thursday january 8 Elvis’ 63rd Birthday: Why has “Calendar” included a mention of the late Elvis Presley’s birthday celebrations every year for the past several, only to use the opportunity to wipe our shoes on his revered but rather pungent hide? It’s easy to kick a man when he’s been…
Even over a cellular phone, even with the driving rain battering the roof of his car, you can still hear it in Mark Aguirre’s voice–the frustration, the resignation, the utter sadness. The tone in his voice is as damp as the weather. These recent days have not been easy ones…
It’s a tad early, not to mention uncouth, to name a Dallas stage award after myself. But since I procrastinate in all other areas of my life, I might as well be early naming, in my honor, a citation for excellence. Flouting Mark Twain’s aphorism that good breeding is merely…
In Hollywood, writer-director Garson Kanin’s wonderful book of film-biz reminiscences, Kanin tells of a mortifying incident in the career of John Forsythe. In the early ’50s, the young actor, while working on a film, entertained his colleagues with a Bogart impression. When the great star visited Forsythe’s set one day,…
When was the last time the audience applauded a trailer and the movie lived up to it? Independence Day enticed millions with its preview shot of the White House blown to smithereens, but that film was a dumb, elephantine sci-fi pastiche. The trailer for Wag the Dog, a far more…
While not a movie year to go down in infamy, 1997 was still mostly full of hype and holler. If the annual yield is judged by how many great films came out, 1997 was a loser. If you factor in the number of films that brought fresh talents and fresh…
thursday january 1 New Year’s Day Psychic Fair: Forget New Year’s resolutions, those cynical promises we make to ourselves that are usually based on whom we think we should be, not on whom we really are. Why not find out what’s going to happen in 1998 and arrange your life…
With 1994’s Exotica, Egyptian-born Atom Egoyan clinched his claim to being Canada’s leading director. His new film, The Sweet Hereafter, a Cannes hit based on Russell Banks’ celebrated novel, should solidify his hold on that problematic title. Egoyan’s work, in general, is small-scale enough to seem arty and plain enough…
thursday december 25 All-Star Christmas Invitational: We dedicate this Christmas edition of “Calendar” to you, the friendless orphan who’s faced with wandering the cold streets alone instead of being cooped up with family and friends you stopped liking long ago. In our minds, Christmas, more than any other holiday, is…
Sitting in the cavernous, “temporary” Arts District Theater to watch Dallas Theater Center’s energetic but passionless A Christmas Carol, I couldn’t help looking around and noticing how much better dressed everyone else was than me. Of course, my friends would be quick to point out that even if I could…
The new Gus Van Sant film Good Will Hunting is like an adolescent’s fantasy of being tougher and smarter and more misunderstood than anybody else. It’s also touchy-feely with a vengeance. Is this the same director who made Mala Noche and Drugstore Cowboy? Those films had a fresh way of…
If Quentin Tarantino’s Jackie Brown didn’t arrive weighted with post-Pulp Fiction expectations, it might be easier to see it for what it is: an overlong, occasionally funky caper movie directed with some feeling. It’s derived from Elmore Leonard’s 1992 bestseller Rum Punch, with the location shifted from Palm Beach, Florida,…
The ad line for As Good As It Gets is “A comedy from the heart that goes for the throat.” Isn’t this simply another way of saying, “You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll gag”? Jack Nicholson plays, of all things, a prolific romance novelist who’s a virulent xenophobe and a hopeless…
Woody Allen’s Deconstructing Harry is a film made by a free man. Liberated, for whatever reason, of the need for playing a nice guy, playing the bad man he does here frees Allen of the optimistic sanctimony that has weighed down so much of his recent work. Allen the filmmaker…
It has been almost a decade since Randy White got paid by the Dallas Cowboys to hit someone. It has been almost 15 years since Billy Joe DuPree caught a Roger Staubach touchdown pass. And it has been nearly 20 years since John Fitzgerald proved himself the master of the…
Regular readers can now tell this whiny Scrooge of a stage critic that he finally got what he’s been bitching about for weeks–a new and decidedly nontraditional holiday play titled Greetings!. I must say that, as much as I enjoyed looking at it, I’m not sure what the hell to…
Now that the Japanese Tora-san series–with fiftysome entries in 30 years–has presumably drawn to a close, following the death of star Kiyoshi Atsumi last year, the James Bond films constitute the longest-running continuous series around. They’ve had their ups and downs, but something about the Bond formula has proved enduring…
If one is in a Biblical frame of mind, the sinking of the White Star Line’s R.M.S. Titanic about 400 miles off the southern coast of Newfoundland in 1912 could well be characterized as an act of divine one-upmanship. The 46,328-ton “ship of dreams” was struck down on its maiden…
thursday december 18 Holiday on Vice: We’ve all heard the hilarious and haunting statistic that suicide crisis hot lines receive more calls this month than during any other time of the year. We’ve also heard that depression is anger turned inward, so, marrying the former fact with the latter hypothesis,…
Was Steven Spielberg fated to make Amistad? “Amity,” you might recall, was the name of the shark-bedeviled island in his breakthrough picture, Jaws; my dictionary defines it as “friendship, esp friendly relations between nations.” Amistad, too, means “friendship”–although the ship the movie is named for is a slave ship, and…
Downstairs, the beat writers were scrambling for quotes. Just moments earlier in the bowels of Reunion Arena, Ross Perot Jr.–the man who owns the Dallas Mavericks and, it seems, a good hunk of the Dallas City Council–had introduced Don Nelson, Mavericks general manager, as the team’s new head coach. Junior…
I hope that Quincy Long’s bracing, cheeky “children’s play” A Por Quinley Christmas is revived often over the next few generations, the way Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol has been for us. That will allow future, cyberspace theater critics to one day rail against it as toothless and overfamiliar the…
