On September 20, Texas Rangers president and general partner Tom Schieffer sat behind the home team’s first-base dugout at the Ballpark in Arlington and smiled. The Rangers were losing to the Anaheim Angels, but the thick summer air that blankets the metroplex was beginning to lift ever so slightly, and…
Watching Dallas Theater Center’s gutsy (and I mean that literally, but more later) production of Michael Ondaatje’s The Collected Works of Billy the Kid, I couldn’t help but wonder why American playwrights haven’t plundered the 19th-century American frontier for the kind of blood-red gems Ondaatje has uncovered. As directed with…
Documentarian Errol Morris is by far best known for his 1988 feature, The Thin Blue Line, which is often described as the only film that ever got an innocent man off death row. But he got his start with a very different sort of material: His first two films, Gates…
Mad City, a descendant of Billy Wilder’s Ace in the Hole, may irritate orthodox movie buffs. In the coruscating Wilder classic, Kirk Douglas’ supremely cynical newspaper reporter turns the rescue of a cave-in victim into “the big carnival” (the film’s alternate title). The protagonist of Mad City, a TV reporter…
In Paul Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers, based on the late Robert Heinlein’s 1959 sci-fi opus, the killer arachnids upstage the humans. Not that it’s much of a contest, since the humans are all raging dullards. We’ve seen these young men and women with their square jaws and pert noses emoting their…
Family films are often pitched for “the child in us all,” but Bean doesn’t have an ounce of “inner child” in it. It’s been worked out to appeal to, at best, 8- to 10-year-olds; there’s not much to delight even precocious pre-teens, let alone adults. This really is too bad,…
thursday november 6 Wilco, Blue Mountain: We know you’re a regular at Sons of Hermann Hall, cried when Naomi’s closed, and read No Depression on a regular basis. So we don’t have to tell you how great Wilco is. You were alternative country when alternative country wasn’t cool. You know…
It’s about 6 p.m. on the Thursday before the Dallas Cowboys are to fly to Philadelphia to be humiliated by the despised Eagles. Most of Jason Garrett’s teammates are at home or doing some radio call-in show or grabbing dinner with the wife and kids. Or maybe they’re out getting…
If, while in the grocery checkout or ATM line, you find yourself standing next to a young man or woman with a shockingly inappropriate platinum dye job, there are two possible explanations–either the person shares Dennis Rodman’s hairdresser, or he or she is a cast member of Kitchen Dog Theater’s…
Taiwanese-American director Ang Lee has carved out a place for himself as our leading director of comedies of manners. His first three films–Pushing Hands (1991), The Wedding Banquet (1993), and Eat, Drink, Man, Woman (1994)–combined humor with touches of pathos, while shedding a light on modern Chinese and Chinese-American family…
A glance at the cast list for the new Sidney Lumet hospital drama Critical Care might lead you to expect an embarrassment of riches. Instead, the results are often just plain embarrassing. How could a film starring James Spader, Helen Mirren, Albert Brooks, Kyra Sedgwick, Anne Bancroft, Jeffrey Wright, Wallace…
Despite its muckraking pretensions, Red Corner is a rickety throwback to escapist adventures that featured beautiful foreign idealists spouting high-flown hooey to fighting Americans. The heroine, a scrappy Beijing defense lawyer, ends up whispering a whole succession of sweet somethings to the hero, a framed Yank. The banalities include (I…
Neil Young has been so many things–a pink-suited and pompadoured rockabilly cat, a founding member of the SoCal folk sound of the ’70s, a tireless campaigner for the separation of art and commerce, a cyber-geek years ahead of his time, a lounge-jazz wannabe, and a relentless rocker–that it’s hard to…
thursday october 30 Maafa: The Assault on African Civilization and the African Response to Slavery: It’s hard not to get emotional about history, but too much emotion, whether it comes from the political right or left, tends to obscure important lessons. The 13th Annual African Awakening Conference will, according to…
Some wag once said that if you want to keep your appetite for sausage and politics, you should never watch either one being made. To that warning I add the process of making art. Since I consider writing, music, and the visual arts to be infinitely superior experiences to a…
Jennifer Jason Leigh follows up one of her smallest and weakest roles–in A Thousand Acres–with a far more challenging and formidable performance in Washington Square. This new film version of Henry James’ 1880 short novel chronicles the courtship of a wealthy girl who has no obvious attractive qualities. But the…
After earning worldwide accolades for her superb 1993 adaptation of Frances Hodgson Burnett’s children’s classic The Secret Garden, Polish-born writer-director Agnieszka Holland is well aware that her equally intense new film version of Henry James’ novella Washington Square may pigeonhole her as a kind of reference librarian of world cinema…
The true-life incident of the Cottingley Fairies is so full of possibilities, so thought-provoking and hilarious at once, that it’s amazing it’s never been filmed before. Making up for lost time, the story has suddenly appeared (on its 80th anniversary) as the basis for two films simultaneously. Photographing Fairies, with…
Stylishness without substance can become wearying real fast. Twenty minutes into A Life Less Ordinary, the new movie from the producing-directing-writing team of Trainspotting and Shallow Grave, I was already into overload. It’s not that director Danny Boyle doesn’t have imagination. It’s just that sometimes imagination is all he has…
thursday october 23 The Collected Works of Billy The Kid: Reading the supple prose of Michael Ondaatje’s Booker Prize-winning The English Patient and watching the beautifully photographed but rather vapid film version was like–well, the difference between a good read and a dorky movie. Michael Ondaatje again jumps between media,…
It’s hard to fault The House of Yes, the wry toast of this year’s Sundance Film Festival, for its limitations as a film. In fact, it’s hardly a film at all. Rather, it’s a barely staged, five-handed farce that trails its amiable cast around a looming Victorian mansion over the…
Editor’s note: The Dallas Observer’s regular sports column debuts this week. Barry Switzer speaks in a soft, twangy growl. At first, you can barely hear him. He’s like a crazy old grandfather scolding invisible ghosts that only he can see, and his sentences often blend into one very long word…
