Thursday, September 25 If there’s anything we need, it’s tips on entertaining. Something inside screams that our next throw-down must have more to it than a game of Cranium and Li’l Smokies with barbecue sauce in a slow cooker, so we’re heading to the Dallas Convention Center for the 15th…
Visualize Tokyo. Got it? Now add popular favorite Bill Murray doing his “lovable schmoe” shtick. Toss in American Rhapsody’s up-and-comer Scarlett Johansson doing her standard “like, duh” face. Dip them both into emotional torpor in the sleek Park Hyatt, add local color, stir. Et voilà: Lost in Translation. For Sofia…
Secondhand Lions is cornier than the cornfields spread out in front of the dilapidated rural Texas manse inhabited by Robert Duvall and Michael Caine, playing grumpy old brothers with mismatched accents. (Caine, in fact, has accent enough for three actors–one English, another maybe Texan, another perhaps Australian.) There is no…
Never mind the trailers, which advertise Cold Creek Manor as some kind of horror-thriller, complete with the image of a hand emerging from the shadows to quiet (yes!) Sharon Stone. Mike Figgis, most recently a maker of unwatchable art-house fare shot on digital video (Timecode, Hotel) that suggests a fetish…
Woody Allen churns out one movie a year, and “churned out” is an apt description of how his new romantic comedy, Anything Else, feels. “Disappointingly mediocre” would be another. It’s not that the film doesn’t have its humorous moments or memorable lines. It has many, but the jokes and quips…
Neil Gaiman, father of a dysfunctional family of seven immortals known as The Endless, never had any intentions of abandoning his children in 1996, when he stopped telling their tales in the pages of the most celebrated and deified comic book of the past 20 years. He merely needed to…
Here’s one way to tell if a production is good. Say the curtain goes up at 8 p.m. If the first time you check your watch the little hand is near the 9, you’re in luck. You’ve been swept into the acting and the story of the play and everything’s…
Ah, fall. The season of gallery walks, museum shows, dealer openings and party pics. Of hype and anxious activity, all aimed at luring that rare but highly prized specimen, Homo sapiens collectoricus. This season, especially, the quarry is as interesting as most of the bait. Over the past decade, art…
In the good ol’ (boy) U. S. of A., David Bowie is soccer. He has long-standing, loyal pockets of devotion that ensure consistent support, but he’s largely viewed as an international anomaly. Delicacy for some, acquired taste for others, foreign weirdo for most. Does that mean the crowd gathered outside…
Thursday, September 18 We like to think of Would I Lie to You? as the Jewish version of Tootsie. But instead of learning how to walk in heels and pluck eyebrows, the protagonist has to learn how to wear a yarmulke and find out what happens at a bris. In…
By the mid-1940s, it looked as though the career of Groucho Marx had come to a whimpering end, especially to Groucho Marx. The laughs had given way to painful groans: Long gone were the surrealistic masterpieces of the late 1920s and early ’30s, having been replaced by mediocre outings that…
9/19 Scarface, directed by Brian de Palma from an Oliver Stone screenplay, is an unremarkable movie full of memorable moments, the kind that transform junk into jewel in the wide eyes of those who adore coke kingpin Tony Montana in spite of themselves. Those who adore it view it religiously,…
9/20 Understand that this is not just another one of those health-frenzy runs-for-a-cure that have become so much a part of the weekend culture. The list of sponsors is the tip-off. In addition to the old standards such as Reebok and RunOn!, you’ve got support from the likes of Big…
9/24 The Dallas Children’s Theater–local haven for bead art and full-body animal costumes–is turning 20 this year. To mark the occasion, the company members have decided to throw a big birthday bash with food, fun and live entertainment. Headlining the event is the DCT’s newest production, The Island of the…
9/20 Like crows, the people of Dallas are attracted to bright shiny objects. This simple fact explains so much, doesn’t it? It’s the reason there’s always a small huddle of humanity at the base of Reunion Tower, looking up. It’s the reason you can never find a parking place at…
9/23 To look at Philip Glass is to look at what could be a genetic splice of Eric Bogosian and Klaus Kinski. For some, to listen to Philip Glass is the musical equivalent of the same caustic artists. Complex, repetitively chaotic and structurally random, Glass is arguably the pre-eminent American…
When Nicolas Cage plays still and sullen–a man possessed by self-loathing and melancholy in Adaptation, say, or the landlocked angel in City of Angels–he comes off as drowsy. He disappears into those roles like a head plopped in a fluffy pillow, and it doesn’t quite suit him. Cage has excelled…
God bless Johnny Depp. For the second time this year, the man has almost single-handedly redeemed an action movie that would otherwise be indistinguishable from the pack. Introduced right up front in Robert Rodriguez’s Once Upon a Time in Mexico, he’s first seen dressed up like Prince in purple glasses…
Once upon a time there was a guy named Sam Raimi. He grew up in Michigan and made amateur horror movies. He stuck with his hobby, and now he’s a filthy rich A-list producer-director in Hollywood. Beats workin’. Unfortunately, since we haven’t yet seen a genre-redefining horror movie in the…
Hedwig and the Angry Inch is every inch the rock musical Rent tried to be and wasn’t. That Hedwig also is a campy drag act, a subversive sex comedy, a witty philosophical allegory based on Plato’s Symposium and a nostalgic tribute to feathery Farrah hair of the 1970s makes it…
Fans will read A. Scott Berg’s Kate Remembered, published only 13 days after Katharine Hepburn’s death on June 29, and find within its pages a woman very much like the actress’ on-screen persona: cranky and charming, tough and thoughtful, independent and in love with those who can keep pace with…
Thursday, September 11 Timeless, tried and true. Things deemed “classic” are generally a sure bet. Think about it. Someone says, “That movie was just so classic.” Or, “Now this is a classic spaghetti sauce.” The brain just automatically accepts that the item in discussion is complete, mastered, if you will…
