It was an excellent day to be at the Dallas City Performance Hall in Dallas Arts district spending a hot Sunday afternoon listening to live classical string music. The auditorium was all but full for a performance of the Basically Beethoven Festival, a free admission series presented by the Fine Arts…
There’s probably only one humanist film that opens with the words, “Merry Christmas Eve, bitch!” accompanied by the proffering of a single, sprinkle-dusted doughnut. In Sean Baker’s Tangerine, best friends, transgender women and prostitutes Sin-Dee and Alexandra (Kitana Kiki Rodriguez and Mya Taylor) catch up at a doughnut joint on…
Here’s a shocker: In Pixels, his latest, Adam Sandler plays a stunted man-child who turns out to be very, very special. That’s his ecological niche: the Manic Potbellied Dream Dork, or, if you prefer, the fragile Sand-Man. Sandler films have predictable scripts: In two hours or less, he’ll transform from…
“Ireland is the old sow that eats her farrow,” declared Stephen Dedalus in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. In the case of Jimmy Gralton, she took bites and spat him out a couple times. It’s tempting to say some people never learn, but, as played by…
The opening of Antoine Fuqua’s Southpaw, shot in gritty, grayed-out tones, is a grim harbinger: A fighter getting ready for the ring holds up his meaty paws for the ritualistic wrapping of gauze and tape. His gloves are slipped over the wrappings, and then they’re taped on too — but…
The opening of Antoine Fuqua’s Southpaw, shot in gritty, grayed-out tones, is a grim harbinger: A fighter getting ready for the ring holds up his meaty paws for the ritualistic wrapping of gauze and tape. His gloves are slipped over the wrappings, and then they’re taped on too — but…
The second round of Special Support Grants for artists was announced this week with a large number going to theater companies. This marks a continued effort on the part of the city to support artists at their level, handing out grants of up to $5000 for projects open to the…
This time of year, the only exposure that most of us want to nature is watching it go by in our car windows. It’s just too damn hot to spend too much time outside, especially in the middle of this concrete-crusted city. But if you’re able to drag yourself away…
At last, some performances to get goose pimply about at the Festival of Independent Theatres, going on two more weekends at the Bath House Cultural Center. The first weekend brought forth Danielle Georgiou’s lively demi-dance-musical The Show About Men, which is exactly that and a lot of fun, and the…
You never know when inspiration will strike. It might lurk between the pages of a history textbook. For 17-year-old Chris Rodenbaugh, inspiration struck sometime in the 20th century while reading about the Irish Republican Army. He remembers reading about this violent rebellion for the first time in Tom Clancy’s Patriot…
After months of anticipation my kid brothers’ dreams finally came true on July 17, as the three of us walked into the Embassy Suites Dallas-Frisco/Hotel for the ScrewAttack Gaming Convention. Mikhail and Luka had a pocket full of cash each for the dealer room, a 24-hour arcade with dozens of…
This part of summer is the worst part of summer. We’re still over a month away from Labor Day, the temperatures only continue to rise, and it seems as if most of the cool stuff in our fair city dies down this time of year. Fortunately, there is still plenty…
Few networks are as willing to bet on new voices as Comedy Central. The network’s hustling approach to original programming has yielded such breakout hits as Broad City, Inside Amy Schumer, and Key & Peele — some of the freshest and most distinctive shows of the last few years. Just three…
If summer is giving you a case of Holly Golightly’s mean reds, join the club. You can’t have the blues in Dallas summers because you can’t gaze out your window longingly at the rain, because the water is drying up in the soul-sucking summer sun. Instead, the dash from one…
For all the constant prattle about whether or not Dallas is a world-class city, there is at least one respect in which Dallas has most other major cities beat: shopping. We may not have 5th Avenue or Rodeo Drive, but there is just as much fashion in this city as…
Now in his thirties, Arturo Donjuan recently ran into someone at a grocery store he hadn’t seen since he was a teen. The obvious mutual question was, What are you doing these days? His old friend is now working as a manager. But Donjuan is still doing what he was…
Thursday, July 16 Othello They say love is a powerful thing. But I think fear is even more powerful. While love does have the ability to ruin lives, fear, jealousy and hatred can ruin love and life. It’s always been this way. We’d rather watch the dramatic fight than the…
If you’ve never seen a baby penguin waddle up to the water and then splash around, you’ll want to suffer the heat in the next few weeks to see little Marina as she learns how to swim. She’s one of four baby animals stealing the hearts of visitors to the…
The largest event of its kind, Kixpo is an enormous expo full of vendors showcasing sneakers and streetwear both regional and national. The event was first held in a Deep Ellum warehouse back in 2007, drawing a crowd of 800. Attendance has grown so much each year that Kixpo actually…
Inside D1 Sports Training, 30 women perform a newly learned dance routine on a small basketball gym floor. One woman, in the back, stops mid-performance to fix her top after realizing it had come undone. None of the other women notice because they are solely focused on their performance. It’s…
Long gone are the days when depictions of reporters in movies were reduced to a fedora with a white “Press” card tucked into the bow. We have Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman in All The President’s Men and Peter Finch’s epic cry of “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take…
The problem with clamoring for more woman-led comedies is that actual comedy may be the thing that ends up being left by the wayside. Tina Fey, among others, has railed against the boneheaded dictum that women can’t be funny. But in the current climate of watchfulness — one in which…
