Eating for the Kids

If you’re like us, you don’t give a lot of money to charities like Make-A-Wish, but you do give a lot of money to restaurants that put food in your belly. And maybe, hypothetically, you’d like to do both. If so, Maggiano’s Little Italy is here to help make your…

Candles on the Range

Not that I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about it, but I never realized museums celebrated birthdays. I guess it’s because museums in general are just too old. They’d have to make a pretty huge cake to hold 130 candles for the Met, and what about the Louvre? There…

The Wrong Way

I’m not gonna lie to you. I’ve hated Sublime for a decade now. Hated them ever since high school, when a bunch of my friends would go around singing that song about hand jobs. You know the one—”And then she pulled out my mushroom tip/Goin’ over it just went drip,…

Neighborly Cuisine

Ah, the Ice Queen with the hidden, passionate, horny heart of fire; the bookish woman who whips off her glasses, shakes the bun out of her hair and growls. Keep your Madonnas and your whores, your bleached bims and skeletal supermodels; for sheer hotness, nothing beats Marian the Librarian with…

Charleton Heston, Jr.

Ladies and gentlemen, this week you are the luckiest rock ‘n’ roll fans in the world. The “Motor City Madman” is coming to town to “Sacrifice the White Buffalo.” We are getting a rare audience with quite possibly the most over-the-top, misogynistic, bow-hunting, guitar-shredding, loin cloth-clad rocker that ever rode…

Oh, Lydia!

Since 1981, Fort Worth’s Jubilee Theatre has represented, at first as a struggling troupe and now as a bastion of black theater. Specialized as it may be, the Cowtown crew is more than a niche-filler, it’s a local institution. Make the trek down Interstate 30 to catch the Jubilee’s 26th…

Zombie Flick

Have you seen the previews for that movie Bug that’s coming out? Ya know, the one starring the least creepy but least talented Judd? It looks all kinds of scary. Like, the regular horror film “Aaaaah! Bugs all over me get offa me get offa me!” type of scary plus…

To Blog or Not to Blog?

Hey, Chicken Little? Noticed anything weird about the sky lately? Kinda sinking a little bit there in the middle. Nothing like freaking out over nothing to get the blood boiling, right, Chickie? Little might want to join his like-minded buddies of the Greater Dallas Chamber for their next Business After…

The ‘Fro’d One

What is this, like the 80th time Albert Hammond Jr. has come to perform in Dallas? Do we really need this? Is the Strokes’ guitarist—as famous for his shaggy mane and his shagging of Drew Barrymore* as for his fake Television guitar licks—really all that great without his fellow girl-jeans-clad…

No Graduation Day for You

I’m perfect gang material. I mean, I love the matching jackets, and I’m super great at tying bandanas. I could be front row in any gang versus gang dance-off, any day. But, last time I went to gang tryouts, things looked way less like West Side Story and Grease than…

Busker Love

Once, written and directed by John Carney, is a deceptively simple movie—a narrative strung together by pop songs, but without the sheen (or arrogance) of most cinematic musicals. By day, a Dublin busker (Glen Hansard) sings Van Morrison on a street corner for spare change, which, on occasion, is swiped…

Pirates: At Wit’s End

And so Disney’s immense, booty-busting, pro-piracy epic has come to an End. I doubt very much that Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End is, in fact, the last we’ll be seeing of Captain Jack Sparrow and, you know, all those other people. How could it be? Treasure remains to…

Superzero

There’s a unique challenge in designing superhero games: How do you make it fun to play a character who, by definition, is vastly more powerful than his opposition? Hulk encounters a purse-snatcher: Hulk smash! Hulk win! Hulk bored. With battles that one-sided, the thrill of being superheroic quickly wanes –…

Our top DVD picks for the week of May 22

Afro Samurai (Funimation) Airwolf: Season Three (Universal) Alone With Her (IFC) Breaking Point (Fox) The Complete Matrix Trilogy (Warner Bros.) Epic Movie (Fox) Escape to Canada (Disinformation) Fay Grim (Magnolia) The 40-Year-Old Virgin: Unrated 2-Disc Double Your Pleasure Edition (Universal) The Good German (Warner Bros.) The John Wayne Collection (Paramount)…

Good Clean Smut

Porky’s: The Ultimate Collection (Fox) When writer-director Bob Clark was killed by a drunk driver in April, the obits trumpeted his holiday classic A Christmas Story…but were somewhat reluctant to mention that, oh, yeah, he also wrote and directed Porky’s. But there’s no question which is the more important movie–and…

Dirty Dancing With Lady Luck

I have a dirty little secret. I was born in Shreveport, Louisiana. We moved to Dallas when I was 3 years old, so I don’t remember much about living there except that it was boring and it smelled really, really bad. I went back to visit when I was about…

World Party

Dallas sees dozens of Independence Day celebrations with the traditional patriotic parades, family cookouts and fireworks shows every summer. Throughout the season there are also countless opportunities to experience less familiar celebrations that some of us have yet to branch out and try. Of course, we’re not saying you should…

Hot Thespian Action

He used to see plays for a living. Now Tom Sime is writing them. The former Dallas Morning News and Dallas Observer theater critic left journalism a few years ago to work full-time in professional theater. Soon Sime will oversee the first full-scale local production of one of his plays,…

That’s Not Fair

Remember that night in the tent when you were 5 and really, really had to wee but were afraid to walk across the campground and your big brother convinced you to just go in the corner, right there near the maps and stuff? That’s where the grown-ups go, he said,…

Flick It

Summer movie season has arrived. There is an insane number of films on the (incomplete) list that follows, and plenty of room for optimism. To that end, we’ve tried to cut back on the snarky comments about pointless sequels and loathsome actors—although it’s nearly impossible to let those infernal pirates…

Rawhide! No Bull

OK, Dallas, let’s get past this right up front. Most of y’all aren’t really from these parts—the chamber of commerce says more than a half-million new residents have moved here since 2000—and most likely have never seen livestock on the hoof up close, let alone a real rodeo. This is…

Kidding Around

It’s summer again. Kids look forward to it all year, while parents dread it. It’s not so much the hot Texas sun (you’ve already stocked up on enough sunscreen to cover the whole Rangers team for a year) as the notion that those lazy days of summer are completely lost…