thursday october 30 Maafa: The Assault on African Civilization and the African Response to Slavery: It’s hard not to get emotional about history, but too much emotion, whether it comes from the political right or left, tends to obscure important lessons. The 13th Annual African Awakening Conference will, according to…
Some wag once said that if you want to keep your appetite for sausage and politics, you should never watch either one being made. To that warning I add the process of making art. Since I consider writing, music, and the visual arts to be infinitely superior experiences to a…
Jennifer Jason Leigh follows up one of her smallest and weakest roles–in A Thousand Acres–with a far more challenging and formidable performance in Washington Square. This new film version of Henry James’ 1880 short novel chronicles the courtship of a wealthy girl who has no obvious attractive qualities. But the…
After earning worldwide accolades for her superb 1993 adaptation of Frances Hodgson Burnett’s children’s classic The Secret Garden, Polish-born writer-director Agnieszka Holland is well aware that her equally intense new film version of Henry James’ novella Washington Square may pigeonhole her as a kind of reference librarian of world cinema…
The true-life incident of the Cottingley Fairies is so full of possibilities, so thought-provoking and hilarious at once, that it’s amazing it’s never been filmed before. Making up for lost time, the story has suddenly appeared (on its 80th anniversary) as the basis for two films simultaneously. Photographing Fairies, with…
Stylishness without substance can become wearying real fast. Twenty minutes into A Life Less Ordinary, the new movie from the producing-directing-writing team of Trainspotting and Shallow Grave, I was already into overload. It’s not that director Danny Boyle doesn’t have imagination. It’s just that sometimes imagination is all he has…
thursday october 23 The Collected Works of Billy The Kid: Reading the supple prose of Michael Ondaatje’s Booker Prize-winning The English Patient and watching the beautifully photographed but rather vapid film version was like–well, the difference between a good read and a dorky movie. Michael Ondaatje again jumps between media,…
It’s hard to fault The House of Yes, the wry toast of this year’s Sundance Film Festival, for its limitations as a film. In fact, it’s hardly a film at all. Rather, it’s a barely staged, five-handed farce that trails its amiable cast around a looming Victorian mansion over the…
Editor’s note: The Dallas Observer’s regular sports column debuts this week. Barry Switzer speaks in a soft, twangy growl. At first, you can barely hear him. He’s like a crazy old grandfather scolding invisible ghosts that only he can see, and his sentences often blend into one very long word…
The highest recommendation I can give Theatre Three’s Texas premiere of British playwright David Hare’s theological drama Racing Demon is that I emerged punch-drunk from the production. The jabs weren’t aimed at the audience, but if you have more than a passing interest in the internal politics of the contemporary…
Writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson’s Boogie Nights opens with a sinuous, breathlessly extended tracking shot that swoops us into a San Fernando Valley disco and then does a curlicue around a succession of faces. In the discotheque’s low-lit luminescence, these people pop out like jack-o’-lanterns. They have the look of trashy…
Steven Soderbergh’s cinematic version of Spalding Gray’s Gray’s Anatomy opens with a hokey educational trailer from the 1950s about the crucial nature of good eyesight. It then segues into nine minutes of talking heads jabbering about their sundry unique vision problems: One woman sleeps with her eyes open; another mistakes…
thursday october 16 Master Magician Kozak: If television and movies drove a stake into the heart of the vaudeville circuit, then the fractured demographics of modern audiences is the ring of garlic around the corpse’s throat to keep it from ever rising again. Nowadays it’s almost impossible to conceive of…
There were a couple of reasons why I entered Teatro Dallas’ 1997 Day of the Dead show, Lamia, with high expectations. First, knowing that Teatro’s autumn celebrations of the Latin American holiday El Dia De Los Muertos–a more historically rooted version of the North American Halloween–manage to scare up more…
Seven Years in Tibet feels more like Seven Days in the Movie Theater. It refuses to come alive–not even when Brad Pitt, hirsute as a yak, wanders the frozen Himalayas with an Austrian accent that probably gave his dialogue coach hives. It’s an epic about how an arrogant, real-life Austrian…
The ’70s were so awash in ’50s nostalgia that it’s surprising Dan Wakefield’s 1970 bestseller Going All the Way is only now turning up in big-screen form. Of course, not all ’50s coming-of-age stories are the same: Unlike The Last Picture Show and American Graffiti–which pretty much dominated the genre…
thursday october 9 A Fine and Pleasant Misery: To find another cast of American characters as defiantly regional as Patrick McManus’ Blight, Idaho, residents, you would have to travel to Joe Sears’ and Jaston Williams’ Greater Tuna. McManus’ New York Times-best-selling short story collections chart the cranky, loony adventures of…
In a recent interview with The Dallas Morning News, Todd Waite, one of the two actors who play eight different characters in Alan Ayckbourn’s bleak two-part comedy Intimate Exchanges, was quoted as saying: “It’s impossible to act the same in a different wig.” Waite has appeal and confidence, as does…
The Locusts. If Elvis Presley acted in Tennessee Williams plays instead of dragster movies and bad beach flicks, he’d have the same kind of charisma as Vince Vaughn in The Locusts. With V-neck undershirts, an early-’60s pompadour, and loads of aw-shucks charm, the Swingers star bashfully saunters his way through…
Janeane Garofalo plows right through The Matchmaker with the same disgruntled sarcasm that typifies her testy, standard-bearer-for-the-underdogs-of-the-world persona. Try though it may to cast America’s Favorite Anti-Star in a Romantic Comedy For People Who Don’t Like Romantic Comedy, this script, a wholesale retread of Local Hero, plays on the generic…
By its very definition, a thriller should, you know, thrill. It should not only scare its audience with a quick jolt, that sudden noise in the dark that comes from nowhere and fills everywhere, but with its slow burn. It’s not enough for a thriller to tell its story, to…
Oliver Stone’s low-budget, hopped-up film noir, U-Turn, is being billed as a change of pace for the Conspiracy Dude, but actually it looks quite at home in the maestro’s hothouse. After all, aren’t conspiracies and the workings of fate what noirs are all about? Stone’s JFK pulped history with the…
