Filial Flub
If you’re nostalgic for the cockeyed let-it-all-out gabfests of the late John Cassavetes, She’s So Lovely will seem like dejà vu all over again. Cassavetes wrote the script more than a decade ago, and now his son Nick — whose first feature, Unhook the Stars, starred his mother, Gena Rowlands…
Attack of the Puppet People
The lights go on behind a flimsy plywood flat that’s been plunked down in the middle of Mary Jane’s. A rectangle has been cut in the flat, and inside it, a sort of a grown-up doll with tiny stitched blue jeans, a blue halter top and red yarn pigtails bobs…
Snitch Vs. Snitch
Jorge Arroyo’s head appeared to be on a swivel. From his vantage point in the burgundy leatherette booth, he constantly monitored the other patrons of Houston’s: Was anyone in the Kirby Drive restaurant watching him? He’d spent much of the past two decades as a paid informant for the U.S…
The Insider
The All-Too-Human Family … We’ve won!” exulted John O’Quinn associate Carl Shaw, the warm-up act for the 400 or so residents of Kennedy Heights and sympathizers who gathered at TSU’s Hannah Hall on the evening of August 21. “We’ve got our judge,” Shaw told the assemblage. “We’re withstanding the tests…
Letters
He Should Have Known It bothers me that activists hold up Rodney Hulin’s story [“What Really Happened to Rodney Hulin?” by Michael Berryhill, August 7] as an example of what’s wrong with sending juvenile offenders into adult prisons. I’m glad your article pointed out that Rodney was victimized by people…
A Slice of Heaven
Recently, I spent three weeks working on an archaeological dig in Central America. In camp, we subsisted on a diet of rice and beans, beans and rice and — on special occasions — plantains, beans and rice. Small wonder that our favorite entertainment was the “What I’m Gonna Eat When…
Static
Raves and wave-offs… Evidently, Liquid is just getting started — or so says the group’s leader. Bassist Kyle Watt has assured me (in a somewhat defensive manner) that the Houston quartet had yet to establish a real flow when they sat down to record Liquid, their new eponymous debut. As…
Wanted Man
It was due in stores by July, but a lifetime of memories does not come easily to a man whose first hit came 41 years ago, when he was a member of a Sun Records roster that included Carl Perkins, Jerry Lee Lewis and a boy named Elvis. So the…
Sound Check
Poor power pop. Few genres in rock have been more painfully misunderstood or so unjustly ignored. Over the last three decades, power pop has cemented its endearing underachiever status with an odd combination of timeless songcraft and bad timing. Locked in a perpetual search for a wider audience, this supplier…
Strange Days
Just before the May release of Strangest Places, Austin singer/songwriter Abra Moore’s major label debut, the Arista Austin promotions department launched a campaign that involved sending thousands of postcards inscribed with cheery greetings and Moore’s facsimile autograph to critics, radio programmers and retail clerks across the country. It was a…
Excess Brattage
Excess Baggage, Alicia Silverstone’s first feature from her First Kiss Productions, turns out to be a rather shaggy and uninvolving jaunt. As Emily T. Hope, a moneyed teenager looking for love from her emotionally distant single dad (Jack Thompson), Silverstone pouts a lot while trying to wring our sympathy. Even…
Time to Kill
Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation — a goofy remake of the 1974 scare, uh, classic — is a film so worthless the admission ought to come with a rebate coupon. In retrospect, the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre seems kind of quaint, its blood-red faded with the passage of time…
Robin Hoodlum
Director Bill Duke’s valentine to Ellsworth “Bumpy” Johnson, the king of the Harlem numbers racket back in the 1930s, is called Hoodlum. But that hardly seems appropriate. If Duke and his backers at United Artists Pictures wanted to remain true to the spirit of the piece, they would have titled…