Stephen Sondheim’s Assassins takes aim at the American dream and blows it to smithereens. The strangely hypnotic musical, now onstage in an excellent production at Quad C Theatre at Collin County Community College, imagines a surreal reunion of four killers of presidents and five who tried. Existing together on a…
The function of most film festivals is to introduce the enthusiastic filmgoer to the unknown. Certainly, the Vistas Film Festival will do a little of all that when it kicks off October 9: Its opening-night film is a Puerto Rican offering titled Julia, toto en mi, about a real-life poet…
Thursday, October 9 Kimonos and obis off. It’s time for Japanese moon viewing. Since the Heian period (794-1185 AD), gazing upon a perky Japanese bum has been surrounded by ceremony. A special time with hopes for a good harvest and offerings to the lunar god. Oh, right. Moon as in…
Alfre Woodard is the kind of actor who ennobles a film just by her presence, who projects more intent with a probing gaze or quick upturning of chin than most can in a page of dialogue and whose distinctive gifts (an earthy intelligence; luminous, intuitive eyes; and a bearing befitting…
Ongoing For those jaded souls whose bones don’t chill, hit the highway for Terrell. No, not for the mental hospital. Head for the old Verdun estate. Legend has it that in 1901, Baron Michael Verdun, a psychopathic werewolf, built a grotesque house on Voodoo Bayou where he conducted cruel experiments…
10/11 Are you ready for Dallas’ ugliest weekend of the year? No, Ross Perot isn’t taking his family out for ice cream. We’re talking about the swarm of horribly colored football fanatics descending upon the Cotton Bowl, 3750 Midway Plaza in Fair Park, on Saturday for the annual TX-OU game…
Ongoing Fright Fest at Six Flags Over Texas is no small undertaking. To transform the 212-acre theme park into a den of terror, the spooksters use 3,000 yards of spider webs, 450 tombstones and 500 bales of hay…because, well, hay is scary. New to the attractions this year is the…
10/12 It’s not truly fall around here until the public puking starts. It’s always autumn when the frat rats come out, frolicking, binge drinking and sidewalk-hurling for Texas-OU weekend. Simultaneously, the carnival rats emerge all giddy, only to puke up their coveted corn dogs on the scary rides at the…
10/13 The journey of a thousand miles begins with one small step, according to a Chinese proverb. Likewise, the 350-word article on the Shaolin Warriors of China appearance at Bass Performance Hall begins with the small step of surfing the Internet, for a refresher course in the American bible of…
Director Richard Linklater’s The School of Rock imagines, sort of, what might have become of voluble rock snob Barry the morning after his grand finale in Stephen Frears’ adaptation of Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity–after his Marvin Gaye impersonation had faded and been forgotten in the daylight hours, after he quit…
Out of Time, in which we’re to believe 48-year-old Denzel Washington and 32-year-old Sanaa Lathan were high school sweethearts, demands its audience ignore all manner of implausibilities. Chief among them is the behavior of Washington’s Matt Whitlock, chief of police in a tiny coastal town just outside of Miami who…
You gotta love John Sayles. No, really–you gotta, or else a mob of indie-minded cineastes will club you into submission. Sometimes it’s easy to comply, as with City of Hope and Sunshine State, both astute portraits of uniquely American class, race and real estate struggles boiling down to the burning…
As distressing as it is that the Christmas season seems to arrive earlier with each passing year, the idea of Halloween creeping up annually makes us shiver with glee. Whereas the former is driven and distorted by greed, the latter (at least superficially) promotes creativity and a simple bit of…
Thursday, October 2 Without high school marching band, we might never have known the glory of “You Can Call Me Al” and “Crocodile Rock.” But thanks to our state-funded training, we can now delight fellow restaurant patrons with our sing-a-long renditions to the Muzak. And it helped in other ways,…
We want men who can cook, juggle every little thing and also suck it up and swallow it whole. And that’s just what we’ll get on Saturday. Well, kind of. As audience members at McFarlin Auditorium, what we’ll actually get is a man juggling change and a man who swallows…
10/4 You’ve probably heard the story about Miss Lady of the Lake. After a nice day of boating, you see a strange woman in a flowing white dress who cons you with tales of sorrow into offering her a ride home. Though she’s never left a puddle of water drenching…
10/4 Unlike other benefit runs where participants pay a flat entry fee, the AIDS Arms LifeWalk requires runners and walkers to work a little harder by collecting pledges from sponsors, thus helping to spread the message of the annual event. Now in its 13th year, the LifeWalk is a growing…
10/3 Sure, trick-or-treating is an all-American tradition for the Halloween season. And so are those annual parties the more well-off family’s kid is throwing down the street equipped with fake fog, silly spooky sounds at the door and cheesy, “scary” games. This year, why not take the kiddies to something…
10/8 If you don’t think that assassins, despite their “moral flexibility,” can be intelligent, charming or, heck, downright lovable, you should rent Grosse Pointe Blank. (You also don’t want to miss out on John Cusack puncturing a guy’s jugular with a ball point pen.) Or if you’re ready for some…
10/2 If one were to meet a man named Chester Nurdiger, would it be a huge surprise that his wife is sexually frustrated? (“She was like a motor so wound up it might just combust.” Pardon our inner-noir-monologue.) With no offense to the Chesters and Nurdigers of the world, the…
Jack Black first appeared on film as a fanatical Young Republican in Tim Robbins’ 1992 Bob Roberts. Black, then only 23, had already mastered his ability to be simultaneously creepy and comic, a round mound of menace leering in a perpetual deep-focus stare beneath eyebrows that appeared to twitch independently…
The dumbed-down movie version of Frances Mayes’ best-selling travel memoir Under the Tuscan Sun is a virtual case study of Hollywood’s irrepressible urge to lower the bar in the hopes of upping the take. Mayes’ 1996 book is a nicely written, carefully observed meditation on buying a decrepit Italian villa…
