Dance Like Everyone’s Watching

Celebrate Contemporary Dance/Fort Worth’s 10th Annual Modern Dance Festival at the Modern (3200 Darnell St., Fort Worth) this weekend with art, formal concerts, films and, of course, dance. CD/FW’s mantra begins, “We’re NOT the ballet. We fall down … on purpose.” And boy, will that hurt in the Modern’s grand…

The Color Wheel, Set at 88 MPH

Neutrals are strong and dependable; nothing’s changed. But as much as black is slimming, gray is chic and a nude shoe can lengthen the leg, there’s something to be said for the energy and attitude of vivid color. It can feel fairly daring to try to live in floral and…

Dane Cook is Coming to Dallas

Cook gets all meta on Louie. The sentence “Dane Cook is coming to Dallas” could be interpreted as a warning or an announcement, depending on your stance. The divisive comic behind the platinum-selling album Harmful if Swallowed and the double-platinum hit Retaliation, is back on tour with a Dallas date…

Ten Easy Ways to Make Dallas Better

Dallas has a reputation for being materialistic and sex-crazed, but that’s judging a city against its veneer. For as many valet brawls and big hair meltdowns as you witness in Uptown, there are dozens of less-visible, more important scenes occurring — humble moments, where neighbors work together to improve our…

You Can See Who Framed Roger Rabbit at Texas Theatre this Weekend

Texas Theatre is going to screen Who Framed Roger Rabbit in 35 mm this weekend (Friday, July 12 to Sunday, July 14), honoring the film’s quarter century anniversary. Now, if our math is right, that means it’s been 25 years since you experienced one of your childhood’s most confusing, conflicting…

The Basically Beethoven Festival Kicks Off In New Location

“Nothing free in life is really free,” says my mom. And she’s right. The last time my phone company told me I was eligible for a “free” upgrade, they also charged me a $30 upgrading fee. Hey, phone company, $30 is not free. One truly free thing Dallasites have been…

Five Things You Should Know About Dallas Roller Derby

Across this great nation Strawberry Deathcakes and Necronancys are lacing up to duke it out on roller derby rinks. While I’ve always appreciated the pleasantly perverse combination of dolled-up costuming and bloodsports, I hadn’t actually made it inside a roller derby bout. On Saturday, that changed as I walked into…

semigloss. Issue 3 Succeeds in its Goal of Exploring Failure

It sounds perverse, but failure can be a welcome motivator. When you’re molding your masterpiece, it’s rarely the success at the end of the road that drives you. It’s the potential blown-tire-flip-over-median-and-tumble-over-cliff-on-the-way-there that keeps you going…

Flashdance the Musical Is the Best Dallas Summer Musical of the Year

According to the creators of the Broadway-bound (eventually) stage musical, what the 95-minute 1983 movie version of Flashdance lacked was 16 more musical numbers — on top of the soundtrack’s period cheese-rock “Maniac,” “Gloria,” “Manhunt” and “What a Feeling” — and another hour or so of dialogue and dancing. They’re…

The Lone Ranger: 149 Minutes of (More) Disney Overkill

The great movie Westerns are about honor, dignity, the majesty of the landscape. But they’re also about beautiful men, charismatic, sometimes dangerous-looking demigods like Robert Ryan, James Stewart, Franco Nero, Randolph Scott and, of course, John Wayne. The Lone Ranger has Armie Hammer and Johnny Depp, the former a long-legged…

Adolescence is a Fantasy in the The Way, Way Back

Though the script includes bits and pieces of writer-directors Nat Faxon and Jim Rash’s real childhoods, The Way, Way Back is a slick debut that feels like a recycling of familiar coming-of-age materials. It even shares with The Descendants, for which Faxon and Rash won an adapted screenplay Oscar, the…

The Good Bad Example

Admit it: Redemption is boring. We think we want characters to “grow” and “change,” but really, it’s the people around us in real life — people who, say, loudly pick their teeth in restaurants, or walk too slowly in public thoroughfares — who need revamping. (We ourselves, of course, need…

The Attack: After a Bombing, a Masterful Thriller

Since it opens with a suicide bombing in downtown Tel Aviv, and since its mystery plot involves an attempt to track down a sheik whose public expectorations call for the slaughter of Israeli civilians, The Attack is most avowedly “about” terrorism. But that’s a subject, not the subject. The film,…

Explosions and Meat Sweats for America

If your idea of an exciting Fourth of July includes a kiddie pool, a six-pack and looking up at big sky booms, you really don’t need us to guide you to the action. For the rest of you, let’s do this thing. Head over to Fair Park for the MetroPCS…

It’s A Nail Trap

Pronail Princesa is the nail-game name of Vanessa Quilantan, who can be found buffing and filing at Oak Cliff’s Studio 410 with her beauty gang, the Lady Misfits, or perhaps a random rap show. (She also writes about rap for the Dallas Observer.) On Friday night, at Texas Theatre (231…

Death Conquers All

So what happens to a band like Death, three church-rooted black brothers from the Motor City, playing the essence of punk way back in ’73, before the genre even had a name? Well, their demo was sent into a world that wasn’t ready for it and marketed by a record…

War Paint and Nikes

It’s unclear exactly when our society become so masochistic, but it has. It really, really has. Take the Color Mob 5K for example, an event that involves 1) running for fun in the heat of a Texas summer and 2) people throwing neon powder at a sweaty, hot and hyperventilating…