For 14 years now, die-hard patrons of the annual Dallas Video Festival have set themselves up for heartbreak. If I attend the documentary about left-handed gay Soviet filmmakers, I miss the experimental piece that guy in New York did with his cat and various hand-sewn costumes. By choosing Barbara Hammer,…
Paul McGuinness has never thought of himself as a teacher of life lessons, so it comes as a bit of a surprise for him to hear it relayed that Kelly Curtis considers him an adviser–hell, a mentor. It comes as even more of a shock to discover that Curtis recalls…
This is how famous Denis Leary is: He begins and ends a story by saying, “To this day, when I see Mick…,” and by Mick, he means Mick Jagger. They became pals, oh, seven years back, when the Rolling Stones were on that week’s farewell tour, kickin’ it in the…
The auditorium fills for the mandatory meeting just after 10 a.m., brimming with crew chiefs and drivers and hangers-on. There’s Jeff Gordon and Bobby Labonte, Dale Earnhardt Jr. and Tony Stewart and a few other guys you see on SportsCenter, all looking on with passive stares as a NASCAR official…
Hello, what’s this? Why, could it be another cautionary tale from Hollywood about recreational drugs being–alert the media!–not particularly good for people? (If only they could try the same with guns. Messrs. Heston and Silver: You awake yet?) Indeed, with Blow, director Ted Demme (Beautiful Girls, Monument Ave.) has set…
French director Patrice Leconte is a chameleonlike talent: Among his films to reach American screens are the psychological thriller Mr. Hire, the period satire Ridicule and the offbeat comic romance The Girl on the Bridge. But in truth, all of Leconte’s films are romances at heart, though they are often…
Easily the most creepy (and, by far, most interesting) thing about Along Came a Spider, yet another adaptation of one of James Patterson’s alleged mystery novels featuring beleaguered Detective Alex Cross, is how much co-star Monica Potter looks, sounds and acts like Julia Roberts. Granted, it’s hardly a startling revelation…
Somewhere, in deepest New South Wales, Australia, there exists a humble sheep paddock. (In this particular case, the paddock is nearly devoid of sheep–barring the odd sound effect–but never mind that.) The setting is rural, it’s pastoral, it’s quaint as all heck–and it also happens to be hallowed ground for…
Like most institutions that seek to divert children, Dallas Children’s Theatre is serious about mixing entertainment and edification. Surely one reason parents purchase theater tickets is to counterbalance the perceived sugary sleaze of American pop culture with exposure to “finer things” like the stage. But like most of its peers,…
The confluence of pop, op, conceptualism, minimalism, et al in the 1960s and 1970s coughed up video art like a fur ball. The portable video camera provided artists with a tool that had till then been the providence of movie studios with bigger bankrolls and enabled its early experimenters to…
Experiencing Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band from the cushy confines of your living room misses the point and then some, but HBO’s got it live (live on tape, actually) if you want it. It took 27 years to land Springsteen and the boys (and gal, counting Mrs. Boss,…
Few animals have been allowed to remain in the human-centric concrete jungle, not including those that call research laboratories home or are identified using the phrases “fresh” or “Grade A.” That leaves rats, squirrels, cats, dogs, cockroaches and birds. So much for biodiversity. In an ecosystem where teddy bears outnumber…
Ennio Morricone can tell you stories about each of his 400 children–where they were conceived, what they mean to him, why each one remains so singular and special he cannot and will not choose a favorite. He’s proud even of the orphans, the runts, the bastards, the children long ago…
PORT CHARLOTTE, Florida–It felt different. Almost radically so. Same game, sure, but that’s where the similarities ended for him and surely where the exigency began. It was all so fresh, so new–from the superior competition to the expansive crowds to the breadth of the media coverage. It was a lot…
Amid the plethora of films starring Freddie Prinze Jr., Mena Suvari, Chris Klein and Jason Biggs, it’s nice–in theory, at least–to see a contemporary romantic comedy like Someone Like You, where the characters, while hardly over the hill, are all over 30. In practice, however, “nice” is really about as…
Justice may be blind, but vengeance, it turns out, has a very short memory. So it goes in Memento, the much anticipated “puzzle” movie from Christopher Nolan (Following), which–as is already fairly well-known–plays out its plot more or less in reverse. Pitting the protagonist (and us) against short-term amnesia and…
As its title suggests, Spy Kids is an action fantasy aimed primarily at the preteen/early-teen audience. For all its thrills–and it has plenty–it’s strictly a PG film…which is all the more surprising when you consider its source: Robert Rodriguez, master of bloody gunplay and monster films that sometimes even push…
A few years back, when Edward Albee spoke at the Dallas Museum of Art, he set aside a very special few minutes to heap vitriol on the profession of theater criticism and those wannabe artists who flail away with ink-stained claws at the accomplishments of others. His sentiments were hardly…
It’s inevitable that Theatre Three’s production of Art would be greeted with high expectations by those of us who saw the December 1999 touring production that Dallas Summer Musicals brought to the Majestic Theatre. With its sometimes vicious wit and uncomfortably recognizable close-up of the inequalities and manipulations of three…
Renee Gimpel, art dealer, diarist and connoisseur of the human comedy, knew almost everyone in the art market during the tender years of the 20th century and left us wickedly insightful anecdotes about many. One of his best concerns the Fricks, millionaire industrialists who collected old masters, and whose collection,…
UFO investigators have a tough time coming up with anything concrete to support their claims, especially when objects come and go in multiple dimensions and the only witnesses are threatened to silence by a shadowy government that doesn’t officially exist. It is not for lack of trying, though. These pursuants…
When writing about The Second City, the famed Chicago-based improv comedy and satire empire, it’s easy just to talk about the company’s famous alumni. But no matter how many recognizable names are listed (and there are enough to fill this space and more), rehashing previous shows by The Second City,…
