A third of the way through Home Fries, you may begin wondering whether the filmmakers haven’t outsmarted themselves. Overloaded with oddities but a bit short on horse sense, this is one of those stubbornly defiant, attitude-driven movies that’s so busy scrambling genres, breaking rules, and dashing expectations on the road…
“I just find it all so bizarre,” notes John Maybury, popping a cigarette into his mouth and lighting it in what appears to be one quick flip of the wrist. “All those issues of ‘being out’ and ‘are you in?’ We should have gone beyond that by now. I know…
Surprise and pleasure come wrapped together in A Bug’s Life. This big adventure about tiny critters is the latest piece of robust whimsy from Pixar, the computer-animation studio that broke into features with the 1995 smash Toy Story. It should prove irresistible to children. Toy Story opened up the secret…
thursday november 26 There’s something mildly disconcerting about eating in a strip club. Actually, eating in a strip club would only be less comfortable if you were dining on a sandwich made of glass and sandpaper. A few months ago, a colleague invited us to lunch at The Lodge, one…
He’s back: that “squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous old sinner” Scrooge, whom Charles Dickens created and every theater company in the world recreates every Christmas in order to pay for the rest of their season. A Christmas Carol comes to the Dallas Theater Center for the 15th straight season,…
So many people rant on about the evils of the holiday season: “It’s hypocritical. Everyone acts selfish and lazy all year, then suddenly November rolls around, and they start donating to charity and going to church and caring about humankind. Then by New Year’s, they’re back to their old ways…
Here we go again. Enemy of the State is Fascism in America 1998, Chapter Four…or Five…or whatever we’re up to. It readily invites comparison to The Siege, but for better or worse its goals are more mundane. While The Siege seems like an ideological agenda driving a film, Enemy of…
The prodigiously talented and now corrosively bitter Woody Allen was once quoted as saying, “I’ve always tried to dissuade people and tell them my films are not all autobiographical.” Allen’s adoring cult has never been convinced of this, of course, because many have never wanted to be. Part of the…
Even students of English history may have trouble sorting out the palace intrigues and intra-governmental conspiracies that fill Elizabeth, the handsome new production about Queen Elizabeth I’s ascension to the British throne in 1558. With the bewitching Australian actress Cate Blanchett (last year’s Oscar and Lucinda) in the title role,…
On May 30, 1957, the Los Angeles Times reported that the body of “the distinguished film producer and director James Whale” had been found floating in the swimming pool at his home in Pacific Palisades. Fully clothed, Whale’s corpse exhibited a head wound. “Whale,” the Times went on to point…
Given choreographer Paul Taylor’s self-described “insatiable itch to communicate to the world at large,” it was surely only a matter of time before he turned his seasoned eyes down south. In his newest piece, “Piazzolla Caldera,” he does just that, lifting the tango right out of Argentina’s back streets and…
thursday november 19 During his 25-year career with the FBI, John Douglas exhibited an uncanny ability to get inside a criminal’s mind. Based on a minimum amount of evidence, he could tell you almost everything you needed to know about the perpetrator: his age, height, weight, where he lived, his…
Modest Mouse is like three smart, attention-deficit-disorder kids running roughshod over a romper room. The Seattle band’s music–small cacophonies of melody and turmoil–ricochets off the ceiling, punches holes in walls, then meets square in the middle of the room for a polite race of Hot Wheels. Then the boys get…
Playwright Paul Rudnick captured the contemporary public’s disdain for William Shakespeare with one utterly accurate declaration from a character in his aptly named comedy I Hate Hamlet: “It’s like algebra on stage!” Just as millions of us sat through that high school mathematical torture learning just enough to pass (or…
Kevin Sullivan remembers the exact moment when he realized the Dallas Mavericks no longer mattered, at least to the rest of the world. He recalls the moment in detail, as you might remember the music playing during a breakup. It occurred during the All-Star Game in 1993, which was held…
Italian commie provocateur Dario Fo got kicked around but good in a recent New Yorker article concerning the sometimes nasty political entanglements of the Nobel Prize’s Swiss nominating committee for literature. The 72-year-old Fo nabbed the literature award last year, but nobody seems to know why–or at least, nobody in…
One of the weirdest things about the huge self-taught art retrospective going on in Fort Worth right now is its dearth of Texas artists. Not that this region has the monopoly on outsider and naive art, but it is rife with it. Texas has really, in its own unruly way,…
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…
