“Howdy, Art Folks”Frank Campagna’s influence–and his art–is all over Deep Ellum. If there’s a mural inside or outside a bar or restaurant, chances are he painted it. He’s something of a leader to Deep Ellum’s long-standing community of streetwise artists, organizing art shows here and there, and tapping his compadres…
American culture has not been kind to the ’60s. Outside of the extraordinarily resilient appeal of the pop music of the time, the period has become–for more than one of the several subsequent generations of college students–the embarrassing punch line to a bad joke. The movies have also not been…
In the 1998 documentary The Fear of God: The Making of The Exorcist, made for the BBC and available on The Exorcist 25th-anniversary DVD, director William Friedkin spends a great deal of time explaining why he excised certain scenes from his film, scenes author and screenwriter William Peter Blatty had…
I didn’t know about comedienne-actress Margaret Cho’s struggles with depression and drug and alcohol addiction, nor about her near-death from kidney failure brought on by extreme dieting. In fact, I didn’t know anything about her at all except that she had been the star of a short-lived television sitcom I…
Some may find reason to embrace the romantic comedy Woman on Top as the nonsensical but sweet-tempered fantasy of two South American filmmakers who don’t understand life in this country very well but grasp all the magical powers of Brazil. After all, Brazil ranks second only to fashionable Tibet on…
We all have our little secrets, and it’s out-of-the-closet time with one of mine: Try as I might, I find it hard to dislike Dan Rizzie. There are plenty of reasons to cast a hypercritical eye on the SMU-educated artist, currently the subject of shows at the McKinney Avenue Contemporary…
At first, you don’t want to admit it, because it seems somehow wrong–just too easy. After all, the woman on the other end of the phone line is not that woman seen every Sunday night on HBO, lamenting the sad, sorry state of her love affairs. She’s not an actress…
Kander, Ebb, and FlowThere’s nothing worse than enduring the second-stringers, the Marilu Henners and Tom Wopats of this world slogging their way through the Broadway classics on their way to the bank. But director Sam Mendes’ revival of Cabaret, which opened in London in 1993 and cleaned up at the…
If you write about the visual arts long enough in this town, you start getting a little respect and a lot of perks. You get gifts in the mail–funky candles from Sock Monkey, death masks from Eddie Ruiz at Expo 825, and invitations to chichi dos, such as the Dallas…
“This song explains why I’m leaving home and becoming a stewardess,” says Anita Miller (Zooey Deschanel) to her well-meaning, overbearing mother, as the soundtrack begins to swell with the low hums of Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel. Just a few seconds earlier, Elaine Miller (Frances McDormand) had insisted she wouldn’t…
It’s unfortunate the title Being John Malkovich has already been taken, as it’s a far better one than Bait–and far more appropriate to boot. As Bristol, a computer expert and wily thief and cold-blooded killer, Doug Hutchison is the human sampling machine. His is a routine coddled together from the…
There’s a trio of duets in Duets. The film is set in the world of karaoke singing, but the title really refers to three sets of paired-off actors performing pas de deux to the tune of John Byrum’s Golden-Age-of-Television-ish dialogue. Only one of the three duos shakes fully to life,…
So many intense themes run rampant in Joe Charbanic’s debut feature, The Watcher, that it’s tricky to keep up. For instance, a young lady who lives alone with her cat seems ominously doomed. Then there’s the gripping premise that borrowing from nihilistic wanker David Fincher (Se7en) or industrial scamp Trent…
At the age of 10, young Martin (Jeremy Kreikenmayer) is forced by his single mother to finally meet the father he had avioded seeing every year. Nothing wrong with that–at least on the surface; boys heading into adolescence need their fathers. Dad (Pierre Maguelon), as is often the case in…
There’s plenty of campaign rhetoric about working families, but who ever talks about one of the biggest problems of the working man today–massive corporate downsizing? In the era of record profits and welfare “reform,” all that matters is having any kind of job, whether or not it’s the one you…
Statistics don’t lie. Fewer than one thousand of the millions who call Dallas home trudged along the broken sidewalks of Fairmont Street or sidestepped the gutter slime in Deep Ellum last year for the annual Dallas Art Dealers Association Artwalk. Don’t blame the piss-poor turnout on the quality of art…
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…
