5/2 If you’re a gringo like me, Cinco de Mayo is an awe-inspiring festivity. On what other date after St. Patrick’s Day, but before July 4th, do so many people from so many races and economic classes join together on common ground and get just totally schlocked? How many other…
5/5 Here are some fun facts we learned while doing Internet research for this story about Texas Discovery Garden’s butterfly gardening workshops at Fair Park: A regal fritillary is a type of butterfly found on North American prairies–not some sort of low-level 18th-century court functionary. (Blast! My royal chamber pot…
4/30 If abiding by Webster’s law, there’s a decided difference between a “community” and a “city,” and it’s a divergence that speaks volumes about our Dallas. A community is defined as “a group of people living in the same locality,” whereas a city is “a center of population, commerce and…
5/1 At first someone plays him. The imitation is solid but not spectacular; the actor has the voice down, the cigar, tennis shorts. Maybe you’d know the impression without an introduction, but it goes like this: In 1971, when Melvin Van Peebles needed some bread to finish his revolutionary pic…
One thing few may mention about Mean Girls is that it could have been unrelentingly terrible. It isn’t–it’s actually pretty fabulous on its own terms–but consider: a rush-job comedy (hastily lensed a few months ago) constructed around a high-concept title with built-in ka-ching and endless potential as talk-show fodder. Produced…
Laws of Attraction is the kind of film you might mistake for “cute” or “charming” at first glance. Maybe you will open the paper and spot the ad with Pierce Brosnan and Julianne Moore canoodling and think to yourself how nice it would be to see James Bond defrosting indie…
This may sound an eensy bit hyperbolic, but dig: Mayor of the Sunset Strip is the greatest rock-and-roll movie of all time. Of course, as with any advanced class, it’s good to bone up on the prerequisites. If you haven’t explored rock in film (and rockin’ film) from The T.A.M.I…
I am going to give 13 Going on 30 too much credit, though it’s hardly worth the effort; Lord knows the filmmakers didn’t put much into it. It’s a shame, as far as these things go, because what could have been an engaging, maybe even enlightening story about the unfairly…
Suicide made merry. Brotherly devotion tinged with carnal deceit. Personal tragedy transformed by malicious humor. These are some of the oil-and-water notions advanced by Lone Scherfig’s Wilbur, a mood-switching meditation on love and death that goes out of its way to yank our chains. From the sly come-on of her…
Among the so-called highlights of this year’s USA Film Festival, which opens Thursday and runs through April 29, is Napoleon Dynamite, which sold for some $5 million at the Sundance Film Festival in January and offers further proof that what plays in Utah sometimes ought to stay in Utah. It’s…
A man and woman sit in a living room. She’s a pretty blonde. He’s well-dressed but mushy around the midsection. Good paintings hang on the wall behind them. The soft beige leather sofa and two pale chairs positioned just so make a visual statement about the couple’s social status (high)…
In the unconscious abyss of sleep and repose lies an arena of possibility. There are the dreamscapes where one enacts the impossible, from the mundane to the amazing, from talking to the president at a barbecue to flying fleet-bodied through urban vistas yet unknown. Beneath the eyes of a resting…
Marriage Play Hes never been married, but playwright Edward Albee is the best when it comes to writing arguments between a husband and wife. Just as he did with George and Martha, the verbally vicious pair in Whos Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Albee presents the disintegration of a couple at…
Kevin Landers When confronted by mass production and industrialization some 150 years ago, artists hustled to craft, fortifying the artists touch and, in so doing, letting the world know, Yes, we do need artists! The machine would not kill the artist. Born in Boston and working out of New York,…
If we were kind, which we seldom are, we’d say the schedule for the University of Texas at Dallas’ Spring Arts Festival was “fluid.” Since we’re not kind, we will tell you that your best bet for enjoying the performances and visual art of more than 700 UTD students and…
Thursday, April 22 The term “stampede” will have a slightly different meaning on Thursday as the Unique Performance Shelby Continuation Facility, 13950 Senlac Drive in Farmers Branch, welcomes The Great American Pony Drive II, when a caravan of Mustangs traveling across the nation in celebration of the 40th anniversary of…
Ira Glass is prepared to disappoint you. On the street, in the grocery store, at a restaurant, the witty, stuttering, guffawing, nasally, dorky, much-loved host of This American Life knows that he cannot live up to the expectations people have for him. Nobody can. They’re not real. They’re his show’s…
4/24 Kay Armstrong tossed her toe shoes and trashed her tutus a long time ago, preferring the business end of ballet and contemporary dance to performing or teaching. Armstrong heads up the Dallas Dance Council, but before that she was part of a team that organized the Houston Ballet and…
4/24 Many years ago, when I did more basketball playing and a whole lot more drinking (but never at the same time, though I suspect that would make for an interesting story), a friend persuaded me to fill in for him in one of those ubiquitous three-on-three hoops tourneys that…
4/24 Want to humble a bunch of seventh-graders? Well, that’s weird, but it’s still easy to do. Hand them a camcorder and make them film a five-minute movie in only one week. Their cheers of “That sounds simple” should soon turn to irritated groans as the endless setting up, reshooting…
4/28 All they’re doing is re-creating bits from The Carol Burnett Show, but it’s still going to be funnier than hell. Onstage Tim Conway is the best physical comedian not named Chris Kataan, and Harvey Korman does this thing where he plays it straight but gets pissed off in the…
If only Dogville were at least involving enough to be perplexing. Sigh. In simplest terms–which it definitely deserves–Lars von Trier’s latest thingamabob is a large, pretentious blob of coulda-been. As in, it coulda been deep and insightful. It coulda been sociologically challenging. It coulda been formalistically thrilling. But it isn’t…
