Events for the week

thursday august 28 Amphitryon (Ye Gods!): Theatre Three is pleased to be able to present a premiere of a new translation by Richard Wilbur, a man who earned a Pulitzer for his poetry and the affection of English-speaking theatergoers worldwide for his translations of Moliere’s devastatingly witty 17th century comedies…

A word’s worth

In critical circles, Harold Pinter has the reputation of being “an actor’s playwright,” mostly because he acted for a number of years in 1950s London under the pseudonym David Baron. His scripts go so far as to instruct the actors where and how long they should pause between dialogue. A…

Leave It to Reruns

Time has a way of slipping by when you’re not looking, but don’t worry: While you’re distracted, studio executives are keeping their usual keen eyes on the calendar, tabulating the simple economic arithmetic of boomer nostalgia. Hmmm…1997 minus 1957 equals 40 years. Forty years of nostalgic forgetfulness multiplied by the…

Sucking to please

Critics and audiences outside France have been going on for so long about the decline in French cinema that it’s fun to see a French film–Irma Vep–that says much the same thing. The rap is, of course, somewhat unfair–most raps are–but there’s no question that even the best of recent…

Naval gazing

In G.I. Jane, Demi Moore’s Naval Intelligence officer, Lt. Jordan O’Neil, is recruited as a test case to be the first female Navy SEAL. She gets a buzzcut and loses her period. She endures the indignities of the male volunteers snickering at her in the food line. She rolls huge…

Open your mouth and say “AH”

When the beautiful entomologist rips open the chest cavity of a huge, bloodthirsty insect in the sci-fi nightmare Mimic, it turns into Thoraxic Park. This movie, like Spielberg’s, features evolution gone haywire and dramaturgy gone to hell. In the prologue, the heroine–the reckless and courageous (or foolhardy and stupid) Dr…

Events for the week

thursday august 21 My Head Was a Sledgehammer: Scanning the two-page, small-type press release that Our Endeavors Productions prepared for its Southwest premiere of playwright Richard Foreman’s My Head Was a Sledgehammer induces a little chill in even the hardiest of experimental theatergoers. Foreman, a six-time Obie winner and acknowledged…

Strange bedfellows

Ask 34-year-old playwright Neil LaBute how he came to see his controversial debut feature In the Company of Men hit the big screen, and he’ll tell you he doesn’t quite know. “I became a filmmaker by accident, by proxy,” LaBute says during the Dallas stop on a 15-city international tour…

Ghost ship

By the end of Event Horizon, an ocean of red nearly drowns half the cast–this is a literal bloodbath. Blood pours from their throats, from their eye sockets, from their exposed veins and entrails; it splashes down corridors, runs down walls, fills every inch of screen space and then some…

Shoot the sheriff

The cops in Cop Land carry on like a bunch of goombahs. On the take from the Mob, they mimic the Mob. The fuzzy line dividing cops and crooks is the subject of many a strong police movie, but Cop Land goes a step further–it says there is no line…

A couple of clowns

When Time magazine columnist Walter Shapiro referred to himself last month as part of a generation that still believes “A Thousand Clowns holds all the secrets to human existence,” I thought he must be daft. Yes, high school students took Herb Gardner’s hit comedy about an urban dropout (played by…

Events for the week

thursday august 14 Landscape: Ever participated in those silly “Be Handicapped For a Day” office events where you ride around in a wheelchair or wear a blindfold to help you sympathize? There’s something about being able to remove your handicap at the end of the day that makes it…well, not…

Tune in yesterday

Ion was written some 500 years before the birth of Christ by a man who, infrequently honored with literary awards during his lifetime, wrote and lived alone in a cave. (Like all juicy tidbits about classical writers, this last item may be apocryphal, originally invented in the interest of characterizing…

The truth, and the consequences, are out there

Jerry Fletcher, the hero of Conspiracy Theory, is a comic, glamorous variation on Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver. Like Travis, he’s a New York cabbie obsessed with protecting a woman from the world’s hidden malignancies. Unlike Travis, Jerry snaps when he achieves sanity. Mel Gibson has been almost too willing…

Lost in Hollywood

In the not-so-brave new world of independent filmmaking, low-budget movies premiere at Sundance or Cannes and win plaudits from over-psyched audiences, publicity from desperate feature writers, and distribution from boutiques that are usually subsidiaries of major studios. Right now Tarantino-style thrillers are out; crazy-clan stories and upstairs-downstairs tales are in…

Tough love

All you heterosexual men looking for a film to see with your girlfriend, consider this a warning–Neil Labute’s In the Company of Men is not a date movie. Nor is this slow-burn indie drama a “black comedy,” as some critics have dubbed it. The film could be described as a…

Events for the week

thursday august 7 New Talent Exhibition: Texas may rank near the bottom in state and city funding for the arts in America, but what little support does manage to trickle through often helps one of the neediest of cultural populations–new artists who have a devil of a time breaking into…

Dead on Arrival

John Leguizamo is lithe and full of juice–he’s like the shy boy who suddenly discovers he can dance and can’t keep still. Given his need to express himself physically–in his first one-man stage show, Spic-O-Rama, I don’t think his feet ever hit the ground–it’s a sad irony that his breakthrough…

Har-de-har-har

There’s a famous maxim, ofttimes attributed to Mel Brooks, that tragedy is when I slip on a banana peel; comedy is when you slip on it. We can polish this little gem about human nature to a harder, more specifically theatrical gleam by adding: “But when we both slip on…

Flunking out

187, a number favored by adolescent thugs, is the California state penal code for homicide–and a harsh sentence for all involved in this hopeless, hapless movie. The gifted Samuel L. Jackson stars as a high school teacher who cracks under the constant threat of rabid teen machismo–and retaliates with his…

Perfect mess

In Picture Perfect, Jennifer Aniston tells a whopper of a lie partially to win the attentions of a guy who has heretofore ignored her, interrupts a wedding, and humiliates a guy at his workplace. This follows on the heels of My Best Friend’s Wedding, which found Julia Roberts trying to…

Events for the week

thursday july 31 Ion: As the final production in its Adventure Series, Fort Worth’s Stage West has chosen a play written around 420 B.C. How adventurous, you might wonder, is a celebrated work by Euripides, the Greek master responsible for The Bacchae, Medea, and other classical lit staples? Well, that…