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,…
Octavio Solis was Dallas’ homecoming king last week. Most of the people in the packed house at the Arts District Theater for his play Santos & Santos knew him when he lived here, pretended to know him, or were friends with someone who knew him. Teachers from the Arts Magnet…
When Major Theatre cofounder Bryce Gonzalez’ brother, who lives in California, fell ill with AIDS last month and needed a caretaker, Gonzalez made the trip west. That left the East Dallas theater operating with a one-man staff–cofounder Rob Clements–who, of course, couldn’t run the projector, sell popcorn, and tear tickets…
Ginger Rogers, who died April 25 at the age of 83, embodied star power with unsurpassed subtlety. Born Virginia McMath in Independence, Missouri (a location with a name so symbolically right it sounds invented), she was primed for stardom at age six when her ambitious mother took her on the…
For nearly three decades, some of Hollywood’s most powerful African-American players have labored unsuccessfully to bring the story of the Black Panther Party to the big screen. The father-son filmmaking duo of Melvin and Mario Van Peebles has managed to make the dream come true, and “dreamlike” is certainly the…
Why do people on the witness stand lie about stuff that doesn’t even matter? “Isn’t it true, Mr. Mossfelt, that before you identified this man as the thief, you were complaining that your contact lenses were dirty?” And all Mr. Mossfelt has to do is say, “Yeah, they were dirty.”…
The Perez Family and My Family (Mi Familia) are full of hardship, deprivation, bitterness, and death, yet they’re ultimately optimistic. They remind us that no matter how terrible our daily lives might seem, for our immigrant predecessors, life was almost certainly worse. These movies don’t glance off of you the…
thursday may 11 Male Figurative Show: Why is it that everyone’s afraid of the penis? From popular entertainment to classic visual art, any Western medium that deals in images over the last few hundred years has treated the male genitalia as verboten–while women’s bodies can be viewed from any and…
About 20 minutes into the French-Italian melodrama Farinelli, a spoiled courtesan summons the greatest castrato singer of 18th century Europe, Farinelli (Stefano Dionisi), to a private meeting with her and dozens of tittering ladies fair. All of them are astounded by the three-octave range of this slender, incendiary beauty who…
In the past two decades, filmmaker John Carpenter has directed 17 movies, and has established himself as a towering figure in modern horror. In technical terms, he’s some kind of lowbrow genius: he has a better idea of how to build unease through freaky camera movements, dissonant sound effects, and…
