Twenty pages into her first read through the script of The Last Seduction, John Dahl’s stunningly nasty film noir, Linda Fiorentino realized she simply had to play the film’s antiheroine, Bridget–a femme so fatale she makes Sharon Stone look like Sandy Dennis. She’d reached the page where Bridget arrives in…
Why is every election between the Republican Idiot and the Democratic Idiot? And then if some third guy shows up, everybody says, “I can’t vote for him. He’s an idiot.” Why is the third guy always an idiot? He’s the only one who doesn’t have 150 years of history behind…
The latest issue of local fanzine publisher Clyde Gentry’s Chinese movie guide Hong Kong Film Connection hits stores November 23. It includes reviews of every Hong Kong movie on video or coming soon to stateside theaters; an update on the latest career moves of the Asian Steve McQueen, Chow Yun-Fat;…
This is how Captain James Tiberius Kirk dies: he jumps across a broken bridge to retrieve a device–whose function is too complicated, and frankly too unimportant, to describe in any detail–the bridge gives way, and he falls into a ravine. Yes, Captain Kirk, the man who cheated death a million…
To know what basketball is, you must live, eat, drink, sleep, and sex it; let other people play it. For a select few, it isn’t a game but a way of life, an identity, a dream of escape from abject poverty. Those who can realize this dream are the ones…
thursday november 24 Turkey Trot, Save the Turkey, and Baby Doll’s Thanksgiving: The organizers of the 1994 YMCA Turkey Trot advertise it as “Dallas’ Way To Begin Thanksgiving,” which implies that most of us are in better physical shape than we really are. For 27 years now the Turkey Trot,…
“His Majesty,” Oscar Wilde purrs to an expectant King Edward VII, “is like a warm stream of bat’s piss. So strong in his sentiments and flowing in his expression.” Monty Python fans will no doubt remember this (paraphrased) line from the classic sketch in which Wilde, Shaw, and other celebrated…
What is this Inner Child dealie? What are people talkin’ about when they say they need to “get in touch with my Inner Child”? I’ve been hearin’ this for several years now, and ever time I hear it I sit there like a goombah, pretendin’ I know exactly what they’re…
thursday november 17 Phyllis Schlafly vs. Sarah Weddington: What causes a democracy’s national mood to shift from left to right, liberal to conservative? While many politicians on both sides like to appear accessible by defining themselves as moderates resting squarely in the center, the moderate voting bloc doesn’t change the…
The 1994 Dallas Video Festival is as eclectic and erratic as the medium itself. The good stuff is some of the best you’ll see anywhere in any medium, and the bad stuff is damn near unwatchable. But that’s what makes this Festival so invaluable, not just to the audiovisual scene…
While sitting through Dreams of Equality and Thinking Like a Woman: the Life and Times of Mary Kay Ash, two locally produced movies scheduled for opening night of the Dallas Video Festival, I couldn’t help wondering: at what point, exactly, did the passion go out of Cynthia Salzman Mondell and…
thursday november 10 John Wayne Bobbitt and the Bobbitt Girls: C’mon, you know you want to. Cast aside, for a moment, all those tiresome warnings from the cultural elite on both the left and the right–I mean journalists, scholars, and others who control the information flow–about America careening into moral…
There are, of course, two Dallases. There’s slick, soulless, sprawling, sterile Dallas, the one that all right-thinking boulevardiers disdain. And then there’s quirky, progressive, funky, interesting, artistic Dallas, its wee heart beating like a field mouse in its hole, which is all the more cherished by the cognoscenti (you and…
Although playwright David Mamet swears he wrote Oleanna before the Clarence Thomas-Anita Hill hearings, you can’t help but feel the same bitter resentments and frustrated rage drifting out of Mamet’s two-character drama that turned Hill’s testimony into a kind of national catharsis. Mamet is aiming to achieve that same kind…
Except for hardcore porn, no movie genre is as disreputable as horror. It is inherently, and proudly, visceral–a severed finger in the champagne flute of cinema history. Even when a highbrow auteur like David Cronenberg or Stanley Kubrick comes along and tries to swathe the genre’s bleeding, ripped-up heart with…
We’re in the movies! The Dallas Observer’s downtown digs will become a makeshift film set courtesy of the crew of Tornado, a new noirish thriller starring James Spader, Eric Stoltz, Peter Strauss, and toothy ’70s macho icon James Coburn. “It’s a blackmail mystery that takes place amongst a group of…
Ever once in a while some photographer or hiker or anthropologist or somebody finds a new “Stone Age tribe” living in Papua, New Guinea or Borneo or the Congo or the Amazon River Basin. A big article comes out in Time magazine, and somebody writes a book about how “gentle”…
Editor’s note: Nora FitzGerald, Dallas Observer’s stage columnist, is on maternity leave. Longtime Observer contributor P.B. Miller is filling in during her absence. Theatrical comedy is a tough sell these days–not that it was ever easy. Finding an audience for comedic theater is even harder now, though, because there’s a…
In the closing credits to his comic feature film debut Clerks, writer-director Kevin Smith thanks Jim Jarmusch, Spike Lee, and Richard Linklater, among others, for inspiration. It’s a good guess Smith looks to those filmmakers more as trailblazers than artistic influences. Although Clerks traffics in the same kind of confused,…
Except for Nicolas Cage, there’s no leading man in movies today who suffers as exquisitely as Matthew Broderick. He’s at his best when his characters are at their down-and-out lowest–struggling to hold onto some small shred of dignity while life is gleefully retching on them. He’s a versatile actor, but…
It’s a rainy Thursday afternoon at the headquarters of DNA Animation, Dallas’ seven-year-old hub of gleeful bad taste and excess, and the company’s core group of artists–Keith Alcorn, Paul Claerhout, John Davis, and Debbie Dunning–are taking a break. Huddled around a television set in one corner of the cluttered, computer-laden…
At a time in which sex and violence in the movies is blamed for every conceivable social ill, talking to the man who made them both a legitimate entertainment experience feels like an audience with the devil. During a four-decade career, 72-year-old filmmaker Russ Meyer has watched American gender issues…
