Two weeks ago in this space, while reviewing Our Endeavors’ disappointing production of Albert Camus’ Caligula, or The Meaning of Death, I suggested that a rape that happens offstage in that show should be brought onstage to balance some of the windy philosophical stretches with a little raw emotion. Well,…
Since the ballyhooed independent filmmaking movement birthed an instant sub-genre of movies about hip, angst-filled young people pontificating on some major–or worse, minor–turning point in their lives, it seemed perfectly reasonable to fear Dancer, Texas Pop. 81. Never mind the critical murmuring seeping out of its premiere at the South…
Dancer, Texas Pop. 81 is a nice little movie. That probably sounds like an insult, but it’s not meant to be. It’s a genuine sentiment, one not often given–or even fished for–with movies these days, where if it can’t be bigger, it had best be weirder than anything that’s come…
In the production notes for Spike Lee’s new movie, He Got Game, the filmmaker is quoted as saying, “I don’t think I’ve ever done a film that is just about one thing….” That’s true: usually he’s able to cram in two or three things. In his new He Got Game,…
Chinese Box arrives with one of the weirdest hybrid pedigrees in living memory. The writing credits include–in addition to the film’s director, Wayne Wang–Jean-Claude Carriere, who worked on most of the best films of Luis Bunuel’s late period (Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, Phantom of Liberty, Belle de Jour); classy…
Victor Hugo’s 1862 novel Les Miserables, which he began in 1845, runs in most editions to around 1,500 pages. The latest film version–there have been five other adaptations for movies or television–runs a bit under two and a half hours. It’s an expert piece of pruning–entire continents of plot and…
thursday april 30 Wynton Marsalis is a jazzman’s jazzman, a purist with a discography longer than a Charlie Parker solo and the chops to back it up. But he has also found time to indulge his other love–classical music–squelching the notion that jazz players “just make it up as they…
Playwright, essayist, and screenwriter Wendy Wasserstein recently admitted in an Advocate interview that she’s fallen in love with more than one gay man during her lifetime. Of course, this was to promote her deliriously witty screenplay for The Object of My Affection, the story of a straight woman who falls…
Bruiser, a rottweiler-mix pup, was found stumbling through an alley, dragging a heavy chain. He had mange and heart worms. Winston the cattle dog was forsaken as well, running lonely through Oak Cliff. How about a smiley little shih tzu with one eye, or a fuzzy poodle with diabetes? Snoopy…
I learned an important lesson while watching Having Our Say, Emily Mann’s theatrical adaptation of the best-selling memoir from a pair of hundred-year-old black sisters in New York: African-Americans have indeed arrived in the mainstream. This huge Broadway hit celebrates the fact that they can be just as shortsighted and…
The gallery space feels womb-like–dark, humid, warm. Actual mist floats though the air. An old film whirrs on a tiny antique projector, little strobe lights throw images toward an old stuffed chair. Smoke and mirrors, if you will, where the claustrophobic meets the soothing in the strange and ominous microcosm…
Hong Kong director Kirk Wong (credited here as Che-Kirk Wong) is the latest defector from the troubled H.K. film industry. Until now, he has been best known in the United States for his Jackie Chan film Crime Story, which played art houses before being picked up for wider release by…
Gwyneth Paltrow gets another chance to show off her letter-perfect English accent in Sliding Doors, an engaging romantic comedy that employs a rather novel narrative device: After introducing the main characters and setting up the basic story, the film splits into two separate but parallel plot lines. It’s a twist…
Is the opposite of offhand, onhand? If so, The Spanish Prisoner is the most onhand movie since Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket. Writer-director David Mamet delights in his own supposed cleverness; he wants you to scratch your head while he manipulates your brain. Campbell Scott plays a researcher in some…
In writer-director James Toback’s quicksilver sex comedy Two Girls and a Guy, Robert Downey Jr. plays Blake Allen, a struggling New York actor who lives in a spacious loft in SoHo he probably can’t afford. He’s a pampered prince who has worked out for himself a cozy romantic subterfuge: He…
Two unrelated facts: the French Revolution happened more than 200 years ago. Painting has been called “dead.” So what’s an artist doing painting the clasped hands of Napoleon and the baleful gaze of Louis the XVI? He’s kicking beautiful dust in the eyes of narrow-sighted fact-mongers, that’s what. Toronto-based Tony…
This year’s USA Film Festival may have, uh, sucked, but that doesn’t mean that great films aren’t coming to Dallas. Witness the Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture’s special screening of The Night of the Hunter, the 1955 film that did for preachers what Stephen King’s It did for clowns…
thursday april 23 Let’s face facts: If wine were really “better than masturbating” (as the tag line for the Art Bar’s Generation X Wine Tasting argues), there would be more Internet sites devoted to full-bodied Merlots instead of Pamela Lee’s full-bodied implants, and peep shows would be replaced by $1-per-glass…
Just now, Cool Storm is anything but. The two-year-old thoroughbred rages beneath his rider, a bundle of nerves wound tightly inside a fierce and beautiful half-ton frame. He shuffles from side to side, rears backward, moves any which way but forward. The horse grinds his teeth so hard, so loudly,…
The caprice of totalitarianism burdened the thoughts of a 32-year-old Albert Camus when, in 1945, he staged a theatrical meditation called Caligula, or The Meaning of Death. He hid out while the Nazis plundered France, writing inflammatory articles for the Resistance and nurturing his philosophy of the absurd that would…
With I Love You…Don’t Touch Me!, first-time filmmaker Julie Davis has made a low-budget movie about love and abstinence among under-30s that looks less to the films of her generational peers–Noah Baumbach’s Kicking and Screaming or Kevin Smith’s Chasing Amy for instance–than to Woody Allen’s quirky romances of the ’70s…
From its very first frame, Neil Jordan’s The Butcher Boy whooshes us inside the rollicking, deranged world of 12-year-old Francie Brady (Eamonn Owens). Francie is a red-headed roustabout who lives with his alcoholic “Da” (Stephen Rea) and screw-loose mother (Aisling O’Sullivan) in a small town in northern Ireland in the…
