3/27 Parents suffer “sticker shock” for the new baby even before he or she is born. Kids will cost you, and their yard work potential won’t begin to cover it. Take a lesson from Daddy Woods, who had Tiger out on the golf course at age 2, or Papa Williams,…
3/29 For young hockey players struggling with feelings of athletic ineptitude, there’s no greater confidence booster than seeing two teams of untalented aging radio personalities decked out in full gear, staggering across the ice like Bambi on a particularly clumsy day. To boost the self-perception of those within viewing distance,…
3/25 Oh, those crazy Chick-Fil-A cows. Whether they hold up kooky signs with badly spelled pleas for their lives or dress up in cute outfits to elicit mercy from potential meat eaters, they ultimately seem to fail at halting the dominance of beef consumption in the United States. If those…
3/31 Sometimes it’s best to let people speak for themselves, especially when they use an intriguing combination of words that also describes everything in the simplest way possible. So, when Our Endeavors Theater Collective hailed its own upcoming extended performance of Dainty Shapes and Hairy Apes, or The Green Pill,…
The appeal of a quirky little Norwegian film called Kitchen Stories arises from the unlikeliest of sources–a series of domestic studies conducted in the early 1950s by a group of Swedish efficiency experts. The mission of the Home Research Institute, as far as anyone could tell, was to chart the…
Oh, dear. Angelina Jolie’s made another bad film. Is it too soon to give up on her yet? There’s no denying that Jolie is sexy as hell. The tattoos, the knife collection, the exhibitionist streak, the bisexual vibe she gives off…totally hot, no question. Given her work with the U.N…
Contrary to what you may have read or heard about Charlie Kaufman, the alleged phantom menace of screenwriting, he does indeed exist, so far as one can tell from a long phone conversation with a man said to be Charlie Kaufman by publicists who have no reason to lie. For…
Like many a drinking binge, James McLure’s evening of companion comedies Lone Star and Laundry and Bourbon starts slowly, picks up momentum and ends with a boisterous, boozy crescendo. Now onstage in a cracking production directed by Cynthia Hestand at Contemporary Theatre of Dallas, the pair of related one-acts takes…
Dallas is a city that thrives on the artificial. That bellwether of 1970s and 1980s greed and flaccid angst–and oh, yes, drama–the television show Dallas, long ago put the city’s affaire d’amour with artifice on the map. Dallas proudly told the world that it loved the artificial and did so…
Once upon a time Uptown was a neighborly neighborhood that rolled peacefully from the Hotel Crescent Court north to Lemmon Avenue past the Hard Rock Café, The McKinney Avenue Contemporary and Bread Winners Bakery with that trolley that nobody ever rides. But that was before Post Properties started its endless…
Thursday, March 18 Only the absolutely nerdiest shindigs require their own specialized dictionaries. Latin club, Klingon conventions, Scrabble championships–all havens for people who never got to spend their own lunch money. But they’re also full of people who take themselves very seriously. Just check out Word Wars, the 2004 Sundance…
So we have this pet peeve involving T-shirts. We don’t mind a good vintage one or even an ironic one once in a while. What we loathe, however, is one in particular. In bold letters, it shouts, “One Tequila, Two Tequila, Three Tequila, Floor!” It has a certain fratty and…
3/18 It was that low-speed car chase in the ever-recognizable white Bronco that first introduced us to Los Angeles trial lawyer Johnnie Cochran. Critics claim he was the first attorney who dealt the “race card” when he defended O.J. Simpson. And whether or not you think he’s a monster for…
3/20 We advise you to be careful when you tell potential roommates, landlords or dates that you have 1,203 pets. Because while most people will tolerate your grouchy cat, overactive dog and long-lived betta, they freak a little when you tell them you keep 1,200 worms in a big plastic…
3/19 Politics have become as ubiquitous among Texas women as big hair. It’s at dinner meetings, cocktail parties and salon visits, sitting alongside the heavy-duty hair spray and combs. At 7 p.m. Friday, you can check out the queen of Texas politics (and queen of big hair) when former Texas…
3/19 On every urban street corner, huddled outside office buildings like knots of Afghan women under the Taliban, today’s smokers are a dying breed. They fight extinction by adapting to a hostile environment. They’re socially shunned outcasts, driven to maintain a pack-a-day habit outside, fighting human nature, braving the elements…
If you were a college-aged East Berliner in October 1989, chances are that your time was occupied by one of several things. Protesting comes to mind, as does hacking at long-reviled concrete. Perhaps you caroused, or lit fireworks, or sang with joy as you coursed through the newly open streets…
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, in which a man has recollections of a soured relationship erased from his brain, may be the most romantic movie in recent memory, if you will pardon the unforgivable pun. Written by Charlie Kaufman and directed by Michel Gondry, it’s about many things–how we’re…
Remember Omar Sharif? He’s been all but absent from the silver screen in recent years (though he has been seen–or at least heard–on television). According to the actor, he left the trade by choice: “Let us stop this nonsense, these meal tickets that we do because it pays well, unless…
It’s a bit unorthodox to ladle superlatives all over a film in the opening paragraph, but The Reckoning deserves them. Moving, gripping and powerful, suspenseful, stylish and literate, this exploration of justice and art may be set in 1390s England, but it resonates today. This is a brilliant and unpretentious…
The problem with Spartan isn’t so much that it’s mediocre, but that it could be a whole lot better. Unlike writer-director David Mamet’s last movie, Heist, a film with such a generic plot and predictable Gene Hackman performance that it never had a chance, Spartan has a reasonably compelling story…
If you were expecting the first film to emerge from Afghanistan since the defeat of the Taliban to be even remotely celebratory, you’ll have to adjust your expectations. Radically. In Osama, filmed in 2002 and 2003 in a “suburb” of Kabul, writer-director Siddiq Barmak is not interested in showing us…
