The moody, feverish images that fill Running Free are so exquisite, they almost make up for the film’s disastrous auditory misstep: the decision to cast Lukas Haas as the voice of Lucky, the chestnut foal that narrates this unusual adventure story. A cross between Nicholas Roeg’s Walkabout and Jean-Jacques Annaud’s…
Rarely have I been to a sold-out performance of a three-hour play where ticket-buyers, during intermission, laughed nervously about whether they had the fortitude to return. Mind you, I’ve been to three-hour shows where people fled during the break because the script or the performances were boring them silly or…
What a curious theatrical creature is Shakespeare for the Modern Man, Lesson 1: Macbeth, currently rattling the boards at Pocket Sandwich Theatre. I can’t count it as altogether successful, because there are so many sonic, thematic, and verbal threads running through it that playwright-adapter Scott A. Eckert couldn’t possibly work…
A lissome teenage girl lies draped across a pool table, crucifixion-style, in the center of an elegant and expensively furnished room. You can’t actually see her until she rises up, hops off the table, and disappears stage right. A shadowy figure of a man appears at the French doors that…
More Whitney hoo-hah Since they’re winding up the Whitney Museum of American Art’s 2000 Biennial on June 4, here’s one BLINK’s worth of gauging the local fallout. This Biennial was the first to use six regional curators, you’ll recall, who scoured the countryside in an attempt to expose New York…
Dating habits are not hereditary. If they were, Brett Leveridge’s first novel would be called My Mom Was a Big-Time Playa and So Am I instead of Men My Mom Dated (And Other Mostly True Tales). But maybe genetics isn’t to blame for poor Brett’s lack of dating success. After…
Is there such a thing as an armchair anime fan? It seems that Japanese animation has spawned an exclusive subculture. It’s exclusive in that you can’t crash it unless you really know your anime and unless your fondness for the medium defines you; it’s a subculture because those not into…
Big D Festival of the Unexpected producer Melissa Cooper, who calls the official inclusion of small Dallas theaters this year “an experiment” (a successful one, let’s hope), has asked a pair of the city’s director-performers to do it Doggy-style…er, we mean Kitchen Dog Theater-style. The Dog is again trotting out…
Audiences raised on Freddy flicks and Jason slasher movies won’t be scared by Nosferatu–Symphony of Horrors. They’re callused, desensitized to anything short of a blood bath on screen and an adrenaline rush off. Yet the 1922 film is still oddly disturbing and, unlike some other black-and-white silent films, hasn’t become…
Many of the subjects of Dallas-based photographer Nic Nicosia seem to be funneling all their joy, sorrow, and paranoia into rituals whose significance is unclear but ominous. Nicosia uses friends, family, and professional models to fabricate an American suburbia that spurns the traditional scars of living for a wholly internalized…
Early on in Mission: Impossible 2 (or M:I-2, as the confident Paramount now calls it), hero Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) complains to his boss about his new assignment: “It’s going to be difficult.” “It’s not mission difficult, Mr. Hunt,” the boss icily replies, “it’s mission impossible. ‘Difficult’ should be a…
Do not judge Shanghai Noon by its trailer, which serves as the very antithesis of advertising: It begs you to stay far away from any theater in which this film is screening. Laden with dreary sight gags (a horse that stays by sitting…just like a dog) and woeful puns (“Your…
To begin, let us discuss puking. You know, upchucking, barfing, yacking, Technicolor yawning, blowing cookies, driving the porcelain bus, screaming at one’s shoes, and, for you Aussies, chundering. Always unpleasant–and yet usually a great relief to a queasy gut–a nice vomit can be provoked by just about anything, but a…
“Industrial-strength boredom” is a vicious term to unload on anybody–friend, foe, or former actress. Considering the lingering discomfort it inspires, one must beware of its impact, even around a seemingly invulnerable producer returning to the screen to melt our hearts in yet another variation on the emotional doppelgänger narrative, à…
In two separate moments of release from the steamrollering epic plot turns of Dreamlandia, offered as the main-stage production of Dallas Theater Center’s Big D Festival of the Unexpected, onstage characters directly implicate audiences. They spot us, identify us, and accuse us. The first happens when a supposedly retarded young…
Overseas loan Key pieces from Southern Methodist University’s Meadows Museum’s permanent collection of Spanish masterworks debuted at the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid on May 9. Carole Brandt, dean of the Meadows School of the Arts, says the loan of 27 paintings is all part of a plan for the museum…
Michael Moore often worries about being seen–and worse, dismissed–as the plump, ball-cap-wearing windbag who barges into company headquarters, demands to see the chairman of the board, then gets kicked out or even arrested. He frets about being reduced to a stuntman of shtick, Captain Ambush, the guy called upon whenever…
Woody Allen is back on screen in Small Time Crooks, a bittersweet comedy that in many ways could have been lifted straight from the ’30s. For the most part, it’s Woody Allen Lite, which is not at all a bad thing. While one doesn’t want to penalize Allen for his…
If you had asked me in 1969 what was the best movie ever made, the answer would likely have been The Valley of Gwangi, in which a group of cowboys in the Mexican desert find a gully full of leftover dinosaurs, animated by Ray Harryhausen, and lasso a tyrannosaurus rex…
Road Trip makes American Pie look like Fast Times at Ridgemont High; Fast Times look like Animal House; and Animal House look like Citizen Kane. It ranks (indeed, it is rank) among the most soul-deadening movies ever made; it has no pulse and seeks to steal yours with a cynical…
Dial the number of the Deep Ellum Center for the Arts, and a recording tells you it’s no longer a working line. Step into the cavernous Commerce Street space on an upcoming weekend night, though, and you will discover the center is still very valuable in its dying gasp. Between…
A recent cover story in American Theatre discussed how the national network of prominent children’s theater in cities such as Minneapolis, Seattle, St. Louis, and Dallas was beginning to generate plays without “blue or pink plaid (and) fake furry animal costumes.” Issues of race, sexuality, and mortality had been introduced…
