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…
For filmmaker Todd Solondz, it’s always midnight in suburbia. Life is lonely, and the natives can be hostile. In his daring second film, Happiness, the darkness engulfs victims of all ages: a boy in the throes of impending adolescence, three New Jersey sisters tormented by sex and love, an obscene…
The first time we see Ray Joshua, the young hero of director Marc Levin’s impressive feature debut, Slam, we get a vivid taste of the conflicting forces that rule him. His olive-drab pants, so hip-hop baggy that you could fit two rail-thin Rays inside, are stuffed with bags of weed,…
A riveting but darkly disturbing thriller, Apt Pupil isn’t easy to sit through. The subject matter itself proves deeply unsettling, while two brief acts of sadism are so horrifying as to be unwatchable. Yet this brutal film borders on the brilliant. Beautifully structured and edited, with a chilling central performance…
At the beginning of Gary Ross’ Pleasantville, fraternal twins who are unhappy suburban teenagers (is there any other kind?) fall down the rabbit hole of their television set and find themselves trapped in a parallel universe: a ’50s sitcom of the same name in which the family is more idealized…
thursday october 22 The metroplex has always been a step behind Austin when it comes to attracting the entertainment community. Austin may have a bit of an unfair advantage, housing the offices of the Texas Film Commission and hosting South By Southwest, the annual music and film festival that only…
I have to confess, I don’t watch TV much anymore–the antenna on top of my set brings in only about five channels. But the rays I soaked as a chubby kid were a ratio of about nine cathode to one solar: a purer product of ’70s boob-tube-feeding you won’t find…
Paula Vogel has guts. Writing about incest, child abuse, and a girl’s sexual awakening without being melodramatic or making an audience cringe is tough. Writing a play about the seven-year relationship between a teenage girl and her uncle without turning the situation into a simplistic battle of good versus evil…
Last week in this space, I compared the Undermain Theatre to Teatro Dallas because of the often surreal and fabulist takes they share on life, death, and all the weird stuff that connects them like a string between two cans. This amounted to clairvoyance on my part, coming as it…
Russell Doak Walker’s home sits just a few doors down from Southern Methodist University, where his father’s high school fame blossomed into magazine-cover myth 50 years ago. Russ bought this place just a year ago and didn’t give much thought to its location at the time. But now, as he…
The small, about-to-be-homeless company known as Teatro Dallas makes art that falls through the cracks between contemporary entertainment boundaries, not to mention the Dallas theater scene. Are they too Latino, or not Latino enough? Should they be concentrating on folklorico rather than premiering political and philosophical voices from Latin American…
The phenomenon of suburban spread has, despite its tendency to homogenize everything in its steamroller path, sparked at least one enriching trend. Buried deep in the hearts of some of the pseudo-cities–Plano, Arlington, even North Richland Hills–are unexpected slices of *real art, almost as though the urban core of the…
Insofar as filmmaker Tony Gatlif’s justly admired “Gypsy trilogy” is an exploration of his roots and a search for his nature–he was born in Algeria to Gypsy parents of Spanish origin, but later educated at Paris’ L’Ecole des Beaux Arts–it comprises one of the most passionate and telling self-examinations in…
The Jonathan Demme-directed Beloved runs nearly three hours, and it’s a long haul. This adaptation of the 1987 Toni Morrison novel bursts with ambition. On one hand it tries to get inside the fevers of the African-American slave experience, but it also wants to be an epic family saga and…
The hero of The Mighty–the title character, in fact–is an eighth-grader known by the nickname Freak (Kieran Culkin). His might isn’t physical–he’s a small, frail boy who suffers from a degenerative birth defect. His spine curves painfully, and he’s able to walk only with crutches and leg braces. But he…
