thursday october 8 Even people who haven’t been to the State Fair of Texas know what Big Tex looks like, standing tall and proud and jug-eared at the gates of the fair, greeting visitors with a booming “Howdy folks!” Some would say that he is cornier than the corn dogs…
Long before Stephen King made horror a national pastime, there was Shirley Jackson. Born in San Francisco in 1919, the author of the wickedly creepy classic The Lottery settled in North Bennington, a small village in Vermont, after her marriage to author and literary critic Stanley Edgar Hyman. Once there,…
I don’t know…sometimes you just don’t feel like spending your whole weekend lost in a drunken haze, propping yourself up against the bar while a really crappy band blows your eardrums out through the back of your brain. Sometimes sitting in a late-night, chi-chi restaurant, making fleeting eye contact with…
Is feminism dead? When Time magazine’s June 29 cover posed that question alongside a picture of TV’s short-skirted, ditzy attorney Ally McBeal, it was not in attempt to answer it as much as to render it moot. Indeed, one wonders what happened to feminists, as the women’s movement seems to…
He walks onto the outdoor court at the Four Seasons Resort and Club, and the cheers fill the thick late-evening air even before the announcer introduces him as “one of the greatest tennis players of all time.” John McEnroe raises his racket with his left hand, nods his head full…
Marriage is a most propitious arrangement for theatrical adventure, as playwrights have known for centuries. When you throw two people into a situation that’s both legally circumscribed and saddled with the baggage of both community and individual, you’re watching an arena contest transpire. The best playwrights don’t so much pit…
The artist doesn’t want to sell his smooth wooden sculptures. He wants to give them away, as toys. Last time that sort of anti-commerce, Santa Claus attitude about art graced this city was…hell, probably never. Those are the smaller pieces, the ones artist Arthur Koch whittles during SMU staff meetings…
The ants in Antz show a lot of personality. The film is the best example yet of how a fully animated computer-generated feature can delineate facial movement. Toy Story (1995), the first such feature to be released, was brasher and more child-friendly, but Antz is more of a–how shall I…
Who would have guessed that a movie called Firelight could give off so little glow? William Nicholson, the screenwriter of Shadowlands (1993) making his directorial debut here, isn’t attempting to be ironic. He wants to create a love story in which the ardor pours through the confines of upper-class decorum…
As a professional lamenter of how “they just don’t make ’em like they used to,” I am always thrilled on those rare occasions when someone even tries to make ’em that way. So I am doubly thrilled that, with The Impostors, writer-director Stanley Tucci has tried and richly succeeded. Those…
Have adultery, murder, and greed all moved to the sticks? Once firmly rooted in the big city, the seven deadly sins have taken on a distinct country-and-western twang in recent years, thanks to noirish, tough-minded scamfests such as John Dahl’s Red Rock West (1992) and The Last Seduction (1994), James…
thursday october 1 No matter whether they’d admit it, many people have a secret jones for bad art, that is, paintings of dogs playing poker or portraits of Elvis Presley rendered on velvet or anything else you could find at a flea market or in the confines of a double-wide…
BEST PLAY-BY-PLAY TEAM Eric Nadel and Vince Cotroneo, Texas Rangers, KRLD-AM (1080) We’ve never met anyone who loved the game of baseball more than Eric Nadel, which is quite a thing to say given that Nadel has spent the last 20 years of his life watching every single Texas Rangers…
If 500X were a person, right now he’d be running around stark naked, whooping joyously, and setting things on fire. He never guessed he’d make it to 20. In this town, most would-be artists lose sight of their own creative flame well before they reach legal age, squelched as it…
As a director of action thrillers, John Frankenheimer has been a peerless stylist for nearly four decades–without leaning on a pile of glitzy special effects. What’s more, his most memorable movies, from The Manchurian Candidate (1962) to The Birdman of Alcatraz (also 1962) to 1986’s wickedly entertaining, unappreciated 52 Pick-Up…
Leelee Sobieski is a mouthful of a name (40 years ago, studio moguls would have made her change it to something short and unassuming), but get used to it, because the young actress behind it is going to be getting a lot of attention. She almost single-handedly carries A Soldier’s…
Back in the early ’70s, when John Waters made his first splash with such low-budget gross-outs as Pink Flamingos and Multiple Maniacs, who would have guessed that someday he’d be making a Hollywood film as benevolent as Pecker? In retrospect, maybe we shouldn’t be surprised. If any director has ever…
Since it moved its digs to shiny North Dallas, the Holy Trinity Greek Orthodox Church has lost its dingy historic authenticity. When it haunted the old, sprawling, stained-glass church building on Swiss Avenue, half-buried under decades’ worth of dense flora and fauna and sitting smack in the middle of a…
It’s state fair time again, and parents all over the metroplex are bracing themselves for the yearly ritual of corny dogs, endless carnival rides, and hours of lining up in the sun. Sounds like a recipe for exhaustion and acute nausea, doesn’t it? Well, this year the Science Place is…
thursday september 24 You may remember author Patricia Anthony peeking out from behind one of her books on our cover a few months ago (“Science Friction,” June 11). A former member of the classified sales staff at The Dallas Morning News, the 51-year-old Anthony is in the midst of a…
For now, Reed Easterwood is content to give away his music, quite literally. His new record, Absolute Blue, means so much to him that, until now, he has yet to sell a single copy; to profit from the music would, it seems, diminish its rewards. So instead, he has given…
Theater classes generally describe Marxist German playwright-poet Bertolt Brecht as being politically opposed to entertainment for entertainment’s sake. Theater artists should always keep audiences aware that they’re watching a play, he instructed us, and should try to remind audiences as much as possible of social injustices that collect like trails…
