Director Wes Craven and screenwriter Kevin Williamson’s 1996 Scream was something of a breath of fresh air — a little of the slasher film’s familiar old holy-shit! mixed in with self-aware glances and not-so-sly asides. It offered nothing new — indeed, Scream often felt like a sequel to something –…
Director Chen Kaige is best known in the United States for Farewell My Concubine, the most successful Chinese production ever released here. As many pointed out at the time, this Oscar-nominated 1993 epic of modern Chinese history may have been wholly Chinese in both content and viewpoint, but it was…
Sharon Stone doesn’t appear on-screen until halfway through this tale of three lives unraveling, but when she does, she makes quite an impression as Rosie, the third player in a horse-racing scam. Adapted from a play by Sam Shepard, Simpatico jumps back and forth between the present day and the…
Contrary to the press clips, there is no musician more difficult to write about than Garth Brooks. How do you describe a shadow? How do you get inside that which is not there? So many millions of words have been spent discussing him over the past decade, yet he remains…
There was a time, not so long ago, when black men and women were lynched on a whim in Texas. When I say “not so long ago,” I mean within the span of a lifetime. Granted, in this case, it’s a very long lifetime — that of one George Dawson,…
Fest intentions Fort Worth advertising agencies were trash-talking Downtown Fort Worth Inc. last year when the nonprofit that puts on the Main St. Fort Worth Arts Festival (among other pro-Cowtown activities) chose a Dallas-based ad agency to promote the weekend-long spring event. Resource 3 in Dallas wrested the account away…
The name Mike Leigh has been attached to some intense, intricate, generally superb character studies in the past three decades. The man has pitted Gary Oldman (as a skinhead) against Tim Roth (as a slow learner) in Meantime (1981), explored the friction of reuniting Cure-fan college chums Katrin Cartlidge and…
The evening of March 14, 1885, was an auspicious one in the annals of musical theater. Less than four years had passed since the opening of London’s Savoy Theatre, built specifically for the productions of librettist William Schwenk Gilbert and composer Arthur Seymour Sullivan. The partners’ first six works had…
The subject matter is surely the stuff of which can’t-miss movies are made: Jacqueline Susann, author of best-seller Valley of the Dolls and other jerk-off (pardon, maddeningly sexy, to quote Helen Gurley Brown) classic lit. There was nothing at all pedestrian about the woman who was regaled in her day…
What do, say, the Rolling Stones and West Africa have in common? How about Chuck Berry and Senegal? Or the Sex Pistols and the djembe drum? In his PBS series and accompanying book The History of Rock and Roll (1995), the late music critic and historian Robert Palmer deftly traces…
Can an alien and an earthling live together in peace? That may sound more like a lead-in to Jerry Springer — or the plot to Starman, Earth Girls Are Easy, and a thousand other sci-fi yarns — but, no, it’s actually the premise of Mr. Spaceman, the new novel by…
One of the late Charles Ludlam’s drag secrets was bird seed. Bird seed for breasts, that is. He discovered that, so long as you seal the pouches tightly, you were assured of mammaries that were pliant and shapely and shiftable, not unlike the real deal. People often accuse Ludlam of…
Because their audiences can connect a face and persona with the work, pop musicians and movie stars are, insufferably, the most high-profile and well-paid among the artistic crowd. The full-blown image of film actors and rockers was built upon the foundation of “widely available” — thus, instant and personalized –…
There was a recent Dallas Morning News profile of a long-term lesbian couple intending to fly off and get hitched in Vermont, which has become the first state to grant homosexuals almost the same marital rights as heterosexuals. Included in the story, somewhat obtrusively, were the war-hero status of one…
At first, there’s something strangely familiar about Dallas Museum of Art’s new “Art Kid,” a savvy cartoon boy/girl who introduces school-age children to the wonders of exploring an art museum. Then it hits you: It’s Pat, Julia Sweeney’s androgynous Saturday Night Live character who could never be trapped into revealing…
Out of the fire sale The grande dame of Dallas commercial gallery owners, Edith Baker, took exception to her year-end holiday exhibition’s being lumped together with Angstrom Gallery’s “fire sale” in the January 6 Blink. Her Masquerade show, featuring works that were smaller than typical Baker fare by 50 gallery…
In the last 30 years, Woody Allen has written and directed something like 28 movies — “something like” reflects the confusion of how to count his contribution to New York Stories. It’s a remarkable productivity record for a major filmmaker, and one that’s even more impressive when you consider how…
Boo hoo! Frank McCourt had a miserable childhood. Honestly, who can say their childhood wasn’t impoverished in some way…or in many ways? That McCourt survived and eventually published his inescapable memoir is nice, of course, and the book is indeed a poignant and crafty piece of work. Nonetheless, it seems…
Children’s programming is flooded with six-month fads and 90-minute toy ads masquerading as films. The odds that writers, illustrators, or directors will continue to create quality work are too risky even by Las Vegas standards. Perhaps that’s why so many of us worship the movies and shows from our childhoods:…
And just what is so cool about…oh, say, a dairy goat display? Or a sheep arena? Or “Junior Heifer registration?” Believe it or not, kids, history is cool. That people today seem willing to free-fall through life with no sense of where they came from is one of the most…
Be Boyd, a recent transplant from North Carolina to the drama faculty of Texas Christian University in Fort Worth, left the stage of Allied Theatre Group in tears at the close of Fires in the Mirror. Quite frankly, I’m surprised she didn’t have to be carried off on a stretcher,…
It’s not just legend. David Hockney’s first stab at conquering a new world was as ballsy as we can only hope our best-known artists might be — you might even think it cinematic. But in his own words, the tale of a young North Englander moving to Los Angeles in…
