When we Westerners think of the Mediterranean Sea, we picture a turquoise playground of the filthy rich and famous, bordering Spain, France, Italy and Greece. Yet, the Mediterranean is a big sea, and the countries that border it on the south and east are North African places (Libya and Egypt)…
The shelves are empty, the vault pillaged. Soon enough David Cross will have no good excuse to talk about Mr. Show with Bob and David, the sketch show he and Bob Odenkirk created (apparently with a Coke can converted into a bong, several notepads and pens, a mutual fondness for…
9/23 Any competition that features wickets, mallets and balls, we are so there. The 2004 Texas Classic Tournament, sponsored by the Dallas Croquet Association, is one of two tournaments we know of that uses these three items. It’s also the only one that you can discuss in a family newspaper…
9/26 Before the actors arrived to rehearse, James Vaughan, the director of the Fifth Annual Caring Friends Follies, took on the task of explaining the show. The Follies is a running gag this year on the comically bountiful theme of Las Vegas. Although not all of the 40 acts (“There’s…
Fortune smiles on groovy egregiousness. In the case of Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, the filmmakers’ investment in their weird visions is wildly unorthodox, but the payoff is oddly satisfying. The movie features myriad killer robots, raucous underwater dogfights and Laurence Olivier’s best work since he died 15…
Essayist. Playwright. Radio personality. Librettist. Actor. Novelist. Now, with Bright Young Things, the inimitable British wit Stephen Fry debuts as feature screenwriter and director. Best known here in the colonies either as Jeeves (opposite Hugh Laurie) in Jeeves and Wooster, or as Peter in Peter’s Friends, or possibly as Oscar…
Hey, have you heard about that new Danish film that just came out? Distributed by Lars von Trier’s Zentropa Entertainments, has the same star as one of the Dogme ’95 movies and features a dysfunctional family full of people who yell at each other? Wait…don’t run away! It’s a good…
If Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence were a live-action sequel, there would be a lot of gossip about star histrionics, creative conflicts and so forth. Since the original Ghost in the Shell, first released nearly 10 years ago, made an anime icon out of its star, the frequently nude…
Consider a world in which morality and legality have been replaced by frontier-style justice and freakish despotism. In which dwindling resources and a diseased environment summon the most callow and petty aspects of human nature. In which confused urbanites join deranged cults, abusers claim unwarranted authority, and children witness horrors…
Smoke and poetry thicken the air in Anna in the Tropics, now onstage in an intensely passionate production at Dallas Theater Center. Set in a cigar factory outside Tampa in 1929, Nilo Cruz’s two-act play, winner of the 2003 Pulitzer for best new drama, unfolds like a hazy, sexy dream…
Anna in the Tropics In a little cigar factory in Ybor City, Florida, workers sit at a long wooden table, quietly rolling tobacco leaves while listening to their hired “lector” read aloud from Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. Soon they’re taking on the roles of Anna, her husband and the count in…
Giggles Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me; fool me three times and I let loose a booming guffaw with great decadent pleasure. In what appears to be a string of exhibits based on simulacrum and fakery, this show is part of Angstrom Gallery’s ongoing…
Art is omnipresent, it seems. Everywhere, one can find it in a fantastically designed structure, a detailed sign, a creative street tag and, sure, the good old standards of painting, photography and sculpture. With an open mind, art is easy to find and take in. What isn’t as easy or…
Thursday, September 16 Be careful, Carlos Mencia, or people will start calling you the Latino Dave Chappelle. Like Chappelle, Mencia’s comedy deals with racial stereotypes, misconceptions and differences in an “equal opportunity offender” style. And now, following in Chappelle’s footsteps, Mencia is preparing a television show for Comedy Central. But…
Let’s talk for just a minute about white shoes. Labor Day weekend has come and gone, and with it a time-honored ritual marking the change of seasons. Well-bred Southern ladies and gentlemen pack away their white shoes on Labor Day and don’t get them out again until Memorial Day. They…
9/19 Would someone please explain the appeal of a parade? People walk or drive slowly down the street, waving. Others stand on the sidewalk and watch. It’s like a traffic jam, only with beads and candy. This is fun? Apparently it is, at least to those who have something to…
9/18 Remember when Johnny Depp stole our hearts and creeped us out a little with his unique performance of a pale freak with scissors for hands? We wondered how a few cuts here and there to shrubbery made him a god in a little suburban town, which must have been…
9/18 A comedian once remarked that we live in culturally strange times. It’s an era when the best-known golfer is black, one of the most famous rappers is white and the tallest guy in the NBA is Chinese. We may live in strange times, but the shake-up of cultural stereotypes…
9/17 One day last week, an actor named Marco Rodriguez was explaining what things used to be like in Dallas. “Every time they were doing Latin theater here, it was always very much about the blood and the guts and all the pain of the Latin people,” he says, a…
Silver City is being marketed as a biting, bitter send-up of George W. Bush. Hence the copious use of trailer footage in which Chris Cooper, as Colorado gubernatorial candidate Dickie Pilager, stumbles over simple sentences, dodges reporters’ questions with mindless macho explications (“My message to the criminals is this: You…
The most crucial piece of equipment in Hollywood is obviously not the movie camera. It’s not the casting couch. Not even the Rolls-Royce Silver Cloud or the personal trainer. It’s the Xerox machine–which was preceded by carbon paper. That’s why, over the years, we have had three Mrs. Norman Mains…
Rare is the film that caters to fans of rabbits, motorcycles, Gordon Lightfoot and fellatio, but now, thanks entirely to Vincent Gallo, we have that demographic nailed. With The Brown Bunny, the cinematic enfant terrible who gave us the awful pleasures of Buffalo ’66 returns, but don’t expect a retread…
