As a rule, I oppose giving away the endings of movies–not because of some vague notion of devotion to the film itself, but because it isn’t necessary. If a movie is bad, it’s usually bad all the way through, and divulging the climax is pointless. Rules were made to be…
If plays were judged by the number of literary allusions they contain, The Swan would rate high. This elliptical, enervating drama by Elizabeth Egloff is rife with references and parallels to works including Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Yeat’s poem, “Leda and the Swan,” Grimm’s fairy tales, and Kafka’s Metamorphosis. Unfortunately, it takes…
When somebody pays attention to filmmaker Abel Ferrara, it’s usually for something naughty he did–shooting Harvey Keitel on a date with Rosy Palm and her five sisters in Bad Lieutenant, or orchestrating the gang rape of a doe-eyed mute woman, only to have her launch a revenge killing spree in…
Many actors–hell, maybe even all actors–can easily outdistance Christian Slater for on-screen magnetism. He’s gotten away with that bargain-basement Nicholson ripoff since Heathers, but he’s never been able to equal Nicholson’s evil energy–the devilish charm that makes Nicholson captivating in almost any part. When the story doesn’t demand of him…
thursday february 15 Molka Alexandrova and Sasha Botcharova: Third Planet Theatre is a Dallas-based performing-arts company that specializes in importing Russian and other international talent as part of a post-communist, good-faith project. Its latest care package to the arts-loving Dallas population is a pair of singer-actor-dancer-comics who promise to deliver…
“I’ll tell you something,” Bob Musgrave whispers while standing in Goff’s Hamburgers, a curiously highbrow dive off the Tollway. “Back in the ’70s, the owner, Harvey Goff, used to keep this side door to the restaurant open, and every once in a while, he’d shoot a .38 slug into a…
Here we are again. It’s time for the 1996 Drive-In Academy Award nominees. I know you’re thrilled. The coveted Hubbie will be awarded in early April, and once again there are no duplications between the Hubbies and those other Academy Awards that they give out at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion…
Anthony has spent the last few weeks in a mental hospital. Dignan, Anthony’s best friend, wants to get him out, and has planned an elaborate escape: Anthony ties his bed sheets together, shimmies out the window to his pal waiting below, and together they make a daring, daylight break for…
thursday february 8 Dance Consortium: If you check out a performance by the Richardson-based contemporary dance ensemble Dance Consortium and dance is not a form of entertainment with which you are familiar, here is a word of warning: Arrive early and read the program from cover to cover. Otherwise, you…
For most baby boomers, Tobacco Road was one of those books which, if encountered at all, was found in dad’s dresser drawer buried beneath the boxer shorts and the scented, monogrammed hankies. Its lurid cover–usually a WTV (white trash vixen) in a dirty, strategically decaying dress–made you ponder the mysteries…
To update, or not to update? That is the question facing directors today who wish to stage classic plays. Stay true to a classic’s setting, period, costumes, and text and you risk audience indifference. Revamp a play and set it in South Central Los Angeles or on a futuristic space…
Every actor wants to be a drunk, and every actress wants to be a hooker. I don’t know why exactly, but I know you can take the straightest white-bread suburban nerd out of an acting class and say, “Hey, how would you like to play a crack-addicted serial killer?” and…
When the new Ridley Scott film, White Squall, really gets rolling, it lives up to the energetic image of its title. The sea rages on like some great, angry ogre of wind and water as a schooner–a floating Outward Bound high school called the Albatross–is mercilessly batted about by a…
“Oscar-caliber” is the kind of backhanded cliche that film critics dole out at year’s end like gruel at a soup kitchen. (Critics hope to guilt Academy voters into seeing things their way or suffering the consequences–whatever those might be.) The plaudit, so overused to begin with, is faint praise at…
thursday february 1 Perspectives: A Concert of Electroacoustic Music: When Jerry Garcia died last year, critics across the country who had never said a kind word about the musical narcotic he and the Grateful Dead created struggled to be kind, or at least respectful. Usually, the memorials emphasized his worldwide…
If Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino aren’t careful, they’ll risk overstaying their critical welcome even before they’ve had a chance to get really cozy. Both directors’ careers have followed arcs that quickly intersected: Each directed independent, critically lauded feature debuts (Rodriguez, his $8,000 miracle El Mariachi; Tarantino, the festival-circuit hit…
Ever since Queen of Venus, there’s been something about outer-space women wearing pointy hardware on their chests that just brings out the appreciation of cinema in its purest form. But in Caged Heat 3000, the finest futuristic women-in-cages exploitation movie ever made in Tijuana, Cassandra Leigh does more than just…
The surprisingly strong, sensitively handled feminist themes that run through the films of Chinese director Zhang Yimou have earned him praise around the world and vilification at home. In Ju Dou, a Double Indemnity-style drama set during the 1920s, he told the story of a peasant girl who dared to…
Before Stanley and Blanche and George and Martha, there was Julie and Jean. The leads in Swedish playwright August Strindberg’s gripping psychodrama Miss Julie set the pattern for modern stage couples who take turns ripping great bloody chunks from each other’s psyches. The play is considered a seminal work not…
There are many ways to get nookie at a drive-in, and some of them are legal. But the best way to execute the art of autoerotic suggestion is to pay good money for a flick that has proven to be so irresistible to women that sometimes just the title alone…
There is a moment in the controversial new film, Georgia, which will pretty much decide what you think of the movie and its star, the ever courageous, enigmatic Jennifer Jason Leigh. Actually, there are nine of them. Legendary “actor’s director” Ulu Grosbard (The Subject Was Roses, Straight Time) lets the…
Let’s apply a little Queer Theory to the Harry Hunsacker plays. Before beginning this instructive exercise, however, it’s necessary to explain to the benighted what the Harry Hunsacker plays are. Harry is the bumbling, narcissistic hero of a series of stage whodunits performed at the Pegasus Theater in Deep Ellum…
