Woody Allen is back on screen in Small Time Crooks, a bittersweet comedy that in many ways could have been lifted straight from the ’30s. For the most part, it’s Woody Allen Lite, which is not at all a bad thing. While one doesn’t want to penalize Allen for his…
If you had asked me in 1969 what was the best movie ever made, the answer would likely have been The Valley of Gwangi, in which a group of cowboys in the Mexican desert find a gully full of leftover dinosaurs, animated by Ray Harryhausen, and lasso a tyrannosaurus rex…
Road Trip makes American Pie look like Fast Times at Ridgemont High; Fast Times look like Animal House; and Animal House look like Citizen Kane. It ranks (indeed, it is rank) among the most soul-deadening movies ever made; it has no pulse and seeks to steal yours with a cynical…
Dial the number of the Deep Ellum Center for the Arts, and a recording tells you it’s no longer a working line. Step into the cavernous Commerce Street space on an upcoming weekend night, though, and you will discover the center is still very valuable in its dying gasp. Between…
A recent cover story in American Theatre discussed how the national network of prominent children’s theater in cities such as Minneapolis, Seattle, St. Louis, and Dallas was beginning to generate plays without “blue or pink plaid (and) fake furry animal costumes.” Issues of race, sexuality, and mortality had been introduced…
He calls them “the dogs,” like other people say “the kids.” He’ll say he was somewhere with “the dogs,” or he was bike-riding with “the dogs,” or he couldn’t take “the dogs” on the book-signing tour. He talks about his first one, Man Ray, as if it were a human…
Shake-ing it up One change in the lineup for this summer’s Shakespeare Festival of Dallas seems to lend credence to the persistent rumors that Dallas’ twitchy Undermain Theatre, under the direction of Katherine Owens and Bruce DuBose, is setting its sights on a move to New York City. Undermain and…
Trent Lott, Tom DeLay, and their Republican ilk have condemned the Clinton administration for its recent declaration of AIDS as “a national security threat,” saying it’s just a Democratic election-year grab for votes from a key demographic. It’s true if you take only the most literal sense of the phrase…
It’s probably happened to everyone. I’ve watched something so hilarious, so brilliant, so truly a piece of comic genius that I have to share it with someone…well, everyone. So I relay the story, laughing loudly at each joke, while my friend stands with furrowed brow, eventually muttering “Hmmmm, yeah, sounds…
The following is a list of women who have been raped, mutilated, tortured, enslaved, crippled, or murdered–and quite often, all of the above. In some cases, these women have also suffered miscarriages, been rendered infertile, contracted horrific diseases, and gone insane. Some of them have even been killed twice, perhaps…
Yet another version of Hamlet? Will they never stop? Ah, well, at least Michael Almereyda’s new adaptation is one of those really different takes on the venerable play. While the last two widely seen versions–the 1990 Mel Gibson/Franco Zeffirelli film and the four-hour-plus 1996 Kenneth Branagh/Kenneth Branagh version–were relatively straight…
This was to be a column extolling the daring and inventiveness of a very groovy Sci Fi Network television show called good vs. evil, in which two dead men — a ‘fro-sporting, cool-spouting brutha and his pale-faced partner — try to save the souls of those who have made Faustian…
Digital video is poised to become a major factor in commercial filmmaking, and Time Code, the new feature from Mike Figgis (Leaving Las Vegas), could be used as a commercial for the process, which is its greatest point of interest. The movie is not so much an intriguing story as…
Silence, you who will dismiss Tom Tykwer’s lugubrious follow-up to Run Lola Run as a sophomoric step backward, because Winter Sleepers, shot before Lola in 1997, is a step backward, literally. With this in mind, it’s easier to assess this heady precursor to Tykwer’s later fireworks for its own successes…
When stars get popular enough (or win enough Oscars), they begin to get to call their own shots: Thus we have The Big Kahuna, the debut release of Kevin Spacey’s production company. Kahuna also marks the film debut of stage director John Swanbeck and screenwriter Roger Rueff. And boy, can…
When asked to name the most erotic sequence they have ever seen in a film, people tend to pick moments like the love scene between Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland in Don’t Look Now or that indelible image of Kathleen Turner in Body Heat, standing just inside her house, silently…
Given that most film studios have multimillion-dollar marketing budgets with which to target 18- to 25-year-olds, it’s astonishing how little they seem to know about the everyday life of those they’re supposed to be studying. Drew Barrymore has never been kissed? Please. Rachel Leigh Cook undatable until Freddie Prinze Jr…
There appears to be quite a bit of flux in the Dallas theater scene now, with the ultimate destination for at least two companies still unknown. Right on the heels of the Theatre Three opening of Mizlansky/Zilinsky, or “Schmucks”, the regional premiere of a comedy by Jon Robin Baitz, a…
In the last hour, 23 people in the metroplex will have decided to start their own film festivals — in a theater, perhaps, or maybe in their living rooms or in the back of their vans. Where there was once but a single film fest on the local horizon (the…
With the rise of Latin Americans as formidable consumers and hotly pursued voters, the world premiere of former Dallas playwright Octavio Solis’ Dreamlandia couldn’t be more propitious. Solis’ map of the shifting fault lines between illusion and reality on the Texas-Mexico border, directed by Richard Hamburger, is the centerpiece of…
It’s easy to compound details and build an ominous “trend” for a whole scene, but one sad development I can confirm in this space: New Theatre Company, which since 1994 has produced some of the most disciplined and adventurous state, regional, and national premieres for Dallas audiences, is moving. Not…
There is a killing late in Gladiator, Ridley Scott’s new heroic epic, and it is one of those wonderfully cathartic slayings that makes a wide-eyed audience rise and cheer. After several brutal battles, after much bloodshed, after considerable suffering both needless and entertaining, a blade finds its mark, and a…
