Self-serving confessions are a mainstay of best-seller lists; now we’re doomed to see their ilk on-screen. 20 Dates is the not-so-verite story of Myles Berkowitz, a tyro filmmaker in his mid-30s who tries to advance his career and up his happiness quotient by filming himself on a score of dates…
There’s an old adage that says that by the age of 40, a man gets the face he deserves. If that’s true, then Clint Eastwood, the producer, director, and star of the death-row thriller True Crime, must have committed a capital offense or two of his own. To call it…
Ginger and Fred. Shirley Temple and Bill “Bojangles” Robinson. Gene Kelly and Debbie Reynolds. To the list of unforgettable movie dance partnerships, we may now add Omar Epps, the trim, handsome young man who stars as one-third of The Mod Squad, and Michael Lerner, the heavyset middle-aged actor who played…
“I hope it’s better than The Truman Show,” said the woman in line behind me at the publicized “sneak preview” of EDtv. Afterward, a man in my row declared, “That was a lot better than The Truman Show.” Pretentious high-concept films like The Truman Show often garner accolades and let…
thursday march 25 It’s a stretch to call stock-car racing–or any type of car racing, for that matter–a sport. If sitting on your butt for hours at a time is a sport, then we should have racked up millions of dollars in prize money in the past year or so…
Internationally feted actor-writer Fred Curchack loves talking about the gap between the “groundlings” and the “sophisticates” when discussing one of his favorite writers, William Shakespeare. Specifically, he loves how hyper-learned critics like Harold Bloom get all red-faced wading into the mosh pit to snatch back Willie’s language from indecent interpretations…
Oh, yeah. Those of us who know what a real fetish is, the kind that makes you kinda dizzy and stupid, are about to be real happy. We’re guitar lovers. No, not the occasional strummers or weekend rock stars or haphazard collectors, although those people will find something to gawk…
Until today, the weather had been warm in Port Charlotte, Florida, temperatures reaching into the lower 80s, the wind barely existent, humidity thick during the wee small hours. But this morning, especially through press-box windows that open to reveal a neatly trimmed baseball diamond below, the air is dry, crisp,…
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…
