Not knowing a lick of French beyond a few pretentious little Continental phrases such as joie de vivre, I have no idea if Moliere’s original script of his sex farce Amphitryon is rote and lethargic, or if celebrated poet Richard Wilbur’s translation is the problem. Having read (though never seen…
Bernardo Bertolucci once dubbed Los Angeles the Big Nipple. Writer-director Curtis Hanson has been suckling at it all his life. Just how much nourishment he’s drawn becomes clear in his terrific new L.A. film, L.A. Confidential. Now 52, Hanson has been a talent for critics to dead-reckon with for 20…
Tomas Gutierrez Alea’s final film, Guantanamera, shares a tone of wistful romanticism with the late Cuban director’s Letters From the Park (a sweetly lyrical film based on the Gabriel Garcia Marquez story about a man who ghostwrites love letters) and Strawberry and Chocolate. Like a Garcia Marquez novel, Guantanamera plays…
The Game is a puzzle picture, and beyond its premise there isn’t much you can divulge without giving the show away. I’m not one of those critics who like to write Stop reading now if you plan to see this movie, so I’m tempted to wrap things up right now…
Having seen two performances of My Head Was a Sledgehammer, the debut by Our Endeavors Productions of Richard Foreman’s scattered stream-of-consciousness script, I’m sure of only two things: This show is fast-paced and pleasurable, and it means absolutely nothing. You might disagree on either or both counts. That’s the beauty…
Film critics rank just ahead of television meteorologists as the worst roadside psychics in the media: We make all kinds of predictions about a movie’s box office impact and Oscar-friendliness, and even anticipate whether said flick will be a beloved classic 25 years from now. Just like when weighing the…
Somewhere in the meat-packing district in downtown Manhattan, behind a nondescript door in an unremarkable building, about 100,000 reels of film sit in stacks on 12-foot-high metal shelves, and in less orderly piles on the concrete floor. The titles taped to the sides of each canister–The Honey Industry, Resistance Welding,…
Welcome to one of the slowest film weekends of the year, second only to the first week in January, when all the classy holiday releases are clogging up the available screens. This is usually when distributors put out their saddest mistakes, looking for a few quick bucks on the way…
thursday september 4 Dancing at Lughnasa: Previously produced in Dallas by the Dallas Theater Center, Brian Friel’s ecstatically lauded family dramedy, Dancing at Lughnasa, gets another production by Fort Worth’s stellar Stage West ensemble. This’ll probably be your last chance to see Friel’s story of five unmarried sisters barely surviving…
It’s tempting (and just a little bit cheap) to read all kinds of incestuous undertones in Paula Vogel’s poignant, occasionally acidic, three-actor comedy, The Baltimore Waltz, not the least because Vogel’s newest Off-Broadway hit, How I Learned to Drive, has offended some in the New York theater community. That emotionally…
Mike Leigh’s new film, Career Girls, is compact and minor. I don’t mean that as a slam exactly. After the dawdling expansiveness of last year’s Secrets & Lies, his latest one is something of a relaxation–it’s appealingly small-scale. Leigh isn’t doing anything here he hasn’t done better before, but at…
Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation–a goofy remake of the 1974 scare, uh, classic–is a film so worthless that the admission ought to come with a $7.50 rebate coupon. In retrospect, the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre seems kind of quaint, its blood-red faded with the passage of time. When it…
If you’re nostalgic for the cockeyed let-it-all-out gabfests of the late John Cassavetes, She’s So Lovely will seem like dejà vu all over again. Cassavetes wrote the script more than a decade ago, and now his son Nick–whose first feature, Unhook the Stars, starred his mother, Gena Rowlands–has directed it…
thursday august 28 Amphitryon (Ye Gods!): Theatre Three is pleased to be able to present a premiere of a new translation by Richard Wilbur, a man who earned a Pulitzer for his poetry and the affection of English-speaking theatergoers worldwide for his translations of Moliere’s devastatingly witty 17th century comedies…
In critical circles, Harold Pinter has the reputation of being “an actor’s playwright,” mostly because he acted for a number of years in 1950s London under the pseudonym David Baron. His scripts go so far as to instruct the actors where and how long they should pause between dialogue. A…
Time has a way of slipping by when you’re not looking, but don’t worry: While you’re distracted, studio executives are keeping their usual keen eyes on the calendar, tabulating the simple economic arithmetic of boomer nostalgia. Hmmm…1997 minus 1957 equals 40 years. Forty years of nostalgic forgetfulness multiplied by the…
Critics and audiences outside France have been going on for so long about the decline in French cinema that it’s fun to see a French film–Irma Vep–that says much the same thing. The rap is, of course, somewhat unfair–most raps are–but there’s no question that even the best of recent…
In G.I. Jane, Demi Moore’s Naval Intelligence officer, Lt. Jordan O’Neil, is recruited as a test case to be the first female Navy SEAL. She gets a buzzcut and loses her period. She endures the indignities of the male volunteers snickering at her in the food line. She rolls huge…
When the beautiful entomologist rips open the chest cavity of a huge, bloodthirsty insect in the sci-fi nightmare Mimic, it turns into Thoraxic Park. This movie, like Spielberg’s, features evolution gone haywire and dramaturgy gone to hell. In the prologue, the heroine–the reckless and courageous (or foolhardy and stupid) Dr…
thursday august 21 My Head Was a Sledgehammer: Scanning the two-page, small-type press release that Our Endeavors Productions prepared for its Southwest premiere of playwright Richard Foreman’s My Head Was a Sledgehammer induces a little chill in even the hardiest of experimental theatergoers. Foreman, a six-time Obie winner and acknowledged…
Ask 34-year-old playwright Neil LaBute how he came to see his controversial debut feature In the Company of Men hit the big screen, and he’ll tell you he doesn’t quite know. “I became a filmmaker by accident, by proxy,” LaBute says during the Dallas stop on a 15-city international tour…
By the end of Event Horizon, an ocean of red nearly drowns half the cast–this is a literal bloodbath. Blood pours from their throats, from their eye sockets, from their exposed veins and entrails; it splashes down corridors, runs down walls, fills every inch of screen space and then some…
