Barney the Dinosaur’s broad purple hide has sustained quite a few scars since Barney and Friends debuted on PBS in spring 1992. Bob Dole denounced him on the floor of the Senate as part of a public television scam. Rogue computer programmers made him the target of automatic weapons fire…
When you think about how some of the smartest, most surprising films about women have been made by men–and how, when a woman filmmaker manages to score a decent budget for her project, she does the same for stories about men–you start to realize: Directors should dare to speak for…
Nobel Prize winner Albert Camus thought life was absurd, but all the more meaningful for it. His contemporaries Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir thought him a cut-rate intellectual because he had a sentimental side. As early as 25, Camus was aware of the conflict between his brain and his…
Thursday April 2 If you just know Ship of Fools and “The Jilting of Granny Weatherall” from college classes, you don’t know the late Texas writer Katherine Anne Porter. Her one novel, Ship of Fools, felt, to some critics, like Peyton Place in a life jacket (plus one dwarf). Even…
Central Expressway at 3 a.m. is a different kind of war zone than its daytime persona. Instead of cars locked bumper-to-bumper in a familiar, maddening crawl through the center of the city, the after-hours Central is far more cinematic. Nearly surreal in its undulating grimness, the only cars it carries…
I recently spoke before about 30 members of the local volunteer arts fundraising group 500 Inc.–with more than a little trepidation. I was the guest of the Undermain Theatre, which, like all major recipients of grants from this group, must provide free “Sample The Arts” events for the organization. My…
I couldn’t see the bathtub in Richard Diebenkorn’s giant abstract painting. Didn’t even try. But two women who had broken off from our guided tour at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth did. Or so they said. In fact, that bathtub got ’em pretty excited. “And see, Susan. Right…
Probably every film director itches to make a western, so let’s be thankful that, with The Newton Boys, Richard Linklater has scratched his itch. Now he can go back to making movies about subjects for which he has some genuine feeling. Linklater should not be begrudged his chance to “stretch.”…
Lovers of American movies used to joke that foreign films wouldn’t look so good if you saw them without subtitles. John Sayles’ latest movie, Men With Guns, plays better than his other films because it does have subtitles. Bald dialogue always sounds better in Spanish and Indian dialects. Set in…
Radiohead is finally coming to town. Why do I hear groans? I’m so tired of critics trying to be perverse by denouncing Radiohead’s 1997 release OK Computer. Seems some of them are compelled to label it pretentious and arty and smug after the first wave of critics deemed it brilliant…
New Theatre Company may have lost a terrific space with the closing of the Theatre on Elm Street, but they got a helluva consolation prize: the almost-black box space called Theatre Too in the basement of Jac Alder’s Theatre Three in the Quadrangle. New Theatre’s artistic director, Bruce Coleman, admits:…
Thursday March 26 America’s intellectual elite hammers us daily with how television has rotted our brains. But the explosion of popularity in staged readings, poetry slams, and spoken-word performances suggests to us that many people have reached the saturation point with electronic sounds and images; the live, one-on-one exchange of…
For all the major American film critics who conspired to cram the ludicrously overpraised L.A. Confidential down the country’s throat, I have found a penalty befitting the crime. Fess up now that you got a little careless after downing a few too many macho-celluloid cocktails shaken by the likes of…
Though critics often compared Virginia Woolf’s nonlinear, almost cubist narratives to the then-burgeoning cinema’s use of montage, close-ups, flashbacks, tracking shots, and rapid cuts, the strength of Woolf’s novels lay in the rhythm of her arresting style, and in her heroines’ poignant and melancholic musings, which insidiously seep through the…
After a quick scan of a list of the past lectures presented by the Eclectic Viewpoint, it’s hard to resist the temptation to denounce the organization as mere coattail riders, snake-oil salesmen preying on the neo-conspiracy theorists who spend their time prowling anti-government chat rooms and their money on X-Files…
The American reissues of Jackie Chan films have met with declining box-office success since Chan burst onto the scene in 1996 with Rumble in the Bronx. With any luck, the latest Chan opus to be recut and redubbed for Americans, the year-old Mr. Nice Guy, should reverse the trend. No…
If ever there was an Op-Ed movie–a movie destined to be written about in an “elevated” realm beyond just the movie pages–it’s Primary Colors. Thanks to Monica Lewinsky and Paula Jones, the Hollywood/Washington nexus has lifted this new Mike Nichols picture, based on the 1996 bestseller by Joe Klein, into…
thursday march 19 Locally based documentary filmmaker Cynthia Salzman Mondell has done a Mike Wallace on one of the most exclusive and secretive realms of public life–the Amazonian domain of the ladies’ restroom. The Ladies’ Room is her new seriocomic documentary about the conflicts and confidences that occur when female…
One more time: Dallas ain’t Cowtown. Never was. Fort Worth is. The old cattle drive routes were west of here, but ever since Trammell Crow dropped a bronze stampede in downtown Dallas, the culture hounds’ arguments over the city’s cowboy history have erupted again. Why? Because everyone wants in on…
They crowded around Dennis Rodman until it seemed as though they were suffocating him with their cameras and questions. He spoke as he dressed, covering himself in a vomit-yellow silk shirt and a red crushed-velvet hat and dark wrap-around shades to block out the blinding TV lights. The reporters–and there…
Can I compose a critical mash note to Dallas actor Terry Martin, star of the Texas premiere of Dan Butler’s The Only Thing Worse You Could Have Told Me, that doesn’t sound foolish? Probably not, but any such effort would contain some sentiment like: It’s hard as hell to make…
In print advertisements for its current production, Dallas Theater Center declares Eugene O’Neill’s 1940 Long Day’s Journey Into Night to be America’s greatest play. Leaving aside the strained hyperbole of calling any piece of art the greatest in its field, there are certainly other contenders for this specious honor, from…
