After last fall’s sumptuously attired Gorey Stories at the Deep Ellum Center for the Arts, Our Endeavors partners Scott Osborne and Patti Kirkpatrick wanted to perform a similar feat — a smartly designed, stylized performance that would be suitable to its season but not tied down by one particular mood…
Lately, it seems that even the most successful film adaptations don’t have much more in common with the books that spawned them than the title and some of the characters’ names — at best. Curtis Hanson’s L.A. Confidential, for instance, had little to do with James Ellroy’s L.A. Confidential, apart…
From its opening moments, The Road to El Dorado looks and sounds oddly out of time, as though it were removed only yesterday from a time capsule sealed and buried in 1972. With its Peter Max visuals and Elton John vocals, it’s a decidedly unhip piece of work from the…
Not so long ago, The Skulls would have starred Tom Cruise — but in which role? He could have been either lead; the one he didn’t choose could have landed in the lap of, say, James Spader or Rob Lowe. One can easily imagine Cruise as Luke McNamara, the beefy,…
What is it with filmmakers and mental retardation? It seems as though use of the differently abled as a central theme ranks second only to troubled childhood when it comes time to make a “personal” film. The connection between the two is fairly obvious: the artist as gentle innocent besieged…
Rod Lurie’s Deterrence is a bush-league foreign-policy debate disguised as a movie. There may come a day when Paramount Classics ships every print it has struck of this inert and tedious piece of business off to selected political science and social philosophy classes and tries to forget about the whole…
In the opening scenes of Price of Glory, set in the late 1970s, a young prizefighter named Arturo Ortega (Jimmy Smits) loses a career-making bout. He earns a few grand, but he’s plainly washed up, and we’re meant to see that it’s his greedy manager’s fault; like Antonio Banderas in…
At or soon after the start of the 20th century, the almost mythical George Bernard Shaw became a vegetarian; a socialist who believed property ownership amounted to public theft; a fervent (and minority) defender of Oscar Wilde during that playwright’s gory public dismantling; and a champion of working women who…
If the version of Cabaret opening at Fair Park Music Hall April 4 were based on the 1972 movie, casting Lea Thompson as Sally Bowles would be an understandable move. After all, in the movie Liza Minnelli transformed Sally into a plucky American singer trying to get discovered, performing in…
Circuses tend to get a lot of coverage in these pages. Two good reasons for this are the creepiness of clowns and the fanaticism of animal-rights groups. But we like circuses…or the idea of them, anyway. Take the grittiness of Anthony Quinn’s strongman in Federico Fellini’s 1954 masterpiece La Strada,…
About a month ago, the Dallas Theatre League held a meeting of theater reps from Theatre Three, Dallas Theater Center, Our Endeavors, Echo Theatre, and Lyric Stage, among others, and various media types, including yours truly and Tom Sime from The Dallas Morning News. Several topics were introduced and then…
The action in most of Edward Albee’s plays are lips flapping, fingers pointing, and people pacing and occasionally changing seats. His plays — from 1966’s A Delicate Balance to 1994’s Three Tall Women — are all talk. This includes Seascape, his 1975 Pulitzer Prize-winning comedy Circle Theatre is currently producing…
Cliff Redd is coming up on the first anniversary of his self-proclaimed “life sentence.” The John Lithgow look-alike fairly squirms in his seat as he talks about his return to the Shakespeare Festival of Dallas, where he took up last April 15 where he left off in 1997 as executive…
At times, it appears his head will come clean off — detach from his bulgingthrobbingbursting neck and shoot straight into the air, where it will explode in a shimmering display of rainbow confetti and gray matter. But that’s not before his eyes pop out of his skull, spurting toward the…
Once upon a time, there was a girl who loved to tell stories. She was quite sure she had some very interesting tales to tell, tales that other people needed to hear. She fancied herself a fascinating storyteller, one whom people would search out for her inimitable skill with words…
Walking papers Guess there simply wasn’t enough “green” at the McKinney Avenue Contemporary on St. Patrick’s Day, or so administrative manager Mary Nicolett was told when she found out she would be out of a job beginning April 21. “I was told it was budget constraints,” says Nicolett, who has…
The drug of romance and its rotten hangover are nothing new to stage, screen, and stereo. You’ve got your Capulets and Montagues, your Griffin and Phoenix, your Ike and Tina. Cautionary tales, the lot. (The formula is as follows: Person + Person + Lovethang – Brains = Emotional Abattoir yielding…
Even the press kit is up-front about it: Whatever It Takes is less a film than a product of marketing research and demographic considerations. It might as well have been written on a bar graph, so fetishistic is it about making sure it appeals to teens and their parents –…
Such a Long Journey is set in Bombay in 1971, shortly before the war between India and Pakistan. Gustad Noble (Roshan Seth) is as middle-class as they come: A bank teller for 20 years, he works hard to support his wife, Dilnavaz (Soni Razdan), and children. But such is the…
Is America ready for the Hong Kong action style? Certainly there are many fans of the more balletic, guns-and-martial-arts, fly-through-the-air movies that have inspired everyone from Quentin Tarantino to the Wachowski brothers. Yet Hollywood still seems to have had trouble marketing the concept. Yes, John Woo gets high-profile projects, but…
Here on Earth, the new teen romance, should do wonders for the reputation of veteran director Arthur Hiller. Not that Hiller had anything to do with the film, mind you — which wouldn’t do wonders for his rep. No, Hiller is the man who, back in 1970, directed the inexplicably…
It’s again that time of year, when we gather to praise Bart Weiss for keeping afloat the Dallas Video Festival against all odds (the odds being, in this case, a city in which culture means Mark Cuban). In its 13th year, the DVF has yet to make Weiss a rich…
