Over the last few months, it seems as though every major small theater company in Dallas–and a couple of debuting ones–has offered us a world-premiere show. The results have been mixed, but the ambitions behind them have been unassailable. It’s an exciting time to be a theater critic in this…
In John Sayles’ Limbo, which is set amid the rough-and-tumble of southeast Alaska, an ex-salmon fisherman with guilty memories (David Strathairn), an itinerant lounge singer with a lousy voice (Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio), and the singer’s melancholy teenage daughter (newcomer Vanessa Martinez) become stranded, Robinson Crusoe-style, on a remote island. This…
Bernardo Bertolucci’s Besieged is a movie of enthralling visual poetry. Set almost entirely inside a ravishing Roman villa, it is a love story played out in furtive glances and stolen looks by characters on opposite sides of the ethnic divide. Culturally, Mr. Kinsky (David Thewlis) and Shandurai (Thandie Newton) couldn’t…
Lauren Hutton may not be the best actress in the world, but she sure has sex appeal. And she has a nice ability to mock her sexiness at the same time she is playing to it, which is a trick not every actress can pull off. In Just a Little…
I had this great idea for a movie the other day. A swaggering adventurer–a Texan, of course–spends years traveling the world participating in disaster-relief campaigns. He is so successful in aiding governments and private groups in organizing these projects that he earns the nickname “Master of Disaster” (hey, a possible…
Richard Belzer says he was too interested in girls in 1963 to really think much of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination at the time. Now, of course, he believes that the murder in Dealey Plaza was a conspiracy, and that J.F.K. himself was part of the plan to hide proof…
thursday june 10 We’ve always thought Star Search was pretty creepy, with its 6-year-old girls wearing more blue eye shadow than Tammy Faye Bakker and singing “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough.” Then there was the always thrilling and vital spokesmodel competition, and we did always like the train-wreck aspect of…
It occurs almost as though on cue; a cynical man might even say it’s the stuff of cliche. But not more than 10 minutes ago, the man known as Tatu was talking about his place on the food chain of local sports fame. The Dallas Sidekicks’ player-coach was saying how,…
A fine line divides inspired silliness from out-and-out witlessness; it’s a short leap from grin from groan. In 1997’s Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery, Mike Myers took a thin premise–spoof the ’60s by transplanting a horny Matt Helm-like secret agent into the ’90s–and danced an unsteady watusi along that…
You couldn’t help but giggle, sitting behind wizened little Stanley Marcus at the world premiere of Blind Lemon: Prince of Country Blues as actors sang or spoke lines like “I can’t even make enough money to buy me a loaf of bread.” You had to wonder whether Marcus, who was…
Too often, we drain our best ideas by analyzing them to a pulp; the real juice is gone before we ever make the first move. After such hair-pulling, the concept that seemed brilliant at its inception finishes hollow and insincere–or so damn academic you wanna send it to detention hall…
While Hong Kong movies have been invading Hollywood through the success of Jackie Chan, John Woo, Jet Li, and others, mainland Chinese cinema has invaded the “classier” neighborhoods of the film industry during the last decade or so. The latest contender is The King of Masks, an affecting melodrama from…
In an early scene in Instinct, we’re told that a brilliant primatologist named Ethan Powell (Anthony Hopkins) is being brought back to the United States from Rwanda, where for several years he has been engaged in a close study of mountain gorillas. Actually, his study has gone a bit beyond…
Never have gone in for sci-fi cons, even as a little kid–save for that one time DeForest Kelley, James Doohan, and the late Gene Roddenberry showed up with Star Trek blooper reels at the NorthPark Inn in 1976. Back then, during the pre-Internet glory days, sci-fi was a hobby, not…
It would be easy to play innocent and imagine that Tim Cridland’s day begins very much like anyone else’s. Have breakfast, take a shower, brush teeth, comb hair. But Cridland is Zamora the Torture King, and his daily routine includes jamming sharpened bicycle spokes through his biceps and smashing concrete…
thursday june 3 Kraft Macaroni & Cheese is hosting a contest called I Want the Blues! The 12 winners will get their pictures on boxes of Kraft Macaroni, in addition to a $10,000 college scholarship and a family vacation in Orlando, Florida. Personally, we wish they’d hold a contest to…
Whitey Herzog does not regret much. His is an almost idyllic existence now: He spends his mornings watching the sun rise over fishing ponds, and spends his evenings bidding farewell to the sun as it sets over the golf course. Now that the man’s retired, it’s almost impossible to get…
I don’t know about you, but if any Old Testament story is primed to make me an atheist, it’s the saga of Abraham, the man who’s happy to stab and incinerate his son because God asked him to as a test of faith. You can talk about historical context and…
David Mamet–famous for his in-your-face characters, brutal and frequently raunchy dialogue, and deliberate, staccato prose about, ya know, dat thing–would seem an unlikely choice to write and direct a screen adaptation of British playwright Terence Rattigan’s genteel drama about injustice. But the Pulitzer Prize-winning author (for Glengarry Glen Ross), whose…
Deja vu is usually a sign of love at first sight. Says who? Says the heroine of The Thirteenth Floor to the hero she’s on the verge of kissing. Though they’ve just met a scene or two earlier, they both feel they’ve seen each other before. That maxim about dejà…
Maybe it’s the damned blinking thing, because it’s not simply the foppish hair and boyish face–or, for that matter, even the vaguely befuddled reticence and wry, self-abasing demeanor we Americans prefer to see in our Brits. It’s got to be the blinking. That’s what he does, almost all he does,…
I have a friend who is obsessed with immortality, and not in the figurative sense: He doesn’t want to accomplish a feat so great that his name will live forever; he wants to live forever. He’s on the Internet daily, like some cyber Juan Ponce de León, looking up the…
