I’ve been watching a bunch of hippie movies from around 1968 to 1973, and I’ve noticed that almost all of them have at least one scene of longhaired, bell-bottomed Disaffected Youths yelling like idiots at a public meeting. It could be a meeting of Army generals or a city council…
Although the hot movie topic for the past year has been Jane Austen, it really should have been William Shakespeare. True, four of Austen’s novels have recently been adapted to the screen, but she hasn’t been nearly as omnipresent as the Bard of Avon nor, Clueless aside, quite so contemporary…
thursday november 7 Desdemona…a play about a handkerchief: Last summer’s Shakespeare Festival of Dallas production of Othello, while competent enough, featured a performance by Liz Piazza Kelley as Desdemona that generally towed the line for generations of Desdemonas before her. While the character being innocent of Othello’s charges is what…
For Dallas theatergoers, the wait is over. We get to find out what happens between Joe and Louis, Pryor and the Angel, Belize and Roy, and poor wandering, hallucinating, but strangely lucid Harper. Dallas Theater Center stuck its neck out with a highly publicized, expensively promoted production of Tony Kushner’s…
Have you noticed how closing times at bars get earlier and earlier? What’s going on here? Certain cities and states now have bars that close at midnight, just like in Communist countries like Sweden. Didn’t we already find out in the 1920s what happens when you monkey with a man’s…
Ticket buyers who decide to attend the Undermain Theatre’s world premiere of John O’Keefe’s new play, The Deatherians, will see a sign at the door of the theater that states the following: “This play contains adult situations and extremely graphic language. For mature audiences only.” That warning is the understatement…
Film critics are put in a difficult position when they see a movie that’s well-made but features characters so unbelievably odious you wouldn’t want to spend two minutes with them in real life. Of course, directors including Sam Peckinpah and Martin Scorsese have built legendary careers out of one scumbag…
There’s a great line delivered by the Scottish protagonist in Trainspotting: “A lot of people hate the English, but I don’t. The English are just wankers, but what are we? We were colonized by wankers! We can’t even pick a decent culture to be colonized by.” That may be the…
Storytellers long ago recognized the fertile ground for plots available at the average neighborhood saloon. A bar can be so many things to different people: a hangout; a pit stop; a place to meet friends, strangers, and lovers, known and unknown. It can be a happy place, or a miserable…
While it’s true that most filmmakers still keep on-screen gay romance in the hand-holding stage, the viewer who yearns to savor a little bit of tenderness between same-sex lovers may have been startled to find a wealth of sweet moments in the most unexpected places recently. Spike Lee, traditionally no…
thursday october 31 Heaven: The Biblical Arts Center is smart–in a public relations sense–to call its latest children’s art show Heaven, although that title doesn’t cover the full range of subject matter here. A more complete label might be Heaven and Hell, because the exhibit contains illustrations by kids ages…
What used to be the two most boring words in the history of the English language? “Mutual funds,” right? What does everybody wanna talk about at parties in the ’90s? Mutual funds, right? Everybody’s buying mutual funds. People who can’t divide nine by three are buying mutual funds. People who…
Cora Cardona, artistic director of Dallas’ sole seasonal Latino theater troupe, Teatro Dallas, has in the past expressed good-natured frustration about what she perceived as a clash of cultures between the traditions of Latino theater and the expectations of Anglo critics. It’s true that in recent memory neither the Observer…
Melodramas often take a bad rap in the critical press, as if there’s something wrong with enjoying schmaltzy love stories or torrid, overblown gangster epics. Granted, they aren’t exactly known for their original plots, but there’s a reason they have staying power. After all, cliches only gain currency as cliches…
In the opening scene of Surviving Picasso, set in Paris at the height of World War II, the great Spanish artist is showing his haphazard collection of paintings–his own as well as those of his friends, the Fauvist genius Henri Matisse and fellow cubist Georges Braque–to a pair of dimwitted…
For most of his 12-year career, director Spike Lee has shouldered a unique burden among young, contemporary black filmmakers. John Singleton, Albert and Allen Hughes, and Matty Rich earned their reputations with debut features that vividly explored inner-city crime. Spike Lee–whose earlier mainstream success arguably opened doors in lily-white Hollywood…
thursday october 24 Resuscitating the Virgin: Gretchen Swen and her nonprofit Extra Virgin Performance Theatre Cooperative enjoyed considerable success with their previous work, Sappho’s Symposium (not bad for a left-leaning political theater troupe in the buckle of the Bible Belt); but their venue troubles, as in not having a reliable…
This First Wives Club stuff is gettin’ scary, isn’t it? What’s the rallying cry of First Wives Club? “Don’t get even–get everything!” Right? Every married man’s worst fear. What we’ve been saying all these years. It’s a money thing, isn’t it? Every ex-wife turns into George C. Scott in the…
Long before movie special-effects wizards combined animatronic models and animation to make animals talk, the stage endowed our fellow mammals with a human voice–and more often than not, they criticized us. Shakespeare summoned an entire forest of quasihuman animals in A Midsummer Night’s Dream to remind us that the mystery…
Some of us remember that there are really two Tom Hankses–Saint Tom and his Evil Twin. Saint Tom won back-to-back Oscars for his charming, bloodless performances in Philadelphia and Forrest Gump. He helped make Apollo 13 one of the most effortless entertainments of 1995, although he couldn’t quite smother the…
For a few years now, I’ve been praying to the talent gods to give me the strength to keep liking James Foley movies. When Foley first began directing 12 years ago, his films ran the range from pompous and dull morality plays (At Close Range, Reckless) to the mind-bendingly idiotic…
thursday october 17 The Legalization of Marijuana: A political correctness not born of the American left has surrounded the debate over how to deal with drugs and drug addictions in our country. Former Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders got canned in part not for advocating the legalization of drugs, but for…
