Jersey Girl, the sixth film by writer-director Kevin Smith, is the least Kevin Smith-y film he’s ever made, which will be welcome news to those exhausted by Smith’s everlasting obsession with his dick, fart jokes and stack of comic books and bad news to those enamored of Smith’s everlasting obsession…
The Ladykillers is the second film in as many years made by Joel and Ethan Coen to fill space between pet projects that seem to run off leash; it’s their time-killer, if you will. But even their recent paychecks reflect the brothers’ restlessness: Their movies have grown more manic and…
Viewers rightfully marvel at the colorful CG seascapes of Finding Nemo and the unique drawing style of The Triplets of Belleville, but when it comes to the actual stories told in contemporary animated films, no one’s pushing the boundaries quite like anime auteur Satoshi Kon. Having taken a page from…
Tom Hanks is who Tom Hanks is today because of something he did about 14 years ago. One afternoon, Hanks walked into his agent’s office and told the man who takes 10 percent, “I don’t want to play pussies anymore.” He had spent the better part of the 1980s being…
“Do you have any idea what it’s like being English?” John Cleese asked in A Fish Called Wanda. “Being so correct all the time, being so stifled by this dread of doing the wrong thing…We’re all terrified of embarrassment.” Understanding that particularly English phobia regarding public humiliation helps explain why…
The Genius of the French Rococo: The Drawings of Franois Boucher (1703-1770) and Bouchers Mythological Paintings The unfortunate thing about the beautiful is that it is all too often intellectually bereft, shorn of historical specificity and just plain lacking in seriousness. To call something beautiful is a more elevated but…
The Lion in Winter King Henry II of England has plans for sons Richard, Geoffrey and John. But Henrys long-imprisoned wife, Eleanor of Aquitaine, has other ideas about succession to the throne. In James Goldmans talky, sexy two-act drama, the Plantagenets go at each other hammer and tongs on a…
Doing the marathon of Dallas and Fort Worth’s seasonal gallery events is like eating at a buffet restaurant. You scoop up a smidgen, walk a bit, spoon over some more, round the corner, grab something else. But we have some advice: Just because it’s a buffet doesn’t mean you can’t…
Thursday, March 25 We had no idea that opiates, smuggling and white slavery are the three pillars of comedy. Playwright Charles Busch and the Pocket Sandwich Theatre apparently have the inside track, though, since the theater’s production of Busch’s Shanghai Moon involves all three. Oh, right, it’s a spoof. Now…
We witnessed the arc of a real-life character over the past two decades. We first met Lady Diana Spencer in the media when she was a 19-year-old kindergarten teacher’s aide in 1980 and followed her life to its ultimate conclusion some 17 years later, in August 1997, in a car…
3/27 Parents suffer “sticker shock” for the new baby even before he or she is born. Kids will cost you, and their yard work potential won’t begin to cover it. Take a lesson from Daddy Woods, who had Tiger out on the golf course at age 2, or Papa Williams,…
3/29 For young hockey players struggling with feelings of athletic ineptitude, there’s no greater confidence booster than seeing two teams of untalented aging radio personalities decked out in full gear, staggering across the ice like Bambi on a particularly clumsy day. To boost the self-perception of those within viewing distance,…
3/25 Oh, those crazy Chick-Fil-A cows. Whether they hold up kooky signs with badly spelled pleas for their lives or dress up in cute outfits to elicit mercy from potential meat eaters, they ultimately seem to fail at halting the dominance of beef consumption in the United States. If those…
3/31 Sometimes it’s best to let people speak for themselves, especially when they use an intriguing combination of words that also describes everything in the simplest way possible. So, when Our Endeavors Theater Collective hailed its own upcoming extended performance of Dainty Shapes and Hairy Apes, or The Green Pill,…
The appeal of a quirky little Norwegian film called Kitchen Stories arises from the unlikeliest of sources–a series of domestic studies conducted in the early 1950s by a group of Swedish efficiency experts. The mission of the Home Research Institute, as far as anyone could tell, was to chart the…
Oh, dear. Angelina Jolie’s made another bad film. Is it too soon to give up on her yet? There’s no denying that Jolie is sexy as hell. The tattoos, the knife collection, the exhibitionist streak, the bisexual vibe she gives off…totally hot, no question. Given her work with the U.N…
Contrary to what you may have read or heard about Charlie Kaufman, the alleged phantom menace of screenwriting, he does indeed exist, so far as one can tell from a long phone conversation with a man said to be Charlie Kaufman by publicists who have no reason to lie. For…
Like many a drinking binge, James McLure’s evening of companion comedies Lone Star and Laundry and Bourbon starts slowly, picks up momentum and ends with a boisterous, boozy crescendo. Now onstage in a cracking production directed by Cynthia Hestand at Contemporary Theatre of Dallas, the pair of related one-acts takes…
Dallas is a city that thrives on the artificial. That bellwether of 1970s and 1980s greed and flaccid angst–and oh, yes, drama–the television show Dallas, long ago put the city’s affaire d’amour with artifice on the map. Dallas proudly told the world that it loved the artificial and did so…
Once upon a time Uptown was a neighborly neighborhood that rolled peacefully from the Hotel Crescent Court north to Lemmon Avenue past the Hard Rock Café, The McKinney Avenue Contemporary and Bread Winners Bakery with that trolley that nobody ever rides. But that was before Post Properties started its endless…
Thursday, March 18 Only the absolutely nerdiest shindigs require their own specialized dictionaries. Latin club, Klingon conventions, Scrabble championships–all havens for people who never got to spend their own lunch money. But they’re also full of people who take themselves very seriously. Just check out Word Wars, the 2004 Sundance…
So we have this pet peeve involving T-shirts. We don’t mind a good vintage one or even an ironic one once in a while. What we loathe, however, is one in particular. In bold letters, it shouts, “One Tequila, Two Tequila, Three Tequila, Floor!” It has a certain fratty and…
