Paul Schrader, thank God. On the occasion of the USA Film Festival's 25th anniversary, there could not be a more inspired and appropriate choice to receive the organization's Great Director award than this bookish, bespectacled, 48-year-old auteur. With the possible exception of Martin Scorsese, no working American director in his...
Note: The 25th Annual USA Film Festival runs Thursday, April 20 through Thursday, April 27 at the AMC Glen Lakes theater, 9450 North Central Expressway (except for The Stars Fell on Henrietta and Panther, which will be screened at the General Cinema NorthPark III-IV, North Central Expressway at Park Lane)...
Filmmakers Andrew Behar, Sara Sackner, and their collaborators sure had their work cut out for them when they decided to follow the Grateful Dead and their fans around the country last year and make a film about that particular subculture. The shoot itself yielded some interesting material, including details about...
Wunderkind producer Irving Thalberg had a lot of theories about how to make a piece of entertainment that gives audiences their money's worth. One surefire ingredient was a little scriptwriting gimmick he called "the old 98-yard dash to victory": put a stalwart hero in a horrifically complicated predicament, stack the...
Darrell Jordan is having second thoughts. The Dallas mayoral candidate had promised to join his two top rivals, Ron Kirk and Domingo Garcia, at an April 23 political event at Roosevelt High School in Dallas. The event is an "accountability session"--the first such mayoral-election event organized by Dallas Area Interfaith...
Suffer the little children State Sen. Florence Shapiro (R-Plano) appears so frequently on the local evening news she's practically an anchorwoman. It's her personal crusade against child molesters that has earned her those coveted sound bites, of course. Her laudable package of get-tough measures, known as Ashley's Laws--after murdered 7-year-old...
Static I just finished reading Laura Miller's latest expose on phone use by our council members ["Who ya gonna call?" April 6] and am delighted. How does she do it? If only you could have accompanied the article with a photo spread showing their faces when the s--t hit the...
I always did think the Washington press corps had played center too long in the Great Football Game (old joke: sees the world backward and upside down), and now I know it. For three months, we have been reading about "the new leadership" in Washington. People have devoted long and...
The gospel, according to the News What makes The Dallas Morning News perhaps the most annoying newspaper in America? Stories like Ed Housewright's incredibly condescending page-one story on the remarkable circumstance of Good Friday and the first day of Passover sharing the same date. Published, of course, last Friday, this...
For those of you unfamiliar with the daily doings of big-league spring training, this players' camp at Homestead, Florida, is much like any other. First, you may call it "camp" or "spring training," but never "training camp." That would be like calling a manager "coach." Also, at this camp, originally...
"People talk a lot about Gram Parsons, and they write a lot about Gram Parsons, but you never hear Gram Parsons on the radio." So said Parsons' old singing partner Emmylou Harris not long after the singer-songwriter's death in 1973 from a drug overdose. It was a comment laced with...
Hell-fire and damnation Jason and the Scorchers never got their due the first time 'round, being inexplicably lumped in with the new-wave-roots movement that flourished and faded within the time it takes to say Phantom, Rocker, and Slim. But there was genius within that country-punk, which breathed more fire than...
Stuart Goddard, like so many of his British brethren who would later choose careers in music, began his career as an art-school dropout, fascinated with punk because it was as much about the packaging of image--torn clothing, men wearing makeup, performance art creeping into concert, treating the audience like shit--as...
Have a good time and do a good deed, all at once. Share Our Strength's "Taste of the Nation" is the restaurant industry's effort to stamp out hunger. Every year, in the same week, food and wine tastings take place in more than 100 cities nationwide, with the proceeds going...
Driving north on the Tollway last week once again, I made a vow: I won't complain any more about going north. No more diatribes about cookie-cutter developments and Dallas clones, I promise. I'm sure you're as sick of reading them as I am of writing them. I'll just make the...
Panther is a film that many powerful inhabitants of black Hollywood dreamed of making for years--a biography of the Black Panther Party for Self Defense, which started in San Francisco and spread steadily out across the United States, breeding black pride and fostering white rage wherever its members reared their...
Filmmaker Gregory Nava's My Family (Mi Familia), a multigenerational epic about a Chicano family in East Los Angeles, is one of the most satisfying dramas I've ever seen. The narrative follows the changing fortunes of the Sanchez family from the early part of the century through the late 1970s. It...
Maybe you've been in a bookstore or a cappuccino shoppe lately and heard a Catholic religious service going on through the Muzak. This is not a mistake. They're playing this stuff in singles bars. It's weird. You got these monks in black hoods, chanting like automatons, as part of the...
The biggest controversy at this year's Academy Awards was the omission of Hoop Dreams from the Best Documentary category. That film dealt with two families struggling to survive economic hardship, framed by the saga of two teenage boys pressured to make the NBA and rescue their households. But also snubbed...
There's only one dud among the seven somber short films featured in Short Stuff. It's a pretentious fantasy flight called "Goddess" in which a Mary Kay-shellacked female icon becomes human in order to avenge the death of a man by his twin brother. Yawn. But two films punch you in...
Film lovers can be divided into two categories. There are those who approach the cinema with a Wildean belief that art exists to improve the human condition, or at the very least idealize it. They watch movies using a kind of aesthetic white glove test, always on the lookout for...
thursday april 20 Ampersand Dance: Creating a new dance company is always a risky business, but in a city like Dallas, where culture too often means you choose an imported beer while watching TV football, it's downright courageous. But dancer-choreographers Eric Salisbury and Shannon Slaton are forging ahead with Ampersand...
