God bless the children who attended the same Saturday matinee performance of The Yellow Boat that I did. During a question-and-answer session after the show, they demonstrated that you don’t just lose your innocence when you become an adult–if you’re not careful, you can also shed a certain clear, tough…
Cult auteur David Cronenberg crashes and burns–his talent, that is–in Crash, a vain attempt at a techno-age Persona. It follows a demented explorer named Vaughan (Elias Koteas) into an insane new world where twisted metal, curvy skin, automotive oil, and bodily fluids merge in an explosive carnal cocktail. To Vaughan,…
Selena opens with a reenactment of the slain Tejano singer’s February 1995 event-style concert at the Houston Astrodome. Bedecked in a sparkling purple jumpsuit, the beloved Texas native (played by Jennifer Lopez) is shown singing a few disco nuggets from her childhood, including “I Will Survive” and “Last Dance.” While…
Jim Carrey caught a lot of grief last year when The Cable Guy tanked at the box office. Carrey was way out of line, doomsayers yelped, to have deviated so far and in such a dark direction from his established, money-in-the-bank persona of the double-jointed dimwit for whom a lobotomy…
thursday march 20 The Rainbow Poets: The Writer’s Garret, in cooperation with the Dallas Poets Community, presents an evening of lyrical male bonding as part of its “Soup’s On” series. Football and fart jokes are being dispensed with; communication rituals practiced by the species homo attitudis are in the spotlight…
Wanda Bodine keeps raggin’ on me for Forgetting About The Weekend. This is some kinda sacred deal with her. Translation: “Get your butt over here and pay attention to me on Saturday night.” You know when I usually notice it’s the weekend? When I go to Aggie’s House of Pancakes…
I must say that A Rose By Any Other Name, the 1997 season opener for Teatro Dallas, surprised me at regular intervals throughout its 90 minutes without intermission. There were enough changes in tone and texture–not to mention a rich performance by one of its stars that didn’t begin to…
City of Industry starts out promisingly and then turns into the kind of crime thriller only a pointy-headed postmodernist could love. Since a lot of critics these days have pointy heads, you might just want to brace yourself for a lot of steaming compost in the press about how “existential”…
If we take Bob Rafelson at his word, Blood & Wine completes a trilogy about family relationships that started with the director’s two crowning achievements, 1970’s Five Easy Pieces and 1971’s The King of Marvin Gardens. Those two films are so often pointed to as evidence of the brilliance of…
It could have been any town in America, and it often was: Athens, Georgia; Chapel Hill, North Carolina; Minneapolis; Austin. Seattle was just another stop on the A&R Express, another destination where the gold-card crowd could run up their expense accounts while they looked for the Next Big Thing. At…
thursday march 13 Doris and Judy: Icons Among Us: In addition to co-founding Swollen Art Productions, actress-writer Dinah Lynch is a professor of theater at UTA who has played a number of strong, difficult women, among them Vita-Sackville West and Dorothy Parker. She offers Dallasites her full-length one-woman show about…
I have a question. Whatever happened to the 40-hour work week? I don’t know ANYBODY who works 40 hours. I know guys who work zero hours and I know guys who work 80 hours. I don’t know anybody in between. And the guys who work 80 hours are not complaining…
Since the blues is probably America’s greatest musical contribution to world culture, it’s not surprising that both African-American and Anglo-American artists have attempted to translate the genre’s quixotic vibe to arts both performing and static. We shouldn’t be surprised that so many such experiments have failed (including Toni Morrison’s weakest…
The ingredients are familiar: Donnie Brasco stars Al Pacino as a Mafia soldier and Johnny Depp as an FBI undercover agent who infiltrates the mob. But there’s a twist. Based on a true story, the film is a grunt’s-eye view of the Mafia, and it’s not remotely “operatic” or Scorsese-ish…
Nobody is going to seriously accuse writer-director Alexander Payne of being chickenshit. For his first feature, the hilarious Citizen Ruth, he has not only chosen the number one issue a filmmaker is likely to get killed over–abortion and a woman’s right to make a personal decision on the subject–but made…
Waiting for Guffman is such a funny mess that it keeps you laughing even when you realize it’s not much better directed than a cable-access talk show. Christopher Guest’s is-this-where-I-point-the-camera? auteurism, last seen in The Big Picture, is redeemed by the performers–himself most of all–and the material they worked up…
thursday march 6 A Month of Dance: The next public offering from the Deep Ellum Opera Theatre demands a strong pair from each of its cast members–in this case, those are feet, not lungs. Nonvocal is the order for a month of weekend performances the DEOT has appropriately dubbed “A…
Never date a woman between the ages of 37 and 41. You know why? The dinner conversation is likely to go like this. You say, “That’s a beautiful dress you’re wearing.” She says, “If you think it’s sexy, perhaps you’d like to fertilize my ovum tonight.” These women think they…
It’s refreshing to be reminded by the Undermain Theatre that Shakespeare wrote comedies, too. And that, slain in the right lunatic spirit, they’re damned funny in the least complicated way possible. Shakespeare’s plays continue to bear nutritious fruit, surprising when you consider that they are raided in and out of…
In the two decades since Eraserhead, David Lynch has established himself as American cinema’s premier surrealist, our own Wizard of Weird. Although his first two Hollywood projects–The Elephant Man (1980) and Dune (1984)–had room only around the edges for the sort of spooky shit at which he excels, his personal…
For his fourth feature, Boyz N the Hood director John Singleton has chosen to re-create the 1923 Rosewood massacre, during which the white population of Sumner, Florida, went on a three-day rampage and destroyed the neighboring black town of Rosewood, killing many of its inhabitants. Perhaps reimagine is a better…
The new Richard Linklater film, subUrbia, adapted by Eric Bogosian from his 1994 play, opens with a long, unbroken tracking shot through a ticky-tacky Texas suburb, backed on the soundtrack by Gene Pitney wailing “Town Without Pity.” This logy, Jim Jarmusch-y opening hints at even greater anomie to come–and boy,…
