It doesn’t take much time wandering the inaugural exhibition at SMU’s Meadows Museum to realize that Santiago Calatrava is no fool. A dreamer, certainly. A weirdo, for sure. A genius, perhaps. But when it comes to building a reputation, the Spanish-born architect and engineer is no quixotic figure. At 49,…
Rent-a-cops have run skateboarders, bicyclists and Rollerbladers out of every parking lot, school ground and parking garage there is. The suburban streets and strip malls no longer welcome the bored suburban kids on wheels, giving them the sort of disdain usually reserved for the angered youths who spray-paint a vulgarity…
What is it about The Wizard of Oz that drives so many creative types to reinterpret L. Frank Baum’s classic fable into something “fresh” and “new”? First, it was Judy Garland’s star vehicle on film; then, Broadway’s innovative The Wiz, followed by a lame film version of the stage show;…
Heath Ledger, wearing the scowl of the anxious and uneasy, is having trouble standing still. He most certainly would rather be anywhere but here: killing time in the WFAA-TV (Channel 8) studio, waiting to be interviewed during a live afternoon newscast. Waiting to promote his new movie. Waiting to assume…
It’s a thrill to celebrate an American movie that’s smart, wry and awesome all at once. One doesn’t always opine harmoniously with venerable critic Peter Travers of Rolling Stone, but his giddy appraisal employed in this movie’s ad campaign is right on. Unabashedly formulaic though it is, this roguish adventure…
Why is John Travolta allowed resurrection after pathetic resurrection, forgiven for endless sins, yet no one cares at all about his frequent former co-star, Olivia Newton-John? Perhaps she should have waited to have her second coming heralded with a Behind the Music episode, but Newton-John returns to the big screen…
The current release of French director Nicole Garcia’s Place Vendôme–which was nominated for 11 César Awards when it debuted in France two years ago–is yet another sign that the drop-off in French imports that has plagued U.S. screens in recent years is reversing: This is roughly the 15th French film…
A shame, this frenetic mess, as there were loads of reasons to be hopeful. First and foremost, there’s the source material, a cute and clever children’s novel by late writer E.B. White, on par with the anthropomorphized menageries he presented in Charlotte’s Web and Stuart Little. There’s the fact that…
There are deeper issues behind the identity of pseudonymous playwright Jane Martin, a Kentuckian who remains the most-produced playwright in the 25-year history of the Actors Theatre of Louisville’s Humana Festival of New American Plays. Women who’ve been accused (and vehemently deny that they are Martin) include established theater artists…
South of Interstate 30 is an area that most Dallasites associate with one thing, lofts: those curSrently hip, so-called urban, overpriced living spaces that commercial real estate developers are banking on as the yupscale future. But this still-developing area, a mix of older industrial buildings and houses where lower-income families…
Urban renewal can only hide the truth; it can’t change it, and the truth is that Dallas has a seedy underbelly. Dallas is no Amsterdam, of course, in that Big D maintains a kind of kitschy, ’50s-style sleaze that retains a certain degree of innocence, aligning itself more with Bettie…
Lately, it’s been hard to throw a rock through a plate-glass gallery window or museum front door without having it bounce off the canvas of some stellar example of a painting by a native Mexican artist. Noted Latino art has seeped into the Dallas Museum of Art and Adani Gallery,…
Last thing first. At this very moment, Chris Carter sits behind his desk in the Ten Thirteen Production offices, on the 20th Century Fox lot in Studio City, California, finishing the final X-Files episode of this season. The show’s creator has just one scene left to write–the very last–and that…
It could have been so different, so much easier or, at the least, smoother. Wouldn’t have been all these rats with pens and tape recorders and television cameras gnawing at him already. That would have come, sure. Just not this quickly. Not right out of the gate. Neophyte quarterback Quincy…
The Center of the World’s screenplay was written by Ellen Benjamin Wong, based on a story concocted by Wayne Wang, precocious filmmaker-performance artist Miranda July, novelist Paul Auster (who penned Wang’s Smoke) and novelist Siri Hustvedt. With this many cooks in the kitchen, one might expect a deceptively simple stew,…
The first thing you must know about Eureka, the new film from Japanese director Shinji Aoyama, is that it runs three hours and 38 minutes. With no intermission. Having said that, let me add that despite its length, despite its deliberately measured pacing and avoidance of flashy effects, Eureka is,…
At first glance, 1999’s The Mummy, starring Brendan Fraser as a lantern-jawed Indiana Jones-in-waiting facing off against an undead Telly Savalas look-alike, played like knowing spoof, a light-hearted, if half-assed, remake of the 1932 film starring Boris Karloff. At first listen, it was one big joke, a horror-movie parody masquerading…
“I see myself writing in the tradition of Shakespeare and Moliere,” playwright Don Evans once told The New York Times. “I’m very much aware I come from a street tradition, but my work came about because of writers I love, like William Shakespeare.” I’m pleased to report that one of…
The damnedest things happen in (early) middle age. At first it’s only a little scary; you see a few crow’s-feet, you wake up a bit stiff, you agree with a Wall Street Journal editorial. Next thing you know, you’ve got metastasizing gray and you’re muttering about “standards” and, worse yet,…
Given the number of people lining up to humiliate themselves on shows such as Temptation Island and Chains of Love, you’d think the connection between fame and shame is a new-millennium phenom. But New Yorkers Justin Bond and Kenny Mellman have been making a scary public spectacle out of themselves…
The notice for the Good/Bad Art Collective’s eighth birthday party was normal. Normal, at least, for the Good/Bad. It was just another wacky, but smart event put on by the prankster artists (or is it artistic pranksters?) at their home at 120 Exposition Street in Denton. It described Forget Anything…
Like some errant, black-sheep Coen brothers movie that slipped away in the night only to be shorn and butchered by neighboring filmmakers, One Night at McCool’s is set in an obnoxious alter-America populated by obtuse caricatures. While this production from Michael Douglas is being touted as a sexy romantic comedy,…
