7/30 There’s an almost irresistible urge to get snide about Late Nights at the Dallas Museum of Art ending at midnight on a Friday, but the event planned for this week is cool enough to do without the more-subversive-than-thou song and dance. Starting at 6 p.m., the DMA is hosting…
7/29 Perhaps you know the voice. It has a lived-in weariness to it, nasal and intelligent. Or maybe you know her performance attire: always a business suit and loosened shirt and tie. Then there’s her stand-up routine: dry, skewering, extemporaneous. Surely, you’ve seen this act or heard of it or…
Near the beginning of The Corporation, a damning documentary designed to expose everything that is irresponsible, immoral, inhumane and lethal about corporations, the narrator posits the film’s thesis: “We present the corporation as a paradox,” she says, “an institution that creates great wealth but causes enormous and often hidden harm.”…
It would be nice to declare, “Fans of Mike Hodges, rejoice!” or some such thing at the arrival of the veteran director’s latest film; alas, not this time. I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead shares elements with some of Hodges’ previous work, including a familial revenge theme (from his original Get…
The two summer shows at the Meadows Museum, The Triumph of French Painting and 20th Century Texas and Spanish Prints, provide the perfect excuse to visit the question: What gives on the Hilltop? When last we visited the Meadows’ edifice on Bishop Avenue, things were looking kind of grim. For…
Festival of Independent Theatres Marathon play-going, walks on the beach and more community theater buffs than you can shake a stick at can mean only one thing, and it’s not a Christopher Guest film. It’s the Festival of Independent Theatres at the Bath House Cultural Center. Showcasing local talent in…
Ellsworth Kelly in Dallas This show should be called “Dallas Collects Ellsworth Kelly.” It would be more honest, not to mention more intriguing. This dainty collection of top-quality painting and sculpture by the mid-20th-century artist does little service to the importance of Kelly. Kelly’s brightly colored and experimentally shaped opaque…
Adrienne ran her soft hands across Roland’s bulging chest. In her seven years as a lonely, stranded homemaker in Laredo, she had never felt a body as tremendous as his, while he had not known the touch of true love since his high school sweetheart fell victim to a yearlong…
Thursday, July 22 We’re too lazy to stop at the grocery store and buy a burrito we can microwave for 90 seconds. So we’re probably not the target audience for Benihana’s Roll Your Own Sushi Dinner. Or maybe we are. Perhaps it’s a nefarious plan: Invite the well-intentioned to a…
Welcome to the land of rusty poles and panels, hastily assembled to dangle you hundreds of feet in the air. Only careful maneuvering will keep you from trampling in mud, discarded Frito pies and puddles of vomit. A wide boulevard is filled with overheated teenagers exercising their groping skills while…
7/24 More than ever this summer, small, personal arsenals are appearing on every porch in North Texas. Rows of chemical missiles, contents under pressure, stand ready on every patio table. They’re WMDs, all right: weapons of mosquito destruction. There’s a blaster of repellent for grown-ups with 35 percent DEET and…
7/23 How does one go about earning the title of lingerie expert? Perhaps the claim requires years of graduate study, or maybe a correspondence course out in Montana sends syllabuses and silicone samples to novice panty-purveyors in training. The means behind getting that certification aren’t entirely clear, but self-proclaimed lingerie…
7/24 Of the two living Williamses–Hank Williams Jr. and Hank Williams III–it’s interesting that Kid Rock chose to tour with Hank Jr. this summer. Oh, sure, Kid Rock admired Junior’s music as a kid, and years later, as a rock star, he befriended the old man. But in age and…
Without risking much critical credibility, it can be said that Catwoman succeeds on its own feline terms. Much like a cat, the movie is a superfluous gob of fluff with an attitude ranging from idiotic to nasty. It’s a sleek and self-absorbed animal, adoring itself so ardently that those of…
7/28 Psychologists may try to blame America’s attention deficit disorder on scapegoats such as video games, MTV and DSL modem connections, but they should probably examine the three-ringed philosophy of P.T. Barnum, James A. Bailey and those rascally Ringling brothers. These provocative promoters understood back in the late 1800s that…
If you’re wondering how Hollywood could possibly adapt Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot, a collection of similarly themed short stories bound together by the slenderest of common threads, the answer is that it didn’t. The credits for I, Robot read “suggested by Isaac Asimov’s book,” but the canny sci-fi fan will…
“Is this one of those avant-garde things?” a dying Cole Porter (Kevin Kline) warily asks Gabe (Jonathan Pryce), a sort of Ghost of Musicals Past who appears out of the ether to shepherd the composer through the this-was-your-life montage that makes up Irvin Winkler’s biopic De-Lovely. “It’s a musical–it should…
The opening moments of The Door in the Floor are not promising. A little girl stands on a chair in a hallway of photos, pointing at the images and speaking about them. Soon, she is joined by a middle-aged man, probably her father, who takes her on a tour through…
For the last 40 years, cultural pundits have focused their attention on the ever-expanding dominion of the mass media. Whether broadcast through television or the Internet, its shimmering blue-light tendrils meander and creep kudzu-like into every aspect of our life. Yet if the play of the news and advertising extends…
The Dining Room In the stuffy but elegant confines of an East Coast WASP-ish household, 60 characters come and go over six decades of meals, arguments and reconciliations conducted around one large dining table. Playwright A.R. “Pete” Gurney, now a master at chronicling the lives of upper-crusters who turn out…
Ellsworth Kelly in Dallas This show should be called “Dallas Collects Ellsworth Kelly.” It would be more honest, not to mention more intriguing. This dainty collection of top-quality painting and sculpture by the mid-20th-century artist does little service to the importance of Kelly. Kelly’s brightly colored and experimentally shaped opaque…
A quick and easy way to silence a table of 20-something creative types performing the sharing-our-intellectual-opinions mating ritual in a chic bar: Start gushing about how your absolute favorite new thing is a public television show called History Detectives, in which four historians use archives, forensics and other sources to…
