Pete's Place

• New movies to be released tomorrow on DVD

  A Christmas Tale (2008) ***** Late in A Christmas Tale Abel Vuillard (Jean-Paul Roussillon), the mirthful, patient patriarch in Arnaud Desplechin’s noisy, cloying and altogether marvelous film, reads aloud from the opening pages of Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals. His audience is his oldest child, Élizabeth (Anne Consigny), who [...]
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  Posted: November 30, 2009, 11:55am EST
  

• My Thanksgiving Toast

  There are many things I have to be thankful for, the principle ones being:My Son.My Granddaughter.My Hero, My Hero's parents (who celebrated their 60th wedding anniversary last weekend -- how wonderful!) and My Hero's children and son-in-law, all of whom have graciously accepted me as part of their family and [...]
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  Posted: November 26, 2009, 3:12am EST
  

• New movies to be released tomorrow on DVD

  Angels & Demons (2009) **½ Since Angels & Demons takes place mainly in the Vatican, and is festooned with the rites and ornaments of Roman Catholicism, I might as well begin with a confession. I have not read the novel by Dan Brown on which this film (directed, like its [...]
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  Posted: November 23, 2009, 8:59am EST
  

• What were these voters thinking???

  Hoop Dreams was not only the best documentary of 1994, it was also that year's best picture. Just a little more than two weeks ago, film critic Roger Ebert called it "the great American documentary." Crumb, another magnificent documentary from that same year, was superior to four of the five [...]
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  Posted: November 21, 2009, 10:13pm EST
  

• It's time to give the area's other football team a little more attention

  I picked up a hard copy of the Dallas Morning News today, something unusual for me. I glanced at the Metro section, then went to the Sports section and quickly realized why I feel hard copies of the Dallas Morning News are largely irrelevant (and I'm a former reporter/writer/editor for' [...]
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  Posted: November 18, 2009, 2:09pm EST
  

• Garland Road improvement projects may face insurmountable obstacles

  From what I gather, there's a group of folks, at the behest of former Dallas city councilman Gary Griffith. that wants to convert Garland Road into another McKinney Ave. This is not a new idea. Mr. Griffith's predecessor, Mary Poss, produced a lengthy "Garland Road Master Plan," and, when I [...]
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  Posted: November 17, 2009, 11:13am EST
  

• I vote for Brown to replace Chief Kunkle

  Like most folks around here, I was shocked to read of Dallas Police Chief David Kunkle's announcement of his retirement next April. It had always seemed to me that the two most prominent members of the city's staff -- the city manager and the police chief -- were pressured out [...]
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  Posted: November 16, 2009, 12:16pm EST
  

• New movies to be released tomorrow on DVD

  Bruno (2009) ** In his various incarnations — Ali G, Borat and now, at feature length, Brüno — Sacha Baron Cohen leads his audience in a two-step of squirming discomfort and smug affirmation. Like Borat, this film offers both succor and sucker bait for liberal-minded viewers who may feel harassed [...]
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  Posted: November 16, 2009, 9:31am EST
  

• Big 12 commish does not like the idea of a college football playoff

  Big 12 Commissioner Dan Beebee, interviewed on Fox Sports Southwest during Saturday's Texas-Baylor blowout, said emphatically he would never, ever support a college football playoff. In fact, he said, if there is too much pressure for college football to do away with the current BCS system, that college football would, [...]
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  Posted: November 15, 2009, 12:30am EST
  

• New York Times sports pages focus on Metroplex

  Saturday's New York Times had a decidely Dallas/Fort Worth feel to it. The lead story focused on Dallas' Tyrone Davis (left, with the ball), who is currently the star of the Georgia basketball team. This is not the Georgia that goes to war with Southeastern Conference foes but the Georgia' [...]
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  Posted: November 15, 2009, 12:14am EST
  

• A BCS fairytale (or nightmare)

  Play a game of "what if" with me here:What if "the ol' ball coach" pulls a rabbit out of the hat and his South Carolina team ambushes Florida this weekend?Then what if Florida defeats Alabama in the SEC title?And, finally, what if Florida and Alabama are the only two undefeated' [...]
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  Posted: November 11, 2009, 12:56pm EST
  

• "Precious" to win best picture Oscar?

