Charles Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol because he needed money, and it’s been produced for that same sound reason for more than a century. It might have proved more interesting, however, if the Dallas Theater Center had staged a modern adaptation of Dickens’ Oliver Twist this year rather than the…
When fans of old Hollywood complain that modern feature films are too darned commercial–that they’ve lost the personality and passion that made films emerging from the old studio system so pleasurable–they are often reminded that there’s no such thing as the Good Old Days. Movies are, and always have been,…
I just got kicked out of a hotel bar for smoking a cigar. I don’t mind so much gettin’ kicked out, ’cause it was a 15-dollar Bolivar and I managed to save it without havin’ to smush it out in an ashtray. But what bugged me was: there was nobody…
The set of the gentle-spirited independent romance Late Bloomers incurred a stroke of bad luck last week, when the director, Julie Dyer, narrowly escaped an attempted mugging in an alley behind an East Dallas house where a wedding scene was being shot. She managed to escape her assailant, who panicked…
thursday december 15 Jingle Bell Run: Should you be walking or driving near downtown Dallas this evening and hear a terrific jingling commotion, don’t worry–Santa’s reindeer aren’t flying kamikaze missions among the skyscrapers. In fact, you’ve stumbled on one of the most fun Dallas holiday traditions–great because it combines a…
Before you can say “all-you-can-eat platter,” we will have the biggest stock-car racing complex–as much as 1,000 acres and up to 250,000 seats–sitting in that undeveloped Tarrant County sprawl near Alliance Airport. At least, that’s where the track should be if North Carolina racing titan Bruton Smith does what makes…
“What is a battery?” Rip asks his apprentice, Stan. “Two cells placed in a container, one dominant and one recessive,” Stan answers in a flat and dutiful tone, as if he were studying to appear on the TV quiz show Jeopardy. This is the definition that Rip, the repair man…
Unlike many large, university-heavy urban areas, Dallas-Fort Worth has never hosted an event celebrating the work of young film students. And that’s a shame, because once you wade through the usual undergraduate film program combo platter of angst, dreck, technical incompetence, and brain-numbing cliches (I’m-sad-because-I-just-killed-my-girlfriend movies, all-this-nudity-proves-I’m-a-brave-artist movies, I-just-saw-Reservoir Dogs-and-want-to-have-fun-with-blanks-and-squibs…
Adapted from Michael Crichton’s bestseller about sexual harassment and office intrigue in a high-tech Seattle computer company, Disclosure is a lavishly photographed, smartly acted, superbly directed piece of hooey. Director Barry Levinson, who gave us such upper-middlebrow entertainments as Bugsy and Rainman, and screenwriter Paul Attanasio, whose work for Quiz…
Somewhere between Joan Rivers’ 1978 bad-taste classic Rabbit Test and the $200 million-plus success of Mrs. Doubtfire teeters Junior, a film whose thudding lack of inventiveness marks the first time I’ve never laughed once at an Ivan Reitman film. Considering the track record of the major players involved, this is…
It should be no small irony to film buffs that 76-year-old filmmaker-author Ingmar Bergman, having directed and written 36 movies during his lifetime, is finally beginning to convey authentic, vital emotion in his work. His most generous feature, Fanny and Alexander (1982), about the sumptuous excesses of his grandmother’s family,…
I have a question for the Lesbos. Is it possible to turn Lesbo? People talk about this all the time. They say, “Well, after that third divorce, she just went plumb lesbo on us.” Or they say, “She’s a lesbian, but she has a boyfriend. She’s just doing it ’till…
thursday december 8 Big Fat Christmas Goose: Fort Worth’s Hip Pocket Theatre serves up one of its reliable grab bags of dance, movement, music, and lighting effects, an original production which manages to yoke the Christmas tradition to American culture and still leave all that stifling mega-bucks commercialism behind. They’ve…
Editor’s note: Jennifer Briggs, who has covered sports for more than a decade, this week joins the Observer as sports columnist. The microphones and notepads hang like Spanish moss around the tall man in the locker room, still wet from the showers and pumped from his first game back in…
It was a place of force– The wind gagging my mouth with my own blown hair, Tearing off my voice, and the sea Blinding me with its lights, the lives of the dead Unreeling in it, spreading like oil. –from “The Rabbit Catcher” by Sylvia Plath. Uttering nothing but blood–…
Peter Jackson might be the boldest English-language director working today whose films are seen by almost no one. His latest effort, Heavenly Creatures, should remedy that situation. Based on a real-life New Zealand murder case in which two adolescent girls plotted the murder of a parent they believed was impairing…
Well, the No-Smoking Nazis have reached the borders of New York City. There’s a lot of things you can say about New York City, but the one thing I always liked about the place is that it was the last place in America that respected smokers. Some of the office…
John Frankenheimer’s World War II-era railway adventure The Train turns 30 this year, and it’s almost appalling to consider just how infrequently modern-day Hollywood has mustered up the energy and dedication to match its countless splendors. A huge, roiling, clanking, screeching, rumbling hulk of mayhem that seizes you from frame…
When a first film–especially a locally produced, very low-budget film–doesn’t ring your bell, the tempting course as a critic is simply to ignore it, under the assumption that bad press isn’t always better than no press at all. Fortunately, Joseph Alexandre, the Dallas-based writer, director, editor, and co-star of the…
thursday december 1 Through the Looking Glass: Getting on the InterNet: As you know by now, all those newsmagazine headlines trumpeting The Information Superhighway were too much, too soon. They spent so much time brainstorming the potential colossal change in our daily lives–yet only a sizable minority of people are…
The road has risen up to meet Dallas’ Kitchen Dog Theater, proving that hard work and artistic talent, even of an alternative and sometimes enigmatic nature, can still be rewarded. The company’s good fortune this season began with a $5,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. (If that…
Twenty pages into her first read through the script of The Last Seduction, John Dahl’s stunningly nasty film noir, Linda Fiorentino realized she simply had to play the film’s antiheroine, Bridget–a femme so fatale she makes Sharon Stone look like Sandy Dennis. She’d reached the page where Bridget arrives in…
