Times certainly have changed. Twenty years ago, a musical about an East German transsexual rock singer would have premiered in one of New York’s off-off-Broadway theaters or cabarets, run for a couple of weeks and remained the pleasant memory of a select few. But when John Cameron Mitchell’s Hedwig and…
There are those who would insist the best thing to have ever happened to James Dean was his death–at an early age, in a violent car wreck, sitting behind the wheel of a Porsche Spyder. What the crash destroyed, history left intact. We did not have to watch him grow…
Matt Stone has little time to talk. It’s Tuesday, July 17, 1 p.m. in Los Angeles, yet Stone and Trey Parker have yet to finish a television show that will debut some 30 hours from now–an episode of South Park titled “Terrance and Garfunkel,” in which the farting, fighting Canadian…
Barry Bonds, the San Francisco Giants’ outfielder/malcontent/ball basher, is here today. He leads the free world in home runs this season with 40. He’s been here for the past two days, taking aim at the short right-field porch at the Ballpark in Arlington. The wall is a mere 325 feet…
There are scenes in Tim Burton’s Planet of the Apes redo so hysterical they drown out minutes’ worth of dialogue that follow, which is hardly a knock. Indeed, the film is often so comical, so ridiculous in that self-aware wink-wink sort of way, it plays like a parody of the…
If there’s any justice in moviedom, this summer’s feel-good hit will be an unassuming Dutch comedy called Everybody’s Famous! Defying long odds, writer-director Dominique Deruddere has taken a couple of shopworn subjects–the public obsession with celebrity and the ineptitude of amateur criminals–and parlayed them into an original and inventive farce…
Actor “Beat” Takeshi Kitano has built an international reputation over the past decade, primarily through a series of ultra-hard-boiled crime films in which he plays either a cop or a felon. With the exception of Gonin (1995; released in the United States in 1998), which was directed by Takeshi Ishii,…
When British theater historian J.C. Trewin referred to Agatha Christie’s stage plays as “a Midas gift to the theater,” he was referring to commercial rather than artistic gold. The woman who remains one of the best-selling, most-translated authors in publishing history mistrusted film as a medium for her blood-soaked tales…
For months, I’ve had in my possession a video cassette of Kirikou and the Sorceress, a 1998 French-made gem that only received its first Dallas screenings last February. Local filmmaker John Carstarphen, whose D-Studios has been handling distribution, gave it to me in April, but the tape soon enough disappeared…
Picture my recent lazy Sunday afternoon: The cable is out, but luckily a retrospective on Animal House is on network television. The first hour includes interviews with cast and crew that attest to the importance of the film; the two-hour movie follows. Fifteen minutes into Animal House, I wonder why…
Robert Scott Crane insists he had no idea that people would be so fascinated with his famous father’s penis (or is that his father’s famous penis?). “We knew it would be big,” Scotty Crane says, “but we didn’t know how big.” He’s talking not about the member in question–of its…
A third Jurassic Park movie was inevitable, given that the second shattered box office records. But when you have one of the hottest box office properties of all time, isn’t it worth taking a little time to craft it? Just because you know it can only be better than The…
A year ago, John Cusack was smarting over his breakup with Catherine Zeta-Jones, who, he lamented, was “out of my class–too smart, too pretty, too much.” He couldn’t figure out why such a self-absorbed glamour doll was going out with such a regular-Joe schmo in the first place; he waited…
Saturday night, my ears rang from a boot to the forehead provided by One Good Beating, the dramatic highlight of 2001’s Festival of Independent Theatres. Theatre Quorum’s look at a grown-up brother and sister attempting to avenge childhood wounds inflicted by their poisonous father rose a little above the ranks…
The key that may provide an entryway into the clean, crisp work of painter John Wilcox in Chapel, on view at the Barry Whistler Gallery, is serendipitously found on the wall that serves as the connective route from the gallery’s main space to the smaller gallery in the rear. The…
The biggest problem with the typical all-ages show is that it usually takes place when the sun is still up. And, Lord knows, it’s next to impossible to make rock happen before sundown. Making things more difficult, the show often happens outdoors underneath an oppressive sun that changes the challenge…
Though Webster’s, American Heritage and even Oxford’s Dictionary have failed to notice, possums aren’t just American marsupials with prehensile tails and opposable thumbs. Dame Edna–besides making Elton John and Dynasty-era Joan Collins look underdressed and underprimped–has given that frequent roadkill a second life as her beloved nickname for her even…
It took awhile to register–and not because of my holiday hangover. There, on the Dallas Mavericks site, the team announced the members of its television and radio broadcast team for the 2001-02 season. They weren’t trying to hide it. They even sent me the press release via e-mail. This is…
Back in her early teens, Reese Witherspoon proved herself a terrific actress in her big-screen debut, Man in the Moon in 1991. Since then, she’s done first-rate work in critical hits like Pleasantville, cult faves like Freeway and Election and underrated gems like Best Laid Plans. So how is it…
Even more than the recent Depression-era comedy O Brother, Where Art Thou?, the turn-of-the-century drama Songcatcher is an absolute treasure trove of old-timey, traditional folk music. Set in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Appalachia in 1907, the film follows city-bred musicologist Dr. Lily Penleric (Janet McTeer) as she traverses the…
Thirty minutes into Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, I realized I had no idea what was going on…and could not have cared less. The New Age-tinged tale set 60 years in the future–about an alien infestation and the dueling schemes to eradicate it from the planet, one of which could…
In the movies, dead husbands and dearly departed boyfriends have an irksome habit of revisiting the women who once loved them–usually at inconvenient moments. Consider Demi Moore in Ghost. Poor thing had to put up with the dramatically challenged shade of Patrick Swayze, who droned on and on about a…
