As of about 25 years ago, it wasn’t enough anymore for a director to be a resourceful hired gun–the kind of person who could be plugged into almost any project and somehow do solid work. According to the new common wisdom, true artists were turks like Peter Bogdanovich, Francis Coppola,…
Here’s something worth cheering: this summer, two big-budget Hollywood adventure movies, Bad Boys and Crimson Tide, have broken the $50 million mark with African-American men in colorblind leading parts–Martin Lawrence and Will Smith as tough Miami cops in the former film, and Denzel Washington as a by-the-book nuclear sub commander…
I used to think that all the Madison Avenue guys who make commercials were pretty dang clever. I remember all those movies starring Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon where the advertising writer is really more brilliant than his job demands, and someday he’ll write the Great American Novel. And some…
friday june 9 Didn’t We Ramble: Of all the bedrock American musical styles that Texas can proudly claim, jazz seems to be the least recognized. Blind Lemon Jefferson plays that twangy down-home blues and Bob Wills moves a dance floor with his galloping Texas swing in our collective memories, but…
The Hon. Thomas G. Jones was angry, though nicely dressed. It was 9:45 a.m. last Friday morning, and I was standing at the service counter of his court in a nondescript strip shopping center in South Oak Cliff, wanting to see some court files; it is the sort of mundane…
It’s like watching someone die or seeing Newt Gingrich having sex on a kitchen counter. I have an image that just won’t leave my head, though this particular memory is hardly in the above category. Years back, Kenny Rogers and then-pitching coach Tom House sat on a secluded bench under…
Picture it: trendy Manhattan folks sipping cafe latte at the terminally hip Cornelia Street Cafe, while in a corner, Melissa Cooper entertains them with her talents as a ventriloquist. Using a dummy named Jack Wood, Cooper explores the silly and the satirical, from channeling with the dummy to creating little…
For a while, Texas Rangers president Tom Schieffer remained adamant that it was not necessary to give away 40,000 tickets and as many hot dogs to get the fans back–that baseball could thrive on its own merits. As if this were as simple as a slice of good apple pie…
Though Anthony Burgess deplored what he saw as modern society’s mechanization of men’s souls, he was a bit of a machine himself. During his allotted three score and 10, Burgess manufactured more than 30 novels, multiple volumes of literary criticism, and hundreds of essays, yet still found time to play…
In the 16 years since he made his screen debut, Mel Gibson has seen plenty of action. Part of what makes him so charismatic is his ability to take a licking and keep on ticking: enemies can beat him, shoot him, torture and humiliate him, but he always comes back…
Has there ever been a cop show on TV where the witnesses cooperate with the cops? Has this ever happened? I was watching “Law and Order” the other day, and they were investigating a rape, and every person they talked to would say, “I don’t know nothin,” or “I don’t…
In honor of the late, great Ginger Rogers, the USA Film Festival’s First Monday Classics series is screening one of the legendary hoofer’s most beloved musicals–The Gay Divorcee. The 1934 film is one of Rogers’ greatest teamups with Fred Astaire. The plot, as you might expect, isn’t really important. What…
thursday may 25 Peacemaker: One of the most obvious but least discussed flaws in the new national mania to “crack down” on juvenile violent crime is that many kids living in urban squalor have to take up arms simply to stay alive–when you’re forced at birth to swim with sharks,…
The old men, who do not seem all that old, laugh about the past, the road trips, the plays, those nights at the Woodside Hotel in Harlem. Buck O’Neill leads the conversation. He never played in the majors. But he was the first black coach in the Bigs. While a…
Not surprisingly, Beginner, the new Erik Ehn work commissioned by the Undermain Theatre, is akin to a religious or spiritual experience. Ehn, a playwright fascinated with the iconography of religion, asks you to travel with him to parts unknown. To get something out of it, you have to give up…
At the American box office, hot weather means action heroes wisecracking their way through one elaborately staged disaster after another–all that we hold dear depending on their charisma and endurance. But this is a unique summer: the country is still reeling from allegations that the Oklahoma City federal building was…
Forget Hollywood’s crop of summer action flicks and their puny explosions; for demolition beyond compare, turn to the wonderfully ludicrous Japanese import Gamera: Guardian of the Universe. Yes, indeed, giant monster fans, this 1995 production–which makes its stateside premiere May 19 as part of the 24-screen AMC Grand theater’s “Gourmet…
When 16-year-old mail order bride Riyo (Youdi Kudoh) gets off the boat that has borne her from her old home in Japan to her new one on a sugar cane plantation in Hawaii, she is shocked by the sight of her spouse-to-be. She expected that the man who paid for…
Clad in a sleek black party dress cut to emphasize her violin-shaped torso, Tamlyn Tomita was a magnetic attraction in the lobby of the AMC Glen Lakes, where she visited last month to promote her latest project, the immigrant melodrama Picture Bride. She’s saddled with the Thelma Ritter part, offering…
Some movies are so bad that they make you look back over your recent moviegoing life with the merciless eye of an FBI agent assembling a dossier, desperately trying to figure out whether the people responsible for the picture that ruined your evening showed signs of obnoxious incompetence early on…
Have you seen these “Choose To Dee-Fuse” commercials? They have a bunch of gangsta rappas hangin’ out in The ‘Hood. One of ’em gets shoved, or dissed, and two guys double up their fists–and then an announcer walks into the picture and says, “Violence is not cool. Choose to defuse.”…
thursday may 18 Deepak Chopra: It’s hard to know where to draw the line among the hordes of books every year written by pop-psych gurus, “secret of success” motivators, and candy-cane spiritualists, but the works of Deepak Chopra, M.D. seem a good place to start. On the one hand, Chopra,…
