Two unrelated facts: the French Revolution happened more than 200 years ago. Painting has been called “dead.” So what’s an artist doing painting the clasped hands of Napoleon and the baleful gaze of Louis the XVI? He’s kicking beautiful dust in the eyes of narrow-sighted fact-mongers, that’s what. Toronto-based Tony…
This year’s USA Film Festival may have, uh, sucked, but that doesn’t mean that great films aren’t coming to Dallas. Witness the Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture’s special screening of The Night of the Hunter, the 1955 film that did for preachers what Stephen King’s It did for clowns…
thursday april 23 Let’s face facts: If wine were really “better than masturbating” (as the tag line for the Art Bar’s Generation X Wine Tasting argues), there would be more Internet sites devoted to full-bodied Merlots instead of Pamela Lee’s full-bodied implants, and peep shows would be replaced by $1-per-glass…
Just now, Cool Storm is anything but. The two-year-old thoroughbred rages beneath his rider, a bundle of nerves wound tightly inside a fierce and beautiful half-ton frame. He shuffles from side to side, rears backward, moves any which way but forward. The horse grinds his teeth so hard, so loudly,…
The caprice of totalitarianism burdened the thoughts of a 32-year-old Albert Camus when, in 1945, he staged a theatrical meditation called Caligula, or The Meaning of Death. He hid out while the Nazis plundered France, writing inflammatory articles for the Resistance and nurturing his philosophy of the absurd that would…
With I Love You…Don’t Touch Me!, first-time filmmaker Julie Davis has made a low-budget movie about love and abstinence among under-30s that looks less to the films of her generational peers–Noah Baumbach’s Kicking and Screaming or Kevin Smith’s Chasing Amy for instance–than to Woody Allen’s quirky romances of the ’70s…
From its very first frame, Neil Jordan’s The Butcher Boy whooshes us inside the rollicking, deranged world of 12-year-old Francie Brady (Eamonn Owens). Francie is a red-headed roustabout who lives with his alcoholic “Da” (Stephen Rea) and screw-loose mother (Aisling O’Sullivan) in a small town in northern Ireland in the…
Since 1993, Denton’s Good/Bad Art Collective has made the unexpected part of its routine. From its one-night-only installation policy to its constant stretching of the definition of art, Good/Bad has created art that not only involves viewers, it depends on them. The collective’s methods extend to the concerts that help…
Machine art. Interactive kinetic sculpture. Robotic performance art. Extreme technology art. Whatever you call it, it’s usually violent, incendiary, and nihilistic. That’s what makes it fun. The Seemen, a San Francisco-based machine-art collective, descend on the Orbit Room on Tuesday, April 21, to show this cloistered town the thrill of…
thursday april 16 In our rush to get out this year’s weak USA Film Festival schedule, we didn’t have time to include last-minute info about major changes that involved two of the festival’s best events. The hilarious, ruthless TV-sitcom writer satire Hacks has been bumped up to Thursday, April 16,…
I don’t know that the title Fireworks really fits the art show to which it refers. Clay works, huh? Real explosive stuff. I guess if you leave it in the kiln long enough… In case you haven’t noticed, an international “celebration” of clay and ceramic works has run through this…
Betting on horse racing is bad, or so we’ve been led to believe for most of our lives. Movies show us it’s bad through their alternating portrayals of track denizens as either pathetic losers or greasy criminals (for a look at both, check out Richard Dreyfuss’ surprisingly entertaining 1989 film…
Thursday April 9 Funny how fast things can change in Hollywood. In the early ’90s, Keenen Ivory Wayans was high on the success of his groundbreaking sketch comedy show In Living Color, and the prevailing wisdom around town was that his brothers and sister would still be waiting tables and…
For four innings, everything was perfect. After a while, you could hear grown men hold their breath each time the ball left the pitcher’s hand; you could feel the cheers every time an opposing batter struck out or a fly ball was snared in midflight or a ground ball bounced…
Playwright and screenwriter John Patrick Shanley loves words. Anyone with a similar depth of feeling for the currency of human communication cannot blame him; it’s easy to become enthralled with the sounds, even the look on the printed page, of words, and forget that they are symbols of meaning, not…
Damned if she does, damned if she don’t. Los Angeles-based Susan Otto faces the same speedbumps other female artists face in this post-feminist age, but she tackles them with a finely tuned sledgehammer. She pounds away at social constructs, at the notion that the female voice is a tired one,…
Rapper Ice Cube’s debut as a director-screenwriter is a big step backward in terms of the representation of African-Americans and women in film. The Players Club features a group of up-and-coming black male actors who portray hardly anything other than rogue hustlers, abusive hip-hoppers, and capricious rapists. The film’s women…
If nothing else, the current edition of Michael Moore’s continuing self-love fest does have a great subject: the desperation hidden inside a “thriving” U.S. economy. While politicians and financial wizards point to unemployment on the wane and profits on the rise, Moore notes that the largest employer in the country…
The flimsiest hustle in movie promotion today–one perpetrated by film festivals and their camp followers–is that independent movies are starved for mainstream attention. The truth is, they often have an open field in big-city media. Major studios are usually unable to deliver a finished print of a would-be blockbuster until…
What follows are brief reviews of some highlights from the USA Film Festival, arranged chronologically. The festival runs Thursday, April 16, through Thursday, April 23. All events take place at the AMC Glen Lakes, 9450 N. Central Expressway, except for the Master Screen Artist Tribute to Christopher Walken, which will…
PORT CHARLOTTE, Fla.–Luis Mayoral answers the door wearing only a white T-shirt and red Jockey briefs. He has a lit menthol cigarette dangling from his smiling lips, and for the rest of the hour we spend together, this is how the Texas Rangers’ Latin American liaison remains–half-dressed, smoking, smiling as…
Driving to Mesquite to see a provocative, world-premiere play by a talented Texas playwright? Jeez, what’s next–performance art by a radical African-American collective in Garland? Actually, you shouldn’t be surprised that a stately construction like the Mesquite Arts Center, which sticks out like a good tooth among the day-care centers…
