thursday april 16 In our rush to get out this year’s weak USA Film Festival schedule, we didn’t have time to include last-minute info about major changes that involved two of the festival’s best events. The hilarious, ruthless TV-sitcom writer satire Hacks has been bumped up to Thursday, April 16,…
I don’t know that the title Fireworks really fits the art show to which it refers. Clay works, huh? Real explosive stuff. I guess if you leave it in the kiln long enough… In case you haven’t noticed, an international “celebration” of clay and ceramic works has run through this…
Betting on horse racing is bad, or so we’ve been led to believe for most of our lives. Movies show us it’s bad through their alternating portrayals of track denizens as either pathetic losers or greasy criminals (for a look at both, check out Richard Dreyfuss’ surprisingly entertaining 1989 film…
Thursday April 9 Funny how fast things can change in Hollywood. In the early ’90s, Keenen Ivory Wayans was high on the success of his groundbreaking sketch comedy show In Living Color, and the prevailing wisdom around town was that his brothers and sister would still be waiting tables and…
For four innings, everything was perfect. After a while, you could hear grown men hold their breath each time the ball left the pitcher’s hand; you could feel the cheers every time an opposing batter struck out or a fly ball was snared in midflight or a ground ball bounced…
Playwright and screenwriter John Patrick Shanley loves words. Anyone with a similar depth of feeling for the currency of human communication cannot blame him; it’s easy to become enthralled with the sounds, even the look on the printed page, of words, and forget that they are symbols of meaning, not…
Damned if she does, damned if she don’t. Los Angeles-based Susan Otto faces the same speedbumps other female artists face in this post-feminist age, but she tackles them with a finely tuned sledgehammer. She pounds away at social constructs, at the notion that the female voice is a tired one,…
Rapper Ice Cube’s debut as a director-screenwriter is a big step backward in terms of the representation of African-Americans and women in film. The Players Club features a group of up-and-coming black male actors who portray hardly anything other than rogue hustlers, abusive hip-hoppers, and capricious rapists. The film’s women…
If nothing else, the current edition of Michael Moore’s continuing self-love fest does have a great subject: the desperation hidden inside a “thriving” U.S. economy. While politicians and financial wizards point to unemployment on the wane and profits on the rise, Moore notes that the largest employer in the country…
The flimsiest hustle in movie promotion today–one perpetrated by film festivals and their camp followers–is that independent movies are starved for mainstream attention. The truth is, they often have an open field in big-city media. Major studios are usually unable to deliver a finished print of a would-be blockbuster until…
What follows are brief reviews of some highlights from the USA Film Festival, arranged chronologically. The festival runs Thursday, April 16, through Thursday, April 23. All events take place at the AMC Glen Lakes, 9450 N. Central Expressway, except for the Master Screen Artist Tribute to Christopher Walken, which will…
PORT CHARLOTTE, Fla.–Luis Mayoral answers the door wearing only a white T-shirt and red Jockey briefs. He has a lit menthol cigarette dangling from his smiling lips, and for the rest of the hour we spend together, this is how the Texas Rangers’ Latin American liaison remains–half-dressed, smoking, smiling as…
Driving to Mesquite to see a provocative, world-premiere play by a talented Texas playwright? Jeez, what’s next–performance art by a radical African-American collective in Garland? Actually, you shouldn’t be surprised that a stately construction like the Mesquite Arts Center, which sticks out like a good tooth among the day-care centers…
Barney the Dinosaur’s broad purple hide has sustained quite a few scars since Barney and Friends debuted on PBS in spring 1992. Bob Dole denounced him on the floor of the Senate as part of a public television scam. Rogue computer programmers made him the target of automatic weapons fire…
When you think about how some of the smartest, most surprising films about women have been made by men–and how, when a woman filmmaker manages to score a decent budget for her project, she does the same for stories about men–you start to realize: Directors should dare to speak for…
Nobel Prize winner Albert Camus thought life was absurd, but all the more meaningful for it. His contemporaries Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir thought him a cut-rate intellectual because he had a sentimental side. As early as 25, Camus was aware of the conflict between his brain and his…
Thursday April 2 If you just know Ship of Fools and “The Jilting of Granny Weatherall” from college classes, you don’t know the late Texas writer Katherine Anne Porter. Her one novel, Ship of Fools, felt, to some critics, like Peyton Place in a life jacket (plus one dwarf). Even…
Central Expressway at 3 a.m. is a different kind of war zone than its daytime persona. Instead of cars locked bumper-to-bumper in a familiar, maddening crawl through the center of the city, the after-hours Central is far more cinematic. Nearly surreal in its undulating grimness, the only cars it carries…
I recently spoke before about 30 members of the local volunteer arts fundraising group 500 Inc.–with more than a little trepidation. I was the guest of the Undermain Theatre, which, like all major recipients of grants from this group, must provide free “Sample The Arts” events for the organization. My…
I couldn’t see the bathtub in Richard Diebenkorn’s giant abstract painting. Didn’t even try. But two women who had broken off from our guided tour at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth did. Or so they said. In fact, that bathtub got ’em pretty excited. “And see, Susan. Right…
Probably every film director itches to make a western, so let’s be thankful that, with The Newton Boys, Richard Linklater has scratched his itch. Now he can go back to making movies about subjects for which he has some genuine feeling. Linklater should not be begrudged his chance to “stretch.”…
Lovers of American movies used to joke that foreign films wouldn’t look so good if you saw them without subtitles. John Sayles’ latest movie, Men With Guns, plays better than his other films because it does have subtitles. Bald dialogue always sounds better in Spanish and Indian dialects. Set in…
