thursday february 27 Sesame Street Live: Elmo may be the beloved imaginary buddy of millions of preschoolers across America, but his carcass is carpet if the parents of these youngsters who humiliated themselves during Christmas ’97 get a hold of him. You’ll find the fuzzy little weasel (or whatever he…
Am I the only guy in America who’s upset because we keep putting people on trial TWICE? We did it with the Rodney King police officers. We did it with O.J. We did it with this guy Lemrick Nelson, who’s accused of starting the Crown Heights riots. I know the…
In many ways, Sam Shepard’s rigorously honed dramedy True West is more evocative of the funhouse floor on which the author stands than any of his other plays. Perhaps the most purely comic of Shepard’s quartet of family safaris (Curse of the Starving Class and Buried Child came first, A…
Robert E. Howard, the subject of Dan Ireland’s wonderful debut film The Whole Wide World, created the sword-and-sorcery genre with his Conan stories. Howard had a grand yet coarse-grained consciousness. His Conan adventures, set in a fictitious primordial age full of demons and killers, boasted swift, cartoon-flavored action (“He moved…
Irvin Kershner’s The Empire Strikes Back, the continuation of George Lucas’ Star Wars, is a classic fantasy in its own right. I vastly prefer it to the first film. Its textures are richer, its emotions deeper, and it’s an honest-to-Jedi movie–not a dozen jammed-together entries of a serial. On its…
Kolya is being talked up as the odds-on favorite to cop this year’s Oscar for best foreign-language film. It just might win. It’s cuddly and heartwarming and life-affirming in that sentimental way that tends to impress Academy jurors who favor poky, old-fashioned Hollywood weepies in foreign camouflage. Kolya is a…
thursday february 20 Americans United For Separation of Church and State: You should know that Americans United For Separation of Church and State is not a bunch of godless pinko heathen, but a group of mainstream religious organizations like the National Council of the Churches of Christ, The Episcopal Church,…
People send me these movies. They come in plain brown wrappers that look like they’ve been mailed from Pakistan, and inside is a video with a plasticine cover they bought at Staples and a letter that’s BEGGING for attention. “Dear Joe Bob: Only you could appreciate the enclosed zombie love…
Artistic director Bruce Coleman and his versatile New Theatre Company have just abandoned a semi-permanent home for a permanent one, alternating shows with Deep Ellum Opera Theatre at TOES (Theatre on Elm Street). Interest is burgeoning from corporate backers, and the company has added an extra performance to their weekly…
In Norman Mailer’s The Fight, his great book on the Muhammad Ali/George Foreman “Rumble in the Jungle,” he begins by writing of Ali, “There is always the shock in seeing him again. Not live as in television but standing before you, looking his best. Then the World’s Greatest Athlete is…
The narrative of Andre Techine’s Thieves opens moments shortly after the story’s climax. A gangster’s corpse is brought to his isolated home; his widow grieves; his 8-year-old son silently assimilates the news; a few mourners arrive. The climactic scene is the bungled caper during which the gangster has been shot…
You’d think that after more than a decade in this business, I’d have learned one simple, sanity-preserving rule: January and February are excellent times for a movie critic to take a vacation. Not because the airfares are low or the weather sucks, but because what a critic must endure professionally…
In Absolute Power, Clint Eastwood plays Luther Whitney, a master thief who burgles on little cat feet. He’s as stealthy as the Pink Panther pilferer, though not nearly as amusing. Luther, you see, is presented to us as an artist. We first see him at the National Gallery dutifully copying…
thursday february 13 True West: With its slowly tightening Mamet grip and a wealth of comic relief that becomes less of a relief as the play goes on, True West is Sam Shepard’s caustic reply to the myth of American male camaraderie on the frontier. The fact that the frontier…
I just found out that one of my best friends is a glitter-that-flies-out-of-the-envelope person. She sends out those greeting cards where GLITTER FLIES OUT OF THE ENVELOPE. I’m reconsidering our whole relationship. Anyhow, who invented this? Who thought this was a good idea? Who had a meeting and said: “I…
thursday february 6 SubUrbia: Among the pioneering crowd that includes Quentin Tarantino, Kevin Smith, Edward Burns, and Eric Shaefer, whippersnapper filmmaker Richard Linklater has proven himself the most diligent not just in developing his vision, but in spending more time behind the camera than in front of it yapping about…
If Theatre Three’s comedies sometimes creak and lurch like a ship of fools set adrift, Norma Young and Jac Alder’s venerable Dallas theater-in-the-round has consistently demonstrated its wit and energy with musicals. You might’ve expected this standard to be compromised with 1995’s Lucky Stiff, a musical farce by Stephen Flaherty…
Billy Bob Thornton’s richly observed Sling Blade opens with a prologue that can only be described as its own small film, a laconically eerie sequence that, as the rest of Sling Blade unfolds, begins to take hold in the memory like a particularly dense nightmare. As Daniel Lanois’ quietly atmospheric…
William Faulkner’s novella Old Man has a biblical magnetism–a primal moral pull. During the horrifying 1927 Mississippi flood, convicts are conscripted for disaster relief. A guard orders two of them to take out a boat, find a man clinging to a cotton house and a woman stuck in a cypress…
Terry George, the director and co-writer (with Jim Sheridan) of Some Mother’s Son, has more complicated feelings about Northern Ireland than he can express coherently. They shoot out in piercing shards of action and potent gutter or pulpit rhetoric. Some Mother’s Son is about the fight to save the lives…
Richard Jewell got his half-million bucks, so I guess he’s satisfied with the whole deal, but I still wish he’d filed a case and pursued it to the Supreme Court. Even AFTER the Richard Jewell case–where an innocent man was hounded half to death by a media convinced of his…
While Tupac Shakur lay bleeding to death inside Suge Knight’s car last fall after an attack on the Strip–all his crack bodyguards couldn’t even ID the perps’ getaway car–Death Row Records realized it was losing a franchise player. But Hollywood may never have had a clue about what it was…
