John Turturro may be best known as an actor, having appeared in such films as Do the Right Thing, Barton Fink, and Quiz Show, but the man speaks like a writer-director. He likes to talk about the themes of his films, and about the way one character’s actions and personality…
Joan Chen, director and co-writer of Xiu Xiu the Sent Down Girl, is best known as an actress. American audiences probably identify her most readily as the doomed wife in Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Last Emperor or as Josie Packard, the alternately evil and innocent character in David Lynch’s weird-o-rama Twin…
OK, let’s see a show of hands from everyone who wants to retire the phrase “performance art” from the critical lexicon. Included in the sea of upraised palms are Laurie Anderson, Tim Miller, and two Dallas writer-actors, Dalton James and John S. Davies — enough votes to spur this humble…
When twentysomething Lisa Ling, new co-host of ABC-TV’s popular talk show, The View, romped through Dallas last month promoting the show and purporting to be hip, she was still getting flack from assembled fans about a major faux pas she had made on a recent episode. In the program’s “Know…
Guerrilla tactics You’d think Frank Campagna would’ve learned his lesson back in 1993, when he took a merry band of fellow Deep Ellum artists to the streets and turned the Good-Latimer tunnels into a riot of visual art. “We took it from idea to execution in six weeks the first…
Texas Rangers fans don’t need an entire book offering them reasons to hate the New York Yankees. The results of last year’s American League Division Series still burn deep in the memory — the way the Yanks kept Texas to only one run during the entirety of the all-too-brief three-game…
In 1924, a tall-hatted, big-mustached, slow-limping, long-gazing cowboy rides into the oil-boom town of Cromwell, Oklahoma, to help keep good folks safe from bootlegging gangsters armed with machine guns. Guess the ending. It’s not hard. After all, there are only two types of Westerns: the kind that end with the…
Whatever you do in this life, don’t go looking for answers in a locker room. They just aren’t there. You won’t find them lying beneath the damp towels or the dirty jocks or the discarded clichés. You won’t find them hanging in a locker next to silk shirts and jars…
Filmmaker Bobby Bowfinger, the lead character in the intermittently funny Hollywood satire Bowfinger starring Steve Martin and Eddie Murphy, has a dream. Nothing so grand as an Academy Award, or even a table down front at the Golden Globes. No, when Bowfinger allows his fantasies to run wild, he sees…
Do not be fooled: Gene Simmons, Paul Stanley, Ace Frehley, and Peter Criss receive top billing in Detroit Rock City, but KISS doesn’t actually appear in the film until its final three minutes. And when they do show up, clad in their de rigueur leather-and-greasepaint getups, it’s simply to perform…
For Morgan J. Freeman (a young writer-director, not the heralded actor), comic timing couldn’t get any worse — or better. That’s because one of the unhappy teenagers in Freeman’s second feature, Desert Blue, is a melancholy girl dressed in moody black who likes to detonate homemade bombs. The Columbine High…
You don’t have to believe in ghosts, Haunting-style, to perceive the specter of Orson Welles hovering about The Big Brass Ring, debuting this week on Showtime. George Hickenlooper’s film is based on Welles’ last completed screenplay, co-written with Oja Kodar in the early ’80s. It has been substantially altered and…
In 1997, former Dallas Observer staffer Kaylois Henry wrote a story examining a national phenomenon of African-American theater. Some North Texas and national black stage artists quoted in it took umbrage at the nickname that these brassy, superficial, but successful touring musicals have earned — “the chitlin circuit.” That phrase…
From John Leguizamo’s Freak to Julia Sweeney’s God Said Ha!, confessional solo shows have been generating quite a bit of ink in theater pages over the last couple of years. Veteran actor John Davies is so aware of this that he has included in the promotional materials for his self-penned…
The gift for making great art is an elusive thing — some have it, most don’t, and any Saturday afternoon stroll through a handful of art venues can attest to that. But the talent for looking at art isn’t so elusive. Even if you don’t like a piece, your instincts…
As he drives back and forth to his weekday job, trying to wrest himself from the traffic jam that is Dallas, actor-writer-composer Dalton James finds his mind becoming an overflowing cornucopia of life’s big issues — sex, death, God, fate, and how slimy your underwear feels when it gets soaked…
In an episode of The Monkees, the boys try to help an old toy inventor named Harper, who can’t get his creations produced because the toy company’s manager, named only Daggart, manufactures toys designed by computers. Daggart says that when the children break or get bored with the shoddy computer-designed…
In the highly competitive, dog-eat-dog world of the modern-day superhero, the members of the group that eventually becomes known as the Mystery Men — they don’t really have a name through most of the movie — start out with a couple of strikes against them. First off, there’s the little…
First published under the title The Iron Man in Great Britain in 1968, The Iron Giant is a minor classic of 20th-century children’s literature. The slim volume by the English poet laureate Ted Hughes is a pacifist parable in the guise of a sci-fi hero fantasy. Hughes spun his yarn…
The Sixth Sense, a kind of touchy-feely horror movie, wants to do it all — scare the hell out of us at the same time that it makes us feel good about life and death. It wants us to believe that an 8-year-old boy in Philadelphia, Cole Sear (blue-eyed, winning…
Ten-year-old Fraser Pettigrew leads an idyllic existence. He lives on a bucolic estate in Scotland with five siblings, four dogs, his gentle mother Moira (Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio), eccentric inventor father Edward (Colin Firth), and indomitable grandmother Gamma Macintosh (Rosemary Harris). For Fraser (Robert Norman, making his professional acting debut), life…
GQ magazine runs a column every month titled “What Were We Thinking?” to present a ludicrous photograph of a famous person dressed in what the magazine had earlier decreed to be a style every hip cat would soon be wearing. In a few short years, it’s my guess that the…
