Smoke Signals billows in from the Sundance Film Festival, noteworthy not simply because it won both the Audience Award and the Filmmaker’s Trophy, but because it is the first feature film written, directed, and co-produced by American Indians to receive a major distribution deal. The buzz has kicked its screenwriter,…
I Went Down is the highest-grossing independent Irish film in history–which, of course, doesn’t say much in the States, where we’ve turned independent filmmaking into a corporate subsidiary and consider Ireland a drab place where either Daniel Day-Lewis or American heartthrobs with poor accents struggle with The Troubles. So the…
Star Wars notwithstanding, film revivals rarely work on a large scale anymore. Blame it on cable or videotape, or just the ever increasing number of new films released every year, but today’s audiences–born and bred on the blockbuster and a steady diet of coming attractions, waiting eagerly for tomorrow’s movie,…
Early on in Six Days, Seven Nights, Harrison Ford’s drunken beach pilot Quinn Harris offers some advice to Anne Heche’s vacationing Robin Monroe. He warns that people often go to isolated island paradises looking for romance. But if you don’t bring it with you, you ain’t gonna find it. If…
Lawn Dogs doesn’t start with the words “Once upon a time,” but it might as well. The film is a fairy tale, plain and simple–and if you argue that this is nothing more than a clever way to say the symbolism and plot points are terribly tired, you won’t get…
Josh Alan Nominated for: Blues, Folk/Acoustic Who knew what to make of Alan’s 1997 Blacks ‘n’ Jews? The title track was a work of absolute genius and chutzpah, the history of black-Jewish relations rolled up into one glib, sharp statement: “Marchin’ two-by-two down in Mississippi/One was a Panther when the…
Dancer, Texas Pop. 81 is a nice little movie. That probably sounds like an insult, but it’s not meant to be. It’s a genuine sentiment, one not often given–or even fished for–with movies these days, where if it can’t be bigger, it had best be weirder than anything that’s come…
Since the ballyhooed independent filmmaking movement birthed an instant sub-genre of movies about hip, angst-filled young people pontificating on some major–or worse, minor–turning point in their lives, it seemed perfectly reasonable to fear Dancer, Texas Pop. 81. Never mind the critical murmuring seeping out of its premiere at the South…
What follows are brief reviews of some highlights from the USA Film Festival, arranged chronologically. The festival runs Thursday, April 16, through Thursday, April 23. All events take place at the AMC Glen Lakes, 9450 N. Central Expressway, except for the Master Screen Artist Tribute to Christopher Walken, which will…
Christopher Walken is creepy–at least on screen. Not creepy in some your-grandmother-slipped-you-a-little-tongue kind of creepy. No, no, Walken is much more insidious. It doesn’t matter whether he’s playing an angel, the devil, the hero, the villain, the star of the show or simply a walk-on going for laughs, his characters…
For 11 years now, the Dallas Video Festival has been better appreciated across the country and around the world than it has in the city whose name it bears. You could offer this as evidence that Dallas has earned its reputation: that of a Southwestern money mecca whose residents would…
Just as HDTV is the television of tomorrow, DVD is the compact disc of tomorrow–and most likely the laserdisc of tomorrow and, quite possibly, the videotape of tomorrow as well. Of course, with DVD, “tomorrow” is really today. DVDs have been on the market for a year. Short for Digital…
In RainMaker Records’ lofty Deep Ellum offices, company co-founder Paul Nugent flashes a Jerry Maguire smile and announces, “Guys, you won a Clio.” The members of the Austin-based rock band Soak don’t quite know what to make of this. “What the hell is a Clio?” asks singer-guitarist Jason Demetri. “Do…
I wandered around the Dallas music scene lonely as a freelance cloud, the Dallas Observer Music Awards were about as interesting to me as a medium-sized rock in a coffee can. Who cares what anybody else thinks? Ah, the carefree ways of callow youth. Now that I’m the Observer music…
“It’s an experiment in the works,” Will Johnson says with a warm laugh. Although he is supposed to be shedding some light on Centro-matic, his solo musical guise, and Redo the Stacks, the band’s “warts-and-all” debut out on steve records, he may well be referring to the coagulating queso dip…
