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…
thursday december 8 Big Fat Christmas Goose: Fort Worth’s Hip Pocket Theatre serves up one of its reliable grab bags of dance, movement, music, and lighting effects, an original production which manages to yoke the Christmas tradition to American culture and still leave all that stifling mega-bucks commercialism behind. They’ve…
It should be no small irony to film buffs that 76-year-old filmmaker-author Ingmar Bergman, having directed and written 36 movies during his lifetime, is finally beginning to convey authentic, vital emotion in his work. His most generous feature, Fanny and Alexander (1982), about the sumptuous excesses of his grandmother’s family,…
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…
thursday december 1 Through the Looking Glass: Getting on the InterNet: As you know by now, all those newsmagazine headlines trumpeting The Information Superhighway were too much, too soon. They spent so much time brainstorming the potential colossal change in our daily lives–yet only a sizable minority of people are…
thursday november 24 Turkey Trot, Save the Turkey, and Baby Doll’s Thanksgiving: The organizers of the 1994 YMCA Turkey Trot advertise it as “Dallas’ Way To Begin Thanksgiving,” which implies that most of us are in better physical shape than we really are. For 27 years now the Turkey Trot,…
Ben Watt, one half of the English music duo Everything But the Girl, is talking about death from his Atlanta hotel room. “I know it sounds glib,” the 31-year-old singer-songwriter-musician says in his high, clear, thoughtful voice, “but everything really is more important now. I find myself wanting to simplify…
thursday november 17 Phyllis Schlafly vs. Sarah Weddington: What causes a democracy’s national mood to shift from left to right, liberal to conservative? While many politicians on both sides like to appear accessible by defining themselves as moderates resting squarely in the center, the moderate voting bloc doesn’t change the…
Although playwright David Mamet swears he wrote Oleanna before the Clarence Thomas-Anita Hill hearings, you can’t help but feel the same bitter resentments and frustrated rage drifting out of Mamet’s two-character drama that turned Hill’s testimony into a kind of national catharsis. Mamet is aiming to achieve that same kind…
thursday november 10 John Wayne Bobbitt and the Bobbitt Girls: C’mon, you know you want to. Cast aside, for a moment, all those tiresome warnings from the cultural elite on both the left and the right–I mean journalists, scholars, and others who control the information flow–about America careening into moral…
thursday november 3 Barbie Appraisals: In one of her last essays before she resigned as New York Times columnist to pursue fiction and motherhood, Anna Quindlen admitted she might be an old stick-in-the-mud, but she hated Barbie–or, more accurately, the “feminine” values of appearance, acquisitiveness, and artifice Barbie symbolizes. Although…
At a time in which sex and violence in the movies is blamed for every conceivable social ill, talking to the man who made them both a legitimate entertainment experience feels like an audience with the devil. During a four-decade career, 72-year-old filmmaker Russ Meyer has watched American gender issues…
In the closing credits to his comic feature film debut Clerks, writer-director Kevin Smith thanks Jim Jarmusch, Spike Lee, and Richard Linklater, among others, for inspiration. It’s a good guess Smith looks to those filmmakers more as trailblazers than artistic influences. Although Clerks traffics in the same kind of confused,…
