On one of the coldest nights this winter, I am led up a curving staircase that begins in the lobby of the Dallas Theater Center’s Kalita Humphreys space. Near the top of the steps is the open door to Frank’s Place, a rehearsal space cum mini-theater named after the designer…
Lars von Trier is, perhaps consciously and defiantly, one of the least commercial brilliant directors in the world. His best-known movie, the 1991 Zentropa, and his earlier The Element of Crime both open with hypnotic voice-overs, seemingly daring us to succumb to sleep before the credits are even over. Nonetheless,…
World governments may topple, stock markets may soar and crash, deadly viruses may mantle the globe, but one constant remains: Woody Allen still hankers for a Cole Porter-ized New York. You have to be a deep-dish romantic, or else a blinkered snoot–or maybe both–to persist in such a demonstration. We…
Kevin Spacey sits in his Four Seasons hotel room to talk about his first experience as a director, about the two years he spent navigating Albino Alligator through the treacherous waters of Hollywood. He does so with passion and patience; he is easygoing, casual in a denim shirt and brown…
OK, metaphor buffs: An Albino Alligator, we’re informed in the movie of that name, is what the other alligators in a group send out as a sacrificial lamb. Members of another group of gators attack the albino, and the remainder of the first group violently dispatches their competition for their…
thursday january 16 Big D Festival of the Unexpected: As is the case every year at its Big D Festival of the Unexpected, the Dallas Theater Center gives mucho push to the national performers and playwrights who appear for the company’s grab-bag of cabaret, spoken word, comedy, performance art, and…
This baby that Wanda Bodine is gonna have–which I did NOT father, even though we haven’t had a blood test yet, and I don’t care what it says, I’m hiring Barry Scheck–as I was saying, this baby that Wanda Bodine is gonna have is a boy. We know this because…
New Line’s release of Jackie Chan’s First Strike is salvo number three in Chan’s invasion of America. (Miramax’s version of the 1991 Operation Condor, the last film on which the star also took a director’s credit, is due out in May.) Like its predecessors, Rumble in the Bronx and Supercop,…
Marvin’s Room, starring Diane Keaton and Meryl Streep as sisters who reunite uneasily for the first time in 20 years, is one of those movies about people who confront the choices they’ve made and become better people for it. Adapted by the late Scott McPherson from his popular 1992 play…
In the opening minutes of The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, the friends of the family’s grown children, Micol (Dominique Sanda) and Alberto (Helmut Berger), take a sylvan bike ride to the Finzi-Continis’ tennis court. Director Vittorio De Sica invests even this expository scene with psychological acuity. The sun-dappled color photography,…
A famous movie composer once told me a joke: Two songwriters are sitting around, and one of them says to the other, “I just saw the most amazing thing. A man fell off the roof of a building, hit a ledge, fell to the street, got winged by a bus,…
Ever since his first film, 1979’s Real Life, Albert Brooks has occupied his own little niche in American cinema. While his old buddy Rob Reiner quickly moved from the small, quirky, and wonderful This Is Spinal Tap to slick mainstream films, the 49-year-old Brooks (n. Albert Einstein) has released a…
thursday january 9 Dallas Video Festival: For in-depth critical appraisal of the tenth annual Dallas Video Festival, check out this week’s Observer coverage by Arnold Wayne Jones and Jimmy Fowler. For a tirade about the unfair bias many people hold against video, read on: It’s certainly true that the tacky…
I be readin’ about “Ebonics.” It’s the new “Black English” just officially certified by the Oakland school board as a second language. Why didn’t they have this when I was in high school? I had to take Spanish and French. I hated Spanish and French. Especially French. Hell, I would…
I must admit that I wasn’t anticipating with delight Theatre Three’s perennial holiday production of The Fantasticks. Nothing against the nice folks at T3, but I’m the kind of fellow who considers seasonal sentiment a prison sentence. To paraphrase Dorothy Parker when she was a New York stage critic for…
Now and again, as I sit here on my power perch–having just praised some pleasing cinematic trifle with a mot so bon it could singlehandedly vault the producers into new tax brackets or having characterized some hack with invective withering enough to permanently brand his pathetic career like some Puritan…
My first impulse in putting together a 10-best list for 1996 was to dispense with the new stuff altogether and go for the revival gold. The best films of 1996 were the rereleased restorations: Vertigo, Strangers on a Train, Lolita, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, and…
friday january 3 Attack of the Killer Mutant Leeches: Fans of bad cinema practically declared a day of public mourning when Comedy Central announced it would cancel “Mystery Science Theatre 3000” (whose creator, by the way, will be honored at this year’s Dallas Video Festival January 9-12). While some of…
How do you make the water stay in the bathroom sink? You may think this is a stupid question, but take it from a man who’s stayed in hundreds of motel rooms–it’s IMPORTANT. Here’s how they want you to THINK you make the water stay in the bathroom sink: By…
There were two different performances happening the Saturday night I saw Deep Ellum Opera Theatre’s production of Gian Carlo Menotti’s holiday classic Amahl and the Night Visitors. One occurred when I closed my eyes, and it was easily the most charming of the twins–the voices of the performers were alternately…
Hollywood routinely creates movies whose sole reason for existing is to provide a beloved celebrity a showcase to deliver a scenery-chewing star turn; occasionally, these films even win their lead performer an Oscar (recent example: Al Pacino in Scent of a Woman). But The Evening Star may be the first…
In Mother, Albert Brooks plays John Henderson, a science-fiction novelist recently divorced from his second wife who decides he can’t risk another relationship until he comes to terms with his mother. So he does the logical thing: He moves in with her. He hauls out of her garage all his…
