The six-month intermission is over; those of you left in the lobby, wondering if Uma Thurman ever did kill Bill, may now return to your seats and unbuckle your belts and resume your gorging. Rest assured that Kill Bill: Vol. 2, the final half of Quentin Tarantino’s fifth movie, offers…
Here’s a subject with which no one should ever have to grapple: Is this new version of The Punisher, starring Thomas Jane as the comic-book assassin, better than the 1989 adaptation with Dolph Lundgren? They both offer slight variations on a tale first told in a 1974 Spider-Man comic, where…
In Israeli writer-director Nir Bergman’s Broken Wings, we never see an automatic weapon, a military roadblock or a horrific explosion on a city street. Rather than dealing with the volatile politics of the Middle East, this quiet, soul-wrenching film examines the unresolved traumas of one middle-class family trying to cope…
When we first see the title characters of Connie and Carla, a penny-dreadful imitation of one of Hollywood’s most inimitable comedies, they are loud-mouthed junior high girls mugging in the school cafeteria. A minute later, they are loud-mouthed grown-ups (well, they’re the size of grown-ups) screaming out show tunes in…
Heavier almost than the mood-setting smoke hanging over the Kalita Humphreys stage for the Fats Waller musical Ain’t Misbehavin’ is the sense of irony that the Dallas Theater Center would choose this show as the follow-up to Topdog/Underdog. Back in March, the theater staged a top-notch production of Suzan-Lori Parks’…
An Inspector Calls The old J.B. Priestley ghost story finds an upper-crust British family interrupted in the celebration of their daughters engagement by a mysterious Inspector Goole (Neil Carpenter). A poor young woman has committed suicide. The inspector questions each member of the family and makes connections between the dead…
Concentrations 44: Matthew Buckingham, A Man of the Crowd Installed deep within the recesses of the Museums contemporary art galleries, Matthew Buckinghams video piece is an exercise in refracted perception. The piece consists of photographs and video in two adjacent rooms. The juxtaposing of somber black-and-white photographs and the pyrotechnics…
Perusing all the possibilities at an expo devoted to stringed instruments, we miss our childhood ukulele. Man, we could rip it out on those four nylon strings. While we pretended to be Bernadette Peters, with our sister playing the Jerk, we’d sit on the tailgate of Dad’s pickup and perform…
Thursday, April 15 Many German fairy tales, though cute and fun, offered a stern moral for those who listened. Playwright and actor Fred Curchack’s one-man show Gauguin’s Shadow could be interpreted as a similar warning: Girls, don’t date artists. The play, which combines acting, masks, puppets and video projections, illustrates…
There was a kinder, gentler time in America that had nothing to do with any member of the Bush family. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, while the plumbers burgled the Watergate, student protesters of the Vietnam War were gunned down on college campuses and newly liberated women burned…
4/17 It’s no secret that today’s kids are just a little more chunky than they should be. According to the American Obesity Association, about 15.3 percent of children ages 6 to 11 are obese as well as about 15.5 percent of adolescents ages 12 to 19. Giving youths something to…
4/17 We had only one question, really, for Supercross rider Joe Oelhof: That whole “nac-nac” thing–how do you do it the first time? A nac-nac–stop smirking, it’s not what you think–is a stunt frequently performed by indoor dirt-track motorcycle racers in which the rider, while flying three stories or so…
4/16 If it’s not glossy, bulleted or catchy, I’m just not interested. A shortened attention span plagues me (and everyone else). In fact, I’m surprised you noticed this. The photo above must have caught your eye. It’s the pictures that get you. From April 16 through May 29, 55 black-and-white…
4/16 This tale, with its bride-stealing, relentless pursuit of immediate gratification and self-centered wandering peasant, is better suited to soap operas than ballet performances. But a good soap opera can capture an audience’s attention like more, um, respected works of art. Peer Gynt, Ben Stevenson’s choreographed interpretation of Henrik Ibsen’s…
Up front, it’s “full disclosure” time. Let it be confessed here, publicly, that I have never been a religious Neil Young fan. Always liked him OK, always appreciated his adventurous spirit, never bought his albums. But since I’ve also never met a Canadian I didn’t like (apart from Mike Myers),…
It is, to those of us born and raised in Texas, the Greatest Story Ever Told and Retold; who can forget the Alamo when it’s on every Texas history class final exam? At 5 a.m. on March 6, 1836, some 189 Texian soldiers and volunteers were slaughtered while trying to…
In the past 10 years there has not been a network television series as moving, as funny or as honest as Freaks and Geeks, which debuted on NBC in September 1999 and ran for a mere 18 episodes, not even an entire season’s worth of shows. Set in a Michigan…
The actors in Dainty Shapes and Hairy Apes or The Green Pill, now playing at The MAC, are made up to look like human marionettes. They move with deliberate, jerky gestures, as if their limbs are manipulated by invisible strings. Their faces are painted chalky white, cheeks circled with bright…
It’s truly amazing what casting sculpture in video rather than the traditional media can do. Materials such as bronze, wood and stone just seem so clunky in comparison to video’s lightweight incandescence. Whether analogue or digital, the result of emulsification processes on paper or a pixelation on a screen, video…
Concentrations 44: Matthew Buckingham, A Man of the Crowd Installed deep within the recesses of the Museums contemporary art galleries, Matthew Buckinghams video piece is an exercise in refracted perception. The piece consists of photographs and video in two adjacent rooms. The juxtaposing of somber black-and-white photographs and the pyrotechnics…
An Inspector Calls The old J.B. Priestley ghost story finds an upper-crust British family interrupted in the celebration of their daughters engagement by a mysterious Inspector Goole (Neil Carpenter). A poor young woman has committed suicide. The inspector questions each member of the family and makes connections between the dead…
We’re not really superstitious. Anyone of intelligence understands a rabbit’s foot won’t bring you good luck. Nor will a four-leaf clover or an upturned horseshoe. Who could believe in that junk? We know the real ways to ensure good luck–we won’t pick up a coin that’s facedown or open an…
