Hardly anyone writes love letters anymore. Sigh. Real billets-doux, the kind penned in inky swirls on creamy paper, have given way to the crude shorthand of instant messages and the tinny squawk of disembodied voicemail. Try wrapping a satin ribbon around those. Back in the dark ages, B.AOL., as it…
6/17 In the unconventional tradition of Heather Whitestone-McCallum (the hearing-impaired Miss America 1995) and Rick Allen (the one-armed drummer for Def Leppard), 15-year veteran skateboarder Jon Comer scoffs derisively in the face of anatomical convention–and then beats its ass into submission with his sick Gringo board. Comer, a Keller resident…
The real Melvin Van Peebles shows up just once in Baadasssss!, a fictionalized account of his making of Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song in 1971, and it’s at the film’s end; he sits silent, grinning, clutching his ever-present cigar. But he’s all over this movie, in which his son Mario plays…
Jehane Noujaim co-directed 2001’s remarkable Startup.com, about two Internet whiz kids who brokered just enough big deals to wind up with broken dreams, and the audience came away understanding how it felt to invest your everything in something eventually worth nothing. The headlines of five years ago came to bittersweet…
Questions about art, race, ethics and language spark passionate arguments in the provocative new play Permanent Collection, currently the main-stage offering at Kitchen Dog Theater’s sixth annual New Works Festival. In an elegantly designed and smartly acted production directed by Dan Day, the Thomas Gibbons drama challenges its characters (and…
Alex de Leon The question begs: What to do with art that makes avid if not heavy-handed political statements in an era so eager to wrest itself from the rant, screed and morality inherently connected with political art? Is it the responsibility of art to engender social revolution, much less…
A Flea in Her Ear The Classical Acting Company with direction by Greg Leaming morphs this turn-of-the-century French absurdist play into a swinging 1960s sex farce with as much innuendo as an episode of Laugh In. Originally written by Georges Feydeau in 1907 Paris, this new adaptation (also by Leaming)…
In her book Words Under the Words, poet Naomi Shihab Nye writes of “the mystery of remembering.” She tells of finding an old photo album with a picture of herself as a grinning child wearing a party dress and standing with her legs crossed. After the picture was taken, she…
Thursday, June 10 If there had been some ancient Japanese rule banning those with physical or mental disabilities from brandishing swords, then contemporary Japanese film would be totally different. Think of any iconic Japanese film, and it’s likely the plot involved someone who shouldn’t be trusted with a pointy, life-taking…
Brad Meltzer, former attorney and now writer of best sellers set in and around the courtroom, makes no apologies for his love of comic books. By his own admission, his chart-topping novels, among them The Zero Game and The Tenth Justice, read very much like the superhero stuff of his…
6/12 No one plans to see a good movie at a drive-in. Because, according to American tradition, you should pick a flick plotless enough to convince your date that the best action’s not on the screen, but in the backseat. (Anything with a title that includes the phrase “Attack of…
6/12 Kids these days have all the fun. Back in the olden days, a trip to a science and history museum was about as exciting as staring at a pile of old bones. Actually, that was the exciting part. At the end of the long maze of boring exhibits about…
6/13 Party of Five, the television show starring Jennifer Love Hewitt and Neve Campbell, perfected the art of whiney, hormonal family dysfunction. Party of Five, the soiree featuring courses prepared by five swanky Dallas chefs, perfected the art of fine cuisine. This quintet from the leading chef-owned restaurants in the…
6/10 Kim Neal Nofsinger started to dabble in choreography the minute he became a dancer. “Choreography was as natural as what attracted me to modern dance in the first place,” he says. “There is so much freedom, and it’s a very personal medium. I found I could make a personal…
Every once in a while, you encounter a person who seems to have been born under an urgent, righteous star–a person who is both a fiery activist lit with the passion of his convictions and a dramatic storyteller who naturally occupies a place in the public eye. When this person…
As much of the civilized world now knows, the latest Harry Potter director is Alfonso Cuaron, best known for the explicit teen sexual awakening movie Y Tu Mamá También. As such, it may come as little surprise that his Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban begins with the teenage…
Ah, the peculiar genius that is Guy Maddin. Who else but the morose Canadian director, born and raised in one of the coldest cities in the world, would marry silent film, 1930s movie musicals, Prohibition, family melodrama, critique of capitalist zeal and monster-movie gore in a surreal montage about sorrow…
It’s a sign that a nation may be losing its collective mind when it grants a nutty hack like Quentin Tarantino an exalted title like officer of arts and letters, but there’s France for ya. Whether Gallic pop culture is rousingly progressive or embarrassingly adolescent is anyone’s call, but few…
If Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1963) sounded an early salvo of the feminist movement, the photographs of Jin-Ya Huang dance a worldly jig of the feminine in-between. The masterful blur of Huang’s images give form to the shuffle and swing of a woman-girl acting in between East and West,…
Cast: Photographs by Jin-Ya Huang In her photographs, Jin-Ya Huang turns fuzziness and blur into a visual vocabulary of the indecipherable. The illegibility of her images is by no means frustrating. The combined result of the artist’s secret prop choices and photo-digital process, these images will keep you guessing while…
Cocktail hour extends to nearly three in WaterTower Theatre’s bouncy, boozy production of Company. The Stephen Sondheim-George Furth musical finds a group of five upscale married couples gathering for the 35th birthday of bachelor Bobby (Donald Fowler), a 1970s Manhattan playboy with an aversion to settling down. Everybody sings, and…
Company Some 1970s musicals sound positively quaint today (heard Pippin lately?). Not this Stephen Sondheim-George Furth gem about a toxic Manhattan bachelor, Bobby (Donald Fowler), being talked into marriage by his 10 married friends. With a score packed with Sondheim classics–“Being Alive,” “Another Hundred People,” “Marry Me a Little,” “Side…
