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…
thursday april 15 We have a simple method when it comes to handicapping horse races: Pick the horse with the funniest name and put all of your money on it. It’s not a foolproof method–we’ve won only once with it since we started going to Lone Star Park at Grand…
Embattled straights are probably thinking, “My stars, I can’t throw a rock at a TV or a movie screen these days without hitting a homosexual! What more do they want?” Actually, we just added one more request to the gay agenda: a little romance. Many of the gay-friendliest heterosexuals are…
Really, we don’t want to give Cameron Cobb a big head–being 23 and talented can be a recipe for obnoxiousness–but the recent world premiere of his Christ resurrection redux Didymus packs a quiet, even occasionally comedic wallop. Director Kimberlyn Crowe launched her theater company, Ground Zero, out of sheer passion…
Sometimes contemporary art can get so damn abrasive and antagonistic and pretentious that, after about two dozen of these “happenin'” gallery openings, you just wanna hurl your controversy-weakened body through the next gallery’s plate-glass window. What’s happening to me? I’m becoming one of the Chapman brothers’ mutated children! So it’s…
Courage comes in an infinite variety of forms and faces, but who among us would be brave enough to go back and relive our high school years, face the horrors of homeroom, and confront hallways so fraught with danger that the most treacherous battlefield would look as placid as a…
Jimmy Cagney brought the same electric physicality to gangsters that he did to song-and-dance men. He gave a bright-eyed mug like his character in Public Enemy extraordinary powers of attraction and repulsion. In The General, Brendan Gleeson enacts a real-life criminal chieftain–Dublin’s notorious Martin Cahill–with a belly-hanging-out buffoonery that is…
Has any major American director had quite so many career swings as Robert Altman? Maybe not, but if there’s one thing the last 30 years have made clear, it is that it’s never safe to count Altman out. The mid- and late ’90s have been particularly unfriendly to him. After…
