Every so often, I get a semicoherent piece of hate mail that makes an interesting point: What I do is worthless. I’m not, mind you, referring to the usual bleating of aggrieved partisans, the rabid billets from fans or gallery owners or artists’ relatives. For those objectors, I have one…
The shop situated in Exposition Park feels like what Tom Waits’ voice sounds like. It’s edgy; it’s at times macabre, and it’s got a great sense of humorous realism. And like the voice that became increasingly iconic over the years, Forbidden Media has evolved into its own landmark destination. Fairly…
More than the bunions, calf muscles and hip joints of Dallas dancers are hurting this year. The tough economy is particularly rough on “the arts,” which are increasingly dependent on corporate sponsors when individual supporters get a look at what happened last quarter to their 401(k)s. We almost lost the…
Citizen-soldiers eager to renew hostilities in the American culture wars can shoot a couple of spitballs at each other this week over Little Secrets, a teen-anxiety movie that leaves no doubt where it stands on family values and moral absolutes: It approves. The shock troops of the Cinema Without Limits…
At a recent performance by the new ChelseaPark Productions troupe at the Trinity River Arts Center, the lights came up for intermission between two one-acts and half a dozen patrons headed for their cars. That effectively diminished the audience by a third. It’s a tough time to get a new…
When last we saw Piet Mondrian, he was a completely cosmopolitan man. To be sure, we all know the backstory: how Mondrian, the hero of De Stijl, champion of the abstract grid, started out as one more Dutch landscape painter. And plenty of books and courses and even minor exhibitions…
Things you will learn from a forthcoming oral history of Saturday Night Live: Dan Aykroyd slept with, among others, Gilda Radner, Laraine Newman and writer Rosie Shuster, the latter of whom was, at the time, married to the show’s producer and creator, Lorne Michaels. To this day, Chevy Chase regrets…
Annie Leibovitz has spent her photographic life capturing celebrities on film, including actors, musicians and models. Women, an exhibit of her work that has been touring for almost three years, may be a departure from her usual magazine work. “May be” because, at times, it’s hard to separate the personal…
I may safely claim to be the least qualified person to attend The Blazin’ Hot Poker Run for Big Brothers Big Sisters of North Texas. I rode on the back of a motorcycle once, and I held on so tight that I bruised the ribs of the driver. I drove…
Andrew Niccol keeps making the same movie over and over again and dressing it in slightly different clothes: the sleek charcoal Hugo Boss grays of Gattaca, the crisp Crayola hues of The Truman Show and, now, the silk-and-satin Hollywood resplendence of Simone. Niccol, writer and director, is obsessed with a…
Sometimes when a director shoots at a barn, the satisfaction comes in simply watching him hit it dead center. So it is with The Good Girl, wherein Miguel Arteta (Star Maps) targets Middle American ennui with wit, compassion and no shortage of ornery malaise. Like Arteta’s second feature, Chuck &…
Robert Evans wrote his autobiography in 1994 as much out of desperation as hubris; it cried out, “Damn it, look at me…please?” He’d produced one film during the past 10 years, The Cotton Club, which was such a colossal failure it rendered Evans a moot point in Hollywood, a position…
Director Neil LaBute (Your Friends and Neighbors, Nurse Betty) seems the unlikeliest candidate to direct the film version of British author A.S. Byatt’s Booker Award-winning best seller Possession. (OK, that’s an exaggeration: There’s always Michael Bay.) LaBute’s earlier films were resolutely tied to American culture, and Byatt’s book couldn’t be…
Up to a certain point, Paul Marino’s story is a familiar one, especially to any single guy in his 20s who likes playing with his joystick. Four years ago, Marino and his pals would leave their offices on a Friday night and go to another friend’s workplace, where they’d play…
How incredible it is to feel like you’re really there. Away from the consumers, the McDonald’s, the lattes…face to face with enormous stone constructions and things as delicate as blades of grass, as gritty as roof shingles. What’s more amazing is that this art is breathtaking on its own, not…
Just returned from the San Diego Comic Convention, the annual gathering of dork knights and wonder women (as in, “I wonder why women go to comic conventions”), the five men who founded and front Ghostwerks Comics are psyched. First of all, they paid top dollar to get their booth–“not just…
Nothing’s more disappointing than the sequel that feels forced rather than organic. It was inevitable Spy Kids, so good Miramax’s Dimension division released it twice last year (once, in a special “long-form” version containing a handful of added scenes), would spawn a sibling; that movie, as neon-bright as the latest…
In case you didn’t happen to read the tagline on the ubiquitous poster, Xander Cage, also known as XXX because he’s tattooed his first initial three times on the back of his neck, is “a new breed of secret agent.” The old breed, we learn pretty quickly, is Bond, James…
Blood Work, Clint Eastwood’s 23rd film as director, is another crime thriller in the vein of, but better than, True Crime (1998) and Absolute Power (’96). And it bears a striking resemblance to 1993’s In the Line of Fire, the Eastwood vehicle directed by Wolfgang Petersen. Or maybe it resembles…
Hearing that her writer boyfriend (Tristán Ulloa) has been killed in an accident, a Madrid waitress (Paz Vega) named Lucia takes off for an island that figures more centrally in his past than she realized. As in his 1998 masterpiece Lovers of the Arctic Circle, Spanish writer/director Julio Medem here…
Friendship is almost as complicated and compelling as love. It’s romance without the sex, whether between members of the same or opposite genders. Marina (Anna Friel)–pretty, vivacious and rebellious on the outside but insecure and empty on the inside–and Holly (Michelle Williams)–shy, intellectual, also insecure–have been best friends since childhood…
A story of a somewhat troubled young man, who, heavily closeted and socially awkward, took to picking up younger males, drugging them, killing them, then fucking the corpses, chopping them up and sometimes eating them. Cutting back and forth in time between Jeffrey Dahmer’s life of crime and his late…
