Two things that can never be mentioned in the same breath without triggering the gag reflex: “John Waters” and “dump.” I bet I know the first image that juxtaposition conjured in your mind: the infamous closing scene from Waters’ Pink Flamingos. Even if you haven’t seen the movie, you probably…
Just because a period of destruction is long past doesn’t mean it’s completely erased. This is especially clear in countries like Poland, where death camps of the Holocaust took a staggering number of human lives. Last Winter, a photographic exhibition by Stephanie Brown and Emily Ewbank, depicts images of 10…
You hate the robber who mugged you last week, but we celebrate outlaws who made Texas their playground in the 1800s. Why? Blame the hats. Criminals in stylish hats such as Stetsons and fedoras seem cool, even if they were killers. Get the skinny on some hat-wearing outlaws when Dallas…
When it comes to “things I love,” Billy Joel and various foodstuffs are always at the top of the list. I’ve been living here in Allentown (er, Obsessionville) since my childhood, and happily the two worlds collided a few years ago when Billy married foodie Katie Lee Joel. As more…
Remember that grizzly old actor who played Whistler the vampire hunter alongside Wesley Snipes in the Blade trilogy? Well, in case you didn’t know, he’s a singer-songwriter too. Starting out his recording career in Nashville working as a janitor at Columbia’s Music Row Studios in 1966, Kris Kristofferson was cleaning…
This year marks the 16th birthday of Mario Kart, the landmark Nintendo franchise that consists of eight identical racing games and legions of fans who buy every one of them. And 16 years later, nobody really has a problem with this. True to form, Mario Kart Wii offers no significant…
Something funny, sad but a little bit wonderful happens between audience and players in Rain: The Beatles Experience, the musical tribute show winding up a nearly sold-out run at the Music Hall at Fair Park. Not for a second do the four singer-musicians portraying the John, Paul, George and Ringo…
Converting a fondly remembered cartoon series—one of the first Japanese animes syndicated on American TV—into a prospective franchise, the Matrix masters, Larry and Andy Wachowski, have taken another step toward the total cyborganization of the cinema. Even more than most summer-season f/x fests, Speed Racer is a live action/animation hybrid…
David Mamet’s Redbelt is a tricky bar brawl—call it the Roundhouse of Games. The writer-director has scarcely abandoned his sense of the movies as an innately duplicitous medium, one best suited to stories that play out as conspiratorial chess matches. But, with his 10th feature—an entertaining tale of high-stakes martial…
No adult has ever been able to codify what separates a good movie from a classic. In kid terms, though—those favored by Son of Rambow, a chipper tribute to the cinema as both supplier and repository of dreams—a good movie merely sends you bounding home from the theater. A great…
When the trailer for Star Wars: Episode I first hit theaters, some fans bought tickets for the movie it was presented with, watched the trailer, and then walked out — essentially paying full price for a fraction of the final product. Superfans are happy to do that sort of thing…
Chalk it up to personal preference, but I’ve always been fonder of those comic-book heroes who emerge by intent rather than happenstance. I mean the ones, like Batman’s Bruce Wayne, whose transformation from average Joe into masked crusader is an act of will instead of the unintended result of a…
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: A lonely dwarf, a wisecracking Cuban-American and a grieving mother walk into each other’s lives, laugh together, cry together, grow, change and heal each other’s emotional wounds. Cue Sundance prizes, Miramax pickup, torrent of glowing reviews and a surprisingly robust indie box-office…
Few shows are so overdone as this one. Critics dread reviewing it again and again. Ardent theatergoers greet its title on a new season brochure with groans of disappointment. Thinking Hello, Dolly! maybe? How about Tuesdays With Morrie? Either or both. They’re always playing somewhere, these two. And like theatrical…
In Made of Honor, Patrick Dempsey plays a conveniently rich and willfully single serial “fornicator” slowly but surely domesticated by his unspoken love for longtime BFF Hannah (Michelle Monaghan), who’s on her way to Scotland to marry Mr. Right Now since Mr. Right’s too chickenshit to say boo before her…
In 2001, a Dawson’s Creek version of Othello, called O, was released. I think old Bill Shakespeare would’ve loved it. A remix of Othello centered on high school basketball star Odin James, and featuring Josh Hartnett as Iago and Julia Stiles as Desdemona? What’s not to love? Shakespeare Dallas’ summer…
Conventional wisdom (as well as the unconventional wisdom of Jim Schutze, who wrote a book about race relations in Dallas) has it that this city was never a hotbed of activism (more of a warm bed, some say) and that the civil rights movement here was more akin to a…
When someone mentions sampling milk, all I can think of is that nasty scene in Napoleon Dynamite. I can’t help it. Ick. Hopefully the milk sampling portion of the Got Milk? Mustache Mobile Tour will be less revolting. That’s right, ladies and gents, the Mustache Mobile Tour is coming to…
Stanley Kubrick’s 1957 anti-war flick Paths of Glory was the first of his films to really showcase the potential of one of the cinema’s greatest artists. This film virtually wallows in the trenches of World War I Europe, and you can almost smell the rot through the screen. The focus…
Within the past year, I’ve managed to murder roughly a dozen plants; daisies, aloe and peace lilies (among others) have all fallen to the wayside in my pursuit of a green thumb. For a while I blamed freaky Texas weather, but I know that’s not possible, because only a couple…
Recent studies have proven that women may enjoy, but cannot actually be described as loving flowers until they enter the maternal state. The maternal state, however, is not exclusively that of having passed offspring through the vaginal canal, but may be inclusive of being a pet mommy, baby-sitter, stepmother, godmother,…
Some folks have no stomach for Arianna Huffington, who runs the popular news/commentary Web site The Huffington Post, and those folks are generally Republicans. Her flip-floppery from conservative Republican to independent to liberal Democrat makes her seem opportunistic and grasping. The problem I have with her is more about her…
