In The Mask of Zorro, Anthony Hopkins plays the eponymous masked hero as if he were doing Shakespeare. He’s trying to turn a kitsch hero into a real one, and his efforts are so weirdly off-key that you don’t know whether to applaud or titter. This dolorous Don Diego de…
The winds that sweep across the Sahara kick up ferocious sandstorms. Dunes change shape by the hour, flying particles blind the eye, and all sense of direction and reason is lost. In such disorienting surroundings, reality and hallucination converge, and the most inexplicable, unimaginable events can occur. Passion in the…
If two trees embraced in a snowy, isolated forest, would the affection make a noise? Zhang Jingru saw it, was moved, and even figured out a way to paint the scene. Employing meticulous brushwork on both sides of hair-thin paper, voodoo somehow arises from the surface–serene, chilly, and eerily breathtaking…
Clowns scare the hell out of us. We’re not sure when it started, because we can remember watching The Bozo Show growing up and not even flinching. It might have been after we read It, the Stephen King novel that introduced the psychotic clown Pennywise into our subconscious. Maybe it…
thursday july 16 One of the most interesting things about the interior of Club Clearview is the collection of fingerpaintings the club has compiled. It’s interesting to see what grown musicians will do with a blank canvas, a set of paints, and their fingers. Clearview recently unveiled 50 new paintings,…
The reporters ask their questions in hushed tones, as though too ashamed to form the words. They stick their microphones and notepads in front of the players and wait for them to answer, which they always do–even when the loss is so humiliating, they’d rather disappear. The Texas Rangers, standing…
The metamorphosis of Theatre Three’s downstairs rehearsal space into the almost full-fledged black box known as Theatre Too is a particularly gratifying transformation for anyone who thinks that having a clear view of the actor’s face is needed for a rich theatrical experience. This is by no means a commonly…
Somewhere high in the Rocky Mountains, 1863: “Wait 20 minutes while I sketch this storm.” “Yeah, right Mr. Bierstadt. We’ll just stand here with the pack mules while the wind freezes our butts off and you indulge yourself. Again.” Granted, conjuring up a mental picture of an impulsive, self-centered artist…
Smoke Signals billows in from the Sundance Film Festival, noteworthy not simply because it won both the Audience Award and the Filmmaker’s Trophy, but because it is the first feature film written, directed, and co-produced by American Indians to receive a major distribution deal. The buzz has kicked its screenwriter,…
“In an old house in Paris that was covered with vines, lived 12 little girls in two straight lines. They left the house at half past nine, in two straight lines in rain or shine. The smallest one was Madeline.” If these words don’t instantly conjure up captivating images of…
If you loved Don Rickles as the acid-tongued voice of Mr. Potato Head in Toy Story, wait till you get a load of Tommy Lee Jones’ gung-ho warmonger, Major Chip Hazard, in Small Soldiers. In Joe Dante’s uncommonly clever fantasy, Jones’ “character” is a military action figure just 12 inches…
thursday july 9 Charlie Gilder has been around Deep Ellum long enough to remember when there was nothing there to remember. When he and his partner Steve Asbeck opened the Twilite Room on Commerce Street in 1983, the only residents of Deep Ellum were a few artists who hadn’t yet…
Back when the National Wrestling Alliance first formed in 1948, wrestling was much more real than it is today. It wasn’t, you know, real, but it wasn’t as ridiculous as it is now. Modern-day wrestling is more like a soap opera for guys, complete with scripted fights, family feuds, ridiculous…
The Inwood Theater continues its Midnight Madness series this weekend with what it calls the “Fun-loving Losers” double-header: Clerks and Slacker, already slump-shouldered classics in their own right; their creators, Kevin Smith and Richard Linklater, respectively, are the prime purveyors of this decade’s new generation of fringe filmmaking. Slacker, in…
All human life may be precious, but the arbiters of popular and scholarly history can be pretty forgetful when it comes to meting out posterity. Take genocide, a practice honed in the 20th century whose episodes have produced vastly disparate amounts of attention. Germany’s Holocaust has spawned a bona fide…
In David Lean’s 1957 film Bridge on the River Kwai, British World War II soldiers held hostage in a Japanese POW camp are forced to build a bridge across a jungle river. If they refuse, their captors will kill them. If they try to escape, the surrounding flora and fauna…
Michael Bay is the director of Bad Boys and The Rock and the new asteroid-attack movie Armageddon–which should be called The Very Big Rock. He has, I’m afraid, perfected a new form: His movies are trailers for themselves. Every scene is all climax and no foreplay. When it’s all over,…
When Quentin Tarantino started up his boutique releasing company, Rolling Thunder, last year, his first release was, unsurprisingly, a Hong Kong production. Tarantino, after all, has been one of the most vocal boosters of Hong Kong cinema in the United States. What was surprising was the choice: Chungking Express, a…
I Went Down is the highest-grossing independent Irish film in history–which, of course, doesn’t say much in the States, where we’ve turned independent filmmaking into a corporate subsidiary and consider Ireland a drab place where either Daniel Day-Lewis or American heartthrobs with poor accents struggle with The Troubles. So the…
Is there room in a modern society for a comic hypnotist? As far as entertainment value goes, hypnotists are almost on the same scale as ventriloquists and plate spinners, or anyone else who regularly appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show. The whole idea is so old, it smells like liniment…
thursday july 2 In the past few months, the Dallas area has hosted several fine photography exhibits spotlighting Mexico and its citizens. The Bath House Cultural Center’s latest pair of exhibits, El Trabajo De La Mujer and En La Casa, may be two of the best yet. Both exhibits look…
Just after we all thought indie rock had saved the planet from overt guitar posturing, leave it to MARS, the super-slick chain of “music and recording superstores” to launch a contest for would-be rock stars. Seems the equipment-shop-cum-amusement-park knows its patronage well: money-spending lawyers and CPAs who still dream in…
