The Corvette is more than just a car–it’s a symbol of American culture. Well, it’s a symbol of American culture in other countries, at least; it’s the American dream wrapped in steel and fiberglass and powered by a Big Block V8. In reality, most Americans’ only contact with a Corvette…
thursday august 13 Riverdance is a celebration of Irish music, song, and dance that almost every person of Irish descent would probably like to see quietly disappear. Unfortunately, that’s not likely to happen anytime soon. The Irish dance troupe attracts inexplicably large crowds wherever it travels, including Dallas, where it…
Even Randy Galloway’s 81-year-old mother, herself a lifelong journalism veteran, couldn’t believe it when he told her the news. Margaret Galloway didn’t come right out and say it, but her 55-year-old son could hear the concern in her voice–feel it, actually, like a slap. It’s the way any son feels…
Although I haven’t always enjoyed Pegasus Theatre artistic director Kurt Kleinmann’s doggedly cinematic brand of live comedy, his dedication to it has a definite logic when you consider how the American stage and American film have both traded traditional theatrical acting for “authenticity.” Before Lee Strasberg, Sanford Meisner, Uta Hagen,…
Opening a gallery in Dallas is just this side of nuts. Even established spaces in our so-called “gallery district” play Russian roulette with nearly every show; rosters of regular clients are no guarantee of a sale. But opening a gallery here and showing works by a “never-heard-of-‘im” German painter is…
Nicolas Cage has never seemed more dazzling than he does in the new Brian De Palma thriller Snake Eyes. Playing Rick Santoro, a corrupt Atlantic City cop who likes to think he’s “everybody’s friend,” Cage for almost two continuous hours is boogying to his own inner beat. It’s like watching…
These are the kinds of people who show up in Hal Hartley films: a nun who writes pornography; a surly, amnesiac hit man; a gas-station attendant who plays Elizabethan ballads on his electric guitar and greets customers in French; and a “radical shortstop” who capped a decade playing for the…
thursday august 6 About the only thing that Red Jacket brags about more than its inclusion on InStyle magazine’s list of coolest nightclubs in the country is the rumor that Jack Ruby spent his last free night at the club. Ruby, as anyone within earshot of Oliver Stone knows, is…
They’re what makes living in Dallas tolerable for those of us who’d rather shove shards of broken Shiner bottles up our noses than go see another trite alterna-band play at another rock-club-cum-hell-hole. The Sons of Hermann Hall is a historic, wood-floored oasis in a land of concrete and noise (some…
It’s never been easy to keep a Deep Ellum crowd occupied. There’s always a better band or cheaper drinks somewhere else. Sure, you can get people to come in, but it’s getting harder to keep them there. And because each club has a separate cover charge, clubgoers are less willing…
The special challenge of children’s theater–namely, how the heck do you make live performance not only accessible to kids, but competitive with the technological media forms–has been addressed before in this space. It’s not really so different from the challenge of making live performance accessible and competitive to adults, who…
Do we really need to see the great Kevin Spacey fuming and fussing in one of those we-do-things-my-way-or-we-don’t-do-them-at-all roles? In The Negotiator, he’s playing Chris Sabian, an expert hostage negotiator for the Chicago police, whose job it is to talk down Samuel L. Jackson’s Danny Roman, another police expert who…
There are disconnected sequences in Whatever, the film debut of writer-director Susan Skoog, that evoke a unique and harrowing experience: the high school party that won’t end. Skoog obviously understands there are two kinds of students–those who can mess around with drugs, alcohol, and sex yet still observe boundaries, and…
The Walt Disney Company has a smart and highly profitable business strategy: Re-release the studio’s proven hits every seven years or so, thereby reaching a new generation of kids–and making another tidy bundle of dollars in the process. Or the Mouse House just remakes its classic films–see, or don’t, last…
The feature directorial debut of writer-director Theresa Connelly is a complete misfire. What is meant to be a somewhat farcical, but also fairytale-like, midsummer night’s sex comedy instead ends up a tedious, uninvolving affair, burdened with a slim premise, grating characters, and poorly realized humor. Clearly a heartfelt project for…
Thanks to the hungry maw of cable TV, nearly every movie production is now accompanied by a documentary crew, assigned with getting enough footage for at least a half-hour making-of short. Such sub-productions are traditionally arranged by the producers of the main feature; and, not surprisingly, it is the usual…
Events like the Dallas Music Expo aren’t for the casual fan. Things like this are for the kind of people who can stand to spend two hours sifting through musty cardboard boxes full of 45s, looking for a piece of black (vinyl) gold. They’re for the fans who have to…
thursday july 30 William Manchee could be Dallas’ answer to John Grisham. Manchee, an author who has maintained a private law firm in Dallas since 1975, recently published Brash Endeavour, a page-turning tale of a small-time lawyer in over his head with some big-time clients. Just like in Grisham’s books,…
“One of the criteria of casting was that we couldn’t afford to have a prick in the company,” said director Milos Forman on the making of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. (Jack Nicholson, we can only assume, hadn’t achieved official prickdom at that point in his career.) The 1975…
WICHITA FALLS–“Walk with me,” Jerry Jones is saying in mid-stride, his voice dripping with sweat and twang. He moves quickly, wasting not a tenth of a tenth of a second. In no time at all, he’s 100 feet from where he just was, heading toward the chain-link fence separating the…
The problem with the one-act, that most bladder-friendly of theatrical forms, is how to present what is essentially a live-action joke and make it look like something more than a joke. Even with the darkest of material–as in, say, Erik Ehn’s Red Plays–the denouement is still a punch line, indeed…
A colleague and I were sitting in a Fort Worth diner just after walking through a certain exhibit at the Kimbell Museum. We were pondering the question If you could steal any object from that show, what would you nab? An enameled caviar server. A curvaceous, trippy mantel clock. A…
