The program for Bucket Productions’ latest show, the Southwest premiere of Anne V. McGravie’s Wrens, declares that the troupe is “dedicated to the production of fun, entertaining, watchable theatre. We don’t have any social agendas or themes, and we have no pretense of a grand artistic vision.” It’s a refreshingly…
Edward Albee’s most famous play, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, so scandalized American theatergoers when it was produced in New York in 1962 that no Pulitzer Prize for drama was awarded that year because the committee was passionately polarized over the play, or so the legend goes. The ever cautious…
As the lights came up after a screening of the new Neil LaBute movie Your Friends and Neighbors, a colleague next to me growled disapprovingly, “That was a nasty movie.” For LaBute–whose divisive debut film, In the Company of Men, is probably the worst date movie ever made–this comment would…
After a summer filled with third-rate pulp, Blade arrives with a pedigree that suggests first-rate pulp: characters and situations from Marvel Comics; a screenplay by David S. Goyer (who gave us this year’s truly transcendent pulp masterpiece, Dark City); and the presence (as star and producer) of Wesley Snipes, a…
As a maker of musical parodies, “Weird” Al Yankovic has an unimpeachable track record, from 1979’s Knack spoof “My Bologna” to 1996’s foray into the world of gangsta rappers, “Amish Paradise.” As a movie star, well, that’s another story. Yankovic never made a film before 1989’s UHF, and there probably…
thursday august 20 Before it was even completed, Grapevine Mills was being touted as the mall to end all malls, the shopping center that would make all others in the metroplex obsolete. Why would anyone want or need to go elsewhere? The Mills has been up and running for almost…
The point of any collection is, presumably, twofold: build it, and show it off. The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth does just that on occasion with its ever-growing permanent collection; they’ve recently lassoed enough new additions to launch an exhibition, Recent Acquisitions and Selections From the Permanent Collection. In-your-face…
The timing couldn’t be better for How Stella Got Her Groove Back. The dog days of summer are upon us, and few prospects could be more welcome to asteroid-weary moviegoers than a light romantic comedy that includes a trip to Jamaica as part of the package. Director Kevin Rodney Sullivan…
Darren Aronofsky’s debut feature, Pi, won the Dramatic Directing Award at Sundance this year, and it’s easy to imagine why: Whatever its faults–and it has more than a few–it is unquestionably different. It at least takes a stab at interpolating cerebral ideas into the format of a thriller. Max Cohen…
The editors who put together the TV ads for Return to Paradise deserve an Oscar. The spots are suffocating montages of suspense, claustrophobia, and desperation–each one a compressed 30 seconds of overwhelming doom that resonates after it’s gone. Lewis McBride (Joaquin Phoenix), captured on video, his gaunt and haunted face…
Victorian costume romance? Oh, no. Jewish Victorian costume romance? Oy, no. Historical romances–particularly Brontë sisters-style bodice-rippers–are difficult enough to swallow on-screen without feeling as if you’re gagging on a mothball. One colored with Hebrew Orthodoxy? That’s going to be one camphoric matzo ball. But Minnie Driver, fresh from her star-securing…
As long as there have been storytellers with the guts to explore all corners of the human experience, there have been listeners who’ve insisted–sometimes with the force of the state behind them–that nothing but harm can come from exploring traditionally taboo subjects…especially those that emanate from the dark, moist corners…
Fulvio descends on the casino oasis to impress his business colleagues and wakes up the next morning beside a blonde named Darla. Like an Italian-bred millionaire getting drunk in Vegas and marrying a Brooklyn-bred showgirl, there are matches made in irony heaven–not built to last, but a hell of a…
The Corvette is more than just a car–it’s a symbol of American culture. Well, it’s a symbol of American culture in other countries, at least; it’s the American dream wrapped in steel and fiberglass and powered by a Big Block V8. In reality, most Americans’ only contact with a Corvette…
thursday august 13 Riverdance is a celebration of Irish music, song, and dance that almost every person of Irish descent would probably like to see quietly disappear. Unfortunately, that’s not likely to happen anytime soon. The Irish dance troupe attracts inexplicably large crowds wherever it travels, including Dallas, where it…
Even Randy Galloway’s 81-year-old mother, herself a lifelong journalism veteran, couldn’t believe it when he told her the news. Margaret Galloway didn’t come right out and say it, but her 55-year-old son could hear the concern in her voice–feel it, actually, like a slap. It’s the way any son feels…
Although I haven’t always enjoyed Pegasus Theatre artistic director Kurt Kleinmann’s doggedly cinematic brand of live comedy, his dedication to it has a definite logic when you consider how the American stage and American film have both traded traditional theatrical acting for “authenticity.” Before Lee Strasberg, Sanford Meisner, Uta Hagen,…
Opening a gallery in Dallas is just this side of nuts. Even established spaces in our so-called “gallery district” play Russian roulette with nearly every show; rosters of regular clients are no guarantee of a sale. But opening a gallery here and showing works by a “never-heard-of-‘im” German painter is…
Nicolas Cage has never seemed more dazzling than he does in the new Brian De Palma thriller Snake Eyes. Playing Rick Santoro, a corrupt Atlantic City cop who likes to think he’s “everybody’s friend,” Cage for almost two continuous hours is boogying to his own inner beat. It’s like watching…
These are the kinds of people who show up in Hal Hartley films: a nun who writes pornography; a surly, amnesiac hit man; a gas-station attendant who plays Elizabethan ballads on his electric guitar and greets customers in French; and a “radical shortstop” who capped a decade playing for the…
thursday august 6 About the only thing that Red Jacket brags about more than its inclusion on InStyle magazine’s list of coolest nightclubs in the country is the rumor that Jack Ruby spent his last free night at the club. Ruby, as anyone within earshot of Oliver Stone knows, is…
They’re what makes living in Dallas tolerable for those of us who’d rather shove shards of broken Shiner bottles up our noses than go see another trite alterna-band play at another rock-club-cum-hell-hole. The Sons of Hermann Hall is a historic, wood-floored oasis in a land of concrete and noise (some…
