The Liberation of Steven Spielberg
This has not been a memorable fall and winter movie season. If last summer was unusually long on intelligent, well-crafted films, this — the supposedly “smart” season — has been largely a string of disappointments, from Scorsese to Eastwood. So it was more than a pleasant surprise to see that…
Ice, Ice, Baby
Amidst the deluge of Christmas plays currently running in theaters around town, EarlyStages’ first nighttime production, Snow Child, is a breath of fresh air. Billed as a “Russian folk tale,” the play is a charming winter’s Pinocchio, with the much-desired child made out of snow rather than wood, and the…
Taming the Beast … and teaching him to tapdance.
After she had watched the classic 1946 Jean Cocteau film version of the French fairy tale Beauty and the Beast — which closes, of course, with the transformation, by love, of the animal-like monster into a conventionally handsome young man — the writer Colette’s complaint became legendary: “Bring back my…
Gray Matter of Concern
As you walk through the CAM’s front doors there’s an eerie sensation of being drawn into a fire — a 15-foot inferno, to be exact — composed of stacked artificial fireplace logs that crackle and flicker. For some, Helen Altman’s gridded wall assemblage evokes natural forms such as a burial…
Old and In The Way
1. The Ballad of Neva and Cole Neva Casey looks anything but destitute when she answers the door of her brick ranch-style house on a hardscrapple road near Crosby. Trim, neatly dressed and alert, 72-year-old Casey is babysitting one of her granddaughters, who is in the other room watching television…
Taking Care of the Boys
During an ordinary Saturday-night high-school football game last fall, Scarborough High School quarterback Kyle Heine came within a scalpel’s stroke of living in a wheelchair. After being sacked by the Kashmere defense, Heine, then a junior, struggled to his feet. A referee’s whistle had blown the play dead. But a…
Picks
Thursday December 16 Bob Allen’s Tell It Like It Is Channel 13/KTRK’s affable sportscaster hosts his weekly sports talk show. Modeled on the “sports reporter” format that’s worked so well in other cities, Allen’s usual panel consists of Chronicle columnist Ed Fowler, the Post’s Kenny Hand and 950 AM/KSEV’s Ralph…
Nothing But a Man
Michael Roemer has had to be very patient about winning anything like his due as a filmmaker. His The Plot Against Harry, made in 1969, originally disappeared without notice, only to resurface, with considerable critical acclaim, in the late 80s. Now his 1964 film about the existential difficulty of being…
Wayne’s World 2
The production notes to Wayne’s World 2 begin, “What’s new with Wayne Campbell and Garth Algar? They’ve cut their hair, enrolled in college and are working nights — NOT!!!” Unfortunately, the flack here had a better idea for a movie than did writers Bonnie and Terry Turner. If Wayne and…
Geronimo: An American Legend
The surrender of Geronimo is functionally brought to life, this time, though, with white-eyes as the bad guys. Focusing on the final months of the U.S. Army’s Geronimo campaign of 1885’86, director Walter Hill (48 Hours) stresses the famed chief’s doomed struggle against ethnocentric subjugation. The movie has everything a…
Mickey and Minnie, the Robber Barons
There’s a town motto that I especially like. It’s for a little west Texas burg called Knot. Its slogan is: “The only town in Texas that’s Knot Texas.” Well, things are kind of slow out there. But it looks like things are picking up around Manassas, Virginia, just 40 miles…
Congressman Bill Archer Greets the Rotarians
Last Thursday’s story tip on skinhead graffitti didn’t pan out. Upon reporting my failure to find anything legibly racist on the men’s-room wall in a fast-food palace, I was ordered to get myself out to the Astrodome Sheraton where Congressman Bill Archer (Republican of Texas) would be addressing the Houston…
Letters
Is the Dream a Nightmare? Of course I believe that Hakeem Olajuwon is pious and loves Allah [“Dreaming of Perfection,” November 25, by Alex Hecht] — even though he fights, throws elbows, disses his teammates, impregnates women, has to be sued for support when the child is born a girl,…
Reassuringly Swiss
There are approximately ten days a year when a Houstonian’s thoughts turn to the comforts of cold-weather food — solid, caloric, somehow reassuring in the face of a chilly universe. On such rare occasions, I find myself pining for the conservative verities of the Swiss Inn: a primal plate of…
The Pop Moment
Ever been disappointed, but not know where to lay the blame? That’s how I felt Monday night at the AstroArena for the Shonen Knife, Breeders and Nirvana triple bill. In fact, I was disappointed just to be disappointed, since this was a twentysomething show (albeit witnessed largely by teens) if…
Too Damn Happy
Phaseshifter Redd Kross This Way Up/Mercury Since its precocious prepubescent youth in the late 1970s (principals and brothers Jeff and Steve McDonald were 11 and 14 when they started the band), Redd Kross has been in critical contention for the title of Hollywood’s coolest band. Part Beatles psychedelia, part Kiss…
Todd Rundgren Takes Requests
It’s not often — for which, in this case, several dependent household pets are thankful — that a critic is called upon to recommend a concert event that both embodies and suggests possibilities of technology and format that, should they prove successful directions for the future of music, could render…