Wanda Bodine opened up a Smell Store last week. It’s this little shop in the mall where she sells stuff that emits AROMAS. Smelly oils, smelly herbs, smelly candles, smelly dried-flower arrangements, smelly clumps of pine bark you’re supposed to stick on your desk at the office so that you’ll…
Dallas-based performance artist Dalton James fills his newest one-man show at the Swiss Avenue Theater, Wet Willie Loves Pyro, with all kinds of personal details–failed romance, family deaths and conflicts, childhood dreams, a leaky air conditioner that nearly drives him mad. At least, we assume that these are personal issues,…
Forget Independence Day. If you really want to see Earth get it, you can’t do any better than Tim Burton’s Mars Attacks! It’s a destructo orgy orchestrated without any phony-baloney sanctimony about the fellowship of man–or spaceman. Burton isn’t interested in intergalactic amity; he’s not even interested in preserving the…
Whitney Houston has had a Movie Star Moment–just not in a movie. Near the end of the “I’m Saving All My Love for You” video, she turns toward the camera with a luminous smile that wilts into heartbreak when she realizes she’s been dropped by her, um, boyfriend. It’s a…
Some amusing stuff about sports agentry drowns in the emotional shallows of Jerry Maguire, which stars Tom Cruise in the title role as a hot-shot dealmaker whose first bout of conscience torpedoes his future at his firm, the monolithic Sports Management International. After visiting a hospitalized hockey player who skates…
thursday december 12 Synthetic Pleasures: By all means, make plans to catch Iara Lee’s droll, kinetic feature documentary, Synthetic Pleasures, before it ends a one-week run on December 13. Resplendent with MTV-inspired samplings from animation, various film stocks, and expressionistic editing techniques, the movie looks at the one significant way…
Every time I try to play poker in peace, like God intended, Cherry Dilday starts screaming: “I wanna go! I wanna go! I wanna go!” There’s a reason why women have been banned from poker games since the beginning of time. Lemme splain it here for you. First of all,…
They just don’t make purely theatrical animals like Noel Coward anymore, eccentric creatures with greasepaint for blood and a gloriously pathological need to project their own cultivated persona onto every character they write and perform. Like many of the playwrights-actors-composers of his generation, Coward erased the line in his own…
It’s impossible to capture on the printed page the anticipatory thrill of watching Sylvester Stallone handle rapid-fire dialogue: the rumbling basso voice, the twisted mouth valiantly trying to wrap itself around a stream of words, the consonants and vowels hurling forward like a toppled barrel of oranges. Will any of…
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,…
