Although playwright David Mamet swears he wrote Oleanna before the Clarence Thomas-Anita Hill hearings, you can’t help but feel the same bitter resentments and frustrated rage drifting out of Mamet’s two-character drama that turned Hill’s testimony into a kind of national catharsis. Mamet is aiming to achieve that same kind…
Except for hardcore porn, no movie genre is as disreputable as horror. It is inherently, and proudly, visceral–a severed finger in the champagne flute of cinema history. Even when a highbrow auteur like David Cronenberg or Stanley Kubrick comes along and tries to swathe the genre’s bleeding, ripped-up heart with…
We’re in the movies! The Dallas Observer’s downtown digs will become a makeshift film set courtesy of the crew of Tornado, a new noirish thriller starring James Spader, Eric Stoltz, Peter Strauss, and toothy ’70s macho icon James Coburn. “It’s a blackmail mystery that takes place amongst a group of…
Ever once in a while some photographer or hiker or anthropologist or somebody finds a new “Stone Age tribe” living in Papua, New Guinea or Borneo or the Congo or the Amazon River Basin. A big article comes out in Time magazine, and somebody writes a book about how “gentle”…
Editor’s note: Nora FitzGerald, Dallas Observer’s stage columnist, is on maternity leave. Longtime Observer contributor P.B. Miller is filling in during her absence. Theatrical comedy is a tough sell these days–not that it was ever easy. Finding an audience for comedic theater is even harder now, though, because there’s a…
In the closing credits to his comic feature film debut Clerks, writer-director Kevin Smith thanks Jim Jarmusch, Spike Lee, and Richard Linklater, among others, for inspiration. It’s a good guess Smith looks to those filmmakers more as trailblazers than artistic influences. Although Clerks traffics in the same kind of confused,…
Except for Nicolas Cage, there’s no leading man in movies today who suffers as exquisitely as Matthew Broderick. He’s at his best when his characters are at their down-and-out lowest–struggling to hold onto some small shred of dignity while life is gleefully retching on them. He’s a versatile actor, but…
It’s a rainy Thursday afternoon at the headquarters of DNA Animation, Dallas’ seven-year-old hub of gleeful bad taste and excess, and the company’s core group of artists–Keith Alcorn, Paul Claerhout, John Davis, and Debbie Dunning–are taking a break. Huddled around a television set in one corner of the cluttered, computer-laden…
At a time in which sex and violence in the movies is blamed for every conceivable social ill, talking to the man who made them both a legitimate entertainment experience feels like an audience with the devil. During a four-decade career, 72-year-old filmmaker Russ Meyer has watched American gender issues…
A guy in New Jersey got hauled into court for whacking a rat with a broom handle. The charge: “needlessly killing a rodent.” The Goody Two Shoes Lobby: the Newark Humane Society. Welcome to the era of Rat Rights. I would think that, if any city would be happy to…
thursday november 3 Barbie Appraisals: In one of her last essays before she resigned as New York Times columnist to pursue fiction and motherhood, Anna Quindlen admitted she might be an old stick-in-the-mud, but she hated Barbie–or, more accurately, the “feminine” values of appearance, acquisitiveness, and artifice Barbie symbolizes. Although…
