On any given day in Dallas, you can saunter in to Gerald Peters Gallery on Fairmount Street and buy a small Picasso painting for $1.25 million, or pick up a sofa-sized David Bates at Dunn and Brown Contemporary for around $80,000. At the Dallas Center for Contemporary Art, you can…
10/16 Friends will disown me. I’ll receive hate mail. But the truth is…I don’t much fancy the Beatles. I don’t disagree that they were instrumental to rock history. They have deceptively simple melodies. Those I like. I even have a few favorite songs, but of times spent wondering what to…
10/18 The women you’ll see outside NorthPark Center on Saturday aren’t the usual “ladies who lunch,” and their gathering has nothing to do with any sale at the mall. No, these ladies–and the men and children who come along to lend their support–are gathered to help fight breast cancer. The…
10/18 Those with plans of making foil antennas for someone’s Halloween costume might as well get on that a little early. Grapevine’s Butterfly Flutterby festival–featuring, among other things, a butterfly parade and costume contest–is this weekend. Adults, children and even pets can participate. Everyone ends up at downtown’s Liberty Park,…
10/17 While the shimmering waters in Venice reflected intricate light schemes against delicate buildings, artist Julie Lazarus–seated among the flowering vines of the lush Mediterranean–moved her pencil across a simple canvas to capture the remarkable landscape. Then she took her ideas to Murano, blending the shapes and colors into drawings…
10/22 We always thought our family was weird. And, well, we were right. What we didn’t realize was that we weren’t the only ones taking a dip in dysfunction. The world is filled with crazies, and, amazingly, they’re not all related to us. This revelation began to sink in sometime…
The opening credits insist Kill Bill: Volume 1 is “Quentin Tarantino’s 4th film,” when it’s actually his 3.5th; it’s too incomplete to be measured as a whole, half a movie waiting for a proper ending due to arrive in the next volume in February. Till then we’ll have to contemplate…
It’s beginning to look as though the films of George Clooney are less works of fiction than products of documentary crews following around the actor leading his enviable life. In film after film he’s seen dining with beautiful actresses in gorgeous surroundings perfectly lit for an evening’s seduction: Jennifer Lopez…
Whatever you think Demonlover is, chances are it ain’t. The title conjures up Frazetta/Bisley-like images of muscular monsters deflowering delicate damsels, but while such visions appear for a few seconds on-screen, they aren’t the point. You may have heard that the movie involves anime: It does, but again, it’s almost…
Is it real or is it biochemical? Does love spring from some mysterious, serendipitous, irrational depth or is it a cut-and-dried chemical reaction, a function of pheromones as cold-blooded as a snake? Dopamine, the feature directorial debut of Mark Decena, poses just such a question. The film takes its title…
Stephen Sondheim’s Assassins takes aim at the American dream and blows it to smithereens. The strangely hypnotic musical, now onstage in an excellent production at Quad C Theatre at Collin County Community College, imagines a surreal reunion of four killers of presidents and five who tried. Existing together on a…
The function of most film festivals is to introduce the enthusiastic filmgoer to the unknown. Certainly, the Vistas Film Festival will do a little of all that when it kicks off October 9: Its opening-night film is a Puerto Rican offering titled Julia, toto en mi, about a real-life poet…
Thursday, October 9 Kimonos and obis off. It’s time for Japanese moon viewing. Since the Heian period (794-1185 AD), gazing upon a perky Japanese bum has been surrounded by ceremony. A special time with hopes for a good harvest and offerings to the lunar god. Oh, right. Moon as in…
Alfre Woodard is the kind of actor who ennobles a film just by her presence, who projects more intent with a probing gaze or quick upturning of chin than most can in a page of dialogue and whose distinctive gifts (an earthy intelligence; luminous, intuitive eyes; and a bearing befitting…
Ongoing For those jaded souls whose bones don’t chill, hit the highway for Terrell. No, not for the mental hospital. Head for the old Verdun estate. Legend has it that in 1901, Baron Michael Verdun, a psychopathic werewolf, built a grotesque house on Voodoo Bayou where he conducted cruel experiments…
10/11 Are you ready for Dallas’ ugliest weekend of the year? No, Ross Perot isn’t taking his family out for ice cream. We’re talking about the swarm of horribly colored football fanatics descending upon the Cotton Bowl, 3750 Midway Plaza in Fair Park, on Saturday for the annual TX-OU game…
Ongoing Fright Fest at Six Flags Over Texas is no small undertaking. To transform the 212-acre theme park into a den of terror, the spooksters use 3,000 yards of spider webs, 450 tombstones and 500 bales of hay…because, well, hay is scary. New to the attractions this year is the…
10/12 It’s not truly fall around here until the public puking starts. It’s always autumn when the frat rats come out, frolicking, binge drinking and sidewalk-hurling for Texas-OU weekend. Simultaneously, the carnival rats emerge all giddy, only to puke up their coveted corn dogs on the scary rides at the…
10/13 The journey of a thousand miles begins with one small step, according to a Chinese proverb. Likewise, the 350-word article on the Shaolin Warriors of China appearance at Bass Performance Hall begins with the small step of surfing the Internet, for a refresher course in the American bible of…
Director Richard Linklater’s The School of Rock imagines, sort of, what might have become of voluble rock snob Barry the morning after his grand finale in Stephen Frears’ adaptation of Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity–after his Marvin Gaye impersonation had faded and been forgotten in the daylight hours, after he quit…
Out of Time, in which we’re to believe 48-year-old Denzel Washington and 32-year-old Sanaa Lathan were high school sweethearts, demands its audience ignore all manner of implausibilities. Chief among them is the behavior of Washington’s Matt Whitlock, chief of police in a tiny coastal town just outside of Miami who…
You gotta love John Sayles. No, really–you gotta, or else a mob of indie-minded cineastes will club you into submission. Sometimes it’s easy to comply, as with City of Hope and Sunshine State, both astute portraits of uniquely American class, race and real estate struggles boiling down to the burning…
