Even English actresses of a certain age have a difficult time finding good roles, so it’s understandable that Judi Dench, Maggie Smith, and Joan Plowright might jump at the chance to star in Tea With Mussolini, Franco Zeffirelli’s new film about a group of English expatriates living in Florence during…
In 1932, when director Karl Freund wanted to scare the socks off the brave movie patrons who had come to see the original Universal Pictures production of The Mummy, he didn’t have the miracle of state-of-the-art computer imagery to create his bogeyman. All he had was gauze–a lot of gauze…
thursday may 13 When the USA Film Festival’s officials elected to cut off the Dallas Observer staff–or “naysayers,” as The Dallas Morning News likes to refer to some of us–from covering the fest’s recent rehash of the Dallas Video Festival (“Buzz,” April 8, and just about every issue since then),…
A USA Film Festival member wrote a letter accusing us of acting like spurned lovers because we took offense at the USAFF’s recent snub of this very newspaper. Well, we’d like to clarify: We’re really more like spurned, masochistic lovers. Slap us, and we’ll give you more publicity–providing you put…
A valid, though unexpected, reason to hit the neighborhood pub this Friday night: to see Martians who look like the spawn of ancient Romans and the members of Kraftwerk, each sporting a headdress, clear plastic clothing, and heavy eyeliner. Granted, it’s only a film screening, but what an amusing reality…
All it takes is for the caller to identify himself as a reporter from Dallas. Erinn Bryan immediately knows where the conversation is going. “You want to talk about Colin.” Even over a phone line from Minneapolis, you can hear the breath leave her body. She exhales loudly, sadly, as…
What is it about gay men and straight women? Or, to phrase it more explicitly: Why are so many gay men drawn to powerful, emotional women? In theory, we shouldn’t give a damn about the female personality: most men (hetero and homo) are hounds, eager to bury our bones in…
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…
