With the rise of Latin Americans as formidable consumers and hotly pursued voters, the world premiere of former Dallas playwright Octavio Solis’ Dreamlandia couldn’t be more propitious. Solis’ map of the shifting fault lines between illusion and reality on the Texas-Mexico border, directed by Richard Hamburger, is the centerpiece of…
It’s easy to compound details and build an ominous “trend” for a whole scene, but one sad development I can confirm in this space: New Theatre Company, which since 1994 has produced some of the most disciplined and adventurous state, regional, and national premieres for Dallas audiences, is moving. Not…
There is a killing late in Gladiator, Ridley Scott’s new heroic epic, and it is one of those wonderfully cathartic slayings that makes a wide-eyed audience rise and cheer. After several brutal battles, after much bloodshed, after considerable suffering both needless and entertaining, a blade finds its mark, and a…
Everybody’s a princess at one point or another. Rich girls work it from birth to final crack-up. Bourgeois girls play the precious ‘n’ misunderstood game through adolescence, shifting it into ruthless ambition shortly thereafter. Poor girls can blow an entire lifetime just screwing up their hair and pretending they’re Galadriel…
In her first role since bagging the 1998 Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress (for L.A. Confidential, the film that should have won Best Picture and Best Director as well), Kim Basinger trembles with fear. Notoriously insecure about appearing on camera, Basinger looks paralyzed by the prospect of doing a…
East-West, the new film from Oscar-winning French director Regis Wargnier (Indochine), is, like Wargnier’s earlier film, a drama about how political circumstances can dominate personal relations. (Also like Indochine, East-West was nominated for an Oscar for Best Foreign Language film, but lost out to Pedro Almodovar’s All About My Mother.)…
The highfalutin soap operas in W. Somerset Maugham’s fiction earned him a huge reading public in his day and made him a favorite of movie producers on both sides of the Atlantic. Maugham’s stories and novels — every one stuffed full of romance, deceit, and tragedy — have inspired nearly…
Pegasus Theatre ought to be aware that one of the most successful Dallas Theater Center shows of this current season was, for all practical purposes, a Pegasus production. Of course, departed director Jonathan Moscone brought in out-of-town actors and designers as well as professional multimedia folks to soup up the…
Get a grip, oh ye of little faith, and bear witness. Finally, without question, there’s irrefutable proof that Dallas can produce damn fine art. Drool-on-your-shirt fine. Lo-and-behold fine. It’s not just the stuff from the handful of local artists picked for the Whitney Biennial in New York City that’s serving…
Hickey B. Good Perhaps if you squint in a semidarkened room, Angstrom Gallery owner David Quadrini would look a little like Elvis Presley. At least, he’d be the one singing “Viva Las Vegas” after the April 22 opening and near-sellout of three concurrent solo exhibitions featuring two Vegas-based artists. One…
The thing that most annoys some people about Sandra Bernhard is what others worship in her. Namely, you never know when she’s being serious or sarcastic. A couple of years ago, when her latest one-woman show I’m Still Here…Damn It! was playing to sold-out crowds in New York City, she…
Wolves always get a bad rap. Bedtime stories say they eat grandmothers, blonde girls in red capes, and little pigs who make bad choices in housing materials. Their beady, glowing eyes and mournful howls inspire nightmares and myths. And, according to Neil Jordan’s bizarre fairy-tale-as-erotica film The Company of Wolves,…
Peter Becker is the most important man in the movie business, even though you have no idea who he is. Becker himself would not cop to such a description; he, like few else in the business called show, does not put himself before the work. To describe what he does…
The voice-mail message begins with the caller identifying himself in a clear, sharp tone: “Hey, this is Chris Thompson, executive producer of Action and Ladies Man, and I hear you’re trying to get a hold of me…” Long pause. “For some ungodly reason.” Then, in a split second, the voice…
After some hectoring and pleading, the Dallas Observer got another crack at USA Film Festival coverage. And if we get our face slapped again, we just hope good intentions and honest impatience justify our impudence. Last year, as you may recall, the Festival chose to deny access to the Observer…
Conrad Hall, who by his own account has been “gainfully employed” behind a film camera since he graduated from UCLA in 1949, is dreaming of his own paradise: a house with five acres of coconut trees on a lagoon some 600 yards from mainland Tahiti. Hall will return there shortly…
Norman Jewison’s filmography is almost unfathomable, as though it’s an amalgam of several directors’ résumés. On the surface, it doesn’t add up; it’s two plus two equaling . How does one reconcile a body of work that includes Doris Day-Rock Hudson films (Send Me No Flowers); slick fashion ads dolled…
Go get a few grains of salt to accompany these observations of tenable consistency and enduring potential: The movie industry is run by big kids; nifty sci-fi trickery may distract an audience from emotional shoals; cops and criminals are divided by a fine line; nostalgia and evil are cheaper by…
You’re just going to have to accept that Natalie Portman and Ashley Judd are far too glamorous for the roles they inhabit in Where the Heart Is. It’s an issue that probably won’t hurt the film’s reception: Remember Julia Roberts in Steel Magnolias? Your average moviegoer loves movie stars and…
Unless you’re iron-willed Margaret Thatcher or some other sort of imperialist nostalgiaphile, it’s hard to get choked up these days about the demise of the Anglo-Irish aristocracy. For one thing, it’s now 80 years after the fact; for another, joint government in Ireland remains a dicey proposition, and the Troubles…
Although its themes are about as revelatory as those of the average “Cathy” comic strip (clothes don’t fit, job too busy, male not clairvoyant, AACK!), there’s something irrefutably charming about Philippa “Pip” Karmel’s debut feature, Me Myself I. The editor of Academy darling Shine has scripted a laundry list of…
If time past and time future all point to the present, wrote T.S. Eliot in Four Quartets, then “all time is unredeemable.” World War II gathered like a flock of vultures as the great poet was scribbling this in England, but the idea that what we regret and what we…
