thursday may 16 Words and Music: The Harlem Renaissance: Two decades of remarkably influential art from one American neighborhood are celebrated in the latest Arts & Letters Live program. The talent lineup for this evening dubbed “Words and Music: The Harlem Renaissance” should put the jelly in your roll: Actress…
Sources as varied as the artist’s published diaries and Jean Stein’s Edie: An American Biography have documented that Andy Warhol had a peculiar disgust with bodily functions. He was, in fact, a highly anal hypochondriac who never touched drink or drugs and rarely participated in sex. It’s fitting, perhaps, that…
thursday may 9 And the Light Shineth in Darkness: Texas-based painter Calvin Davis is up-front about the agenda behind his series of gorgeously detailed paintings. Exhibited as And the Light Shineth in Darkness, the pictures are designed so “people will come away from it with a greater desire to seek…
thursday may 2 26th Annual Big D Charity Horse Show: There are those who bond with horses faster than Elizabeth Taylor could drop a violet tear in National Velvet. But you needn’t have much interpersonal equestrian experience to enjoy the 26th Annual Big D Charity Horse Show, which features four…
Although they happen almost 60 years apart, a pair of funerals climax writer-director Ken Loach’s mournful Land and Freedom. The film opens with the death of one of these individuals: An English gentleman in his ’80s is found slumped on his couch by paramedics. We discover as his granddaughter discovers,…
thursday april 25 C.J. Crit and Literature on Film: The Writer’s Garret and the McKinney Avenue Contemporary join forces for one hot, cheap night of entertainment at the MAC. First up is poet-songstress-monologist C.J. Crit, who performs surgery on sex roles and other social absurdities with a finely honed spray…
Since his death in 1990, the late British author Roald Dahl has only strengthened his relationship with international cinema. Dahl, perhaps most famous in America as the husband who nursed Patricia Neal through crippling strokes and promptly left her, wrote about the world of adults with the same acrid wit…
thursday april 18 The Hunchback of Notre Dame: Get a jump on the sure-to-be-insipid animated Disney version of The Hunchback of Notre Dame, which will be released this June, with a surefire unpredictable evening. This 1923 film version was the first cinematic take on the classic and remains (Charles Laughton’s…
This year, the USA Film Festival introduces a new series called “Cinema on Film” that peeks at the glistening guts of filmmaking as the medium turns 100. But unfortunately, ticket buyers can’t savor the two best documentaries in this series–profiles that scrape away the paunchy, narcissistic hide of two filmmakers…
There is fact, and there is cinema. If the two happen to meet, you’d damned sure better guarantee the filmmaker understands the emotional essence of the story. That way, the documented events will be portrayed with an effective urgency. Stonewall purports to take the events of June 1969 and personalize…
Mardis Note: The 26th Annual USA Film Festival runs Thursday, April 18 through Thursday, April 25. All screenings are at the AMC Glen Lakes Theatre, 9450 North Central Expressway at Walnut Hill Lane. All tickets, available exclusively through Ticketmaster, are $6.50, except for opening-night tickets to The Grass Harp, which…
thursday april 11 Guarded Territories: The author of the new play Guarded Territories, which is being presented by the Beardsley Living Theatre in its North Texas premiere, was born in Canada, educated in the United Kingdom (where he studied scriptwriting), and currently lives in Fort Worth. Yet it’s not a…
When a Los Angeles publicist for a major Hollywood studio asks, “Which Kid do you want to interview?” the choice is tough. Two days apart, two different staffers in Paramount’s L.A. publicity office called with offers to chat with any of the five Kids in the Hall about the feature…
Congratulate artistic director Gretchen Swen and her Extra Virgin Performance Cooperative, which turns 3 years old this month. Toast her not only for surviving this long in a local theater scene paralyzed by crushing audience indifference, but also for refusing to trade her integrity in the bargain. Case in point:…
On an uncharacteristically chilly morning in March, writer-director David O. Russell looks every bit the brooding auteur: uncombed black hair stands up in patches all over his head; flinty brown eyes manage to penetrate and deflect every bold question. Russell doesn’t take his image seriously, but he’s earned it in…
thursday april 4 Ray Wylie Hubbard, Darden Smith, Chuck Pyle: This three-headliner event at Sons of Hermann Hall is called “Writers in the Round,” which in this open-mic crazy town suggests yet another convergence of literary muses. Actually, Ray Wylie Hubbard, Darden Smith, and Chuck Pyle all work firmly within…
thursday march 28 Soup’s On: The media information for “Soup’s On,” the performance showcase sponsored by The Writer’s Garret and Stone Soup Workshop, is titled “BYOA–Bring Your Own Art.” That pretty much sums up the collegial attitude of “Soup’s On,” which is scheduled the last Thursday of every month. The…
friday march 22 Sorrow and Solace: Every American military action since the mid-’70s–Kuwait, Panama, Rwanda, the former Yugoslavia–is examined up, down, and sideways by the press and politicians for any sign of infection by that most dreaded of American viruses–Vietnamitis. Everyone wants to know if the latest deployment of troops…
When is a kid’s film not for kids? When it uses child characters to portray universal adult dilemmas, when one simple but philosophically profound problem propels all the action, and when a witty script attempts to capture the foibles of grownups in all their childish (or, more accurately, unchildlike) guile…
Try this for an impressive balancing act: Tony Kushner, 39, the most acclaimed American playwright of his generation, can wash dishes, grind coffee beans, and sling blade-sharp observations about Marx, Brecht, and the Christian Coalition with little apparent strain. He does all three at the same time during an hour-long…
thursday march 14 Ampersand Dance/Theatre: The title of the latest multimedia showcase by the Fort Worth-based Ampersand Dance/Theatre is nicely populist for a troupe which dabbles in decidedly noncommercial media–“Better Than A Movie and Cheaper Than A Cowboys Game” (a two-part statement to which we reply: “We’ll see about that,”…
thursday march 7 Dawn Upshaw: Critics have fallen all over themselves to sing the praises of American-born soprano Dawn Upshaw ever since she won the Young Concert Artists International Auditions in 1984. Terms like “sweeping romanticism” and “spine-tingling” are tossed around as easily as Nerf balls, but the word no…
