When a friend asked a few days before Halloween whether I thought we could get away with trick-or-treating–ya know, for the candy–I didn’t automatically say yes. Or no. I just let the idea hang with a noncommittal “Yeah, that would be funny.” It’s an unwritten rule that using fake blood,…
From here, the star doesn’t shine as brightly as it once did. The blue isn’t as deep. The silver isn’t as lustrous. From here, the future seems less certain, the past more distant. The salary figures appear more daunting, the talent less talented, the injuries more overwhelming. From here, problems…
The soon-to-be-talked-about sensations in Darren Aronofsky’s Requiem for a Dream include three or four flashing, near-subliminal montages that combine an eye’s iris and dilating pupil, an extreme close-up of heroin cooking in a teaspoon, and a sucking hypodermic needle; a surpassingly frightening sequence in which Ellen Burstyn, in the midst…
There once was a man, and he called himself Seuss, Who wrote the best children’s books ever produced. With drawings elaborate, and tales subtly moral Of his greatness, not even this critic would quarrel. Alas, he’s now dead, and so all is not groovy, For someone said, “I know! Let’s…
Refreshingly, the biggest wonder about the new Arnold Schwarzenegger ride is not that human cloning has become a reality, nor that the America of the future (“sooner than you think,” as an opening caption ominously suggests) very closely resembles present-day Vancouver, British Columbia, in Canada. It’s not even that technological…
Given the stress and emotional turmoil associated with family holidays, in the cinema, as in life, it’s very peculiar that anyone feels obliged to entertain the notion of Thanksgiving anymore. Really, thanks for what, exactly? Jammed freeways? Delayed flights? Overcrowded supermarkets? Big, dead birds? Witchhunts? Territorial conquest and genocide? Well,…
As an area of academic study, art history is a ridiculously young enterprise. To be sure, formal art education has long existed, and the European aristocracy could always just look at the walls. But the formal, ivory-tower study of art history qua history is a recent development. Begun at Harvard…
I have been neither fan nor foe of hip-hop. Most of my limited experience with the music has been filtered through the scrim of a good 15 years’ worth of near-hysterical mass media scrutiny. I have listened to it as “a cultural phenomenon” or “a social expression” rather than as…
This fall, two local film festivals celebrate their second birthdays, and already both have learned to run before they bothered to crawl. The Vistas Film Festival, which had its run last month, proved that no line exists between “great Latin cinema” and “great cinema”; Vistas featured some of the best…
I’ve lived in several run-down houses in Denton. One was a two-bedroom house that I shared with four roommates. We drank a lot and talked about how we were destined to rule the world because of our wonderful ideas. Rent was $125 a month, and I spent more money on…
Brute ForceIf we were as smart as writer Dorothy Parker, we’d try to paraphrase her infamous maxim that “you can lead a horticulture, but you can’t make her think” and poke fun–or a very sharp, pointed stick–at some of the freak shows going on around Dallas that are calling themselves…
No one likes to be seen as the roadblock to a revolution. The unfortunate soul–or the dumb bastard–who chooses to impede progress is likely to be mowed down by those charging toward tomorrow. He will become a thing to be wiped off the shoes of those who march, march, march…
November may mean Thanksgiving to most of you, but in the film biz it means a rush of “serious” films trying to gouge an impression into the short memories of Oscar voters. This shouldn’t be a bad thing, but since the relationship between “Oscar” and “actually interesting filmmaking” is nearly…
Little Nicky will redefine the phrase “worst movie ever,” because it might actually be the worst movie ever. Never again will one be able to so casually sling around that phrase about, say, anything produced by Jerry Bruckheimer or anything starring Richard Grieco or Robert Davi or Rodney Dangerfield (who,…
If you’re planning to take a look at Antony Hoffman’s Red Planet, it is highly advised that you squint. This way, instead of observing a facile romance lightly spiced with danger and heavily laden with rawkin’ effects, you’ll see the movie for what it really is: a cadre of little…
At first glance, the new Japanese import Non-Stop seems to be a crude knockoff of German director Tom Tykwer’s wonderful Run Lola Run, but Non-Stop was released in Japan (under the title Dangan Runner) in 1996, two years before Lola was shot. Could Tykwer have seen the film at a…
“I don’t rant and rave about the terror of our racist society,” the playwright and screenwriter Lonne Elder III once remarked. “It is never directly stated; it’s just there.” Elder, who died four years ago and is probably more famous for writing the scripts to Sounder and A Woman Called…
Pity the poor art student; or better yet, imagine what it would be like to be one. Wriggle your toes into a pair of badly bruised Birkenstocks and walk around. Pretend you’re young and enthusiastic, and people keep telling you how talented you are. Imagine you’ve had the 10th fight…
A music fan from Plano introduced me to The Flaming Lips. He was a typical suburban misfit–dark, twisted, a disposable income–who played the album In a Priest Driven Ambulance as we sat Indian-style on a cigarette-stained carpet in a room with greasy handprints around the light switches. He made sure…
Of Mice and MenDon’t look now, but according to the metroplex arts calendars, it’s about time for the holiday hysteria to kick in. My friend, Jeffrey Cranor, puts it best: “You can’t throw a fruitcake around here without hitting an Ebenezer Scrooge or a Mouse King.” And it’s not enough…
Let’s get this out of the way right now, because so many of you will find this hard to believe: Yes, Mad magazine still exists. It is still being published 48 years after it was created by Harvey Kurtzman and William Gaines, neither of whom lived long enough to see…
It’s Friday. Only a few miles down the road, college kids and twentysomethings imbibe libations. They stand in line from Deep Ellum to Lower Greenville, waiting to shake their trunks in the ass-clubs, hoping for relief from everyday drudgery. House music plays. Shots are slugged. Digits are exchanged. Brenden Morrow,…
