thursday june 18 Tuna, Texas, may be a fictional city, but the characters who inhabit it are awful real. You can find them crowded around the back of a beat-up pickup truck in one of the countless one-stoplight towns that dot the back roads of Texas, or distributing “Free Richard…
thursday june 11 Stephen King once said, “I have seen the future of the horror genre, and his name is Clive Barker.” Barker hasn’t really lived up to King’s hyperbole, but the British author and director has built a rabid cult following based on his perverse, six-volume set of stories,…
What happened to car design? Seems as though the architects of the machines we practically live in have grown complacent lately. They’ve rolled out legions of cookie-cutter sport utility vehicles (what’s the difference, really, between a Range Rover and a Land Cruiser, besides ethnicity?) and look-alike econo-mobiles (the new Civics…
The life of the rodeo wife is filled with the constant anxiety that some day, a wild steer or a bucking bronco will stomp her husband to death. It is riddled with the gnawing realization that even the best of heroes can die in the arena, caught between the hard…
The essays and book-length ruminations of Susan Sontag, the American zeitgeist’s preeminent fag hag, are accessible, friendly, almost conversational in their explorations of camp aesthetic and AIDS mythology. But her mammoth first novel, The Volcano Lover, from which I had the fortitude only to snatch scattered sections, felt like–horrors!–a veteran…
Henry Jaglom’s movies offer everything that Americans hate about French films, but with little of the philosophical depth or visual daring that mark the best French cinema. He captures the annoying qualities of Woody Allen movies–the self-absorption, the feigned feminism, the pretentiousness–without achieving anything like Allen’s humor and charm. Talky,…
Early on in Six Days, Seven Nights, Harrison Ford’s drunken beach pilot Quinn Harris offers some advice to Anne Heche’s vacationing Robin Monroe. He warns that people often go to isolated island paradises looking for romance. But if you don’t bring it with you, you ain’t gonna find it. If…
Star Wars notwithstanding, film revivals rarely work on a large scale anymore. Blame it on cable or videotape, or just the ever increasing number of new films released every year, but today’s audiences–born and bred on the blockbuster and a steady diet of coming attractions, waiting eagerly for tomorrow’s movie,…
Prop and costume sales are usually just overpriced garage sales, a way for a theater company to clear out the basement and make some quick money. Most of the items would be practically worthless by themselves; anybody who has ever seen the green-foam-and-staples monstrosity that Eddie Murphy wore as Gumby…
There have been numerous American plays that have grappled with what might be called “the morning after” dilemma–as in, “OK, what do I do the morning after I’ve spent the night with someone I just met?” Think David Mamet’s Sexual Perversity in Chicago or Terrence McNally’s Frankie and Johnny at…
We were walking along Cedar Springs–my mother and I–when it happened. A few weekends back, while hitting the so-called “gallery district,” we passed a crowd filtering into the Florence Art Gallery. Curious, we peered into the window before a helpful bystander filled us in: “It’s that child prodigy, you know…
It’s a truism that unless your film picks up momentum as it goes along, you’d do well not to put a ticking clock in it. Thrillers like The Big Clock and DOA work because they’re superior mousetraps that have found a way to put time itself in pursuit of the…
Rule number one: when crafting a thriller, make sure the audience can relate to, identify with, or empathize with at least one of the characters. Rule number two: the characters’ motivations must be clear. Fail in either area–or worse yet, both–and you end up with a film like A Perfect…
Lawn Dogs doesn’t start with the words “Once upon a time,” but it might as well. The film is a fairy tale, plain and simple–and if you argue that this is nothing more than a clever way to say the symbolism and plot points are terribly tired, you won’t get…
The Truman Show, starring Jim Carrey, is the zeitgeist movie of the hour. How could it not be? It’s all about the omnipotence of television and how our lives seem scripted by some unseen force–a TV producer, perhaps? Zeitgeist movies, almost by definition, get written about not only by film…
Most people associate the disco era with hedonism, homosexuality, a sense of community, tacky fashions, and awful music. But in The Last Days of Disco Whit Stillman imagines the era as merely a singles bar for romantics in search of soulmates, largely heterosexual and hardly debauchees. The clothes, and the…
Festivals such as the Texas Scottish Festival and Highland Games have always seemed like a Cliff’s Notes version of history. For the most part, heritage festivals are just an excuse to get dressed up in a silly costume and drink heavily. Many years of culture are crammed into a few…
The gender thing again? C’mon. Less than a year ago, the usually adventurous Arlington Museum of Art ran an exhibit titled Women’s Work, showcasing the female-tinged artwork of a dozen or so emerging women artists. Back then, I was both bemused and irritated with the gender angle; the individual works…
thursday june 4 “Colorin Colorado” is an idiomatic expression in Spanish that is used at the end of children’s stories, but in the case of Colorin Colorado: The Art of Indian Children, it marks the beginning. The Art of Indian Children is an exhibition of colorful wall-sized murals created by…
By the time you read this, the Dallas Stars will either be down two games to none in the Western Conference finals against the Detroit Red Wings or have the series all knotted up at one game apiece; by the time you read this, the Stars will either have their…
Comic actor Coy Covington trowels on the base and mascara far too infrequently for Dallas audiences; underneath all that getup and goo, he has a bloodhound’s sense for the moment to play comedy up or down. While he stalks the daytime in man drag, he ought to consider teaching lessons…
Frank Sinatra never gave a better performance as an actor than he did in The Man With the Golden Arm (1955) as Frankie Machine, a hot-shot poker dealer and junkie who emerges from prison hoping to kick all his bad habits (heroin included) and earn a living as a drummer…
