In retrospect, it seems odd that a project like The Right Stuff–screened Monday, September 4 at 7 p.m. at the AMC Glen Lakes by the USA Film Festival–could get made in Hollywood at all. Sure, the 1983 movie is based on a best seller by New Journalism icon Tom Wolfe,…
David Mamet and John Patrick Shanley belong to a select group–playwrights who have had their work interpreted by chick singers with only one name (Madonna in Mamet’s case, Cher in Shanley’s). This highly significant factoid has not been lost on the 11th Street Theatre Project, which has cannily combined a…
Get a load of this: Antonio Banderas, all decked out in bandit black, scampering across the bar in a dingy cantina, a blazing gun in either hand, mowing down bad guys as he twirls his arm this way, that way, any way, like a flamboyant bullfighter facing death in the…
Prominent movie critics across the country have joined hands in ritual public display of their admiration for Oklahoma-born photographer Larry Clark’s unrated feature debut Kids. This, after all, is the film that Mickey The Mouse refused to release under His newly acquired Miramax label, forcing the filmmakers to form their…
Last week I told Star-Telegram columnist Bud Kennedy that my Uncle Dick’s funeral was at the same time as Mickey Mantle’s, and, by gosh, there was no question what I had to do. “Yeah,” said Bud, “Uncle Dick, a fine ol’ boy–but he couldn’t switch hit.” Hundreds of others placed…
It’s easy to see why Hollywood went berserk over El Mariachi. Produced for the now-legendary sum of $7,000, Austin-based filmmaker Robert Rodriguez’ fable of a guitar player caught in a border town war between rival drug gangs wasn’t a revelatory piece of cinematic art. It was just a bunch of…
Fretful, chain-smoking fashion wunderkind Isaac Mizrahi–the subject of Douglas Keeve’s wildly kinetic, hysterically funny documentary Unzipped–is a slightly more butch Yiddish version of Alicia Silverstone, and sort of like Harvey Fierstein without the mileage. During this documentary, which details the New York fashion designer preparing for his fall 1994 show,…
Have you ever heard this? “Best movie I ever saw in my life! It’s about this guy, and he goes to this place, and then a bunch of funny things happen to him, and then he escapes–but he doesn’t really escape–and then this really goofy old friend of his whom…
thursday august 24 Radiothon: Sadly, it often takes one tragedy to prevent others from happening. This is what the Dallas-based Mothers Against Teen Violence, Inc. hoped to do when they formed two years ago after the brutal murders of Charles Christopher Lewis and Kendrick Demon Lott – both of whom…
What happened to Stephen Wade should happen to everyone. The young Chicagoan was having a perfectly average early ’60s American childhood until the night he saw the Beatles on the “Ed Sullivan Show.” From that point forward, the Creepy Crawlers set began to gather loam in the closet as Wade…
For some reason I wasn’t getting any action on my new, improved personal ad for the ’90s. “Chain-Smoking Couch Potato, 35 (but looks 55), card-carrying NRA member. Hates to laugh but loves to drink pina coladas on a bass boat while watching you scuba dive. Seeking morose, big-breasted, bisexual lesbian…
Paul Rudnick’s Jeffrey, directed by award-winning New York stage director Christopher Ashley in his feature film debut, is something of a mess. Ashley has no sense of how to build momentum within the camera’s frame, so he relies on stock TV effects–slow motion, crane shots, first-person addresses by the lead…
A glance at the names associated with Like Water For Chocolate’s Alfonso Arau’s new filmic fable A Walk in the Clouds is enough to strike terror in the heart of any Like Water cultist. Can the Mexican director’s pulsing, sexy vision survive the Zucker brothers production team, who have individually…
Upon greeting the photographer assigned to take his portrait for a newspaper profile, Mexican filmmaker Alfonso Arau immediately turns his Crescent Court hotel suite into a set. “Do you like this light?” he asks, gesturing toward delicate sun rays that shimmer through a window and rest upon a fawn-colored chair…
Going into it, I never would have imagined that Operation Dumbo Drop would provoke any thought whatsoever; it is, after all, just another predictably heartwarming human-animal bonding story, about a bunch of tough American servicemen charged with procuring a baby elephant to please the inhabitants of a strategically important South…
thursday august 17 The Women in Theatre Festival: It’s easy to fear that a series of short plays performed under the title “The Women in Theatre Festival,” presented by the New Horizons Theatre Company and the Bath House Cultural Center, will spend most of their time scoring the obvious political…
I love it when a movie leaves me feeling wrung out and exhausted–as if I’ve been on a tortuous journey I didn’t expect to take, but one that showed me things I never would have dreamed I’d see. Belle de Jour, surrealist filmmaker Luis Bunuel’s 1967 film about a repressed…
thursday august 10 Surfabilly roundup: You say you don’t have 50 bucks to blow for the privilege of sweating your eyeballs out at Starplex, standing among zoned-out stoners and hopped-up acid freaks, and watching Courtney Love’s eyeliner roll in rivers down her cheeks? Well, join the rest of the city…
Imagine for a moment that the good citizens of Austin have Dallas surrounded and are lobbing mortar shells into the streets, gang-raping women, and “cleansing” the Metroplex of its men. Now imagine that you are a playwright who wishes to comment on these events, but in order to reach the…
Only in California. People keep getting kicked off the O.J. jury for “planning to write a book.” First of all, what difference does it make? Nine million people a day decide their life is so danged fascinating they’ll write a book about it, but none of them ever actually do…
It’s a small world after all–oppressively small, in fact. The announcement that the Magic Kingdom would be purchasing Capital Cities/ABC for an estimated $19 billion, instantly transforming the Magic Kingdom into the largest media conglomerate on the planet, shook the entertainment industry last week in ways that Westinghouse’s purchase of…
As of this writing, there are only three American actresses who’ve proven to Hollywood they can attract big audiences by name alone–Demi Moore, Meg Ryan, and Julia Roberts. Moore is by far the worst of the three, a relentless publicity machine whose presence in wretched box-office triumphs like Disclosure proves…
