It’s not yet noon on a sleepy Saturday. The skies are ash-colored and dreary, and the wind has some chill in it. The kind of day that’s good for staying hugged up in your bed, sleeping away last night’s hangover and today’s cheerless reality. But this is one of the…
We can run, we can hide, we can even try switching films, but there’s just no escaping that pesky Gene Hackman. He starred in The Conversation, he is ubiquitous, and revere him we must–virtually every single time we go to the movies. (There’s even a song by Robyn Hitchcock about…
In David Maquiling’s quirky little first feature, Too Much Sleep, a rudderless 24-year-old who lives at home with his mother and works nights as a security guard must go on a quest. Rising lazily from his bed, he sets out into the tidy suburbs of New Jersey to track down…
It’s a scenario we’re all familiar with by now: young single guys in search of hot babes, firing one-liners at each other, making pop-cultural references ad nauseam, and ultimately finding out that women are somewhat less shallow than they’ve been led to believe. At least, it’s a scenario you know…
“Do you know what a wild bird’s tongue looks like?” a caged Evie (Sue Birch) asks her despairing and restless daughter Maxine (Susan Sergeant). Evie’s describing a secret trauma that I won’t reveal in this review. “Black, flattened, moving splinters. And the sounds they make with tongues like that. Horrible.”…
One of the most unnatural things you’ll ever encounter in modern and contemporary art is a representation of nature. It’s one of the few constants in visual art during the past century. From the tail end of post-Impressionism through futurism, Dada, surrealism, abstract expressionism, Op, Pop, and the endless waves…
Believe it or not, there is such a thing as palate fatigue, a condition whereby the taste buds peter out. But you’d never know it by listening to expert wine tasters. Because while their mouths say “cassis with the crisp horizontal aspects of weed ambling symmetrically into exuberant and lively…
Guitar shows and sci-fi conventions always bring out a special type of person. One wouldn’t think guitars could be lumped in with tri-corders, but the difference between a sci-fi convention and a guitar show is not as great as you might think. The genetic pool that created the person wearing…
Gil Cates takes a long, deep breath before answering the question: Is producing the Academy Awards show the ultimate no-win situation? Cates has produced nine of the past 11 Oscar telecasts, and he returns March 25 after a year’s layoff; for those scoring at home, Cates is not to blame…
To keep it simple, Enemy at the Gates plays like a cross between the PlayStation game Medal of Honor, a World War II Nazi-shoot-’em-up viewed through a sniper’s scope, and a Harlequin romance novel. It’s history lesson as video game, video game as soap opera, soap opera as highbrow drama,…
It’s always dangerous, when describing a film, to label it as “whimsical.” For one thing, it’s often hard to get a bead on what exactly that means. Then, once you get some idea, you realize that it generally means either (a) a movie that’s trying to be funny but isn’t;…
The heroine of Andrucha Waddington’s Me, You, Them is a force of nature who holds men in her thrall and deftly reshapes them to suit life. Without knowing it, they fall prey to her charms, her spirit, her very scent. But she’s no Cleopatra dripping with jewels, no Lucrezia Borgia…
I haven’t been too keen on Dallas Theater Center artistic director Richard Hamburger’s leviathan takes on musicals (although anything performed in that aircraft hangar known as the Arts District Theater has got to be stretched to fit), but I’ve adored his similar outsized approach to classical works. Memories of Hamburger’s…
Dallas has always hated its image. If you want to see goose bumps sprout on local politicos and moguls, just allude to the stereotype: the burg that killed Kennedy, full of squillionaire John Birchers and real-live Beverly Hillbillies, where every other car is a pickup and every other pickup packs…
Writer-director Mike Judge doesn’t sound nearly as much like Hank Hill, the character he created and has voiced for 100 episodes of Fox’s King of the Hill, as you want him to. But when discussing his TV habits, the Austin resident does slide into an enthusiastic technical description of his…
Our fascination with miniatures begins in childhood. Children love to have control of a world where the roles are reversed, and everything is miraculously smaller than they are. Many adults still love their train sets and dollhouses, but it is the privileged few who can find time in a hectic…
One can only imagine the pitch meeting at which comedian-turned-film actor Denis Leary told ABC programming execs he wanted to write and star in a show about a pill-popping, Scotch-swilling, chain-smoking, adulterous New York City cop who utters obscenities as casually as he exhales. It’ll be a 30-minute show, Leary…
Van Gogh was a lunatic who cut off his ear. Picasso was a self-absorbed cur who abused women. Warhol turned out to be a weird, desperate loner, Basquiat a doomed junkie. Try as he might, shriveled little Toulouse-Lautrec failed miserably at romance. As for El Greco’s explosive affair with that…
Director John Herzfeld’s last feature, the droll and underrated 1996 2 Days in the Valley, was a more than adequate counterbalance to the catastrophe of his first feature, Two of a Kind, a 1983 John Travolta vehicle that, together with Moment by Moment, put its star on the fast track…
Hollywood appears to be developing a healthy sense of humor about Valentine’s Day, which, from this cynic’s perspective, is a good thing. In the new millennium, rather than dole out romantic trifles like Return to Me as per the usual plan, we’ve seen Valentine (bitter ex-nerd cuts beautiful people to…
Over my five years-plus stint as a theater critic in this town, actor after actor has told me that after the experience of directing themselves in a play, they’d never do it again. (Having seen some of the results of this overburdening of theatrical responsibilities, I have been tempted to…
Nothing nudges common sense out of any fruitful discourse quite like nudity. Ever since Homo sapiens began covering their bodies with “clothing,” from animal hides to Anna Sui, the necessity has arisen at some point or another to toss it off. The reaction to the absence of clothing, however, has…
