There is something fairy-tale-like, but also deeply human, about Twin Falls Idaho, a gentle, beautifully realized tale of love and intimacy that marks the feature-film debut of Mark Polish and Michael Polish. Identical twin brothers, Mark Polish wrote the script, Michael Polish directed it, and both brothers star. It is…
It’s bad enough when a major studio — in this case, Warner Bros. — blows $40 million (or more) on a by-the-numbers film. It’s worse when they blow it on a by-the-numbers film made by people who don’t know how to count. We’re not talking literal math here, but rather…
I don’t visit Joe Dickinson’s Pocket Sandwich Theatre very often, but lest the readers think I’m too snobby to lob a handful of popcorn with the Pocket faithful, let me rush to confirm that I’ve desperately wanted to hurl comestibles at a few shows during the just-ended Dallas theater season…
Actor-writer-director John Turturro’s engaging, episodic, occasionally confusing look at the turn-of-the-century theater in New York, Illuminata, has all the sexual shenanigans of farce without the plot structure to give the accidents and assignations lasting impact. One image that will linger with me, however, makes its first appearance within the opening…
“Erotic male flesh. Drinking with criminals and aristocrats. Not cleaning your brushes on anything but the curtains of the Savoy. Screaming Popes in Adolph Eichmann war crimes trial cages.” These are some of the Francis Bacon clichés drolly laid out by British artist and writer Matthew Collings, and while Collings…
Police officers don’t get much respect from adults. No news flash there. After all, cops stop us and issue speeding tickets when we don’t deserve them. (And we never do.) Seriously — 73 in a 70? State trooper, dude, I’m late to school already; going three miles per hour over…
Back in college, I took a hardcore sociology course with a focus on gender. One day the teacher (with barely veiled feminazi leanings) asked the class: “Cats or dogs? Who here is a cat person, who a dog person?” and she tallied the vote. For the most part, the chicks…
In January 1998, only a few days after he announced he was purchasing the Texas Rangers for $250 million, Tom Hicks sat in his opulent, marble-and-oak office in the Crescent and spoke of how he saw the future: on television. He was trying to explain why a man with his…
“Is it art or is it pornography? I don’t think it matters what you call it,” said Annie Sprinkle at the close of her sold-out Friday-night performance of The Herstory of Porn: Reel to Real. Given that art, broadly speaking, isn’t illegal, and that the vice cops in attendance at…
Dunn deal Big jobs in big art galleries are hard work and high-profile in Dallas, but few and far between. Art forces to be reckoned with, like Talley Dunn, who recently resigned as gallery director for Gerald Peters Gallery, tend to stay put. Dunn’s decision to leave is still the…
What is it they say — that even a flea can reach Mount Olympus riding in Pegasus’ mane? Well, in the case of the new Albert Brooks comedy The Muse, Brooks is the flea and Pegasus is his delectable costar, Sharon Stone. But I get ahead of myself. In The…
LL Cool J is God, at least to the characters of In Too Deep. He’s crime lord Dwayne Gittens, otherwise known as “God” to his peeps on the street; he acts as life-giver, protector, and judgment-maker for the inner-city dwellers of Cincinnati. He dotes on his newborn son, throws Thanksgiving…
It has been almost 40 years since Eric Rohmer, riding the crest of the French New Wave, embarked on the first of his Six Moral Tales. The series would eventually include at least two classics: My Night at Maud’s (1969) and Chloe in the Afternoon (1972). Linked by theme, style,…
It seems like only yesterday that movies dealing with gay and lesbian life were extravagant displays of gloom and doom. From the suicides of The Children’s Hour and Advise and Consent to the serial killers of Cruising and Basic Instinct, same-sexuality was no fun — in the worst possible way…
Fortune has smiled on Brendan Fraser. The star of the new Dudley Do-Right looks great in or out of his clothes; has an easy, self-effacing likability on screen; and seems unafflicted with any pressing need to be taken seriously. If he’s no more than modestly talented as an actor, he’s…
As the late, legendary English critic Kenneth Tynan noted in his 1977 profile of the playwright Tom Stoppard, who was only that year enjoying the first decade of his theatrical success after his early smash hit Rosencranz and Guildenstern Are Dead, Stoppard is something of a rare fauna in the…
The temptation to label the seven women, who met in art class at SMU and have maintained a loosely constructed collaboration in fine art for nearly 15 years, is uncontrollable. Even as you try to resist it, a litany of stereotypes comes to mind — housewives, mothers, grandmothers, DMA docents,…
After a spring season of veteran exhibitions, the new artists swarm into the light during these boiling summer months like cockroaches driven out from beneath the fridge. The galleries fill this otherwise dead time and space with emerging artist shows, and right now, Craighead-Green has one of the best samplers…
This is the story of an incredible journey — not the Disney story about two dogs and a cat, but the history of a 72-year-old theater organ. (Yes, theater organ, but don’t stop reading.) This isn’t the kind of organ used by churches or for classical music. It was designed…
If Kevin Williamson has anything to say about it, the good works of noble movie schoolteachers such as Mr. Chips and Miss Dove and Mr. Holland will be wiped out in one fell swoop. In their place, the creator of TV’s hormonal Dawson’s Creek series proposes an unmitigated horror –…
Lo and behold the plight of the American gangster. John Gotti, the Dapper Don, has been sent down the river. His big-time heavy, Sammy “The Bull” Gravano, is famous and face-lifted for being a no-good-dirty-rat stool pigeon. And Robert De Niro, the reigning deity of hoodlum heavies in films such…
As a filmmaker, actor John Turturro clearly believes in drawing from personal experience: His directorial debut, the 1992’s Mac (which won the Camera D’Or at Cannes), was avowedly based on his father’s life. For his second feature, Illuminata, Turturro takes a look at the theater, showing us the ambitions, fears,…
