The bewildering penchant of recent American movies for glorifying the lovable naïf, the perpetual adolescent, and the village idiot takes a strange new turn in Miguel Arteta’s dark comedy Chuck & Buck. Arteta’s hero, Buck O’Brien (Mike White), is a 27-year-old man-child who eats lollipops all day, takes refuge in…
For one moment–and that’s all you can stomach–really look at Eddie Murphy’s filmography. You will notice how his bad films (and most transcend that feeble definition, falling more often into the “wretched” category) far outweigh the good. You will see that those few good films–Murphy’s Holy Trinity of Funny: 48…
It’s a premise that’s bound to succeed. A young man living on the edge is trying to pull it all together while frequenting 12-step programs and holding down a job that seems calculated to drive him insane. Searching for a way out, he makes contact with a mysterious figure who…
All you dumb asses who attend a Pocket Sandwich Theatre show with the desire to disorder the performers by pelting them with popcorn, beware: The actors have a unique opportunity for revenge in 20,000 Babes Beneath the Sea, and they seize it. I won’t reveal it here, but let’s just…
Someone once said, “Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you what you are.” (Obviously, that someone was French–specifically, it was epicure Anthelme Brillat-Savarin.) He could just as well have made the same proclamation on how we eat. Do we regularly dine off of ornate, specialized china placed…
It’s a shock when you reach adulthood and realize that you’re not yet done with Shakespeare, that you didn’t leave him padlocked in your bologna-sandwich-smelling high-school locker or folded in a dog-eared college lit text at the campus bookstore. He’s out here in the grown-up world too. He waits at…
It’s tempting to think there’s something twisted about her tale. After all, she was a mere 18 the first time she had sex in front of a camera–for money, small change that would soon enough blossom into a pile of cash–and did so only at the insistence of her boyfriend,…
Well, I lost a thumb on the Fourth of July / I ran into my mother and she started to cry / She looked at the label on that M-80 and she wiped the tears from her eyes / She said the Chinese we are not to trust / They…
In the course of two hours, Neil Gaiman speaks 10,000 words (or damned near, when transcribed), and it seems a shame to waste a single one, since there is not an uh or y’know among them. Even the most eloquent writer gets lost in thought every now and then…uh…y’know? But…
Rather than asking if this senseless and expensive new film from wunderkind entertainer Robert Zemeckis is devoid of merit (it is), or “worth seeing” (it isn’t), we should instead take the movie’s title–What Lies Beneath–as a direct question. Indeed, what does lie beneath? Possible answers include: a glaringly improbable shift…
Twelve hours after seeing Loser, the only thing I could remember about it was Alan Cumming’s performance of “Willkommen” from the 1998 Broadway production of Cabaret–which isn’t technically even in the movie, since the scene is obviously spliced in to make it appear as though the film’s two would-be lovebirds…
Here’s my final report from the Second Annual Festival of Independent Theatres. Taken with last week’s review, I hope it will give an accurate account of the scope and ambition of a city event that has risen to eminence in a very short time: Echo Theatre revives a one-act by…
There’s enough new and engrossing theater between Dallas and Fort Worth that I don’t usually get the chance to review the same play twice when one area company opts to produce a script that another has recently staged. When I do see the same author’s work interpreted by two very…
Kim Rody’s Fishart paintings likely feel right at home at the Dallas Aquarium in Fair Park. Around them swim the fish, shrimp, turtles, and other aquatic life forms that inspired (and occasionally modeled for) the artist. They also probably feel relieved. Some of Rody’s other Fishart paintings have hung in…
Some people don’t worry about their free time. Maybe they have a passion like playing golf or going to the movies or logrolling that they indulge whenever possible. Maybe they have little free time because of family obligations, house-cleaning, bill-paying, and work. In either case, these people don’t have to…
Bryan Singer did not read comic books as a young boy, because he couldn’t read them. As a kid, he was slightly dyslexic and, therefore, unable to follow the dialogue as it bubbled across panels and pages; quite simply, Singer says now, comic books confused him, so the Jersey boy…
Just hours after the decision was handed down, and just hours before the Rangers are to play A.L. West foil Oakland, the scene at The Ballpark is absent any obvious drama. The player who just had a dream dashed stands near second base and effortlessly gobbles grounders as he would…
In Bryan Singer’s last movie, 1998’s Apt Pupil, Ian McKellen portrayed a Nazi war criminal hiding out in the suburbs, passing himself off as an ordinary old man crouching behind drawn blinds. In Singer’s new movie, X-Men, McKellen plays Erik Magnus Lehnsherr, the son of Jews murdered in Auschwitz. In…
It has taken moviemakers and, more crucially, foot-dragging movie investors almost a decade to catch up with rave culture–the heady mix of secret warehouses, electronic music, designer drugs, and ecstatic dancing that has come to define the yearning and the restlessness of a generation. But now, the 5 a.m. faithful…
Kenneth Branagh’s latest adaptation of Shakespeare, Love’s Labour’s Lost, is not swooningly wonderful; rather, it is simply quite nice. Kindly note the distinction: If the movie were a dinner guest, it would not be the brash charmer who transforms your party into a par-tay; it would be the crisply attired…
So who are these celebrated Coen brothers anyway, and what’s their point? These days, it’s pretty easy to switch over to critical auto-pilot, to gush about funny-looking friends shoved into wood-chippers or Hula-Hoops being designed, you know, for the kids. But where does the slender path of the Coen mythos…
Imagine being given a do-over, a free pass to correct yesterday’s mistakes and missteps. Perhaps you’d choose a different job, a different lover, a different life; perhaps you’d reinvent yourself altogether, since you have in your possession the gift of hindsight. You know where you went wrong last time; tomorrow,…
