Much like the religion that has swirled around the Star Wars trilogy for 22 years, the fanaticism evidenced among American fans of Japanese anime remains a mystery to some of us. Writer-director Hayao Miyazaki’s megahit Princess Mononoke does very little to cast light on this obsession: More’s the pity, since…
Is it possible to be separate and equal? It certainly didn’t work out that way for African-Americans, and when applying the questions to lesbians and gays — who have created their own neighborhoods, restaurants, and film festivals — you inevitably encounter ambivalence. Folks want to be comfortable everywhere, but they…
Dallas artist Arthur James is obsessed. Artman, as he prefers to be known, loves the blues, its history, its legends, and its connections to his hometown. His interest exploded when he moved into the Boyd Hotel building on Elm Street. Almost as though possessed, James began researching the blues history…
If you lie down with critics, you get up with fleas, or some such pestilence. So the winners of the 1999 Dallas Theater Critics Forum Awards can gain solace that a certain persistent itch is at least accompanied by an award for “outstanding excellence in the field of stage virtuosity,”…
Visual artists make for lousy interviews. Not that paint-to-canvas genius needs verbal backup, but some of the most dismal conversations I’ve had were with visual artists trying to explain their work. They stumble over their own ideas. They circumvent the questions. They use plenty of hand gestures to subsidize what…
Home for homeless art Without too much fanfare, and with a still-leaking roof and the occasional uninvited mouse, Carol Brewer’s hard-won permanent home for the Dallas Street Art Project opened last Saturday in a rehabbed machine shop at 1325 North Peak St. in Old East Dallas. Brewer’s friends and colleagues,…
Harmony Korine’s directorial debut, Gummo, was like a hard smack to the face of contemporary cinema. Relentlessly nonlinear, filled with disturbing imagery, and impossible to synopsize, it caused many viewers to wince in pain and persuaded even more to walk quickly past its poster — of the slightly misshapen head…
Wes Craven — purveyor of fine horror movies, including A Nightmare on Elm Street, Wes Craven’s New Nightmare, and the Scream trilogy — has apparently decided to go “legit.” And with Music of the Heart, he has done so with a vengeance. The film’s only death is the result of…
Lord, just what is it about rock and roll that so befuddles filmmakers? Save for This Is Spinal Tap, there has never been a movie about the music business that got it right…or, for God’s sakes, merely half-wrong. Too often, these films are made by people who seem to have…
Fran Lebowitz once observed that if the problem with communism is that it’s too boring, then the problem with fascism is that it’s too exciting. This aphorism neatly sums up the strange sex appeal some people find in Nazi drag: high leather boots, padded shoulders, shaved heads, various daunting interrogation…
Most among us don’t love or hate The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Rather, it’s a matter of how much you love it — a little, or a-rice-throwing, Windex-bottle-spraying-lot. Maybe you’re just a Brad if you don’t dig a schlock-and-roll musical that lampoons ’50s uptightness and old sci-fi movies, dolled up…
“It’s one hollow thing meeting another hollow thing.” This is how London art critic Matthew Collings describes the hubbub over the Brooklyn Museum’s recent staging of the traveling exhibition Sensation. Collings, who has viewed the über-trendy Brit art show in all three of its venues — The Royal Academy in…
I would have said that the October chill had solidified resolve in the Dallas theater community, but temperatures have reached the upper 80s and lower 90s, so there’s some other explanation for the bold confidence displayed in this month’s productions. 11th Street Theatre Project offers up one of its simplest…
Bats This horror picture about mutant killer bats terrorizing a little desert town is basically just like Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds. There are two major differences: First, The Birds was about birds, while Bats is about bats; and second, The Birds was a flawed but brilliant work by one of…
Pat Toomay’s name is not so prominent in the history books, perhaps because he played for the Dallas Cowboys between a beloved veteran (George Andrie) and a would-be Super Bowl MVP (Harvey Martin). Or maybe someone has gone into the history books and erased his name, since he did not…
Even from this distance, a long city block away on the courthouse square in Waxahachie, you can tell something’s not quite right with Perry Murphy. The sight of him, half-shuffling across Franklin Street, grabs the attention of the dozen people gathered early this evening for Stephen Anderson’s art opening at…
Gorey Stories, the autumn production of Scott Osborne and Patti Kirkpatrick’s Our Endeavors Theater Company, is an exciting theatrical event for one reason, shared by two entities: Sitting in the audience, you are watching a company (Our Endeavors) and an institution (Deep Ellum Center for the Arts) tumble out of…
And on the subject of turning an unwieldy performance space into a suitable showcase for theater, I have to say that Teatro Dallas artistic director Cora Cardona and her design crew have made me a believer in the potential of that shoebox of a “converted” rehearsal space that resides in…
Local angle Fort Worth Modern Art Museum chief curator Michael Auping says that after one final conference call this week, he’ll wrap up his decision as one of the six curators for New York’s prestigious Whitney Museum of American Art 2000 Biennial. Selected artists won’t be announced until December for…
“That reminds me of the movies Marty made about New York,” stammered Lou Reed somewhere in the mid-’80s. “All those frank and brutal movies that are so brillyunt.” It was a clumsy, rhyme-impaired album track (“Doing the Things That We Want To” from New Sensations), but, as has often been…
Boys Don’t Cry, the first effort from writer-director Kimberly Peirce, unfolds as slowly and deliberately as the reel of film it’s printed on, dawdling on the minor, mundane moments of growing up and growing bored in a small Midwest town. It’s as though Peirce wants to show just how easy…
Since there is no way to talk about The Best Man without eventually invoking the phrase “Spike Lee’s cousin,” let’s just get it out of the way: The Best Man is the directorial debut of Malcolm D. Lee, who is Spike Lee’s cousin. Having worked on various S. Lee films,…
