thursday january 5 Elvis Presley’s 60th Birthday: If you really want to rile die-hard Elvis fans, pop the subject of the King’s new son-in-law and watch their ears burn. Last October’s planned tribute to Elvis at Graceland was supposed to feature Michael Jackson and Lisa Marie Presley performing duet versions…
John Jiler seems the least likely candidate to write a musical. A 48-year-old free spirit who doesn’t remember the ’60s–and therefore must have been there–Jiler says his only ambition through much of adulthood “was to have as many strange experiences as possible.” The playwright, who is half Irish-American and half…
“A good movie can take you out of your dull funk and the hopelessness that so often goes with slipping into a theatre,” writes legendary film critic Pauline Kael in an influential 1969 essay entitled, “Trash, Art, and the Movies.” “If somewhere in the Hollywood entertainment world someone has managed…
Coming in at 10,000-plus performances, The Fantasticks is the Cats of off-Broadway–and the longest-running musical in the world, according to press materials. Much of its legendary charm is due to its lyrical, sometimes melancholy music, from the legendary “Try to Remember” to “Soon It’s Gonna Rain.” The work, written by…
Gillian Armstrong, the director of Little Women, isn’t a daring, kinetic film artist like Martin Scorsese or Peter Jackson or Jane Campion. She’s a storyteller of a purer, less flashy sort–like William Wyler, George Stevens, and other directors from Hollywood’s studio era. Armstrong has faith in the strength of her…
It’s quite a compliment to say that an artist’s failures are more interesting than most of his colleagues’ successes. The description certainly applies to Robert Altman, a filmmaker who works so close to his heart and intuitions that even his most ill-conceived films usually show you something startling and fresh…
The Fire Chief of New York City keeps trying to get permission to rip down all the fire-alarm boxes on the street–let people just dial 911 if they see a fire–but nobody wants to let him do it. Everybody thinks the city will burn down or somethin’. But listen to…
The best way to describe Jodie Foster’s singular brand of beauty is bird-like–large eyes, sharp nose, a concentrated mouth, a tiny frame. She contains a fierce intelligence which compels her to talk a mile a minute. The tom-boyishness of her childhood movie performances returns even as she riffs eloquent on…
The conventional line about Hollywood is that there are few good roles for women. And while women still tend to be simultaneously blamed and glorified for what happens to us as a culture, it remains unlikely that cinema–as pure a social reflection as you’ll find–can create an adult female who…
thursday december 22 TubaChristmas Concerts and the Dallas Bach Society: The tuba has as long and esteemed a history as most of the other brass instruments–but somehow, all that goes down the tubes when you hear one in its natural habitat. Not to say that the tuba is an unworthy…
There are two kinds of bad movies: actively bad and passively bad. An actively bad one can prove perversely enjoyable. You sit there gazing up at the screen, marveling at the gap between what the filmmakers believed they were doing and what they’re really giving you. This kind of movie…
Bill Bates wanted to be a Dallas Cowboy ever since elementary school. He had spent his life preparing for this career on the field. But nothing prepared him for the night last week at Incredible Universe when a pair of soft cotton panties came sliding across the table for an…
Charles Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol because he needed money, and it’s been produced for that same sound reason for more than a century. It might have proved more interesting, however, if the Dallas Theater Center had staged a modern adaptation of Dickens’ Oliver Twist this year rather than the…
When fans of old Hollywood complain that modern feature films are too darned commercial–that they’ve lost the personality and passion that made films emerging from the old studio system so pleasurable–they are often reminded that there’s no such thing as the Good Old Days. Movies are, and always have been,…
I just got kicked out of a hotel bar for smoking a cigar. I don’t mind so much gettin’ kicked out, ’cause it was a 15-dollar Bolivar and I managed to save it without havin’ to smush it out in an ashtray. But what bugged me was: there was nobody…
The set of the gentle-spirited independent romance Late Bloomers incurred a stroke of bad luck last week, when the director, Julie Dyer, narrowly escaped an attempted mugging in an alley behind an East Dallas house where a wedding scene was being shot. She managed to escape her assailant, who panicked…
thursday december 15 Jingle Bell Run: Should you be walking or driving near downtown Dallas this evening and hear a terrific jingling commotion, don’t worry–Santa’s reindeer aren’t flying kamikaze missions among the skyscrapers. In fact, you’ve stumbled on one of the most fun Dallas holiday traditions–great because it combines a…
Before you can say “all-you-can-eat platter,” we will have the biggest stock-car racing complex–as much as 1,000 acres and up to 250,000 seats–sitting in that undeveloped Tarrant County sprawl near Alliance Airport. At least, that’s where the track should be if North Carolina racing titan Bruton Smith does what makes…
“What is a battery?” Rip asks his apprentice, Stan. “Two cells placed in a container, one dominant and one recessive,” Stan answers in a flat and dutiful tone, as if he were studying to appear on the TV quiz show Jeopardy. This is the definition that Rip, the repair man…
Unlike many large, university-heavy urban areas, Dallas-Fort Worth has never hosted an event celebrating the work of young film students. And that’s a shame, because once you wade through the usual undergraduate film program combo platter of angst, dreck, technical incompetence, and brain-numbing cliches (I’m-sad-because-I-just-killed-my-girlfriend movies, all-this-nudity-proves-I’m-a-brave-artist movies, I-just-saw-Reservoir Dogs-and-want-to-have-fun-with-blanks-and-squibs…
Adapted from Michael Crichton’s bestseller about sexual harassment and office intrigue in a high-tech Seattle computer company, Disclosure is a lavishly photographed, smartly acted, superbly directed piece of hooey. Director Barry Levinson, who gave us such upper-middlebrow entertainments as Bugsy and Rainman, and screenwriter Paul Attanasio, whose work for Quiz…
Somewhere between Joan Rivers’ 1978 bad-taste classic Rabbit Test and the $200 million-plus success of Mrs. Doubtfire teeters Junior, a film whose thudding lack of inventiveness marks the first time I’ve never laughed once at an Ivan Reitman film. Considering the track record of the major players involved, this is…
