It’s a Bird! It’s a Plane!
Since 1962, the Air Rice field in west Houston has been a dirt crop-duster airstrip surrounded by rice fields. Today, a lone, faded wind sock stands stiff in the brisk winter breeze. Hawks and raptors fly low, scouring the shrinking grasslands for prey. It’s a Monday in early December, and…
Wars, Penguins and Gays: Oh, My!
Swearing In: Year of the R-Rated Comedy It’s an unavoidable trend — if two movies make a trend, that is — so much so that if you Google the phrase “the return of the R-rated movie,” the first hit takes you to the tsk-tsking Family Media Guide’s article on the…
Letters to the Editor
Pro-Choice Not happy: One of the great benefits of living within the HISD boundaries has been parental choice [“Don’t Worry, Be Happy,” by Margaret Downing, December 15]. As a former teacher and parent in the district, I loved the idea that the district would respect my choices as I mapped…
Baby Boom
December is usually a bad time for the performing arts in Houston, mostly because theaters are desperate to cash in on the holidays. Thinking that folks won’t buy tickets to anything that’s not somehow associated with Scrooge or Santa or religion, producers end up offering the sort candied nonsense that’s…
Image of the Week
Noe Cobrera hauls a flocked tree from Houston Garden Center on I-45 South…
Capsule Reviews
A Christmas Carol This season, the Alley Theatre has cobbled together a new version of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, and it is as darkly funny and as sweetly tender as Dickens can be. The production features the same script, which was adapted by Michael Wilson, that the Alley used…
Office Spaced
As my date and I make our way through Commerce Street Artists Warehouse, we follow the laughter and horrid Christmas music to one of the main galleries, which has been brilliantly converted into an office for the I Love You Baby Office Christmas Party. Garish tinsel and holiday streamers run…
Wit Love
There’s a sign on the side of the road in front of Devin Borden Hiram Butler Gallery — it’s a diamond-shaped metal traffic sign in a pale silvery-gray with white letters. It reads, “I WISH I COULD LOVE.” The plaintive roadside declaration by Danny Yahav-Brown is part of the exhibition…
Unconventional Pair
Samosas are savory Indian pasties. Sold on the streets of every Indian town, they’re normally filled with potatoes, vegetables or meat. At Restaurant Indika (12665 Memorial, 713-984-1725), the samosas ($8) don’t follow tradition. They’re stuffed with crabmeat and laced with hot peppers, and instead of the traditional triangular shape, they…
Capsule Reviews
“KCHO: Every Man Is an Island” The artist Kcho was born on Cuba’s tiny Isla de la Juventud. His work is imbued with melancholy, and this exhibition is filled with references to water, isolation, poverty and escape. Kcho’s 2003 installation Para Olvidar (“To Forget”) consists of an actual fishing pier…
Dead Like Me
I hate the Grateful Dead. I’ve always hated the Grateful Dead. Numerous times over my lifetime, people have tried to get me to appreciate the band, with little success. The interminable solos, the dope-smoking-moron lyrics, the ridiculous ambient jams — I’d rather shove chopsticks up my pee hole than listen…
Springtime for Mel
In 1968 it was a movie. In 2001 it became a musical. Now it’s a movie again? Yep, and there’s actually pretty good reason to return The Producers to the screen. The original film, though intermittently inspired, was slow and often boring, and its homophobic, misogynistic humor no longer plays…
Yule Fuel
For several consecutive Christmases when I was a kid, my aunt Libby (who is only seven years older than I am) and I had an odd musical tradition. My grandparents and aunts (and some of their children) were all then living in an old three-story house just off Bissonnet near…
Losing Ugly
You try to do something nice, and see what happens? A couple of weeks ago, we praised City Hall bureaucrats for not getting in bed with a low-income-housing developer who’s the subject of an FBI investigation in Dallas (see “Winning Ugly,” November 24). We said the city took a pretty…
