Though the modern museum’s roots go back to the Age of Enlightenment, in terms of sheer numbers, the recently departed century was its Golden Age. According to the Association of Art Museum Directors, its 180 member museums hold more than 14,000,000 works of art. These statistics don’t begin to account…
Nobody likes a showoff. In fact, no one likes a winner if he wins too much. Something makes us want to tear down anyone or anything that becomes too successful. From politicians to pop stars, anyone who sits on top for too long eventually will be ousted. The Harlem Globetrotters,…
In a city where African-American and Latino activists have gotten into some ugly tussles at school board and city council meetings, we can’t think of a better idea than taking essentially apolitical art and using it for political ends–or, to be more specific, to help end the politics that divide…
The voice on the other line is gruff but familiar, a unique Texas twang with a deep timbre. Strangely, it’s comforting, even hypnotizing, and it’s easy to understand how the conversation quickly morphs from interview to chat to lullaby. The voice, so calm and confident, is one that’s been heard…
Vampires have always seemed to be the coolest of the doomed, creatures both fascinating and evil. Amid all the seduction, sexual metaphor, and consumption, however, the source of the creature’s unholy hunger usually remains a mystery. Not so in Shadow of the Vampire by E. Elias Merhige (Begotten), a film…
The Wedding Planner begins with footage of a 7-year-old girl performing a wedding ceremony with her Barbies, a fitting opening since the movie that ensues could almost be the result of a screenwriter literally transcribing the play scenario enacted by a small child and her dolls. If you were (or…
There are few things more deadly in cinema than theater types taking stage material and simply transposing it to the big screen. But occasionally such adaptations are handled so deftly that they work. To stretch a point, one could mention My Dinner with Andre as a successful instance; and, I’m…
Irish playwright Conor McPherson is often paired with his equally successful enfant terrible peer Martin McDonagh (The Beauty Queen of Leenane), but McPherson is slowly overtaking his more reclusive artistic brother by single-handedly reviving the idea of storytelling as theater–or at least bursting the membrane that separates the two forms…
The role of artistic associate at Dallas Theater Center is turning into a briefer and briefer stepping stone on a long career path: Preston Lane follows previous associate Jonathan Moscone’s departure a mere two and a half years after Lane came to work alongside Richard Hamburger. And just as Moscone…
There are still a handful of dreamers in Dallas, and they’re not all starry-eyed lottery players, or dot.com entrepreneurs, or the founders of Legend Airlines, for whom “a wing and a prayer” proved no match for Southwest Airlines. Dallas isn’t Disneyland, or Camelot, or Oz. Dr. Jacob Kupersztoch found this…
Before Sesame Street but during the heyday of Captain Kangaroo, legend has it, Dallas-area kiddies got their kicks while they ate their Kix in front of the TV from one of two locally produced morning shows. It was the early 1960s, and television was still creeping out of its primordial…
Pink Floyd’s Roger Waters wrote The Wall after a tour in which he felt isolated from audiences. He saw them merely as barbiturate-laden barnacles clinging to the band and viewing what he considered art as simply a good soundtrack for their lava lamps. In effect, an actual barrier was being…
For 17 years, Dorothy Swanson has waged the loneliest battle: keeping good shows on television, a medium that exists as if only to taunt her. You can hear in her voice the toll such a struggle has taken on her. Her voice breaks and softens when she speaks about the…
This is a test. It’s tougher than one with Rorschach ink blots, harder than a post-grad LSAT. It’s not a pop quiz like the ESPN “Game of the Week” or last Friday’s home letdown against Western Conference foe Detroit. For the Stars, for these Stars–a group remarkably different from recent,…
Quite obviously, Guy Ritchie was paying very close attention to the early-’90s Tarantino double-whammy of Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction. Fascinated by the commercial success of films that blend ruthless violence with brash cutting and cartoonish characters, Ritchie emerged with a hit called Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels. For…
For his first film as director, 1991’s The Indian Runner, Sean Penn chose as his source material Bruce Springsteen’s “Highway Patrolman,” off Nebraska. It was a perfect song, and it spawned a nearly perfect movie; Penn, writing his own screenplay about two brothers–one good, one bad, each inseparable from the…
“This is some damn fine coffee you got here in Twin Peaks. And some damn good cherry pie. But I have to tell you something, sheriff: Last night, I had a dream in which a dancing midget talked backward, thus leading me to believe that our killer is a man…
The 20th century is replete with examples of unconscionable crimes carried out in the name of some quasi-political, military, or religious cause–acts of such misguided judgment and mindless brutality. The My Lai massacre of 1968, in which American GIs gunned down more than 500 Vietnamese civilians, most of them women…
Writer-director Anne DeSalvo explores the notion that compromise is a good thing with rare grace and an abundance of rich characterization in her debut feature, The Amati Girls. Centered on a gaggle of four adult sisters, the movie presents a lively discourse upon love and life that would kill you…
Last Sunday night’s production of The Frequency of Death at Pegasus Theatre drew a healthy crowd when you consider its performance time, and as I cast my snooping journalist’s ears around the place to gather scraps of conversation, I surmised that many of these people were either first-time or very…
The centuries-old global art of shadow puppetry has been given a little light by three estimable Dallas theater talents: director Lisa Lee Schmidt, producer-puppeteer Laurel Hoitsma, and designer-performer Dalton James. Working under a loose, newly founded stage entity known as Xlthlx Productions, the trio has found a unique storybook solution…
For contemporary artists living and working outside the world’s art centers, regionalism has long been a high-risk, low-reward career path. To choose it is to work in a style whose heyday is long gone, to opt for a future with built-in limitations, to abandon all hope of ever being The…
