Poignant ugliness pervades The Life, the tuneful musical about prostitutes and pimps. The show is now onstage at the Trinity River Arts Center in an eye-popping regional premiere produced by the Uptown Players. The year is 1980. The place is pre-Disneyfied 42nd Street. Under the glow of porn theater marquees,…
It’s time for that annual exam. Put on the backless, scratchy paper examination gown. Giddy up those ankles onto the icy cold stirrups. Now scoot closer. No, closer. Seriously, closer. Sounds like a lot of fun, huh? Sure, we can complain–and we will–but we’ve got it better than women in…
At the opening of The Fog of War, the brilliant new documentary from director Errol Morris, we see a composed, sharply groomed and middle-aged Robert McNamara preparing to brief the press on the Vietnam War. He asks two questions: First, if the chart he’s set up is visible, and second,…
On its surface, Jose Padilha’s absorbing documentary Bus 174 shows us how a homeless 21-year-old named Sandro Rosa de Nascimento hijacked a city bus in Rio de Janeiro on July 12, 2000, how he took 11 passengers hostage at gunpoint and became the raving centerpiece of a five-hour urban drama…
This may seem incredible, but there’s a group of people in the world called “the Japanese,” and apparently some of them like to travel to other countries. Within the skewed perspective of Japanese Story, this amazing “novelty” is represented by an uptight young corporate heir named Hiromitsu (pretty Gotaro Tsunashima),…
Errol Morris, sitting just one story above the floor from which Lee Harvey Oswald killed (or did not, whatever) John Kennedy, does not know where to begin. The maker of documentaries–he’s interviewed subjects ranging from Florida codgers and owners of pet cemeteries to the imprisoned innocent and builders of execution…
Put on a show called The Wild Party and it darn well better be. Anything less is like inviting hungry friends to a smorgasbord and serving them TV dinners. For a few minutes at the beginning of The Wild Party they’re throwing over at Theatre Three, there are appetizing hints…
The stories of ZZ Packer have appeared in The New Yorker, The Best Short Stories of 2000 and The Best American Non-Required Reading 2003. She has the academic pedigree of a Rockefeller: Yale, Johns Hopkins, the Iowa Writers Workshop and Stanford. Last year, her picture graced the pages of practically…
Thursday, February 5 Our line of sight falls somewhere just below five feet. We’re short and tend to look down when we walk, plowing through crowds of people like a fox running through heavy underbrush. So when it comes to buildings, it takes a lot to catch our attention. Yet…
Last week, the security cameras at the Meadows Museum caught Edmund P. Pillsbury (Ted to his friends and sycophants) red-handed. Actually, surveillance video revealed white-gloved hands carefully tracing the gentle curve of a nude woman’s buttocks. He was seen stroking the arch of another’s back, caressing the contours of her…
2/7 Ask the barefoot and pregnant-by-a-first-cousin young women slouching in broken lawn chairs, drinking Coors Light and smoking unfiltered Camels under hail-damaged awnings outside rusted-aluminum trailer homes on the outskirts of Little Rock if they like being lumped into a big, stinky stereotype such as “Arkansas girls.” It’s not always…
2/6 I had few qualms about telling my 6-year-old Max that there was no Santa Claus or that the tooth fairy can run out of cash, just the same as his old man. But when Max was cheering wildly for the Harlem Globetrotters to win their game against the hapless…
2/6 Theodor Seuss Geisel was born 100 years ago in Springfield, Massachusetts, but we know him better today as the magnificent Dr. Seuss. Lovable, fun, clever and quick in a pinch, he should be sainted for giving us the Grinch. His books, including The Cat in the Hat, put a…
2/6 Matters of the heart will forever baffle the mind. Besides being a multitasker of the highest extreme, with all the pumping and beating and loving and hating, the human heart provides endless fodder for the arts, and we suspect it’s that enigmatic quality that makes it so popular with…
2/10 It took awhile for me to get it, this whole slam poetry thing, which is odd, since I profess to like poetry. But poetry competitions, with teams and judges and points and awards? Poetry as stage performance and quasi-sporting event? That’s not poetry; poetry comes in books, written mostly…
Surf’s up. Palm trees sway invitingly in the breeze. The sparkling beaches are amply decorated with bikini babes and hard-body surfer dudes. Everybody has a nice cold drink with a wedge of fresh lime in it. Seen that way, The Big Bounce is as alluring a midwinter pitch for the…
Behold a tale of true love (between a boy and a bicycle), of tireless courage (from a bitty grandmother with a club foot) and of a very shocking new definition of sexy (three wizened matriarchs who ravenously slurp down frogs). This is The Triplets of Belleville, an animated extravaganza of…
Two years ago, Harvey Weinstein, who runs Miramax Films with an iron fist that no doubt smells of cigarettes and meat, bought a Hong Kong-made movie called Hero for $20 million. That is an extraordinary amount of money for a foreign-language film made by a director, Zhang Yimou, relatively unknown…
Based on the 1996 movie, The Spitfire Grill serves up theatrical comfort food set to a pleasant, bluegrassy score by James Valcq and Fred Alley. The six-voice, seven-character musical, now running at Addison’s WaterTower Theatre, is as warm and wholesome as a plate of home-cooked meat loaf and gravy. Predictable,…
Slaves in Texas didn’t learn of the Civil War’s end and the announcement of their freedom until nearly two-and-a-half years after Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation became official. It took until June 19, 1865, for Major General Gordon Granger’s Union soldiers to land in Galveston and begin spreading the word. And…
Thursday, 29 In college, there was always an event stapled or taped to a lamppost or bulletin board to rescue the disenchanted, lonely or just plain bored. A poetry slam, live music night, an indie film screening. The appeal was fleeting, and attendance was often bleak (unless they were showing…
1/31 Adventure? Excitement? Men in leather? We at the Dallas Observer crave not these. No, we hunger for quilts. Mounds of them. Some might even say an inordinate amount of quilts. But we wouldn’t say that. We love the fluffy buggers. And there’s only one event in this great city…
