11/11 Every week as we craft these scintillating blurbs for your amusement, we professional writers let our minds wander (does it show?) to a dark, secret place where we imagine that we will soon write the next Great American Novel. Ultra-confident, we picture ourselves chatting with Oprah about our first…
11/7 Take some fresh dirt, tight Wranglers, cowboy boots marked with wear, brawny steeds and some mighty holding-on power, and you’ve got a good old-fashioned rodeo. Mix it with Billboard chart-topping musicians and charitable intentions, and you’ve got the Texas Stampede. Now in its third year, the event continues to…
11/8 You want to talk about some truly influential women–ask Adam about Eve, Paris about Helen of Troy, Samson about Delilah. Or ask Ichabod Crane about Katrina Van Tassel–because when it comes right down to it, you know The Legend of Sleepy Hollow isn’t really about Dutch folklore. No, as…
11/7 Brad Oldham–soft-spoken sculptor, metallurgical production god, demure man of mystery–is holding his first gallery show, On Track, on Friday at DEBRIS (1205 Slocum St.; receptions held Friday evenings 6:30 to 8:30 through December 6; call 214-752-8855 for more info). You should go see it for many reasons, not the…
11/6 We try to live by the great credos of hip-hop. Though Nelly’s “She only want me for my pimp juice” and 50 Cent’s “We gon’ party like it’s your birthday” are helpful in many situations, even more so we prefer Public Enemy’s “Don’t believe the hype.” So when Circus…
With its soundtrack stockpiled with songs of romance and Christmas and a screenplay by the man who wrote Bridget Jones’s Diary, Four Weddings and a Funeral and Notting Hill, it’s appropriate Love Actually feels less like a brand-new movie than a greatest-hits compendium. It offers nothing new and instead makes…
A not terribly long time ago in an uninhabitable galaxy called Burbank, a generally astute movie studio founded by four Polish siblings alienated a young hotshot filmmaker. The studio was Warner Bros., and the project was a cold, disturbing, highly stylized vision of a mechanized future called THX-1138. Not wholly…
‘Tis the season and all that jive; beneath the tree this first week of November you will find two films set during the final week of December, when sugar plums and candy canes go on sale at the concession stand for all the good little girls and boys’ parents to…
The spooky beauty of Elephant, Gus Van Sant’s strange take on the Columbine massacre, arises not from the shock of sudden violence but from the filmmaker’s steady gaze at the numbing routines of life inside a suburban high school. With what first looks like cool detachment, Van Sant (My Own…
Even when people were watching Will Ferrell on television every Saturday night, they weren’t seeing Will Ferrell. They saw no more than a glimpse of him, beneath wigs and behind glued-on beards and buried under characters who became almost better known than he during his seven years on Saturday Night…
Each scene in The Life and Times of Tulsa Lovechild, now onstage at Contemporary Theatre of Dallas, is introduced with a cutesy caption projected on a screen. “Somewhere in Wyoming,” it’ll say in white Courier font on a black background, or “Busted flat in Babylon.” Tennessee Williams first used this…
New York performance artist Annie Murdock is the daughter of Robert Murdock, the former curator of contemporary art at the Dallas Museum of Art, and since graduating from Wesleyan University she’s been studying in New York and Oaxaca and working with paper sculpture artist Lesley Dill. So you could say…
Thursday, November 6 Big state. Big hats. Big country. Big hearts. Camp Summit holds its second auction in a style true to Texas. Dinner, dancing and bidding benefit the camp that caters to pardners young and old who have disabilities. Camp Summit’s Boots and Bandanas Benefit Auction and its presenting…
The moment was so tender that it could rival the memories of the greatest lovers in the world. In that crowded, dusky room, an image of soft, flowing lines stood out in the distance, and we were so impressed that we overcame intimidation to take a better look. Once close…
The riddles of identity that drive and disturb Philip Roth’s impressive body of fiction usually focus on contemporary Jewish characters whose conflicts between self-absorption and self-hate remain poignantly (and often hilariously) unresolved. But in The Human Stain, the first Roth novel to be adapted as a film in three decades,…
Remember that silly little-girl version of Meg Ryan in When Harry Met Sally, snuffling “I’m difficult!” through a charming tantrum? Well, make it a point to greet Ryan’s new incarnation in the psycho-sexual thriller In the Cut. Post-Crystal, post-Hanks and even post-husband Dennis Quaid (toward whom this performance almost plays…
Pieces of April, made by playwright-turned-novelist-turned-screenwriter-turned-director Peter Hedges, could be confused for a compendium reel of someone’s home movies. Shot on digital video using existing light, it looks like something assembled by a film student for a final and lost soon after, left behind for a stranger to find and…
In the beginning, there was The Evil Dead, and Stephen King looked down upon it and saw that it was good. Then God said, “Let there be Evil Dead 2: Dead by Dawn, that the message of writer-director Sam Raimi be spread across the land!” So it was written, so…
Beneath the jagged scars on the heaving chest of Dr. Frankenstein’s scary monster beats the heart of a true romantic. Just whose heart it is–or used to be–we can’t be sure. The giant creature is a crazy quilt of random body parts stitched together by a mad scientist and brought…
Philanthropist, n. A rich (and usually bald) old gentleman who has trained himself to grin while his conscience is picking his pocket. –Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary Ray Nasher isn’t a man given to grinning. At 82, he is a diminutive man, stern of countenance and bald of pate, with…
Having lived in Arlington all my life, I realize–like most of us residents–that it’s a city without a great reputation for nightlife other than the regular meat market/sports bars and the endless restaurant chains. I know this, yet I still think there’s hope in places where ESPN isn’t the focal…
Thursday, October 30 To us, Halloween’s scare factor has nothing on El Da de los Muertos celebrations. While All Hallow’s Eve offers the chance to scream and run from fake ghosts in haunted houses, the Day of the Dead is asking real ghosts–the souls of departed loved ones–to return home…
