As heroes go, the two just-released mental patients struggling to make a new life in Peter Næss’ touching social comedy Elling are notably short on glamour. When we meet him, the shy, middle-aged title character, portrayed by an exquisitely subtle actor named Per Christian Ellefsen, is a quivering bundle of…
Only the hardest of humbug hearts could resist the high-gloss charm of Dallas Theater Center’s A Christmas Carol, now onstage at the Arts District Theater. It’s a riotous, expensive-looking rendition of the Charles Dickens classic, crowded with pretty dancing wenches and adorable urchins wassailing around fir trees under garlands of…
You just know the whole director’s commentary thing has gotten way out of control when they’re showing up on porn DVDs; sorry, but didn’t really need to know the fluffer on duty during the filming of Stop! My Ass is on Fire. (Well, come to think of it…) Then there’s…
Want to get a jump on Christmas partying? Hook up with Dallas-Fort Worth’s Colombians and Colombian-Americans, many of whom grew up celebrating Christmas for an entire month. Colombia, a predominantly Roman Catholic nation, begins holiday fiestas December 7 with Dia de las Velitas, a candlelit vigil in honor of the…
The smart sci-fi fan knows that, technically speaking, Steven Soderbergh’s Solaris is not a remake of Andrei Tarkovsky’s film at all, but rather a newly filmed interpretation of a Polish novel penned by Stanislaw Lem. Nonetheless, the new film stands in a mighty big shadow. If someone attempted to make…
It’s doubtful Robert Louis Stevenson imagined his Treasure Island populated by cyborgs and scored to Goo Goo Dolls outtakes; and one has to wonder what the author would have made of his characters being turned into talking and walking dogs and cats that, gulp, copulate and reproduce mangy hybrids. Far…
Being of the minority who did not worship Schindler’s List (vital message, tedious movie), it’s easy to feel skeptical of the preachy delivery of Ararat, which concerns not the Jewish holocaust but the Armenian one, its genocidal forebear of 1915-1918. Armenian-Canadian writer-director Atom Egoyan (The Adjuster, The Sweet Hereafter) has–like…
At the University of Texas at Austin, this was the first offering screened in introductory film classes; if the professor, a man whose knowledge of cinema history was surpassed only by his willingness to share it with everybody all the time anyplace without any prompting whatsoever, didn’t consider it the…
Small-town stud Tully (Anson Mount) works the family farm with his younger brother Earl (Glenn Fitzgerald) and their inexpressive, unsmiling widower dad (Bob Burrus). The sudden possibility that they might lose the farm opens up a trove of disturbing family secrets, challenging Tully’s heretofore shallow nature. Hilary Birmingham–who co-produced (with…
Taking its cue from Christopher Hitchens’ excoriating, similarly titled book (minus the “s” in “Trials”), this terse and compelling documentary presents the case that former Secretary of State and National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger deserves to be tried for war crimes and crimes against humanity, under the standards applied to…
Through a strange chain of events, a likable young pianist (Anna Mouglalis) becomes an interloper in the household of an internationally renowned musician (Jacques Dutronc), whom she believes might be her father. He’s sure he’s not, but her appearance proves disturbing to both his son (Rodolphe Pauly) and even more…
Andy Richter, the man who for seven years proved himself the rare late-night television sidekick worthy of being labeled equal partner, is not given to saying nasty things about people who sign his paychecks, a rarity in a business where people are more than happy to bite, then bite off,…
Since airing two hours of absolutely nothing wouldn’t do much for Fox’s ratings or ad revenue on this first night of Hanukkah, the net’s done the next best, by which I mean the next worst, thing: given us The Brady Bunch in the White House, a sorta sequel to 1996’s…
Chaos theorists have suggested that a butterfly flapping its wings in Brazil might cause a tornado in Texas. Well, we can’t say for sure if the same goes for paper butterflies, but there will be plenty of flapping at Leland Faulkner’s World of Wonder, and if the inverse theory also…
This is the story of David Cross as told only by David Cross, since no one else contacted for this story, this oral history, would comment on the subject of David Cross. That is not entirely true, as no one else was actually contacted for this story; really, who has…
Ethelred the Unready is ready for his close-up. Shakespeare got a lot of mileage out of the feuds and foibles of many crowned heads in British history, mainly your sequentially numbered Richards and Henrys. But until Silence, the comedy by Brit playwright Moira Buffini that’s been held over for a…
To judge from the glowing reviews of Horace Clifford (H.C.) Westermann’s traveling retrospective, now on view at Houston’s Menil Collection, it seems a major re-evaluation of this most American of 20th-century sculptors is well under way. Organized by Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art, the Westermann show has been roaming the…
Ah, yes. We remember it like it was yesterday. Taking a mid-afternoon break from high school, tooling down a two-lane blacktop doing 96 mph in a classmate’s jacked-up Chevy SS, smoking a fatty and listening to Skynyrd blaring on his cassette deck. Of course, where we’re from–the backwoods of the…
Ladies and gentlemen, children of all ages, step right up and get yourself a new gay-bingo card. That’s right. It’s that time of the month again for all local queens, and kings, of bingo. Saturday is Big Top GayBINGO night at the Lakewood Theater. Dallas’ own madam of ceremonies Kerri…
The tragedy is that even those who should have known better didn’t know at all; how could they? The names they sought weren’t listed, their contributions weren’t cited, their influences weren’t credited, so even those who spent hours and days and forevers wearing out the grooves in search of holy-mother-of-God…
Ah, Halle’s berries. Don’t care much for them personally, as they’re components of an actress (bane of the thinking man), but those golden globes are shifting loads of Hollywood product these days, the latest dose being Die Another Day, the 20th official entry in the 40-year-old James Bond franchise. As…
Goodbye, Mr. Chips. Hello, Mr. Hundert. If we can judge by the new Kevin Kline vehicle, The Emperor’s Club, the notions remain alive (if not particularly well) that a self-sacrificing boarding-school teacher can enrich the lives of his students while subsisting in relative emotional misery himself–and that the terrible furies…
