Crimes of the Heart is part Carson McCullers novel, part Dixie Chicks song — a pseudo-Southern gothic piece chock-full of family melodrama and eccentricities that add layer after layer of plot to the award-winning play. It’s a dramatic standard, a playwright’s go-to since the early 1980s, with lush dialogue and…
Is that graphite? If you were to ask exhibitions manager Kevin Jacobs the most memorable line during the Adam McEwen opening back in April, he’d say without a doubt, “Is that graphite?” In other words, it’s a question he got to field. A lot. Folks were astonished and perplexed and…
The Amazing Spider-Man, an inexcusably good reboot-thing from director Marc Webb, celebrates the heartwarming arachno-genetic bar mitzvah in which a boy becomes a spider, and a spider becomes a man, a rite of passage last observed in Sam Raimi’s uneven but often pretty great trilogy in the aughts. And there’s…
In Woody Allen’s new film, To Rome With Love, people — like, really young people — still talk, improbably, about “neuroses.” Horny, middle-age businessmen actually stand around the water cooler and ogle the hot secretary, as in the Playboy cartoons of the ancients. In the Allen Legendarium, Freudian psychiatrists never…
“Welcome to the recession, boys,” says John Travolta’s DEA-double-agent profiteer in Oliver Stone’s Savages, based on Don Winslow’s novel. Savages is a movie of its moment, though both its good guys and bad guys (if there’s really even a difference) are unquestionably the 1 percent of their industry — that…
A zealous gumbo of regionalism, magical realism, post-Katrina allegory, myth and ecological parable, Beasts of the Southern Wild, the southern Louisiana-set debut feature of 29-year-old Benh Zeitlin, rests, often cloyingly, on the tiny shoulders of Quvenzhané Wallis. Her character, Hushpuppy, the film’s 6-year-old (also Wallis’ age during filming) protagonist and…
There’s no doubt that you know the name Chris Pine. He is of course the leading man who made Captain James Tiberius Kirk synonymous with cool again. And the name Alex Kurtzman might not ring a bell, but it should. After all, he is the writer who made Star Trek…
It’s going to take a humorously large amount of pies to make it happen, but on July 31st, three different clowning contingents will unite over a love of grand-scale slapstick in front of the American Airlines Center. You’re invited to participate, which means your life has finally turned out exactly…
There’s no question as to whether we love our local artists and what they do here, but any community risks becoming insular and myopic without exposure to the movements and ideas cropping daily outside our own heads. For those of us who believe in Dallas – underground, grassroots, outsider Dallas…
The folks from Old Murder House Theatre warned me last week that the only way to make it through their live reenactment of Jurassic Park was to hold onto my butt. And held on I did. From the moment the first park worker was devoured by an imaginary Velociraptor to…
Let your parents go to parades, petting zoos, dog shows and other boring crap: here’s where to party for the Third and Fourth of July. Now let’s do red white and blue Jell-O shots, get some bad tattoos and set this thang off, Dallas. Tuesday 7.3 The Devil’s Bowl –…
In this week’s Dallas Observer we profile 30 of the metro area’s most interesting characters, with new portraits of each from local photographer Mark Graham. See the entire Dallas Observer People Issue here. In the third-semester acting class he teaches at KD Studio, theater director René Moreno recently asked students…
In this week’s Dallas Observer we profile 30 of the metro area’s most interesting characters, with new portraits of each from local photographer Mark Graham. See the entire Dallas Observer People Issue here. When Ben Fountain published his first book in 2006, a collection of short stories called Brief Encounters…
While it may seem unorthodox to use Kafka as a point of reference for an exhibition of Russian photographers, the newest show at Photographs Do Not Bend Gallery, while subtle in its drama and dignified in its pathos, carries a palpable sense tasty, existential dread. And, while Russia is not…
Name: Antonio Barnes Age: 21 Occupation: Full-time college student Location: Beauty Bar Style influences: “I’m into new fashion. I’m always looking at style guides and catalogs for different companies.” Style breakdown: Levi’s pants, H&M shirt, bow-tie and suspenders, Rue 21 shoes and glasses…
In this week’s Dallas Observer we profile 30 of the metro area’s most interesting characters, with new portraits of each from local photographer Mark Graham. See the entire Dallas Observer People Issue here. You might have seen his face on billboards — intense eyes conducting the traffic below with precision…
In this week’s Dallas Observer we profile 30 of the metro area’s most interesting characters, with new portraits of each from local photographer Mark Graham. See the entire Dallas Observer People Issue here. Altering the focal direction of a long-standing institution like the Dallas Museum of Art doesn’t happen overnight…
In this week’s Dallas Observer we profile 30 of the metro area’s most interesting characters, with new portraits of each from local photographer Mark Graham. See the entire Dallas Observer People Issue here. Think of her as a modern Artemis, Protector of Young Women. Though she is soft-spoken, measured and…
In this week’s Dallas Observer we profile 30 of the metro area’s most interesting characters, with new portraits of each from local photographer Mark Graham. See the entire Dallas Observer People Issue here. With so many large walls in need of decorating, an ornate painting of a park in autumn…
In this week’s Dallas Observer we profile 30 of the metro area’s most interesting characters, with new portraits of each from local photographer Mark Graham. See the entire Dallas Observer People Issue here. There is a moment in the sexy Adam Rapp play Red Light Winter that could test the…
The tense moments came fast and furious during the fourth episode of the new Dallas this week, making us salivate – no, downright drool – for the moment that J.R. finally reclaims control of Southfork Ranch. We’re supposed to be rooting for the bad guy, right? Because it’s a hell…
In this week’s Dallas Observer we profile 30 of the metro area’s most interesting characters, with new portraits of each from local photographer Mark Graham. See the entire Dallas Observer People Issue here. Jane Aldridge reaches for a life-sized white ceramic cat perched on one of her coffee tables and…
