The first shot in Steven Spielberg’s remarkable World War II epic Saving Private Ryan is an American flag with the sun behind it. It’s a delicate, almost diaphanous image–the fabric has the transparent delicacy of a chrysalis. This is the perfect introduction to a movie about the fragility–and fortitude–of compassion…
Director-writer-composer-star-visionary Vincent Gallo, a left-field character actor whose best work has been in the films of mainstream eccentrics like Emir Kusturica (Arizona Dream), Abel Ferrara (The Funeral), and Alan Taylor (the low-key Palookaville), arrives as full-blown auteur with Buffalo ’66, a million-dollar art project currently on the cover of both…
thursday july 23 In case you didn’t read last week’s Observer (or any Observer for the last, oh, four months), Peter Schmidt–former Three on a Hill and Funland frontman–released his first solo album, love or the decimal equivalent, on July 21. The album, recorded under the name Legendary Crystal Chandelier…
Harp music wafting across thick red carpet, a few hundred well-dressed people sipping cool white Chardonnay and murmuring something about “legs” and “HDL levels.” What a perfect illusion of Dallas sophistication, of Texas savvy: Hang out at the Meyerson in your coolest duds and sip the most acclaimed regional wine…
It seems as if the Dallas music scene has lost more than it has gained recently. Within the last year alone, UFOFU, rubberbullet, and Course of Empire called it quits, and the Dark Room and the Orbit Room had to shut their doors. Deep Ellum has become the province of…
You don’t have to be a twentysomething to dread the idea of a bleak comedy written by a twentysomething playwright about twentysomethings who have no direction in their lives. I shall remain in this demographic for about 10 more months, and I’ve spent more than half of this last decade…
For those who thought Dumb and Dumber signaled the end of the world as we know it, my advice to you is duck and cover. Comedy avatars Peter and Bobby Farrelly, the odium savants who perpetrated what some might consider Jim Carrey’s Hamlet (the geniuses from South Park are currently…
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…
