Insomniacs, rejoice! During the first several decades of Sydney Pollack’s bloated, interminable Random Hearts, your eyelids will droop, your pulse and respiration will slow, and you’ll get that $8 nap you’ve been craving. Once the credits roll and the lights come up, you’ll awaken refreshed, undisturbed by vague dreams about…
Jesus, Mary, and Joseph! The repressed Irish Catholic schoolgirl that Molly Shannon plays on Saturday Night Live is certainly not everyone’s cup of glee. But there’s no denying the tug she exerts on anyone whose past is littered with the dry husks of Latin verbs and memories of nuns swinging…
A few generations got their first taste of Julia Child through Saturday Night Live. In the late ’70s, one of Dan Aykroyd’s most popular impersonations was of the trilling, stoic female chef; she (or rather he, in gruesome drag) walked SNL viewers through the preparation of a turkey when –…
There are plenty of legends about journeys and locations of historical objects. The History Channel dissects the tales from George Washington’s wooden teeth to Marilyn Monroe’s dress from The Seven Year Itch. Then there’s how the “Cowardly Lion” costume from The Wizard of Oz was found in a studio’s trash…
The guy in the corner of the lobby gallery of Continental Lofts doesn’t live here, but he is camped out nonetheless. He’s too tidy to be a panhandler, but too casual to be a security guard, even in Deep Ellum. His short ponytail pops up as he bends his graying…
That championship season Dallas area arts organizations, ever in survival mode, have to hate the Irving Arts Center and the 13 small local arts groups that benefit from IAC’s total funding by the city of Irving. Public funding means no pledge drives, no schmoozing of corporate sponsors. IAC’s financial plan…
There is nothing gratifying about watching a bullet blast through a woman’s skull. Exploding helicopters and splattered cattle are utterly indefensible. And few would smile at the image of a little boy being obliterated by a flashy missile. So why is David O. Russell’s Three Kings such rousing entertainment? This…
It begins with a simple request. “Do you want anything to drink?” asks the Warner Bros. publicist, a lanky young man outfitted in a pressed green shirt, a businessman’s tie, and dark slacks. “Some water maybe?” The visiting journalist, ushered into the Crescent Court Hotel suite to interview Three Kings…
The premise is preposterous, the final score inevitable, and the record reading on the feel-good-ometer totally predictable. But Mystery, Alaska comes furnished with some winning quirks and charms — including a very funny bit concerning premature ejaculation at 20 degrees below zero. So even if you don’t really believe that…
Ah, May-December romance! It’s a grand old tradition in movies dating back to 1919’s Daddy Long Legs, and it’s almost always a male fantasy: With the exception of a very small handful of titles, it’s the guy who’s December and the girl who’s May. And even in that small handful,…
A classic that fully merits the designation, Jean Renoir’s 1937 anti-war masterpiece Grand Illusion is, quite simply, one of the greatest films ever made. Recently restored, with a new print struck from the film’s original camera negative — confiscated by the Nazis after the fall of France and thought to…
Period films are, in general, not what you would call a commercial sure shot in the current marketplace, unless of course the period in question is the 22nd century or some “long, long ago” that resembles the 22nd century. In Plunkett & Macleane, director Jake Scott — son of Ridley,…
The fact that Drive Me Crazy is actually based on a novel (How I Created My Perfect Prom Date by Todd Strasser) is a sad comment on the state of contemporary young-adult fiction. The story’s not entirely dreadful, but the fact that a script created from a shuffled deck of…
Ken Nelson, a regular at the “Branson-on-the-Brazos” show in Waco, was destined to have a career in music. His mother sang with a big band, his father was a trumpeter, and their home was filled with the music of Frank Sinatra. Nelson’s own calling began with his cabaret show of…
Almost everyone has a ghost story, or at least knows someone who does. Hard to buy into the spirit world at all until you hear some completely sensible, non-hoodoo person tell their tale: the high-functioning yuppie cousin who had to move out of her San Francisco Victorian in the wake…
The marketers of so-called “race records” — blues, rhythm and blues, and jazz recorded by black artists for black audiences in the first half of the 20th century — often conferred royalty on their headliners in an American society that made them separate and unequal in the most mundane daily…
I recently received a letter signed by “members of the theater community” about a very negative review I gave to Echo Theatre’s production of Maria Irene Fornes’ Fefu and Her Friends. Once I recovered from what I assumed to be a shot at my masculinity (these members said I was…
“Painting is dead” was a manifesto embraced by a swell of artists throughout the latter part of this century. As photography, moving film, sculpture, and conceptual art evolved, painting took on the rather unenviable role of static old grandpa: outdated, unsuited for dealing with modern concerns, narrow by its very…
The art of war Though Gerald Peters, president of the gallery that bears his name, has yet to formally answer the lawsuit filed by his former gallery director Talley Dunn, her pre-emptive strike in the form of a petition to invalidate her no-compete clause and seek $1.4 million in damages…
Behind the camera, Beauty’s driving forces are new to movies, but their theatrical résumés are faultless — a fact that did not escape the deep pockets at DreamWorks. The screenwriter, playwright Alan Ball, is the author of dark absurdist comedies such as Five Women Wearing the Same Dress and The…
The joke that opens Jakob the Liar, the new Holocaust comedy (and talk about an oxymoron) starring Robin Williams, captures the bittersweet quality — the grim reality mixed with laughter — that the rest of the movie tries and fails to embody. The story takes place in an unidentified Jewish…
There’s a long tradition of stories about mysterious drifters who arrive in a small town and either create trouble or catalyze an explosion of long-simmering problems. Mark Twain used that hook, as have Dashiell Hammett (Red Harvest), Akira Kurosawa (Yojimbo), and Sergio Leone (A Fistful of Dollars). Now Hampton Fancher…
