Directed by Walter Salles (1995’s Foreign Land), the Brazilian film Central Station concerns the relationship between a homeless 9-year-old boy and the insensitive, acerbic woman who reluctantly agrees to help him find his father. Winner of the Golden Bear for Best Film at the 1998 Berlin Film Festival (as well…
History has always been among my weaker subjects: I carry around gaps in my knowledge that you could drop a war or a social movement through. But it was nonetheless startling to learn that Article III of the original Constitution was a clause forbidding theater critics. Frank Rich of The…
The lead story last week in the syndicated column News of the Weird was about how “Great Britain’s premiere art award, the Turner Prize, was won in December by painter Chris Ofili, whose signature finishing touch on his work is a few blotches of elephant manure. Ofili’s centerpiece…bears the title…
Viewers who find Hurlyburly one of the most weirdly annoying movies they’ve seen–which is likely–will probably locate different “last straws” in the self-indulgent bundle of hay that has been made from David Rabe’s grueling 1984 play. For me, it was watching Eddie (Sean Penn) stretched out beneath a glass coffee…
For critics (and for audience members who enjoy thinking too much), there are movie devices and there are movie effects. Movie devices–happy endings, sad endings, emotion-wracked confessions, harrowing confrontations–are those stock contraptions that filmmakers employ with varying degrees of subtlety to induce movie effects–making you laugh, making you cry, creating…
Somewhere under the glossy imbecility of Varsity Blues lurks an idea that could make a great American movie: a coming-of-age story in a setting where no one else has come of age, a place where the hero must find his way to maturity without a mentor. The setting, in this…
Info: Night & Day January 14 – 20, 1999 By Zac Crain thursday january 14 There’s no better indicator of a trend’s death than when Hollywood gets its grubby little hands involved. By the time the latest craze finally makes its way onto the studio heads’ cultural radar, it has…
This is perfect. Velvet Goldmine was destined for midnight-movie status before it even hit screens earlier this fall, packing all the elements of a great cult film–big rock music, subversive sex, a rambling narrative, pretty boys and girls (and more boys), and its focus on a pop subculture. In this…
When Langston Hughes wrote “Harlem No. 2” in 1951, he spoke of the hopelessness of lives spent fighting poverty and prejudice, with no promise of change except through bursts of violence: “What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun…Or does it explode?”…
The biggest disappointment in Dallas theater in 1998 was the conspicuous omission of the 1997 Jimmys by the winners in their artist bios on play programs. Granted, last year was the first year they were presented, so the adjective “august” doesn’t come to mind when describing their status, and granted…
The great attorneys of our time–Tom Cruise, Susan Sarandon, Tom Hanks–must now make room in the firm for a new partner. John Travolta, who in past lives has been a disco king, a hip hit man, and a deep-fried presidential candidate, reinvents himself in A Civil Action as a greedy…
Writer-director Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line, the filmmaker’s adaptation of James Jones’ 1962 bestseller about the World War II battle for Guadalcanal, arrives in theaters with an almost unbearable weight of expectation. After graduating in the first class at AFI’s Advanced Film Studies program and working briefly as a…
thursday january 7 Keenen Ivory Wayans’ publicist and agent can spin this however they want, but the fact is, his three-night stand at the Improv in Addison is a sign that the actor-comedian-talk show host’s career is on a downward spiral that will most likely end with a recurring role…
It’s funny how none of the press materials accompanying the flurry of local activity surrounding Elvis Presley’s 64th birthday celebration on Friday mention The King’s untimely passing a while back. It could be wishful thinking or complete denial, but more likely, no one wants to upset all of the true…
It makes perfect sense to form a Beatles or Rolling Stones tribute band. After all, everyone already likes those bands and knows all the songs, or at least enough to fill an hour-long set at Club Dada. Plus, the Fab Four have been broken up for almost three decades, and…
Early in the second quarter against the Washington Redskins on Sunday night, Emmitt Smith ran toward history, and this time he did not stumble, did not spin around and go backward. Two minutes and 22 seconds into the period, Smith ran for inches–inches that, finally, did not seem like miles–and…
My early college years found me jumping back and forth between attraction and repulsion on the question of white people co-opting black culture-or, at least, black music. On the one hand, reading liver-spotted libidinist Norman Mailer’s inadvertently hilarious early essay “The White Negro” led me to adopt this ode to…
It’s a new year. Time to stop asking the question: “How does the Dallas art scene compare to other cities?” Replacement query: How is the Dallas art scene doing, period? I won’t pretend that I’m intimate with every dent and cranny of the local artistic community. For various reasons, from…
Silver lining or slender thread? That question nags at me as I go over my best-of-the-year list. There were some terrific movies in 1998–eight, according to my count. But the average film keeps on getting worse. If movies remain as synthetic and incompetent as they are for the most part,…
The past year has been filled with good films…interesting films…worthwhile films. In fact there were many that I think of as being wonderful or droll or whatever. But 1998 failed to produce a single film to which the term “great” might be applied. Most years have at least one great…
So it takes a big holiday to lure the Old 97’s onto a Dallas stage. See, Rhett don’t live here anymore. Even after he sang (with great conviction, we might add) about Los Angeles: “I might’ve wound up in L.A. pannin’ for gold/Found me a woman to warm up with…
Orson Welles’ classic, The Lady of Shanghai, is the quintessential film noir. You have all the basic elements: the femme fatale, the unsolved murder, and the innocent man unable to extricate himself from the labyrinthine sequence of events that trapped him, or from the woman who drew him in. From…
