If you’re planning to take a look at Antony Hoffman’s Red Planet, it is highly advised that you squint. This way, instead of observing a facile romance lightly spiced with danger and heavily laden with rawkin’ effects, you’ll see the movie for what it really is: a cadre of little…
At first glance, the new Japanese import Non-Stop seems to be a crude knockoff of German director Tom Tykwer’s wonderful Run Lola Run, but Non-Stop was released in Japan (under the title Dangan Runner) in 1996, two years before Lola was shot. Could Tykwer have seen the film at a…
“I don’t rant and rave about the terror of our racist society,” the playwright and screenwriter Lonne Elder III once remarked. “It is never directly stated; it’s just there.” Elder, who died four years ago and is probably more famous for writing the scripts to Sounder and A Woman Called…
Pity the poor art student; or better yet, imagine what it would be like to be one. Wriggle your toes into a pair of badly bruised Birkenstocks and walk around. Pretend you’re young and enthusiastic, and people keep telling you how talented you are. Imagine you’ve had the 10th fight…
A music fan from Plano introduced me to The Flaming Lips. He was a typical suburban misfit–dark, twisted, a disposable income–who played the album In a Priest Driven Ambulance as we sat Indian-style on a cigarette-stained carpet in a room with greasy handprints around the light switches. He made sure…
Of Mice and MenDon’t look now, but according to the metroplex arts calendars, it’s about time for the holiday hysteria to kick in. My friend, Jeffrey Cranor, puts it best: “You can’t throw a fruitcake around here without hitting an Ebenezer Scrooge or a Mouse King.” And it’s not enough…
Let’s get this out of the way right now, because so many of you will find this hard to believe: Yes, Mad magazine still exists. It is still being published 48 years after it was created by Harvey Kurtzman and William Gaines, neither of whom lived long enough to see…
It’s Friday. Only a few miles down the road, college kids and twentysomethings imbibe libations. They stand in line from Deep Ellum to Lower Greenville, waiting to shake their trunks in the ass-clubs, hoping for relief from everyday drudgery. House music plays. Shots are slugged. Digits are exchanged. Brenden Morrow,…
The opening credits of Charlie’s Angels hint at a movie that never appears in the film’s expurgated 94 minutes; the tease is too soon rendered a disappointment. A Mission: Impossible-style prelude suggests a live-action cartoon as directed by Robert Altman; a camera stalks the aisles of a jumbo jet, capturing…
Gopher. Explosives. Gopher… explosives. Gopher! Explosives! There. Now you know exactly what was running through this critic’s mind during The Legend of Bagger Vance, the impeccably aimed new tranquilizer dart from Hollywood’s Mr. Honeydrip, Robert Redford. Of course, it’s really not fair to compare this meditative drama to that other…
If you need proof that The Love That Dare Not Speak Its Name has turned into The Love That Won’t Shut Up, look no further than Outtakes Dallas 2000. The gay, lesbian, bisexual, and try-sexual (those enterprising folks who’ll try anything once) filmmakers whose features, documentaries, and shorts are scheduled…
Fascinating and engrossing on every conceivable level, this beautifully constructed feature-length documentary opens with the mournful sound of a train and images of toys and books that sit untouched in what was once a child’s bedroom. As the credit sequence ends, an elderly woman addresses an unseen interviewer, recalling the…
Canadian filmmaker Denys Arcand (Jesus of Montréal) isn’t the first guy to skewer what Tennessee Williams called “the bitch-goddess of success.” Or to lay bare the absurdity of Andy Warhol’s 15 minutes of fame. Or to otherwise annihilate celebrity worship. But in his observant, swiftly paced Stardom, Arcand does it…
The indefatigable Cora Cardona, artistic director of Teatro Dallas, has threatened on occasions when the itinerant troupe cannot find a stage to pitch a tent in a parking lot and perform there. OK, so it’s not a parking lot for the 2000 edition of their annual Dia de los Muertos…
In the summer of 1946, while on holiday along the French Riviera, Pablo Picasso wandered to the nearby village of Vallauris, a Provençal town where artists and craftsmen had been turning out pottery since at least Roman times. Picasso was 65 years young, and somewhat at loose ends. Though he…
“Moshing” wasn’t a word in 1969, let alone an outdated exercise, yet the Rolling Stones hosted a more violent show at Altamont Speedway 30 years ago than the the infamous Limp Bizkit performance at Woodstock ’99. The presence of the Hell’s Angels with lead-weighted pool cues acting as out-of-control security…
So, more people are watching network TV this season than last; either their cable’s gone out or they’re hypnotized by the sheer awfulness of the new season, unable to turn away from that grisly Geena Davis-Bette Midler-Michael Richards pileup out on the interstate. As it turns out, the best new…
Standing on a lacquered wooden bench near a corner in the Cowboys locker room, he held court after a convincing win, playing lord of the manor as reporters shoved microphones and cameras in his face. It’s a character that fits him, the king–the man who carries a small, leather-covered ball…
Before others could reject him, Michael Chabon had convinced himself no one wanted to read an epic novel about comic-book creators, mythical Jewish monsters called golems, New York in the 1930s, daring escapes from Lithuania, Nazis, and the Empire State Building’s elevator system. He wanted to write the book–desperately, one…
Although it must have been a no-brainer to make a sequel to The Blair Witch Project, it was hard to imagine an intelligent follow-up to a film that culminated in the apparent death of all the principals. Romeo and Juliet 2, anyone? Hamlet Returns? But given the inevitability of Book…
Any moviemaker who ventures into the sewers of New York City corruption will find Sidney Lumet’s wet footprints. In films such as The Pawnbroker, Serpico, and Q&A, this streetwise director has explored, among other things, individual morality in the face of big-city vice, and individual transcendence of ethnic conflict. Other…
The stark simplicity of A Time for Drunken Horses, one of the few films that have slipped out of post-revolutionary Iran to the West, does nothing to obscure its emotional power or the complexity of the geopolitical issues underlying it. Filmed on location in wintry Kurdistan, it is the heartbreaking…
