Legendary American standup Lenny Bruce became a legend not because he was flat-out funny. Listening to his recorded material today–from his famous “Lone Ranger” routine to his various tours through the ethnic hothouses of the urban landscape–reveals a rather glaring lack of imagination, especially when you compare what has survived…
Movie special-effects maestro Phil Tippett has won billowing praise for the jaw-dropping digital transformations that turned models of alien bugs into the fearsome insect armies of Starship Troopers. But the 46-year-old founder of Tippett Studio in Berkeley, California, is his own most astonishing piece of transformation. If he’s at the…
thursday december 4 Cara Mia Theatre Company: A general perception is that immigrant and first-generation Mexican-American women are acculturated to keep silent and endure whatever life hands them. Director Marisela Barrera and Cara Mia Theatre Company, a troupe of Latina artists, have put together a show that posits a cultural…
Not long ago, Mike Modano would have been frustrated by nights like this. He would have been dissatisfied by his inability to shoot the puck to the back of the net, by the Edmonton Oilers’ determination to keep him out of the game with hard checks, by the way despised…
When people refer to playwright Alan Ayckbourn as “the British Neil Simon,” the comparison is usually intended to be a compliment. Both men are god-awful rich (with Simon probably in the lead, but only because of the countless American movie versions of his plays); both, at their best, have stitched…
First, The Heiress was unofficially remade as Washington Square, then The Big Carnival as Mad City, and The Day of the Jackal as The Jackal. But now we get The Absent-Minded Professor, all dressed up in new threads, as Flubber. In this frenzy of plundering the past, is nothing sacred?…
You can’t exactly call Alien Resurrection a pleasurable experience, but, then again, you wouldn’t say that about its predecessors either. Directed by Frenchman Jean-Pierre Jeunet, who previously co-directed with Marc Caro Delicatessen and The City of Lost Children, this fourth installment in the Alien onslaught is once again designed to…
friday november 28 Phillip Walker: This weekend, Teatro Dallas was all prepared to present you a theatrical troupe from Venezuela performing a political satire in which the two lead characters were prostitutes. We’d be lying if we said we weren’t a little disappointed to hear that the theatrical company never…
There are two plays that alternate in New Theatre Company’s crisp, occasionally volatile production of Donald Margulies’ Sight Unseen. One is the portrait of an aborted relationship, the other a savage, expressionistic landscape of the terrain between art and identity, commercial success and exploitation. You have to wonder if Margulies…
John Grisham’s The Rainmaker lulls you into the mindset you get while reading a bestseller at the beach. What a sad thing to say about a Francis Ford Coppola movie! Rather than heighten your awareness the way The Conversation or The Godfather did, The Rainmaker makes you feel lazy and…
In John Berendt’s beguiling travel-cum-true-crime book, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, the people of Savannah, Georgia, (in Berendt’s words) “flourished like hothouse plants tended by an indulgent gardener. The ordinary became extraordinary. Eccentrics thrived. Every nuance and quirk of personality achieved greater brilliance in that lush enclosure…
This Australian answer to Bonnie and Clyde, inelegantly titled Kiss or Kill, is the kind of film that carries you along even as you know exactly where it’s headed. And where it’s headed, of course, is trouble–trouble for all involved. Two sweet and tender hooligans, Nikki and Al, pay the…
thursday november 20 20th Annual Chi Omega Christmas Market: You say your blood isn’t quite blue enough to click champagne glasses with the wealthy and powerful of Dallas, but your idea of self-employment doesn’t extend to holding a sign at the corner of a Stemmons exit ramp? The 20th Annual…
They awaited his arrival as though he were a visiting king from a faraway land. The reporters set up their microphones, checked their tape recorders, focused their cameras, made sure their pads were empty and their pens filled with ink. A few even hurriedly inhaled some last puffs from cigarettes…
“How they gonna keep him down on the farm once he’s seen Paree?” was roughly the question in some friend’s minds when I told them I was going to cram as much theatergoing as I could afford into my eight-day Manhattan vacation. After I arrived–during various conversations in which I…
A team of Russia-based international bad guys want to knock off someone at the very top of the U.S. government. Who you gonna call? The Jackal. As personified by Bruce Willis, this assassin di tutti assassins is a rather tight-lipped psychopath with an alarming collection of multi-colored hairpieces. Willis trademark…
Put brutally, the marvelous The Wings of the Dove is the story of a romantic frame-up that backfires. Thankfully, nothing is put brutally in this smart, lyrical movie. Director Iain Softley and screenwriter Hossein Amini cut to the thick of Henry James’ masterpiece about amorous extortion and moral purification. Helena…
thursday november 13 The Love Clinic: Is satisfying long-term monogamy possible between a man and a woman? Is it even desirable? The Love Clinic, a monthly African-American forum hosted by Jubilee United Methodist Church, cries “Yes!” to both. They temporarily move their clinic to Stephanie’s Collection of African-American Art, but…
On September 20, Texas Rangers president and general partner Tom Schieffer sat behind the home team’s first-base dugout at the Ballpark in Arlington and smiled. The Rangers were losing to the Anaheim Angels, but the thick summer air that blankets the metroplex was beginning to lift ever so slightly, and…
Watching Dallas Theater Center’s gutsy (and I mean that literally, but more later) production of Michael Ondaatje’s The Collected Works of Billy the Kid, I couldn’t help but wonder why American playwrights haven’t plundered the 19th-century American frontier for the kind of blood-red gems Ondaatje has uncovered. As directed with…
Documentarian Errol Morris is by far best known for his 1988 feature, The Thin Blue Line, which is often described as the only film that ever got an innocent man off death row. But he got his start with a very different sort of material: His first two films, Gates…
Mad City, a descendant of Billy Wilder’s Ace in the Hole, may irritate orthodox movie buffs. In the coruscating Wilder classic, Kirk Douglas’ supremely cynical newspaper reporter turns the rescue of a cave-in victim into “the big carnival” (the film’s alternate title). The protagonist of Mad City, a TV reporter…
