Magic for Adults
There seems to be an unwritten rule in American cinema that adults don’t go for original fairy tales. Fantasy, sci-fi, sure — but it’s a rare entry that shoots for the it-could-happen-to-you weirdness of a classic Brothers Grimm or Hans Christian Andersen story in anything other than a parallel universe…
Alison Cook looks back at 1997: The Year That Bit
To bite or be bitten: The classic Darwinian drama raged throughout our fair city in 1997, a year in which strange eating behaviors — just ask Evander Holyfield — made for an entertaining (if slightly indigestible) feast. Even our beloved new boom underscored the point, as humongous malls threatened to…
A Last Bite of ’97
Time, as has-been ’70s rocker Steve Miller once observed, keeps on slippin’, slippin’, into the future. Or maybe it was noted 5th-century B.C. Greek philosopher Heraclitus who said that. No matter. It’s an immutable truth: You can’t stop the clock. There’s no sense even trying. Nonetheless, year’s end is the…
Letters
Coming Soon “See Juarez” [by Charles Bowden, December 11] was certainly as fine a piece of journalism as I’ve ever read in Houston. We here in the Lone Star state need to know what’s going on just south of our border. As the article’s headline implies: It may be coming…
Press Picks
thursday january 1 YMCA league sports Okay, this is it: the first day of the new year, and the first day (so the old adage has it) of the rest of your life. It’s time to shape up — literally. So what if you went and ate and caroused and…
Dish
Haute on the Grange Gone are the extra words in the name: What was once the Ohio Grange Cafe is now merely The Grange — and likewise, the restaurant itself is sleeker and chic-er. Also gone is the menu’s oddball ode to Midwestern farm values; instead, emblazoned at the bottom…
Bridging the Gulf
I’m pleased to report that there’s finally a restaurant worth mentioning on the ill-fated corner of Richmond and Greenbriar. It’s a tough spot, what with the strip center’s ownership changes, fierce parking competition from the nearby nightclubs, and revolving-door restaurant turnovers, but somebody’s got to fill it. I sincerely hope…
Girl in the Spotlight
Rod Serling walks out of the sound-stage gloom and into a pool of light cast by a single spotlight. “Submitted for your approval,” he says, pulling his lips back from his teeth. “A portrait of a young woman who wants nothing more than to sing, and who wishes for a…
Highway Lunacy
Northside Houston resident Tony Avitia was an 18-year-old stock boy at a Kroger store when, somewhere among the Tylenol, the Haagen-Dazs and the freshly watered produce, he met Billy Kinnamon. Kinnamon was a 16-year-old bagger from Greenspoint who was interested not just in bagging groceries, but in bagging as many…
Rotation
Hurricane #1 Hurricane #1 Sire/Warner Bros. The American public has been largely monogamous — if serially so — when it comes to its relationship with ’90s Brit-pop, saving its affection for just the right combination of hooks and hubris, distended ego and nostalgia-laden esoterica. Last year, the object of adoration…
The Other Vaughan
Though Jimmie Vaughan has quietly and consistently proven that he’s just as skillful and dedicated a bluesman as his younger brother ever was, the wild life, flashy chops and tragic death of Stevie Ray Vaughan may always end up dwarfing his older sibling’s accomplishments. Still, we shouldn’t forget that after…
Static
The year in lists… The word that best sums up popular music in 1997 is “potential” — not because there was so much of it, but because there were so many cases in which it was squandered, ignored or flat-out lacking. Still in a state of extended grief over the…
The Albanian Candidate
When was the last time the audience applauded a trailer and the movie lived up to it? Independence Day enticed millions with its preview shot of the White House blown to smithereens, but that film was a dumb, elephantine sci-fi pastiche. The trailer for Wag the Dog has also been…
1997, by the numbers: Our film critics’ “ten best”lists
Peter Rainer 1. Hamsun 2. L.A. Confidential 3. A Self Made Hero 4. La Promesse 5. Grosse Pointe Blank 6. Wag the Dog 7. Riding the Rails 8. The Daytrippers 9. Conspiracy Theory 10. Mimic Michael Sragow 1. L.A. Confidential 2. The Wings of the Dove 3. Wag the Dog…
Cuddly or Crude?
The ad line proclaims As Good As It Gets “a comedy from the heart that goes for the throat.” Isn’t this simply another way of saying, “You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll gag”? Jack Nicholson plays, of all things, a prolific romance novelist who’s a virulent xenophobe and a hopeless neurotic…