Paul Rudnick’s Jeffrey, directed by award-winning New York stage director Christopher Ashley in his feature film debut, is something of a mess. Ashley has no sense of how to build momentum within the camera’s frame, so he relies on stock TV effects–slow motion, crane shots, first-person addresses by the lead…
A glance at the names associated with Like Water For Chocolate’s Alfonso Arau’s new filmic fable A Walk in the Clouds is enough to strike terror in the heart of any Like Water cultist. Can the Mexican director’s pulsing, sexy vision survive the Zucker brothers production team, who have individually…
Upon greeting the photographer assigned to take his portrait for a newspaper profile, Mexican filmmaker Alfonso Arau immediately turns his Crescent Court hotel suite into a set. “Do you like this light?” he asks, gesturing toward delicate sun rays that shimmer through a window and rest upon a fawn-colored chair…
Going into it, I never would have imagined that Operation Dumbo Drop would provoke any thought whatsoever; it is, after all, just another predictably heartwarming human-animal bonding story, about a bunch of tough American servicemen charged with procuring a baby elephant to please the inhabitants of a strategically important South…
thursday august 17 The Women in Theatre Festival: It’s easy to fear that a series of short plays performed under the title “The Women in Theatre Festival,” presented by the New Horizons Theatre Company and the Bath House Cultural Center, will spend most of their time scoring the obvious political…
I love it when a movie leaves me feeling wrung out and exhausted–as if I’ve been on a tortuous journey I didn’t expect to take, but one that showed me things I never would have dreamed I’d see. Belle de Jour, surrealist filmmaker Luis Bunuel’s 1967 film about a repressed…
thursday august 10 Surfabilly roundup: You say you don’t have 50 bucks to blow for the privilege of sweating your eyeballs out at Starplex, standing among zoned-out stoners and hopped-up acid freaks, and watching Courtney Love’s eyeliner roll in rivers down her cheeks? Well, join the rest of the city…
Imagine for a moment that the good citizens of Austin have Dallas surrounded and are lobbing mortar shells into the streets, gang-raping women, and “cleansing” the Metroplex of its men. Now imagine that you are a playwright who wishes to comment on these events, but in order to reach the…
Only in California. People keep getting kicked off the O.J. jury for “planning to write a book.” First of all, what difference does it make? Nine million people a day decide their life is so danged fascinating they’ll write a book about it, but none of them ever actually do…
It’s a small world after all–oppressively small, in fact. The announcement that the Magic Kingdom would be purchasing Capital Cities/ABC for an estimated $19 billion, instantly transforming the Magic Kingdom into the largest media conglomerate on the planet, shook the entertainment industry last week in ways that Westinghouse’s purchase of…
As of this writing, there are only three American actresses who’ve proven to Hollywood they can attract big audiences by name alone–Demi Moore, Meg Ryan, and Julia Roberts. Moore is by far the worst of the three, a relentless publicity machine whose presence in wretched box-office triumphs like Disclosure proves…
At Valley Ranch, David Lang is sitting barefooted in front of his locker, which sits next to Emmitt Smith’s locker and Emmitt’s empty sweaty shoes. It is good that the shoes are sweaty because that means Emmitt is healthy, and all that is loved more than God and family in…
Editor’s note: Beginning this week, P.B. Miller, a longtime Dallas Observer contributor, takes over our regular Stage column. Nora FitzGerald, our previous columnist, has relocated to the Washington, D.C. area. Before she passed, Eurydice-like, from these pages, Nora FitzGerald asked me to visit several area theaters she had been unable…
Let’s face it. What’s the No. 1 reason for bar fights in America? It’s the following words: “What are you looking at?” And we know what he’s looking at, right? He’s looking at a female. And the female is with a guy. And any other guy who looks at, talks…
About 30 minutes into Clueless, an utterly disposable new teen comedy starring MTV-spawned glamour gal Alicia Silverstone as a spoiled Beverly Hills princess, I started to picture myself as the protagonist of a post-apocalyptic science fiction movie. I’m playing a hardbitten journalistic loner, a cross between Mad Max and Andrew…
At first, adults might not see the delightful kid-flick Babe as an intelligent, even brave film. The film’s clever combination of stunts by live animals and incredibly expressive animatronic puppets makes you suspicious, a little fearful it might become an ordeal of gimmicks. The story unleashes a barnyard full of…
That carefree blond mop atop a paste-white, square face graced by dual ellipses of tortoise shell; that rigid frame; those nimble hands; these mark the presence of Ed Begley, Jr., one of the more reliable supporting actors in Hollywood. He etched himself onto our minds during his five years with…
thursday july 27 Taste of Deep Ellum Tour ’95: With their long series of art and music festivals, it seems obvious that the powers behind Deep Ellum are trying to allay fears that the neighborhood is headed toward tourist-trapsville. Although it may be one of the first places Dallas hosts…
The Indian in the Cupboard is an oasis of calm amid the glitzy din of summer. It rarely shouts when it can whisper. Like the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm and the stories of the Arabian Nights, it’s strange and complicated and contradictory. Working from a kids’ novel by…
I’m gonna start selling this new flag. It has 49 stars and 12 stripes on it. This is gonna drive the cops crazy, not to mention the Newt Nuts who are about to clutter up the Constitution with a don’t-torch-the-flag amendment. Just think. We can load up about a thousand…
On July 28, the most expensive movie of all time, the Kevin Costner sci-fi epic Waterworld, will sail into a multiplex near you. That’s why you can’t open a newspaper or magazine or turn on the TV these days without encountering yet another retelling of its cursed production. The features…
thursday july 20 Moving The Fire: Removal of Indian Nations to Oklahoma: There is nothing more haunting about the infamous “Trail of Tears”–the U.S. government’s brutal relocation of American Indian tribes to Oklahoma in the 19th century–than the fact that so many settlers left their belongings behind but brought with…
