A tangible sense of sadness and longing hangs over The Legend of 1900, the mesmerizingly beautiful and poetic new film from Italian director Giuseppe Tornatore, best known in the United States for his Academy Award-winning Cinema Paradiso. Based on a dramatic monologue by contemporary Italian novelist Alessadro Baricco but filmed…
The last half-decade has been very good to Jane Austen: Besides Ang Lee’s estimable 1995 version of Sense and Sensibility, we’ve been given film or TV adaptations of Emma, Persuasion, and Pride and Prejudice, not to mention Clueless, Amy Heckerling’s remarkably apt updating of Emma. Now Miramax and the BBC…
With all the accolades showered on a young Joe Orton (the very acclaim that, in part, caused lover Kenneth Halliwell’s silver hammer to come down upon the 34-year-old playwright-novelist’s head) during the mid-’60s, more than 30 years passed after his murder before the wicked farceur received his most fitting tribute…
I heard my first excerpt from David Sedaris’ SantaLand Diaries last Christmas break. I was working at the University of North Texas library, hoping to earn enough money to make rent and buy a few presents before the next financial aid check arrived in January. The library was empty: Most…
My original plan was to be writing my book on England by Thanksgiving. I thought that by launching the novel off the emotional strain of being alone during the holidays, I’d really have something — some angsty independence I’d never experienced this time of year, as I’m usually warm in…
Eight years have passed since Terminator 2, otherwise known as the last Arnold Schwarzenegger movie worth a damn. Since then, he has appeared in one half-decent actioner (James Cameron’s wink-wink True Lies), one pale imitation of a pale imitation (Eraser, which is what its script was written with), and a…
When Broken Glass, Arthur Miller’s glimpse at the intersection of marriage and world community responsibility, opened in New York in 1994, it closed quickly after receiving mixed to horrible reviews. London audiences and critics, a few years later, bruised their palms in riotous ovations. I’m not sure what this reaction…
Somewhere along the timeline, among those frenetic years between Impressionism and Abstract Expressionism, the popularity of landscape painting took a nose dive. Traditional landscape’s unceremonious dumping was most noticeable before heavy Cubism but after early Fauvism — right around 1900 — and it’s not that the general population suddenly stopped…
Art in the right place? When Ken Kahn announced in September he was resigning as president of the Arts Council of Fort Worth and Tarrant County — which oversees funding and professional assistance to 60 Tarrant County arts organizations — he agreed to help find his own replacement. After all,…
More often than not, I think Harold Bloom’s a pompous ass — except when it comes to his complaints about live Shakespeare, and then, he’s spot on. In his book The Invention of the Human, Bloom insists — as I do, which, of course, makes him right this one time…
The program notes for Absurd Person Singular, the latest show by New Theatre Company, are ominous, and they seem to confirm rumors that’ve been circulating since before Bruce Coleman resigned as New Theatre artistic director to take a staff position at Theatre Three. It appears that after seven seasons, new…
They’re not going to make it, judging from a quick glance at the clock and the degree of difficulty the dozen or so staff members at Florence Art Gallery are having. One of the gallery’s harried staffers stands at the wall phone, alternately talking, hanging up, and answering the next…
Commerce gets the cash It was slim pickins in the cash-awards category for the hometown artists, who will instead have to settle for getting their work into the McKinney Avenue Contemporary’s “Juried Exhibition of Contemporary Texas Art.” And that’s no small feat, even though good exposure somehow pales in comparison…
“The spectre is known at all the country firesides by the name of the Headless Horseman of Sleepy Hollow,” writes Washington Irving in his original fantasy. Thanks in large part to the silly, watered-down fun of the animated Disney version, the Horseman and his victim, the gangling and gallant Ichabod…
Poor old MGM — the once-golden studio that has been battered and abused by ever-changing ownership and management for nearly three decades — still has one sure-shot franchise among its assets: the James Bond series, whose longevity is astounding. If nothing else, the series’ overseas popularity keeps the films profitable…
Be forewarned: In the continuing quest to get people to pay attention to their films by any means necessary, the marketing wizards at Artisan Entertainment have been misrepresenting Felicia’s Journey to an even greater extent than they did The Minus Man. No doubt hoping to attract a young male demographic,…
There’s a turning point when Felicia’s Journey becomes a completely different movie from the one you’ve been watching, and if you’re unfamiliar with William Trevor’s 1994 novel upon which the film is based, it makes your back stiffen with alarm. It is, satisfyingly, a very Atom Egoyan moment: The film…
The first time I ever heard Georgia O’Keeffe disparaged, I was shocked: As recently as 1996, I was convinced, in the rote Southwestern tradition, that O’Keeffe was our region’s artistic grande dame. But as Aussie-cum-Time magazine art critic Robert Hughes put it in his book and PBS series American Visions,…
Improv is for daredevil comedians. Getting up on stage without pre-written jokes is like walking the tight rope without a safety net — or a rope. And using audience suggestions to build jokes on the spot is like letting someone else pack your parachute — someone who has never skydived…
“Yesterday I wasn’t even sure God existed,” laments Bethany (Linda Fiorentino), the reluctant yet divinely touched heroine of Kevin Smith’s ambitious new film, Dogma. “Now I’m up to my ass in Christian mythology.” As it turns out, so are we. Strutting to a spiritually snappy groove not observed in mainstream…
Had things worked out the way writer-director Kevin Smith planned, Matt Damon would not have appeared in Dogma, much less starred in it. The role of Loki — an avenging angel who, along with fellow fallen angel Bartleby, discovers a way to escape an eternity of exile in Wisconsin –…
Some days, when he’s not making movies, peddling comic books, or fighting denunciations from the Catholic League, Kevin Smith wonders when the time will come to quit the biz. He’s spoken in the past of his admiration for Spike Lee’s career, of the wily Brooklynite’s ability to make all kinds…
