They’re the books you see middle-aged women reading on the beach. Or the books you buy in the airport. Or the books you have in your home but you swear to all guests you’ve never actually read. They are the cheesy romance novels that are so painfully over the top,…
You’ve seen a lot of movies like Too Late, and yet you haven’t. Shot over several years on 35mm, Dennis Hauck’s neo-noir detective drama is only being shown theatrically in that increasingly rarefied format — a bold financial move for an independent film at a time when so many others…
When everything’s a game, it’s easier to forget the wrongdoing perpetrated during play. We see this in sports, but we also see it in war, young men and women coping with stress by envisioning their targets as the bad guys in a first-person shooter. In Pablo Trapero’s bleak but occasionally…
Jean-Marc Vallée’s Demolition presents an interesting experiment: What if you told a story of tragedy but withheld all the tenderness and emotion from it, so that you were left — at least until the very end — with just literal and figurative wreckage, disconnected fragments seeking to be put back…
Richard Linklater’s Everybody Wants Some!! is being billed as a “spiritual sequel” to his 1993 high school stoner classic Dazed and Confused, but in some key ways it feels closer to his animated 2001 philosophy bull session Waking Life — a freewheeling grab bag of ideas, ruminations and loose ends…
A she-wolf of Wall Street with a spiky ginger Suze Orman shag, Michelle Darnell, the anti-heroine of fitfully funny The Boss, is the latest of the Rabelaisian wonders played by Melissa McCarthy. The actress specializes in characters with indestructible bravado, no matter where they stand on the socioeconomic ladder; Michelle,…
You are sitting among the Real Housewives of Dallas and trying to figure out if there’s any tension among the women. You don’t want to flat out ask, because it’s assumed they would say no. So you observe closely and fixate on the little clues. The Housewives are eating and…
On April 7, two of rock history’s star witnesses will be sharing their life stories at The Kessler Theater in Oak Cliff. Pattie Boyd is music’s Helen of Troy; she has inspired many epic guitar wars. Her first husband, George Harrison, immortalized the way she moved in the Beatles’ “Something,”…
Bearings Down at The Goss-Michael Foundation Paula Crown serves on President Obama’s Committee for the Arts and Humanities. Balancing traditional studio time while engaging technology, her art is about mapping experiences. Crown’s work centers on places and landscapes, exploring how they can exist as objects. This is an immersive installation…
Years ago, the Occupy Wall Street protests played out in the media. You remember it. They were the people crazy and passionate enough to live in tents in New York’s Financial District to represent what they called the 99 percent. But what happened to the protesters after they were evicted…
If you don’t have a pet, you probably don’t understand the obsessive amount of time, money and energy that goes into taking care of a ridiculously spoiled dog or cat. Pets are like family members, which means that they need the same organic food, fancy toys and pampering experiences that…
It was squared circle nirvana this past weekend for over 100,000 fans in North Texas as Wrestlemania swept through town. The marquee event of the World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) has grown from a single-day card into a multi-day entertainment extravaganza. The numbers show wrestling’s enduring power. The announced attendance…
Find yourself feeling a little bit of spring fever creeping in? We’ve got just the cure: take five of these local arts and culture happenings this week, invite a friend or two to join you, wash them down with a cocktail…and see if you don’t feel better. There’s a wide…
In some ways, Wanda Means is the typical Highland Park mom. She has the youthful yet conservative clothes, four kids in the school system, a successful home-building business with her ex-husband, and a blog, Jesus, Divorce and Over 40, that sounds like something a more pious Elizabeth Gilbert might write…
The notion that wrestling is staged isn’t a new one. Even hardcore WWE fans who lived in denial for years that their heroes were just part of a pre-determined storyline designed to yank on their emotions like a Franciscan monk ringing a church bill on Christmas have accepted that fact. …
When a Comedy Central rep reached out to comedian Josh Johnson last October about appearing on the new season of “Adam Devine’s House Party” on Twitter, he treated it the way most people might expect a comedian would. “I thought it was a joke,” Johnson says. “I thought it was…
All types of people showed up for the three-day Texas Pinball Festival this month. The young and old, male and female, pierced and khaki-ed all came to Frisco to play more than 350 tables. The games spanned the history of pinball, starting with the first flipper games of the ’50s. Kids…
Anyone who’s been top South by Southwest knows that the fun and the stress come in equal measure. This is especially true for any artist trying to network, schmooze and further their careers. To unwind, Dallas’ filmmakers host a basketball game they call #SXhoops. More than a dozen artists, distributors…
Some free advice: If you ever find yourself defensively reminding people that you’re not in a cult, you’re probably in a cult. This comes up early and often in The Path, Hulu’s new series premiering on March 30th, not that any adherents of the fictional Meyerist Movement seem fazed by…
Willful ignorance as a character trait typically evokes annoyance in those who witness it — at least in real life. In many French films, however, a character who’s willfully ignorant is portrayed in the twee manner, encouraging us to believe it is their blissful view of the world we should…
Have you ever considered the fact that, in 1951, Hank Williams actually wrote “Hey Good Lookin'”? That, for the first 175 years years of American history, those words and that melody weren’t already part of our shared heritage? Williams didn’t just pluck it out of the air, of course. Cole…
We Are All Homeless at The MAC Willie Baronet started collecting signs made by homeless individuals in 1993. Now with more than 1,000 signs, the project has developed into an exhibit called We Are Homeless. This attempt to confront an often ignored and uncomfortable issue has been exhibited nationally and…
