thursday december 8 Big Fat Christmas Goose: Fort Worth’s Hip Pocket Theatre serves up one of its reliable grab bags of dance, movement, music, and lighting effects, an original production which manages to yoke the Christmas tradition to American culture and still leave all that stifling mega-bucks commercialism behind. They’ve…
Editor’s note: Jennifer Briggs, who has covered sports for more than a decade, this week joins the Observer as sports columnist. The microphones and notepads hang like Spanish moss around the tall man in the locker room, still wet from the showers and pumped from his first game back in…
It was a place of force– The wind gagging my mouth with my own blown hair, Tearing off my voice, and the sea Blinding me with its lights, the lives of the dead Unreeling in it, spreading like oil. –from “The Rabbit Catcher” by Sylvia Plath. Uttering nothing but blood–…
Peter Jackson might be the boldest English-language director working today whose films are seen by almost no one. His latest effort, Heavenly Creatures, should remedy that situation. Based on a real-life New Zealand murder case in which two adolescent girls plotted the murder of a parent they believed was impairing…
Well, the No-Smoking Nazis have reached the borders of New York City. There’s a lot of things you can say about New York City, but the one thing I always liked about the place is that it was the last place in America that respected smokers. Some of the office…
John Frankenheimer’s World War II-era railway adventure The Train turns 30 this year, and it’s almost appalling to consider just how infrequently modern-day Hollywood has mustered up the energy and dedication to match its countless splendors. A huge, roiling, clanking, screeching, rumbling hulk of mayhem that seizes you from frame…
When a first film–especially a locally produced, very low-budget film–doesn’t ring your bell, the tempting course as a critic is simply to ignore it, under the assumption that bad press isn’t always better than no press at all. Fortunately, Joseph Alexandre, the Dallas-based writer, director, editor, and co-star of the…
thursday december 1 Through the Looking Glass: Getting on the InterNet: As you know by now, all those newsmagazine headlines trumpeting The Information Superhighway were too much, too soon. They spent so much time brainstorming the potential colossal change in our daily lives–yet only a sizable minority of people are…
The road has risen up to meet Dallas’ Kitchen Dog Theater, proving that hard work and artistic talent, even of an alternative and sometimes enigmatic nature, can still be rewarded. The company’s good fortune this season began with a $5,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. (If that…
Twenty pages into her first read through the script of The Last Seduction, John Dahl’s stunningly nasty film noir, Linda Fiorentino realized she simply had to play the film’s antiheroine, Bridget–a femme so fatale she makes Sharon Stone look like Sandy Dennis. She’d reached the page where Bridget arrives in…
Why is every election between the Republican Idiot and the Democratic Idiot? And then if some third guy shows up, everybody says, “I can’t vote for him. He’s an idiot.” Why is the third guy always an idiot? He’s the only one who doesn’t have 150 years of history behind…
The latest issue of local fanzine publisher Clyde Gentry’s Chinese movie guide Hong Kong Film Connection hits stores November 23. It includes reviews of every Hong Kong movie on video or coming soon to stateside theaters; an update on the latest career moves of the Asian Steve McQueen, Chow Yun-Fat;…
This is how Captain James Tiberius Kirk dies: he jumps across a broken bridge to retrieve a device–whose function is too complicated, and frankly too unimportant, to describe in any detail–the bridge gives way, and he falls into a ravine. Yes, Captain Kirk, the man who cheated death a million…
To know what basketball is, you must live, eat, drink, sleep, and sex it; let other people play it. For a select few, it isn’t a game but a way of life, an identity, a dream of escape from abject poverty. Those who can realize this dream are the ones…
thursday november 24 Turkey Trot, Save the Turkey, and Baby Doll’s Thanksgiving: The organizers of the 1994 YMCA Turkey Trot advertise it as “Dallas’ Way To Begin Thanksgiving,” which implies that most of us are in better physical shape than we really are. For 27 years now the Turkey Trot,…
“His Majesty,” Oscar Wilde purrs to an expectant King Edward VII, “is like a warm stream of bat’s piss. So strong in his sentiments and flowing in his expression.” Monty Python fans will no doubt remember this (paraphrased) line from the classic sketch in which Wilde, Shaw, and other celebrated…
What is this Inner Child dealie? What are people talkin’ about when they say they need to “get in touch with my Inner Child”? I’ve been hearin’ this for several years now, and ever time I hear it I sit there like a goombah, pretendin’ I know exactly what they’re…
thursday november 17 Phyllis Schlafly vs. Sarah Weddington: What causes a democracy’s national mood to shift from left to right, liberal to conservative? While many politicians on both sides like to appear accessible by defining themselves as moderates resting squarely in the center, the moderate voting bloc doesn’t change the…
The 1994 Dallas Video Festival is as eclectic and erratic as the medium itself. The good stuff is some of the best you’ll see anywhere in any medium, and the bad stuff is damn near unwatchable. But that’s what makes this Festival so invaluable, not just to the audiovisual scene…
While sitting through Dreams of Equality and Thinking Like a Woman: the Life and Times of Mary Kay Ash, two locally produced movies scheduled for opening night of the Dallas Video Festival, I couldn’t help wondering: at what point, exactly, did the passion go out of Cynthia Salzman Mondell and…
thursday november 10 John Wayne Bobbitt and the Bobbitt Girls: C’mon, you know you want to. Cast aside, for a moment, all those tiresome warnings from the cultural elite on both the left and the right–I mean journalists, scholars, and others who control the information flow–about America careening into moral…
There are, of course, two Dallases. There’s slick, soulless, sprawling, sterile Dallas, the one that all right-thinking boulevardiers disdain. And then there’s quirky, progressive, funky, interesting, artistic Dallas, its wee heart beating like a field mouse in its hole, which is all the more cherished by the cognoscenti (you and…
