In 1997, Britain’s The Full Monty came from nowhere and was nominated for Best Picture and a handful of other Oscars, winning Best Musical/Comedy Score. (It might have snagged more but for the confluence of excellent movies that shoved it out of Best Picture, Best Original Screenplay and Best Director:…
With VH-1 and other cable stations broadcasting an endless array of programs offering flighty commentary on pop culture and nostalgia, a new kind of pundit is in demand. Someone who can crack an easy Paris Hilton joke when the latest gossip demands it or unleash a one-liner about Gloria Gaynor…
Singer-songwriter AJ Croce is damn good. And why shouldn’t he be? This guy has enough inspiration to propel him through decades of song. The son of the affable songster Jim Croce (“Time in a Bottle” and “Bad, Bad Leroy Brown”) endured his father’s death and his own sudden blindness as…
My recent move to a renovated East Dallas flat might allow me to fall under the umbrella of “urban living”…I think. It may not be a chic Uptown highrise or a trendy downtown loft, but it’s my quaint spot in the bustling city. However, if urban living means learning the…
Slipped into the summer movie season like acid in your happy meal, Richard Linklater’s A Scanner Darkly is a blockbuster of counter-programming. No matter that the dude from The Matrix is its star–or would be, if he weren’t half-hidden under a thick swath of digital paint. Linklater’s return to Waking…
Owen Wilson has moved up in the world: He’s gone from crashing weddings to crashing entire marriages. In the listless farce You, Me and Dupree, his eponymous ne’er-do-well shows up on the doorstep of his childhood friend Carl (Matt Dillon), having lost his job and been evicted from his apartment…
Perhaps no one can pinpoint the exact moment vaudeville died, but there’s a moment early in Strangers with Candy where you’d swear you had just witnessed the death of visual comedy. En route to her first day of high school, a tarty middle-aged jailbird–this is not a Disney Channel joint–tosses…
Set in 1942 and ’43 and shot in 1969, Jean-Pierre Melville’s Army of Shadows follows a small group of French resistance fighters in their desperate struggle to survive the Nazis. The movie, too, has been in hiding, at least in the United States, where, amazingly, it went unreleased for 37…
Mamma Mia!, defying critical drubbings for half a decade, has been called a Twinkie of a musical. But that’s an insult to spongy Hostess snack cakes that have stood the test of time. Think of it as more of a theatrical baklava: layers of tissue-thin story line piled one atop…
Grand Prix (Warner Bros.) John Frankenheimer, as underrated as he was brilliant, made a racing picture in 1966 that’s yet to be topped 40 years later. James Garner suffered through the director’s churlish demands (which Frankenheimer reveals and owns up to, in archival footage on one of the documentaries here)…
From Pokmon to Dragon Ball Z, Japanese pop culture has captured the imagination of American kids. The latest import craze is Naruto. Anyone hip to Harry Potter will find the story familiar: A bunch of otherwise ordinary kids, including titular hero Naruto Uzumaki, study ninjitsu (rather than wizardry) in a…
Basic Instinct 2 (Sony) Bill Maher: New Rules (HBO) Bridezillas: The Complete 1st and 2nd Seasons (Weinstein) Care Bears: Hearts at Sea (Family Home Ent.) Dennis Miller: All In (HBO) Dolla Morte (Grimoire) The Dudesons Movie (Rhino) The Ellen Show: The Complete Series (Sony) ER: The Complete Fifth Season (Warner…
So Im just going to assume all of you know about the classic film Jezebel and the Oscar it won Bette Davis (not to mention another that went to supporting actress Fay Bainter). But did you know that Miss Bette took this role because she lost the part of Scarlett…
If musical success was determined by how many superhero movie soundtracks your band has contributed to, Taking Back Sunday would be bigger than both God and the Beatles. The Long Island-based emo outfit appeared on the soundtracks for such cinematic masterworks as Spiderman 2, Fantastic 4 and Electra. And because…
After this many years, it seems silly to describe how GayBINGO Dallas works again. We’ve frequently told you about the only bingo game in town in which a straight line won’t get you anywhere—arrangements vary by game and prizes go all the way up to $500 for playing in the…
Those people at The Lodge don’t know when to quit. Exotic dancers washing cars—that’s all you have to say. The geniuses behind Bikini Carwash Companies I and II knew that. Unaided by cinematic crutches like plot and characters, Kristi Ducati’s enormous knockers draped in suds were enough to guarantee the…
Knowing what you know now, if you’d been alive back in 19th-century Britain, would you have let anything stop you from going to hear Charles Dickens talk about his novels? Or, if you were living in Elizabethan England, would there be any price you wouldn’t pay to hear Shakespeare crack…
When it comes to summertime, the words “unleashed” and “unhinged” don’t sound so good. I immediately think of mangy, dehydrated dogs roaming hot streets. Then my thought process goes something like this: “Unhinged, eh? Off the hinges. Door off hinges, open. Air conditioning is getting out. Too hot outside. Must…
The last time I checked, The Golden Girls’ Betty White wasn’t Italian. The same goes for Family Matters’ Jaleel White, as well as beloved Eagles defensive end Reggie White. Ditto for Jack, Meg, Barry, Vanna, E.B. and Snow. So it’s hard to say exactly which Whites of Italy will be…
In case you didn’t get enough soccer action during the World Cup (yeah, right), one of the most popular soccer teams in Mexico is coming to town Wednesday night to take on our beloved Hoops, which is what FC Dallas calls themselves for some strange reason (their mascot is a…
I’m so addicted to the Discovery Channel’s Deadliest Catch that I often dream of cashing my last Dallas Observer check and hitchhiking to the Pacific Northwest, where I’d roam the docks of Puget Sound looking for work on an Alaska-bound red crab boat. But alas, I have to don a…
As kids, we’d imitate adults, dressing up in our mother’s clothes or playing doctor with the neighbor kid. We’d build forts out of couch cushions and comforters–a sovereign nation within the living room. If we were lucky, we had access to a few tools, some discarded wood and a perfect…
