Oh La La

There’s “freedom” fries, “freedom” toast and Inspector Gadget starring “Freedom” Stewart. One more and we’ll stick our “freedom” manicured nail down our throat and hurl, or “freedom” kiss a wall outlet and electrocute ourselves. But we have compatriots in our disdain. We have Beret!, the hardcore band so angry the…

Bellsll Be Ringing

3/23 This is Dallas, the city of trade shows, conventions, seminars and any other informative event that requires a ticket or a tax I.D. Here’s another, and so what, right? Wrong. For the first time the metroplex might just be opening its mind in a big way. June Wedding Inc…

Fast Food

3/22 The thing that makes the Uptown Run & Trolley Walk one of the best fun runs in the area is the large number of sponsors. The more sponsors a race has, the better the free food spread is afterward. With most races you get a banana, maybe half a…

Tune In

3/23 For pity’s sake, give your poor, culture-starved kiddos something to listen to besides the Aussie-twanged musical stylings of Anthony, Greg, Murray and Jeff. Take the first step toward Wiggles deprogramming. Take a break from Raffi’s eco-political warbling about saving baby Beluga whales. Do yourself and your kids a favor…

Ground Zero

3/21 “Fashion. Art. Music.” While it could be argued that the previous quote proves redundant under the umbrella of art itself, the bar/lounge Open is covering each base this Friday with NYC3 (three, as in cubed). Complete with a dance atmosphere supplied by sultry NYC personality DJ Penelope Tuesdae (who…

Tear Jerker

3/25 It’s impossible not to cry at some point when reading the work of John Irving. The New Englander has a gift for sideswiping his readers with a cheap shot of the sharpest emotion, and yet he appeals to the mother, the air-traveler, the romantic and many of the readers…

Now Hear This!

Perhaps the most incomprehensible image from Lee Hirsch’s documentary Amandla! A Revolution in Four-Part Harmony is that of the smiling faces seen throughout. Even under the oppressive rule of the National Party, responsible for making “official” the apartheid laws of segregation and humiliation that defined and defiled South Africa for…

Winter of Our Discontent

What more can go wrong in suburbia? Director Rose Troche (Go Fish) wants us to know, and to that end she has recruited another army of wounded parents, troubled children and broken dreamers, then marched them all into a whirlpool of dysfunction on the quiet, tree-lined streets just minutes from…

The Stunted

The Hunted pits Tommy Lee Jones against Benicio Del Toro in a battle of hand-to-hand, wit-to-wit fighting skills. Frankly my money would be on Tommy Lee any old day: He may be old, but he’s a tough geezer who looks like he could mop the floor with Benicio. (Also, frankly:…

Look Who’s Stalking

Plays by Rebecca Gilman should come with a warning label: “As seen in Ladies Home Journal.” Gilman constructs heavy, overwritten dramas, including Boy Gets Girl, now onstage in Echo Theatre’s production at the Bath House Cultural Center, and Spinning into Butter, done last season at Theatre Three, around some mushy…

This Week’s Day-By-Day Picks

3/13 Cultural arts organization seeks young professionals with an interest in socialization, arts outings and leadership for ballets, art exhibits and more–possibly even a long-term relationship. During Culture Shock, the Fort Worth Dallas Ballet’s Members of Barre will wine and dine new recruits for its group, which provides a social…

Life Preserver

We never imagined those hours spent watching Saturday-morning and after-school cartoons would give us information we could use in the real world 20 years later. We mean besides the there’s-no-such-things-as-ghosts lesson. (Thanks, Scooby Doo!) But one simple slogan blaring from the TV speakers actually is worth the reels on which…

Mill Around

3/15 Take your Claritin, your Allegra, your Tylenol Allergy, whatever. The time has come again to experience the blooms of nearly 250,000 bulbs. This year marks the most flora ever displayed since Dallas Blooms began 19 years ago. A landscape of thousands of pansies, violas, flowering azaleas and other blooming…

Shamrock On

3/15 Kids can celebrate St. Patrick’s Day early this year with the Luck of the Green Lock In at Eisenbergs Skate Park in Plano. From midnight Friday through 8 a.m. Saturday, kids are treated to all-night skating or biking, contests, pizza, party favors, games and breakfast. The only requirements are…

Dishing

3/13 From a survey we conducted among preschoolers, we gathered this informative fact about nutrition: Ten out of 10 do not balk at consuming unidentifiable items found on the ground. OK, so maybe we didn’t really ask kids about their eating habits, but we do have fond memories of our…

Get Out

3/13 Dallas theater bolts out of the winter doldrums this week with WaterTower Theatre’s second Out-of-the-Loop Festival, a celebration of acting, dance, music and art filling three venues at the Addison Theatre Centre. More than 20 new works will be featured, including the area premiere of The Guys, Anne Nelson’s…

Bass Ackwards

In nature, living things prey upon each other all the time. Humanity, on the other hand, has a choice. It’s flouting this choice that turns on director Gaspar Noé. In his latest project, Irrversible, he basically swipes Christopher Nolan’s backward-narrative structure from Memento to tell a lurid tale of rape…

Radner Reincarnate

“Having cancer gave me membership into an elite club to which I would rather not belong,” Gilda Radner said after being diagnosed. Cancer is a bonding experience, whether one has it, knows someone with it or has lost someone to it. A 16-year breast cancer survivor, Kathy LaTour has put…

Beer Run

3/15 If you think those athletic types who wake up on Saturday mornings for races and fun runs are a bunch of boring health nuts too busy counting carbs and calories to have any fun, then check out the pack of lushes that lines up each year for the St…

Impossible Dreamer

Filmmaker Terry Gilliam is no stranger to fiasco. After all, this is the human dynamo who saw 1989’s inventive (if sometimes incoherent) The Adventures of Baron Munchausen through a series of artistic and financial crises that would have landed most people in an asylum. But Gilliam’s encounter with the tale-spinning…

SEAL Appeal

John Shaft went to Africa, so why shouldn’t Die Hard’s John McClane? In the new action romp Tears of the Sun, Bruce Willis undertakes a jungle rescue operation on the Dark Continent, and for his part it’s a McClane adventure in camouflage, minus all the sass and most of the…

Phat Chance

You know Internet dating has become totally mainstream when Disney cranks out a bland comedy featuring a randomly selected pair of mismatched stars to take on the subject. Bearing the unwieldy and meaningless title Bringing Down the House, said comedy is predicated on the biggest pitfall of cyber-flirting, the idea…