Hello, Godmudda. Hello, fodder for a Pocket Sandwich Theatre comedy whose jokes are so bad one suspects the script was dropped at the front door wrapped around a rotting halibut. Fredo Corleone wasn’t as dumb as The Godmudda–A Mafia Fairy Tale, which tries to blend the Cinderella story with a…
As far as he can remember, he always wanted to be an actor. To him, being an actor was better than being president of the United States. Even before he first wandered into the high school auditorium for an after-school audition, he wanted to be one of them. It was…
This is one of a series of essays in the Dallas Observer’s calendar section demonstrating that some among our staff are, not to put too fine a point on it, one-browed knuckle-draggers. Our subject this week is opera, or specifically The Dallas Opera’s premiere of a new production of Giancomo…
In all, a far better year than any in recent memory, so much so it feels impolite and irresponsible to choose a mere 10 best among the annum’s offerings. This list remained in flux till the last possible moment; five seconds ago it featured, among others, Signs, Full Frontal, Human…
It’s never a good sign when somewhere in the vicinity of half of my most memorable moviegoing experiences in a given year come from reissues of films at least three decades old. But there it is: In my memory banks, 2002 may well be remembered as the year of the…
There have been other films dealing with the Jewish ghettos during the Nazi occupation of Poland–some very good–but The Pianist, the latest feature from Roman Polanski, may be the best. Of course, it starts out with a huge advantage: The 69-year-old Polanski is probably the only working filmmaker to have…
Dallas theater turned out some cruel and freaky work in 2002. In A Clockwork Orange at Quad C Theatre, gangs of cranked-up teens executed beautifully choreographed “ultra-violence.” In Barbette at Kitchen Dog Theater, a Texas-born transvestite committed suicide hanging from a trapeze. In Side Show at Theatre Three, pretty conjoined…
One of the best parts of this gig is the mail. I get it all, from outraged flacks and befuddled tourists to wounded curators and bootlicking publicists to stony silence. But the very best mail is from the artists themselves, especially when, every now and then, an artist bites back…
What kind of dork would go to a midnight screening of Office Space, a movie about working a mind-numbing job without a happy ending? Put simply, if you haven’t been enslaved by bureaucracy and corporate culture yourself, you have no idea how accurate–and therefore funny–this movie actually is. One ongoing…
These chicks dig rock and roll. These chicks also play rock and roll. But, beyond that, these chicks have rocked little folks to sleep and rolled the occasional stroller. That’s because these chicks are Frump, Dallas’ own all-mom garage band. Now imagine asking your mother to turn down that amp…
Everything about Catch Me If You Can, the loosely based-on-fact tale of a teen-ager who swindled millions while posing as, among other things, a Pan Am pilot and doctor and lawyer, is breezy and easy to swallow. Its maker, Steven Spielberg, hasn’t had so much fun in two decades, since…
It’s been nearly three years since Pedro Almodóvar’s All About My Mother won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film. Perhaps it’s in the spirit of spreading things around that Spain has not nominated Almodóvar’s latest, Talk to Her, as their entry this year. Certainly it’s hard to imagine any…
Based on the true story of three young Aboriginal girls who walked 1,500 miles across the Australian Outback to be reunited with their mothers, Rabbit-Proof Fence might well be subtitled True Grit in recognition of the courage and single-minded determination that drove the trio to undertake such a perilous journey…
Al Capone himself probably couldn’t kill Chicago. The bawdy Kander and Ebb musical has been charming theater audiences since 1975 with its gleefully jaundiced view of life, and Rob Marshall’s inventive movie version will likely win a lot of new friends for the stagestruck murderess Roxie Hart, her sharpie lawyer…
Here’s a tricky little movie to review, as it’s going to divide audiences fairly drastically. Conservatives, especially black ones like Larry Elder and Ken Hamblin, will likely laud Antwone Fisher as a heroic story of a triumphant black man who conquers all his inner demons and outer obstacles (of which…
The biggest event to happen to television this year took place at the multiplex this summer: My Big Fat Greek Wedding, a one-woman show that has blossomed into a one-woman franchise. This spring, CBS-TV will debut My Big Fat Greek Life as a midseason replacement, featuring the entire cast of…
The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth’s new home is stunning, and only in part because of its size, which is downright Texan. Driving up, the place has the feel of a concrete-bunkered city on what passes for a hill–in North Texas anyway. At first gander, it looks less like…
I can’t dance. Don’t ask me. Consider yourself warned. My few ventures onto a dance floor with the missus usually ended up with some good Samaritan rushing up, reaching into my mouth and grabbing my tongue to keep me from swallowing it. “I’b okayb,” I’d say as I broke out…
Some say that the spirit of Christmas is joyful giving, sharing the love of family and friends in a cheerful celebration of life-affirming blah, blah, blah. Others suggest that it’s a commercialized greedfest characterized by grabbing, ripping and crying when one doesn’t receive the perfect (pricey) gift. But we all…
Martin Scorsese’s latest epic of the streets, Gangs of New York, means to show us how a great metropolis was forged in the mid-19th-century cauldrons of unbridled greed, ethnic violence and Civil War. It means to give us the city as wild frontier–without the usual cowboy hats. This is a…
Fantasy is at its best when it ennobles our reality, and at the movies this year no fantastic adventure towers above The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers. The second installment of J.R.R. Tolkien’s delightful yarn is here adapted just as handily as last year’s The Fellowship of the…
It’s easy to presume About Schmidt isn’t much of a movie, since its protagonist, Warren Schmidt, isn’t much of anything. He’s portrayed by Jack Nicholson, but the actor is actually someone who looks like he used to be Jack Nicholson. This Warren, this rinky-dink actuary banished to the wasteland of…
