Get a grip, oh ye of little faith, and bear witness. Finally, without question, there’s irrefutable proof that Dallas can produce damn fine art. Drool-on-your-shirt fine. Lo-and-behold fine. It’s not just the stuff from the handful of local artists picked for the Whitney Biennial in New York City that’s serving…
Hickey B. Good Perhaps if you squint in a semidarkened room, Angstrom Gallery owner David Quadrini would look a little like Elvis Presley. At least, he’d be the one singing “Viva Las Vegas” after the April 22 opening and near-sellout of three concurrent solo exhibitions featuring two Vegas-based artists. One…
The thing that most annoys some people about Sandra Bernhard is what others worship in her. Namely, you never know when she’s being serious or sarcastic. A couple of years ago, when her latest one-woman show I’m Still Here…Damn It! was playing to sold-out crowds in New York City, she…
Wolves always get a bad rap. Bedtime stories say they eat grandmothers, blonde girls in red capes, and little pigs who make bad choices in housing materials. Their beady, glowing eyes and mournful howls inspire nightmares and myths. And, according to Neil Jordan’s bizarre fairy-tale-as-erotica film The Company of Wolves,…
Peter Becker is the most important man in the movie business, even though you have no idea who he is. Becker himself would not cop to such a description; he, like few else in the business called show, does not put himself before the work. To describe what he does…
The voice-mail message begins with the caller identifying himself in a clear, sharp tone: “Hey, this is Chris Thompson, executive producer of Action and Ladies Man, and I hear you’re trying to get a hold of me…” Long pause. “For some ungodly reason.” Then, in a split second, the voice…
After some hectoring and pleading, the Dallas Observer got another crack at USA Film Festival coverage. And if we get our face slapped again, we just hope good intentions and honest impatience justify our impudence. Last year, as you may recall, the Festival chose to deny access to the Observer…
Conrad Hall, who by his own account has been “gainfully employed” behind a film camera since he graduated from UCLA in 1949, is dreaming of his own paradise: a house with five acres of coconut trees on a lagoon some 600 yards from mainland Tahiti. Hall will return there shortly…
Norman Jewison’s filmography is almost unfathomable, as though it’s an amalgam of several directors’ résumés. On the surface, it doesn’t add up; it’s two plus two equaling . How does one reconcile a body of work that includes Doris Day-Rock Hudson films (Send Me No Flowers); slick fashion ads dolled…
Go get a few grains of salt to accompany these observations of tenable consistency and enduring potential: The movie industry is run by big kids; nifty sci-fi trickery may distract an audience from emotional shoals; cops and criminals are divided by a fine line; nostalgia and evil are cheaper by…
You’re just going to have to accept that Natalie Portman and Ashley Judd are far too glamorous for the roles they inhabit in Where the Heart Is. It’s an issue that probably won’t hurt the film’s reception: Remember Julia Roberts in Steel Magnolias? Your average moviegoer loves movie stars and…
Unless you’re iron-willed Margaret Thatcher or some other sort of imperialist nostalgiaphile, it’s hard to get choked up these days about the demise of the Anglo-Irish aristocracy. For one thing, it’s now 80 years after the fact; for another, joint government in Ireland remains a dicey proposition, and the Troubles…
Although its themes are about as revelatory as those of the average “Cathy” comic strip (clothes don’t fit, job too busy, male not clairvoyant, AACK!), there’s something irrefutably charming about Philippa “Pip” Karmel’s debut feature, Me Myself I. The editor of Academy darling Shine has scripted a laundry list of…
If time past and time future all point to the present, wrote T.S. Eliot in Four Quartets, then “all time is unredeemable.” World War II gathered like a flock of vultures as the great poet was scribbling this in England, but the idea that what we regret and what we…
There is an unsettling quality to the laughter — luckily, quite a bit of it — in the WaterTower Theatre’s regional premiere of Golf With Alan Shepard. Separation, the burden of memory, and the loneliness that too often descends on the aged are bound to rattle the nerves of anyone…
Art movement When Kristi Chapman-Hopkins’ State Street Gallery closed in March 1999, Cynthia Mulcahy was one of the last art gallery owners to stick it out in Dallas’ historic State-Thomas district. Mulcahy opened State-Thomas Gallery in 1994 in the uptown area that, in the last two years, has been rapidly…
Someone once said the rich are different. They have libraries named after them. They wear clothes that cost more than most people’s cars, and jewelry that could be exchanged for a condo. They have huge oil paintings of dead relatives hanging in their family estates — which have names like…
Folks who know John Waters only from his reputation as the film chronicler of the middle-class American id are always shocked when they see him in his less famous incarnation — as orator. He is polite, articulate, compassionate, even debonair, and lest you think this is some kind of elder-statesman…
In their own time The Dallas Visual Art Center has announced its 2000 Legend Award recipients, to be presented in ceremonies at the Fairmont Hotel on September 14. DVAC honors artists, collectors, and arts professionals each year who have made a special contribution to the Dallas arts community. The Legends…
When I awoke from a dream a few mornings ago still hazy and feeling lost, I wondered, “Did I really just defend the Spice Girls when the police tried to arrest them for pornography? Was I really sticking up for them, or was I just trying to finish an interview…
Inwood Theatre kicks off its spring World Cinema Matinee series with a masterpiece by German auteur Fritz Lang, who is most fondly remembered for that other masterpiece — the frenetic, angular Metropolis (1926), a movie that will live on as long as there are university film departments and experimental musical…
A mildly retarded man who works in a grocery store believes he is Batman, the Dark Knight on a mission to free Gotham City from the clutches of The Joker. An actress playing the role of Wonder Woman becomes a spokeswoman, then scapegoat, for the Commie witch-hunters working for the…
