Rule number one: when crafting a thriller, make sure the audience can relate to, identify with, or empathize with at least one of the characters. Rule number two: the characters’ motivations must be clear. Fail in either area–or worse yet, both–and you end up with a film like A Perfect…
Lawn Dogs doesn’t start with the words “Once upon a time,” but it might as well. The film is a fairy tale, plain and simple–and if you argue that this is nothing more than a clever way to say the symbolism and plot points are terribly tired, you won’t get…
The Truman Show, starring Jim Carrey, is the zeitgeist movie of the hour. How could it not be? It’s all about the omnipotence of television and how our lives seem scripted by some unseen force–a TV producer, perhaps? Zeitgeist movies, almost by definition, get written about not only by film…
Most people associate the disco era with hedonism, homosexuality, a sense of community, tacky fashions, and awful music. But in The Last Days of Disco Whit Stillman imagines the era as merely a singles bar for romantics in search of soulmates, largely heterosexual and hardly debauchees. The clothes, and the…
Festivals such as the Texas Scottish Festival and Highland Games have always seemed like a Cliff’s Notes version of history. For the most part, heritage festivals are just an excuse to get dressed up in a silly costume and drink heavily. Many years of culture are crammed into a few…
The gender thing again? C’mon. Less than a year ago, the usually adventurous Arlington Museum of Art ran an exhibit titled Women’s Work, showcasing the female-tinged artwork of a dozen or so emerging women artists. Back then, I was both bemused and irritated with the gender angle; the individual works…
thursday june 4 “Colorin Colorado” is an idiomatic expression in Spanish that is used at the end of children’s stories, but in the case of Colorin Colorado: The Art of Indian Children, it marks the beginning. The Art of Indian Children is an exhibition of colorful wall-sized murals created by…
By the time you read this, the Dallas Stars will either be down two games to none in the Western Conference finals against the Detroit Red Wings or have the series all knotted up at one game apiece; by the time you read this, the Stars will either have their…
Comic actor Coy Covington trowels on the base and mascara far too infrequently for Dallas audiences; underneath all that getup and goo, he has a bloodhound’s sense for the moment to play comedy up or down. While he stalks the daytime in man drag, he ought to consider teaching lessons…
Frank Sinatra never gave a better performance as an actor than he did in The Man With the Golden Arm (1955) as Frankie Machine, a hot-shot poker dealer and junkie who emerges from prison hoping to kick all his bad habits (heroin included) and earn a living as a drummer…
Only a week after lizards came crawling across the nation’s screens in both Godzilla and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Hope Floats comes lumbering along, scourging all in its path with saccharine sentimentality and bogus emotions. Let’s start with the title: two words whose juxtaposition is neither evocative nor…
thursday may 28 Anyone who saw last December’s twisted Christmas special Santa vs. The Snowman is aware of the brilliance that is John Davis and Keith Alcorn, known collectively as DNA Productions. The pair started their computer animation shop 15 years ago, but only recently have they come to the…
The leaders of the slam poetry movement are often heard proudly announcing that they have rescued poetry from the stuffy halls of academia and returned it to the masses. While that may work as a sound bite, it’s a self-serving claim designed to inflate their importance. Claiming that slam poetry…
Compare these two sets of prose. Amo amat amass; Amonk amink a minibus Amarmyladie Moon, Amikky mendip multiplus Amighty midgey spoon. She loves you–yeah, yeah, yeah She loves you–yeah, yeah, yeah. With a love like that, you know you should be glad. Both were penned in late 1963 and unleashed…
Watching Kitchen Dog Theater’s ballsy new interpretation of Tennessee Williams’ dramatic warhorse The Glass Menagerie makes you feel as though you’re doing a high-wire act right alongside the actors. Director Tina Parker has taken Williams’ kitchen-sink staple from its claustrophobic apartment in St. Louis into the Big Top. At first,…
Could it have been all the drugs that kept Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas from being made into a movie? Whatever the cause, journalist Hunter S. Thompson’s staggering, semi-fictional account of “a savage journey to the heart of the American dream” has proven to be one of the most…
No genre of film is quite as beleaguered as the humble romantic comedy. Ideally suited to the modest budgets and limited chops of the burgeoning filmmaker–no horses, no explosions, no alien embryo pods filled with disgusting slime–the genre often takes the blame for twentysomething tales told without the benefit of…
The “Size Matters” marketing campaign for Godzilla is far more ingenious than the movie. It’s also highly annoying–and somewhat misleading. After all, as the ads for a new film called Plump Fiction remind us, “Width matters, too.” Perhaps the best thing about this week’s ballyhooed arrival of Godzilla is that…
Jerry Seinfeld killed stand-up comedy. He didn’t mean to, but the damage was done just the same. After Seinfeld, comedians don’t want to be just comedians anymore; they want a 13-episode deal and the time slot after Friends. A guest shot on The Tonight Show or Letterman used to be…
Two artists glancing through the same window may see the same hills, the same river, the same trees–but they damn sure won’t paint them all the same way. Two Texas painters, Julie Lazarus and Bruno Andrade, both concern themselves with landscape. Though their takes on flora and fauna come from…
thursday may 21 When artist Bill Haveron is at his best, his work is reminiscent of the doodlings of a creative adolescent whose mind has wandered from high school algebra class. The strange people and fantastical creatures that make up his crowded pencil drawings would look right at home on…
Fernando Tatis didn’t say a word as he stripped out of his civvies and put on his batting-practice blues. The normally talkative young man was unusually glum and silent, lost in a funk and in a hurry to get to the field to take some practice swings in the hours…
