In Paul Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers, based on the late Robert Heinlein’s 1959 sci-fi opus, the killer arachnids upstage the humans. Not that it’s much of a contest, since the humans are all raging dullards. We’ve seen these young men and women with their square jaws and pert noses emoting their…
Family films are often pitched for “the child in us all,” but Bean doesn’t have an ounce of “inner child” in it. It’s been worked out to appeal to, at best, 8- to 10-year-olds; there’s not much to delight even precocious pre-teens, let alone adults. This really is too bad,…
thursday november 6 Wilco, Blue Mountain: We know you’re a regular at Sons of Hermann Hall, cried when Naomi’s closed, and read No Depression on a regular basis. So we don’t have to tell you how great Wilco is. You were alternative country when alternative country wasn’t cool. You know…
It’s about 6 p.m. on the Thursday before the Dallas Cowboys are to fly to Philadelphia to be humiliated by the despised Eagles. Most of Jason Garrett’s teammates are at home or doing some radio call-in show or grabbing dinner with the wife and kids. Or maybe they’re out getting…
If, while in the grocery checkout or ATM line, you find yourself standing next to a young man or woman with a shockingly inappropriate platinum dye job, there are two possible explanations–either the person shares Dennis Rodman’s hairdresser, or he or she is a cast member of Kitchen Dog Theater’s…
Taiwanese-American director Ang Lee has carved out a place for himself as our leading director of comedies of manners. His first three films–Pushing Hands (1991), The Wedding Banquet (1993), and Eat, Drink, Man, Woman (1994)–combined humor with touches of pathos, while shedding a light on modern Chinese and Chinese-American family…
A glance at the cast list for the new Sidney Lumet hospital drama Critical Care might lead you to expect an embarrassment of riches. Instead, the results are often just plain embarrassing. How could a film starring James Spader, Helen Mirren, Albert Brooks, Kyra Sedgwick, Anne Bancroft, Jeffrey Wright, Wallace…
Despite its muckraking pretensions, Red Corner is a rickety throwback to escapist adventures that featured beautiful foreign idealists spouting high-flown hooey to fighting Americans. The heroine, a scrappy Beijing defense lawyer, ends up whispering a whole succession of sweet somethings to the hero, a framed Yank. The banalities include (I…
Neil Young has been so many things–a pink-suited and pompadoured rockabilly cat, a founding member of the SoCal folk sound of the ’70s, a tireless campaigner for the separation of art and commerce, a cyber-geek years ahead of his time, a lounge-jazz wannabe, and a relentless rocker–that it’s hard to…
thursday october 30 Maafa: The Assault on African Civilization and the African Response to Slavery: It’s hard not to get emotional about history, but too much emotion, whether it comes from the political right or left, tends to obscure important lessons. The 13th Annual African Awakening Conference will, according to…
Some wag once said that if you want to keep your appetite for sausage and politics, you should never watch either one being made. To that warning I add the process of making art. Since I consider writing, music, and the visual arts to be infinitely superior experiences to a…
Jennifer Jason Leigh follows up one of her smallest and weakest roles–in A Thousand Acres–with a far more challenging and formidable performance in Washington Square. This new film version of Henry James’ 1880 short novel chronicles the courtship of a wealthy girl who has no obvious attractive qualities. But the…
After earning worldwide accolades for her superb 1993 adaptation of Frances Hodgson Burnett’s children’s classic The Secret Garden, Polish-born writer-director Agnieszka Holland is well aware that her equally intense new film version of Henry James’ novella Washington Square may pigeonhole her as a kind of reference librarian of world cinema…
The true-life incident of the Cottingley Fairies is so full of possibilities, so thought-provoking and hilarious at once, that it’s amazing it’s never been filmed before. Making up for lost time, the story has suddenly appeared (on its 80th anniversary) as the basis for two films simultaneously. Photographing Fairies, with…
Stylishness without substance can become wearying real fast. Twenty minutes into A Life Less Ordinary, the new movie from the producing-directing-writing team of Trainspotting and Shallow Grave, I was already into overload. It’s not that director Danny Boyle doesn’t have imagination. It’s just that sometimes imagination is all he has…
thursday october 23 The Collected Works of Billy The Kid: Reading the supple prose of Michael Ondaatje’s Booker Prize-winning The English Patient and watching the beautifully photographed but rather vapid film version was like–well, the difference between a good read and a dorky movie. Michael Ondaatje again jumps between media,…
It’s hard to fault The House of Yes, the wry toast of this year’s Sundance Film Festival, for its limitations as a film. In fact, it’s hardly a film at all. Rather, it’s a barely staged, five-handed farce that trails its amiable cast around a looming Victorian mansion over the…
Editor’s note: The Dallas Observer’s regular sports column debuts this week. Barry Switzer speaks in a soft, twangy growl. At first, you can barely hear him. He’s like a crazy old grandfather scolding invisible ghosts that only he can see, and his sentences often blend into one very long word…
The highest recommendation I can give Theatre Three’s Texas premiere of British playwright David Hare’s theological drama Racing Demon is that I emerged punch-drunk from the production. The jabs weren’t aimed at the audience, but if you have more than a passing interest in the internal politics of the contemporary…
Writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson’s Boogie Nights opens with a sinuous, breathlessly extended tracking shot that swoops us into a San Fernando Valley disco and then does a curlicue around a succession of faces. In the discotheque’s low-lit luminescence, these people pop out like jack-o’-lanterns. They have the look of trashy…
Steven Soderbergh’s cinematic version of Spalding Gray’s Gray’s Anatomy opens with a hokey educational trailer from the 1950s about the crucial nature of good eyesight. It then segues into nine minutes of talking heads jabbering about their sundry unique vision problems: One woman sleeps with her eyes open; another mistakes…
thursday october 16 Master Magician Kozak: If television and movies drove a stake into the heart of the vaudeville circuit, then the fractured demographics of modern audiences is the ring of garlic around the corpse’s throat to keep it from ever rising again. Nowadays it’s almost impossible to conceive of…
