The appearance of The Lost World: Jurassic Park carries a double burden. Not only is it the sequel to the most popular movie ever made, but it is also the first film Steven Spielberg has directed since 1993’s Schindler’s List. Now that he has finally won his Oscar and achieved…
thursday may 22 Black Velvet and George and Scheherazade, sad, sad, sad: 11th Street Theatre Project brings these two short plays written by a playwright who graduated from Southern Methodist University to the Dallas area for the first time. Angela Wilson, who currently teaches on the faculty of Mountainview College,…
Last week I belted down three whiskeys, grabbed a couple of ammo belts, and prepared to enter the Place of Unspeakable Darkness. Rhett Beavers wanted to go to… The Computer Store. Why do all the people in computer stores look like terrorists? Their hairdos stick out in 17 different directions,…
Laurel Hoitsma, a company member of Undermain Theatre and actress about town, called a couple weeks ago to make a request unusual to these ears: “Please don’t review the new show I’m in.” Had I finally bored a Dallas actor to the breaking point? After being reassured that this disinvitation…
Sidney Lumet has had enough ups and downs in his long, prolific career that it’s never safe to count him out–even after two disappointing films in a row, A Stranger Among Us (1992) and Guilty as Sin (1993). Even the greatest directors frequently falter in their seventies, so it’s pleasant…
Gummy with heartfelt folderol and overbearingly chummy, Fathers’ Day comes across like a feature-length expansion of its sniffle-and-giggle trailer. Prior to this teaming, Robin Williams and Billy Crystal had never been in a movie together–though, along with Whoopi Goldberg, they appear together annually on the televised Comic Relief fundraiser–so there…
If you’re hankering to see a movie that sends up swinging ’60s London and Carnaby Street and vintage James Bond movies, don’t bother to check out Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery. What the movie mostly sends up is its star and screenwriter, Michael Myers. That’s not all bad: Myers…
thursday may 15 Harry Wu: A lot of American political leaders, both Republican and Democrat, wish that Harry Wu would just shut up. Scheduled as the keynote speaker for the upcoming Congressional hearings on whether China’s “most favored nation” status should be renewed, the 19-year gulag veteran, courageous activist, and…
I have this friend Donovan who has a thing for flight attendants. You’d realize why right away if you got a look at Donovan. He’s one of those Gucci-loafer-hanging-halfway-off-the-foot sorta guys. He’s got a Movado watch that’s so expensive it doesn’t have hands OR digital readouts OR anything else on…
At this writing, I’ve seen two performances of the Undermain production of writer-director Erik Ehn’s The Sound and the Fury–a Wednesday preview and last Saturday’s opening night. I must admit I didn’t start to enjoy the show until I’d kicked it around in my head during the interval. This made…
In The Fifth Element, the all-knowing, all-powerful Supreme Being of the Universe turns out to be Leeloo (Milla Jovovich), an orange-haired babe in a skimpy, Band-Aid-thin mod outfit who speaks in a kind of Slavic scat and cries a lot. It’s as if the filmmakers started out to make a…
Judy Davis is often at her ravaged best when she’s playing women pulled apart by their own warring impulses. Torn between their isolating desire for freedom and their need for solace, the women in such films as High Tide, Husbands and Wives, The New Age, and A Passage to India…
thursday may 8 James Kelman and Duncan McLean: Booker Prize-winning novelist James Kelman earned all kinds of comparisons to James Joyce–not all of them favorable–when his brutal, poetic novel How Late it Was, How Late stormed the world’s literary salons in 1994. His dogged pursuit of the perfect Scottish dialect…
I ran into Rusty Tisworthy down at the pool hall, where he normally takes up space by making bets on how many times you can twist the wingnut on the bottom of a Mixmaster. And Rusty started tellin’ this nasty story about the sex he had last weekend, and lemme…
The young heroine of The Holy Inquiry, a United States premiere presented by Teatro Dallas, makes two mistakes early on in the play–she learns how to read, and she saves a Jesuit priest from drowning in the river after his canoe capsizes. These may not sound like screw-ups, but for…
When Masterpiece Theatre aired a multipart Anna Karenina to mark the novel’s centennial in 1977, the series producer, Joan Sullivan, said, “I think that great stories [like Tolstoy’s] are what the series is about.” Now Bernard Rose, the writer-director of the new movie version, talks about how lucky he was…
In Ellen Ousmano’s book Movies for a Desert Isle, in which film notables discuss the one movie they’d take along if stranded on…well, you get the picture…John Waters says, “I think I’d take a movie with me I’d never seen because that way it’d be a surprise.” Waters almost seems,…
thursday may 1 Shoppers’ Guide to the Center of the Universe: The 18-year-old Dallas-based modern dance troupe Dancers Unlimited mounts an ambitious new production that springs from the mind-meld of artistic director Lori Darley, composer Frank Lacey, and writer Tom Blackwood. Still, don’t confuse “ambitious” with “self-important”; while the contemporary…
What two words at a cocktail party are guaranteed to make your eyes glaze over and your brain start throbbing like you were just shot up with three quarts of Lithium? “School board.” Listen to me: I DON’T WANNA HEAR ABOUT IT! OK? I’m sure it’s important and everything, but…
What, the cynical historian might ask, can a play written in 413 B.C. say about the 1997 us? Whatever it tells us–and if you pay close attention to the text, placarded with disciplined but unaffected readings in the Gryphon Players’ new mounting of Euripides’ Electra, you’ll find much that’s familiar–you…
New-to-movies subjects are hard to come by, but Traveller has one: the inbred world of Irish grifters living in the backwoods of the American rural South. Clannish con artists descended from the Irish Tinkers, they fan out across the countryside pulling bogus home-repair jobs on unsuspecting, mostly elderly folk, and…
Volcano is set in Los Angeles, and audiences get high watching the city crash and burn. For L.A. haters, Volcano could prove a peak experience. You don’t even have to hate L.A. to enjoy it–love/hate will do. That’s why the film closes with Randy Newman’s “I Love L.A.,” a facetious…
