What are the five most horrifying words a man can hear at holiday time? You already know, right? “Take me to ‘The Nutcracker.”’ Why do we always PRETEND we wanna do this? Why do we sometimes even convince OURSELVES that we really do wanna go watch the Dance of the…
Wes Craven, creator of the Nightmare on Elm Street series and writer-director of its two best entries (the first and the last), works whispering distance from the commercial Hollywood mainstream, just far enough to allow for more rude wit and less comfortable resolution than most studio product. His films open…
Western civilization has taken its fair share of direct blows over the ages, but never before was it so threatened with destruction by such markedly unempowered foes until Beavis and Butt-head hit MTV in 1993. How unempowered? Consider that those who have every right to be offended by the doltish…
Why a movie of The Crucible now? Arthur Miller’s play about the Salem witchcraft trials was first staged on Broadway in 1953, when McCarthyism was still in flower, and it was not a resounding success. Now, of course, it’s a staple of rep theaters and high school and college drama…
thursday december 19 Peter and the Wolf: Besides offering its typical detailed stage design and original puppet and marionette creations, the nonprofit Dallas Puppet Theatre offers a musical/educational undercurrent to its holiday production of Peter and the Wolf. The mischievous hero known as Peter and his animal pals each represent…
If some doubted that the 20th-century black Sunday sermon doubled as spectacular theater, a story distributed last month on the Associated Press wire should convince otherwise. Apparently, African-American evangelical Christian churches in upstate New York have become hot tourist stops for Europeans vacationing in America. Tourist buses have made Sunday…
Wanda Bodine opened up a Smell Store last week. It’s this little shop in the mall where she sells stuff that emits AROMAS. Smelly oils, smelly herbs, smelly candles, smelly dried-flower arrangements, smelly clumps of pine bark you’re supposed to stick on your desk at the office so that you’ll…
Dallas-based performance artist Dalton James fills his newest one-man show at the Swiss Avenue Theater, Wet Willie Loves Pyro, with all kinds of personal details–failed romance, family deaths and conflicts, childhood dreams, a leaky air conditioner that nearly drives him mad. At least, we assume that these are personal issues,…
Forget Independence Day. If you really want to see Earth get it, you can’t do any better than Tim Burton’s Mars Attacks! It’s a destructo orgy orchestrated without any phony-baloney sanctimony about the fellowship of man–or spaceman. Burton isn’t interested in intergalactic amity; he’s not even interested in preserving the…
Whitney Houston has had a Movie Star Moment–just not in a movie. Near the end of the “I’m Saving All My Love for You” video, she turns toward the camera with a luminous smile that wilts into heartbreak when she realizes she’s been dropped by her, um, boyfriend. It’s a…
Some amusing stuff about sports agentry drowns in the emotional shallows of Jerry Maguire, which stars Tom Cruise in the title role as a hot-shot dealmaker whose first bout of conscience torpedoes his future at his firm, the monolithic Sports Management International. After visiting a hospitalized hockey player who skates…
thursday december 12 Synthetic Pleasures: By all means, make plans to catch Iara Lee’s droll, kinetic feature documentary, Synthetic Pleasures, before it ends a one-week run on December 13. Resplendent with MTV-inspired samplings from animation, various film stocks, and expressionistic editing techniques, the movie looks at the one significant way…
Every time I try to play poker in peace, like God intended, Cherry Dilday starts screaming: “I wanna go! I wanna go! I wanna go!” There’s a reason why women have been banned from poker games since the beginning of time. Lemme splain it here for you. First of all,…
They just don’t make purely theatrical animals like Noel Coward anymore, eccentric creatures with greasepaint for blood and a gloriously pathological need to project their own cultivated persona onto every character they write and perform. Like many of the playwrights-actors-composers of his generation, Coward erased the line in his own…
It’s impossible to capture on the printed page the anticipatory thrill of watching Sylvester Stallone handle rapid-fire dialogue: the rumbling basso voice, the twisted mouth valiantly trying to wrap itself around a stream of words, the consonants and vowels hurling forward like a toppled barrel of oranges. Will any of…
The stodgy works of Ismail Merchant and James Ivory, makers of Howard’s End and Jefferson in Paris, have encouraged the sad notion that costume dramas must be leaden and respectable. Ang Lee’s Sense and Sensibility helped rehabilitate the form; and now Patrice Leconte’s Ridicule ventilates the stifled form with yet…
thursday december 5 Wet Willie Loves Pyro: Dallas-based actor-writer-poet Dalton James offered local audiences a rich, thoroughly lived-in performance earlier this year in Open Stage’s production of Nicky Silver’s jet-black family comedy Fat Men in Skirts. James lured us through his funny-scary transformation from a timid, Katharine Hepburn-obsessed mama’s boy…
Have you seen these shows on ESPN 2 where some guy rides a tricycle off a cliff, does a triple-reverse upside-down back flip, free falls toward a raging white-water river, opens his parachute, grabs a tree limb on the way down, hooks his ankles into a bungee cord, dunks his…
There are many reasons why Jonathan Tolins’ The Twilight of the Golds should become obsolete in just a few short years–or so you think as the Dallas premiere by Littlefinger Productions unfurls in front of you. Unfortunately, this problem plagues many scripts concerning contemporary gay themes, because as the gay…
Anthony Minghella believes in ghosts–and, at his best, makes believers out of viewers, too. The writer-director of Truly Madly Deeply and this heartfelt, eye-filling adaptation of the Booker Prize-winning novel The English Patient scatters his movies with passionate specters. In Truly Madly Deeply the main ghost was a musician who…
In the post-Babe era, can you make a live-action movie about animals and not have them talk to each other? For me, this is the deep philosophical question raised by Disney’s new 101 Dalmatians, a live-action remake of the studio’s 1961 animated feature–in which, by the way, the animals did…
friday november 29 BR5-49: Take a listen to either their debut EP Live at Bob’s or their recently released, self-titled debut album on Arista, and it’s clear why BR5-49 have earned an ecstatic following by folks who normally pooh-pooh roots country…and have been condemned as a bunch of pretty-boy smartasses…