The Hanukkah Songs
In an unfortunate confluence of the Hebrew and Christian calendars, Hanukkah begins at sundown on December 25, which means that we Jews will have to deal with the ol’ “Hanukkah? Isn’t that the Jewish Christmas?” thing from those unenlightened goyim a lot more than usual this year. Still, when it…
Bling-Bling Bordeaux
The chef’s counter at Pappas Bros. Steakhouse is the best seat in the house, unless you’re trying to get romantic. When the hostess told my brother Gordon and me that we could either sit at the counter or wait an hour for a table, we jumped on a pair of…
Tough Crowd
Even though it’s a little after ten when I walk into the Proletariat’s Saturday-night karaoke show, co-hosted by the ladies of Houston Roller Derby, the place is still a bit dead. But I had a hunch then (one that was later borne out) that if I had come out for…
Washington Apple
A few friends and I drop into Mink (3718 Main, 713-522-9985) late one weeknight, and the narrow bar seems to fill up with our presence. As we settle in, I wonder who’s in control of the music, because Bryan Adams is whining out of the speakers. Derek the bartender is…
The Flunk-Out
Buck Henry walks into a studio boss’s office and pitches him a movie. Says it’s gonna be a sequel to a movie he wrote called The Graduate, the beloved Mike Nichols film that starred Dustin Hoffman as 21-year-old Benjamin Braddock, and Anne Bancroft and Katharine Ross as the mother and…
Beautiful Dreamer
The gifted Irish novelist and filmmaker Neil Jordan (The Crying Game, Michael Collins) says that his overriding concern is “how individuals work with what they’ve been given.” Case in point: Jordan’s new feature, Breakfast on Pluto. This bittersweet, gender-bending drama takes a page from Candide — its beleaguered hero, too,…
Backhanded Slapstick
The Jerry Lewis chromosome is running amok again inside Jim Carrey, and if you don’t feel like getting clubbed half to death with a slapstick, stay away from Fun with Dick and Jane. On the other hand, if Carrey’s tireless antics — slithering onto nightclub tables, speaking in tongues and…
Fellowship of The Ringer
It’s impossible to talk about The Ringer, a comedy about someone pretending to be retarded in order to rig the Special Olympics, without mentioning that episode of South Park in which Cartman does the same thing. The Ringer was already in production when that episode was made, and has taken…
The Impossible Bomb
Serenity (Universal) Joss Whedon’s film version of his TV series Firefly came and went like a lightning bug in October; the predicted phenom stuck around the multiplex just long enough to lose millions. But like Firefly, which sold enough boxed sets to warrant a movie, Serenity’s bound to do well…
Yuletide Fear
The notion that Wolf Creek is opening nationwide on Christmas Day brings to mind the scene from Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas, in which a young boy opens up his holiday gift and finds a severed head. The movie is about as diametrically opposed to the concept of “goodwill…
Loaded GUN
Publisher: Activision
Platforms: GameCube, PC, PlayStation 2, XBox, XBox 360
Price: $39.99-$59.99
ESRB Rating: M (for Mature)
Score: 7 (out of 10)
Rogues’ Gallery
When your movie critics’ tastes range from Jane Austen to Rob Zombie, there’s bound to be some turbulence come award time. Perhaps it’s not surprising, then, that determining the year’s best films is something of an imprecise science here: Our top movie was anything but a unanimous pick among the…
Cyber Sunday
It’s almost halftime. On a TV screen inside PJ’s Sports Bar, Eli Manning just connected to Giants tight end Jeremy Shockey. Shockey catches the ball in stride and hustles toward the 49ers’ end zone, scampering 32 yards for six points just before time runs out. Wearing his No. 80 Shockey…
The Reel Truth
If you go to Rotten Tomatoes, the Web site that compiles more than 100 film critics’ reviews each week, you will find at the top of the “Certified Fresh” list a single movie that was the very best reviewed of 2005. It was not a remake or a sequel, nor…