The stodgy works of Ismail Merchant and James Ivory, makers of Howard’s End and Jefferson in Paris, have encouraged the sad notion that costume dramas must be leaden and respectable. Ang Lee’s Sense and Sensibility helped rehabilitate the form; and now Patrice Leconte’s Ridicule ventilates the stifled form with yet…
thursday december 5 Wet Willie Loves Pyro: Dallas-based actor-writer-poet Dalton James offered local audiences a rich, thoroughly lived-in performance earlier this year in Open Stage’s production of Nicky Silver’s jet-black family comedy Fat Men in Skirts. James lured us through his funny-scary transformation from a timid, Katharine Hepburn-obsessed mama’s boy…
Have you seen these shows on ESPN 2 where some guy rides a tricycle off a cliff, does a triple-reverse upside-down back flip, free falls toward a raging white-water river, opens his parachute, grabs a tree limb on the way down, hooks his ankles into a bungee cord, dunks his…
There are many reasons why Jonathan Tolins’ The Twilight of the Golds should become obsolete in just a few short years–or so you think as the Dallas premiere by Littlefinger Productions unfurls in front of you. Unfortunately, this problem plagues many scripts concerning contemporary gay themes, because as the gay…
Anthony Minghella believes in ghosts–and, at his best, makes believers out of viewers, too. The writer-director of Truly Madly Deeply and this heartfelt, eye-filling adaptation of the Booker Prize-winning novel The English Patient scatters his movies with passionate specters. In Truly Madly Deeply the main ghost was a musician who…
In the post-Babe era, can you make a live-action movie about animals and not have them talk to each other? For me, this is the deep philosophical question raised by Disney’s new 101 Dalmatians, a live-action remake of the studio’s 1961 animated feature–in which, by the way, the animals did…
friday november 29 BR5-49: Take a listen to either their debut EP Live at Bob’s or their recently released, self-titled debut album on Arista, and it’s clear why BR5-49 have earned an ecstatic following by folks who normally pooh-pooh roots country…and have been condemned as a bunch of pretty-boy smartasses…
So I was checking into this motel room in Galveston with Vida Stegall–don’t even ask, I don’t wanna go into it–and as soon as I flipped on the light switch, she starts complaining about how everything is “not right.” “This room is not right,” she says. And I’m looking at…
Countless playwrights have this century tackled the Spanish legend of Don Juan, the man whose insatiable appetite for women represented what could be considered the first feminist cautionary fable. Even those writers who have explored the comic possibilities in Juan’s winding trail of broken hearts have rarely ignored the serial…
In The Mirror Has Two Faces, Barbra Streisand plays Rose Morgan, a Columbia University Romantic literature professor who endures a drab, romanceless life. She lives with her imperious, fault-finding mother, Hannah (Lauren Bacall)–a beautician, no less–and wards off the attentions of a nebbishy suitor (Austin Pendleton) while pining for the…
It’s Thanksgiving 1972, and a year after returning to his upper-middle-class Texas home, Vietnam vet Jeremy Collier (Emilio Estevez) is still reeling from his war experiences. Living at home and listlessly taking a few community college courses, he has grown only more alienated from normal society. His mother, Maurine (Kathy…
When we first see the character of middle-aged Australian David Helfgott (Geoffrey Rush) in Shine, he’s standing in the driving rain and tapping at the window of a wine bar after closing time. Let inside by a sympathetic waitress, he keeps up a nonstop nonsensical patter that makes him sound…
thursday november 21 Taking Back Our Democracy From Corporate Domination: If anybody thought that the two major American political parties cater to vastly different interests, the snoozefest of a 1996 presidential election should have put that to rest. For all the hullabaloo about race, sex, and other white-hot cultural issues,…
Did you see where the Canadians blew up a decommissioned warship so that it would settle at exactly the right place on the bottom of the ocean? They wanted it to be right next to the other ships they’ve already sunk in the waters between Vancouver Island and the mainland…
Feminist literary critics have tap-danced on the grave of every dead white male in the Western canon of letters…except for William Shakespeare. Willie the Shake has by and large escaped the scorched-earth academics who have reduced the likes of Milton and Marlowe to smoking cinders. The conventional wisdom is, in…
As Palookaville begins, three wayward city boys–Jerry (Adam Trese), Sid (William Forsythe), and Russell (Vincent Gallo)–chisel their way through the outer wall of what they believe to be a jewelry store, only to find out that they’ve actually broken into the bakery next door. While Sid stands guard, Russell steals…
friday november 15 Twilight of the Golds: There are a whole lot of hot-potato topics that get tossed around in Jonathan Tolins’ drama, The Twilight of the Golds, and you can bet Little Finger Productions and Actors’ Theatre of Dallas, the two companies that have joined forces to premiere the…
I’ve been watching a bunch of hippie movies from around 1968 to 1973, and I’ve noticed that almost all of them have at least one scene of longhaired, bell-bottomed Disaffected Youths yelling like idiots at a public meeting. It could be a meeting of Army generals or a city council…
Although the hot movie topic for the past year has been Jane Austen, it really should have been William Shakespeare. True, four of Austen’s novels have recently been adapted to the screen, but she hasn’t been nearly as omnipresent as the Bard of Avon nor, Clueless aside, quite so contemporary…
thursday november 7 Desdemona…a play about a handkerchief: Last summer’s Shakespeare Festival of Dallas production of Othello, while competent enough, featured a performance by Liz Piazza Kelley as Desdemona that generally towed the line for generations of Desdemonas before her. While the character being innocent of Othello’s charges is what…
For Dallas theatergoers, the wait is over. We get to find out what happens between Joe and Louis, Pryor and the Angel, Belize and Roy, and poor wandering, hallucinating, but strangely lucid Harper. Dallas Theater Center stuck its neck out with a highly publicized, expensively promoted production of Tony Kushner’s…
Have you noticed how closing times at bars get earlier and earlier? What’s going on here? Certain cities and states now have bars that close at midnight, just like in Communist countries like Sweden. Didn’t we already find out in the 1920s what happens when you monkey with a man’s…
