Many a marriage must feel exactly like Winnie’s predicament in Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days, now being forcefully and hilariously performed at Kitchen Dog Theater. There good wife Winnie (played by Shelley Tharp-Payton) stands in the first act, buried up to her waist in a mound of earth. Husband Willie (David…
It is a decade ago, and Neil Burger has trekked from New York to the small Texas town of Fredericksburg, where Admiral Chester Nimitz was born, where heroes gather at the National Museum of the Pacific War to reminisce and mourn, where tourists collect to pay their dues to the…
In The Banger Sisters Goldie Hawn plays Suzette, an aging groupie too stuck in a gloriously seedy past to move into the future. It’s 2002, yet she acts as though it’s 1969 and nothing’s changed–not the Sunset Strip’s Whisky A Go-Go, where she still tends bar behind sunglasses and illicit…
There’s no denying that U2 is awesome, nor that Phil Joanou is a snappy director, but the charming awkwardness of Sam Jones’ 16mm black-and-white rockumentary I Am Trying to Break Your Heart makes one wanna murmur, “Rattle on? Humbug!” at the Irish Grammy-grabbers’ old-school cinematic self-celebration. As we turn our…
Among the more preposterous rumors spread by Harry Knowles, whose Ain’t It Cool News movie-biz-gossip Web site garners undue attention from studios too craven to do their own thinking, was one from year’s beginning: Terrence Malick, Knowles “reported,” was working on an adaptation of The Catcher in the Rye for…
Although his name sounds like an inventory notebook for candy bars, Heath Ledger is presently overcoming this confusion–as well as the plight of the pretty boy–to become one of contemporary cinema’s more vital actors. In The Four Feathers–as in The Patriot, A Knight’s Tale and Monster’s Ball–Ledger once again plays…
Muccino (But Forever in My Mind) pays his respects to Fellini (Juliet of the Spirits on television) and Tarantino (a Reservoir Dogs poster), then straddles with aplomb the intergenerational niche he’s carved between. It’s a mostly engaging approach, as confused Gen-Xer Carlo (Stefano Accorsi) struggles with his feelings for his…
Originally meant to be called Springtime for Hitler, Mel Brooks’ first feature as writer-director was only a moderate success when released in 1968. Now, it is legendary and for good reason. (It has, of course, also spawned a hugely successful musical.) This story of a manic, larger-than-life Broadway producer (Zero…
He’s one of Oprah’s Angels and an Olympic champ, a published author (of his own autobiography, Harnessing Anger) and, soon enough, the subject of a Walt Disney-produced feature based on his life’s story (cf. The Rookie, Remember the Titans). Till then, here’s Chris Dalrymple’s engaging (if, at a mere 75…
The son of a fascistic intelligence agency boss (Gregg Henry) is kidnapped by Sever (Lucy Liu), a ruthless, mysteriously hooded killing machine. The only one who can retrieve the boy is Ecks (Antonio Banderas), a former FBI operative who has been on the skids for seven years, ever since his…
Start with Steinbeck: “They had walked in single file down the path, and even in the open one stayed behind the other…The first man was small and quick, dark of face, with restless eyes and sharp, strong features…Behind him walked his opposite, a huge man, shapeless of face, with large,…
It’s hard to dislike Julie Speed, the self-taught surrealist whose macabre oil-on-board visions and bizarre collages currently fill the front galleries at Pillsbury and Peters Fine Art. And doubly so for me, for Speed is everything that a good painter should be. She’s talented, and smart, and irreverent, and figurative,…
If you are annoyed with epic films that tax the limits of your bladder, you’ll be, uh, relieved to hear that it will probably take you longer to read this newspaper than to see any of the films featured at D-Studios’ Long on Shorts film festival. All the films are…
You gotta wonder what a pep talk for a dog must sound like to a fly on the wall. “You got it, Rufus, you’re number one! You are the bone, be the bone, go after the bone. Get out there and tell those mutts what for!” Say “dog competition” and…
After several years of taking the baddie roles Dennis Hopper was passing on, not to mention the occasional bizarro gamble (say, as Mr. Roarke in the short-lived Fantasy Island revival), Malcolm McDowell returns to prime form in Gangster No. 1. At long last, this spry and mean little film gives…
For those with any kind of pop cultural memory, it’s more than a little surprising to see Ice Cube in a movie like Barbershop. Not because it’s a light comedy–Friday was, too, and that was certainly in character. What’s odd about Barbershop is its seeming embrace of positions that the…
The much-celebrated Spokane/Coeur d’Alene poet and novelist Sherman Alexie (and writer-producer of Smoke Signals) brings all his ironic intelligence–the great elasticity of his mind–to bear on this striking, semi-autobiographical portrait of a successful Native American writer still struggling to reconcile opposites–his reservation childhood and his urban present, his worldly sophistication…
While it’s no longer the revolutionary tranifesto it may have been, D.A. Pennebaker’s 1973 concert film (first released in 1983) captures David Bowie’s meticulous identity quest with all the frenetic energy (read: slop) of a wildlife documentary on drugs. What this means for you, viewer and/or fan, is that the…
In turn-of-the-century France, a minister (Charles Berling) scandalizes his tiny Protestant community by divorcing his wife (Isabelle Huppert) and falling in love with a newly arrived young woman (Emmanuelle Béart). Their existence is briefly idyllic, until he is called back to run his family’s china factory in Limoges. Between business…
Taking up more or less from where her last concert film I’m the One That I Want (2000) left off, Margaret Cho continues her exploration of the outer limits of raunch with considerable brio. Like every female stand-up since the dawn of time, Cho’s humor is derived from this disparity…
After those first few piano notes sound as the lights come up on the panicked dancers of A Chorus Line, the audience should get hit with a full-on assault on the eardrums. As written, the opening song, “I Hope I Get It,” is a big blast of noise combining music,…
Ah, September. The start of art’s regular season. What with Gallery Walk coming up this weekend and all the local bigwigs rolling out the rug, I figure it’s time to take a gander at some oft-overlooked venues. And what venue is more overlooked than the University of Texas at Arlington’s…
