Notes on a Scandal, brilliantly adapted by Patrick Marber from the darkly comic Zoë Heller novel, is a grim piece of work—Fatal Attraction for the art-house crowd, shorn of its predecessor's fearful misogyny. Set in a dreary London where a gray funk of fog and cigarette smoke hangs over everyone's...
Great casting makes great theater. For The Miracle Worker to work as well as it does in Dallas Children's Theater's current production, it's not enough just to find a young actress who can fling herself into the furniture portraying blind and deaf Helen Keller as a child. The role of...
Look, maybe we just never get tired of running this picture of Ann Lott. Ever think of that? Guy Brignon, the chairman of the Dallas Housing Authority and a real-estate developer and apartment complex owner, said earlier this week he won't OK or even discuss DHA president and CEO Ann...
Bishop J. Neaul Haynes: What did he know about Pastor Sherman Allen, and what did he do about it? Pastor Sherman Allen's bishop in the Church of God in Christ, J. Neaul Haynes of Dallas, has been aware of paddling allegations involving Allen for at least 17 years. One of...
New Pagan Love Song, Paul Brill's wonderfully skewed neo-pop confection from 2004, established the New Yorker as a singer-songwriter of unusual subtlety and brave innovation. Mixing the plainspoken charm of Ben Folds with the sonic weirdness of Sparklehorse, Brill found a fertile, unforeseen meeting place of the sweet and the...
Dear Mexican, I'm a Spanish-language student struggling with tenses and the gender of nouns. The other day, some friends and I were discussing street slang and the word verga (penis) came up (no pun intended). It occurred to me that the definitive symbol of masculinity ends in the feminine -a...
Dallas County District Attorney Craig Watkins says he wants to get innocent people out of jail. Oddly, in Dallas County, this is a novel concept. On Wednesday, DNA testing exonerated Andrew Gossett of Garland, who had been serving a 50-year sentence for a 1999 sexual assault he didn't commit. Within...
A Friend of Unfair Park read our earlier item about Craig Watkins' Web site comments and sent a missive directing us to his comments in the League of Women Voters' campaign insert that appeared, among other places, in the paper version of Unfair Park. Whyohwhy don't we actually pay attention...
Aside from that new ball, NBA Live 07 may be the worst product to bear the league's name this year. The new basketball game from Electronic Arts is so glitchy that scores of buyers launched an online petition demanding a do-over. Luckily for the rest of us, consumers have a...
When the Levees Broke (HBO) Spike Lee's four-part doc, easily the best non-fiction film of 2006, gets a fifth part on DVD: a 105-minute epilogue that reveals just how little has changed since Hurricane Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast in August 2005. Featuring new interviews with the displaced and displeased,...
They gave away the Lone Star Emmys Saturday night in Houston, and in case you missed the results, KDFW-Channel 4 is, like, the best station ever. Or something. The local Fox affiliate picked up the night's top honor, Overall Station Excellence, which was presented to General Manager Kathy Saunders; KDFW...
One April morning, Richard Chichakli, a slender man of Syrian descent, was sitting behind his personal computer, checking e-mail and preparing for the day. His wife and teenage son were sleeping in another room of their modest brick home in Richardson. At 6 a.m., Chichakli says, he heard banging on...
An inmate lawsuit, whose allegations of incompetence and neglect at the Dallas County jail have been echoed by a pair of internal investigations into the health care at the facility, continues to stymie the county. If that's not exactly a surprise, the case has also underscored the ineffectiveness of the...
Shareholders of Wichita-based Lone Star Steakhouse & Saloon approved a cash buyout late Tuesday by Dallas-based Lone Star Funds for $27.35 a share, which means Lone Star Steak will now officially emanate from the Lone Star State. The price is a boost from the contested offer of $27.10 Lone Star...
If I had to venture a guess—just based on the personally scrawled letter on notebook paper that arrived accompanying Daniel Folmer's new release—I'd say he's a simple guy, prone to bouts of wit and vulnerability. Hell, the 21-year-old explains his musical history (cello since age 7, writing and recording the...
Buzz was going to begin our annual look back at the past year this way: Another year has come and gone. Good God, will they never end? But then something strange happened on the way to press. Reviewing the past 12 months, we became afflicted with an odd, unfamiliar feeling...
We never get tired of looking at John Grayken. The Robert Bass protege is one handsome man. John Grayken, chairman of downtown-based Lone Star Funds (you remember them, right?), must have been up all night. South Korean prosecutors, who've been after Lone Star Funds for months concerning its acquisition and...
When Guy Reynolds decided to take photos of his routine walks through downtown Dallas, he chose a specific camera. Knowing that Reynolds is the photo editor and an occasional photographer for The Dallas Morning News, you would assume the camera to be something ultra-modern and fancy with all the bells...
He looks like a good cop. He's got the 'stache, the short-cropped hair, the pushed-out chest and the shiny badge. He sounds like a good cop too; drawled and official. He's got a TV reporter's microphone in his face and a brick of marijuana in his hand, and he's answering...
Before sky, sun and moon, there were the Melvins. These primal Northwest lumberjacks have been laying out their eccentric, riffy slabs since the dawn of man (actually since debut Gluey Porch Treatments, circa 1987). Unfazed by trends, wars or Seattle suicides, the now-frosty-fro'd King Buzzo and Dale Crover have simply...
United 93 is the Dallas-Fort Worth Film Critics Association's best pic of 2006. Yeah, I can agree with that. The rest of the list, not s'much. The Dallas-Fort Worth Film Critics Association -- of which I am a member, though perhaps not for long -- this morning released its (our?)...
Conclusive evidence that man and dinosaurs coexisted. If little else happens in a Christian's life, he should develop a certain measure of humility. That, after all, is the character of Jesus Christ, who emptied himself of his rights and privileges as God's only son to die for sorry folks like...
