Some art-house programmer would be wise to schedule a double bill of The Aristocrats, Paul Provenza’s talkumentary about the dirtiest joke ever told, and The 40-Year-Old Virgin, writer-director Judd Apatow’s near-brilliant movie about a grown-up geek who simply lost interest in trying to get laid. Both offer countless giddy variations…
Red Eye may not seem to be your typical Wes Craven movie. It’s not really horror, there are no marketable monsters, and unlike Cursed, Scream 3 and other recent Craven offerings, it’s actually an enjoyable time at the movies. But heroine Lisa Reisert (Rachel McAdams) is very much in the…
Ain’t nothing in this world more tedious than highbrow erotica, which works itself into a lather and then wipes off the sweat before anyone notices how awfully and inappropriately worked-up it got. Asylum, adapted by Closer’s Patrick Marber and Chrysanthy Balis from the novel by Patrick McGrath, is just that…
William Betts: Sliver of Clarity The painter William Betts has reconceived the “hands-on” approach to painting, refining the process of this hoary medium down to a few principles: a couple of pecks at the computer keyboard, a click here and there of the mouse working in Photoshop and a flick…
Little Footsteps Rover Dramawerks stages Ted Tally’s 1986 play about a young Manhattan couple freaking out over impending parenthood. Rick Dalton plays Ben, a snotty TV exec so full of himself there’s no room for a baby in his heart or his apartment. Joslyn Justus is Joanie, the pregnant wife…
To survey Gordon Parks’ lifework in photographs is to move through a landscape of visual extremes. Make way for a collision of conflicting events, attitudes and worldviews. In keeping with such visual discord and crack-up, the Dallas Museum of Art’s exhibition Gordon Parks, Half Past Autumn: Selections from the Collection…
Among the some 30 films screening at the Asian Film Festival of Dallas this weekend, at both the Magnolia Theater and the Dallas Museum of Art, there are several that merit essential-viewing status: Takashi Miike’s nutty Gozu, which even David Lynch might find a tad confounding; Juh-hwan Jeong’s closing-night Save…
Thursday, August 18 Before they were famous, were they so irritating? Did people notice as much when they suffered a bad bout with bloat? Did they do their own laundry? Did they talk with one another about bad dates? Did anyone care how many girls named Jennifer either of them…
Cartoons have a broad, almost universal, appeal. While Saturday morning programming may be mostly aimed at youngsters (the only ones with the energy and self-esteem to be awake that time of day), teens and adults get their dose of animated mischief the rest of the week. Shows like The Simpsons,…
Cowboys, capuchins and a carnival 8/19 The rodeo–the terminus for country-western thrills–is coming to Denton, and the North Texas State Fair and Rodeo, running from August 19 through August 27, happens to be one of the good ones. It’s no secret that the rodeo is enjoying a return to the…
Festival is up, up and away 8/19 The best action sequence in the storied history of Walker, Texas Ranger was the hot air balloon chase that occurred at the beginning of Episode 102. Entitled “Sons of Thunder (Part One),” this jewel of the fifth season began with a robber balloon-jacking…
Plush’s new home, sweet home 8/20 What a bum deal. One minute evicted and the next forced out by the ominous big city of Dallas. But Plush wouldn’t be a highly acclaimed alternative gallery if it didn’t have a few exciting bumps and bruises here and there. Let’s just say…
From floozy to Miss Firecracker 8/19 There’s something about the title The Miss Firecracker Contest that makes people think about drag queens. OK, so it makes me think about drag queens. Though this play doesn’t have a single drag queen in it, the movie Flawless with Robert De Niro and…
Pity the daily newspaper critic who must review The Aristocrats without using such phrases as “a longshoreman’s arm up a little girl’s ass,” “then my wife goes down on my son while the dog’s licking his balls,” “my grandmother’s covered in my come,” and “is it shit before piss, or…
Once you get past its negligible plot, scant dialogue and almost zero action, Gus Van Sant’s elliptical rendering of the final hours in the troubled life of a grunge musician is rarely boring. That may seem like a backhanded compliment, but given the absence of such customary cinematic conventions as…
How do you make a dead baby float? Two scoops ice cream, two scoops dead baby. Old joke. Terrible joke. But there it is, coming out of the mouth of Ben Marcus, the expectant father at the center of Little Footsteps, now onstage at the Black Box Theatre at the…
Little Footsteps Rover Dramawerks stages Ted Tally’s 1986 play about a young Manhattan couple freaking out over impending parenthood. Rick Dalton plays Ben, a snotty TV exec so full of himself there’s no room for a baby in his heart or his apartment. Joslyn Justus is Joanie, the pregnant wife…
On these would-be millennial times, the claim that “God is in the details” might easily be mistaken for another plug for spiritual shysters on the make–one more slogan for the verbal arsenal of God-hucksters so ready to link faith and fortune. Let us not forget that it has long been…
Robert Bechtle: A Retrospective Just as Freud’s rejoinder that “sometimes a cigar is just a cigar” was deceptively simple, so too are Robert Bechtle’s paintings of shiny jalopies, suburban tract housing and ground-hugging strip-mall architecture. Bechtle treats these dumb objects as chunks, wedges and slivers of flat-image composition. The pink…
With cinematic role models such as Napoleon Dynamite, we wonder if any of today’s teenagers will ever be lucky in love or anything else. When we were their age, movies helped us navigate the minefields of high school, the mall and our friend’s backyards. Take Fast Times at Ridgemont High,…
Thursday, August 11 Those old, heavy cast-iron skillets are good for more than smacking animated critters in cartoons. While Mom only hauls hers out for fried chicken, a new cast-iron craze advocates using those weighty skillets for more than home and campfire cooking. They’re gourmet now. Sure, the bible of…
Waiting to Exhale and How Stella Got Her Groove Back were both page-turning bestsellers and entertaining box-office sweethearts. The Interruption of Everything, however–and don’t we know we’ll get some disagreement on this–should probably just head directly over to Lifetime for the movie option. The latest release from the otherwise strong,…
