Bye Bye Birdie
Bye Bye Birdie 1963, G, 112 min. D: George Sidney; with Janet Leigh, Dick Van Dyke, Ann-Margret, Paul Lynde. Great music and brilliant performances by Ann-Margret, Paul Lynde, and Dick Van Dyke.
Cleopatra
Cleopatra 1963, NR, 243 min. D: Joseph L. Mankiewicz; with Richard Burton, Elizabeth Taylor, Rex Harrison. Taylor, Burton, and Harrison are sublime in this sweeping epic of love and nations, a film that also earned Oscars for its cinematography, art direction, special effects, and costumes.
Lawrence of Arabia
This desert epic won seven Academy Awards and features Peter O’Toole in his first starring role, as the adventurer T.E. Lawrence.
Lover Come Back
Lover Come Back 1961, NR, 107 min. Directed by Delbert Mann, Narrated by , Voices by , Starring Rock Hudson, Doris Day, Tony Randall, Edie Adams, Jack Oakie. Hudson and Day play battling ad account executives who try to wrest each other’s product in this comedy of the sexes.
The Exorcist
The Exorcist 1973, R, 121 min. D: William Friedkin; with Linda Blair, Ellen Burstyn, Max Von Sydow, Jason Miller. No matter how many times viewed, The Exorcist never fails to deliver the goods. As soul-frightening and technically mesmerizing as it ever was, The Exorcist proves that there’s no ghost movie as scary as a Holy…
Wild Wild West
Wild Wild West 1999, PG-13, 152 min. Directed by Barry Sonnenfeld, Narrated by , Voices by , Starring Musetta Vander, Frederique Van Der Wal, Bai Ling, M. Emmet Walsh, Ted Levine, Salma Hayek, Kenneth Branagh, Kevin Kline, Will Smith. The pillaging of classic (and in this case, not-so-classic) television series marches relentlessly onward. One wonders…
An Ideal Husband
The Oscar Wilde drama about deceit and honor is presented by a solid cast.
Summer of Sam
Summer of Sam 1999, R, 142 min. Directed by Spike Lee, Narrated by , Voices by , Starring John Leguizamo, Adrien Brody, Mira Sorvino, Jennifer Esposito, Michael Rispoli, Saverio Guerra, Anthony LaPaglia, Bebe Neuwirth, Ben Gazarra, Michael Badalucco. In the summer of ’77, I was 11 years old and living in upper New York state,…
South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut
South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut 1999, R, 80 min. D: Trey Parker; with the voices of Trey Parker, Matt Stone, Mary Kay Bergman, Isaac Hayes. By now, you know that the naughty boys who created this land called South Park, Trey Parker and Matt Stone, don’t just like crass humor — they sport a…
Buena Vista Social Club
Intended less as a concert film than as a set of cinematic liner notes, BVSC is about the vanishing musical culture of Cuban stars who became famous in the Forties and Fifties while playing in the legendary Havana night club of the title.
Ms. Write
Carolyn Banks isn’t easy to classify. She’s written five books in a series of comic mysteries set in the equestrian world, four suspense novels, a book of erotica called Tart Tales, and the recently reissued Mr. Right: A Smartass Parafeminist Psychoerotic Thriller (Second Chance Press, $25 hard), just to name a few. Banks crosses genres…
Dancing About Architecture
New Sincerity-era Austinite Pat McDonald of Timbuk 3 fame is one person who’s tough to track, and the Flipnotics ad touting his “Farewell Austin Shows” this Friday and Saturday night only adds to the confusion. McDonald himself admits to some bafflement over the ad’s wording, since he doesn’t have a home in Austin and hasn’t…
Live Shots
The Nightripper: Dr. John at Antone’s June 18 photographs by John Carrico 26th Anniversary Weekend Hole in the Wall, June 18-20 Even if they put in a Galleria downtown and finally finish tearing up South Congress, two things will never vanish from Austin: the Hole in the Wall and truck driving songs. Whiskey makes three.…
Off The Bookshelf
by Mike Meserole DK Publishing, $17.95 paper They’re the kind of questions that keep sports fans up at night: Who is the tallest man to play in the NBA? What NFL team holds the record for the longest losing streak? What Division I school has the oldest basketball arena? Well, stir no more! The answers…
Bull Creek Watershed Map
The Bull Creek watershed is framed by four highways: Research Boulevard, Loop 360, RR 620, and RM 2222. Much of booming Northwest Austin is drained by Bull Creek and its tributaries, but in the heart of the watershed-along Spicewood Springs Road, which cuts through the middle of the watershed-one finds horses, ranches, and seven low-water…
Five for 2000
Laura Wilkinson photograph courtesy of University of Texas Sports Information Department Their spindly, midair arcs seem other-worldly. It seems impossible, but that’s a body up there in the air, a real live human body contorted so elegantly into effortless twists and spirals that average bodies like yours and mine achieve only under the rare, extreme…
Postscripts
File this under “Scandals, Unrealized.” Ideality.com, a self-described “dream brokerage” that brings community events to Austin, decided that a book called The Technology of Orgasm : “Hysteria,” the Vibrator, and Women’s Sexual Satisfaction (Johns Hopkins University Press, $22 hard) by former Austinite Rachel P. Maines is pretty interesting and deserves more of a publicity “push”…
