcement came just three months after The Donald announced that he had personally won $20 million by betting the long odds on the Tyson-Holyfield fight? Of course, we still don’t…
God bless the children who attended the same Saturday matinee performance of The Yellow Boat that I did. During a question-and-answer session after the show, they demonstrated that you don’t just lose your innocence when you become an adult–if you’re not careful, you can also shed a certain clear, tough…
Cult auteur David Cronenberg crashes and burns–his talent, that is–in Crash, a vain attempt at a techno-age Persona. It follows a demented explorer named Vaughan (Elias Koteas) into an insane new world where twisted metal, curvy skin, automotive oil, and bodily fluids merge in an explosive carnal cocktail. To Vaughan,…
Selena opens with a reenactment of the slain Tejano singer’s February 1995 event-style concert at the Houston Astrodome. Bedecked in a sparkling purple jumpsuit, the beloved Texas native (played by Jennifer Lopez) is shown singing a few disco nuggets from her childhood, including “I Will Survive” and “Last Dance.” While…
Jim Carrey caught a lot of grief last year when The Cable Guy tanked at the box office. Carrey was way out of line, doomsayers yelped, to have deviated so far and in such a dark direction from his established, money-in-the-bank persona of the double-jointed dimwit for whom a lobotomy…
thursday march 20 The Rainbow Poets: The Writer’s Garret, in cooperation with the Dallas Poets Community, presents an evening of lyrical male bonding as part of its “Soup’s On” series. Football and fart jokes are being dispensed with; communication rituals practiced by the species homo attitudis are in the spotlight…
Wanda Bodine keeps raggin’ on me for Forgetting About The Weekend. This is some kinda sacred deal with her. Translation: “Get your butt over here and pay attention to me on Saturday night.” You know when I usually notice it’s the weekend? When I go to Aggie’s House of Pancakes…
I must say that A Rose By Any Other Name, the 1997 season opener for Teatro Dallas, surprised me at regular intervals throughout its 90 minutes without intermission. There were enough changes in tone and texture–not to mention a rich performance by one of its stars that didn’t begin to…
City of Industry starts out promisingly and then turns into the kind of crime thriller only a pointy-headed postmodernist could love. Since a lot of critics these days have pointy heads, you might just want to brace yourself for a lot of steaming compost in the press about how “existential”…
If we take Bob Rafelson at his word, Blood & Wine completes a trilogy about family relationships that started with the director’s two crowning achievements, 1970’s Five Easy Pieces and 1971’s The King of Marvin Gardens. Those two films are so often pointed to as evidence of the brilliance of…
It could have been any town in America, and it often was: Athens, Georgia; Chapel Hill, North Carolina; Minneapolis; Austin. Seattle was just another stop on the A&R Express, another destination where the gold-card crowd could run up their expense accounts while they looked for the Next Big Thing. At…
thursday march 13 Doris and Judy: Icons Among Us: In addition to co-founding Swollen Art Productions, actress-writer Dinah Lynch is a professor of theater at UTA who has played a number of strong, difficult women, among them Vita-Sackville West and Dorothy Parker. She offers Dallasites her full-length one-woman show about…
