Pass the blintzesThis Sunday, the Jewish Community Center hosts the Fifth Annual Jewish Arts Fest at the Meyerson. According to the press release, this event will “highlight the sounds, sights, smells, and tastes of Jewish culture.” Funny thing about Jewish culture: It exists. This can be something of a sore…
He’s sitting in a makeshift conference room in a temporary building, not far from where workmen are finishing his more permanent, palatial digs — maybe a long touchdown pass or kickoff return from SMU’s nearly finished Gerald J. Ford Stadium. Even now, with silver and green wires hanging everywhere, with…
“Please hold for Tammy Faye.” The few seconds between those words and those that follow, uttered by the woman who once haunted pay-to-pray TV like a mascara-ed harlequin, are interminable. Until a month ago, the notion of talking to Tammy Faye Bakker-Messner, once the most adored and reviled figure in…
Directed by Howard Deutch. Written by Vince McKewin. Starring Keanu Reeves, Gene Hackman, Brooke Langton, Orlando Jones, Jon Favreau, and Jack Warden. Opens Friday.
t would be the easiest thing in the world to write off But I’m a Cheerleader, the story of a teenager discovering her sexual identity through a program designed to repress it, as a Saturday Night Live sketch awkwardly inflated to feature length. But when you start looking deeper into…
Before we get into it, a few of life’s sorrowful inevitabilities: Friends will vanish; romantic love will deteriorate; family will freak; and, sooner or later, the matrix will come to claim your soul. No, no, not that matrix — not some silly, goopy sci-fi escape hatch — but the big,…
Murphy and Pryor. Skywalker and Kenobi. Amos and Zeppelin. Regardless of the creative universe, the maverick apprentice tends to stride off into territory beyond the edges of the master’s map. So it is with Alan Rudolph, whose career blossomed after serving as assistant director to Robert Altman on Nashville in…
The October of my sophomore year in high school, a small group of friends and I drove a short way outside Dallas to a haunted house called something like “Eternal Torture” or “Infinite Terror” or “The House of Endless Screams.” We should have been clued in to the experience that…
Pam Johnson, founder of the Irving-based Secret Society of Happy People, may be onto something. As she says on the group’s Web site (www.ssohp.com), “Somewhere between The Ed Sullivan Show and The Jerry Springer Show, talking about being happy became politically incorrect.” People are almost afraid to be happy these…
Toy aisles are like Hollywood — every year there are more young faces and fewer of the old ones. There’s the new blood: Arthur, the Teletubbies, Bear in the Big Blue House, Pokémon, and Blue and her clues. Then come the middle-aged toys: the residents of Sesame Street, a Muppet…
I am Vlad the Impaler, Joe Eszterhas’ penis. You know Joe, right? Bigfoot-looking son of a bitch, like Jerry Garcia after he swallowed Brian Wilson on an Acapulco Gold high? The guy who wrote Basic Instinct and Showgirls and Flashdance and a whole lotta crap for which he was paid…
There are many, many productive paths a bright, ambitious young fellow can pursue in America. He can, for instance, start a mediocre rock band and try to make music for beer commercials. He can also design a Web site to advertise Web sites about Web sites. Or there’s always the…
It’s a pleasure to say that Clint Eastwood reverses his recent downward slide –A Perfect World (1993), The Bridges of Madison County (1995), Absolute Power (1997), and True Crime (1999), each of which has seemed less satisfying than its predecessor–with Space Cowboys, his latest. It isn’t an especially profound film,…
To hell with PETA: They really should test producer Jerry Bruckheimer’s movies on animals before releasing them. Just unleashing them into theaters every few months seems so unhealthy, like spraying pesticide into the water supply or selling decaying fish to Chinese restaurants and calling it “pork.” Every few months, a…
Honestly now, have you, of late, found yourself enthralled by pleasing stimuli? Please, no nauseating responses like “Aromatherapy shifts my reality” or “After I get rolfed, my heart is more open to love.” Instead, think of the good, serendipitous stuff, the random intoxicants that bombard your subcutaneous organs. For example,…
In 1995, a former Jesuit priest and scholar in Eastern languages published a religious study that has since become indispensable to Christians, agnostics, and pagans alike–a book that undertook a witty, irreverent, somewhat distant, but astringently observant investigation of all the sex, blood, pestilence, smiting, betrayal, and vengeance in the…
Words like “amazing” and “wondrous” have been so overused that now they’re just a tad more meaningful than “neat” or “cool.” The boss’ new haircut isn’t merely nice, it’s fabulous. A fancy meal doesn’t just taste good, it’s spectacular. The words are cheapened, making it much more difficult to sound…
Sometimes it’s downright difficult to live in Dallas. The heat, pollution, and traffic are out of control. People don’t trust the city government. And, darn it, there’s just no place to shop. But keep your chin up: There is hope. In the name of research and goodwill, we sacrificed an…
Mike White, the writer and star of Chuck & Buck, has grown a little weary of all the intense scrutiny from writers who interview him for the film. But he’s sensible enough to know that it’s part of the press drill for a hot indie property. He also understands why…
The bewildering penchant of recent American movies for glorifying the lovable naïf, the perpetual adolescent, and the village idiot takes a strange new turn in Miguel Arteta’s dark comedy Chuck & Buck. Arteta’s hero, Buck O’Brien (Mike White), is a 27-year-old man-child who eats lollipops all day, takes refuge in…
For one moment–and that’s all you can stomach–really look at Eddie Murphy’s filmography. You will notice how his bad films (and most transcend that feeble definition, falling more often into the “wretched” category) far outweigh the good. You will see that those few good films–Murphy’s Holy Trinity of Funny: 48…
It’s a premise that’s bound to succeed. A young man living on the edge is trying to pull it all together while frequenting 12-step programs and holding down a job that seems calculated to drive him insane. Searching for a way out, he makes contact with a mysterious figure who…