The Other Sister
The Bull Creek watershed is fairly neatly contained within the diamond formed by four highways: US 183 (Research Boulevard), Loop 360 (Capital of Texas Highway), RR 620 (which has no snazzy name), and RM 2222, which is actually called Bull Creek Road until it crosses Bull Creek near the latter’s junction with Lake Austin. Go…
Author Literatus
Steven Saylor has so effectively created an alternate fictional universe in his Roma Sub Rosa series — which consists so far of seven novels about the end of the Roman republic — that fans of his novels may be tempted to imagine that every day the author wakes, dons a toga, opens dense historical texts…
Come On Down
Council members, startyour engines. After an almost month-long hiatus, the Austin City Council is back in action this week with a 130-plus-item agenda (usually a few inches thick and bound with a rubber band, this week’s supporting materials equaled the weight of a large German Shepherd puppy and came shrink-wrapped). To make matters worse, the…
Book Reviews
by Kiki Feroudi Moutsatsos with Phyllis Karas Putnam, $25.95 hard Maria Callas: Sacred Monster by Stelios Galatopoulos Simon & Schuster, $35 hard There’s something about The Onassis Women by Kiki Feroudi Moutsatsos that rings a bit hollow, and it’s Kiki herself. She is the only character in the book who has no public reputation, and…
Naked City
Next time you’re on the north side of Town Lake hike-bike trail, directly across from the old Seaholm Power Plant, cast your gaze on the quiet little building that sits along the shore and think: “Lo! ‘Tis a lovely place to rest my weary haunches.” That’s sort of the idea that greenspace huggers are floating…
About AIDS
The Federal Trade Commission has issued a warning that some of the at-home HIV test kits being sold on the Internet may give a false negative result. The FTC bought test kits from suspect sources, and they failed to test positive on known HIV-infected samples. If HIV-positive people used such a kit, they would think…
Play on Worlds
Austin Powers: Operation Trivia Berkeley Systems/Macintosh & PC For anyone faintly familiar with Berkeley Systems’ gut-wrenchingly funny You Don’t Know Jack series, Operation Trivia should rouse your funny bone on premise alone. Players may either behave with Austin or team up with Dr. Evil to best the International Man of Mystery at his own game.…
Coach’s Corner
The roster of colleges reads like a Hank Snow song book of hard times on the road. Bowling Green, American International, Southern, Longwood, Nicholls State, Drexel, Navy. Many of the players are journeyman pros — Elie, Kerr, Kersey, Perdue — guys who had the good fortune to be, more than once, in the right place…
Scanlines
aka Dellamorte, Dellamore D: Michele Soavi (1994) with Rupert Everett, Fran�ois Hadji-Lazaro, Anna Falchi. Cemetery keeper Francesco (Everett) is talking on the phone when there’s a knock on the door. He answers the knock to find a pasty-faced zombie in a suit leering at him. Calmly he produces a large revolver, levels it at the…
Day Trips
View from the patio of the Eagle’s Lodge on Lake Buchanan photograph by Gerald E. McLeod Canyons of the Eagles Lodge and Park, on Lake Buchanan outside of Burnet, is more than just a park. It’s a new kind of park. It’s a destination that offers an outdoor experience for a rainbow of types of…
Short Cuts
The Art School at the Austin Museum of Art is again offering a film appreciation class this summer called Cinema Eye. It will use excerpts from classic and contemporary films from Gone With the Wind to GoodFellas to introduce students to the basic elements of film and visual narrative techniques. It will be taught by…
Page Two
When Lisa Tozzi talks about her vacations, she offers a list of which major-league teams she saw at what stadiums (“We saw Chicago and the Dodgers in L.A.,” etc.). She denies this obsession. Instead, she claims that having overheard her a couple of times discussing her vacation in this manner, I have exaggerated her casual…
TV Eye
The July lineup of the PBS series POV (Television with a Point of View) features three films about loyalty and identity, starting with Emiko Omori’s new film, Rabbit in the Moon (7/6, 10pm, KLRU). Omori’s film memoir recounts the period during World War II when thousands of Japanese-Americans and Japanese natives were interned in camps…
Public Notice
Matthew and Hummos photograph by Amanda Redmond We get a little misty when we hear of nuts like 22-year-old Matthew Lawrence and his canine sidekick, Hummos (see photo), who together are biking across America in hopes of raising dough and awareness for AIDS along the way. We know that this sounds preposterous on two fronts,…
The Great Pretenders
Some trace the origins of today’s fantasy games to a little game played with dice and cards invented in 1960 called Strat-O-Matic (See sidebar). But the La Rotisserie story is to fantasy sports what Abner Doubleday and Cooperstown is to baseball. The legend goes something like this: One night about 20 years ago a group…
