If you go to the movies a lot, the music used in the latest trailer advertising First Knight might seem awfully familiar: a grandiose, brass-and-string-heavy bit of orchestration that rises in urgency and pitch until it resolves with a hopeful C major chord. This short snippet, referred to by filmmakers…
Senate majority leader Robert Dole (R-Kansas) recently blamed rappers Ice-T and Snoop Doggy Dogg; Oliver Stone’s movie Natural Born Killers; the Tony Scott-Quentin Tarantino picture True Romance; and other controversial artists and art for accelerating America’s alleged free fall into social chaos. The reasoning behind Dole’s selection of four very…
Danny Wright, a trim, blond 31-year-old with a killer grin, is giving a reporter a tour of his spacious home in Fort Worth–a California-style, sunlight-saturated minipalace done up in tasteful tones of black and ivory. The color scheme befits a man who, during the past decade, has amassed a small…
Here’s something worth cheering: this summer, two big-budget Hollywood adventure movies, Bad Boys and Crimson Tide, have broken the $50 million mark with African-American men in colorblind leading parts–Martin Lawrence and Will Smith as tough Miami cops in the former film, and Denzel Washington as a by-the-book nuclear sub commander…
As of about 25 years ago, it wasn’t enough anymore for a director to be a resourceful hired gun–the kind of person who could be plugged into almost any project and somehow do solid work. According to the new common wisdom, true artists were turks like Peter Bogdanovich, Francis Coppola,…
In honor of the late, great Ginger Rogers, the USA Film Festival’s First Monday Classics series is screening one of the legendary hoofer’s most beloved musicals–The Gay Divorcee. The 1934 film is one of Rogers’ greatest teamups with Fred Astaire. The plot, as you might expect, isn’t really important. What…
In the 16 years since he made his screen debut, Mel Gibson has seen plenty of action. Part of what makes him so charismatic is his ability to take a licking and keep on ticking: enemies can beat him, shoot him, torture and humiliate him, but he always comes back…
Some movies are so bad that they make you look back over your recent moviegoing life with the merciless eye of an FBI agent assembling a dossier, desperately trying to figure out whether the people responsible for the picture that ruined your evening showed signs of obnoxious incompetence early on…
Clad in a sleek black party dress cut to emphasize her violin-shaped torso, Tamlyn Tomita was a magnetic attraction in the lobby of the AMC Glen Lakes, where she visited last month to promote her latest project, the immigrant melodrama Picture Bride. She’s saddled with the Thelma Ritter part, offering…
When 16-year-old mail order bride Riyo (Youdi Kudoh) gets off the boat that has borne her from her old home in Japan to her new one on a sugar cane plantation in Hawaii, she is shocked by the sight of her spouse-to-be. She expected that the man who paid for…
Dallas congressman John Bryant had felt a lot of conflicting emotions watching Frank Capra’s classic 1946 tearjerker It’s a Wonderful Life, but he’d never numbered anger among them. Then one Christmas a few years ago, as the Democratic legislator sat in his living room watching the film on TV for…
The Perez Family and My Family (Mi Familia) are full of hardship, deprivation, bitterness, and death, yet they’re ultimately optimistic. They remind us that no matter how terrible our daily lives might seem, for our immigrant predecessors, life was almost certainly worse. These movies don’t glance off of you the…
For nearly three decades, some of Hollywood’s most powerful African-American players have labored unsuccessfully to bring the story of the Black Panther Party to the big screen. The father-son filmmaking duo of Melvin and Mario Van Peebles has managed to make the dream come true, and “dreamlike” is certainly the…
Ginger Rogers, who died April 25 at the age of 83, embodied star power with unsurpassed subtlety. Born Virginia McMath in Independence, Missouri (a location with a name so symbolically right it sounds invented), she was primed for stardom at age six when her ambitious mother took her on the…
When Major Theatre cofounder Bryce Gonzalez’ brother, who lives in California, fell ill with AIDS last month and needed a caretaker, Gonzalez made the trip west. That left the East Dallas theater operating with a one-man staff–cofounder Rob Clements–who, of course, couldn’t run the projector, sell popcorn, and tear tickets…
As Jim Carroll, the teenage prep-school junkie hero of The Basketball Diaries, Leonardo DiCaprio is so brilliant he’s scary. He’s only 20, but he has the expressiveness and assurance of someone who’s been starring in films for decades. He gives you everything he has to give, yet at the same…
In the past two decades, filmmaker John Carpenter has directed 17 movies, and has established himself as a towering figure in modern horror. In technical terms, he’s some kind of lowbrow genius: he has a better idea of how to build unease through freaky camera movements, dissonant sound effects, and…
The past couple of months have already seen an ongoing, gay-themed series of midnight movies cosponsored by the Inwood Theater and The Met, and a Silver Anniversary USA Film Festival schedule rich in gay and lesbian-themed features. Which means that the organizers of the 1995 Gay & Lesbian Festival, which…
The name Kenneth Anger conjures different associations, depending on who you’re talking to–and assuming, of course, that the person has heard of him to begin with. Anger, who will visit Dallas April 28 and 29 in conjunction with Las Colinas’ Mandalay Festival of Arts, is a multifaceted legend. He’s a…
Filmmaker Gregory Nava’s My Family (Mi Familia), a multigenerational epic about a Chicano family in East Los Angeles, is one of the most satisfying dramas I’ve ever seen. The narrative follows the changing fortunes of the Sanchez family from the early part of the century through the late 1970s. It…
Wunderkind producer Irving Thalberg had a lot of theories about how to make a piece of entertainment that gives audiences their money’s worth. One surefire ingredient was a little scriptwriting gimmick he called “the old 98-yard dash to victory”: put a stalwart hero in a horrifically complicated predicament, stack the…
Filmmakers Andrew Behar, Sara Sackner, and their collaborators sure had their work cut out for them when they decided to follow the Grateful Dead and their fans around the country last year and make a film about that particular subculture. The shoot itself yielded some interesting material, including details about…
