Consider life’s unbreakable rules. Send Mom flowers on her birthday. Keep your fastball down. Never order lasagna in Des Moines. Don’t go sailing with people you can’t stand. Violation of this last rule has yielded some pretty fair books and movies over the years–Moby Dick and The Caine Mutiny come…
Like the similar, funnier Bring It On, Drumline is intent on proving that marching band participants are genuine athletes. Fair enough: The boot camp-style physical training they go through onscreen will come as an eye-opener to some. Also similar to its cinematic cheerleader predecessor is the notion that at this…
The blood disease porphyria sparked madness in England’s King George III, so its impact on manic Margot (Nicole Garcia) and her hapless daughter Betty (cucumber-cool Sandrine Kiberlain) is about as shocking as a Hoosier mom beating her kid on camera–and as scarring. What’s wonderful about director Claude Miller’s adaptation of…
The 10th Trek film, ostensibly the last featuring the Next Generation crew (or any other, c’mon), plays like a greatest-hits remix; like Die Another Day, it’s bent on resurrecting a moribund franchise by recalling all the things you used to love about it till you grew into big-boy pants. And…
Rob Schneider’s latest look-at-me-I’m-so-cute comedy features the star bumbling around half-clad in Christina Aguilera’s Goodwill donations. He plays a revolting petty thief who magically swaps bodies with a petulant high school cheerleader (Rachel McAdams), sparking roughly a bazillion gags about how funny it is to have a penis. To counterbalance,…
Notes from a network executive’s forthcoming biography, pilfered from the desk of an editor at a major publishing house. This was hard to read, as it was scribbled in crayon on the back of a copy of Highlights taken from a pediatrician’s office. From page 412: “Last week, I met…
Cross Noises Off with Waiting for Guffman and you get Inspecting Carol, Daniel Sullivan’s two-act comedy now playing to well-deserved laughs at Plano Repertory Theatre. This backstage farce about a struggling theater company’s disastrous production of the Dickens Christmas classic builds to a loud, slap-happy conclusion and serves as a…
Tom Berenger achieves the impossible with his portrayal of Paul “Bear” Bryant in the made-for-ESPN The Junction Boys: He’s even more unlikable than he was in Platoon, in which Berenger played the scarfaced C.O. begging for a little friendly fire. Berenger’s Bryant, much like the real (dead) thing, is the…
Perhaps the erudite among you don’t live paycheck-to-paycheck, even in this economy, but we do. Our December paydays aren’t cooperating with Christmas shopping this year, either. We get paid on December 12 and December 26, and even if the accounting grinches turn loose of our petty cash a couple of…
Robert De Niro loves an acting challenge, but lately those tests have been less along the lines of, “Can I convincingly play a boxer?” and more like, “Can I alone be good enough to make this formulaic mess worth watching?” Yes, it was impressive that he played a half-paralyzed stroke…
Transcribed verbatim from the DVD commentary track of Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones, here’s an informative sci-fi concept from director George Lucas: “As we go through the movie, there’s all little funny moments like Jango bumping his head, because in Star Wars one of the Stormtroopers bumps…
Here’s an original idea for a movie: a low-budget, digital video look at the search for love in New York City, in which person A wants to connect with person B, who’s only looking at person C, who’s in pursuit of person D, and so forth, until it all comes…
As heroes go, the two just-released mental patients struggling to make a new life in Peter Næss’ touching social comedy Elling are notably short on glamour. When we meet him, the shy, middle-aged title character, portrayed by an exquisitely subtle actor named Per Christian Ellefsen, is a quivering bundle of…
Only the hardest of humbug hearts could resist the high-gloss charm of Dallas Theater Center’s A Christmas Carol, now onstage at the Arts District Theater. It’s a riotous, expensive-looking rendition of the Charles Dickens classic, crowded with pretty dancing wenches and adorable urchins wassailing around fir trees under garlands of…
You just know the whole director’s commentary thing has gotten way out of control when they’re showing up on porn DVDs; sorry, but didn’t really need to know the fluffer on duty during the filming of Stop! My Ass is on Fire. (Well, come to think of it…) Then there’s…
Want to get a jump on Christmas partying? Hook up with Dallas-Fort Worth’s Colombians and Colombian-Americans, many of whom grew up celebrating Christmas for an entire month. Colombia, a predominantly Roman Catholic nation, begins holiday fiestas December 7 with Dia de las Velitas, a candlelit vigil in honor of the…
The smart sci-fi fan knows that, technically speaking, Steven Soderbergh’s Solaris is not a remake of Andrei Tarkovsky’s film at all, but rather a newly filmed interpretation of a Polish novel penned by Stanislaw Lem. Nonetheless, the new film stands in a mighty big shadow. If someone attempted to make…
It’s doubtful Robert Louis Stevenson imagined his Treasure Island populated by cyborgs and scored to Goo Goo Dolls outtakes; and one has to wonder what the author would have made of his characters being turned into talking and walking dogs and cats that, gulp, copulate and reproduce mangy hybrids. Far…
Being of the minority who did not worship Schindler’s List (vital message, tedious movie), it’s easy to feel skeptical of the preachy delivery of Ararat, which concerns not the Jewish holocaust but the Armenian one, its genocidal forebear of 1915-1918. Armenian-Canadian writer-director Atom Egoyan (The Adjuster, The Sweet Hereafter) has–like…
At the University of Texas at Austin, this was the first offering screened in introductory film classes; if the professor, a man whose knowledge of cinema history was surpassed only by his willingness to share it with everybody all the time anyplace without any prompting whatsoever, didn’t consider it the…
Small-town stud Tully (Anson Mount) works the family farm with his younger brother Earl (Glenn Fitzgerald) and their inexpressive, unsmiling widower dad (Bob Burrus). The sudden possibility that they might lose the farm opens up a trove of disturbing family secrets, challenging Tully’s heretofore shallow nature. Hilary Birmingham–who co-produced (with…
Taking its cue from Christopher Hitchens’ excoriating, similarly titled book (minus the “s” in “Trials”), this terse and compelling documentary presents the case that former Secretary of State and National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger deserves to be tried for war crimes and crimes against humanity, under the standards applied to…
