In front of a weathered old Singer sewing machine, in the middle of one of the oldest costumes shops in the South, 83-year-old Fortunato Mata sits surrounded by costumes from nearly every period and place in time. The Dallas Costume Shoppe has been outfitting big time Broadway bombshells in decadent…
Dallas-based Jeremy Snead has a hot commodity on his hands these days. He’s the director, writer, and producer of Video Games: The Movie, a documentary on the history of video games. With his production company MediaJuice, he successfully raised over $100,000 through a Kickstarter campaign, got Zach Braff to be…
Alika Herreshoff is addicted to painting. It’s the art form he can’t let go of and he’s not planning to try anytime soon. In the early 2000’s, Herreshoff was a member of Dearraindrop, an art collective that was based at that time in Virginia Beach. He worked alongside the other…
There’s a running joke among critics that the reason they are given aisle seats is that they are statistically more likely to die during a play than another audience member. On the aisle, the dead critic is more easily removed from the theater. The death of the critic is something…
I’m not sure how you spent your Friday night, but we sent our photographer Scott Mitchell into the nine circles of hell, which apparently look like a fashion show, meets performance art meets a zombie cocktail party. The hybrid art collective and digital publication, Austere Mag’s event featuring the work…
The Dallas DanceFest is back. After a 10-year hiatus, the festival that began with outdoor performances at the Annette Strauss Square returns with the same premise but a new venue, the Dallas City Performance Hall. Its original debut in 1985 started off small, featuring only three companies: Dallas Black Dance…
Mixmaster presents “100 Creatives,” in which we feature cultural entrepreneurs of Dallas in random order. Know an artistic mind who deserves a little bit of blog love? Email lauren.smart@dallasobserver.com with the whos and whys. As a kid Jeremy Bartel’s mother made him and his two brothers dress alike. He never…
It was another good year for the Asian Film Festival of Dallas. In its 13th year, AFFD is the pre-teen of local film festivals, with enough action, drama, and comedy to exhaust even the most ardent devotee. Audiences packed in to see new releases, like Samurai Hustle, and animated classics…
Mixmaster presents “100 Creatives,” in which we feature cultural entrepreneurs of Dallas in random order. Know an artistic mind who deserves a little bit of blog love? Email lauren.smart@dallasobserver.com with the whos and whys. When Mark Lowry was contemplating the launch of a website covering regional theater he didn’t have…
QuakeCon is one of the most beloved video game conventions in the business, but the last six years must have carried an air of longing among its many, many attendees. Way back in 2008, id Software promised its fans that it was working on a new Doom game. Each QuakeCon…
Jonathan Norton almost didn’t apply for the Artistic Innovations grant twice. But the third time was the charm for the local playwright, who was awarded a $15,000 grant from the Mid-America Arts Alliance this week. Of 137 applicants, Norton was one of 15 recipients of the grants, “awarded to support…
Last year, Jerry Saltz bemoaned the death of the New York City gallery show. He was pointing to the emergence of an online art market that no longer required collectors to be present at opening night receptions. It deflated the communal conversations at such events, leaving him with fewer people…
This week just won’t end. It’s been one fire after another that needed putting out. But we’re finally rounding the corner to see the glorious week’s end off in the distance. It didn’t come quickly enough but now that it’s arriving, the Monday doldrums begin to slip away. Now, it’s…
The business of childhood is the business of waiting: waiting for Christmas, waiting for school to let out, waiting to be old enough to stay up past 9 p.m. No other movie I can think of better captures the wistfulness of those days full of waiting than Richard Linklater’s Boyhood,…
Wish I Was Here, the movie that actor and second-time director Zach Braff partially funded with money raised through Kickstarter, isn’t nearly terrible enough to satisfy all the grumblers who are hoping to see it fail. When Braff couldn’t secure traditional financing for the film, he appealed to the fan…
It turns out that the cars and planes of Cars and Planes can kiss. Deep into Planes: Fire & Rescue, a time-killing kid-flick whose title is an exact summary of its plot, the filmmakers introduce us to two creaky old Winnebagos, a husband and wife in their sunset years, revisiting…
From the first line of Christhelmet, you know you’re in for something special in this gritty, great new musical written, directed by and starring Matthew Posey at his 40-seat Ochre House Theatre. “There’s gonna be a lot of feelings felt this summer,” warns Rosie (Dante Martinez), the jaded barkeep of…
The annual Festival of Independent Theatres is underway at the Bath House Cultural Center. Opening night featured two of the eight shows by companies too small to have their own permanent spaces. Instead of a dazzling launch for the four-weekend fest, however, the productions by PrismCo and Nouveau 47 were…
If the Saw series taught us anything, it’s that every quasi-inventive genre movie is fated to become a yearly franchise with increasingly diminishing returns. The Purge practically cried out for this treatment from its premise alone: James DeMonaco’s film had a big idea — a near-future in which “any and…
A defiantly R-rated farce seemingly commissioned to plug the We’re the Millers-shaped hole in the summer lineup, Sex Tape is warmer and more amusing than its ads would lead one to believe. In fact, it’s almost good enough, leaning a little too hard on the innate likability of stars Cameron…
The horror comedy is a tricky topic to tackle because it has balance both genres in one movie. It’s like watching a plate spinning act. If it goes wrong, it’s still entertaining but for all the wrong reasons. The Spanish movie Witching and Bitching is one of the good ones…
Splits on silks; tits on tightropes; pasties on platforms. Burlesque and cirque are a match made in sexytime heaven. The circus arts already have sexy women on swings, so why not add a little strip tease? If you’re into that sort of thing, Viva Dallas Burlesque hosts its mind-numbingly frequent…
