“This is contrary to how we grew up,” Stacy Peralta is saying a few minutes after getting dropped off at a newspaper office by a limo driver. The 45-year-old Peralta, still SoCal handsome and boyish beneath a ball cap and behind a well-trimmed beard, grins long and hard–a real hell-yeah…
Imitation being the sincerest form of show business, Neil Simon simply imitated one of his own successful formulas with California Suite, the comedy now getting a fine go-round at the Richardson Theatre Centre. The premise–one hotel room, four different stories–already had worked in Plaza Suite, the 1968 Broadway hit set…
Had some wickedly funny novelist set out to satirize the excesses of contemporary art, she could do worse than to open the action at Wonder, the current show at the University of Dallas’ Haggerty Gallery. The place to start would, in fact, be with Bettie Ward’s CV, which sits at…
We competed in gymnastics as a child. We had medals, trophies, the works. But did we practice hour after hour, spraining our ankles and jamming our thumbs instead of playing Cabbage Patch and My Little Pony in order to learn about victory and defeat, experience the payoff of practice and…
For some reason we can’t quite fathom, someone once gave us a gift subscription to Southern Living, the magazine devoted to helping its readers live more elegant “Southern” lives. Maybe they were trying to tell us something. In addition to recipes for mint juleps (we drink beer) and many creative…
Poor William Randolph Hearst. The snapping dogs of Hollywood just won’t leave the guy alone. It’s been barely 60 years since a little epic called Citizen Kane portrayed the great newspaper tycoon as a ruthless dictator who degenerated into an emotional basket case, and already there’s more bad publicity in…
During the past half-century, countless filmmakers great and obscure have stood in serious debt to The Bicycle Thief. But, for my money, no one has borrowed so cleverly or shifted the weight of Vittorio De Sica’s 1948 masterpiece so gracefully as young Wang Xiaoshuai, whose Beijing Bicycle embodies the spirit…
The USA Film Festival, now in its 32nd year, may never again be the powerhouse fest it was at its inception–which is not to damn it, since there are several excellent offerings this year, but merely to accept a rather delightful reality. At its inception, there was no Sundance, no…
Written and directed by Bart Freundlich, this project deserves commendation for its psychological cogency and compassion, but it loses significant points for its lazy story and complacent delivery. Basically, we have a mannish boy named Cal (Billy Crudup, Almost Famous) who’s a modestly successful New York architect but decides to…
The thoroughly unlikable heroine of Stephen Herek’s cautionary comedy about striving and satisfaction is a vain, actressy TV blonde (vain, actressy Angelina Jolie) whose driving ambition is to move up from Seattle’s inane morning news-and-talk show to a major network’s inane morning news-and-talk show. But first, a typical Hollywood curveball…
A likable British convict (James Nesbitt) plans an ingenious escape that involves cons (Lennie James, Timothy Spall, Bill Nighy), the prison’s psychologist (Olivia Williams) and the staging of Nelson!, an awful musical biography of the well-known admiral written by their dotty, musical-comedy-obsessed warden (Christopher Plummer). Complications, of course, abound, with…
Once-renowned Iranian filmmaker Bahman Farmanara (Prince Ehtejab) had not made a picture since 1979, when his third film was banned by the post-Revolutionary Censor Board. Now, 23 years later–after moving to North America for a decade, then returning to Iran–he is back making movies. Smell of Camphor so closely mirrors…
Peter Bogdanovich, maybe the last man alive who wears a neckerchief without irony, holds a copy of a newspaper article in which his old friend Larry McMurtry is saying nice, or not nice, things about him–Bogdanovich can’t tell which. “He’s kind of risen from the dead,” McMurtry was quoted as…
Some plays are timely, some plays are timeless. Christopher Durang’s Laughing Wild is one of the former. Thornton Wilder’s Our Town is the latter. And in productions of each, currently onstage at Kitchen Dog Theater and Dallas Theater Center’s Arts District house, respectively, the reason why timeless works better is…
Sitting at a railway crossing as the train cars cha-chunk, cha-chunk in front of our car, we tend to stare at the clock in the dash, watching the minutes slip past. But those who risk nausea and look instead at the cars might catch a glimpse of art, though they…
The only time I can recall literally rolling with laughter was during a particularly good Monty Python’s Flying Circus episode. It contained a sketch that had something to do with a giant electric penguin threatening an Arctic adventurer with octopus-like live-wire tentacles. Looking back, it seems more silly than funny;…
The perpetrators of the new Sandra Bullock vehicle, Murder by Numbers, could be hauled in on any number of charges, including plagiarism and child abuse. But their most obvious crime is first-degree dullness, giving us a thriller without thrills and a mystery devoid of urgent questions. This merely bloody piece…
Say this about World Wrestling Federation Entertainment head honcho Vince McMahon: He knows what his fans want. Few movies have ever been as specifically tailored to an existing audience as The Scorpion King, in which McMahon’s prize champion, The Rock, portrays The Rock wearing a loincloth and going by the…
An 18th-century battle of the sexes that contains a radiant performance by Mira Sorvino as a princess whose complicated scheme to win the man she loves finds her juggling three suitors at once, all while disguised as a man. “I’m losing track of my own plot,” she giddily confesses at…
Ah, marriage. How sweet it is to discover, among all the recent wedding movies (Muriel’s, My Best Friend’s, Polish, Monsoon, etc.) that the institution’s still inspiring. Trés Greek writer and star Nia Vardalos has crafted here a worldly wise and very funny script, the better to play opposite decidedly non-Greek…
While it is surely difficult to concoct fresh, lively scenarios from worn elements (neurotic family, neurotic city, neurotic holiday), it is the filmmaker’s obligation, at the very least, to try. To her credit, veteran scribe Daniele Thompson clearly decided to take a very personal tack with her feature directorial debut,…
Arriving in theaters just ahead of a four-disc, outtakes-and-all boxed set and its Rhino Records-issued DVD companion, which comes crammed with two different commentary tracks and assorted effluvia, Martin Scorsese’s rockudrama withstands big-screen scrutiny some 24 years after its initial release. Meant to be seen large and played loud, this…
