More than a couple of times in David Mamet’s rage-and remorse-filled trilogy of scenes, The Old Neighborhood, staged by New Theatre Company, one character is stuck trying to express himself and finally just says: “Do ya know?” The other character replies: “Yeah, I know.” It’s vintage Mamet–a concession that more…
The last decade has been an extraordinary period for Iranian cinema: Restricted by minuscule budgets, filmmakers have been forced to fall back on exactly those qualities that Hollywood thinks it can afford to ignore–character insight, social analysis, and unadorned storytelling. The success of Abbas Kiarostami, Iran’s best-known moviemaker, at international…
Imagine a bunch of kids watching the classic 1956 film musical The King and I on television, then going outside and spending the rest of the afternoon acting it out in the back yard. Apart from a lack of hired-gun Broadway voices performing the songs, their re-creation might not be…
At the movies, the fun-loving temptress has been liberating the buttoned-up clod ever since Katharine Hepburn’s dog made off with Cary Grant’s dinosaur bone in Bringing Up Baby 61 years ago. Maybe even longer, if you count pioneer vamp Theda Bara’s effect on a long succession of speechless men. In…
After nearly two decades of explicit and sometimes buck-naked solo appearances at theater spaces around the world, gay performance artist Tim Miller still harbors a shocking revelation. This one should really unnerve the fundamentalist Christian demagogues who had declared him armed and dangerous in the litigious standoff over NEA-funded “indecent”…
thursday march 18 When we were young, we were deathly afraid of roller coasters, so a trip to Six Flags Over Texas was, understandably, a nightmare. Our parents, God bless ’em, made us go on every single ride. Judge Roy Scream, the Shockwave, all of them. It wasn’t just that…
South by Southwest has a way of turning Dallas into a fleetingly improved rock town. That’s Dallas, not Austin. Austin during SXSW is a roiling cesspool of drunken industry types and frustrated musicians. It’s Dallas, an easy stopover between the rest of the country and the music festival, that showcases…
This is odd. After the years I’ve spent perusing museum exhibitions–studying objects as varied as giant taxidermy bears in Minneapolis, motorcycles in New York, opera sets in London, and excavated gold jewelry in Key West (this, of course, in the Mel Fisher museum)–I’d say that the big new show at…
Immodesty becomes Guy Ritchie, the British writer-director who makes a jovial debut on a Jovian scale in Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels. In this wayward gangster comedy set in London’s East End, Ritchie cooks up a gleefully improbable tale out of mismatched ingredients–a rigged card game, a hydroponic marijuana…
It took me a while to fall for Julia Sweeney’s one-woman movie–but when I fell, I fell hard. God Said, ‘Ha!’ originated at the Magic Theater in San Francisco in 1996; the next year, Sweeney turned it into a book. She put the movie together from two performances shot on…
The Deep End of the Ocean starts out as a maternal horror movie and ends up as a family therapy session. Michelle Pfeiffer plays the photographer wife of a restaurateur (Treat Williams) and mother of two sons and an infant daughter. While checking into a jammed hotel for her 15th…
Lately, it’s been kind of a crapshoot when the Flaming Lips come to town–like last July, when the band staged one of its infamous experiments at Galaxy Club. The event involved 30 boom-boxes, hundreds of tapes, and audience volunteers. It also apparently required singer-guitarist-weirdo Wayne Coyne to wear a tight…
thursday march 11 If a comedian is described as a “comic’s comic,” it means only one thing: No one has a clue who he is. Sure, you’ve probably seen his act a half-dozen times, and maybe even dug it, but you couldn’t remember his name even if you were spotted…
Opening night, with its mix of season subscribers, journalists, theater folk, and assorted other naysayers and wellwishers who were able to scam comp seats, always hums with energy. And the opening-night audience of Dallas Theater Center’s Alice: Tales of a Curious Girl that watched as the lights dawned on Riccardo…
So the amateur–I mean avid–art fans are swarming the Kimbell to see this year’s Big Show, and sure enough, Matisse and Picasso are worth the drive to Fort Worth and the elbow-digging crowds. But in the process of obsessing over these two masters’ obsessions with each other, you may miss…
By now, Darrell Jordan figured he would be in the middle of building a dream. Not two years ago, he had this moment so perfectly pictured in his mind: Construction trucks rumbling through Fair Park, workers rebuilding one of this city’s few remaining historic monuments, engineers getting ready to raise…
Maybe it’s because the show is set in the ultra-glamorous, intrigue-ridden world of journalism. Or maybe because there’s a glaringly unnecessary subplot about clairvoyance and ghost sightings. Or perhaps my cold critical heart has begun to thaw and leak watery pink juice. For whatever reason, the latest Pegasus Theatre comedy…
For Cruel Intentions, his directorial debut, writer Roger Kumble has come up with the clever idea of updating Choderlos de Laclos’ durable 18th-century novel Dangerous Liaisons. With its focus on amoral protagonists who use sex as a tool to manipulate innocents, the book caused a scandal when it was first…
In the three decades that director Ken Loach has been a steadfast champion of the British working class, his films have lost none of their sting. Whether examining a brutal Belfast police incident in Hidden Agenda (1990) or the plight of an unemployed man struggling to buy his daughter a…
“Honey,” Ellen Burstyn’s character in The Last Picture Show remarks to her daughter, “everything gets old if you do it often enough.” The specific activity she had in mind was sex, but the maxim applies at least as appropriately to genre conventions in movies, which even the casual moviegoer can…
When hit men wore hats and Cadillacs had running boards, the average Mafia don could knock off the bosses of the five boroughs in mid-afternoon and sit down to a nice plate of chicken cacciatore that evening, content that he’d seen to the family business and blazed a path for…
thursday march 4 Most of the time, reading a humor book is about as entertaining as running through a crowded mall wearing nothing but a few strategically placed pats of butter and a smile. (Well, that’s actually pretty amusing, so long as you’re not the one doing it.) The reason:…
