There are two kinds of laws–Mom Laws and Dad Laws. Mom always wants to regulate, control and pass laws about every single second of human existence. Mom Laws are rules like, “Never go out without a muffler, even if you’re in a hurry.” Or “Never make anybody feel bad, even…
Don’t let the title mislead you–Unstrung Heroes doesn’t deal with an underdog sports team, or a state psychiatric hospital that wins big against the snobs of a private institution during field day. Still, the film does deal with mental illness–not to mention cancer, religious faith, the human imagination, family relationships,…
As soon as writer-director Spike Lee burst into the national arena with his masterful unwinding of an urban race riot in 1989’s Do The Right Thing, both Anglo and African-American audiences expected him to explain for us the strangling bitterness that lurks between black and white in America. Unlike the…
Mississippi State head coach Jackie Sherrill has long had a reputation as one of college football’s worst rogues. Now he’s got more than the NCAA on his back. Sherrill’s former divorce attorney, Edward G. Murr, is suing him for an alleged stiff-arm on $17,432.58 in legal fees. The Houston lawyer…
There are soreheads among us who claim to dislike musicals as a dramatic form because they lack verisimilitude. Orchestral music doesn’t well up and people don’t break into song at the drop of a hat in real life the way they do in musicals, these dry, mostly Norwegian nitpickers complain…
It’s been a strange summer. In July I accepted a position as a pop culture writer at New York Newsday. I gave my notice on a Monday. On Wednesday, my editors ran an affectionate Buzz item bidding me farewell. The editor of The Met, Eric Celeste, once my boss in…
Photographer Larry Clark’s debut feature film Kids is one of those tough critical calls for a movie pundit, although you wouldn’t know it by reading any of the rapturous notices printed in the national press about this eye-poppingly explicit look at the hijinks of a group of rootless adolescents on…
“What an actor that guy is!” “She is such a little actress!” When people say stuff like this, they usually mean, “What a liar!”‘ And this is a little annoying–especially if you’re an actor. Because I know a lot of actors, and they spend all their time, every day, thinking…
thursday september 7 Ampersand Dance/Theatre: Two good buddies, Texas Christian University graduates Eric Salisbury and Shannon Slaton, have been profiled extensively in the Dallas press for talents that don’t often bring you much acclaim – not to mention financial security – in this city. Salisbury is a dancer-choreographer who’s performed…
This much-anticipated, unofficial American version of the 1994 Australian art-house hit Priscilla, Queen of the Desert has different audiences waiting for different results. Action film fans wonder how Wesley Snipes and Patrick Swayze will carry themselves with heels, fake nails, and extravagant drag-queen mannerisms. Gay audiences, thrilled by the moxie…
Right-thinking people–and Woody Allen agrees with me on this–would much rather live in the 1930s than endure our current decade, if somehow they had a choice. No, not the real Thirties, with its bread lines, fascist pogroms, lynchings, and all of that. I mean the champagne-laced Fred and Ginger Thirties,…
Matthew McConaughey, a lean, 25-year-old Texan with curly, blondish-brown hair and a scraggly beard and moustache, is hunched over a Tex-Mex breakfast at Barney’s Beanery, a popular greasy spoon on Santa Monica Boulevard in Los Angeles, scooping egg onto a tortilla with a fork and telling a reporter from Dallas…
Let’s talk Pro Beach Volleyball. I’ve decided the universe can continue to exist without Pro Beach Volleyball. Baggy-shorts jerks in a sandbox, right? Not just baggy shorts. Purple baggy shorts. Aquamarine baggy shorts. With goggle sunglasses riding up on their foreheads like they were a bunch of four-eyed possums sponsored…
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…