Mr. Smarty Pants Knows
On rare occasions, some snakes can reproduce without engaging in sex. According to “The Joy of Pi,” 10 digits to the right of the decimal point of pi are sufficient to give the circumference of the earth to the fraction of an inch. The one millionth digit of pi is one. Grapefruit consumed with coffee…
Of Dice And Men
Before those sad and isolated statistics replaced hale and hearty line scores as the seat of a fan’s interest; before the flux and flow of the National League disabled list took on the watercooler importance of the Dow Jones; before eager owners mined the late-edition box scores to see if light-hitting Jose Vidro did indeed…
Automat
The Hoffbrau 613 W. Sixth, 472-0822 Mon-Fri, 11am-2pm, 5-8:30pm One of Austin’s longest running success stories, the venerable Hoffbrau has been slinging steaks since 1934. Though more trendy restaurants are growing up around it, the steak-and-potatoes fare here remains the same as it ever was. A definitive Austin tradition is there ever was one. GM…
Out of Left Field
Bobby Valentine holds an important place in the history of eyeblack. A decade ago, while working for the Texas Rangers, Valentine managed a game while wearing wristbands, sunglasses, and eyeblack. Apparently, Valentine thought the outfit indicated his intensity and love for baseball. Last month, after he was ejected from a game, Valentine, who now manages…
Taco Arriba & Chelo Kabob
2525 W. Anderson (Northcross Mall Food Court), 459-4595 Mon-Sat, noon-9pm; Sun, noon-6pm Chelo Kabob serves Persian cuisine and, based on my somewhat limited exposure to the food of the country now known as Iran, quite delicious Persian cuisine at that. The Taco Arriba part (it has a standard Mexican taco-based menu as well) seems a…
Clash of the Titans
SHAVRDA SVEC Hole Score +/- Score +/- 1 4 +1 4 +1 2 5 +3 4 +2 3 3 +3 4 +3 4 4 +4 4 +4 5 5 +6 5 +6 6 3 +6 4 +7 7 5 +8 3 +7 8 3 +8 4 +8 9 3 +8 4 +9 Total 35 +8…
Articulations
One of the area’s leading musicians and teachers of musicians passed away this past Tuesday, June 22. Dr. William Race was the Priscilla Pond Flawn Regents Professor of Piano at UT Austin and a 30-year veteran of the School of Music, having joined the faculty in 1967. During his career at the university, Race served…
Food-o-File
It’s been almost a year since I’ve printed a restaurant’s phone number incorrectly twice in a row. Hopefully, the patient folks at BBQ World Headquarters will get lucky the third time. Their phone number is 323-9112. Katz’s New Kreation Never one to rest on his knishes, restaurant entrepreneur/nightclub owner/record label magnate Mark Katz has come…
The Score
Why do we love sports? After all, for all the joy sports may bring us, they also have a tendency to exacerbate some of our worst personality traits: superstitious compulsions, desperate need to control all things we cannot, and — worst of all — our annoying self-righteousness. Like a lot of sportsaholics, I’m not really…
Under-Stated
The Texas I saw in the darkened rooms of my youth was, without question, a magnificent place. Great expanses of land, spreading out in all directions. Endless carpets of green rolling to the horizon, usually teeming with cattle. Oceans of sand flecked with islands of stubborn scrub and cactus. Massive outcroppings of rock rising from…
Blame It on the Bossa Nova
illustration by Nathan Jensen Brazil has one of the richest and most varied pop music scenes in the world, which isn’t surprising given that the South American beach paradise has an enormous, culturally diverse population. But what else do you know about Brazil? Not much, huh? Well, Caetano Veloso’s coming to town, so you’d better…
We Got Game
“Ho ho ho, merry Elmer!” brayed Elizabeth King, running to home plate, victorious from a hit that brought in two runners and a homer. I was on the bench desperately hoping I wouldn’t have to bat. No one else wanted me to, either. illustration by Jason Stout I was a fifth-grader by fluke in my…
A Select Bibliography of Texas Plays
Horton Foote, Only From the Heart (1944) Ramsey Yelvington, Home to Galveston (1949) Horton Foote, The Chase (1952) Horton Foote, The Trip to Bountiful (1953) Horton Foote, The Traveling Lady (1954) Ramsey Yelvington, The Texian Trilogy: A Cloud of Witnesses (1955), Shadow of an Eagle (1961), Women and Oxen (1965) Oliver Hailey, Who’s Happy Now…
Vamos Caetanear
Quick. Name one contemporary pop musician whose name has been transformed into a commonly used verb? Prince? Madonna? What about Selena? Come on, name one. Okay, let’s go find one. Run your finger down the globe, down past that little bulge in the middle. Now stop at that large mass occupying half of South America.…
Zen and the Art of Entree Experimentation
315 Congress, 482-9010 Lunch: Tue-Fri, 11am-2pm Dinner: Mon-Thu, 6-10:30pm; Fri-Sat, 6-11pm The art of the Japaneserock garden is to isolate individual natural elements in order to elucidate their essential qualities. The effect is unexpected, at once soothing and shocking. Its very contradiction leads toward spiritual, intellectual tranquility. Like the rock garden, Japanese food utilizes the…
