A new kind of war movie for a new kind of war, Body of Lies is about the War on Terror as it is being waged on the ground, in the air, but most of all in cyberspace. Directed with terrific verve by Ridley Scott (coming after the listless American…
The protag of Mike Leigh’s Happy-Go-Lucky is a modestly gaudy people’s heroine industriously repairing the social world, one frayed interaction at a time. After extended cameos in two previous Leigh films (as a resourceful pop tart in All or Nothing and the date-raped rich girl in Vera Drake), fine-boned Sally…
Nobody in the theater intentionally puts on a “steaming turd of a play,” says Sylvia Glenn, one of two actress-characters in the showbiz-based comedy Legends. Well, actually, in the case of this script, they did. Until Uptown Players, the Oak Lawn theater company, got their clever little mitts on it,…
I have a relative who insists that the door from a public bathroom must be opened with a paper towel. She has her reasons, explaining that when people don’t wash their hands, they touch the doorknob and…you get the picture. The first time she told me this I stared at…
So, dancing is back “in” you say. There’s a reality show called So You Think You Can Dance that gets great ratings to prove it. There’s even a tour: the So You Think You Can Dance Tour 2008, where people can sit and watch salsa, ballroom, hip-hop, street dancing, contemporary,…
At the end of the summer, sports lovers nationwide gear up for fantasy football. Fans carefully draft their own teams, banking on a core of experienced players and hand-picking a few promising rookies, hoping their selections will deliver a winning season. Meanwhile, clotheshorses are playing fantasy fashion, perusing the runways…
Patrice Oneal wonders whether condoms work. “If you’re going to fuck a bitch with a condom on, and she go, ‘Ooh, I’m so glad you got that condom on, ’cause my pussy’s a mess,’ would you still fuck her?” So why is he an occasional Fox News commentator? Perhaps because…
Charles L. Mee’s new play, Big Love, sets out to prove once and for all that bigger really is better. Forget Seven Brides for Seven Brothers; this has 50 brides for 50 grooms. True, the grooms aren’t brothers, but who cares? There are 50 of them. It’s like The Bachelor…
The timing of the much-lauded Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs exhibit could not be better for the Dallas art scene as a whole. The internationally anticipated event will bring thousands of visitors from around the world to Dallas, each seeking a peek at artifacts from the past…
Although the plethora of products, beauty magazines and very confident reality show princesses might cause one to assume otherwise, only 2 percent of women consider themselves to be beautiful. Come on, ladies! Even without spouting platitudes about beauty coming from within, we can all agree that there’s something beautiful in…
In the glory days of Saturday Night Live, musically inclined comedians Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi became Elwood and Jake Blues for one of the show’s musical sketches. It was so fun that they decided to pull together some of the most respected musicians in the business and front an…
What is up with Billy Bob’s? For years it was world-famous for showcasing country and Western acts exclusively. But things have changed. A while ago, I wrote about Bret Michaels playing there, which kind of makes sense. But now the stage of this legendary honky-tonk will be “graced” by none…
George Rodrigue painted a blue dog for a collection of Cajun ghost stories in 1984, and he’s been painting different portraits of that ghostly loup-garou ever since. If the dog’s blue fur coat and eerie yellow eyes weren’t so captivating and mysterious, the dog probably would have been labeled a…
Among the better films of the last decade is Being John Malkovich, which was the breakthrough movie for director Spike Jonze and writer Charlie Kaufman. Jonze was best known for directing music videos by acts such as R.E.M. and The Beastie Boys, including one of the best videos of all…
When I was 10 years old, my fifth-grade class had to fill out a questionnaire for the yearbook, and everyone was asked to list their favorite band. I don’t remember who I chose, but I do recall the most popular answer: The Presidents of the United States of America. And…
Jameson Irish Whiskey’s abortion of a comedy tour somehow managed to choose the four least funny overgrown frat-boy douchebags on Earth, with Bert Kreischer leading the charge. Kreischer got his start when Rolling Stone named him the nation’s No. 1 Party Animal in 1997. He turned the publicity into a…
During the last presidential debate in 2004, my shoe somehow flew across the room and missed the television screen at which it was aimed, hitting (and breaking) the antenna. It took me a year and a half to get around to getting a new one. The lesson that I learned…
For every successful celebrity out there, there is often a lesser-known, sometimes slightly less attractive sibling to be found waiting in the wings. Chad Lowe, Don Swayze, Chris Penn, Clint Howard, Eric Roberts, Roger Clinton–I could go on and on. Now, some 19 years after A Time to Kill introduced…
For every successful celebrity out there, there is often a lesser-known, sometimes slightly less attractive sibling to be found waiting in the wings. Chad Lowe, Don Swayze, Chris Penn, Clint Howard, Eric Roberts, Roger Clinton–I could go on and on. Now, some 19 years after A Time to Kill introduced…
When music collides with performance art, the hope is always that nymph-like art rock icon Laurie Anderson is the mastermind. For more than three decades, Anderson has provided fodder for head-cocks and deep thoughts through amazingly diverse performances, film and, hell, even a little dance. And she’s done it all…
There’s this guy who’s known for wandering the streets late at night, kinda drunk, and harassing people by asking them lots of questions. He’s pretty blue, smokes a lot and talks frequently about pirates and other people who are typically missing appendages. No, he’s not the creepy homeless guy who…
I don’t care who you are–if you watched the Olympic gymnastic competition you wanted to squash He Kexin like a bug when Nastia Liukin got silver after tying on uneven bars. And your eyes welled up with happy tears when Luikin and Shawn Johnson went one-two in the all-around competition…
