Why, Spy?
If you’re hankering to see a movie that sends up swinging ’60s London and Carnaby Street and vintage James Bond movies, don’t bother to check out Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery. What the movie mostly sends up is its star and screenwriter, Mike Myers. That’s not all bad: Myers…
Tolstoy, Stripped for Speed
Bernard Rose, the writer/director of the new movie version of Anna Karenina, talks about how lucky he was to discover “this marvelous story as an adult.” But in an adaptation, the story should be no more than what Henry James called the donne — the base an artist works from…
Pulp Friction
Robert E. Howard, the subject of Dan Ireland’s wonderful debut film The Whole Wide World, created the sword-and-sorcery genre with his Conan stories. Howard had a grand yet coarse-grained consciousness. His Conan tales, set in a fictitious primordial age full of demons and killers, boasted swift, cartoon-flavored action (“He moved…
Cotswold Unspun
The spacious banquet room at the new Kim Son was packed. The latest addition to Market Square, the restaurant itself is one more sign of renewed life downtown, and the people who gathered there on January 23 had been invited for the public unveiling of a grand plan for the…
Restoration Man
It was a hopeless scene. On a midsummer morning in 1995, a rundown Sixth Ward neighborhood was filled with the floating gray particles that only a fire brings. At 1505 Kane, the parishioners of St. Joseph’s Catholic Church stood on the sidewalk and wept at what they saw. Their church,…
Renaissance Play?
As a veteran builder and real-estate developer, Julio Laguarta may have seemed like an ideal choice to run the day-to-day operations for Houston Renaissance, the city-sanctioned, nonprofit corporation that plans to rebuild the Fourth Ward. Unfortunately, Laguarta brought a mountain of unfinished personal business to the Renaissance effort, the worst…
The Insider
Bad Dadditude Mayoral candidate Rob Mosbacher flaunted his big-money backers and raised more than a million bucks at a Galleria gala last week. By contrast, likely contender Lee P. Brown is still ensconced in the grove of academia and has fired hardly a campaign shot — until now. A memo…
Letters
Hard Questions I just finished reading “Bursting the Bubble” on David Vetter, the “Bubble Boy” [by Steve McVicker, April 17]. What an amazingly wonderful yet sad article. I cried. I felt so much pain for all who were involved. David Vetter’s life really addressed an issue that many parents with…
Press Picks
thursday may 1 Sweet Little 19 Poor old Numbers: Despite nearly two decades of cutting-edge bookings, the cavernous club on lower Westheimer has yet to be named “best live venue” in a Houston music poll. And yet, like Susan Lucci, the club makes do — sans trophy — with a…
Roll with It
Sometimes, for a restaurant to work, all it needs is one standout dish, something that, no matter what you think about the other offerings, you’ll come back for again and again. If it’s a fast-foodish sort of restaurant, it helps if that standout dish is something inexpensive. Think, for example,…
What’s Soul Got to Do with It?
Despite her success, Tina Turner has done her best to obscure the fact that she’s a great singer. It doesn’t help that she just launched her latest solo album, Wildest Dreams, and her first U.S. tour in six years (which will kick off Thursday and Friday at the Cynthia Woods…
She’s the Boss
“What I’ve always heard is: ‘You’ve got really great lips and you’ve got a really great voice.’ But I wanted them to say, ‘And you’ve got really great songs, too.’ I want to sing my songs, and I guess that makes me a difficult person to deal with sometimes.” From…
Rotation
Son Volt Straightaways Warner Bros. Jay Farrar certainly picked an odd time to play it safe. Now that the hubbub over his former Uncle Tupelo cohort Jeff Tweedy — who had the critics in the palm of his hand last year thanks to Wilco’s Being There, a sprawling paean to…
A Magical Flute
Mozart’s The Magic Flute lends itself to an imaginative set design. Indeed, it almost demands one that can capture the flavor of the heroic/comic opera, which Mozart set in ancient Egypt. Several seasons ago, Houston Grand Opera presented renowned illustrator Maurice Sendak’s delightful vision of The Magic Flute. Now, HGO…
Austin’s Fave
Jimmy LaFave’s meat-and-potatoes blend of rambunctious instinct and softhearted sincerity is about as awe-inspiring as blue-collar rock gets these days. That may explain why he’s become a live music institution throughout Texas, even if fans in his adopted hometown of Austin would prefer to keep LaFave to themselves. And who…
S R O
Harlem’s Pointe Ballet dancers, sheltered as they often are, seem unlikely prospects for a labor strike. But every now and then the art world’s athletes get as upset as anyone else about their work conditions and pull a walkout. That’s what happened in New York City early last month with…
Static
Music Council malaise… Next Monday and Tuesday at the Fabulous Satellite Lounge and May 14 at Ovations, the Houston Music Council will be holding parties to celebrate the release of its most recent CD designed to survey the local music scene, HMC Compilation Volume 4. Excited? Me neither. But according…
Neighborhood Values
August Wilson’s Two Trains Running, an installment in the subscriber-sharing deal between the Alley and the Ensemble theaters, seems an appropriate entry in the series. The play, perhaps more so than anything else offered up during the audience exchange, presents a window on the world of the middle-class black in…