Growing up in this melting pot of a country we call home, is it surprising that the exposure of most Anglos to the Hispanic culture came from reruns of Chico and the Man and a half-dozen Cheech and Chong movies? Sure, there was much to absorb from the adventures of…
There was a young curate whose brain Was deranged from the use of cocaine He lured a small child To a copse dark and wild Where he beat it to death with his cane Welcome to the perfidious pen of author-illustrator-playwright Edward Gorey, who for five decades has drawn those…
He still looks young, even up close — like a memory come to flesh-and-blood life, not yet the vestige of a hero. There is a little gray in the eyebrows, and his hands look callused and battered. But otherwise, sitting beneath a shade tree behind the Four Seasons Resort and…
You’d think that the biggest annual fair in the nation’s biggest state would pack some genuine art. Not only crafts — quilts, pottery, and such — which a fair seems obligated to showcase, but some indication of the region’s artistic leanings. If the State Fair of Texas is supposed to…
With all the recent publicity about school shootings, a story about a classroom terrorized by a sadistic, witchy substitute teacher seems quaintly anachronistic — no Goth makeup, no consciences deadened by video-game violence, just disruptive little tykes who love recess and hate homework. I couldn’t help but wonder how many…
By 1954, when English playwright-composer Sandy Wilson wrote the book, lyrics, and music for his first and only major stage success, The Boy Friend, a celebration of the 1920s, America and England were experiencing a déjà vu of decades. Folks on both sides of the Atlantic were comparing the ’50s…
Everyone’s a critic Two big names in art criticism are coming to Dallas, and neither one of them is New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani, who last week added his name to the list of politicians bent on shaping American minds about art. “It’s not art. It’s disgusting,” is Guiliani’s…
When I was growing up, Kurt Vonnegut Jr. was the closest thing I had to a paternal mentor, the only authoritative voice I consistently trusted. Novel after freakish, scattershot, infinitely humane novel, the man provided tools to identify and cope with the daily horrors of America — this vast sea…
The triumvirate is complete. First, Paris, Texas; then Dancer, Texas Pop. 81; and now Happy, Texas. German existentialism. Coming-of-age melodrama. Screwball mistaken-identity crapfest. Is there any situation small-town Texas can’t fulfill, any scenario it can’t endure? Apparently not, according to indie filmmakers. In this one, two cons on the lam…
Trust Allison Anders and her old running mate Kurt Voss to come up with a piquant, carefully observed movie about tarnished hope, overfed vanity, and half-baked scheming on the treacherous Los Angeles music scene. They know the territory. In 1988, the ex-UCLA Film School classmates wrote and directed Border Radio,…
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,…
