Don’t let the glut of movies about hit men stop you from seeing Grosse Pointe Blank. It’s not quite like any other movie–let alone one about a hit man. That may be because it’s a hit-man movie crossed with a high-school-reunion comedy, and the two genres mesh surprisingly well: It’s…
thursday april 10 Homerun: Whether she’s channeling Chippy the West Texas hooker or negotiating with an armed bandit who breaks into her gynecologist’s office while she’s in mid-exam, Jo Harvey Allen is what we like to think of as the consummate Texan–individual, unflappable, and able to converse with animal, vegetable,…
We started worrying about Vida Stegall the week she said: “See y’all later! I’m going on vacation!” And when we asked her WHERE she was going on vacation, she said “Brunei.” And we asked her where that was, and it turns out it’s somewhere over in the Middle East, and…
Only recently have I been able to articulate why the stage musical so often encounters a “Keep Out” sign on the door of my heart. I’m an essentially sentimental person who can coo over empty packages when they’re wrapped in original style, which is precisely what Rodgers and Hammerstein, Lerner…
When Val Kilmer walked away from the Batman franchise, it was only a matter of time before he offered up his own competing brand. The Saint isn’t just his answer to Batman–it’s a full-length commercial for all the Saint movies to come. There’s a breezy effrontery in the ploy; Kilmer…
On its surface, The Daytrippers probably seems like your generic ’90s American independent let’s-get-our-friends-together-and-make-a-movie movie. Shot in Long Island and Manhattan in 16 days for about a half-million dollars, with a cast including the inevitable Parker Posey and the almost equally inevitable Stanley Tucci and Campbell Scott–where was Eric Stoltz?–it…
Film actors are generally said to have good chemistry or no chemistry. But bad chemistry in movies does exist, and a sleep-inducer called Inventing the Abbotts is a case in point. In ascending order of age, Liv Tyler, Jennifer Connelly, and Joanna Going play Pamela, Eleanor, and Alice Abbott, sisters…
Over the past five years, action star Jean-Claude Van Damme has become one of America’s leading importers of foreign talent. In 1993, he hired Hong Kong action ace John Woo to direct Hard Target. For last year’s Maximum Risk, he brought over Ringo Lam. And now he has used a…
thursday april 3 Mary Williford-Shade and Jose Bustamante: Nationally acclaimed dancer Mary Williford-Shade has earned something of a reputation as an angst queen with her ferocious, frenetic style of dance. She teams with Jose Bustamante, a University of Texas at Austin dance faculty member who has choreographed in both Spain…
Have you ever noticed that, every time they do a survey of sex in America, it always looks something like this: Guys who have cheated on their wives at least once: 75 percent. Gals who have cheated on their husbands at least once: 20 percent. Guys who have had sex…
When my eyes landed on the definition of “arabesque” in Webster’s Dictionary, a thought hit me with the force of a quick, hard wedgie: I’m a fraud. I was researching to write this review of one program in Deep Ellum Opera Theatre’s March series, A Month of Dance. Webster’s was…
By re-releasing The Godfather, Paramount Pictures is both honoring itself a and perpetrating a crime. The honor is that one of the greatest and most influential films ever made is being rereleased on the occasion of its 25th anniversary. The crime is that Paramount, according to a studio spokeswoman, has…
In The Devil’s Own, Brad Pitt plays Frankie McGuire, an Irish Republican Army gunman with 24 kills to his credit–13 British soldiers and 11 police officers. After a bloody firefight in Belfast, he escapes to New York, where, helped by a pro-IRA judge (George Hearn), he is placed in the…
Although Russian director Sergei Bodrov has made half a dozen features and won a fistful of awards since the mid-’80s, he is virtually unknown in the United States–despite having lived in Los Angeles on and off for several years. Orion Classics is now distributing his 1996 film, Prisoner of the…
I spent the 68th anniversary of the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre watching The Godfather with the new soundtrack prepared for its 25th anniversary. The scene was a mixing room in the Saul Zaentz Film Center in Berkeley, and the master of ceremonies was much-honored editor and sound expert Walter Murch,…
thursday march 27 All’s Well That Ends Well: The Dallas Theater Center closes its 1996-’97 season with a whisper rather than a bang; one of Shakespeare’s more nuanced sex-role comedies with a heroine that makes Titania look like Edith Bunker. Strong-willed Helen chases a man who has sworn his antipathy…
I noticed my buddy Donald Trump’s casino company lost 31 million bucks last year. But isn’t it strange that this announcement came just three months after The Donald announced that he had personally won $20 million by betting the long odds on the Tyson-Holyfield fight? Of course, we still don’t…
God bless the children who attended the same Saturday matinee performance of The Yellow Boat that I did. During a question-and-answer session after the show, they demonstrated that you don’t just lose your innocence when you become an adult–if you’re not careful, you can also shed a certain clear, tough…
Cult auteur David Cronenberg crashes and burns–his talent, that is–in Crash, a vain attempt at a techno-age Persona. It follows a demented explorer named Vaughan (Elias Koteas) into an insane new world where twisted metal, curvy skin, automotive oil, and bodily fluids merge in an explosive carnal cocktail. To Vaughan,…
Selena opens with a reenactment of the slain Tejano singer’s February 1995 event-style concert at the Houston Astrodome. Bedecked in a sparkling purple jumpsuit, the beloved Texas native (played by Jennifer Lopez) is shown singing a few disco nuggets from her childhood, including “I Will Survive” and “Last Dance.” While…
Jim Carrey caught a lot of grief last year when The Cable Guy tanked at the box office. Carrey was way out of line, doomsayers yelped, to have deviated so far and in such a dark direction from his established, money-in-the-bank persona of the double-jointed dimwit for whom a lobotomy…
thursday march 20 The Rainbow Poets: The Writer’s Garret, in cooperation with the Dallas Poets Community, presents an evening of lyrical male bonding as part of its “Soup’s On” series. Football and fart jokes are being dispensed with; communication rituals practiced by the species homo attitudis are in the spotlight…
