8/20 Listen up, Dallas, to some ugly truth: You’re fat. Not stout. Not pleasingly plump. Not big boned, but F-A-T, as in two-by-four, can’t get through the kitchen door. Men’s Fitness says so, ranking Dallas No. 3 on its list of the fattest cities in the nation. Even the mayor,…
8/20 As if it weren’t already hot enough in August, Highland Village has to prove that its air is hotter than everybody else’s air by throwing a hot air balloon festival. Yeah, that’s what happens when you chop down all the shady trees and throw down tons of black asphalt…
8/23 The “block parties” we remember from childhood involved myriad containers of green bean casserole, a teetering portable basketball hoop with no net and oft-shirtless men milling around Dad’s deer feeder inspecting the welded joints. Generally, the moms would discuss the infidelities of some PTA member while pushing around weird…
8/20 We’re not big on crying. For one, it’s not becoming. Swollen eyelids and a snotty nose? No thanks. But there was a time when tears came more easily for us. Say, 1989 or so, when we were 13 and a whole lot less jaded, and when Steel Magnolias was…
A good friend likes to say that there’s only one kind of great pop song–the song that someone had to create, as though the writer and performer had no choice. The song can be corny or cynical, upbeat or downhearted; it doesn’t matter. All that counts is that the person…
Garry Marshall is at it again. The director of Pretty Woman, Beaches and the original Princess Diaries has returned to peddle his particular brand of überschmaltz in The Princess Diaries 2: Royal Engagement, in which he disguises an insidious worship of wealth and privilege as a “feel-good” comedy about a…
Pierre Huyghe: One Million + Kingdoms Pierre Huyghe (pronounced “Weeg”) is an artist who’s in touch with the power of mass media–both as it molds our collective identity and as fodder for making good art. The three videos now showing at the Fort Worth Modern confront the manner in which…
Anton in Show Business Take three actresses of varying ages and levels of talent. Put them in a no-money production of Anton Chekhov’s The Three Sisters on a toilet-sized stage in San Antonio. Then let the angst begin. In this comedy by the pseudonymous Louisville playwright Jane Martin, the play-within-the-play…
“The American theater’s in a shitload of trouble,” the “stage manager” says to the audience in Anton in Show Business, Jane Martin’s roundhouse punch at the absurdity of the acting profession. That may be true, but the funny thing is, by choosing this dark, smart satire as its season opener,…
Have you heard the one about helping little old ladies across the street? No, of course, you haven’t. That’s because comedy and kindness rarely go hand in hand. There are no funny jokes about spending Christmas serving mashed potatoes at a soup kitchen. “Altruism” and “philanthropy” are words that would…
Thursday, August 12 A letter circa the late ’70s (some content altered for improved readability): Dear Rodgers & Hammerstein, Thank you. I was really discouraged about my spelling, but thanks to the rousing “Oklahoma!” I am able to spell the state’s name aloud and with a damn catchy melody. I…
Mothers are the worst people in the world. Sure, some moms aren’t so bad, like the ones on Jerry Springer or the mother of JonBenet Ramsey, but they pale in comparison to mothers who don’t throw their kids’ comics in the trash. See, in our youth, we built up a…
8/16 He was the first-born son of Ewell and Lena Holston Pope, small and imaginative but racked from an early age with diphtheria that spread from his skin to his throat. And as he lay dying, Lena asked her son Conrad what she would do without him. Conrad took a…
8/14 There are those who believe that Elvis Presley did not, in fact, die on August 16, 1977. These are the people who decorate their houses (trailer or otherwise) with velvet paintings of the once and future King. They’ve seen Graceland more often than they’ve seen their in-laws’ home, and…
8/16 We echo the Pulp Fiction-engendered disgust of the idea of Dutch people slathering french fries in mayonnaise. And, unlike our father, we have never been inclined to drown our pinto beans in ketchup; nor will we allow Tabasco sauce to touch any food we plan on consuming. The simple…
8/13 Ever-advancing years don’t make this any easier to admit: My first exposure to a Broadway show was Disney’s Beauty and the Beast almost a decade ago…and it was fairly awesome. No offense meant to fans of the story or the production; it’s just that a high school senior typically…
You’re not likely to hear this critic utter the phrases “American remake” and “good idea” in the same breath. Godzilla, anyone? La Femme Nikita bastardized into Point of No Return? The Ladykillers? Just say no! Yet when Hidayo Nakata’s shocker Ringu was remade successfully as The Ring by workmanlike Gore…
Sheathed in a custom-tailored gray suit and sporting expensively barbered silver hair, Tom Cruise looks like an older, harder version of the self-absorbed L.A. sharpie he played 16 years ago in Rain Man. But in Collateral, a frenetic Michael Mann thriller that runs up a Baghdad-level body count, Cruise’s character…
Little Black Book, with its Carly Simon soundtrack all but daring you to tune it out before it begins, is being marketed as a daffy romantic comedy in which a woman plows through her boyfriend’s Palm to uncover his past relationships. In truth, the movie’s anything but light and frothy;…
There is nothing mysterious or subdued about Stacy Peralta’s enthusiasms. A product of Southern California’s vivid beach scene, he’s been a surfer since boyhood and was a professional skateboarder in the ’70s before he started making documentaries about the defining moments of those sports. The phenomenally successful Dogtown and Z-Boys…
As a reviewer, it can be very tempting to want in on the ground floor of a phenomenon, to say you were there first when some low-budget feature with a nifty premise made its festival debut, only to be picked up by a big studio and become a national phenomenon…
There is a phrase bandied about that other film industry–“gay for pay”–that means exactly what it says. The queer thing is, this switch-hitting work ethic obviously applies to the “straight” industry as well, since actors not infrequently launch their careers, or rev ’em up, by playing gay. Witness recently Heath…
