Nobody can convey more, doing nothing, than Billy Bob Thornton. His minimalist style is appropriate for the ironically named Levity, but what is conveyed never quite generates the emotional charge of Sling Blade or Monster’s Ball. Writer-director Ed Solomon is best known as the screenwriter of the two Bill &…
Perhaps only a fanatical Russian filmmaker, steeped in a history as ruthless and magnificent as the nation’s harsh winters and endless landscapes, could have dreamed up and executed such an audacious plan: an 87-minute, dreamlike journey through 300 years of Russian/Soviet history, told in a single, uncut Steadicam shot that…
I didn’t lose $100 playing poker last night. I paid $100 for poker lessons–a Hold ‘Em tutorial, to be straight with you, though if I’d actually seen a straight during four hours of play, the instructional rates might have been slightly less steep. Last night, I became, more or less,…
The plot thickens. In any decent stage play, that’s what usually occurs around the 20-minute point in Act 1. We get some conflict, some trouble. Stuff starts to happen between protagonist and antagonist. Blanche DuBois moves into the Kowalskis’ place, cramping Stanley’s style. Felix and Oscar have a tiff over…
Marble shooting is so satisfying it’s easy to become passionate or even obsessive about it. There’s care taken to arrange the targets in a perfect formation after choosing the perfect ledge upon which to set them. There’s the weightiness of the rifle, a .22 perhaps, and the cold feel of…
Thursday, May 15 A lunar eclipse may be less end-of-the-world-ish and happen more frequently than its solar counterpart, but it’s still pretty cool. For one, you don’t need those dorky eye protectors to watch as Earth’s shadow eats the moon. And, secondly, the moon is made of cheese (which is…
“The Beam Walk,” “Bed of Nails” and “Ball of Danger” all sound like they should be episodes of Buck Rogers. In fact, they are the situations that make up Risk! at the Fort Worth Museum of Science and History. The interactive exhibit offers insight into risk and risk assessment. For…
5/19 The last time we saw Mary Tyler Moore give a speech, she was in front of a club for divorced people telling them that she wasn’t actually divorced, that she had joined the group under false pretense in order to qualify for a group rate for a trip to…
5/16 This is a story about a boat race, so let’s talk about baseball. First off, an admission for all you baseball fans: We’re stupid. All those subtleties and chess-like strategies, the Zen-like purity of the game? Don’t see it, never did. On our fun-o-meter, watching a baseball game ranks…
5/20 You can go in a car. You can come from afar. You can arrive by train or by private plane. You can hitchhike like a hobo or bounce in on a pogo. It doesn’t matter where you’re at, the time has come to see the Cat. “What Cat is…
5/17 It’s nearly summer in Deep Ellum. The bare midriffs and pierced navels are just beginning to hatch from their shells and peek out into the world. The vomit and urine are starting to bake onto the pavement, the smell fresh and brand-new all over again, but changed slightly by…
5/15 Things found while cleaning a closet: three roaches (one for smoking), one skeleton and a Robert Schimmel interview transcript c. 2001, from which only a few words were excised for a short piece written the last time Schimmel was at the Addison Improv, 4980 Belt Line Road, where he…
In March 2002, days before President Bush was scheduled to visit Peru, a car bomb exploded near the U.S. embassy in Lima, killing nine and injuring dozens. Government officials, here and in Peru, blamed the attack on Shining Path–a Marxist terrorist organization with roots dating to the 1960s, though it…
Neil LaBute is back to his old self, and the cinematic world is a better place for it. Honestly, what was he thinking when he made Possession? Did the charges of misogyny, still lingering from In the Company of Men and Your Friends & Neighbors, get to him so much…
What a strange enterprise, making a movie about reading a book. It’s the kind of paradox philosophy students chew over at 3 o’clock in the morning–and a prospect any Hollywood producer would flee from as fast as his Ferragamos could carry him. But for Mark Moskowitz, a lifelong bibliophile re-examining…
Long ago Eddie Murphy had grown tired of Eddie Murphy parts: the fast-talking high-jiver, the preening put-on. Even before he began parodying himself in Bowfinger and Showtime and I Spy, the latter two perhaps accidentally, he accepted high-paying roles in low-rent movies that neutered and humiliated the character he had…
Whoever said that “laughter is the most subversive weapon of all” could have been talking about Palestinian director Elia Suleiman’s sly and corrosively funny political comedy Divine Intervention. A film-festival favorite both in and outside the United States (it won the Special Jury Prize at last year’s Chicago International Film…
Two women, dressed in standard waitstaff uniforms, emerge from the bar and into the well-appointed lobby of the hotel built 90 years ago by beer magnate Adolphus Busch, who tried to bring the Jazz Age to what would become a Muzak town. About 50 feet away, an interviewer and his…
Bat Boy just wants to be loved. Is that so wrong? In the creepy, funny, disturbing Bat Boy: The Musical, now playing at Theatre Three, a feral creature emerges from the depths of a West Virginia cave and tries to find his place in the world. With pointy incisors and…
Winslow Homer is one of those rare topics on which the hoi polloi and the critics have always agreed. Nearly a century after his death, he retains the critical and popular acclaim that followed him through life; from Robert Hughes to Meyer Schapiro, critics who couldn’t agree on the time…
The pinnacle of our public television contribution history came when we weren’t even old enough to have an allowance. We were in preschool (or would have been if we hadn’t cried and screamed until the teacher called our mom to pick us up early…and never come back). We cried and…
Thursday, May 8 The two raunchiest and yet completely enthralling autobiographies we’ve ever read: Klaus Kinski’s Kinski Uncut and Lenny Bruce’s How to Talk Dirty and Influence People. Their juxtaposition of real-life heartache and happiness with gutter-dwelling and porn-ish anecdotes is a literary treat when well-written. OK, so no one’s…
