thursday may 30 Dreamers and Demons: The World of Isaac Bashevis Singer: The Dallas literary series “Arts & Letters Live” presents a tribute to an international icon of letters whose voluminous body of work denied the existence of national borders. Like most great writers who manage to tap universal wellsprings,…
While nothing can come close to duplicating the inimitable Drive-In experience, going to the videotape is the next best thing. I heartily recommend these classics–true Drive-In material–for every home library: * I Spit On Your Grave: This flick is considered “the most disgusting movie ever made” by Ebert the Wimp…
It’s a debate that dates back to at least Plato’s time. What is reality–that which we can objectively perceive and quantify with our senses, or that which we interpret through our subjective and particular points of view? Teatro Dallas takes a crack at this timeless conundrum in Tales From the…
In 1988, Robert Ellington and his wife, Kathleen, opened Kathleen’s Cafe, a cozy eatery on Lovers Lane. After a year of operation, things looked bleak. “We were starving,” recalls Ellington. “We asked ourselves what we could do to generate more income. It occurred to us that maybe we could generate…
The camera loves 30-year-old French actor Olivier Martinez, but it doesn’t do him justice. In Jean-Paul Rappeneau’s deliriously romantic spectacle, The Horseman on the Roof, he wields heavy-lidded eyes that can make an offhand glance look like an invitation to hit the sack, yet there’s not an ounce of self-consciousness…
AMC’s The Grand–the Gotham City of film-exhibition venues–officially opened its doors in May 1995 with its inaugural movie, Die Hard with a Vengeance. One year later, The Grand can lay claim to unofficially opening the doors to something else as well–an unstoppable movie-house feeding frenzy that has seen three additional…
thursday may 23 Shadow of a Man: The Bath House Cultural Center hosts the premiere production of the Cara Mia Theatre Company, a brand-new Chicano theatre troupe whose aim is both to honor the Chicano experience in Dallas and offer that experience to anyone who enjoys the catharsis of live…
Sho Kosugi is the best kung-fu man since Bruce Lee. Forget Jackie Chan. Forget Jet Lee. Forget Bruce Lei, Bruce Li, Bruce Lea, and Bruce Leigh. It’s no wonder that they’re giving Hong Kong back to the Commies. They haven’t turned out a world-class thwacker since 1974, when Bruce’s head…
The one thing we all have in common is our separateness. Once launched from the womb, we are all so many Ishmaels seeking connection to a larger whole. Some people seem to feel this sense of isolation and rootlessness more keenly than others. For Tony- and Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright August…
You have to wonder what compels capable actors–aside from pure greed, of course–to want to appear in franchise entertainment packages like Flipper. After all, it’s been predigested and massaged so much it hardly qualifies as a legitimate movie. Rather, it is an extended anecdote–or at best, a shaggy-dog story. There…
Sources as varied as the artist’s published diaries and Jean Stein’s Edie: An American Biography have documented that Andy Warhol had a peculiar disgust with bodily functions. He was, in fact, a highly anal hypochondriac who never touched drink or drugs and rarely participated in sex. It’s fitting, perhaps, that…
There is virtually no doubt in my mind that the opening scene of Twister is more terrifying than being trapped in an actual tornado. As a small farming family rushes to its storm cellar to escape the approaching maelstrom, the sense of wrenching danger comes off in two ways: first…
thursday may 16 Words and Music: The Harlem Renaissance: Two decades of remarkably influential art from one American neighborhood are celebrated in the latest Arts & Letters Live program. The talent lineup for this evening dubbed “Words and Music: The Harlem Renaissance” should put the jelly in your roll: Actress…
Vida Stegall threw all my stuff out on the lawn last week and refused to gimme my dog back just because I failed to mention I was having the occasional date with Cherry Dilday. It’s one of those woman things. They just never understand that men forget stuff. I just…
What is it with Texas actresses and product endorsements gone wrong? First Brenda Vaccaro rasped about the absorbent properties of tampons, then Sandy Duncan chirped about the healthy, wholesome taste of Wheat Thins in TV ads that have hung like albatrosses around their necks ever since. Vaccaro couldn’t get arrested…
When I walked out of a screening of Dead Man Walking last January, I didn’t quite know what to think. Here was a movie written and directed by Tim Robbins, and starring Susan Sarandon and Sean Penn–three of the most unabashed liberals Hollywood has to offer–that did not allow easy…
The buzz on Heaven’s Prisoners, the screen adaptation of James Lee Burke’s novel, has been so miserable for such a long time that its release date has been changed more than Hillary Clinton’s hair style. (Not surprisingly, it’s been sitting on the shelf since roughly the Bush Administration.) I tend…
thursday may 9 And the Light Shineth in Darkness: Texas-based painter Calvin Davis is up-front about the agenda behind his series of gorgeously detailed paintings. Exhibited as And the Light Shineth in Darkness, the pictures are designed so “people will come away from it with a greater desire to seek…
Today’s lesson is on The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. No matter how many times I’ve talked about this flick before, you guys still expect me to take time out from serious drive-in reviewing to go rehash all the Saw trivia just because you missed it the first time. So now I’m…
Short of dropping your pants, there’s no better way of exposing yourself than by writing a work of fiction. A novel or a play is just an author’s way of lifting the lid on the bait box of his or her brain to reveal the writhing, wriggling worms within. Open…
In 1975, Ellen Burstyn–who’d won the Academy Award for best actress the previous year–caused a stir when she publicly decried the lack of good female roles in movies, and encouraged her sisters in cinema to boycott the Oscars by refusing to nominate, vote for, or participate in the actress and…
Although they happen almost 60 years apart, a pair of funerals climax writer-director Ken Loach’s mournful Land and Freedom. The film opens with the death of one of these individuals: An English gentleman in his ’80s is found slumped on his couch by paramedics. We discover as his granddaughter discovers,…
