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. Movie buffs can have such an infectious love for film that it feels like it should…
There’s a chance you’ve already forgotten about The Bachelorette’s Marcus Grodd. OK, so there’s also a chance you don’t give shits about The Bachelorette. But, let’s say you do care. In that case, you might remember last week’s hometown date with Marcus that took place almost entirely in Highland Park…
“They don’t really photograph well,” says Lucas Martell, as we walk through Lagoon at Circuit 12 Contemporary, the local artist’s first solo exhibition. “It’s impossible to get the green the right color when it’s being photographed.” The Internet opened up possibilities of experience to us. Today we can see the…
A new Planet of the Apes movie is upon us and even though Rise of the Planets of the Apes and Dawn of the Planet of the Apes are getting heaped, there have to be some naysayers out there who still insist that all the CGI in the world can’t…
What’s not to love about tens of galleries throwing open their doors, cranking up the A/C, serving cold beer, and inviting you to look at the art on the walls? Design District Gallery Day is a party without a guest list and you’re sure to meet interesting people, discover art…
Standing outside the light brick structure of the Bath House Cultural Center that lies nuzzled against one of the less-trodden sides of White Rock Lake, Shelby-Allison Hibbs happily admits that the artistic hub has been like a second home to her. Hibbs, a theatre director who obtained her MFA from…
Gossip columnists are a strange lot. That there are people whose income is earned by slander, backstabbing, bad behavior and dirty laundry is one of the strangest things about the media industry. But it’s been a reality of newspapers and magazines since their inception. Up in New York, the Post…
It isn’t often that non-profit organizations stand in the way of people who want to do good, but the case of blood banks is particularly unique. In case you weren’t aware, men who have had sex with other men since 1977 are barred from donating blood at most major blood…
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. Is there really an underground art scene in Dallas? Are there artists who deserve recognition that…
We’ve got the most exciting news you’ll hear all day. Have you ever wondered how you were going to channel your love of Rocky Horror into a something worthwhile? Have you ever fancied yourself an undiscovered Broadway star? The Dallas Theater Center is looking for you…
Remember how a portion of Oak Cliff began as a short-lived Utopian society settled by some French who weren’t crazy about Napoleon III in 1855? No? It doesn’t ring a big bell for most, but it probably should since we’ve got a tower and a reborn artists’ community named after…
Who are Soner and Patricia Rodriguez? What does their work entail? Is it just graffiti or is it something more? With Urban Nature, Kirk Hopper Fine Art is opening up its walls for these two artists to redefine and contextualize how we view graffiti, a form of expression and language…
The whining has officially begun. It’s finally hot. The mild summer June introduced us to was stripped away by the rising temps of July and triple digits are on the way. This isn’t your official weather report and to be perfectly honest, from this ice cube of an office I’m…
On this week’s Voice Film Club episode, film critics Alan Scherstuhl, Amy Nicholson and Stephanie Zacharek recommend seeing Matt Reeves’ Dawn of the Planet of the Apes (12:00) and Richard Linklater’s Boyhood (20:00), a movie filmed over twelve years with the same cast…
Who knows why, but the sight of apes sitting tall and proud on horseback is stirring in a primal way. That’s one of the best images in Matt Reeves’ Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, the sequel to the enormously successful 2011 Rise of the Planet of the Apes…
Plays adapted into movies always feel naked by the time they make it to the screen, their theatrical bones showing through in a most awkward and unbecoming way. That’s more or less true of Roman Polanski’s screen version of David Ives’ Venus in Fur, in which a playwright and first-time…
Turns out the revolutionary way to stage Les Misérables is to take the French revolutionaries out of it entirely. No frilly shirts. No peasants waving big red flags. None of that ghastly marching-in-place every other Les Miz (or Les Mis, if you prefer) uses for clap-bait toward the end of…
In contemporary genre-splash Indiewood, the task is often simple but bedeviling: You have an HD camera and a modest house in the L.A. hills; now what do you do? Shane Carruth, among others, has proven that you don’t need much more — just add ideas. Call it Home-Based Sci-Fi, from…
A major achievement in sunny wretchedness, Álex de la Iglesia’s splatter-comedy Witching & Bitching projectile pukes its outrages at you with a gusto recalling the early days of those (sadly) reformed upchuckers Sam Raimi and Peter Jackson. De la Iglesia doesn’t share those directors’ interest in making clear just why…
How has there not already been a Nicolas Cage movie called Rage? That title could fit many of the Drive Angry star’s late-career time-wasters. Here it works best as an imperative rather than an announcement of theme: You may feel some anger if you pay to watch this. Or you…
“It’s the secret films you have to watch out for,” jokes Richard Linklater of his new movie Boyhood, a furtive experiment that he kept quiet for more than a decade. In 2002, he chose a first-grader named Eller Coltrane, the 6-year-old son of two Texas artists; cast Patricia Arquette and…
Do you enjoy stand-up comedy? Do you like bar hopping? Do you think getting trashed on Friday is so passe? Well then it’s time to count your lucky stars, mark your calendars and keep your bail money in hand, because we’re doing all three. The second annual Dallas Observer Comedy…
