Will Clark, the slugging first baseman, made some predictions before the start of the Home Opener at The Ballpark in Arlington last Thursday. Then again, a lot of guys have put on their Kreskin panties lately. A few should have stuck to jocks. But more on them in a minute…
You have to give Gaitley Mathews credit. The indefatigable artistic director of Deep Ellum Opera Theatre nurtures ambitious new operas in his hole-in-the-wall, neo-warehouse setting. And Mathews’ current offering, Mata Hari, is his third world premiere. It is based on a true tale that has all the elements of an…
As Jim Carroll, the teenage prep-school junkie hero of The Basketball Diaries, Leonardo DiCaprio is so brilliant he’s scary. He’s only 20, but he has the expressiveness and assurance of someone who’s been starring in films for decades. He gives you everything he has to give, yet at the same…
Whether Oscar-nominated actor Leonardo DiCaprio chooses to identify himself as “gay” is entirely his business. Where once the issue of outing celebrities sharply divided the gay and lesbian community, there has been a growing consensus that the reluctance of the mainstream press to discuss such “personal” issues is hypocritical, since…
How come all the people who defend porno act like they hate porno? You ever notice this? There’s always some guy in a corduroy coat, the professor of institutional mediocrity at Wyoming State Technical Institute, and he’s being interviewed by Dick Cavett or William F. Buckley or somebody. He says,…
thursday may 4 Contemporary Hollywood Portraits: Pick up movie magazines, watch syndicated entertainment news programs, listen to cinephiles sit around the table for drinks and discussion–everyone’s lamenting the dearth of genuine movie star appeal in American cinema. This is not a new complaint, of course–folks back in the ’20s bemoaned…
The name Kenneth Anger conjures different associations, depending on who you’re talking to–and assuming, of course, that the person has heard of him to begin with. Anger, who will visit Dallas April 28 and 29 in conjunction with Las Colinas’ Mandalay Festival of Arts, is a multifaceted legend. He’s a…
It is Thursday morning, and Roy Tarpley is walking away from what will likely prove his last home practice in a place where he has never really felt at home. He sees that the sun is shining and says the weather is crazy and that he will not talk to…
In the long run, Richard Hamburger’s success with the Dallas Theater Center will be measured by plays such as Santos & Santos. Written by Texas-born playwright Octavio Solis, Santos is a dark work that explores the underbelly of the American dream through an immigrant crime family. Hamburger has described the…
The past couple of months have already seen an ongoing, gay-themed series of midnight movies cosponsored by the Inwood Theater and The Met, and a Silver Anniversary USA Film Festival schedule rich in gay and lesbian-themed features. Which means that the organizers of the 1995 Gay & Lesbian Festival, which…
I’ve tried credit cards. I can’t do it. I get a little surprise in the mail every month, and when I open it, I go, “I did not spend 700 bucks on phone sex. I know it wasn’t a penny over 650.” I’ve tried checking accounts. After one week, I…
The Cahiers du Cinema-era French film critics coined a name for the American crime drama of the ’40s and ’50s, in which every technical effort was extended to forge a mood of sordidness and epic struggle. They called it film noir–a genre in which ticket-buyers were carried roller coaster-style through…
thursday april 27 Joel-Peter Witkin: If, as someone once observed, humans are animals cursed with the ability to think like gods, then legendary photographer-montagist Joel Peter-Witkin is the documentarian of that dilemma. His pictures are ecstatic nightmares about mortality, images of twisted and deformed bodies trapped in tableaux of pain…
Sitting on the stage of the McKinney Avenue Contemporary recently, playwright Erik Ehn evoked the presence of a visiting spiritual dignitary–calm, understated, full of humility. “I’m as perplexed by the script as you are–so there,” he said during the recent question-and-answer session for the MAC’s Playwrights Project. “If my plays…
Paul Schrader, thank God. On the occasion of the USA Film Festival’s 25th anniversary, there could not be a more inspired and appropriate choice to receive the organization’s Great Director award than this bookish, bespectacled, 48-year-old auteur. With the possible exception of Martin Scorsese, no working American director in his…
Note: The 25th Annual USA Film Festival runs Thursday, April 20 through Thursday, April 27 at the AMC Glen Lakes theater, 9450 North Central Expressway (except for The Stars Fell on Henrietta and Panther, which will be screened at the General Cinema NorthPark III-IV, North Central Expressway at Park Lane)…
Filmmakers Andrew Behar, Sara Sackner, and their collaborators sure had their work cut out for them when they decided to follow the Grateful Dead and their fans around the country last year and make a film about that particular subculture. The shoot itself yielded some interesting material, including details about…
For those of you unfamiliar with the daily doings of big-league spring training, this players’ camp at Homestead, Florida, is much like any other. First, you may call it “camp” or “spring training,” but never “training camp.” That would be like calling a manager “coach.” Also, at this camp, originally…
Panther is a film that many powerful inhabitants of black Hollywood dreamed of making for years–a biography of the Black Panther Party for Self Defense, which started in San Francisco and spread steadily out across the United States, breeding black pride and fostering white rage wherever its members reared their…
Filmmaker Gregory Nava’s My Family (Mi Familia), a multigenerational epic about a Chicano family in East Los Angeles, is one of the most satisfying dramas I’ve ever seen. The narrative follows the changing fortunes of the Sanchez family from the early part of the century through the late 1970s. It…
Maybe you’ve been in a bookstore or a cappuccino shoppe lately and heard a Catholic religious service going on through the Muzak. This is not a mistake. They’re playing this stuff in singles bars. It’s weird. You got these monks in black hoods, chanting like automatons, as part of the…
The biggest controversy at this year’s Academy Awards was the omission of Hoop Dreams from the Best Documentary category. That film dealt with two families struggling to survive economic hardship, framed by the saga of two teenage boys pressured to make the NBA and rescue their households. But also snubbed…