  That's what In Contention's Kris Tarpley thinks. He's also predicting right now that Gabourey Sidibe and Mo'Nique will win best actress and supporting actress respectively.I'm not that sure. I remember this time three years ago I thought another film with an all-black cast, Dreamgirls, looked like a sure best-picture winner [...]
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  Posted: November 11, 2009, 12:07pm EST
  

• Local officials should be finding solutions, not just celebrating, on Veterans Day

  Today is Veterans Day and Dallas City Hall is all festive for the occasion. But city officials and others should take some time out during the day and come to terms with sobering facts about today's veterans. I don't know what the local figures show, but nationally it is estimated' [...]
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  Posted: November 11, 2009, 11:37am EST
  

• DeNiro's most famous line actually came from The Boss

  Here's an interesting story -- at least I found it interesting. While preparing for his role in Taxi Driver, Robert De Niro attended a Bruce Springsteen concert during which the adoring crowd kept yelling Bruce's name. At one point, as the crowd is yelling "Bruce! Bruce!", Springsteen turned and said [...]
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  Posted: November 10, 2009, 1:49am EST
  

• There goes another great idea

  I was going to yell, to scream, to stand on the mountaintops and hoist the flags from the valleys down below -- in another words I was prepared to raise the roofbeams with my voice-- to emphatically deny -- put all those vicious rumors to rest -- that I was [...]
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  Posted: November 10, 2009, 1:39am EST
  

• Why are some council members afraid to think for themselves?

  I spent much of Monday reading, writing and just plain relaxing in my home office. For entertainment I had the Dallas City Council's agenda meeting on the television. I watched them wrangle with the question of "Just how ethical do we want to be?" for much of the morning before [...]
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  Posted: November 10, 2009, 12:32am EST
  

• And I thought Texas" criminal courts were corrupt

  Texas can't hold a candle to Florida.Consider the case of Joe Sullivan, a mentally impaired boy convicted of sexual battery, largely on the testimony of two accomplices, both of whom were older than Sullivan, who each were rewarded for their testimony by given light sentences, one of them in a' [...]
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  Posted: November 10, 2009, 12:18am EST
  

• October's Oscar Poll

  Last month, I conducted my first poll of the almost 500 Oscar voters representing all the branches who are willing to share with me who plan to cast their nominating votes for in this year's Oscar race. I just finished counting all the returns and here are who the nominees [...]
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  Posted: November 09, 2009, 8:23pm EST
  

• SI's college football playoff bracket after games of Nov. 7

  (1) Florida vs. (16) Miami(8) LSU vs. (9) Ohio State(5) TCU vs. (12) USC(4) Cincinnati vs. (13) Iowa(3) Alabama vs. (14) Houston(6) Boise State vs. (11) Oregon(7) Georgia Tech vs. (10) Pittsburgh(2) Texas vs. (15) Utah [...]
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  Posted: November 09, 2009, 2:46pm EST
  

• New movies to be released tomorrow on DVD

  Ballast (2008) ****½ There isn’t much talk and not a drop of cynicism in this film, Lance Hammer’s austerely elegant, emotionally unadorned riff on life and death in the Mississippi Delta. Shot with a sure hand and a cast of unknowns, the film doesn’t so much tell a story as [...]
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  Posted: November 09, 2009, 10:39am EST
  

• Yesterday's elections

  A lot of pundits are looking at the results of yesterday's elections in New Jersey and Virginia and calling them a rebuke of President Obama and a shot in the arm for Republican conservatism. Those pundits need to look more closely.Gov. John Corzine of New Jersey lost because he failed [...]
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  Posted: November 05, 2009, 9:50pm EST
  

• The Kinky and Medina factors

  To me, the surprising result of the University of Texas/Texas Tribune poll unveiled today is not that Gov. Hair leads Sen. Hutch by 12 percent among Republicans, but that Kinky Friedman has a nine percentage point lead over Tom Schieffer among Democrats. Could Kinky win this primary on name recognition [...]
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  Posted: November 04, 2009, 12:56pm EST
  

• The Mavs at 3-1

  If anyone told me the Dallas Mavericks would be 3-1, especially after their opening game home loss to the Washington Wizards, which hasn't done a thing since, I would have told them they were crazy. It's not that I was overly concerned about the Wizards game -- it was the' [...]
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  Posted: November 04, 2009, 12:17pm EST
  

• Top 25 High School Football teams

  I ran across this nifty Internet set that ranks high school football teams all over the nation and the Texas section offers an option where the teams are ranked regardless of class. Here is its ranking of the 25 best high school football teams in the state (the last number [...]
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  Posted: November 03, 2009, 4:50pm EST
  

• New movies to be released tomorrow on DVD

  Aliens in the Attic (2009) ** In Aliens in the Attic, basically a tweener cable movie on steroids, a group of intergalactic travelers comes to Earth with plans for widespread massacre and planetary domination. Most of the battling with the four-armed, knee-high green critters is done by a crew of [...]
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  Posted: November 02, 2009, 4:28pm EST