Making movies seems like a dream job. Sure, there’s that pesky loss-of-privacy thing, but it’s got to be better than database entry or bookkeeping, or, well, anything else. But for David Chappelle, making movies is almost like a nine-to-five job. It simply allows him the funds and the time to…
“I had a very passionate temper,” Victorian poet Christina Rossetti once wrote to an intimate about her childhood. “On one occasion, being rebuked by my dear Mother for some fault, I seized a pair of scissors and ripped up my arm to vent my wrath.” It is perhaps a classic…
Ivan Turgenev had paved the way for Anton Chekhov’s seething domestic storms in 1850 with his play A Month in the Country, which concerned educated individuals vacationing at a summer home who fail to make a love connection and are rendered miserable by it. He caught great acclaim from the…
People are as likely to talk about the architecture of the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth as they are to talk about the art. The building is art, many have said, and some argue that its relevance as an aesthetic monument is as important as its function. Louis I…
The dealmaker Local art gallery owners may be worried about the impact hotshots like Ted Pillsbury, new partner with Gerald Peters in Pillsbury and Peters Fine Art, and Talley Dunn, principal with Lisa Hirschler Brown in Dunn Brown Contemporary, are going to have on the competitive commercial gallery scene. But…
The first rule of Being John Malkovich is you do not look at the poster for Being John Malkovich. Really, avoid that poster, despite its curious, clinical design, until after you’ve seen the movie. Plot-spoiling critics are harmless compared with what these filmmakers have opted to disclose in their own…
And now…a G-rated movie from David Lynch! No, Lynch hasn’t lost his mind. He hasn’t gone soft in the head. And he hasn’t sold out to the smiley-faced bean counters at Disney. While the notion of America’s King of Weird — the man who brought us Blue Velvet and Twin…
In the eyes of the general public, Michael Mann is still best known for Miami Vice. He has received a great deal of critical acclaim for films about serial killers, Mohicans, and bank robbers. So who would have guessed that his most engrossing and suspenseful film to date would be…
Much like the religion that has swirled around the Star Wars trilogy for 22 years, the fanaticism evidenced among American fans of Japanese anime remains a mystery to some of us. Writer-director Hayao Miyazaki’s megahit Princess Mononoke does very little to cast light on this obsession: More’s the pity, since…
Is it possible to be separate and equal? It certainly didn’t work out that way for African-Americans, and when applying the questions to lesbians and gays — who have created their own neighborhoods, restaurants, and film festivals — you inevitably encounter ambivalence. Folks want to be comfortable everywhere, but they…
Dallas artist Arthur James is obsessed. Artman, as he prefers to be known, loves the blues, its history, its legends, and its connections to his hometown. His interest exploded when he moved into the Boyd Hotel building on Elm Street. Almost as though possessed, James began researching the blues history…
If you lie down with critics, you get up with fleas, or some such pestilence. So the winners of the 1999 Dallas Theater Critics Forum Awards can gain solace that a certain persistent itch is at least accompanied by an award for “outstanding excellence in the field of stage virtuosity,”…
Visual artists make for lousy interviews. Not that paint-to-canvas genius needs verbal backup, but some of the most dismal conversations I’ve had were with visual artists trying to explain their work. They stumble over their own ideas. They circumvent the questions. They use plenty of hand gestures to subsidize what…
Home for homeless art Without too much fanfare, and with a still-leaking roof and the occasional uninvited mouse, Carol Brewer’s hard-won permanent home for the Dallas Street Art Project opened last Saturday in a rehabbed machine shop at 1325 North Peak St. in Old East Dallas. Brewer’s friends and colleagues,…
Harmony Korine’s directorial debut, Gummo, was like a hard smack to the face of contemporary cinema. Relentlessly nonlinear, filled with disturbing imagery, and impossible to synopsize, it caused many viewers to wince in pain and persuaded even more to walk quickly past its poster — of the slightly misshapen head…
Wes Craven — purveyor of fine horror movies, including A Nightmare on Elm Street, Wes Craven’s New Nightmare, and the Scream trilogy — has apparently decided to go “legit.” And with Music of the Heart, he has done so with a vengeance. The film’s only death is the result of…
Lord, just what is it about rock and roll that so befuddles filmmakers? Save for This Is Spinal Tap, there has never been a movie about the music business that got it right…or, for God’s sakes, merely half-wrong. Too often, these films are made by people who seem to have…
Fran Lebowitz once observed that if the problem with communism is that it’s too boring, then the problem with fascism is that it’s too exciting. This aphorism neatly sums up the strange sex appeal some people find in Nazi drag: high leather boots, padded shoulders, shaved heads, various daunting interrogation…
Most among us don’t love or hate The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Rather, it’s a matter of how much you love it — a little, or a-rice-throwing, Windex-bottle-spraying-lot. Maybe you’re just a Brad if you don’t dig a schlock-and-roll musical that lampoons ’50s uptightness and old sci-fi movies, dolled up…
“It’s one hollow thing meeting another hollow thing.” This is how London art critic Matthew Collings describes the hubbub over the Brooklyn Museum’s recent staging of the traveling exhibition Sensation. Collings, who has viewed the über-trendy Brit art show in all three of its venues — The Royal Academy in…
I would have said that the October chill had solidified resolve in the Dallas theater community, but temperatures have reached the upper 80s and lower 90s, so there’s some other explanation for the bold confidence displayed in this month’s productions. 11th Street Theatre Project offers up one of its simplest…
Bats This horror picture about mutant killer bats terrorizing a little desert town is basically just like Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds. There are two major differences: First, The Birds was about birds, while Bats is about bats; and second, The Birds was a flawed but brilliant work by one of…
