There’s a modern cliche that it takes only three or four phone calls to get in touch with anyone in the world. But trying to contact action-film mogul Joel Silver for comment on Jack Crain, the Weatherford knifemaker whose career in action movies he singlehandedly created, repudiates it handily. The…
Screenwriter Steven DeSouza, who wrote the scripts for such action opuses as Commando and the Die Hard pictures, summarizes the lasting appeal of blade weapons in movies with the succinctness of a letter opener to the throat. “Not many people have been shot or blown up,” he says, “so when…
When a first film–especially a locally produced, very low-budget film–doesn’t ring your bell, the tempting course as a critic is simply to ignore it, under the assumption that bad press isn’t always better than no press at all. Fortunately, Joseph Alexandre, the Dallas-based writer, director, editor, and co-star of the…
John Frankenheimer’s World War II-era railway adventure The Train turns 30 this year, and it’s almost appalling to consider just how infrequently modern-day Hollywood has mustered up the energy and dedication to match its countless splendors. A huge, roiling, clanking, screeching, rumbling hulk of mayhem that seizes you from frame…
Peter Jackson might be the boldest English-language director working today whose films are seen by almost no one. His latest effort, Heavenly Creatures, should remedy that situation. Based on a real-life New Zealand murder case in which two adolescent girls plotted the murder of a parent they believed was impairing…
The latest issue of local fanzine publisher Clyde Gentry’s Chinese movie guide Hong Kong Film Connection hits stores November 23. It includes reviews of every Hong Kong movie on video or coming soon to stateside theaters; an update on the latest career moves of the Asian Steve McQueen, Chow Yun-Fat;…
Twenty pages into her first read through the script of The Last Seduction, John Dahl’s stunningly nasty film noir, Linda Fiorentino realized she simply had to play the film’s antiheroine, Bridget–a femme so fatale she makes Sharon Stone look like Sandy Dennis. She’d reached the page where Bridget arrives in…
While sitting through Dreams of Equality and Thinking Like a Woman: the Life and Times of Mary Kay Ash, two locally produced movies scheduled for opening night of the Dallas Video Festival, I couldn’t help wondering: at what point, exactly, did the passion go out of Cynthia Salzman Mondell and…
The 1994 Dallas Video Festival is as eclectic and erratic as the medium itself. The good stuff is some of the best you’ll see anywhere in any medium, and the bad stuff is damn near unwatchable. But that’s what makes this Festival so invaluable, not just to the audiovisual scene…
We’re in the movies! The Dallas Observer’s downtown digs will become a makeshift film set courtesy of the crew of Tornado, a new noirish thriller starring James Spader, Eric Stoltz, Peter Strauss, and toothy ’70s macho icon James Coburn. “It’s a blackmail mystery that takes place amongst a group of…
Except for hardcore porn, no movie genre is as disreputable as horror. It is inherently, and proudly, visceral–a severed finger in the champagne flute of cinema history. Even when a highbrow auteur like David Cronenberg or Stanley Kubrick comes along and tries to swathe the genre’s bleeding, ripped-up heart with…
It’s a rainy Thursday afternoon at the headquarters of DNA Animation, Dallas’ seven-year-old hub of gleeful bad taste and excess, and the company’s core group of artists–Keith Alcorn, Paul Claerhout, John Davis, and Debbie Dunning–are taking a break. Huddled around a television set in one corner of the cluttered, computer-laden…
Except for Nicolas Cage, there’s no leading man in movies today who suffers as exquisitely as Matthew Broderick. He’s at his best when his characters are at their down-and-out lowest–struggling to hold onto some small shred of dignity while life is gleefully retching on them. He’s a versatile actor, but…
