Zane (Charlie Sheen), the hero of the new sci-fi film The Arrival, is a geeky, quasi-paranoid radio astronomer. Zane works at the Jet Propulsion Lab for the SETI project (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence), and spends most of his time aiming a large parabolic satellite dish to the heavens and listening…
The Phantom opens with a scene that contains a device I refer to as “The Axiom of the Rickety Bridge.” The rule is this: In any movie where there’s a creaky, handmade bridge–usually strung together with what appear to be vines and scraps of discarded lumber, swinging precariously hundreds of…
thursday june 13 Linda Ronstadt: Linda Ronstadt has notched 25 years in the music business, worldwide album sales of 30 million, and grown a thick hide to protect herself from the critical thorns that have scraped her along the journey. She’s also periodically grown a face: earnest country-rock girl, slick,…
Cecil O’Neal, director of Kitchen Dog Theater’s pressure-cooker production of Oleanna, proclaims in the playbill that “no one is right in this play…Both characters are flawed.” Bullshit, Cecil. The dude is right, and the chick is wrong. You know it, I know it, and any one who sees this play…
After the groundwork laid already this summer by Twister and Mission: Impossible, there’s no use or point in mentioning that in DragonHeart the plot-surprises are few, or that you can expect astounding special effects. (Hollywood is three-for-three so far.) But DragonHeart succeeds, in parts, where those other films don’t–as a…
Writer-director Hal Salwen may be only now releasing his feature-film debut Denise Calls Up, but he is no neophyte to filmmaking. The New York University Film School graduate worked for years on spec as a screenwriter in Hollywood, and it was during these uncertain, lean, lonely years that Salwen conceived…
“I give great massages.” You ever know a girl who says this? When a guy hears this, something inside the male body goes, “yeeeeeeeessssssssssssss!” Seventeen thousand neurons rush through the nervous system and plant a flag on Mount Everest, if you know what I mean, and I think you do…
thursday june 6 Spring Gallery Night: The title of the simultaneous night of receptions in the so-called Gallery District–around Fairmount and Cedar Springs–around Deep Ellum, and at other galleries around town is “Spring Gallery Night.” Technically, it’s still spring, although if temperatures persist toward the 100-degree mark, you may wish…
Stephen King embarked on a new project recently–The Green Mile, a serialized novel that he’s publishing in short monthly paperback installments. Luckily for King, he’s having much better luck with this new venture than with an earlier “first,” his directorial debut, which I reviewed a while back. Maximum Overdrive is…
Back in the ’60s there was a TV show called The Time Tunnel about two guys with military haircuts who get hurled through a time-space-continuum contraption and land in a different era each week. The first thing they had to do was figure out in what epoch they were, but…
There’s a junkie brilliance to Mission: Impossible that manages to out-shine the sparkling white teeth of its improbably smarmy star and producer, Tom Cruise. It reaches a level of such unregulated shamelessness that it easily crosses the line from schlocky fun to genuine camp. The movie doesn’t make any logical…
There are a couple reasons why director John Schlesinger’s Cold Comfort Farm should have made no splashier an American debut than Masterpiece Theatre. For one, Schlesinger filmed the project early last year to be broadcast on BBC-TV. Only a strong, favorable response from film festivals worldwide led to a chance…
thursday may 30 Dreamers and Demons: The World of Isaac Bashevis Singer: The Dallas literary series “Arts & Letters Live” presents a tribute to an international icon of letters whose voluminous body of work denied the existence of national borders. Like most great writers who manage to tap universal wellsprings,…
While nothing can come close to duplicating the inimitable Drive-In experience, going to the videotape is the next best thing. I heartily recommend these classics–true Drive-In material–for every home library: * I Spit On Your Grave: This flick is considered “the most disgusting movie ever made” by Ebert the Wimp…
It’s a debate that dates back to at least Plato’s time. What is reality–that which we can objectively perceive and quantify with our senses, or that which we interpret through our subjective and particular points of view? Teatro Dallas takes a crack at this timeless conundrum in Tales From the…
In 1988, Robert Ellington and his wife, Kathleen, opened Kathleen’s Cafe, a cozy eatery on Lovers Lane. After a year of operation, things looked bleak. “We were starving,” recalls Ellington. “We asked ourselves what we could do to generate more income. It occurred to us that maybe we could generate…
The camera loves 30-year-old French actor Olivier Martinez, but it doesn’t do him justice. In Jean-Paul Rappeneau’s deliriously romantic spectacle, The Horseman on the Roof, he wields heavy-lidded eyes that can make an offhand glance look like an invitation to hit the sack, yet there’s not an ounce of self-consciousness…
AMC’s The Grand–the Gotham City of film-exhibition venues–officially opened its doors in May 1995 with its inaugural movie, Die Hard with a Vengeance. One year later, The Grand can lay claim to unofficially opening the doors to something else as well–an unstoppable movie-house feeding frenzy that has seen three additional…
thursday may 23 Shadow of a Man: The Bath House Cultural Center hosts the premiere production of the Cara Mia Theatre Company, a brand-new Chicano theatre troupe whose aim is both to honor the Chicano experience in Dallas and offer that experience to anyone who enjoys the catharsis of live…
Sho Kosugi is the best kung-fu man since Bruce Lee. Forget Jackie Chan. Forget Jet Lee. Forget Bruce Lei, Bruce Li, Bruce Lea, and Bruce Leigh. It’s no wonder that they’re giving Hong Kong back to the Commies. They haven’t turned out a world-class thwacker since 1974, when Bruce’s head…
The one thing we all have in common is our separateness. Once launched from the womb, we are all so many Ishmaels seeking connection to a larger whole. Some people seem to feel this sense of isolation and rootlessness more keenly than others. For Tony- and Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright August…
You have to wonder what compels capable actors–aside from pure greed, of course–to want to appear in franchise entertainment packages like Flipper. After all, it’s been predigested and massaged so much it hardly qualifies as a legitimate movie. Rather, it is an extended anecdote–or at best, a shaggy-dog story. There…
