The Color of Freedom
At first blush, Blue sounds terribly over-conceptualized. Most ominous is that this is the first in a movie trilogy by Polish filmmaker Krzysztof Kieslowski. The second film is titled White, and the third is, yes, Red. Before you swell with patriotic pride, be advised that these are also the colors…
Great Escapism
With the approach of 1997 — the year that control of Hong Kong will turn over to China — and with the success of John Woo’s films, including his American-made Hard Target, U.S. interest in Hong Kong filmmaking is perhaps at an all-time high. And with good reason. With their…
Drunk, But Not Disorderly
How realistic a portrait of substance abuse can a movie give when it features perky beauty Meg Ryan playing an alcoholic? That’s the question raised by When a Man Loves a Woman. The always lovely, always breezy Ryan has never looked better than she does here — which is a…
The Man Behind Mad Max
Thirty minutes after the Houston Rockets have disposed of the Golden State Warriors 134-102, basketball is a subject far from Vernon Maxwell’s thoughts. The Houston Rockets’ streaky and volatile off-guard is instead making a beeline for the cramped counter at a bar he calls “the spot.” Here, at World Bait…
A Taxing Situation
Late one Monday morning in March of last year, Michael Lee was tending his vegetable garden when a stranger appeared at his fence. The man identified himself as Neil Swenson, an appraiser for Harris County. Swenson asked if he could take a look inside Lee’s two-story brick house, but for…
The Crip Patrol Rolls
When United Cerebral Palsy of Greater Houston honored restaurateur Ninfa Lorenzo with a dinner at the downtown Hyatt Regency last month, the organization got a little bit more theater than it had planned. As the attendees converged on the hotel’s opulent banquet hall, they were greeted by a small group…
Press Picks
thursday may 12 Young Writers Reading Series Writers in the Schools, a nonprofit organization that sends real live writers around to teach children, allows kids to have the whole literary experience, up to and including public readings of their own deathless prose. High and middle school students from M.D. Anderson…
Hot Plate
Get the Halos When you see a phrase like “angel fish” on a menu, you figure it for marketing mumbo-jumbo, right? Well, out at Denis’ Seafood — one of the most compelling reasons for journeying to Houston’s wild western suburbs — the angel fish appearing as a special now and…
Take My Picture — Please!
If you’ve been following the papers, you may already know about the flap caused by Houston rap group Trinity Garden Cartel’s recent release of Don’t Blame It on Da Music on Rap-a-Lot Records. The CD’s cover features a photograph — allegedly obtained without permission — of two uniformed HPD officers…
Rotation
The Mike Gunn Almaron Double Naught If any band slouching around the Houston underground has made a ripple outside its home turf — not counting the in-limbo Pain Teens — it’s The Mike Gunn. One of my earliest tasks as a reviewer in Houston was to consider the Gunn’s Durban…
Noise Doctors
By the sound of Sonic Youth’s latest disk, New York’s guitar-noise barrier busters have abandoned their skronk mandate for quieter avenues of snotty expression. But since what’s hip on the East Coast will ever find its way to the West (or is it the other way around now?), there’s Medicine…
Japanese Catnip
Of the many rock-culture legacies left in the wake of the late Kurt Cobain, the most lastingly important may be neither his music nor his sad self-martyrdom. Because when Cobain and Nirvana opened the floodgates of an underground musical spectrum that had, before Nevermind, been accurately described as alternative, he…
Haute Spot
It’s a pleasant — and all too rare — surprise when a restaurant you’d written off acquires a new lease on life. Yet that is exactly what has come to pass at downtown’s Lancaster Hotel, where talented young chef Louis Cressy is busy turning out provocative neo-Gulf Coast cuisine that…
Letters
My Model Story “Still Lives” [by Ann Walton Sieber, April 21] prompted me to write. I used to model for art classes and fine-art photographers when I lived in New York years ago. Before becoming a model I taught high school art, and that was such a mental and emotional…
Nut Case
Tom Topor’s Nuts, currently in the final weekend of a briskly effective production at Actors Theatre, has an unpromising title that threatens run-of-the-mill farce. In fact, although Nuts has its moments of pointed comedy, for the most part it’s a surprisingly stirring courtroom drama that studiously examines the social construction…
The Secret Life of Plants
Botany occupies a peculiar position in the history of human knowledge. For eons it was the one field in which humankind had anything more than the vaguest of insights. Tropical cultures survived for millennia by utilizing the magical properties of flora — an ability that has been largely lost in…