thursday august 15 Seven Underground Films: Press material for the traveling program “Seven Underground Films Tour 13 Cities in 13 Days in One ’65 Chevy” indicates that the short films on this bill are united by “an artful lowlife sensibility.” Co-sponsored by the nationally celebrated Austin Film Society, which recently…
What are the seven most dreaded words in the history of civilization? Of course, you know what I’m talking about. “I need to talk about the relationship.” Wanda Bodine was on me about this last week. She left it on the answering machine. After a three-day drunk in Mexico, I…
Nicky Silver is probably the hottest young playwright lurking in off-Broadway right now, with his last play The Food Chain easily his most critically and financially successful New York production to date. Additionally, since the ’90s began his works have been staged dozens of times by big-city theaters, including three…
The season began unspectacularly, with no sign of questionable new trends. Then slowly but surely, this summer’s insidious onslaught made itself known. First, Eddie Murphy’s Nutty Professor, an obese research scientist, discovers a “secret formula” through which he can re-create himself by transforming his own DNA. Next, in Multiplicity, Michael…
I don’t know what I expected Douglas McGrath to look and sound like after I had been told the writer-director of Miramax’s sterling new version of Emma was born and raised in Midland, Texas. But the last thing I imagined was the polite, dapper, dandyish man with the glittering eyes…
thursday august 8 Donna Lovely and Stewart Charles Cohen: The Bath House Cultural Center hosts a pair of photography exhibits by award-winning professionals who entered a foreign culture and emerged with little pieces of time. In the case of Donna Lovely, the “foreign culture” she explored happens right here on…
Have you noticed that the only people who know how to do anything are from other countries? These two Armenian brothers are the only guys I’ll let work on my car. I can never pronounce their names, so I refer to ’em as the Skinny Goofy One and the Stocky…
The author of more than 30 plays, recipient of three Tony Awards and a U-Haulful of dramatic accolades, and the next likely Pulitzer Prize winner, playwright Terrence McNally possesses a keener ear for dialogue than any other celebrated American dramatist now alive. The language he creates is a pure theatrical…
The era of the mom-and-pop video store has pretty much died in Dallas, with the thrilling exception of four stalwart independents: Tapelenders on Cedar Springs; Premiere Video at Mockingbird and Central; and Forbidden Books and Alternative Videos in Exposition Park. Genre is the operative word at each of these valuable…
Everyone thinks he was the first to adore Louise Fitzhugh’s remarkably sophisticated 1964 short novel, Harriet the Spy. As with sex or illicit drugs, your average adolescent must be turned on to Fitzhugh’s smart-aleck exploration of a lonely girl’s traumatic introduction to the consequences of honesty. I had a whip-smart,…
thursday august 1 Fredrik Noren: You can’t get much whiter than Sweden, which makes the idea of a Swedish ensemble playing jazz–a premiere African-American musical form–an easy target for snickers. So if you’re a jazz fan and the idea of listening to Basie and Bird played by men with names…
You ever get advice like this? “Gee, that’s a horrible story, Joe Bob. You should prob’ly just swear off women entirely.” That makes you feel great, doesn’t it? It’s sort of like hearing, “You seem to be a toxic individual. Everything you touch turns to dog doo-doo.” I mean, you…
The program for Kitchen Dog Theatre’s latest production, the racial-sexual drama Porcelain, contains some astute notes by director David Irving, who is the newest member of Kitchen Dog. His essay reads: “‘Shocking plays’ always seem to raise a question of validity in people’s minds, as though the plays want to…
Ticket buyers should know there is a controversial presumption behind Trainspotting, the remarkable new feature by director Danny Boyle and writer John Hodge–that drugs are fun. Specifically, heroin. The synthetic morphine substitute that keeps creeping back into ’90s headlines–most recently, with the overdose death of Smashing Pumpkins keyboardist Danny Melvoin…
A Time to Kill, like just about everything seeping from John Grisham’s popular pen, points up the author’s two weaknesses as storyteller: plotting, and everything else. In this fairly routine courtroom drama, a cocky young Mississippi attorney named Jake Brigance (Matthew McConaughey), craving success and adulation, agrees to represent Carl…
The Scottish accents are so thick in Trainspotting that for the first few minutes you’re not sure the characters are really saying what you’re hearing. Could it be–in the politically correct ’90s–that the central characters of a film are extolling the virtues of heroin addiction? Can these smart, interesting, vigorous…
thursday july 25 Deborah Henson-Conant: Critically adored harpist-singer Deborah Henson-Conant has become famous in jazz and classical circles because she treats her instrument of choice like everything but a harp. She pounds it, plucks it, caresses it, massages it, and does everything short of establishing onstage carnal knowledge with it…
Why is it that the people on airplanes who look like they have no jobs are always the ones who have to get off the plane immediately to get somewhere? Check out the guy with the six-day growth of beard carrying a paper sack full of greasy buffalo wings. As…
Watching the latest production by Theatre Three, a pair of one-acts from reigning theatrical neurotic Christopher Durang aptly dubbed Disgraceful Acts, the viewer is intrigued. In one evening, Dallas’ 35-year-old theater company offers the simultaneous experience of watching a skillful satirist at his prime and said writer floundering for inspiration…
Peter Jackson’s brief resume as a writer-director is about as impressive as any independent filmmaker. Three genre films–Bad Taste, Meet the Feebles, and Dead-Alive–preceded his art-house breakthrough Heavenly Creatures, but they all bespoke a peculiar, highly individualized voice. Whether you like his movies or not, you have to acknowledge how…
A month into its much-heralded summer release, Disney’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame has begun a slow limp down the box-office ladder. Everybody who harbors ill will toward this film–and there are a surprising number who do–want to take credit for its (relatively) poor performance with the public. Southern Baptists…
thursday july 18 First-Annual Texas Film and Video Awards: The Dallas-Fort Worth Film Critics’ Association, which boasts 30 highly opinionated men and women (and one purehearted calendar editor), has decided that all this talk about the expanding Texas film-production scene deserves its own seal of approval–something that only folks who…
