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…
All right, girls, either be lesbos or don’t be lesbos, but make up your goldurn minds. You know what I’m talking about? I must know 30 women out there who go back and forth–homo and hetero. One week they’re making the Sign of the Twelve-Humped Anaconda with a Wal-Mart stock…
There are some who contend that Galt McDermot, Gerome Ragni, and James Rado’s 1968 musical, Hair, nearly dealt a fatal blow to the American musical. Without the ascendancy of Stephen Sondheim and the emergence of Andrew Lloyd Webber in the 1970s, musicals would barely have scored a blip on the…
Throughout the ’60s in England and the ’70s in America, the development of film as a form of popular entertainment began to explore areas of realism previously thought to lack a minimum level of escapism. Until then, conventional wisdom held that viewers might willingly pay to be moved by tender…
thursday october 10 Joan Osborne: The 1995 Joan Osborne single, “What If God Was One of Us?” was definitely one of the more intelligent songs to find its way onto alternative playlists in recent years, although heavy rotation, as is its wont, transformed a good thing into that I-can’t-stop-singing-it-to-myself phenomenon…
How come any time you meet a new gal who might be willing to have sex with you, every other woman you know can smell that she’s in town? They don’t know her name. They don’t know where she came from. They just suddenly know that there’s a possibility you…
In the canon of angry white males produced by William Shakespeare, Hamlet is hardest to figure out. Richard III chokes on self-pity; Macbeth buries himself alive with ambition; Lear is felled by the family neglect born of his own megalomania. To identify exactly which of Hamlet’s peccadilloes finally undoes him…
Los Angeles is an elastic city, the kind that people who have never been to feel comfortable projecting attributes on, usually based on nothing more than rumor, supposition, or a willingness to buy into popular cliches. Especially in the movies, it has the capacity to be all things for all…
Heterosexual Anglo moviegoers often find it difficult to understand why America’s various minority groups kick up a ruckus every now and then about the way they’re portrayed on movie screens. From Jesse Jackson’s protest outside this year’s Academy Awards ceremony to the recent condemnation of the action comedy Bulletproof from…
