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…
It’s never been easy to keep a Deep Ellum crowd occupied. There’s always a better band or cheaper drinks somewhere else. Sure, you can get people to come in, but it’s getting harder to keep them there. And because each club has a separate cover charge, clubgoers are less willing…
The special challenge of children’s theater–namely, how the heck do you make live performance not only accessible to kids, but competitive with the technological media forms–has been addressed before in this space. It’s not really so different from the challenge of making live performance accessible and competitive to adults, who…
Do we really need to see the great Kevin Spacey fuming and fussing in one of those we-do-things-my-way-or-we-don’t-do-them-at-all roles? In The Negotiator, he’s playing Chris Sabian, an expert hostage negotiator for the Chicago police, whose job it is to talk down Samuel L. Jackson’s Danny Roman, another police expert who…
There are disconnected sequences in Whatever, the film debut of writer-director Susan Skoog, that evoke a unique and harrowing experience: the high school party that won’t end. Skoog obviously understands there are two kinds of students–those who can mess around with drugs, alcohol, and sex yet still observe boundaries, and…
The Walt Disney Company has a smart and highly profitable business strategy: Re-release the studio’s proven hits every seven years or so, thereby reaching a new generation of kids–and making another tidy bundle of dollars in the process. Or the Mouse House just remakes its classic films–see, or don’t, last…
The feature directorial debut of writer-director Theresa Connelly is a complete misfire. What is meant to be a somewhat farcical, but also fairytale-like, midsummer night’s sex comedy instead ends up a tedious, uninvolving affair, burdened with a slim premise, grating characters, and poorly realized humor. Clearly a heartfelt project for…
Thanks to the hungry maw of cable TV, nearly every movie production is now accompanied by a documentary crew, assigned with getting enough footage for at least a half-hour making-of short. Such sub-productions are traditionally arranged by the producers of the main feature; and, not surprisingly, it is the usual…
Events like the Dallas Music Expo aren’t for the casual fan. Things like this are for the kind of people who can stand to spend two hours sifting through musty cardboard boxes full of 45s, looking for a piece of black (vinyl) gold. They’re for the fans who have to…
thursday july 30 William Manchee could be Dallas’ answer to John Grisham. Manchee, an author who has maintained a private law firm in Dallas since 1975, recently published Brash Endeavour, a page-turning tale of a small-time lawyer in over his head with some big-time clients. Just like in Grisham’s books,…
“One of the criteria of casting was that we couldn’t afford to have a prick in the company,” said director Milos Forman on the making of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. (Jack Nicholson, we can only assume, hadn’t achieved official prickdom at that point in his career.) The 1975…
WICHITA FALLS–“Walk with me,” Jerry Jones is saying in mid-stride, his voice dripping with sweat and twang. He moves quickly, wasting not a tenth of a tenth of a second. In no time at all, he’s 100 feet from where he just was, heading toward the chain-link fence separating the…
The problem with the one-act, that most bladder-friendly of theatrical forms, is how to present what is essentially a live-action joke and make it look like something more than a joke. Even with the darkest of material–as in, say, Erik Ehn’s Red Plays–the denouement is still a punch line, indeed…
A colleague and I were sitting in a Fort Worth diner just after walking through a certain exhibit at the Kimbell Museum. We were pondering the question If you could steal any object from that show, what would you nab? An enameled caviar server. A curvaceous, trippy mantel clock. A…
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…
