On May 30, 1957, the Los Angeles Times reported that the body of “the distinguished film producer and director James Whale” had been found floating in the swimming pool at his home in Pacific Palisades. Fully clothed, Whale’s corpse exhibited a head wound. “Whale,” the Times went on to point…
Given choreographer Paul Taylor’s self-described “insatiable itch to communicate to the world at large,” it was surely only a matter of time before he turned his seasoned eyes down south. In his newest piece, “Piazzolla Caldera,” he does just that, lifting the tango right out of Argentina’s back streets and…
thursday november 19 During his 25-year career with the FBI, John Douglas exhibited an uncanny ability to get inside a criminal’s mind. Based on a minimum amount of evidence, he could tell you almost everything you needed to know about the perpetrator: his age, height, weight, where he lived, his…
Modest Mouse is like three smart, attention-deficit-disorder kids running roughshod over a romper room. The Seattle band’s music–small cacophonies of melody and turmoil–ricochets off the ceiling, punches holes in walls, then meets square in the middle of the room for a polite race of Hot Wheels. Then the boys get…
Playwright Paul Rudnick captured the contemporary public’s disdain for William Shakespeare with one utterly accurate declaration from a character in his aptly named comedy I Hate Hamlet: “It’s like algebra on stage!” Just as millions of us sat through that high school mathematical torture learning just enough to pass (or…
Kevin Sullivan remembers the exact moment when he realized the Dallas Mavericks no longer mattered, at least to the rest of the world. He recalls the moment in detail, as you might remember the music playing during a breakup. It occurred during the All-Star Game in 1993, which was held…
Italian commie provocateur Dario Fo got kicked around but good in a recent New Yorker article concerning the sometimes nasty political entanglements of the Nobel Prize’s Swiss nominating committee for literature. The 72-year-old Fo nabbed the literature award last year, but nobody seems to know why–or at least, nobody in…
One of the weirdest things about the huge self-taught art retrospective going on in Fort Worth right now is its dearth of Texas artists. Not that this region has the monopoly on outsider and naive art, but it is rife with it. Texas has really, in its own unruly way,…
First, a disclaimer: Having missed last year’s I Know What You Did Last Summer, I deliberately put off seeing it until after viewing its sequel, I Still Know What You Did Last Summer. That way I could view part two without prejudice and be able to judge whether IKWYDLS virgins…
Postwar Italy’s most heralded contribution to world cinema may have been neorealism, but its most distinctive and beloved filmmaker was Federico Fellini (1920-1993), who found his true voice when he abandoned neorealism for its polar opposite. While the conventional wisdom has Fellini moving abruptly from his neorealist roots toward a…
Well, now we know why the term “bored to death” was invented. Meet Joe Black takes an interesting idea–Death assumes human form and comes to earth to learn about human existence–and reduces it to a flat, uninspired, interminably slow movie. Not only slow but long: a full three hours. Produced…
American History X, a hard-edged look at American neo-Nazis, arrives in theaters with a lot of behind-the-scenes baggage: First-time director Tony Kaye has engaged in a protracted, high-profile battle with distributor-producer New Line Cinema over the film’s final form. While Kaye may have a justified grievance, this is not as…
thursday november 12 Sometimes, the most basic images are the most striking. For example, about three years ago video director Spike Jonze–known for his work with the Beastie Boys and Weezer–created one of the most interesting music videos in recent years with a clip that consisted of little more than…
Then I woke up, and it was all a dream. My back was aching from resting against the knobbly tree trunk, my tongue was sweating it was so damn hot–107 degrees on the bank’s digital thermometer–and if it hadn’t been for my Onion Fest baseball cap, the shifting sun would’ve…
What better way is there to spend a chilly autumn evening than to curl up with a large box of popcorn and watch a good thriller? Genealogies of a Crime, directed by Raoul Ruiz and brought to Dallas by the USA Film Festival, may be just the movie you need:…
Standard evening question: Should we eat first, and then see the movie, or should we catch the early movie and then eat? For years now, the Granada Cinema and Drafthouse has solved that problem with a left-right combo: Wash down that pizza with a pitcher of Bud while you watch…
“Theater should be a grand poetic spectacle, the language given flesh and breath,” Federico Garcia Lorca once said. Now celebrating the Spanish poet and playwright’s centennial, Texas Woman’s University reminds us of what he meant through its production of Blood Wedding, perhaps Garcia Lorca’s best-known drama. The story–itself inspired by…
Who’da thunk Dallas was ready for a revival of the revue, the late-19th-century live entertainment that might best be called “short attention span theater”? Hell, in a city where stealth police cars are employed to curtail tailgating, speeding, and other restless by-products of road rage, the question should be more…
Fascism is in the air…well, at least it’s on movie screens. In a two-week stretch we’ve seen old Nazis (Life Is Beautiful), neo-Nazis (American History X, due next week), old Nazis training neo-Nazis (Apt Pupil), book-burning (Pleasantville), and now, with The Siege, a story of full-blown military rule on American…
As a requiem for the ’60s, The Big Chill didn’t quite hit the mark the first time around, in 1983 (the film is scheduled for recycling November 6). Its greatest-hits soundtrack was soul-stirring, for sure; it’s hard to top the Rolling Stones, Marvin Gaye, or Aretha Franklin in any decade…
thursday november 5 Every five years, Dallas endures another landmark anniversary of the Kennedy assassination, once again dredging up our city’s sullied past as “The City of Hate.” All copies of Oliver Stone’s controversial 1991 film JFK disappear from local video stores. Magazines rehash the facts. Conspiracy theorists crawl out…
Fred Washington’s lawyer does not want his client’s picture taken for this story. Attorney Eric Fein believes that if you were to see a picture of Washington, who stands about 5-foot-11 and weighs a little more than 200 pounds, you might not be so quick to believe that he could…
