First-time feature filmmaker David Frankel’s Miami Rhapsody is so fleet-footed, cheerful, and entertaining it’s tempting to dismiss it as just another piece of popcorn entertainment. But there’s clearly a certain craft–even art–to creating a motion picture that makes you feel this swoony, giddy, and grateful, and in that light, Frankel’s…
Anyone with even a passing interest in the culture of corporate America will enjoy Undermain Theatre’s ongoing production of Tiny Dimes. Playwright Peter Mattei, a founding member of Cucaracha Theatre in New York, has created an absurdist comedy that makes complete sense and none at all, a nonnarrative piece that…
Generally speaking, directors who try to make movies in which characters represent political or philosophical beliefs have a difficult time making those people feel authentic to movie audiences. One of two things usually happens: either the filmmaker reduces the characters to strident mouthpieces (David Mamet’s adaptation of his own play…
It’s rare that an independent film manages to survive and thrive outside the realm of major Hollywood distribution companies. Yet that’s exactly what has happened with Sankofa, a bold low-budget slave epic currently making its way across North America, city by city, drawing huge and enthusiastic crowds wherever it plays…
From the fertile mind of University of North Texas film teacher Justin Wyatt (who’s also the author of High Concept, a compelling analysis of Hollywood’s blockbuster mentality) comes one of the boldest and most provocative film festivals this city has seen in a while. Titled The Cinematic Body: A Film…
I’m really sick of talkin’ about sperm. I don’t wanna hear about it. I don’t wanna hear about people freezin’ sperm, savin’ sperm, bankin’ sperm, borrowin’ sperm, gettin’ sperm from their brother, donatin’ sperm, fightin’ custody battles over sperm, buyin’ sperm, sellin’ sperm, or otherwise doing anything with sperm except…
thursday february 9 Deborah Mathis: As strange as it seems, the normally indefatigable national press has been cowed by House blowhard Newt Gingrich’s claims that they are “a tool of the Democratic Party” (a charge leveled at professionals who, over the past two years, nailed Bill Clinton–sometimes fairly, sometimes hysterically–to…
SWEETWATER–The retiree from Alvin, Texas, turns off I-20 and maneuvers the gray Ford pickup down the gravel road toward the private hunting club. His door opens to reveal a shopping bag, a cowboy hat, and Styrofoam coffee cups with cold, wet grounds still in the bottom. There are guns and…
When I first noted that Kitchen Dog Theater’s current production, composed of two one-acts and called Women’s Voices, included the work of a man, I was a little baffled. I mean, if Kitchen Dog wanted to give the evening that kind of feminist–or at least feminine–weight, couldn’t it have found…
To Live, the latest historical melodrama from Chinese filmmaker Zhang Yimou, isn’t anything like the film I’d been led to anticipate–and that’s good. The trailers playing in art houses across the United States position it as a traditionally sentimental epic about a poor family buffeted by the winds of history;…
There’s nobody in American movies like Hong Kong superstar Chow Yun-Fat. Best known stateside as the stoic center of John Woo’s most dizzying action maelstroms (including The Killer and Hard-Boiled), Chow’s antiheroic presence is so alluring that he seems born to play such parts. (It’s been argued that Chow’s good…
Raucous, bawdy, sexy, and violent, Queen Margot is history as feverishly overwrought soap opera–history painted in tears, sweat, blood, and semen, with a very broad brush. In telling the tale of the title character, who survived a ghastly royal power struggle that pitted Catholic against Protestant and royal against royal…
I think I’m the last person in America who doesn’t give one flyin’ flip about what he eats. “Why are you drownin’ those pancakes in syrup?” Is this a question? This is not a question. Do I have to answer this? “I can’t believe you’re puttin’ butter on that.” Why…
thursday february 2 Video Art: The First 25 Years: Ever since portable video equipment became an affordable technology in the late ’60s, a growing number of artists have employed the medium to make personal statements in a way film had never been used. The key words for the first generation…
It is true that those who despise Mark Morris’ dancemaking do so for the same reasons many of us find him the most innovative choreographer of his generation. In some eyes, Morris has brought a fine-tuned and sensitive musicality formerly missing from postmodern dance, while his gender-bending style helped liberate…
AUSTIN–Early into Before Sunrise, as Jesse (the traveling American played by Ethan Hawke) and Celine (the French student, portrayed by Julie Delpy) share their first moments on Eurail bound for Vienna, Hawke’s character explains an idea for a cable access program that would run 24 hours a day for an…
All movie fans have a filmmaker they latch onto, take to heart, and enthusiastically root for. Their triumphs make you euphoric and their failures make you surly and sad, and once you’re plugged into the thrill of following their careers, the emergence of each new work is simultaneously thrilling and…
thursday january 26 Friends of the Major: Major Theatre co-owners Rob Clements and Bryce Gonzalez present the debut screening and reception for what they plan to be a regular series of special events. Friends of the Major is what they call it, and it’s a combination fund-raiser and meeting-of-the-minds. For…
It was three NFC championship games ago. I was standing in the driveway of the Cowboys’ San Francisco hotel–one day before Dallas beat the 49ers. Charles Haley was standing nearby, waiting for cough medicine. None that tastes bad, he told his wife, in a fine rendition of the man-who-has-a-cold whine…
When the curtain first lifted on the antimusical Avenue X, my first thought was, this is just another musical. That’s not a bad thing normally, but I expected a different, scrappy kind of beginning rather than the entire ensemble gently singing a lovely opening number amidst a muted set. The…
Paul Newman is our most complex living movie icon. The man and his image are loaded with contradictions–he is an actor of fairly limited abilities, but at least a dozen of his performances from a 41-year career have been burned into our consciousness with the force of genius. Newman’s appearances…
For several years now, I’ve wondered if I simply didn’t get the movies of Krzysztof Kieslowski, the Polish filmmaker who specializes in fare so abstract, obtuse, and overtly symbolic that it’s nearly impossible to read it fully and accurately in one sitting. The first film of his that I sat…
