If you’re hankering for a movie about an awkward yet lovable “outsider” type who wanders into a pastel mock-up of Middle America and cajoles the straights to get saucy, you’re in luck. It’s called Edward Scissorhands, and it’s been available on video for years. Renting it will absolve you of…
It took four years, but finally Dark Castle–Robert Zemeckis and Joel Silver’s horror division, which puts out a movie a year around Halloween–has made something that’s genuinely scary. It may be no coincidence that this time around, Silver has scored a higher-profile cast than usual and a better-known director in…
All they ever wanted was someone who got their brand of humor–or, barring that, at least someone who could stomach it. It would not be easy to find a network executive keen on the concept of a 46-year-old ex-junkie whore returning to high school after decades on the street and…
Bad things happen in trailer parks. Between tornados, they’re magnets for human mayhem. Any episode of Cops finds a squad car rolling into some trailer park where a half-drunk, goggle-eyed good-for-nothing will be escorted in cuffs out of an aluminum double-wide as his teenage girlfriend sobs in the background, snot-smeared…
Think Tiki music, and you’ll think young. You’ll think hip. You’ll think 20-something guy who buys his vintage flower-print shirts at Ahab Bowen and classic brushed-steel cocktail shaker at Metro Retro. You don’t think 60-something, balding, trumpet-playing, Shriner-pledging grandfather. But we first heard of Tiki from our Poppy, who played…
Thursday, November 20 Without choreography, a dance performance would probably be like an improv comedy show–either really entertaining or laughable (and not in a good way). For the 2003 Fall Dance Concert at Meadows School of the Arts, they’ve got the choreography covered. Of the three works, a ballet, contemporary…
Not three years ago, the comic-book industry had been proclaimed as dead as Barry Allen and Hal Jordan–and if you don’t know the references, really, why are you even reading this? But that was before the X-Men mutated into movie stars and Spider-Man spun a franchise. Biz is up in…
11/20 No one looks particularly glamorous in Richard Avedon’s portraits. There’s the white background, set up wherever it’s convenient, on a wall or hanging from a trailer. There’s natural light with the shade creating lines and contours. Then there’s Avedon, his camera and his subject. That’s all. There are no…
11/20 When your child is transfixed by the Winter Olympics and even has a teddy bear pair named Torvill and Dean, you’ve probably got a future ice skater on your hands. On the other hand, she might be a horrible klutz and end up working at a weekly newspaper. We’re…
11/22 We’d love to wax jubilant about the upcoming Trains at NorthPark exhibit, as we treasure nothing more than smothering ourselves in Abercrombie flannel, Sunglass Hut eyewear and Neiman Marcus idiocy while pretending we’re giants in an episode of Thomas the Tank Engine. Besides, the exhibit’s 400-plus miniature cars and…
11/22 You don’t have to be Jewish to enjoy the vibrant steel, copper, brass and fused glass sculptures of Gary Rosenthal, but it helps. His blending of the ancient and the contemporary in such Judaic artifacts as menorahs, dreidels and kiddush cups makes for the perfect holiday gift (Hanukkah, that…
11/22 It was in the tragic aftermath of her first husband’s death that Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis commissioned the famed Leonard Bernstein to write MASS: A Theater Piece for Singers, Players and Dancers to celebrate the 1971 opening of The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C…
In the annals of fraud and fakery, a discredited ex-magazine reporter named Stephen Glass likely will wind up a mere footnote. The people who forge Van Goghs and the con artists who bilk naïve grandmothers out of their life savings (not to mention certain fast-dancing corporate executives) even more richly…
When we first see Fanda, the craggy, octogenarian hero of a sublime Czech tragicomedy called Autumn Spring, he alights from a sleek black limousine under a rich canopy of trees and begins looking at a luxurious country mansion with obvious distaste. “Quite shabby,” he says to the obsequious sales agent…
The only man who knows the answers to the story below is dead–has been for six years, though even before that, he may not have been able to provide any cogent response to the questions raised and accusations made by those who now fight over the corpse. He was a…
Disturbing, daring, exceedingly funny, The Danube takes dark, unexpected turns. This fascinating one-act, now onstage in a sharply directed and well-acted production at Kitchen Dog Theater, begins with a deceptively conventional theatrical setup: Two men at a cafe table in 1938 Budapest chat amiably about weather, clean streets and movies…
For 10 years, I’ve been a photographer. Photography is a passion, for sure, and the camera has become a part of me. It may be a cliché, but that’s only because it’s so true. With a camera in front of my face, it is somehow easier to see things. I…
Thursday, November 13 Some people quote The Simpsons; other people do Reality Bites. We’ve got Morrissey. But this time we promise it’s fitting. We swear on our plastic sleeve-covered vinyl copy of Hatful of Hollow. When Morrissey croons, “In our lifetime those who kill, the newsworld hands them stardom,” we…
In 1999, when the annual Out Takes gay and lesbian film festival made its first appearance in Dallas, the fest screened a handful of films over four days, including two episodes of a controversial British TV series called Queer as Folk. This was before the Fab Five taught everyone how…
11/15 War, death and pestilence are the noteworthy headlines, yet we grasp on to our tangible items, such as the newest Lexus, the widest flat screen, this year’s most sought-after name-brand fashions. Some people thrive on bringing false judgments upon others every day for what they do not have. These…
11/14 Oh, how we hate Rocky. Not the story, the acting or even ol’ Sly. No, our beef is with those fight scenes. If ever a young Texan needed inspiration for his fresh, sponge-like brain, the last place such education should come from is an underdog Italian who beats the…
11/16 Writer and illustrator Eric Carle once said, “I believe the passage from home to school is the second-biggest trauma of childhood; the first, of course, being birth.” So it’s no surprise that he has devoted his life’s work to creating soothing, colorful children’s books with positive messages to counteract…
