At this writing, I’ve seen two performances of the Undermain production of writer-director Erik Ehn’s The Sound and the Fury–a Wednesday preview and last Saturday’s opening night. I must admit I didn’t start to enjoy the show until I’d kicked it around in my head during the interval. This made…
In The Fifth Element, the all-knowing, all-powerful Supreme Being of the Universe turns out to be Leeloo (Milla Jovovich), an orange-haired babe in a skimpy, Band-Aid-thin mod outfit who speaks in a kind of Slavic scat and cries a lot. It’s as if the filmmakers started out to make a…
Judy Davis is often at her ravaged best when she’s playing women pulled apart by their own warring impulses. Torn between their isolating desire for freedom and their need for solace, the women in such films as High Tide, Husbands and Wives, The New Age, and A Passage to India…
thursday may 8 James Kelman and Duncan McLean: Booker Prize-winning novelist James Kelman earned all kinds of comparisons to James Joyce–not all of them favorable–when his brutal, poetic novel How Late it Was, How Late stormed the world’s literary salons in 1994. His dogged pursuit of the perfect Scottish dialect…
I ran into Rusty Tisworthy down at the pool hall, where he normally takes up space by making bets on how many times you can twist the wingnut on the bottom of a Mixmaster. And Rusty started tellin’ this nasty story about the sex he had last weekend, and lemme…
The young heroine of The Holy Inquiry, a United States premiere presented by Teatro Dallas, makes two mistakes early on in the play–she learns how to read, and she saves a Jesuit priest from drowning in the river after his canoe capsizes. These may not sound like screw-ups, but for…
When Masterpiece Theatre aired a multipart Anna Karenina to mark the novel’s centennial in 1977, the series producer, Joan Sullivan, said, “I think that great stories [like Tolstoy’s] are what the series is about.” Now Bernard Rose, the writer-director of the new movie version, talks about how lucky he was…
In Ellen Ousmano’s book Movies for a Desert Isle, in which film notables discuss the one movie they’d take along if stranded on…well, you get the picture…John Waters says, “I think I’d take a movie with me I’d never seen because that way it’d be a surprise.” Waters almost seems,…
thursday may 1 Shoppers’ Guide to the Center of the Universe: The 18-year-old Dallas-based modern dance troupe Dancers Unlimited mounts an ambitious new production that springs from the mind-meld of artistic director Lori Darley, composer Frank Lacey, and writer Tom Blackwood. Still, don’t confuse “ambitious” with “self-important”; while the contemporary…
What two words at a cocktail party are guaranteed to make your eyes glaze over and your brain start throbbing like you were just shot up with three quarts of Lithium? “School board.” Listen to me: I DON’T WANNA HEAR ABOUT IT! OK? I’m sure it’s important and everything, but…
What, the cynical historian might ask, can a play written in 413 B.C. say about the 1997 us? Whatever it tells us–and if you pay close attention to the text, placarded with disciplined but unaffected readings in the Gryphon Players’ new mounting of Euripides’ Electra, you’ll find much that’s familiar–you…
New-to-movies subjects are hard to come by, but Traveller has one: the inbred world of Irish grifters living in the backwoods of the American rural South. Clannish con artists descended from the Irish Tinkers, they fan out across the countryside pulling bogus home-repair jobs on unsuspecting, mostly elderly folk, and…
Volcano is set in Los Angeles, and audiences get high watching the city crash and burn. For L.A. haters, Volcano could prove a peak experience. You don’t even have to hate L.A. to enjoy it–love/hate will do. That’s why the film closes with Randy Newman’s “I Love L.A.,” a facetious…
thursday april 24 Edward James Olmos: His well-publicized personal troubles with a certain angry ex-wife and a rogue gun aside, Edward James Olmos claims that his life would be just hunky-dory if he chose not to speak out against gang activity in nationwide tours. As it happens, Olmos insists that…
Remember this joke? Question: Want to know how you can lose 10 pounds of ugly fat? Answer: Cut off your head. Well, according to the press kit for 8 Heads in a Duffel Bag, the average human head–dead and drained of blood–weighs 4.4 pounds. I can’t imagine the heads of…
Everybody’s been hacked off all week because Chubb Fricke showed up at the family reunion with his new mail-order wife from the Philippines. Actually, I’m not supposed to call her a mail-order wife ’cause it makes Chubb mad. He spent $1,200 on a plane ticket to go over there and…
It’s refreshing that a film festival, at which independent movies are celebrated for their individuality at the same time distributors are courted for their establishment relationships, offers Jean-Luc Godard’s cynical Contempt, a dead-on dissection of the corrupting influence of “The Deal.” In the late ’50s and early ’60s, Godard was…
One of the biggest discussion topics among cinephiles these days–courtesy the recent Oscar season–is whether Hollywood is petering out because it can’t produce the kind of probing, intelligent films the independents are cranking out these days. The tragedy is, supposedly, that special-effects extravaganzas are all the studios know how to…
Like other Gotham-based directors (Woody Allen, Martin Scorsese, Sidney Lumet), Paul Mazursky is a New Yorker who often makes movies (often about other New Yorkers), but that’s pretty much where their similarities end. You can look at practically any scene–sometimes any frame–from an Allen, Scorsese, or Lumet picture and instantly…
thursday april 17 A Tribute to Margo Jones: Arts & Letters Live continues its 1996-’97 season with a two-part tribute to a Dallas woman whose impact on national theater is profound. It would be enough to say Margo Jones nurtured the early careers of Tennessee Williams and William Inge, but…
If there’s one rule to staging Sam Shepard’s wildly eccentric plays, it’s that the cast must have a sense of humor. The poetry in Shepard’s enormous canon (45 plays, among which are 11 Obie winners) has hoodwinked more than a few actors and directors into taking Shepard, as crazy as…
You won’t find a better paradigm for the polarities of opinion about British director Peter Greenaway than in Love and Hisses, a collection of picks and pans written by members of the National Society of Film Critics. Reviews of the filmmaker’s 1990 scatological comedy The Cook, The Thief, His Wife,…
