In David Lean’s 1957 film Bridge on the River Kwai, British World War II soldiers held hostage in a Japanese POW camp are forced to build a bridge across a jungle river. If they refuse, their captors will kill them. If they try to escape, the surrounding flora and fauna…
Michael Bay is the director of Bad Boys and The Rock and the new asteroid-attack movie Armageddon–which should be called The Very Big Rock. He has, I’m afraid, perfected a new form: His movies are trailers for themselves. Every scene is all climax and no foreplay. When it’s all over,…
When Quentin Tarantino started up his boutique releasing company, Rolling Thunder, last year, his first release was, unsurprisingly, a Hong Kong production. Tarantino, after all, has been one of the most vocal boosters of Hong Kong cinema in the United States. What was surprising was the choice: Chungking Express, a…
I Went Down is the highest-grossing independent Irish film in history–which, of course, doesn’t say much in the States, where we’ve turned independent filmmaking into a corporate subsidiary and consider Ireland a drab place where either Daniel Day-Lewis or American heartthrobs with poor accents struggle with The Troubles. So the…
Is there room in a modern society for a comic hypnotist? As far as entertainment value goes, hypnotists are almost on the same scale as ventriloquists and plate spinners, or anyone else who regularly appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show. The whole idea is so old, it smells like liniment…
thursday july 2 In the past few months, the Dallas area has hosted several fine photography exhibits spotlighting Mexico and its citizens. The Bath House Cultural Center’s latest pair of exhibits, El Trabajo De La Mujer and En La Casa, may be two of the best yet. Both exhibits look…
Just after we all thought indie rock had saved the planet from overt guitar posturing, leave it to MARS, the super-slick chain of “music and recording superstores” to launch a contest for would-be rock stars. Seems the equipment-shop-cum-amusement-park knows its patronage well: money-spending lawyers and CPAs who still dream in…
Obviously, a Pulitzer Prize just isn’t enough to imbed a playwright in the firmament of American stage greats. Or, to paraphrase a famous line from The Boys in the Band: “So who do I have to fuck around here for a little theatrical posterity?” Novelist and playwright Paul Zindel nabbed…
There will always be a Britain; and that means there will always be movies about the pluck and sacrifice, during World War II, of the little people. Not Billy Barty little people–though surely there must have been a few of them involved–but the simple salt-of-the-earth types who kept muddling along…
Too many post-Woody Allen movies have been made about “sex in the head.” The smart, engaging Out of Sight is an action comedy about love in the head. The real thing ignites between bank robber Jack Foley (George Clooney) and U.S. Marshal Karen Sisco (Jennifer Lopez) when she stumbles into…
The 1967 musical Dr. Dolittle, which starred Rex Harrison, was a commercial disaster for its studio, Twentieth Century Fox. The new nonmusical Fox version of this material, starring Eddie Murphy, isn’t in the same overblown category as the Harrison film–its disasters are more mundane. It’s a kiddie comedy that really…
Not even the most diligent red ants can stop culture hounds from descending on Samuell-Grand Park with wine coolers and baked chicken: It’s Bard time again, kids! And while we all nobly extol the timeless wisdom of history’s most famous playwright, it seems the real draw of the Shakespeare Festival…
One of my best memories about summer is the time my mother tried to make cookies ‘n’ cream ice cream. Since she had never branched out from chocolate or vanilla before, this was pretty exciting. (Give me a break, I was 10.) Anyway, she had no idea how to go…
thursday june 25 The Liquid Lounge is poised to take over where the Dark Room left off, hosting rock shows in an intimate venue, shows that are a little quieter but much more special. Already the club has hosted two shows by Peter Schmidt’s Legendary Crystal Chandelier project. (If you…
Technicolor was a movie lover’s aphrodisiac during Hollywood’s Golden Age. It produced colors of astonishing depth, boldness, and subtlety via a complex beam-splitting camera that generated three separate negatives. Lab technicians built them into a photographic sandwich that was developed with a unique dye-transfer system called imbibition. Gone With the…
Harried parents don’t have time to wade through a review that yammers on about the sociopolitical ramifications of a children’s theater production. Yet being childless myself and, as a critic, inordinately fond of my own opinions, I can’t help but rhapsodize about the wonderful Wildean darts to the establishment heart…
The artist has something to tell us about how we process information, and Trenton Hancock uses the digestive tract to do it: teeth, throats, intestines, rectums–his as well as others’. Oddly enough, art hounds are eating it up. To kick off his one-man, five-week exhibition at the Gerald Peters Gallery…
It’s Christmas vacation, 1958. The movie my dad has chosen for a first-grade pal and me to see is the new Disney live-action adventure, Tonka, starring Sal Mineo as a young Sioux named White Bull who traps and domesticates a clear-eyed, spirited wild horse named Tonka. Having seen The King…
High Art is a low-budget, American independent movie about a junkie, lesbian photographer, Lucy Berliner (Ally Sheedy), who spends most of her time looking romantically mournful. She’s famished and abrasive and oh-so world-weary. When she smokes cigarettes, she exhales in a way that can best be described as existential–the smoke…
The X-Files is a movie that answers questions…No, wait a minute. The X-Files is a movie that asks questions…Hmmm. OK. The X-Files is a movie that makes me wanna ask some questions, like: What the hell does “Fight the future” mean? I mean, I can understand “The truth is out…
Although four years have passed since I last played in the Hoop-It-Up tournament, my experience there has scarred me forever–literally. That doesn’t mean that the annual three-on-three street basketball tournament is dangerous, just that it’s rougher than the typical driveway game. At the tournament in 1994, my two teammates and…
Hollywood’s been threatening to remake The Women, a 1939 razor of a film, for years now, with the likes of Julia Roberts and Demi Moore taking keen interest in the potential project. No surprise here; to resurrect Joan Crawford’s conniving vamp, Rosalind Russell’s catty blue blood, and Norma Shearer’s martyred…
