My poor planning occasionally triggers a situation that every critic should experience–I sometimes actually pay for admission to the shows I review. When I don’t have time to make the advance call necessary for comps, I just dig into my own pocket. Tragic as this scenario is, do hold your…
Bring earplugs to Batman & Robin. A pair of noseplugs wouldn’t hurt either. The fourth installment in the Batman franchise is one long head-splitting exercise in clueless cacophony that makes you feel as though you’re being held hostage in some haywire Planet Hollywood while sonic booms pummel your auditory canal…
To get into a good-lovin’ mood before each date, a college housemate of mine croaked along to Van Morrison’s “Tupelo Honey” while blasting it through his stereo. My fondness for the song survived. So as the end credits for Ulee’s Gold unrolled against the robust lyricism of Morrison belting out…
Nothing against My Best Friend’s Wedding, but it’s a sign of just how vacuous things have become in Hollywood when folks start getting excited about a movie with a handful of partially engaging characters, a fairly intriguing storyline, and a smattering of clever lines. Look, that’s what movies are expected…
thursday june 19 National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America: Unfortunately, the history of human civilization has been one ethnic/religious/sexual group repressing and exploiting another, weaker one. But can we distinguish between garden-variety atrocities and atrocities with a capital A? Here’s a handy guide: Your group’s suffering is an…
You say your company is doing a play about the intersection of the sacred and the sexual? Protagonists whose myopic love challenges centuries of religious dogma in a foolhardy but passionate stand for the transcendent power of eros? Well, you’ve got this critic’s undivided attention and best wishes for success…
British filmmaker Peter Greenaway sits near a window in the dining room of the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel; he indicates with his eyes a man walking along the sidewalk toward Hollywood Boulevard. In trying to explain his use of multiple imagery in his new film, The Pillow Book, and separating it…
First, the good news: Unlike most action film sequels, Speed 2: Cruise Control is not a mere retread of the original. Now the bad news: Better it had been. Director Jan De Bont made a dazzling debut with the 1994 Speed. His riveting direction of action triumphed over a hackneyed,…
thursday june 12 Taming of the Shrew: Fort Worth beats Dallas to the “Shakespeare in the Park” punch with a production of Willie’s ultimate battle-of-the-sexes comedy, The Taming of the Shrew. The question is, will actress Theda Reale–who has worked extensively in theater and film on both coasts–deliver Katerina’s final…
A certain kind of movie lover adores anything and everything foreign–French romantic comedies, Chinese historical dramas, English studies of class conflict. This is a perfectly defensible bias to hold, since the cinema does nothing better than take the stories of distant neighborhoods and write them so large across the screen…
When you consider that Dallas-based playwright Angela Wilson mines very familiar territory in her two one-acts, Black Velvet and George and Scheherazade, sad, sad, sad, the little gems she extracts in her dirt-covered fingers are all the more surprising. Like all playwrights who attempt to cull the dramatic from the…
It wouldn’t be completely fair to say that the hits produced by Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer from 1983 through 1996 are stylistically interchangeable. But it wouldn’t be so awfully unfair either: A homogeneous, auteurial touch runs from Flashdance (1983) through Top Gun (1986), Beverly Hills Cop II (1987), and…
thursday june 5 1997 Tour of World Figure Skating Champions: Some skating superstars have become famous for things other than working the blades–Dorothy Hamill for drinking iced tea and shampooing her hair, Rudy Galindo for being boy crazy, Oksana Baiul for proving you can laugh at someone’s name and still…
OK, we’re into the mopping-up phase now. It’s the fifth and final week of the Drive-In Academy Award nominations, and so far we’ve received a total of 34 ballots–54 if you count inmates. This is the kind of apathy that led to Nazi Germany. Nevertheless, we begin with the increasingly…
Having recently seen the same Samuel Beckett one-act performed by two different Dallas theater companies for two different audiences, a comparison is in order–and would be particularly helpful for neophyte theatergoers. Three weeks back, a large group of people, mostly heterosexual couples, attended a performance of Bucket Productions’ For Whom…
Make no mistake: Twin Town ain’t Trainspotting, baby. Even though on its poster–and soundtrack–two of its stars are posed in mid-lunge, crouching as though running from a Cannes jury aching to cram some prize down their throats…just like Trainspotting. Even though Twin Town’s executive producers directed (Danny Boyle) and produced…
In a season of lumbering big-screen circuses, Rough Magic provides a rowdy creative sideshow. It’s the kind of haywire high-wire act that suspends the laws of science and grows more involving and comical with every artful near-fall. It’s about magic as illusion and magic as genuine miracle, and it shuffles…
It lasted a mere four seasons, but thirtysomething lives on. Its legacy began the moment the show went off the air in 1991: The yuppie angst fantasy created by Marshall Herskovitz and Ed Zwick continues to spawn even now, its children looking almost exactly like the parents. First came My…
thursday may 29 Cruces de la Vida: In a culture that has prized the public display of machismo as highly as the Latino culture has, it’s inevitable that Latinas have traditionally been driven to find and exercise strength inside themselves. The Catholic Church has provided much fuel to help stoke…
Yes indeed, it’s Dinosaur Week in the 1997 Drive-In Academy Award nominations, time for our annual recognition of those who have just made too goldurn many B movies. This has always been a popular category, even though Morgan Fairchild once won it three years in a row and her dominance…
It says a lot about New Theatre Company’s collective skills that a play about boredom should come across so forcefully. Yet Keith Reddin’s Dallas premiere of Nebraska twiddles its thumbs with such homicidal intensity, the thwarted lives of the various couples it portrays are rendered from the inside out, all…
Picking up the press kit for the new gay comedy-drama Love! Valour! Compassion!, I was primed to find a dictionary noting the multiple meanings of “queen.” Of course, this enterprise is too self-consciously tasteful to commit such a faux pas. Terrence McNally’s Tony Award-winning work has been called “one of…
