Thursday, May 29 Joni Mitchell says, “They paved paradise and put up a parking lot.” So what if it’s your mother’s cemetery plot instead of paradise and a supermarket instead of that parking lot? Suzan-Lori Parks assigns that li’l problem to Billy, the main character of Parks’ novel Getting Mother’s…
We had no idea how much trouble Sandra Bullock’s career was in until we heard about Top Speed coming soon to a theater near us. The final film in the trilogy of Speed action flicks, Top Speed takes place when, on their honeymoon, Annie Porter (Bullock) and Alex (played by…
6/1 There’s a lot more to Latin music than salsa and merengue. Check out KNON 89.3-FM’s fourth annual Latin Energy Festival, one of the summer’s first all-day concerts, to get a rich sampling of modern Latin music sounds–Norteno, rock en Español, Latin rap, hip-hop, Latin dance, freestyle and more. Featured…
5/30 The suits invented the charity golf tournament, not the jocks. And why wouldn’t they? It’s the perfect ploy to play all day and get paid for it. The company pays while you play, and any self-respecting golf tournament will have the beer iced up and flowing by the time…
6/4 Every third-grader one day will be a teen-ager, which means the dance club get-down will undoubtedly occur. Why not start them out early by sending them to the library to get their groove on Wednesday at 3:30 p.m. The Dallas Office of Cultural Affairs Neighborhood Touring Program will feature…
5/30 It’s gonna be tough, but at no point in the following will the author resort to that old bromide, “I don’t know what’s art, but I know what I like.” I don’t know what’s art. Let’s just leave it at that. For example, I’ve always been curious about people…
5/29 Two words that strike fear into the heart of wedding planners, caterers and Vera Wang: “old maid.” Despite the array of Bride’s, Modern Bride, Southern Bride and Neurotic Bride magazines (no, really, there should be Neurotic Bride magazine) that our old college chums studied religiously, we chose to never…
Many moviegoers see hyperactive Jim Carrey as the second coming of Jerry Lewis, but no one’s ever mistaken him for God. Clearly, he’d like to change that–at least for now, at least at the box office. Hey, you’d feel the same way if your last movie were The Majestic. In…
Occasionally I can be convinced it’s the singer, not the song. I’ve no love for Britney Spears’ “Baby One More Time,” but can’t get enough of Brit band Travis’ laconic redo of said iconic single, which squeezes out the then-teen temptress’ toxic sugar till it’s just a bittersweet lament. On…
French putz Xavier (Romain Duris) is depressed. The poor guy lives in Paris, has Amélie’s Audrey Tautou as a girlfriend, eats gourmet vegan dinners prepared for him by his free-spirited mother and is being set up for a graduate degree in economics by a friend of his father’s. “I don’t…
Shortly after saying “I do,” Jane, the main character in Ground Zero Theater Company’s strange, sexy, wonderful new one-act play 10:10, decides she won’t after all. At her wedding reception, Jane locks eyes with Randy, the humpy half-brother of her shlumpy new husband, Gregger. In an impulsive move she will…
The only time we’ve paddled across a body of water in a canoe was in Girl Scout camp one summer in elementary school. We were terrified to wiggle or exert too much force, convinced after watching weeks and weeks of summer camp movies that we’d rock the boat and be…
Thursday, May 22 Casting a Spell: Winslow Homer, Artist and Angler has caused a whirlwind of traffic from both art lovers and fishing enthusiasts alike. In conjunction, Fort Worth’s Amon Carter Museum offers a special gallery talk today from 12:15 p.m. to 12:45 p.m. led by docent Alan Laureyns and…
Was a time when Hong Kong cinema was considered exotica by the mainstream, as wow as the most spaced-out sci-fi and as now as the most indie cinema. But with the co-opting of John Woo, who traded bullets for boredom; and Jackie Chan, the Harold Lloyd of HK who’s quickly…
5/22 We are impressed with all the good things people had to say about comic hypnotist Flip Orley. Things like, “I don’t think I’ve laughed so hard in my life.” “But wait a minute,” we thought. “This guy’s a hypnotist. He tricks people into believing things.” Once we realized that,…
5/22 Her daily workout includes two dozen chin-ups with a 25-pound weight fixed to her waist, three sets of 300-pound leg squats and something called “the woodchop.” Out where they park the courtesy Buicks, we bet Swedish golf sensation Annika Sorenstam could kick the butts of at least half the…
5/24 Still embarrassed, but still laughing, about the old Saturday Night Live bit with Tim Meadows as a camp counselor, herding the little black kids onto the bus? “Noxema, Chlamydia, Trojan, let’s go!” he said, launching into a memorable and controversial roster that ridiculed so-called “ethnic” names. Don’t let your…
5/22 We don’t practice Santeria. We ain’t got no crystal ball. (Though we do keep a couple of Magic 8 Balls around.) Yet, in your future we see a journey. You will be driving down Hall Street and feel a strange urge to turn onto Lee Parkway. Obey your instincts…
5/24 “Dance is just like life,” Ann Williams once told me. “It’s an educational process.” The founder/artistic director of Dallas Black Dance Theatre put her toe shoes where her mouth was three years ago and created a second string of young, talented dancers and emerging choreographers who could learn, side…
Talk about tough acts to follow: The original 1999 Matrix, a critical and commercial smash, came almost as a revelation out of nowhere–if the combination of Joel Silver, Warner Bros. and roughly 60 million bucks qualifies as “nowhere.” After more than four years, The Matrix Reloaded–the first of two sequels…
Ross Hunter, dead seven years, hasn’t been this alive at the movies since the 1950s and ’60s, when he produced some of the weepiest melodramas and cheeriest romantic comedies ever to barely stick to the screen. His ghost has been wandering up and down the aisles ever since Don Simpson…
Forthcoming is an impressive collection of expensive junk amassed for a movie The New York Times predicted four years ago had “big prospects as a cult classic,” most notably a video game (Enter the Matrix, its very title a command to reach into your back pocket) and a DVD collection…
