Woody Allen’s Deconstructing Harry is a film made by a free man. Liberated, for whatever reason, of the need for playing a nice guy, playing the bad man he does here frees Allen of the optimistic sanctimony that has weighed down so much of his recent work. Allen the filmmaker…
It has been almost a decade since Randy White got paid by the Dallas Cowboys to hit someone. It has been almost 15 years since Billy Joe DuPree caught a Roger Staubach touchdown pass. And it has been nearly 20 years since John Fitzgerald proved himself the master of the…
Regular readers can now tell this whiny Scrooge of a stage critic that he finally got what he’s been bitching about for weeks–a new and decidedly nontraditional holiday play titled Greetings!. I must say that, as much as I enjoyed looking at it, I’m not sure what the hell to…
Now that the Japanese Tora-san series–with fiftysome entries in 30 years–has presumably drawn to a close, following the death of star Kiyoshi Atsumi last year, the James Bond films constitute the longest-running continuous series around. They’ve had their ups and downs, but something about the Bond formula has proved enduring…
If one is in a Biblical frame of mind, the sinking of the White Star Line’s R.M.S. Titanic about 400 miles off the southern coast of Newfoundland in 1912 could well be characterized as an act of divine one-upmanship. The 46,328-ton “ship of dreams” was struck down on its maiden…
thursday december 18 Holiday on Vice: We’ve all heard the hilarious and haunting statistic that suicide crisis hot lines receive more calls this month than during any other time of the year. We’ve also heard that depression is anger turned inward, so, marrying the former fact with the latter hypothesis,…
Was Steven Spielberg fated to make Amistad? “Amity,” you might recall, was the name of the shark-bedeviled island in his breakthrough picture, Jaws; my dictionary defines it as “friendship, esp friendly relations between nations.” Amistad, too, means “friendship”–although the ship the movie is named for is a slave ship, and…
Downstairs, the beat writers were scrambling for quotes. Just moments earlier in the bowels of Reunion Arena, Ross Perot Jr.–the man who owns the Dallas Mavericks and, it seems, a good hunk of the Dallas City Council–had introduced Don Nelson, Mavericks general manager, as the team’s new head coach. Junior…
I hope that Quincy Long’s bracing, cheeky “children’s play” A Por Quinley Christmas is revived often over the next few generations, the way Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol has been for us. That will allow future, cyberspace theater critics to one day rail against it as toothless and overfamiliar the…
It’s hard for anyone under, say, 35 to understand the impact that the so-called French New Wave directors in general–and Jean-Luc Godard in particular–had on cinemaphiles (and on the art of film itself) when their films suddenly burst upon American art-house screens in the early ’60s. There was almost nothing…
Wes Craven’s Scream, which opened almost exactly a year ago, was the surprise hit of an overcrowded Christmas season. In part, the success was a triumph of counter-programming: In the midst of a glut of classy Oscar contenders, Scream was the only teen horror film. And it was helped by…
thursday december 11 La Virgen de Guadalupe Exhibition: She’s loved by millions in the Latino community; she can be seen in the back-window shrines of pickup trucks, and she’s made other people rich and famous off her image. Are we talking about Selena? No, it’s the Virgin of Guadalupe! The…
Dick Motta enters Reunion Arena quietly, with no introduction or applause. The crowd doesn’t even know he’s on the floor; they pay him no mind as he visits with a few of his former players, retired Mavericks whose faces are so familiar we take them for granted. Dressed in a…
Legendary American standup Lenny Bruce became a legend not because he was flat-out funny. Listening to his recorded material today–from his famous “Lone Ranger” routine to his various tours through the ethnic hothouses of the urban landscape–reveals a rather glaring lack of imagination, especially when you compare what has survived…
Movie special-effects maestro Phil Tippett has won billowing praise for the jaw-dropping digital transformations that turned models of alien bugs into the fearsome insect armies of Starship Troopers. But the 46-year-old founder of Tippett Studio in Berkeley, California, is his own most astonishing piece of transformation. If he’s at the…
thursday december 4 Cara Mia Theatre Company: A general perception is that immigrant and first-generation Mexican-American women are acculturated to keep silent and endure whatever life hands them. Director Marisela Barrera and Cara Mia Theatre Company, a troupe of Latina artists, have put together a show that posits a cultural…
Not long ago, Mike Modano would have been frustrated by nights like this. He would have been dissatisfied by his inability to shoot the puck to the back of the net, by the Edmonton Oilers’ determination to keep him out of the game with hard checks, by the way despised…
When people refer to playwright Alan Ayckbourn as “the British Neil Simon,” the comparison is usually intended to be a compliment. Both men are god-awful rich (with Simon probably in the lead, but only because of the countless American movie versions of his plays); both, at their best, have stitched…
First, The Heiress was unofficially remade as Washington Square, then The Big Carnival as Mad City, and The Day of the Jackal as The Jackal. But now we get The Absent-Minded Professor, all dressed up in new threads, as Flubber. In this frenzy of plundering the past, is nothing sacred?…
You can’t exactly call Alien Resurrection a pleasurable experience, but, then again, you wouldn’t say that about its predecessors either. Directed by Frenchman Jean-Pierre Jeunet, who previously co-directed with Marc Caro Delicatessen and The City of Lost Children, this fourth installment in the Alien onslaught is once again designed to…
friday november 28 Phillip Walker: This weekend, Teatro Dallas was all prepared to present you a theatrical troupe from Venezuela performing a political satire in which the two lead characters were prostitutes. We’d be lying if we said we weren’t a little disappointed to hear that the theatrical company never…
There are two plays that alternate in New Theatre Company’s crisp, occasionally volatile production of Donald Margulies’ Sight Unseen. One is the portrait of an aborted relationship, the other a savage, expressionistic landscape of the terrain between art and identity, commercial success and exploitation. You have to wonder if Margulies…
