You ever go to one of these groovy tourist towns like Santa Fe, N.M., or Sedona, Ariz., or Eureka Springs, Ark., where they sell genuine folk-art paintings of cows wading through a stream and necklaces with turquoise roosters painted on ’em? Wouldn’t you expect some 85-year-old Ozarks lady with wrinkly…
If you had any doubts that the Hollywood script factory has run out of things to say about serial killers, Copycat stumbles into theaters like a badly miscalculated pratfall. Indeed, everything about this unimaginatively directed, awkwardly structured, but expertly performed thriller suggests filmmaking by committee, too many hands converging to…
How’s this for a movie plot: two unlikely friends – one a responsible, buttoned-down dud, the other a bewildered, manic slacker – experience relationship dilemmas, take refuge in a sea of commercialism, and neatly resolve all their problems (ranging from the unexpected death of an acquaintance to run-ins with the…
thursday october 26 Doubles: Japan and America’s Intercultural Children: As often as Americans get bogged down in their own racial hostilities, it’s easy to forget how cultures across the globe stratify their peoples along rigid ethnic lines. Finding context is part of the reason why the Japan-America Society of Dallas/Fort…
“All happy families are alike, each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Tolstoy’s famous opening lines to Anna Karenina lifted the lid on the pot of stewing emotions that exist in almost every familial setting. A lot of writers have poked around in that pot since, Arthur Miller…
Editor’s note: With this issue, Arnold Wayne Jones, a Dallas attorney and writer, joins the Observer as a regular contributor and film critic. There’s a joke about the movie business that gets revived occasionally in one form or another, usually following the latest success of Benji, or Lassie, or Mr…
A Roland Joffe film just wouldn’t be a Roland Joffe film without a flaming cart rolling uncontrollably through the town square; I’d swear there was one in The Mission, The Killing Fields, even, if I remember correctly, City of Joy. I’m at somewhat of a loss to explain why Joffe…
I have a question about “women’s studies.” Did you know you can get a Ph.D. in this? You can basically spend your whole life at a college proving how the reason the world is all screwed up is that there are too dang many men in it. People go to…
By the time you read these words, some of you will have already wandered into a bookstore and skimmed through the pages of Jim Dent’s new book, King of the Cowboys: The Life and Times of Jerry Jones. You will have been so enthralled by Chapter 11 and its account…
As if the Los Angeles Police Department didn’t have a big enough public-relations disaster after the O.J. Simpson murder case, along comes Strange Days, a futuristic action thriller whose entire convoluted plot depends on one act of racist violence by an LAPD cop. Judging by the unprecedented level of media…
thursday october 19 A Literary Overview of the Post-War period: The friends of the SMU Library celebrate a quarter-century of existence with a panel discussion that coincides with their exhibit of first-edition books, Visionaries and Rebels: American Literature After the Atom Bomb. The panel discussion features four Texas writers and…
You never know what you’re going to get when you go on an anti-communist tirade. Take The Invisible Circus. It never would have come into being if Joe McCarthy hadn’t made things too hot in America for artists like Charlie Chaplin. Chaplin emigrated to Switzerland to escape the ill wind…
About 60 years ago, when parimutuel betting was first legal in Texas and Arlington Downs was a horse mecca, my memaw, a divorced mother of five, put up jockeys at the house to bring in some extra money. I heard much about them while growing up–especially the nutty one who…
Filmmaker Gus Van Sant almost scored another flop to go along with his last film–Even Cowgirls Get the Blues–based on the kind of advance notice his latest movie, To Die For, got before it hit Cannes. The audiences at that much-hyped Italian film festival have been known to commit sin–deluging…
According to its movie poster, Dead Presidents, the latest Hughes brothers film, is about “getting paid.” Truer to fact, the second outing by the brothered ones is as flat and senseless as the white faces printed on that poster’s pile of greenbacks. And when you read the film’s slogan, “Dead…
“Did you have a good flight?” Why do people say this? I hate it when people say this to me. What’s a “good flight”? You get on the airplane, the airplane doesn’t crash–that’s a good flight. Does somebody really wanna hear about the frozen Three Musketeers ice cream bar they…
thursday october 12 Sacred Circles of the People: There is an amazing range of subjects being covered in the two-day “Sacred Circles of the People” conference, from substance abuse workshops to Pow Wow etiquette. The fourth annual event is hosted by the American Indian Center, Inc., a non-profit, charitable and…
Humans are packed on this Arlington dance floor like a size 12 behind pushed into a pair of petite 6 Rocky Mountain Jeans. No room to spare on the hardwood, and Toby Keith is backstage, getting ready to sing. Cowboys Bar is rockin’, celebs are in the crowd, and there’s…
Where would children’s literature be without the Brits? Fairy tales and other traditional stories aside, it’s British writers, most of them active from the late 1800s to about 1950, who created the canon of works for children that most of us grew up with. Take away Lewis Carroll, George McDonald,…
I went out to El Lay last week and, for the first time in my life, I felt nekkid without a cellular. I actually wanted to hold a cellular in my hand. I went to lunch with three guys at one of those restaurants with a veranda where you can…
One of the biggest box-office successes in the history of Japanese cinema, The Mystery of Rampo arrives on these shores as a limited engagement in a few major markets. Indeed, the film has been booked for one week only at Landmark’s Inwood Theatre, so if you want to catch this…
When you hear that an upcoming film has generated a positive “buzz,” that usually means one thing–studios expect it to make money and win positive critical reactions and a fistful of Oscar nominations. Jocelyn Moorhouse’s multi-generational comic-romantic epic How To Make an American Quilt has created so much advance excitement…
