First, a disclaimer: Having missed last year’s I Know What You Did Last Summer, I deliberately put off seeing it until after viewing its sequel, I Still Know What You Did Last Summer. That way I could view part two without prejudice and be able to judge whether IKWYDLS virgins…
Postwar Italy’s most heralded contribution to world cinema may have been neorealism, but its most distinctive and beloved filmmaker was Federico Fellini (1920-1993), who found his true voice when he abandoned neorealism for its polar opposite. While the conventional wisdom has Fellini moving abruptly from his neorealist roots toward a…
Well, now we know why the term “bored to death” was invented. Meet Joe Black takes an interesting idea–Death assumes human form and comes to earth to learn about human existence–and reduces it to a flat, uninspired, interminably slow movie. Not only slow but long: a full three hours. Produced…
American History X, a hard-edged look at American neo-Nazis, arrives in theaters with a lot of behind-the-scenes baggage: First-time director Tony Kaye has engaged in a protracted, high-profile battle with distributor-producer New Line Cinema over the film’s final form. While Kaye may have a justified grievance, this is not as…
thursday november 12 Sometimes, the most basic images are the most striking. For example, about three years ago video director Spike Jonze–known for his work with the Beastie Boys and Weezer–created one of the most interesting music videos in recent years with a clip that consisted of little more than…
Then I woke up, and it was all a dream. My back was aching from resting against the knobbly tree trunk, my tongue was sweating it was so damn hot–107 degrees on the bank’s digital thermometer–and if it hadn’t been for my Onion Fest baseball cap, the shifting sun would’ve…
What better way is there to spend a chilly autumn evening than to curl up with a large box of popcorn and watch a good thriller? Genealogies of a Crime, directed by Raoul Ruiz and brought to Dallas by the USA Film Festival, may be just the movie you need:…
Standard evening question: Should we eat first, and then see the movie, or should we catch the early movie and then eat? For years now, the Granada Cinema and Drafthouse has solved that problem with a left-right combo: Wash down that pizza with a pitcher of Bud while you watch…
“Theater should be a grand poetic spectacle, the language given flesh and breath,” Federico Garcia Lorca once said. Now celebrating the Spanish poet and playwright’s centennial, Texas Woman’s University reminds us of what he meant through its production of Blood Wedding, perhaps Garcia Lorca’s best-known drama. The story–itself inspired by…
Who’da thunk Dallas was ready for a revival of the revue, the late-19th-century live entertainment that might best be called “short attention span theater”? Hell, in a city where stealth police cars are employed to curtail tailgating, speeding, and other restless by-products of road rage, the question should be more…
Fascism is in the air…well, at least it’s on movie screens. In a two-week stretch we’ve seen old Nazis (Life Is Beautiful), neo-Nazis (American History X, due next week), old Nazis training neo-Nazis (Apt Pupil), book-burning (Pleasantville), and now, with The Siege, a story of full-blown military rule on American…
As a requiem for the ’60s, The Big Chill didn’t quite hit the mark the first time around, in 1983 (the film is scheduled for recycling November 6). Its greatest-hits soundtrack was soul-stirring, for sure; it’s hard to top the Rolling Stones, Marvin Gaye, or Aretha Franklin in any decade…
thursday november 5 Every five years, Dallas endures another landmark anniversary of the Kennedy assassination, once again dredging up our city’s sullied past as “The City of Hate.” All copies of Oliver Stone’s controversial 1991 film JFK disappear from local video stores. Magazines rehash the facts. Conspiracy theorists crawl out…
Fred Washington’s lawyer does not want his client’s picture taken for this story. Attorney Eric Fein believes that if you were to see a picture of Washington, who stands about 5-foot-11 and weighs a little more than 200 pounds, you might not be so quick to believe that he could…
If some actors, directors, and designers from Dallas Theater Center and the Dallas theater scene didn’t already want to restrain me atop a stone temple and yank my beating heart out like one of those S.R.O. Aztec sacrifice rituals, they will now: I’m writing a review of a preview performance…
Even for staunch flesh eaters, which I am, a meat-packing plant carries all the charm of the sixth level of hell. Doesn’t matter how spotless, how ventilated, how safe for the workers, it’s just one step removed from the actual slaughterhouse–all those disembodied slabs of meat a jarring reminder of…
In 1994’s The Monster (Il mostro), his most recent film to gain wide American release, Italian writer-director-star Roberto Benigni put himself at the center of a mistaken-identity farce about a serial killer. In Life Is Beautiful (La vita e bella), Benigni plays a wacky, high-spirited man who convinces his young…
It must be math season in the film world. Recently, Darren Aronofsky’s Pi hit Dallas’ screens, and now we get Vincenzo Natali’s Cube. The connection isn’t merely in the movies’ titles–if it were, I would have cited Sphere too–but in their stories. The plots of both films rely upon mathematical…
When Montoya, one of the fearless vampire killers in John Carpenter’s Vampires, tells another character that nobody believes in the title creatures because nobody wants to, there’s no mistaking the ancestry of the line. It comes down, through two generations of horror films, from the moment in the original Dracula…
Sitting in the recently opened Deep Ellum Center for the Arts with producer-director-writer Scott Osborne while builders and light engineers help him transform the space’s interior is eye-opening for a theater critic. Wow, sets and props and furniture really aren’t created by stage elves who wander into the space at…
thursday october 29 There hasn’t been much progress in the fight against HIV and AIDS. Public awareness and understanding of the disease have improved in the last decade or so, and scientists have discovered drug combinations that temporarily stave off HIV and AIDS, but no one has yet found a…
The Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture is one of those interesting bits of the city that might pass unnoticed by those for whom downtown is synonymous with Deep Ellum. For almost 20 years, the institute has dedicated itself to encouraging discussion about “the cultural issues that are vital for…
