Poetry is for wimps — or so the stereotype goes. It’s a safe haven for overly sensitive tree-huggers who bare their souls. They’re not considered perceptive, or honest, or eloquent; no, these poets are labeled as rare beef: too tender and pink. Then there’s slam poetry, with its young, defiant…
Even if you have devoured every word about the cinematic adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis’ 1991 novel American Psycho, about a Wall Street yuppie obsessed with using skin-care products and devouring the entrails of prostitutes, you have not read this one particular fact. And it is a fact. No one…
On the surface — and that’s all the movie is, a puddle instead of a lake — Return to Me is a hackneyed, silly, slapdash film. Whole scenes look, if not out of focus, then at least a little blurry, as though we’re missing something just out of frame. And…
Allow pitch-perfect Bijou Phillips, who plays hip-hopping uptown white girl Charlie, to set the tone for Black and White with her address to her stern father: “I’m havin’ a good day, goin’ wit’ my friends to da liberry an’ shit, but you have to go and ruin it for me!”…
Merchant/Ivory Productions has long been America’s quintessential purveyor of classy, “literary” films. At its best, the team of director James Ivory and Ismail Merchant has given us A Room With a View (1986) and The Remains of the Day (1993); at its worst, Slaves of New York (1989) and Jefferson…
Film topics are cyclical, of course, and boxing movies are currently enjoying their return to the spotlight. Or maybe “enjoying” is too strong a word. Despite the recent number of fighting tales — Play It to the Bone, The Hurricane, On the Ropes, Knockout, Price of Glory — not one…
There are two scenes in One Flea Spare, the Southwest premiere of playwright Naomi Wallace’s pressure cooker of class and sexuality served up by Kitchen Dog Theater, that seem to be especially close to the heart of Adrian Hall, the show’s director and a nationally lauded stage visionary for more…
[Flashback to 1954. Scene: interior bedroom. Pregnant wife and husband talking in bed.] WIFE: It’s less than a month now. We have to resolve this. HUSBAND: I don’t think it’s such a big deal. W: Our last name is Fuhrer! What on earth are we going to call this baby?…
Up-write Citizens Brigade If you think newspaper coverage of visual arts in Fort Worth stinks, you’re not alone, and the Fort Worth Art Dealers Association has got a crusade for you. It’s more constructive than what one local artist suggested. “We could make used-gum sculpture and place it on every…
Pick a night, any night, and likely one of Dallas’ more than a dozen improvisational comedy groups is performing at a club or restaurant somewhere between Deep Ellum and Addison. On Fridays and Saturdays several groups perform regular gigs at different clubs — some sparsely littered with people, others sold…
After last fall’s sumptuously attired Gorey Stories at the Deep Ellum Center for the Arts, Our Endeavors partners Scott Osborne and Patti Kirkpatrick wanted to perform a similar feat — a smartly designed, stylized performance that would be suitable to its season but not tied down by one particular mood…
Lately, it seems that even the most successful film adaptations don’t have much more in common with the books that spawned them than the title and some of the characters’ names — at best. Curtis Hanson’s L.A. Confidential, for instance, had little to do with James Ellroy’s L.A. Confidential, apart…
From its opening moments, The Road to El Dorado looks and sounds oddly out of time, as though it were removed only yesterday from a time capsule sealed and buried in 1972. With its Peter Max visuals and Elton John vocals, it’s a decidedly unhip piece of work from the…
Not so long ago, The Skulls would have starred Tom Cruise — but in which role? He could have been either lead; the one he didn’t choose could have landed in the lap of, say, James Spader or Rob Lowe. One can easily imagine Cruise as Luke McNamara, the beefy,…
What is it with filmmakers and mental retardation? It seems as though use of the differently abled as a central theme ranks second only to troubled childhood when it comes time to make a “personal” film. The connection between the two is fairly obvious: the artist as gentle innocent besieged…
Rod Lurie’s Deterrence is a bush-league foreign-policy debate disguised as a movie. There may come a day when Paramount Classics ships every print it has struck of this inert and tedious piece of business off to selected political science and social philosophy classes and tries to forget about the whole…
In the opening scenes of Price of Glory, set in the late 1970s, a young prizefighter named Arturo Ortega (Jimmy Smits) loses a career-making bout. He earns a few grand, but he’s plainly washed up, and we’re meant to see that it’s his greedy manager’s fault; like Antonio Banderas in…
At or soon after the start of the 20th century, the almost mythical George Bernard Shaw became a vegetarian; a socialist who believed property ownership amounted to public theft; a fervent (and minority) defender of Oscar Wilde during that playwright’s gory public dismantling; and a champion of working women who…
If the version of Cabaret opening at Fair Park Music Hall April 4 were based on the 1972 movie, casting Lea Thompson as Sally Bowles would be an understandable move. After all, in the movie Liza Minnelli transformed Sally into a plucky American singer trying to get discovered, performing in…
Circuses tend to get a lot of coverage in these pages. Two good reasons for this are the creepiness of clowns and the fanaticism of animal-rights groups. But we like circuses…or the idea of them, anyway. Take the grittiness of Anthony Quinn’s strongman in Federico Fellini’s 1954 masterpiece La Strada,…
About a month ago, the Dallas Theatre League held a meeting of theater reps from Theatre Three, Dallas Theater Center, Our Endeavors, Echo Theatre, and Lyric Stage, among others, and various media types, including yours truly and Tom Sime from The Dallas Morning News. Several topics were introduced and then…
The action in most of Edward Albee’s plays are lips flapping, fingers pointing, and people pacing and occasionally changing seats. His plays — from 1966’s A Delicate Balance to 1994’s Three Tall Women — are all talk. This includes Seascape, his 1975 Pulitzer Prize-winning comedy Circle Theatre is currently producing…
