It’s almost easier to pick the year’s worst than its finest. Leading the pack is I Am Sam, in which Sean Penn does his Rainman dance for Oscar only to watch it horribly misfire, followed closely by Captain Corelli’s Mandolin (Nic Cage, who, given recent choices, might be mentally challenged),…
Had anyone asked me back in September how 2001 was looking, I would have been tempted to rate it as even worse than the dismal 2000 (which suffered further from proximity to the wondrous 1999). But my assessment shifted during the final quarter of the year–half because of some fine…
Normally, these year-in-TV columns are a breezy, easy write–a plea for good shows buried somewhere in an embittered litany of bad ones. In recent years, it has felt as though the proliferation of channels and choices has given us only more of the wretched and less of the watchable; satellite…
When David Quadrini stood on the bank of the East River and watched the World Trade Center collapse, he broke into a spontaneous wail. His knees gave, his eyes watered with overwhelming disbelief, and he knew, like the rest of us, that life couldn’t continue as it had before. But…
The photographs that some theater companies send to promote their plays are dreadful enough to send anyone not dedicated to supporting local stage arts screaming for the hills like hammy actors from a high school production of The Sound of Music. At worst, there’s an exit sign, a hanging mike…
When the press release for the “all-new” Pink Floyd LaserSpectacular hit our desk, our first reaction was to check the calendar. Nope, it’s not 1985. Our second was to inspect the release more closely, in case it was some ancient leftover. (The Dallas Observer’s offices are not what you’d call…
Appropriately, A Beautiful Mind does not offer a literal translation of the life of John Forbes Nash Jr., the mathematician whose work on game theories won him a Nobel Prize in 1994. The film leaves out significant events, people and places; it amalgamates central figures, disguises prominent locations and hides…
Had The Royal Tenenbaums been made by a first-time filmmaker unburdened by acclaim or expectation, it could be heralded–and then, just as easily, dismissed–as a light, literary exercise in filmmaking that’s as pleasant as it is frustrating. Its tale of a dysfunctional family of geniuses torn asunder then brought back…
It took Andre Dubus all of 18 pages to communicate the grief that fills every frame of Todd Field’s two-plus-hours In the Bedroom, a wrenching bit of filmmaking based on Dubus’ short tale “Killings.” Both story and film tell the same tale in the same solemn and gripping tone, with…
The most daunting thing for an actor is to portray a god, and when that god comes equipped with a tangle of myths and the quickest left jab in history, the actor’s job can soon verge into guesswork. To Will Smith’s credit, he has managed to get, at least partway,…
Love him or not love him, Lasse Hallström has done it again: the human frailty, the sorrowful past, the hopeful future, the triumph of love and family over crushing despair. Ever since he broke out in 1985 with his Swedish feature Mitt Liv Som Hund (My Life as a Dog),…
When he first auditioned for Any Given Sunday director Oliver Stone to play quarterback Willie Beamen, an embittered bench-warmer prone to fits of vomiting before each snap, Jamie Foxx was sure he’d blown it. Stone, as subtle as an ice pick to the cornea, said as much–loud enough so Foxx,…
The laughs are all there in black and white in It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Murder!, Pegagus Theatre’s stylish, fast-paced chiaroscuro comedy written by and starring Kurt Kleinmann. Twelfth in a series of satirical mysteries featuring lovably bumbling detective Harry Hunsacker (played by Kleinmann), this one gets a…
It’s become a cliché: A stand-up comedian, after years of living out of a suitcase, performing to rooms full (or not) of pleased spectators and merciless hecklers, happens to be in the right club on the right night and gets his Big Break. A sitcom deal follows. Jerry Seinfeld, Kevin…
Before the Thanksgiving dishes were washed and dried, the question was on everyone’s lips: “What are you doing on New Year’s Eve?” The answer, an honest one at least, would sound something like this: “I’ll be taking my chances on the road with all the other amateur drinkers and having…
The tricked-up charms of James Mangold’s Kate & Leopold may be precisely what the moment demands–if you accept the existence of chivalry, the possibility of time travel and the stream of bubbles emanating from Meg Ryan. Skeptics need not apply. Having toured the psychiatric ward in Girl, Interrupted and slogged…
I remember when I realized Dale Chihuly had entered some sort of parallel art universe. It was during the mid-’90s, and I was visiting my parents, who a few years back retired to one of those depressingly uniform, pastel-hued Florida seaside communities. We were sitting there, on my mother’s peach…
String together the words “modern” and “virginity,” and likely the resulting image is of Britney Spears getting friendly with a boa constrictor on MTV. But the same kids who watch Total Request Live are also taking their parents’ and grandparents’ lead and becoming more interested in a 470-year-old virgin, the…
(Editor’s note: The following contains a very un-P.C. sexist rant. The author is not normally a pig, but Yuletide avarice has affected his reasoning. Please forgive him.) Here’s a conversation that’s been taking place about every week lately at a certain married couple’s Northwest Dallas home. Their names have been…
Since the horrors of dominator culture–destruction, devastation, dumb-assness–do not appear to be receding of their own accord, there’s great poignancy to the new cinematic adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring. The film succeeds as massive, astonishing entertainment; enthralling us is its chief…
Having given us The Shawshank Redemption in 1994 and The Green Mile five years later, director Frank Darabont finally busts his way out of prison with his third feature, The Majestic (which, incidentally, has the worst ad art since Green Mile). Working from a script by Michael Sloane–no Stephen King…
Ever since his debut film Cronos, Spanish director Guillermo del Toro has been the focus of much undue adulation among critics and the Internet community of self-professed horror geeks. The problem is that del Toro’s work thus far simply doesn’t measure up to this kind of talk. Cronos’ biggest novelty…
