It all begins with the word. “I believe I may have a first sentence,” murmurs Virginia Woolf (Nicole Kidman, really) to her husband, Leonard (Stephen Dillane), commencing labor on the author’s fourth novel, Mrs. Dalloway. The year is 1921, but skillfully intercut segments illustrate that the book’s heady emotional content…
These are the dog days of January, the poor put-upon month used by studios as a dumping ground for product considered too lethally toxic for release during those real moviegoing months–December, say, when audiences are buzzed on two weeks of vacation and award-contenders do their Oscar striptease and reveal that…
As light and crisp as the bubbles in a Buck’s Fizz, the dialogue in Oscar Wilde’s infrequently performed comedy-melodrama Lady Windermere’s Fan stands as some of the playwright’s best. “I don’t know what society’s coming to,” moans a snooty duchess, “the most dreadful people seem to go everywhere. They certainly…
Things learned from the season premiere of Dinner for Five, the Jon Favreau-hosted Independent Film Channel production in which the Swingers writer-star invites famous pals to spill infamous tales: Director Kevin Smith (Clerks, Mallrats) and Favreau once feuded via the Internet over allegedly disparaging things the latter once said about…
Here’s a black-and-white rhetorical question for you: How many people of the opposite race do you socialize with regularly? Schoolmates, co-workers, your kids’ friends and fellow church members you see on Sunday don’t count. We suspect that it’s not many. And we don’t say this meanly, since the same is…
This is how it works in the modern age: A man writes a book, two other men make a movie based on the book, another man writes a soundtrack to the movie based on the book, then the man who wrote the book writes an essay about his reactions to…
Spike Lee’s adaptation of David Benioff’s 2001 novel The 25th Hour hews closely to the original tale, which the author has adapted in screenplay form: Montgomery Brogan, a working-class white boy who dreamed of being a New York City firefighter till he fell into the soft pile of easy money…
“Cops die daily, and they die bad,” barks manic police lieutenant Henry Oak (Ray Liotta) to undercover narcotics officer Nick Tellis (Jason Patric), revealing both his hardened ‘tude and a little confusion when it comes to adverbs. Welcome to Narc, Paramount Pictures’ bid for a gritty, post-Training Day dirty-cop thriller,…
Those who seek a polar opposite to Michael Caine’s kind-but-firm patriarch Dr. Wilbur Larch in The Cider House Rules will find it in Jim Broadbent’s horrid, one-eyed headmaster, Wackford Squeers, in the new adaptation of Nicholas Nickleby. Author John Irving cribbed extensively from Charles Dickens to create his delightful (and…
According to various unreliable sources on the Internet, Just Married co-stars Ashton Kutcher (forever to be known as the star of Dude, Where’s My Car?) and Brittany Murphy (who wears way too much scary makeup even when she isn’t playing mental patients who’ll never tell) are now actually planning to…
Hello, Godmudda. Hello, fodder for a Pocket Sandwich Theatre comedy whose jokes are so bad one suspects the script was dropped at the front door wrapped around a rotting halibut. Fredo Corleone wasn’t as dumb as The Godmudda–A Mafia Fairy Tale, which tries to blend the Cinderella story with a…
As far as he can remember, he always wanted to be an actor. To him, being an actor was better than being president of the United States. Even before he first wandered into the high school auditorium for an after-school audition, he wanted to be one of them. It was…
This is one of a series of essays in the Dallas Observer’s calendar section demonstrating that some among our staff are, not to put too fine a point on it, one-browed knuckle-draggers. Our subject this week is opera, or specifically The Dallas Opera’s premiere of a new production of Giancomo…
In all, a far better year than any in recent memory, so much so it feels impolite and irresponsible to choose a mere 10 best among the annum’s offerings. This list remained in flux till the last possible moment; five seconds ago it featured, among others, Signs, Full Frontal, Human…
It’s never a good sign when somewhere in the vicinity of half of my most memorable moviegoing experiences in a given year come from reissues of films at least three decades old. But there it is: In my memory banks, 2002 may well be remembered as the year of the…
There have been other films dealing with the Jewish ghettos during the Nazi occupation of Poland–some very good–but The Pianist, the latest feature from Roman Polanski, may be the best. Of course, it starts out with a huge advantage: The 69-year-old Polanski is probably the only working filmmaker to have…
Dallas theater turned out some cruel and freaky work in 2002. In A Clockwork Orange at Quad C Theatre, gangs of cranked-up teens executed beautifully choreographed “ultra-violence.” In Barbette at Kitchen Dog Theater, a Texas-born transvestite committed suicide hanging from a trapeze. In Side Show at Theatre Three, pretty conjoined…
One of the best parts of this gig is the mail. I get it all, from outraged flacks and befuddled tourists to wounded curators and bootlicking publicists to stony silence. But the very best mail is from the artists themselves, especially when, every now and then, an artist bites back…
What kind of dork would go to a midnight screening of Office Space, a movie about working a mind-numbing job without a happy ending? Put simply, if you haven’t been enslaved by bureaucracy and corporate culture yourself, you have no idea how accurate–and therefore funny–this movie actually is. One ongoing…
These chicks dig rock and roll. These chicks also play rock and roll. But, beyond that, these chicks have rocked little folks to sleep and rolled the occasional stroller. That’s because these chicks are Frump, Dallas’ own all-mom garage band. Now imagine asking your mother to turn down that amp…
Everything about Catch Me If You Can, the loosely based-on-fact tale of a teen-ager who swindled millions while posing as, among other things, a Pan Am pilot and doctor and lawyer, is breezy and easy to swallow. Its maker, Steven Spielberg, hasn’t had so much fun in two decades, since…
It’s been nearly three years since Pedro Almodóvar’s All About My Mother won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film. Perhaps it’s in the spirit of spreading things around that Spain has not nominated Almodóvar’s latest, Talk to Her, as their entry this year. Certainly it’s hard to imagine any…
