Discussing 1993’s year in movies, veteran Hollywood scriptwriter William Goldman–who wrote the screenplays for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, All the President’s Men, and Marathon Man and authored the classic how-to book Adventures in the Screen Trade– singled out Free Willy as a story he wished he’d written. He…
Jason Kidd is sucking a small Gatorade and sweating like a fat guy on a rec gym free-throw line. He is atop a trailer at “Hoop it Up” in the West End. The sun feels hotter up here. And he really hates that Texas sun. No offense, of course, he…
I write this, my final column for the Dallas Observer, from an otherwise empty townhouse I have just moved into, somewhere between the Beltway and Virginia’s Bible belt. It is the transitory nature of this business that just when you feel confident in your writing gig and your babysitter and…
The opening credits of the new sci-fi thriller Species are splashed across a panorama of stars while ominous, understated theme music lurks in the background. Veteran monster movie fans might be reminded of Ridley Scott’s 1979 Alien by this deliberately hushed but melodramatic beginning. Audiences will find another link between…
There’s a moment in the second half of Crumb, Terry Zwigoff’s scorching and fearless feature-length profile of the underground comic-book artist Robert Crumb, that confirms movie audiences have entered a very different world than they are accustomed to exploring. After Crumb and numerous friends, family members, and loved ones have…
Looking at Judge Dredd star Sylvester Stallone these days, with his bulbous physique, his imploding face, and his orangeish, rubbery-looking skin, it’s tough to recall that he once seemed rather charming, and that he was a pretty good actor to boot. He made his starring debut in the self-written 1976…
The city of Bellevue, Wash., is trying to force Papagayo’s Cantina–which, by the way, is an excellent topless bar if you ever get up that way–to make its stage “wheelchair-accessible.” In case any handicapped topless dancers decide to buy G-strings. Let me pause here for a moment so you can…
Since Chuck Jones is the subject of a tribute at the Dallas Museum of Art this weekend, I have an excuse to wax eloquent about how much joy his work has given me over the years. The legendary Warner Bros. animator’s distinctively rough draftsmanship and quirky sense of humor gave…
friday july 14 West End’s Taste of Dallas: This is a warning to people who think they have iron stomachs–the wide variety of foods available at the West End’s three-day Taste of Dallas doesn’t necessarily mix well. If you choose to sample Frito pie and ostrich stew in the same…
By now you know that the Dallas Mavericks drafted a guy named Cherokee Parks in last week’s NBA draft. But what you don’t know is that it takes a lot of food–and several full platters of boredom–to bring rookies to Dallas to play basketball. This is the part of the…
At the recent yearly summit of Dallas’ theater critics, a ritual gathering designed to hash out the annual Dallas Theater Critics Forum Awards, the group discussed that there were perhaps 40 to 50 fewer productions this past season than in previous years. No one had an answer for the sad…
Those seeking an illustration of the media food chain’s numerous hypocrisies need look no further than the Hugh Grant affair. As you doubtless know, Grant was arrested last week in Hollywood for “public lewdness” with a prostitute in the back seat of a car. The ironies were irresistible: here was…
If you’re gonna make a gorilla flick, the gorilla’s got to party down. The gorilla’s got to do something. It’s either got to eat people, or else run around solving their problems. It’s got to be either a capitalist gorilla or a communist gorilla. There’s no such thing, in the…
First Knight, a new effort from Ghost director Jerry Zucker, purports to tell the tale of King Arthur’s ill-fated marriage to Lady Guinevere–a young English noblewoman who fell madly in love with the aging king’s most trusted knight, the young, virile, reckless Lancelot. Of course it makes hash of the…
A friend of mine who writes film criticism in another city was waxing rhapsodic the other day about Maria Maggenti, the New York-based writer-director of The Incredibly True Adventure of Two Girls in Love. “Oh, you’re just gonna fall in love with this woman,” she told me. “After I met…
The Incredibly True Adventure of Two Girls in Love is an awfully long title for such a short, simple movie about first love. The lovers in question are two young women of different races and social backgrounds. One is Randy Dean (Laurel Holloman), a slender redheaded white girl who lives…
His ship might be damaged beyond repair and his longtime ambition to walk on the moon dashed forever, but Jim Lovell (Tom Hanks), commander of the ill-fated Apollo 13 mission, still can’t help dreaming. As he and his fellow crewmembers float in a damaged tin can miles above the world,…
friday july 7 Annie Leibovitz and Fabrice Berger-Remond: Is there doubt in anyone’s mind that Annie Leibovitz is one of the greatest photo-portraitists working in America right now? Sure, she gets the same flak Richard Avedon has for decades now about snapping so many celebrities and working primarily with (gasp!)…
Billy Joe Martin sat on the mound of an empty high-school baseball field in Arlington. He’s always seemed alone since his dad died that Christmas day six years ago. The younger Martin had been working with kids earlier in the day, showing them how to bat. Being a good example…
In a few weeks, Undermain Theatre will fly to Macedonia to perform Sarajevo, a play written by Macedonian native Goran Stefanovsky, at the three-week summer festival there. Ten theaters will perform at the festival, and all of them except the Undermain are Eastern European troupes. The Undermain members have taken…
If you go to the movies a lot, the music used in the latest trailer advertising First Knight might seem awfully familiar: a grandiose, brass-and-string-heavy bit of orchestration that rises in urgency and pitch until it resolves with a hopeful C major chord. This short snippet, referred to by filmmakers…
I was disappointed in the first two Batman movies. Despite moments of genuine craziness, dark wit, and visual brilliance, they didn’t move me emotionally, and I didn’t think much of them as entertainment, either. The problem was their director, Tim Burton. He’s an artist, not a showman; a visionary, not…
