Just when the McCain mania of the presidential campaign peaks and Ross Perot’s Reform Party teeters toward meltdown, Ralph Nader arrives to pick up the banner of reform vérité. The respected consumer activist and critic of corporate power last month kicked off his fight for the fledgling Green Party’s nomination…
It seems that cooking, along with letter-writing, sewing, and being courteous, is becoming a lost art. And really, who needs to be able to cook these days? Preprepared, heat-and-eat “gourmet” foods, recently the domain of elite gourmet markets, are popping up at plain old grocery stores. Convenience foods are becoming…
I’ve spent some long evenings in the theater recently, but rarely has the time sailed by as intelligently and harrowingly as it did in Inexpressible Island, a U.S. premiere courtesy of Dallas Theater Center. And we’re talking about a situation, however based in reality, that seems like a gimmick manufactured…
League of their own Never one to mince words, Jack Alder, founder and executive director of Theatre Three, had his doubts about the future of the Dallas Theatre League, a 6-year-old nonprofit group established to get local theaters working together for the good of one and all. But that part…
Garry Shandling does not have a face for the big screen. He has a mug that seems to spread to the edges of the theater; it’s like an approaching storm front, a sky full of billowing clouds roaring in from the north. And it’s a face built for two emotions:…
The first thought one has while watching The Next Best Thing is, “Was Madonna always this bad an actress?” It’s a question that soon fades from consciousness, to be replaced by, “Was Rupert Everett always this bad an actor?” Then, a little later, arrives this query: “Was John Schlesinger always…
In the closing years of the 20th century, lowbrow white America finally learned to enjoy an ironic laugh at itself, led by Hollywood’s cheerful mockery of the culturally challenged working class. Outside the system, John Waters had this stuff pegged from the get-go, but the American grotesqueries of the original,…
Willie Morris’ autobiographical novel, My Dog Skip, is a nearly perfect piece of bedtime reading for children — and their parents. Each chapter is virtually a self-contained anecdote; the descriptions of World War II-era Mississippi are lush and dreamlike; and the escapades of the central canine character, depicted as smarter,…
If you think the prevailing attitude toward sex in the United States is often archaic, consider that of late 1960s Ireland, as depicted in Agnes Browne, the new movie directed by Anjelica Huston. When asked by her best friend, Marion (Marion O’Dwyer), whether she misses “it,” the recently widowed Agnes…
“I’ve got the world’s largest pubic mound,” Margaret Cho yells. She’s joking about her weight again — -one of her comedy-show standards along with her family (her Korean mother leaves hysterical messages on her answering machine and has a curious fascination with gay porn) and her hometown of San Francisco,…
Let’s face it, folks. Circuses stink. Literally and figuratively. Clowns are unfunny and strident at best, and at worst, psychologically scarring previews for kids of humanity’s freakish existential dilemma (“Mommy, why can’t that man stop smiling? Why can’t he stop smiling, Mommy?!!!”). And watching lions and tigers forced to perform…
At this point, the chance of scoring a ticket to Don Juan in Chicago, the new show by Lean Theater in Theatre Three’s Theatre Too basement space, is about as likely as finding an unwrinkled sheet on Don Juan’s heart-shaped bed. Word of mouth has spread throughout Dallas theatergoing circles…
The last time Drew Daleo showed his art at Gallery 414, he seemed stuck in a rut of war machines and military imagery that some people liked and some hated. If you didn’t fancy the content — World War II bombers and fighter planes — it was hard to get…
Hardhat Shakespeare Since Cliff Redd returned to his roots as executive director of the Shakespeare Festival of Dallas last April, all hell’s broken loose. “You might say we have a hyperactive staff,” Redd says of the ambitious programming changes for the festival this summer, plus the February launch of an…
Last year’s remake of The Mummy had all of Hollywood’s essential Egyptian movie standards — lots of sand, eternal love, priests and magic, Westerners who didn’t understand what they were messing with, treasure hunters and booby traps, and curses on those who entered tombs and disturbed the dead. While some…
James Lipton is so obsequious, it’s astonishing the man does not conduct his interviews from his subjects’ anal cavities. The host of Bravo’s hysterical, oddly riveting Inside the Actors Studio never misses an opportunity to suck up to the famous and talented who deign to accept his invitation. When Sylvester…
Once, a very long time ago, John Frankenheimer was scared of things. He was scared of being fired from his job directing live television dramas during the 1950s; scared of missing a shot, of trying something daring and failing so spectacularly that he would never work again. Once, in the…
Director John Frankenheimer has been putting bad guys on the street since Luca Brazzi slept with a teddy bear, and he shows no sign of letting up at age 70. In Reindeer Games, a relentless (and relentlessly witty) crime thriller set in the frozen wastes of northern Michigan, a sleazy…
Step right up, youth of the world, and receive the Boomer inoculation that is Wonder Boys, the first feature from director Curtis Hanson since his much-lauded adaptation of James Ellroy’s L.A. Confidential. (Indeed, this is yet another adaptation, this time of Michael Chabon’s 1995 novel.) Then marvel at Michael Douglas…
It’s not a startling breach of conventional wisdom to apply the term “masterpiece” to Alfred Hitchcock’s 1954 film Rear Window, which is being reissued this week in a nice restored print that, if memory serves, is better (though not that much better) than we’ve seen before. But critical reputations can…
What’s going on here? A tender, patient shot of a school custodian sweeping the floor? Frequent cutaways to branches teeming with singing birds, or to an unused water tower looming like an alien monolith? Split-level houses, bric-a-brac, and a freshly renovated kitchen? Is director Eric Mendelsohn attempting, in his first…
Some film aficionados are weaned on art-house offerings, savoring the mise-en-scène of Kurosawa, the montage of Eisenstein, and the imagery of Fellini. Others suckle on the teat of Cinemax, sneaking back into the living room after Mom and Dad have gone to bed to study the brutal disfigurement of bad…
