At the recent yearly summit of Dallas’ theater critics, a ritual gathering designed to hash out the annual Dallas Theater Critics Forum Awards, the group discussed that there were perhaps 40 to 50 fewer productions this past season than in previous years. No one had an answer for the sad…
Those seeking an illustration of the media food chain’s numerous hypocrisies need look no further than the Hugh Grant affair. As you doubtless know, Grant was arrested last week in Hollywood for “public lewdness” with a prostitute in the back seat of a car. The ironies were irresistible: here was…
If you’re gonna make a gorilla flick, the gorilla’s got to party down. The gorilla’s got to do something. It’s either got to eat people, or else run around solving their problems. It’s got to be either a capitalist gorilla or a communist gorilla. There’s no such thing, in the…
First Knight, a new effort from Ghost director Jerry Zucker, purports to tell the tale of King Arthur’s ill-fated marriage to Lady Guinevere–a young English noblewoman who fell madly in love with the aging king’s most trusted knight, the young, virile, reckless Lancelot. Of course it makes hash of the…
A friend of mine who writes film criticism in another city was waxing rhapsodic the other day about Maria Maggenti, the New York-based writer-director of The Incredibly True Adventure of Two Girls in Love. “Oh, you’re just gonna fall in love with this woman,” she told me. “After I met…
The Incredibly True Adventure of Two Girls in Love is an awfully long title for such a short, simple movie about first love. The lovers in question are two young women of different races and social backgrounds. One is Randy Dean (Laurel Holloman), a slender redheaded white girl who lives…
His ship might be damaged beyond repair and his longtime ambition to walk on the moon dashed forever, but Jim Lovell (Tom Hanks), commander of the ill-fated Apollo 13 mission, still can’t help dreaming. As he and his fellow crewmembers float in a damaged tin can miles above the world,…
friday july 7 Annie Leibovitz and Fabrice Berger-Remond: Is there doubt in anyone’s mind that Annie Leibovitz is one of the greatest photo-portraitists working in America right now? Sure, she gets the same flak Richard Avedon has for decades now about snapping so many celebrities and working primarily with (gasp!)…
Billy Joe Martin sat on the mound of an empty high-school baseball field in Arlington. He’s always seemed alone since his dad died that Christmas day six years ago. The younger Martin had been working with kids earlier in the day, showing them how to bat. Being a good example…
In a few weeks, Undermain Theatre will fly to Macedonia to perform Sarajevo, a play written by Macedonian native Goran Stefanovsky, at the three-week summer festival there. Ten theaters will perform at the festival, and all of them except the Undermain are Eastern European troupes. The Undermain members have taken…
If you go to the movies a lot, the music used in the latest trailer advertising First Knight might seem awfully familiar: a grandiose, brass-and-string-heavy bit of orchestration that rises in urgency and pitch until it resolves with a hopeful C major chord. This short snippet, referred to by filmmakers…
I was disappointed in the first two Batman movies. Despite moments of genuine craziness, dark wit, and visual brilliance, they didn’t move me emotionally, and I didn’t think much of them as entertainment, either. The problem was their director, Tim Burton. He’s an artist, not a showman; a visionary, not…
Bob “Ho-Hum” Dole can’t even come up with any NEW reasons to hate Hollywood. He could have written that speech in 1909. All these goldurn violent movies like Natural Born Killers are destroying our young people. All these goldurn sexy movies like Basic Instinct are corrupting our libidos. I guess…
I’m worried about the fate of Pocahontas, Disney’s 33rd animated feature. Of all the big-budget, feature-length cartoons released by Disney in the past six years, this one–about a romance between a Native American woman and a white man who arrived in the New World seeking to conquer the land and…
thursday june 22 Kirk Whalum: In the midst of all those beltway arguments among critics and musicians as to who makes jazz and who makes Cheez-Whiz, certain contemporary artists have chosen to make their mark with a sound that capitalizes on the hippest jazz conventions while, at the same time,…
George Chiappa and the seven competitors standing around him are as burly and bad-assed as any lineman who ever ran down the Texas Stadium tunnel and lived to spit on the locker room floor about it. George is wearing tube socks, turf shoes, a workout shirt, about 60 pounds of…
In The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde created a wry, entertaining novel that has also become a modern myth: the protagonist Dorian–based on the youthful-looking John Gray, whom Wilde was quietly courting at the time–remained young, seductive, and beautiful as his hidden portrait was transformed into an ugly, wretched,…
Usually, Harvey Keitel isn’t a man who enjoys promoting his movies. But he seems positively eager to talk about Smoke–even if that means having to talk about himself. By turns gregarious and evasive, thoughtful and emotional, he comes across in private conversation as more nimbly intelligent and self-effacingly mellow than…
Senate majority leader Robert Dole (R-Kansas) recently blamed rappers Ice-T and Snoop Doggy Dogg; Oliver Stone’s movie Natural Born Killers; the Tony Scott-Quentin Tarantino picture True Romance; and other controversial artists and art for accelerating America’s alleged free fall into social chaos. The reasoning behind Dole’s selection of four very…
Think about the most wildly popular fantasy adventures of the past couple of years–everything from Jurassic Park to the spastic Jim Carrey vehicle The Mask–and it’s a given that what you’ll remember are single images: the tyrannosaurus rex bumping its nose against the clear plexiglass roof of a jeep where…
Have you heard this one? “Maybe if we have a baby, the marriage will get better.” So lemme get this straight. You’re takin’ a couple of people who are arguing every day about how much money to should spend on a pair of high heels, or whether the orange juice…
thursday june 15 Dr. Kent Weeks: The latest Egyptologist to make world headlines about his discoveries frolicking among the dead is Dr. Kent Weeks, whose recent discovery of a tomb that dates back to 1500 B.C. is said to house most of the 52 sons of the legendary Rameses the…
