I have a question about Twister. You know those little plastic thingies with whirlybirds on ’em that they throw up inside the tornado funnel at the end–the things that look like they’re prizes out of a gumball machine? We’re all supposed to feel great, right, because Bill Paxton and Helen…
Don’t ask why, but about two years ago I found myself on a tour of a hospital located at the base of the Appalachian mountains. The hospital’s administrator, a Catholic nun, was explaining some of the unique pathologies seen at the facility, most of them derived from the effects of…
Anyone who thinks the films of 50 years ago placed the virgin/whore shackles on female characters should check out Molly Haskell’s perpetually irritated book, From Reverence To Rape. Given the obvious gender constraints of that time, Haskell insists, actresses at the height of their careers–women like Barbara Stanwyck, Katharine Hepburn,…
A shooting, a base closing, a school controversy, an interracial romance, a 40-year-old murder. These are among the numerous prosaic events that, when taken alone, don’t amount to much, but put together constitute the elements of life in a dying border town. Yet these dull, dreary distractions that seem to…
thursday june 27 Wake-Up Call ’96: Some of the statements made by the Christian-based men’s movement offshoot Promise Keepers sound like empty whining when you consider that males have ruled Christianity and just about every other cultural institution for countless centuries now. Men are suffering a collective identity crisis? They’ve…
Have you ever noticed that, when the media do interviews, they almost always ask questions about… a) things that happened 30 years ago and don’t matter anymore, like why the Beatles broke up, or b) stuff that nobody wanted to know in the first place, like what Henry Kissinger’s favorite…
It’s one of the enduring enigmas of great literature. Why did Archie have such a fixation on Veronica, and such little regard for Betty, when the two females (hair color aside) were virtually identical? Why didn’t he just glom on to both of them? The timeless conundrum of sexual attraction…
It must be liberating for an actor to work with directors who routinely say, “You can ham it up all you want–there’s no way you can overact this role.” It must be equally comforting for a director to work with an actor willing to heed that advice. When you add…
When asked if there’s anything he’d like to discuss about his hot new indie flick, Welcome to the Dollhouse, writer-director Todd Solondz doesn’t hesitate. It’s not the movie itself that comes to mind, but his experiences publicizing it. “Some of the journalists I’ve spoken to for this movie have said…
thursday june 20 Sappho’s Symposium: Dallas’ nonprofit Extra Virgin Performance Cooperative is fully aware that naming its latest play festival Sappho’s Symposium is bound to keep droves of the Dallas curious-but-conservative away. (“Sappho? Didn’t she live on the island of Lesbos, enjoy women’s professional tennis, and own every Indigo Girls…
So far this summer, we’ve lost only 849 lives in Texas boating accidents, and I think that’s a real credit to the new Alamo Plastic Speedboat Propeller, which often maims instead of killing. One reason Texas lakes are so much safer this season, I would have to say, is due…
When I die, let me come back as a guest in an English country home as depicted by Noel Coward or P.G. Wodehouse. Let there be plenty of potty English gentry about the place and calm, competent butlers named Jeeves or Jenkins to straighten out the inevitable romantic imbroglios. Let…
Zane (Charlie Sheen), the hero of the new sci-fi film The Arrival, is a geeky, quasi-paranoid radio astronomer. Zane works at the Jet Propulsion Lab for the SETI project (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence), and spends most of his time aiming a large parabolic satellite dish to the heavens and listening…
The Phantom opens with a scene that contains a device I refer to as “The Axiom of the Rickety Bridge.” The rule is this: In any movie where there’s a creaky, handmade bridge–usually strung together with what appear to be vines and scraps of discarded lumber, swinging precariously hundreds of…
thursday june 13 Linda Ronstadt: Linda Ronstadt has notched 25 years in the music business, worldwide album sales of 30 million, and grown a thick hide to protect herself from the critical thorns that have scraped her along the journey. She’s also periodically grown a face: earnest country-rock girl, slick,…
Cecil O’Neal, director of Kitchen Dog Theater’s pressure-cooker production of Oleanna, proclaims in the playbill that “no one is right in this play…Both characters are flawed.” Bullshit, Cecil. The dude is right, and the chick is wrong. You know it, I know it, and any one who sees this play…
After the groundwork laid already this summer by Twister and Mission: Impossible, there’s no use or point in mentioning that in DragonHeart the plot-surprises are few, or that you can expect astounding special effects. (Hollywood is three-for-three so far.) But DragonHeart succeeds, in parts, where those other films don’t–as a…
Writer-director Hal Salwen may be only now releasing his feature-film debut Denise Calls Up, but he is no neophyte to filmmaking. The New York University Film School graduate worked for years on spec as a screenwriter in Hollywood, and it was during these uncertain, lean, lonely years that Salwen conceived…
“I give great massages.” You ever know a girl who says this? When a guy hears this, something inside the male body goes, “yeeeeeeeessssssssssssss!” Seventeen thousand neurons rush through the nervous system and plant a flag on Mount Everest, if you know what I mean, and I think you do…
thursday june 6 Spring Gallery Night: The title of the simultaneous night of receptions in the so-called Gallery District–around Fairmount and Cedar Springs–around Deep Ellum, and at other galleries around town is “Spring Gallery Night.” Technically, it’s still spring, although if temperatures persist toward the 100-degree mark, you may wish…
Stephen King embarked on a new project recently–The Green Mile, a serialized novel that he’s publishing in short monthly paperback installments. Luckily for King, he’s having much better luck with this new venture than with an earlier “first,” his directorial debut, which I reviewed a while back. Maximum Overdrive is…
Back in the ’60s there was a TV show called The Time Tunnel about two guys with military haircuts who get hurled through a time-space-continuum contraption and land in a different era each week. The first thing they had to do was figure out in what epoch they were, but…
