Laurie Anderson really doesn’t like to make broad statements. But her semi-musical, quasi-theatrical, demi-technological performance art not only involves so many grand forms, it also deals with issues so big–technology, communication, politics, human frailty–that you frequently forget that these are the broad issues in your life as well. Onstage, the…
The “SLC” in SLC Punk! stands for Salt Lake City, but it might as well stand for Some Lucky Chump. The filmmaker, James Merendino, has stated that this tale of two punk buddies trying to spread anarchy through the Utah capital in 1985 reflects his own rebellious teenage years there…
The most surprising thing about the new teensploitation horror film Idle Hands is the lack of masturbation jokes. It is a movie about a 17-year-old boy who loses control of his right hand to an evil demon, yet there’s only one such obvious crack. As the gloriously lazy hero Anton…
We seem to be in the middle of one of those thematic blitzes that happen every now and then in the film world. Last year there was The Truman Show and Dark City; this year, so far, there have been EdTV and The Matrix. Coming up in the next month…
Sean Connery has always been a terse, minimalist actor, spitting out his lines in tight bursts of Scottish brogue. But in Entrapment, the kingly Scot goes beyond minimalism to the point where he’s practically doing semaphore with his eyebrows. As the legendary art thief Robert MacDougal, Connery isn’t just reserved,…
We suppose the swing revival is still going strong in Dallas. So many local clubs are cashing in on the craze that you could probably take free swing-dance lessons just about every night of the week. That’s fine. But if you’re interested in more than just dressing in your grandparents’…
thursday april 29 A month or so ago, Night & Day placed a moratorium on coverage of local improvisational comedy troupes. It’s not that we don’t like some of them or that we’re not fans of the idea in general. No, it’s just that every theater, comedy club, bar, and…
While Dallas’ hopeful status as the “third coast” has turned out to be a pretty disappointing joke (witness the ghost town that is the Las Colinas studios, and no, Oliver Stone cannot single-handedly turn the metroplex into Hollywood Jr.) this town still boasts its share of aspiring filmmakers–people who have…
Digital editing techniques in the recording studio have resulted in songs being not so much captured as assembled nowadays; choruses and verses are often pieced together, line by line, from many different sessions. What’s lost in the process is any sense of urgency and momentum and suspense, everything that a…
The two young artists on display at 500X, Steve Cruz and Rosemary Meza, wear their heritage on their paint-and-wax-encrusted sleeves. Their two-person show is titled The Passions of Santos, the Ecstasy of Malinche, and while plenty of people in my East Dallas neighborhood would know precisely who Santos and Malinche…
Comedian David Spade’s chosen shtick–every line a zinger, every crack calculated to draw blood–works well in the short bursts characteristic of stand-up, sketches, and TV sitcoms. But the man can wear you out over the course of a two-hour movie. Like the too clever motormouth at a cocktail party, he…
In Pushing Tin, the edgy new comedy from British director Mike Newell, the dominant image is a black screen pulsing with obscure fluorescent markings, like the characters on some early prototype of Pac-Man. In this case, though, nobody’s playing any games. The markings represent very real jet airliners filled with…
Too often baseball players are reduced to statistics, hollow numbers that resonate with the fetishist who drifts off to sleep counting runs batted in and home runs and career batting averages. Baseball demands such precision: It’s a team sport, yes, but ultimately it’s man against man, record against record, history…
Plenty of celebs lend their fame to charitable causes. Richard Gere has his Dalai Lama. Sharon Stone supports pediatric AIDS patients. Kim Basinger props up animal rights–and Alec Baldwin’s career. Then you have Quentin Tarantino, a man whose cause celebre is orphans–albeit of a different sort than might first spring…
thursday april 22 A recent viewing of Disney’s Rocket Man–starring the seemingly chinless Harland Williams–brought a few questions to mind. First, was it worth the 10 to 20 IQ points we lost in the process of watching the entire dreadful thing? And second, why hasn’t Hollywood shipped Williams back to…
Among the films screening at this year’s USA Film Festival: Animal House, Xanadu, Can’t Stop the Music, Cruising, Bonnie and Clyde, Little Big Man, A Hard Day’s Night, The Shining, Night Moves, and the direct-to-video Savior, centerpiece of the Dennis Quaid, ah, tribute. Sounds like TNT’s Saturday-night schedule to us–unless…
Melanoma Monday. What’s next? Sickle-cell Saturday? Actually, the American Cancer Society has christened April 26 Melanoma Monday for two perfectly good reasons: one, popular awareness of this killer is slim, and two, on the following weekend there are free screenings for suspect skin spots in six area locations–no appointment necessary…
At first, it looks like any other pick-up game you’ve ever seen, shirts against skins going at it on the hardwood with nothing at stake, save for the afternoon’s bragging rights. They’re a motley lot, these 10 men running up and down the floor in their homemade jerseys and hundred-buck…
To oversimplify matters, you could say that the pair of one-acts that make up Our Endeavors’ latest evening, Loved It/Hated It: Two Distinct Plays, are separated as sharply as the mind-heart dichotomy: The first act makes you think, the second act makes you feel. But we know from real life–and…
Imagine, if you will, one of Bob Hope and Bing Crosby’s classic road movies that never leaves the terminal, and you get a pretty good description of Life, the strikingly uneventful new comedy starring Eddie Murphy and Martin Lawrence. It’s their Road to Nowhere. Life, which was directed by Ted…
David Cronenberg has a thing for body openings. His movies are, literally, full of holes. There’s the botched surgery wound on Marilyn Chambers that bites and infects unsuspecting sexual partners in Rabid; the vaginal VCR in James Woods’ chest where he plugs into tapes to experience ever more exotic porn…
When I was a little kid, say 9, I developed this strange fixation on the legend of King Arthur’s court. I tried to pick my way through Le Morte d’Arthur and The Crystal Cave, tried to pry any knowledge of all things Holy Grail from my well-read, albeit amused, parents…
