It would be journalistically lazy, gratuitous, even, to reduce all of blues legend Johnny Winter’s accomplishments down to the fact that he was born a cross-eyed albino, but…the man is a cross-eyed albino! The mere percentages against this turn of nature are staggering, but when you factor in the fact…
The press release here before me the most build-up ever with lines like “Possibly the most performed Mexican theatrical production in the world” and “Brought to you by the Dallas Video Festival, Vistas Film Festival and the Asian Film Festival of Dallas.” My expectations are high for their subtitled silent…
It’s called A Brief History of White Music, and yet nowhere in the list of songs do I find any trace of tribute to the works of Michael Bolton or Wilson Phillips. If you’re going to do a history of white music, you should really include the cornerstones and at…
It’s the City of Light, and the City of Love. It’s a city on the other side of the world, yet we all still love Paris, and not just in the springtime. Paris, Je T’aime (Paris, I Love You), is a must-see film all about loving Paris and loving love,…
Yeah, yeah. Let’s skip all the usual Wizard of Oz blather–how the flying monkeys scared you as a kid, whether a munchkin actually died on the set, whether the original book was really a Populist allegory. Whatever. The movie’s been around forever. You’ve seen it before; you might see it…
Howard Stern fans might recognize the voice of Craig Gass from his call-ins as “Sam Kinison calling from Hell,” and. “Al Pacino” and “Al Pacino’s baby.” Gass, whose parents and sister are deaf, learned to speak by imitating television characters. See him at the Addison Improv, 4980 Belt Line Road,…
Grab your plastic sheets, your rain slickers and maybe an umbrella because things are going to get messy at the House of Blues on Saturday. That’s right, Gallagher is coming to town with his handy-dandy Sledge-O-Matic to smash some stuff. There must be something very cathartic about squashing fruit and…
Sadly, No Reservations is not the big-screen adaptation of Anthony Bourdain’s snack-gulping, risk-taking Travel Channel show; you’ll find no monkey brains here, nor any attempts to party down in Beirut whilst Hezbollah and Israel blow each other to smithereens. This is just more of the same from the franchise factory—by-the-recipe…
Steve Buscemi the director is nothing like the art-damaged auteur Buscemi the actor played in 1995’s Living in Oblivion. No dry ice and dwarves for the victim of the cinema’s most celebrated wood-chipper massacre, who as a filmmaker inhabits tight spaces (an ice-cream truck, a prison cell) and trapped lives…
In his big-screen debut, Homer Simpson utters the “D’oh!” heard round the world—or at least as far away as Washington, D.C. (which, given the unspecified coordinates of Springfield, might not be that far at all), where President Schwarzenegger and an overzealous EPA chief (voiced by Albert Brooks) rush to contain…
Hard Boiled: Two-Disc Ultimate Edition (Weinstein) The Criterion version of John Woo’s masterpiece, about two cops (the overworked Chow Yun-Fat and the undercover Tony Leung) gunning for the Hong Kong Triads, is still the “ultimate” edition. It has a better commentary track (with Woo and Pulp Fiction co-writer Roger Avary,…
The less said, the better The Boxer is. The new play by Dallas writer and Bootstraps Comedy Theater founder Matt Lyles, who also directs this production, is a clear audience favorite at the current Festival of Independent Theatres at the Bath House Cultural Center. Its brilliance lies in how it…
Last time I checked, getting shot in the head could earn you some serious street cred. However, for singer-songwriter Marc Cohn, best known for the 1991 adult contemporary hit “Walking in Memphis” and making babies with 20/20 anchor Elizabeth Vargas, it was simply an opportunity to get back on a…
When it’s festooned with Winnie the Pooh characters, it’s a mobile. When it’s strung with abstract shapes, it’s “kinetic art.” The works of Salvador Presta fall into the latter category (as to whether he likes Pooh, we wouldn’t venture a guess). Presta’s works explore the interaction of space and light…
Never really got the whole “cowboy poetry” thing. Seems like contrived sentimentality, the bane of good poetry, but since this Sunday Fort Worth will mark the National Day of the Cowboy with a tribute that includes the Cowtown Opry cowboy poetry contest, we thought we’d give it a shot. Let’s…
Tim McGraw and his CMA-sore-loser wife bring their bullshit mainstream country treacle back to Dallas for the second installment of their Soul2Soul tour. Faith Hill’s music is so unremarkable that I can’t remember what any of her songs sound like. I recall that her desperation for success led her to…
I’ve attempted to draw the perfect rocket ship since I was around 5 years old. I am incapable of such an achievement. For more decades than I can to admit, this simple achievement has eluded me. And I’m not talking about some crazy-detailed NASA-worthy model, I’m just going for the…
The day George Clooney, Tom Cruise and Angelina Jolie do dinner theater may be light years away. Heck, it would probably be an alternate universe. So instead we’ll just have to settle for knock-offs thanks to Tim Shane and the Comedy Killers, as they present Celebrity Newly-Deads. Tom Schmooze and…
Remember the days of neighborhood pickup football games? You know, lacing up your sneaks after watching the Cowboys whip the Steelers (or maybe the Bills, depending on how old you are), and your team (named after your street, of course) scoring a game-winning touchdown via the strategy of six lateral…
Well, it looks like Felicity’s higher education from fictional college UNY didn’t do her much good–she ended up as a waitress at a pie diner in Small Town, U.S.A. And forget about choosing between Ben or Noel–Keri Russell’s now married to a controlling bad egg of a husband who won’t…
Since the early ’90s, hundreds of young women have been found dead, raped and tortured in the outskirts of Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua–the Mexican sister city of El Paso. Most of them worked at one of the city’s hundreds of maquiladoras (assembly factories operated by American corporations in search of cheap…
When a photographer shoots a photograph, he has a decision to make. Crop close to show only detail, removing the noise that might surround the subject, or allow other elements to creep into the image. German artist Wolfgang Zurborn accepts this challenge with fervor, choosing to represent all elements that…
