Iced tea, at least in our family, is a minefield of personal, picky choices. Mom will only drink it plain, but Cousin Steph wants it as sugary as corn syrup, with three lemons. Some won’t touch it unless it’s made with actual sugar; others stir in three packets of saccharin…
Pure comedy should be widely relatable, a titter-inducing double helix of universal truth and common experience. This may be why scholars and simpletons alike find the same inherent joy in the most ordinary of humorous occurrence, whether it’s a pie in the face, a “your mama so fat” joke or…
As anyone who’s ever read FOUND magazine can attest, you can find some pretty interesting stuff stranded in the parking lots, dumpsters and landfills of our society. “One man’s trash is another man’s treasure,” or so they say (or in the case of Dirty FOUND, one man’s porn is another…
Can’t sing? Can’t read? Have I got the event for you: From 10 a.m. to 9 p.m. Friday, drive out to Frisco-oh-my-god-I-can’t-believe-people-actually-live-this-far-from-civilization, get up onstage and wail into a microphone to PlayStation 2’s SingStar (their newest karaoke videogame in which you get to sing along with the chart-topping music of…
Russian nutcrackers indeed. You can imagine the muscles those prima ballerinas develop. Probably what the Russian vixen Onatopp studied before she played nutcracker on James Bond in Goldeneye, while the rest of her troupe went on to form the more family-friendly Moscow Ballet Touring Company in 1993. Since then the…
Beauty and the Beast is a tale as old as time. I know because I remember the lyrics from the Disney song. Here’s a brief refresher course: A prince lives in a beautiful castle surrounded by everything he could want. But the prince is a jerk. One winter’s night an…
An epic journey has been completed. It began with some comic books and a dude that sang kinda like a girl. Now it is finished—with some comic books and a dude that sings kinda like a girl. Put that way, prog rock band Coheed and Cambria’s tetralogy of albums telling…
Tom Wilson as manure-plagued bully Biff in Back to the Future was my childhood’s idealized bully. He was a cowardly brute, pure stupid evil—barely even a human being. But as an underrated character in an unwatched show—gym teacher Coach Fredericks in Freaks and Geeks—he showed that even an overbearing tormentor…
How exactly does one sum up the appeal of Michael Caine? Whether he’s winning a couple of Oscars, camping it up as Austin Powers’ dad or keeping Batman down to earth as loyal manservant Alfred, he’s always kicking thespian ass. He’s like the white British Morgan Freeman—completely reliable, with a…
It’s one of the best rivalries in professional sports: The San Antonio Spurs, the NBA champions every other year, and the Dallas Mavericks, who would love to be the champions one of these years. The Mavericks thought they had toppled their longtime adversary in 2006, when they beat them on…
Castlevania, the vampire-hunting series that stretches over 20 years and as many games, has basically two kinds of fans. There are the traditionalists, who’ve followed the games since they were straight-up action titles with thumb-busting combat and infamously steep difficulty curves. Most agree that the best of the old-school Castlevanias…
Sesame Street: Old School Volume 2 (Genius) On the heels of the Electric Company boxed sets, which were at once educational and groovy as all get-out, comes the latest in greatest hits from Sesame Street before the neighborhood was gentrified for Elmo’s protection. Chief among the copious highlights in this…
The Best of the Colbert Report (Paramount) Blame It on Fidel! (Koch Lorber) Blood Car (TLA) The Crown Prince (Koch) Deck the Halls (Fox) Election (Tartan) Flight of the Conchords: The Complete First Season (HBO) Help!: Deluxe Edition (Capitol) I Now Pronounce You Chuck & Larry (Universal) James Bond Ultimate…
Although he plays a college professor in his latest film, Robert Redford was, by his own admission, never much of a student, consistently more interested in what was going on outside the classroom window than inside. But there’s one moment from Redford’s academic past that burns brightly in his memory…
“Hold still”—it’s what the hunters say to the hunted in the Coen Brothers’ No Country for Old Men. The first time we hear it, it’s the out-of-work Vietnam vet Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin) whispering optimistically to the antelope he spies through his rifle sight while perched on the crest of…
Less a war drama than a set of dueling position papers, Robert Redford’s Lions for Lambs may be the gabbiest movie ever made about American foreign policy—and it wasn’t even written by Aaron Sorkin. Hot young screenwriter Matthew Michael Carnahan is fresh off his alpha-male script for The Kingdom, which…
Banking on the career choices of Vince Vaughn garners increasingly erratic returns, which is ironic, given that he has finally settled on (or surrendered to) a consistent onscreen persona: his own bad self. Uneasy from the beginning, Vaughn avoided the superstardom that seemed within reach after Swingers by trying on…
Named for the spot in Christian fundamentalist hell where sinners are condemned to spend eternity, Tony Kaye’s Lake of Fire is a provocatively beautiful movie on the hottest hot-button issue in American life: a woman’s right to an abortion. The British-born Kaye, an enormously successful maker of deluxe TV commercials,…
We learn from failure, not from success!” wrote Bram Stoker in Dracula. If Irving’s ICT MainStage heeds that advice, director Bruce R. Coleman’s staging of the 1897 vampire saga, adapted by Seattle playwright Steven Dietz, will not have been in vain. Or vein. So much is right in the beginning…
Since Mark Cuban was voted off Dancing With the Stars, my love for televised ballroom dancing has waned ever so slightly. Sure, I appreciate a good foxtrot just as much as the next viewer, but—wait, what am I saying? People watch Dancing With the Stars not for dancing (save a…
This year, if nothing else, there have been a lot of film festivals. Obviously, there have been quality film festivals in the DFW area for years, but this year–well, we’ve been extremely lucky to have so many opportunities to view the offbeat, the undistributed and the directed-by-Fred-Durst. The Lone Star…
If you wear Wranglers, would you please buy the next size up? Seriously, dudes. I know you think “the Ladies” like the way those jeans look when they’re all tight, but they’re cutting off your circulation, which can’t be good for your sperm count and might mean you can’t reproduce—wait—I…
