Brothers in Chains
Although Russian director Sergei Bodrov has made half a dozen features and won a fistful of awards since the mid-’80s, he is virtually unknown in the United States — despite the fact that he has lived on and off in Los Angeles for several years. Orion Classics is now distributing…
Power Outage
In Absolute Power, Clint Eastwood plays Luther Whitney, a master thief who burgles on little cat feet. He’s as stealthy as the Pink Panther pilferer, though not nearly as amusing. Luther, you see, is presented to us as an artist. We first see him at the National Gallery dutifully copying…
Saint Rudy
Finding people who are happy to trash Les Alexander and John Thomas is like finding people willing to make fools of themselves on television: There’s a nearly inexhaustible supply. But a bad word about Rudy Tomjanovich is as rare as criticism of the Constitution. “Rudy’s a standup guy,” says Summit…
Greed Head
After returning home for the Christmas holidays in 1995, Houston native Chris Burkhalter decided it was time to plan a move back to his hometown. Burkhalter had a good job as the sports information director at Northern Arizona University, but he’d been away from Houston for a number of years…
Unbelievable! Fabulous! World Class! Outstanding!
Houston just can’t shake its inferiority complex. Every few years, the phrase “world class” starts making regular appearances on the editorial pages, and the opera and the museums are thrust forth as proof that, really and truly, we’re just as good as any other metropolis. Boosters relentlessly tout our showings…
The Insider
If He Had a Hammer History will record that Houston’s 1997 mayoral destruction derby officially got under way shortly after 8 a.m. on Saturday, February 8, when Rob Mosbacher stood to address a collection of still-drowsy east-side business folk at Rio Posada Restaurant. Among the 30 or so listeners clutching…
Letters
Wallet Unzipped Your January 23 story on John O’Quinn [“O’Quinn Unzipped,” by Mary Flood] brought to mind a phone call I got from O’Quinn’s secretary in 1989. I’d never met the man, but I certainly had heard of him. We met for lunch, where we talked about our work, growing…
Press Picks
thursday february 13 Freedmen’s Town celebration The fate of Freedmen’s Town has been hot on the lips of developers and politicians of late, but at least one structure in the historic district won’t tumble to make way for upscale housing. The former home of Rutherford B. Yates, freed slave and…
The Reason of Rimes
It was a Saturday night at Billy Bob’s in Dallas, and the cavernous honky-tonk — so big that the beer lights seem to follow the curvature of the globe as they disappear into the blue smoke — was alive with ritual: girls in tight jeans eyeing guys in starched Western…
Shiny Happy People?
On the surface, Sweden is a land of crystal lakes, rolling rivers and snowcapped mountains, with lots of happy blond people enjoying the country’s famed social welfare system. But it’s also a nation perilously deprived of sunlight much of the year, which very well might indicate that underneath that shimmery…
Rotation
Chris Whitley Terra Incognita Work Chris Whitley’s 1991 debut, Living with the Law, is some of the finest driving music ever made. Impossibly atmospheric and superbly moving, Law draws your focus away from the centerline and into scenescapes as vast, detailed and dust-caked as a Sergio Leone spaghetti Western. Even…
On the Chang Gang
At times, trendiness can be its own reward. That certainly seems to be the case at P.F. Chang’s China Bistro, the sort of Chinese, sort of bistro, sort of Architectural Digest-style wonderland restaurant that opened up for business a little more than a month ago cater-cornered to River Oaks Burger…
They’re the Queers, They’re Here
If you’d already heard of the Queers before last year’s Don’t Back Down, you’re probably the sort of Mohawked, ultra-into-punk punk who’s already written the band off as a commercial sellout. If Don’t Back Down was your first exposure, you’re probably wearing a Green Day T-shirt and skateboarding home from…
Static
God bless the caterer… You can learn a lot about a rock act from its backstage likes and dislikes. That much I took away from my trip to The Woodlands Mall last weekend. The occasion? A viewing of On Tour, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum’s traveling…
Where Angels Fear to Tread
You’d think that after more than a decade in this business, I’d have learned one simple, sanity-preserving rule: January and February are good times for taking a vacation — very good times. Not because the airfares are low or the weather sucks, but because what a critic must endure at…