There's a moment on Laurie Anderson's most recent album, last year's portentous and unnerving Bright Red, when her velvety sage's voice breaks out of its cool, ironic mode and challenges the very universe. In "Love Among the Sailors," a funereal piece about the devastation of AIDS, Anderson declares: "If this...
This is Capriccio's third move--it opened in the old house on Maple, then moved to the reconstructed San Simeon space on McKinney. In December, it moved again, into the old house once occupied by the ever-lamented Routh Street Cafe. Capriccio's most recent space on McKinney had been completely redone, transformed...
It's a good bet that in any packed, claustrophobic gathering of movie buffs, some wiseacre will declare, "This reminds me of the stateroom scene in A Night at the Opera." The scene, which occurs in the Marx Brothers' 1935 gem, occurs aboard an ocean liner in which the brothers are...
Writer-director Tim Burton's recent biographical film, Ed Wood, offers an easy metaphor for the state of the horror film: an elderly, decrepit Bela Lugosi (Martin Landau) dressed in his Dracula getup, now incapable of scaring even an 8-year-old trick-or-treater. The image encapsulates one of the central concerns of Burton's films:...
This guy got his head cut off by an elevator in the Bronx. Did you hear about this? The guy's gettin' off the elevator, it starts to go up real fast while the door is still open. The guy loses his balance, leans toward the elevator, and it cuts his...
It's pointless to respectfully review a film as ineptly written, indifferently directed, and slothfully performed as Just Cause, the new legal thriller about a Harvard law professor and anti-death penalty advocate (Sean Connery) who heads down south to the Florida Everglades to win freedom for condemned black murderer Bobby Earl...
friday march 3 North Texas Irish Festival: It's been said that the unhappiest people throw the most elaborate parties. This might go a long way toward explaining the centuries-old reputation the Irish have for celebrating life with raucous music, merry dance, and prodigious drink--when they haven't been treated like a...
Everyone loves to be the one "in the know," the one in touch, the one who knows what's hot and what's not. Everyone loves a secret--if they're in on it--and from the first day it opened, Gloria's was everyone's favorite secret. "Hey, I know this great little Salvadoran place." (Salvadoran--what's...
How sweet it is. Lakewood is one of the prettiest parts of Dallas, but it lacks certain urban quality-of-life requirements. You can't get good groceries there, or go to a first-run movie. Good restaurants are scarce and--until recently--to get a good cup of espresso you had to drive across, or...
Whither Debbie Does Dallas? Manufacturers and distributors of adult video tapes are threatening to pass up the Video Software Dealers Association national convention in Dallas this May. The convention will fill the Dallas Convention Center, welcome 14,000 participants, and, according to organizers, pump as much as $15 million into the...
How to make room in Reunion Okay, so the Dallas City Council won't let us vote on whether or not we want a new arena because we "don't understand the economics of all this" ["Let them cast ballots," February 9]. Well, here's a little bit of economic theory that I...
God is their co-pilot It is common for a journalist to wish a colleague heading off for a difficult interview "good luck." It is less common to commence an investigative project with a request for divine aid. But that, BeloWatch has learned, is precisely how undercover Channel 8 cameraman Darrell...
You must picture it first: five Irish sisters, single women in their 30s and 40s, tending assiduously to home and hearth in the small town of Ballybeg. Their only vice--and only an Irish Catholic could consider it such--is a wireless (a.k.a. radio) that plays "Irish dance music all the way...
We live in scary times. And what's the first thing to do when you get scared? Tell the truth: you turn around and run. Hide under the bed. Find your mommy. Eat something. That's why, I theorize, comfort food has become the sure bet of the food business. It began...
Subdued, elegant, and directed with disarming simplicity, I, the Worst of All (Yo, La Peor de Todas) is the kind of historical drama whose resonance sneaks up on you. On the surface, it's an intimate religious drama about a minor figure in Catholic history, a 17th-century Mexican writer and nun...
A distinctive voice in Texas criticism was lost February 16 when Dallas Morning News film writer Russell Smith died in his Dallas home of AIDS complications. He was 38. Born and raised in Dallas, he joined the Dallas Morning News 12 years ago, working as a copy editor and a...
Okay, I'm gonna describe this woman. She's got fluffy blonde hair--teased, permed, and coiffed--about $300 worth. She's got a straight nose, thin lips and large bedroomy eyes. She wears tiny pearl earrings and a simple pearl necklace that hangs down onto a tanned neck and chest. Her dress is classic--either...
Few literature students have escaped exposure to the works of T.S. Eliot. Although Eliot's influence has waned somewhat, he represented, for the post-World War II American academic elite, a living wish-fulfillment fantasy of everything they thought a man of letters should be--Anglophilic to the extreme (he renounced his American citizenship...
thursday february 23 Valery Kuleshov: In retrospect, isn't it strange that the former Soviet Union often made exceptions (albeit heavily guarded ones) for its most talented artists when the time came to export Russian influences throughout the rest of the world? That suggests there has always been, in many of...
JaM's acid test Thousands of North Texans are probably convinced their kids are druggies after seeing a particularly inane news-you-can-use graphic on Channel 5. The helpful advice came as a bonus during a report from Jammin' Jane McGarry on the Bedford junior high school LSD scandal. McGarry, backed up by...
The story of Leni Riefenstahl's rise from renowned professional dancer to beloved German movie star to perhaps the greatest woman filmmaker of all time is marked by one constant--her brash, archaic, even narcissistic belief in herself and her creative abilities. Her artistic achievements, specifically her film versions of the gargantuan...
About 10 minutes into Sam Raimi's Western The Quick and the Dead, his nomadic, gunslinging heroine, Ellen (Sharon Stone), slouches down in a rickety chair on the front porch of a saloon in the middle of Redemption, a Southwestern town so desolate even the cacti look withered, and lets a...
