If we see one more “reason for the season” sweatshirt, we’ll scream. If one more do-gooder rings a bell outside Target, we’ll have to pummel him with one of the “WWJD” paddle-ball games our agnostic father-in-law orders every year–by the dozen–from Oriental Trading Company. When Christmas gets this close, nearly…
Beached WailWe can thank the ’60s beach-party genre for starting a few celluloid trends. Because of Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello, twentysomething actors are allowed to play teenagers. Also, there are the misconceptions that in California high jinks have replaced homework and the parents of cool kids are either never…
Christmastime is here, but for the first time, Charlie Brown’s father will not be around to watch his depressed, round-headed child celebrate the holiday. He will not be in front of the television next week to watch his little boy seek psychiatric help from a nickel-grubbing girl who diagnoses her…
He was always talented, always smooth slashing to the goal or pulling up for a long jumper. Won back-to-back state championships at nearby Kimball High. Big-name schools like Arizona and USC tried to get his attention, did everything but wear hot-pink lipstick and stuff their bras. From there everyone knew…
Day One: It was just part of the job, just another movie on another afternoon. This one promised to be no more special than any other, save for the casting of Meg Ryan and Russell Crowe. Proof of Life was the movie during which they fell in love, or whatever…
About halfway through the megabudget mountain climbing adventure Vertical Limit, even the most rugged, thrill-hungry disaster movie fans may find themselves going numb. Not from the howling weather on the icy faces of K2, in the Himalayas, where the action supposedly takes place. Not from oxygen deprivation. Not even from…
The Saturday matinee performance of A Christmas Carol at Dallas Theater Center’s Arts District Theater was between half and three quarters full, but when you consider these people had set aside ticket money and prime mall time to soak in Dickens at DTC, there was an odd taciturn air drifting…
Don’t look for John Hartley on one of Jerry Springer’s “Are You My Baby’s Daddy?” segments. He doesn’t yet have any actual children; his paternal tendencies wouldn’t show up on a DNA test. The prolific but relatively un-shown painter is best known as the brains, vision, and sweat-investor behind Gallery…
You’ve sipped their wine, chugged their beer, and eaten their stale cheese. You’ve achieved opening-night art-lover status, and, as pleased as local gallery owners are to see your face once a month like clockwork when there’s a free art party, it’s time to pay up. The holiday season promises payback…
Speed DemonsWhen used in advertising or marketing, the word “extreme” should be as useless as the phrase “alternative music.” Each is too often used to describe mainstream products, the sort of stuff created only to exploit the youth culture for profits. But, unlike most things called “alternative music”–which ceased being…
Tonight was one of those nights. He hates those nights. They’re tough to deal with, tougher still when reporters come around asking questions, revisiting his fresh pain. Christian Laettner sits in front of his locker, one of several in the Mavericks posh dressing room. Unlike his teammates, the 6-foot-11 forward/center…
Thirty-five years ago, at the height of Beatlemania–the phenomenon, not the stage show–some cynics pooh-poohed the notion that the unprecedented hysteria around the Four Lads from Liverpool would endure. (“What are you going to do when the bubble bursts?” a smug, apparently drunk Tallulah Bankhead sneered at John and Paul…
We’ve entered that time of the year when those of us who bitch about plastic sentiment and sequin-sewn optimism during the other 11 months now complain that there isn’t enough of it–or rather, that the treacle we’re being served lacks variety. What’s up with us? Even when somebody does try…
Until now the revisionist media tried to convince us that we missed out on something really big if we didn’t experience the revolutionary social changes and psychedelia of the ’60s. They made everyone appear to be either a mini-skirted model, a bearded protester, or a mind-expanding musician decked out in…
Webb SightsResolve to break free of other tired old holiday traditions. We suggest a mind-numbing, radio-blasting road trip this weekend to Waxahachie. Really. Get the hell out of town and escape to the Webb Gallery’s consistent, artful take on the Twilight Zone. Proprietors Bruce and Julie Webb cultivate quirky, obsessive,…
Unbreakable is such a quiet film that whenever a character speaks above a whisper, it sounds like the shattering of glass in a monastery. It’s also a terribly sad movie; almost no one cracks a smile or a joke, and everyone wears the look of someone who’s just spent the…
The moods of Kenneth Lonergan’s You Can Count on Me are so artfully mingled that it’s difficult to get a fix on this highly personal independent feature. Set in a quiet little town in upstate New York’s lovely Catskill Mountains, it is at once a drama about the unresolved traumas…
If the concept of dubious celebrity Ben Affleck romping in a water park with cinematic darling Gwyneth Paltrow and two adorable moppets does not inspire in you spasms of dizziness and nausea, then you may find plenty to tolerate in Bounce, the new romantic dramedy from writer-director Don Roos. This…
Playwright Nicky Silver insists he wrote The Food Chain, which is enjoying a raucous if sometimes shrill run at Fort Worth’s Circle Theatre, as relief from a more painful play he had to discontinue. Some may think this is the equivalent of choosing, say, electric shock to the tongue over…
You must call it curious that the nontraditional holiday meal of Charles Dickens served by Kitchen Dog Theater is called Act of Passion. They didn’t christen it so, of course. Playwright John Tyson, currently a company member at Houston’s Alley Theatre, chose to plunge through the great Victorian moralist’s surface…
The reports of Katherine Wagner’s imminent “death” are not greatly exaggerated. On December 15, the executive director of the Dallas Visual Art Center will succumb, after 11 years in one of the hottest seats in the Dallas art scene, to what she calls the “modern woman’s malady.” She won’t literally…
Art galleries and museums ought to get mad because the Internet isn’t working out so well for them. The Net sucks the life out of art; even high-resolution images look like something you’d see if you were hanging your head out of the window of a speeding car with your…
