Despite dozens of travel shows and guide books–namely the homogenized promos covering transatlantic journey–we have little media that give us the real skinny on what it’s like to traverse another continent. Michael Palin’s PBS series Pole to Pole comes closer than most. The intrepid Monty Pythoner braves the fringes and…
The latest release from Paramount Pictures’ bouncing baby, MTV Films, is set in a high school and has been inoculated with the usual doses of teenage angst, teenage wit, and teenage lust. Here’s the surprise: It declines to get down on hands and knees to woo Generation Y to the…
A hand-wringing reassessment of the libertine 1960s has hit full stride–stirred as much, you can’t help thinking, by the transfiguration of former acidheads and ex-leftist firebrands into establishment power-mongers as by the half-baked grumblings of their children. The antiwar and civil rights movements were shot through with self-service and intolerance,…
When we first see Isa, the 21-year-old heroine of Erick Zonca’s The Dreamlife of Angels, she’s trudging under the weight of a huge backpack through the chill dawn of an almost featureless European city. With her close-cropped dark hair and street urchin’s sniffle, she seems to be carrying the burden…
For the second week in a row, Dallas is being treated to a dazzling new Spanish import. Last week it was Alejandro Almenabar’s Open Your Eyes; this week it’s Julio Medem’s Lovers of the Arctic Circle–arguably an even more intriguing work. The two stars of Medem’s film, Najwa Nimri and…
While many people are still waiting in line for tickets to see Star Wars: The Phantom Menace, I’ll already be watching it, courtesy of the $300 ticket I bought about a week ago for a special advance screening on May 17, two days before the film officially hits theaters. All…
“I guess I won’t bet on that one,” my friend says as she watches the thoroughbred hurl its body against the paddock stall and crash to the ground, all while kicking its long legs at its trainer. It was the second time Number Six, otherwise known as Merge Right, had…
thursday may 6 Does anyone care about Naomi Judd anymore? No, and no one should, because she is still such a stage mother after all these years, popping up intermittently to swipe some of her more successful daughters’ spotlight. Look, Naomi, you used to be a star too, singing with…
Laurie Anderson really doesn’t like to make broad statements. But her semi-musical, quasi-theatrical, demi-technological performance art not only involves so many grand forms, it also deals with issues so big–technology, communication, politics, human frailty–that you frequently forget that these are the broad issues in your life as well. Onstage, the…
The “SLC” in SLC Punk! stands for Salt Lake City, but it might as well stand for Some Lucky Chump. The filmmaker, James Merendino, has stated that this tale of two punk buddies trying to spread anarchy through the Utah capital in 1985 reflects his own rebellious teenage years there…
The most surprising thing about the new teensploitation horror film Idle Hands is the lack of masturbation jokes. It is a movie about a 17-year-old boy who loses control of his right hand to an evil demon, yet there’s only one such obvious crack. As the gloriously lazy hero Anton…
We seem to be in the middle of one of those thematic blitzes that happen every now and then in the film world. Last year there was The Truman Show and Dark City; this year, so far, there have been EdTV and The Matrix. Coming up in the next month…
Sean Connery has always been a terse, minimalist actor, spitting out his lines in tight bursts of Scottish brogue. But in Entrapment, the kingly Scot goes beyond minimalism to the point where he’s practically doing semaphore with his eyebrows. As the legendary art thief Robert MacDougal, Connery isn’t just reserved,…
We suppose the swing revival is still going strong in Dallas. So many local clubs are cashing in on the craze that you could probably take free swing-dance lessons just about every night of the week. That’s fine. But if you’re interested in more than just dressing in your grandparents’…
thursday april 29 A month or so ago, Night & Day placed a moratorium on coverage of local improvisational comedy troupes. It’s not that we don’t like some of them or that we’re not fans of the idea in general. No, it’s just that every theater, comedy club, bar, and…
While Dallas’ hopeful status as the “third coast” has turned out to be a pretty disappointing joke (witness the ghost town that is the Las Colinas studios, and no, Oliver Stone cannot single-handedly turn the metroplex into Hollywood Jr.) this town still boasts its share of aspiring filmmakers–people who have…
Digital editing techniques in the recording studio have resulted in songs being not so much captured as assembled nowadays; choruses and verses are often pieced together, line by line, from many different sessions. What’s lost in the process is any sense of urgency and momentum and suspense, everything that a…
The two young artists on display at 500X, Steve Cruz and Rosemary Meza, wear their heritage on their paint-and-wax-encrusted sleeves. Their two-person show is titled The Passions of Santos, the Ecstasy of Malinche, and while plenty of people in my East Dallas neighborhood would know precisely who Santos and Malinche…
Comedian David Spade’s chosen shtick–every line a zinger, every crack calculated to draw blood–works well in the short bursts characteristic of stand-up, sketches, and TV sitcoms. But the man can wear you out over the course of a two-hour movie. Like the too clever motormouth at a cocktail party, he…
In Pushing Tin, the edgy new comedy from British director Mike Newell, the dominant image is a black screen pulsing with obscure fluorescent markings, like the characters on some early prototype of Pac-Man. In this case, though, nobody’s playing any games. The markings represent very real jet airliners filled with…
Too often baseball players are reduced to statistics, hollow numbers that resonate with the fetishist who drifts off to sleep counting runs batted in and home runs and career batting averages. Baseball demands such precision: It’s a team sport, yes, but ultimately it’s man against man, record against record, history…
Plenty of celebs lend their fame to charitable causes. Richard Gere has his Dalai Lama. Sharon Stone supports pediatric AIDS patients. Kim Basinger props up animal rights–and Alec Baldwin’s career. Then you have Quentin Tarantino, a man whose cause celebre is orphans–albeit of a different sort than might first spring…
