No Balls
First-time writer/director Neil LaBute’s In the Company of Men is about Chad (Aaron Eckhart) and Howard (Matt Malloy), two thirtyish white-collar executives who have recently been passed up for promotions and rejected by their girlfriends. En route to a six-week business trip at the home office, Chad, the bristlier and…
The Legend
The pros come home in the summer like returning kings, in Cadillacs, Lexuses and Mercedes-Benzes — tall, disdainful men with gold chains around their necks and diamonds in their ears. Their egos are large, their skills highly developed. Some of them make more than a million dollars a year playing…
The Insider
Pipe Dreams You’ve got to hand it to Houston lawyer George Fleming: He’s nothing if not persistent in pursuing the $107 million payday he and his associates claim they’re entitled to for representing approximately 38,000 clients in a decade-long lawsuit against the producers of leaky polybutylene pipe. Never mind that…
Letters
It’s for Traffic Control As a major supporter of the gate at Dian and Wynnwood, I feel I must respond to the biased article [“A Neighborhood Divided,” by Jennifer Gin Lee, July 24]: 1. The headline was misleading. We are four separate neighborhoods who all share a common goal of…
Press Picks
thursday August 14 The Family Manager’s Guide for Working Moms Almost every working mom has had the out-of-body experience of watching herself accomplish more than she ever would have thought humanly possible during her single years. Unfortunately, most lawyer/driver/bottle-washer/fanny-wiper/counselor/tutor/cooks also have the gnawing feeling that everything they do is done…
To Boldly Go
The first time I met Deanna Rund, she was standing over a smoke-belching Volkswagen Beetle brandishing a pair of grill tongs. An artist friend had retooled the famously indestructible automotive icon of the ’60s for Rund’s barbecue smoker, complete with a firebox where the rear engine used to be. Her…
Rotation
Slobberbone Barrel Chested Doolittle Whiskeytown Strangers Almanac Outpost It’s long past the point where ingenuity is a prerequisite for even the best alt-country outfits. Then again, ingenuity hasn’t been much of a factor since 1993, when Uncle Tupelo traded in its punked-up power trio format for a more subtle rhythm…
Talking the Talk
It takes the cojones of a seasoned matador to emerge from near obscurity and proclaim right off that you’re the man. Reputation, after all, is usually something that’s earned. No matter, contends Mark Morrison. The self-described R&B rebel phenom has already established his rep as a given quantity on his…
Static
Dissecting a standoff… If all else fails, take your cause to the people: It’s a romantic gesture, for sure, mailing out thousands of letters in Houston and throughout the country, each one requesting a single dollar in cash to help preserve the quality and stature of a local institution that,…
Hats Off
It’s so damned hot in Austin on this Saturday that condensation forms on your skin before you’re all the way out the door. You’re like a cold-drink bottle just taken from a frigid icebox. Your clothes stick to your skin until they become your skin. You don’t just sweat in…
Shifting Foundation
Only 15 blocks long, Hyde Park Boulevard begins not as a boulevard at all but as a narrow lane, curling coyly out of Pacific Street just west of downtown and winding past an old three-story, faux-French townhouse where Clark Gable once stayed. The street has remained remarkably free of the…
Queen for a Day
Queensryche lead singer Geoff Tate sees himself as a living example of the old adage, “Be careful what you wish for.” Like any group with stadium aspirations, Tate and his Queensryche bandmates spent their early years pushing hard to become a million-selling entity. In the mid-’80s, they tried to be…
Shoot the Sheriff
The cops in Cop Land carry on like a bunch of goombahs. On the take from the Mob, they mimic the Mob. The fuzzy line dividing cops and crooks is the subject of many a strong police movie, but Cop Land goes a step further — it says there is…
Real Girls
Mike Leigh’s new Career Girls is compact and minor. I don’t mean that as a slam, exactly. After the dawdling expansiveness of last year’s Secrets & Lies, his latest film is something of a relaxation — it’s appealingly small-scale. Leigh isn’t doing anything here he hasn’t done better before, but…