Art-wise, these early summer weeks are some of the juiciest Dallas will see all year. Short of the big fall and holiday seasons, this is the most well-attended time for the local galleries. People are more excited about the longer days than sick of them — they’ll step out often…
As he works his way through a crowded Denton bar on a Thursday night, Paul Slavens looks like a regular guy in his white T-shirt and jeans and brown hiking boots. But when the shaved-headed Slavens takes a seat at the keyboard and opens his mouth to sing, the voice…
I used to have this roommate who was addicted to video games. He’d play them all day, from the time he woke up until he went to bed; sometimes, he’d take a break and, like, go to work. But for the most part, he spent hour after hour ass-down in…
Garfield Heard doubted the day would ever come, and when it did, almost no one knew about it. ESPN and CNN/SI didn’t air the press conference live; newspapers didn’t splash the headlines on the fronts of their sports pages. OK, so in Washington, D.C., it got a little coverage, but…
This is the first thing you notice about John Travolta as he stands before you, extending his hand in welcome: He does not look at all like a Movie Star. At 45, he seems a bit softer and a tad shorter than he did even on television, where the small…
Joy isn’t a word that often comes to mind when thinking about the films of director Wim Wenders. But infectious, intoxicating joy is the emotion conveyed by every frame of this ravishing, exuberant documentary. Buena Vista Social Club is not only the German filmmaker’s most engaging, soulful film since 1987’s…
Anthology films are an odd-duck genre: While there once was a time, long gone, when books of short stories were published with nearly the frequency of novels, their cinematic equivalent has never amounted even to 1 percent of the fictional films released. You could argue that Pulp Fiction counts as…
Disney’s The Lion King, one of the studio’s most popular films ever, contained a streak of xenophobia that bordered on the fascistic. Think about it: The effeminate usurper of a hereditary title pollutes the leonine kingdom by integrating the hyenas — creatures with ethnic voices — into the pride. Late…
It all happened because Bill Maher lost a bar bet. Though probably not his first (likely there was one involving a beer, a dollar bill, and a monkey), this one dictated that once a week, an anonymous American gets to sit beside movie stars, politicians, journalists, musicians, and the occasional…
Craig Karges probably isn’t invited to dinner parties very often. He also probably gets kicked out of a lot of restaurants. See, he has this little problem of bending spoons, tilting tables, and making things levitate with his mind. Karges calls himself an “extraordinist,” because the word psychic is used…
If you have spent any time at all in rural Mississippi, you’ll know that what the uninitiated may roll their eyes at as exaggeration in plays and films is often simply a wild truth trapped out of context. And if you’ve ever been in certain small-town Mississippi churches on a…
“The best example of…” A couple of weeks ago, local rich guy Howard Rachofsky spoke to a crowd at the McKinney Avenue Contemporary about how he’s built his art collection, a vast yet fine-tuned cross-section of modern to contemporary works housed in his Richard Meier-built home. It’s an ongoing process,…
OK, here’s a sample of the Dallas cast list for Undermain Theatre’s world premiere (have I written that phrase often enough recently?) of Erik Ehn and Octavio Solis’ stormy Texas tragicomedy Shiner. Let’s see, there’s Jeremy Schwartz, Dalton James, Rhonda Boutte, Christina Vela, and Max Hartman, who also has written…
Over the last few months, it seems as though every major small theater company in Dallas–and a couple of debuting ones–has offered us a world-premiere show. The results have been mixed, but the ambitions behind them have been unassailable. It’s an exciting time to be a theater critic in this…
In John Sayles’ Limbo, which is set amid the rough-and-tumble of southeast Alaska, an ex-salmon fisherman with guilty memories (David Strathairn), an itinerant lounge singer with a lousy voice (Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio), and the singer’s melancholy teenage daughter (newcomer Vanessa Martinez) become stranded, Robinson Crusoe-style, on a remote island. This…
Bernardo Bertolucci’s Besieged is a movie of enthralling visual poetry. Set almost entirely inside a ravishing Roman villa, it is a love story played out in furtive glances and stolen looks by characters on opposite sides of the ethnic divide. Culturally, Mr. Kinsky (David Thewlis) and Shandurai (Thandie Newton) couldn’t…
Lauren Hutton may not be the best actress in the world, but she sure has sex appeal. And she has a nice ability to mock her sexiness at the same time she is playing to it, which is a trick not every actress can pull off. In Just a Little…
I had this great idea for a movie the other day. A swaggering adventurer–a Texan, of course–spends years traveling the world participating in disaster-relief campaigns. He is so successful in aiding governments and private groups in organizing these projects that he earns the nickname “Master of Disaster” (hey, a possible…
Richard Belzer says he was too interested in girls in 1963 to really think much of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination at the time. Now, of course, he believes that the murder in Dealey Plaza was a conspiracy, and that J.F.K. himself was part of the plan to hide proof…
thursday june 10 We’ve always thought Star Search was pretty creepy, with its 6-year-old girls wearing more blue eye shadow than Tammy Faye Bakker and singing “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough.” Then there was the always thrilling and vital spokesmodel competition, and we did always like the train-wreck aspect of…
It occurs almost as though on cue; a cynical man might even say it’s the stuff of cliche. But not more than 10 minutes ago, the man known as Tatu was talking about his place on the food chain of local sports fame. The Dallas Sidekicks’ player-coach was saying how,…
A fine line divides inspired silliness from out-and-out witlessness; it’s a short leap from grin from groan. In 1997’s Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery, Mike Myers took a thin premise–spoof the ’60s by transplanting a horny Matt Helm-like secret agent into the ’90s–and danced an unsteady watusi along that…
