School’s back in session and even if we’re still sweating a little bit (or a lot), there’s that twinge of fall lurking around the corner. This week’s recommendations have the butterflies ushering in decidedly autumnal events like Burton screenings, Nick Cave releases and yes-oh-yes, costume sales. Take a jacket to…
Opening your film on the image of a child plummeting off a cliff, presumably to his death, is a fairly foolproof way of getting the audience’s attention. And Alexandre Aja’s hyper-stylized coming-of-age-movie-slash-fantasy-slash-psychological-thriller The 9th Life of Louis Drax excels at grabbing you with a steady stream of provocative and ornate…
Do This! Video game sounds have predictably had a huge influence on contemporary music, but what about classical music? The Dallas Symphony Orchestra is out to prove that there’s plenty of opportunity for crossover there, too, with their performance of music from Final Fantasy at the Morton H. Meyerson Symphony…
No matter how much you love your 9 to 5, chances are you’ll always live for the weekend. Make the most of those precious days off and start scheduling time away from the Big D. From surf museums to speakeasies and Sioux-style tepees, these 10 Texas getaways are sure to…
Beaded medicine bags, leather moccasins and colorful, breastplate chokers spill from Autumn Moss’ brown, zippered suitcase. The Native American bead artist is a descendant of Esther LaBarre, who starred in the once-feared-lost silent film Daughter of Dawn. The handiwork, Moss says, is that of her grandfather, Billy LaBarre, a full…
Like American Sniper (2014), Clint Eastwood’s Sully is a movie of nightmares. In Sniper, Chris Kyle (Bradley Cooper) sits rigidly in the living room, imagining the gunfire, roaring helicopters and wailing bystanders of Fallujah playing out on a turned-off television as his children race through the house. In Sully, Chesley…
Where were you when you learned that you’d be making your DJ debut at the biggest rave of the year? And that said rave was only eight hours away? Ethan, the sheepish main character of Netflix’s straight-to-streaming EDM movie XOXO, gets the news in his kitchen, where his mom is cooking breakfast…
“There’s just no point in fighting me over it, that’s all. Want some coffee?” “Your birthday’s coming up, Jessie. Don’t you want to know what we got you?” You wouldn’t guess from those lines that Jessie and Mama, the lone characters in Marsha Norman’s tragedy (or dark comedy, depending on…
London native John van der Put became a world-renowned magician despite suffering from an incurable and socially crippling malady. “Many of us are afflicted with resting grumpy face,” says van der Put, who’s better known as the gruff, fire-breathing illusionist Piff the Magic Dragon. Piff doesn’t seem to care whether his…
Dallas has had a long relationship with professional wrestling, as home to one of the most renowned independent promotions of the ’70s and ’80s, World Class Championship Wrestling. And in a seeming nod to this history, WWE has come to town twice this year, first for the record-setting Wrestlemania in April,…
Natalie Portman proves herself a filmmaker of intelligence, ambition and inventiveness in her debut as a director and writer — just not one who is always certain as a storyteller. A Tale of Love and Darkness adapts, with a passionate somberness, several threads from Amos Oz’s autobiographical novel of the…
Nepotism is occasionally a positive, and not just for the direct beneficiary. Ridley Scott gave us Alien, with heroine Ripley and a memorable cast of ne’er-do-wells and villains with defined personalities. And now Scott’s son, Luke, who’s been shadowing his dad on his last few big-budget films, has delivered unto…
Were we wrong to root for Kevin Smith? When he burst onto the scene in 1994, it was the most improbable of rags-to-riches movie narratives: bankrolling Clerks by selling his comic book collection and running up thousands of dollars in credit card debt. Almost overnight, he joined the likes of…
Tension and release is the driving principle of a tearjerker, where every good fortune is countered by something worse. And as dismissive as critics often are of the genre, it’s actually quite difficult for a director to make people cry en masse and genuinely feel things. Derek Cianfrance’s foreboding melodrama…
Dear Stoner: I have a metal pipe that I can unscrew and clean, and the other day I had a great idea: What if I put a nug in there to get nice and sticky after smoking a few bowls? Will it be more potent? JustBlaze Dear Blaze: No one…
The state of Colorado has South Park; Springfield, Oregon is the spiritual home of The Simpsons, according to the show’s creator Matt Groening; and Richardson, Texas, has its own claim to an animated series called Cyanide and Happiness. The web comic, which uses big-headed stick figures as pawns in its twisted comedy experiments, has ballooned into…
Rick Perry is sitting at home with his wife, eating Funyuns and scrolling through channels on the moving picture box in his living room when he comes across President Obama standing behind a podium and delivering a heartfelt, encouraging speech to the nation. “I could do that,” Perry says to…
Dear Stoner: What is Thai stick? Is it just an old strain of chronic from the ’70s? The Berg Dear Berg: Be ready to take notes if an old-timer ever tells you about the time he smoked a Thai stick, because it was probably crazier than any blunt you’ve ever…
This month, North Texas lost a theater icon. Rose Pearson, founder of Fort Worth’s Circle Theatre, died on Aug. 19 after quietly battling cancer for several years. She was 69. Pearson and her husband, Bill Newberry, founded Circle in 1981. What was once a small room in the back of…
The Antichrist, the embodiment of evil, manifests itself in the internet. The wired world isolates humans, ruins them mentally and physically and releases their darkest impulses, yet humanity has grown so dependent on it that one good solar flare could be enough to fry the ‘net and civilization along with…
The Dallas Observer has recently been collaborating with a team of videographers known as Exploredinary. (Perhaps you’ve seen this video they made about a party store in Oak Cliff selling Donald Trump piñatas, or this one about Leon Bridges.) We thought it appropriate to tell you a little bit more about…
Texans dominated in the Summer Olympics this month. If Texas were its own country it would have ranked third in gold medals, with 42 total metals, 26 of them gold. And even though the closing ceremony took place on Aug. 21, the events in Rio de Janeiro aren’t truly over…
