If you think of history as a big bowl of Neapolitan ice cream–and I do, all the time–then it’s funny how journalists and scholars become anal-retentive malt-shop clerks, slicing up the parallel layers and serving them in separate containers. Epochs, movements, controversies, regimes, and ideologies all melted into each other…
My first guitar had strings that looked like colored fishing line and a white plastic body emblazoned with a photograph of Luke, Bo, and Daisy Duke, and the General Lee. I wanted a real guitar. That The Dukes of Hazzard guitar was just another in a line of toy instruments…
Every so often, the 1973 documentary Jimi Hendrix shows up on the True Stories network, a Starz! offshoot for fact-based tales. The film, directed by three men (including folk-rock producer Joe Boyd), is a swift and nifty bio narrated by the ghost of Jimi, who talks to the camera in…
Almost Famous is the movie Cameron Crowe always wanted to make–and the movie he tried to keep from making as long as he could. The writer-director insists he didn’t want to make a film about his wonder years as a Rolling Stone writer in the 1970s, because he didn’t want…
Dawn Staley could have been a star. As could her teammates–most of them, anyway. But you don’t care. You’re not paying attention–to her, to them, to me. If you consider yourself “sports-savvy,” you’ve probably already tuned me out. Listen, we’re not talking Sonny Bono-level fame here, or even Shawn Bradley…
Critics and stage artists will ever have a dysfunctional, back-stabbing, roller-coaster relationship. Unlike, say, movie critics, whose opinions can be reassessed throughout the foreseeable future with one trip to the video store, the words of theater pundits celebrate or sting a little more because they are often the only available…
Humans and their stories, my oh my. Somehow, the familiar themes just keep coming around, again and again, ad infinitum. Of course, most of them have already been captured and processed by Shakespeare. From the bitter young man to the crazy old king, from the flirty young thing to the…
Uh-oh. That’s what you’re thinking, and you know it. You’ve been thinking it for days, letting it rattle around like some awful ‘N Sync song you just can’t get out of your head. It’s festering up there right now, causing you brain pain. And there’s nothing you can do. More…
A month ago, R.J. Cutler thought he found a home for his child, one that would coddle and nurture his baby until it was ready to stand on its own two legs without wobbling or falling. A month ago, it all seemed so simple to the Oscar-nominated producer-director, who was…
This is the beginning of The Way of the Gun you will not see, because it was written but never filmed: Two men, Parker (Ryan Phillippe, sporting a pubic beard) and Longbaugh (Benicio Del Toro, looking lost and dangerous), urinate in an open grave in front of mourners, beat up…
It seems like he has always been there, this man whose presence is as inescapable as heat on the sun. He taught the children of the 1970s how to read, pronouncing letters until they formed words until they became sentences; they called him “Easy Reader,” because he made learning such…
In 1988 Penelope Spheeris released the amusing rock documentary The Decline of Western Civilization Part II: The Metal Years. Rob Reiner’s This Is Spinal Tap is an almost perfect parody of Spheeris’ film, and Christopher Guest’s Nigel Tufnel is a perfect parody of Ozzy Osborne’s persona in Spheeris’ film. The…
It’s strange to encounter a movie like The Opportunists, the debut feature by writer/director Myles Connell, because, as it eschews pomp and sensationalism, there aren’t a lot of obvious highlights to mention. The stakes are low, the relationships are subtle, and Christopher Walken hardly even raises his voice, barking only…
Catfish in Black Bean Sauce starts with a promising premise for either a farce or a melodrama: Two Vietnamese-American siblings, adopted and raised by a black couple, find their lives turned upside down when their birth mother arrives in the States 20-some years later. Unfortunately, writer/producer/director/star Chi Muoi Lo doesn’t…
It’s a pretty sad state when a playwright has caricatured herself by the time her most successful script gets worldwide attention. Former SMUtant Beth Henley had not only cornered the market in eccentric, obsessive Southern women when Crimes of the Heart was first being produced everywhere, she appeared to be…
All things being equal–and don’t get the Dallas or Fort Worth art farts started on that subject unless you’re packing Valium and a sturdy overnight bag–the time-honored tradition of heralding the opening of the visual arts season in North Texas with a festive “art walk” or “gallery night” has gotten…
From We Are the World to the Tibet Freedom Concerts, musicians have been selling their pet charities along with records, concert T-shirts, and logo baseball caps. There are festivals and records dedicated to everything from ending world hunger to aiding the American farmer. Though we’re detached, even apathetic, toward causes…
About eight years ago, give or take a couple of days, Kinky Friedman gave me a copy of his first three novels, collected in a single volume by a British publishing house. Inside, he had scribbled a note that, to this day, gives me no small amount of solace and…
Note to art politicos: Stop whining that Dallas is a cultural wasteland and pay attention to the plethora of performances being offered in the Dallas Morning News Dance Festival. This year the Dallas Office of Cultural Affairs and the Dance Council decided to spotlight dance companies chosen by national dance…
OKLAHOMA CITY–There was a time when he was deemed a dissenter, a cancerous growth too talented to biop. That changed quickly, of course, and former managers from Joe Torre to Tony LaRussa cut him out and replaced the prodigious outfielder with the more congenial while publicly branding him a malcontent…
Success is relative in Hollywood, like a third cousin twice-removed who doesn’t recognize you at family reunions, and doesn’t care to. Fame is so fleeting it has a month-by-month lease. Six years ago, Christopher McQuarrie was as famous as any screenwriter on the backlot known as Los Angeles. He had…
Whatever one might believe about the past centuries of English oppression of the Irish, one thing is sure: No matter how raw a deal they’ve gotten in real life, the Irish haven’t been shortchanged on the screen. From the Easter Rising to the more recent Troubles, the conflict has been…
