thursday december 28 Earthly Pleasures: By this time of year, our ears bleed spontaneously each time we hear a “fa-la-la-la-la,” so it’s easy to forget that the Christmas classics weren’t exactly fresh when December rolled around. It’s time for a new set of hard-candy favorites–or, in this case, a set…
Alan Paton’s classic 1948 novel Cry, The Beloved Country managed to be both political and literary in a century of world literature that often tried to achieve greatness through its politics alone. The French had their existentialists, the Germans their realists, but South Africa had scarcely registered as more than…
In an age when the British Royal Family is more of a sick joke than it is a necessary monarchical body, it would seem to follow that many of Shakespeare’s regal tragedies (Henry IV, Richard II, etc.) become noteworthy for their historical significance even as they lose their obvious relevance…
If playwrights and producers would only subscribe to the “Journal of the American Medical Association,” they wouldn’t have to waste so much time worrying about the nature of laughter and what generates it. As the journal points out, laughter is merely a matter of the levator labbi superioris muscle lifting…
It’s comforting to think of leadership as an innate ability among certain men and women, a talent much like any other, such as playing the harpsichord or doing long division in your head. “A born leader,” you often hear, as if no training were involved to demonstrate proficiency at it…
There is a scene from the long-awaited film version of Waiting to Exhale, tenderly crafted by director Forest Whitaker, that will take your breath away. Sitting in a hotel bar after being trounced by her soon-to-be ex-husband in preliminary divorce proceedings, Bernadine (Angela Bassett) is captivated by a man’s love–for…
Terry McMillan and Ron Bass are Hollywood’s hot item, collaborators on the most eagerly anticipated movie of the year, even the decade. Waiting to Exhale, McMillan’s book, has sold about three million copies to date, camping out on The New York Times bestseller list for 38 weeks. And Waiting to…
Our topic today is the Woman of Easy Virtue. Bless her little heart. I’ve been hearin’ a lot lately about the big bad Womanizer. Oooooooooooo, what a piece of scummy crud he is. We’ve got Congressional Womanizers, Big-Business Womanizers, Showbiz Womanizers and, of course, the old-fashioned Traveling-Salesman Womanizer. These are…
thursday december 21 Winter Solstice Celebration: When Dallas Observer ran an item about the Summer Solstice drum celebration, we received angry calls from organizers because the term “pagan rituals” was used. Maybe we should have said “pagan-influenced,” or “paganish in a nice way” instead. Now the Winter Solstice Celebration is…
All right, that’s enough. Let’s stop stealin’ one another’s football teams. I was just gettin’ used to the Carolina Panthers, for God’s sake, and the Jacksonville Jagwires, and now they’re expecting the words “Nashville Oilers” to come out of my mouth? Heck, I still can’t say “Indianapolis Colts,” much less…
Heat, writer-director Michael Mann’s heavy-hitting crime drama, has some eye-catching images, a wonderfully ambiguous mood, and numerous detailed characters ably performed by a great cast. You have to admire the brazen magnitude it’s reaching for, even though the film’s impressive scope ultimately works against it. The central narrative–about the symbiotic…
It’s the old dilemma: Spectacle vs. substance–which do you choose for a movie? Ideally, you choose both–even if in unequal doses. Jurassic Park, for all the backlash it finally endured (ranging from gripes that the special effects dominated the actors to the complaint that there were only 10 minutes of…
White Man’s Burden has a lofty goal: to put the races in the other guy’s shoes. But being released as it is in the wake of O.J. Simpson’s acquittal, White Man’s Burden comes off as a Hollywood knee-jerk take on race–something like those “in-depth,” 300-page “real-story” books released 17 days…
thursday december 14 The Littlest Angel: The Dance Consortium is a troupe for people who don’t like too much of any one dance style, but are turned on by a blend of the best of many kinds. The Consortium mixes classical ballet with modern choreography and, whenever it’s appropriate, tries…
What, the Dickens again at the Dallas Theater Center? You bet your suet pudding. This is DTC’s 12th annual production of Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, and practice, as they say, makes perfect. With enough dazzling visual effects to satisfy the Andrew Lloyd Webber whizbang crowd, and with an emotional punch…
It’s impossible to review a film and not consider the political climate of the country in which it was produced, especially if the movie makes no bones about trying to piss off as many people as possible. This is clearly the mission of filmmaker Greg Araki’s fifth feature The Doom…
As Sabrina opens, a woman’s voice purrs in breathless tones: “On the north shore of Long Island there was a big house–a castle almost,” and it’s clear you’re being set up for a fairy tale. The only thing missing is an overstuffed, gilt-edged, leather-bound book with large gothic letters spelling…
The shadow of marital infidelity falls dark and heavy over the theater, perhaps because that subject is particularly suited to the claustrophobic confines of the stage. Audiences can sit close to actors who piece together the tortured mosaic of betrayal and be forced to question their own boundaries of love…
Today I wanna pay tribute to all the guys who are in love with ugly girls. The best thing about them is that they never know the girl is ugly, so it saves the rest of us from a lot of embarrassment in later life. She’ll never find out that…
I wasn’t much of a fan of Sean Penn’s first effort as a writer-director, The Indian Runner. The film, a mood piece about a man’s return from Vietnam and his big brother’s attempts to understand him, had the kind of problems you’d expect from many freshman efforts; it was long…
thursday december 7 Malignant Redemption: Goethe’s Faust legend has for centuries now served as a neat microcosm of humanity’s search for experience beyond the physical realm. Its protagonist can be displayed as cocky or well-meaning, the antagonist as evil or fateful, but always, the action forces us to consider the…
Hailing Mary is not just a rote exercise for area artists honoring the Virgin of Guadalupe. In fact, the passion and intensity poured into spiritual art is all too evident in two local exhibits paying homage to the Virgin. The December shows also give ample evidence of the conflict between…
