Femme Form

Artists take on rare beauty 11/12 Saturday evening’s art exhibit at Nine Eyes Studio, entitled Rara Figura, is a project concerning womanhood in today’s society. Featuring work by nine female artists (painting, installations, photography, etc.), Rara Figura deals with the “declining reverence” of Woman, but I’m not sure I quite…

Cool Girls

Disney royalty hits the ice 11/16 Calling all guys who like girls who like to have a little fun by playing dress-up. This Wednesday through Sunday, there will be an array of hot, busty babes wearing very little clothing in a very cold room, all showing off for your viewing…

Blessed Are the Buttmunches

Beavis and Butt-head: The Mike Judge Collection, Volume One (Paramount) This three-disc, 40-episode volume chronicling Beavis and Butt-head’s early years will come as a relief to anyone who was stuck in a teenage wasteland when the MTV series first hit the air; turns out, we weren’t just stoned — this…

Street Fighters

Rockstar Games has a winning recipe: Blend a nuanced story with a rich environment, add a dash of sensational marketing, then drench the confection in blood. What else would you expect from the publisher that gave us Grand Theft Auto? Rockstar’s latest release, The Warriors, proves that the bad boys…

Our top DVD picks for the week of November 8

Bang Rajan (Hart Sharp) Big Fish: Special Edition (Columbia/Tristar) Blue Collar TV: Season 1, Volume 1 (Warner Bros.) Burn (Columbia/Tristar) Christmas With the Kranks (Sony) Cronicas (UMVD) Edward Scissorhands: Anniversary Edition (Fox) 50 Cent: Refuse to Die (New Line) Jumanji: Deluxe Edition (Columbia/Tristar) La Dolce Vita: Deluxe Collector’s Edition (Koch…

Human Nature

Atmos Energy expects to raise customers’ bills by 60 to 90 percent this winter; TXU wants to raise its bills by 24 percent by January. It’s costing $40 a week just to get to work. And all I want for Christmas are cheaper utility and gas station bills, but instead…

The Force Runs Its Course

Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith (Lucasfilm Ltd.) The final installment of the Star Wars saga actually plays better at home: You can watch it, then pop in the original trilogy and chart the evolution of Anakin, and have it all actually make sense. Though it’s still a…

Exquisite Corpse

Pity the videogame zombie. He spends his short afterlife dodging self-righteous heroes hell-bent on peppering him with buckshot, setting him on fire, or blowing him to smithereens with a bazooka. Well, Stubbs is here to even the score. Set in the 1950s, Stubbs the Zombie casts players as the eponymous…

Our top DVD picks for the week of November 1

American Chopper: Third Season (Columbia/Tristar) Attack Pack (Commando, Predator, and Kiss of the Dragon) (Fox) Bill Maher: I’m Swiss (Image Ent.) The Brady Bunch: Four-Season Pack (Paramount) Dear America: Letters Home From Vietnam (Warner Bros.) Disney Princess: A Christmas of Enchantment (Disney) Duran Duran: Live From London (Universal Music) Fame:…

Killing Time

If Jarhead, director Sam Mendes and writer William Broyles Jr.’s adaptation of Anthony Swofford’s 2003 Gulf War memoir, seems at all familiar–like, say, a DJ’s mash-up of Full Metal Jacket and Three Kings–there’s good reason for it. Swofford, 20 years old during Operation Desert Storm in 1991, writes in his…

Wild, Then Crazy

Does Steve Martin have multiple personality disorder, or is he just brilliantly in tune with some things and wildly out of touch with others? Shopgirl, the movie based on Martin’s novella of the same name, is one of the most schizoid films in recent memory. It opens with crystalline originality,…

Capsule Reviews

Dafatir: Contemporary Iraqi Book Art Before you stammer in disbelief, yes, Iraqi artists are making contemporary art. And, yes, it’s good. This show educates and enthralls through form, disabusing you of any misconceptions you might have had about Iraqi culture while indulging your eyes and emotions. The book art showing…

Capsule Reviews

Danny and the Deep Blue Sea WingSpan Theatre Company presents John Patrick Shanley’s taut little romantic comedy about two young losers who find true love by accident. Actors Heather Henry and Clay Yocum act with such authenticity and raw abandon that they’re almost too real. Director Susan Sargeant keeps the…

Raunch Dressing

Give us a T! Give us an A! A little of both are on display in Debbie Does Dallas: The Musical, now shaking its pompons and some booty at Kitchen Dog Theater. Based on the infamous smut film from the late ’70s, but only very loosely, this is porn to…

Unleashed

Any guitarist proud of their calluses and pasty complexion will correct you in a heartbeat should you mispronounce this name: Yngwie Malmsteen. Since performing with Steeler in 1981, the Swedish “neo-classical” guitarist has thrilled guitar geeks with his arpeggio-ridden, largely instrumental works. Now that’s great and all, but I’m no…

This Week’s Day-By-Day Picks

Thursday, November 3 We’d like to think that if we were stuck in a cabin in the woods during a snowstorm with no electricity, no phone, no radio, no outside contact at all, that an innate hunter-gatherer instinct would kick in and we could chop wood, start a fire with…

Take Us Out

These days, every demographic has its own film festival. We just had the Latino culture-highlighting Vistas Film Festival in October and the Asian Film Festival of Dallas in August. There is also the Juneteenth Film Festival celebrating African-American movies and even the KidFilm festival. But it works. Think about it…

Drawn Together

The Hulk and Hellboy meet and greet 11/4 Since adding North Texas to its circuit of comic book conventions two years ago, Wizard Entertainment has brought in more Hollywood hype than actual creative talent from the medium it’s supposedly celebrating. Not that anybody’s complaining about an appearance from Kevin Smith,…

Watch & Wait

City folk commune with nature 11/4 When Charles Darwin sailed to the Galapagos, he found seals so tame they would nibble on his pant leg. Dian Fossey pretended to munch bamboo in order to bond with African mountain gorillas. Farley Mowatt ran naked among caribou in the Canadian tundra (or…

Party Paws

Get bidding for little beggers 11/6 Who knew a little German shepherd went so well with a glass of French Cabernet? We’d never have paired a well-aged Siamese or domestic tabby with red wine either, but the folks at Operation Kindness sure do know how to serve their homeless animals…

Big D Blues

Blind Lemon remembered 11/8 Chances are if you strolled through Deep Ellum past the corner of Elm Street and Central Avenue in 1912, you would have noticed a blind man singing country blues and heard the clink of coins people dropped into a tin cup tied to his guitar. In…

A Family Adrift

Writer and director Noah Baumbach has made three light films–one so slight (1997’s party-hopping Highball), it didn’t see release till five years after its completion, and even then it snuck onto video-store shelves credited to a pseudonymous writer and director. There was nothing on his filmography–not even his co-writing credit…